mind had snapped. It must have.
He was seeing things.
He swallowed the lump of shock that had lodged into his throat, shuddered as it landed like a brick in his stomach.
He was seeing Gemma.
But he couldn’t be. His mind must be projecting the one thing it wanted most, the woman whose memory and taste and touch had been driving him insane and whom he’d despaired of seeing again.
He closed his eyes.
He opened them. She was still there.
“Shaheen, why did you stop?”
He heard his father’s concern as if it were coming from a mile away. Gemma, who was at the far end of the two-hundred-foot space, felt mere inches away.
Her gaze snared his across the distance, just like that first time, was roiling with the same intensity, the same awareness. One thing was missing. Shock.
Of course. She was expecting to see him. There was no element of surprise for her this time. But there was more in her expression. Apprehension. Aversion even.
She was that loath to see him? Then why was she here?
The relevant question hit him harder than the shock of her being here.
How was she here? In Zohayd, in the palace, at this function?
He felt himself moving again, his body activated and steered by his father’s hand on his forearm as he led him deeper into the throngs of people gathered to watch his sacrifice.
Moving forced him to relinquish his eye lock with Gemma. He rushed ahead to gain another direct path to her. But she evaded his eyes now, hid from him.
Frustration seethed through him, questions. The urge to cleave through the crowd, push everyone out of the way till he got to her overwhelmed him. He imagined hauling her over his shoulder and storming through the palace to his quarters, pressing her to the nearest upright surface and devouring her.
It wasn’t consideration for his father’s guests, the most influential people in Zohayd and the region, that stopped him. It was her avoidance. The knowledge that she didn’t want him as he wanted her. That whatever had brought her here wasn’t him.
For an interminable time, he believed he responded when addressed, monosyllables that he vaguely thought were appropriate, shook hands and grimaced at eager female faces and fawning family members, all the time trying to catch glimpses of her, desperately trying to get her to look at him again.
At one point, his older brother Harres appeared at his side.
“You look out of it, bro. Got stoned to get through this?”
Shaheen felt the urge to deck him. “And what if I did, Mr. Immune-From-This-Abominable-Fate Minister of Interior?”
Harres grimaced. “I did offer to do it myself again. I told them that, unlike you, I don’t care one way or another, and I’d certainly remain neutral in my post since I would never get attached to whatever wife they saddled me with. They still refused.”
Shaheen’s aggression drained. Harres had tried to take his place time and again. He would spare him if he could.
He exhaled. “They know you’d get attached to your children.”
Harres shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. I really can’t imagine being a husband let alone a father.” He put an arm around Shaheen’s shoulder, gave him a hard squeeze of consolation, the golden eyes that could have been their father’s flaring with empathy. “I would have done anything to spare you this.”
Which Shaheen had just thought. “Aih, I know.”
He again caught sight of Gemma among the shifting crowd, took an involuntary step nearer as if to force her acknowledgment, resurrect her hunger with his eagerness.
“And I know who you’re looking at. Who would have thought our little Johara would turn out to be such a stunner?”
Harres’s words made no sense. Had Shaheen’s mind started to deteriorate from the stress?
Shaheen looked at Harres, seeing him for the first time since they’d started talking, the juggernaut knight the kingdom had entrusted with its security, and who’d done the best job in its history. An expression softened his hewn, desert-weathered features, one Shaheen had never seen there except around their female family members. A rare gentleness, a proud indulgence.
And he’d thought Harres had said … No. He couldn’t have said that name. Where would it come from, anyway?
He shook his head, desperate to clear it. “What are you talking about?”
“The vision in gold over there. Our Johara … or I should say your Johara all grown-up.” Harres gave a nod in Gemma’s direction. “You’ve been looking nowhere else since you walked in. And I can’t blame you. I gaped at her for a solid ten seconds when Nazaryan greeted me with her on his arm. Who would have thought, eh?”
Shaheen stared at Harres as if he’d started talking in a language he’d never heard before. “Nazaryan?”
Harres snapped his fingers in front of his eyes. “Snap out of it. You’re scaring me.”
Shaheen shook his head again. “What do you mean Nazaryan?”
“I mean Berj Nazaryan, our royal jeweler, her father.”
Shaheen’s eyes slid from Harres’s, as sluggish and impeded as his thoughts, followed the direction of his earlier nod.
Gemma was the only one in that direction dressed in gold. Harres was talking about her. And he was calling her … calling her …
Johara.
The bubble of incomprehension trembled inside Shaheen. Then it burst.
Gemma was Johara.
Shock mushroomed through him like a nuclear detonation.
His mysterious Gemma was Johara. Berj Nazaryan’s daughter. Aram’s sister. The girl he’d known since she was six. Who’d become his shadow since the day he’d plucked her out of the air from a thirty-foot fall.
No wonder he’d felt he’d known her forever. He had. He had recognized her with that first look, even if not consciously.
And no wonder. She looked nothing like the fourteen-year-old she’d been when he’d last seen her. Skinny with glasses and braces, with no ability to wield her femininity the way girls in Zohayd learned to from a very early age. She hadn’t only realized her potential, she’d become the total opposite of her former self.
He’d thought he’d seen every brand of beauty this world had to offer. But she was something he’d never thought would be gathered in one woman, all his tastes and fantasies come to life. And that was just on the surface. Deeper, where it counted most, little Johara, as Harres had called her, had
