impact almost demolished her precarious balance as his eyes bored through her.
She’d always thought they resembled burning coals, even when he’d trained them on her with utmost kindness. But now, with the flare of recognition accompanied by a focus searing in intensity and devoid of gentleness, she felt their burn down to her bones. Her blood started to sizzle, her cheeks to steam.
She’d gravely underestimated the size of the mistake she’d made coming here. She now had no doubt it was one she’d regret for the rest of her life.
She stood, rooted, mesmerized as he approached her, watching him with the same fatalism one would an out-of-control car on a collision course.
Regret had swamped Shaheen the moment he’d set foot in Aidan’s sprawling penthouse. It intensified with every step deeper into the cacophony of forced gaiety.
He shouldn’t have agreed to come. He should have told Aidan this wasn’t a farewell party to him, but a funeral pyre.
And here was his friend and partner, coming to add to his misery with a blithe smile splitting his face.
“Hey, Sheen!” Aidan exclaimed over the skullsplitting techno music. “I thought you’d decided to let me look like a fool. Again.”
Shaheen winced an attempt at a smile. He hated it when his friends abbreviated his name to Sheen. His western friends did so because it was a more familiar name to them, and those back home because that was the first letter of his name in Arabic. He didn’t know why he put up with it. But then again, what was a nickname he disliked compared to what he would be forced to endure from now on?
Shaheen peered down into his friend’s grinning face, his lips twisting on his barely leashed irritation. “If I’d known what kind of event you were planning, Aidan, I would have.”
“You know what they say about all work and no play.” Aidan hooked his arm high up around Shaheen’s shoulder.
Shaheen almost flinched. He liked the man, and he did come from a culture where physical demonstrations of affection were the norm, contradictorily between members of the same gender. Apart from immediate family, he didn’t appreciate being touched. Even in sexual situations, he didn’t like women to paw him, as they seemed to unanimously wish to. His liaisons were about taking off an edge, not about intimacy. He’d made that clear, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, to all the women he’d had such liaisons with.
He could barely remember his last sexual encounter. Such carnal couplings, devoid of any deeper connection, had lost their appeal and begun to grate, to defile. To be expected, he guessed, when the women he liked and respected didn’t arouse any carnal inclinations in him.
He stepped away smoothly, severing his friend’s embrace without letting him feel the distaste behind the move. “If being dull is the opposite of this … frenzy, I assure you, I prefer it.”
A disconcerted expression seeped into Aidan’s eyes, replacing the teasing. After six years of business partnership, the man had no idea what Shaheen appreciated. Probably because he kept Aidan, like everyone else, at arm’s length. But Aidan had set this up with the best of intentions. And though those usually led to hell, it wasn’t fair to show him how wasted his efforts truly were.
He gathered the remnants of his decorum. “But it’s not every day I say goodbye to my freedom. So the … fanfare is …” he paused before he forced himself to add “… welcome.”
Aidan’s face cleared, and his words came out in the rush of the eager to please. “It’s not like you’ll really lose your freedom. I hear these royal arranged marriages are the epitome of … flexibility.” Aidan added that last word with a huge wink and slap on the back.
Shaheen almost snapped his oblivious friend’s head off. It was a good thing Aidan turned away from him, exclaiming at the top of his voice to the people who’d flocked over to shake Shaheen’s hand.
Shaheen set himself on auto, performing as Aidan wished him to. No point in setting Aidan straight anyway. He wasn’t really all there with a few drinks in him. Shaheen should let him wallow in his rare surrender to heedlessness without dragging him into the land of harsh reality where he now existed.
His whole existence was about to cave in.
Not on the professional level. There, he’d never stopped soaring from one success to another. But on the personal level, things had been unraveling for a long time. He could even pinpoint the day when it had all started to go downhill. His fight with Aram.
Before that point, he’d lived a carefree existence where he’d felt his future was limitless. But things had gone from bad to worse since then.
He’d long known that, as a prince, he was expected to make a marriage of state, but he’d always shoved that expectation to the back of his mind, hoping that one or both of his older brothers would make a terrific political match. Then Amjad, his oldest brother and crown prince, had made such a match. And it had ended in disaster.
Amjad’s wife had come to the marriage already pregnant, had schemed to murder Amjad and pass the child as his, to remain forever a princess and the mother of the heir to the throne.
After Amjad had divorced her in a scandal that still resounded in the region, he’d torn through the world acquiring power until he’d become almost as powerful as all of Zohayd put together. No one dared ask him to make another political match. He’d said that, when it was time for him to become king, his brother Harres would be his heir. Failing that, Shaheen. Period.
As for Harres, he would never make a political match, either. It had been agreed that his marriage into any tribe in the region would compromise his position. He’d become the best minister of interior and head of central intelligence and homeland security that Zohayd had ever had, and no one wanted to see the belief in his impartiality tainted. So, if he ever decided to marry—which seemed unlikely, since he hadn’t favored any particular woman of the reported hundreds he’d bedded in his thirty-six years—Harres would nevertheless be free to choose his own wife.
So it fell to Shaheen to make a blood-mixing marriage that would revitalize the wavering pacts between factions. He was the last of the king’s “pure-blood” sons, born to a purely Zohaydan queen. Haidar and Jalal, Shaheen’s half brothers from the current queen, Sondoss, who was Azmaharian, weren’t considered pure enough for the unification the marriage was required to achieve.
For years now, he’d known there was no escape from his fate, but instead of becoming resigned to the idea, he’d hated it more daily. It felt like a death sentence hanging over his head.
Only days ago—the day following his thirty-fourth birthday, to be exact—he’d decided to get the suffocating suspense over with, turn himself in to the marriage pact. He’d announced his capitulation to his father, told him to start lining up the bridal candidates. The next day, the news that he was seeking a bride had been all over the media. As one of the most eligible royals in the world, his intention to marry—with the identity of the bride still undecided—was the stuff of the most sensational news.
And here he was, enduring the party his associate was throwing for him to celebrate his impending imprisonment.
He flicked a look at his watch, did a double take. It had been only minutes. And he’d shaken a hundred hands and grimaced at double that many artificially elated or intoxicated faces.
Enough.
