To Touch a Sheikh (14 page)

Harres had thought he was being his obnoxious self, had joked that he, Mr. Crown Prince, would be minus a future throne, too.

Amjad had told him in obscene detail that he couldn't care less.

He'd lost Maram. No other loss would ever matter.

His phone rang. Had to be Harres. Again insisting that he stop fooling around.

He'd almost reached the palace. He'd answer him face to fist.

The phone rang again and again. He fumbled it on with fingers numbed with rage, bellowed, “If I don't find you dying when I arrive, Harres, and this is not you croaking for help—”

“You are as caring an oldest brother as you are everything else.”

“Maram…”

He couldn't go on. He suffocated with the hope. That she'd changed her mind. With the fear…that there was no changing it.

“I just wanted to inform you. I'm going back to my father.”

A thousand questions flooded his mind. But one thing trumped all. Relief. That he wouldn't go out of his mind worrying about where she'd be. That she'd be safe in familiar surroundings, with family, even such as Yusuf was.

Then she dealt him another blow.

“So, how does it feel now that you've been had but good?”

A
mjad's heartbeats piled up.

Maram was taunting him.

Something he hadn't felt since he was a child burned behind his eyes, almost threatening to liquefy them.

He shut them on the melting, whispered, “It feels…far better than I deserve. To have you talking to me again, even if only to gloat over my gullibility.”

“You bought it, didn't you?” Her voice was a monotone of emptiness. “My whole breakdown act.”

“I bought it so much, I almost bought
it.
”

He expected her to scoff his head off at his claims of almost fatal distress at hers.

She only said, “Too bad you're too hardy.”

He bit his lip. On the surge of agonizing hope. “It would have been what I've done my level best to deserve.”

A beat of silence. “You don't believe I conned you, do you?”

“So I would release you and you could go back to your father and continue your plot? No. Not for a second.”

“Then you're an even bigger fool than I thought. And you're a run-of-the-mill man after all. All it took to bring you down
was some persistence, a few well-placed touches and a couple of strategically timed tears.”

“There weren't some or a few or a couple of anything. There were deluges of everything. I was destined to be brought to my knees from the moment you had me in your crosshairs.”

“Interesting that you're taking it so philosophically.”

His delight at sparring with her again came out on a ragged sigh. “You should have hit me, Maram. Or better still, used some heavy, blunt object and knocked me over my fool's head.”

“To expend my alleged agony at your betrayal? I guess you haven't heard anything I said. It seems you've been deafened by a lifetime of listening to your own voice booming inside your head.”

“I've been listening to you far, far closer than you think, Maram. I may be intractable, but you stuck with me long enough, tried hard enough, you penetrated my foot-thick skull. You rewired me where you're concerned. And I'm never getting scrambled again. I wish I could have given you your pound of flesh, raved and ranted at your implied ‘manipulation' and ‘betrayal.' But I can't distrust you even in pretense now, not even to appease you.”

Silence unfurled, pulsed, then stormed, until he felt he might crush the phone in unbearable anticipation.

She finally exhaled. “Seems this was the only thing I was right about where
you're
concerned. You
are
a far better judge of character than I am, Amjad.”

A smile trembled on his lips at her implied admission. “You're no slouch yourself.”

“Oh, but I am. You took me in completely.”

“I didn't—”

“You just pretended not to see through me from the start.” She drowned out his voice, not interested in hearing his redundant protests. “To make me pant extra hard to ‘convince' you of my ‘innocence.' But what's one more pretense, right? Anyway, now my childish effort to get back at you failed because there is no
getting back at a total fraud, taunting you with what you never felt, I return to the real reason behind my call.”

He exhaled in resignation. There was no getting through to her. Not now. But her contacting him again at all gave him hope there might be.

He could only try to keep her involved. “So why are you going back to your father? If you can revise your stance on uprooting him from your life, I submit that I deserve the same leniency.”

“Neither you nor he deserve any. You were the two people I loved and trusted most and you both used and abused my love and trust in ways I'm still unable to fully grasp. I think I will hate you more as the implications hit me.”

He squeezed his eyes shut.
This
he believed.

He tried again. “Then at least try to understand—”

“Of course, I do.”

“You do?” he echoed, floundering.

“You had overpowering reasons.” She thought so? “You, and he, will always have those, in your own minds, to take whatever measures you must to get what you want, no matter who you use or abuse. And
I
have learned that what I thought to be my bottomless genetic capacity to rationalize and accept being both has come to an end.”

Her calmness drove her pain deeper into his heart.

She went on. “You asked why I'm going back. One reason. To convince Father to give you back the jewels.”

His heart stopped. This time he felt it wouldn't restart.

His unbelievable, unpredictable Maram.

“You would do that?” he choked, going light-headed.

“I hope you don't think I'm doing it for you. I'm done doing anything for you. I want to stop my father from seeing through a catastrophe I know he hasn't fully calculated and can't handle.”

He digested this for one heart-pounding moment, seeing only one significance. “If you're worried about what he's getting himself into, and you're going back to again act as his misplaced-at-birth brain, it seems you
have
forgiven him.”

“I haven't. And I won't. I'm not doing it for him either. You
both can take flying leaps from your respective capitals' tallest skyscrapers. I'm doing this because I, unlike both of you, am not blinded by my ambition. I am thinking of the whole region. I might emotionally wish it to go to hell as it deserves, but rationally, humanitarianly, I can't let the situation explode into petty, escalating tribal wars if those damn trinkets aren't returned to your family's grimy royal hands.”

Exactly what he thought of the whole situation. Even if she thought he'd done what he had to protect “his” future throne.

His heart swelled with pride in her even as it did with the ache of yet another manifestation of her loss of faith in him.

“But you know me so well, you probably knew I would do this the moment you ‘let me go.' It's probably why you did.”

“Now,
wait
a minute—”

“But maybe you
don't
know me well enough.” She steamrolled over his outburst with her tranquility. “If you did, you would have known you didn't need to kidnap me, but needed only to explain the situation to get me to help you. I would have gone back and squeezed my father until he coughed up the jewels. But no harm done. At least to your interests. I'll do that now. Once he does, I'll call you to arrange their return.”

It nearly suffocated him, the need to reach inside the phone and rip her out of her disillusion and into his assuagement.

He exhaled the raggedness of his frustration. “You really expect him to hand them over?”

“If his brain truly is nonexistent and he resists, I'll do something drastic. I'll tell him I'm having your baby.”

Before his heart could fracture on the next heartbeat, the line went dead.

The agony and longing and regret of her words echoed inside his head, almost rupturing it.

He'd wondered, when she'd rushed into his trap, what kind of catastrophe would befall him in repayment for that unsettling ease. He'd thought it had hit when she'd found out about his deception and had been inconsolable.

Seemed that had only been the first blow.

 

Maram looked around the opulence of her father's stateroom.

She felt as if someone else had inhabited her body when she'd last been here. The Maram who'd left this palace on that Amjad-bound trip hadn't returned.

She'd been lost in that desert. As she deserved to be. Putting all her faith, emotions, desires and hopes in someone like that. In Amjad, the man the world had unanimously elected its coldest raider.

But that world had also thought him honest to the point of insanity. No one had detected the deception that had created that illusion. He'd conned everyone, not just her. But she'd seen his every vice as uniqueness, wonder. And she'd paid the price…

Running steps beat on the palace's marble floors before the ornate oak double doors burst open and her father spilled in.

Maram watched the man who'd meant the world to her since she was twelve. Tall and lithe and distinguished, with those eyes that were like looking back into her own, and those streaks setting his temples and trimmed beard on silver fire. Before she'd seen Amjad, she'd thought him the most magnificent man on earth. Yes, she'd been a confirmed daddy's girl.

Too bad he'd never been a “daughter's dad,” as she'd so stupidly thought no matter how many times he'd proved he wasn't.

She observed him from behind her new barrier of frost. It had descended on her after a storm of weeping had almost drained away her sanity after she'd left Amjad. She prayed it would never lift.

Her father's face shuddered as he snatched her into arms trembling with simulated debilitating relief and draining anxiety.

“Maram,
b'nayti.
” His voice choked in her ear, his breathing rioted in her hair. “You're here…”

She removed his arms from her, calmly. “No thanks to you. I could have been fossilized in the desert for all you cared.”

His eyes widened as if she'd punched him. “How can you
say that? I've been in constant negotiations with Harres and Shaheen.”

She eyed him with detachment, wondering at how different he appeared to her through the dispassionate prism of disillusion. “Right. Negotiating
not
to ransom me.”

He took an urgent step toward her. Her cold stare aborted his momentum. He stopped, looking suddenly defeated, fragile. “I
begged
them to convince their brother to return you to me.”

“Sure. Out of the goodness of his heart.”

“It was all I could do. I couldn't ransom you.”

“Wouldn't, you mean.”

“No, I mean couldn't. None of this is as you all think.”

“Okay, rewind and replay here. You're telling me you have nothing to do with stealing the Pride of Zohayd and replacing them with fakes?”

“That's…that's not what I meant.”

“
Not
the right time to be coy, Father. Just own up.”

“You won't understand, Maram.”

“Because I never went out on a mile-long limb to understand and accommodate your most self-serving actions? All right,
you
understand this. Amjad pretended to kidnap me to scare you into handing back the jewels. But because I'm clearly worth nowhere near as much to you, I'll tell you why you have to return them. I'm…” The word, the lie, the notion lanced through her. She spat it out before it tore through her cocoon of numbness. “Pregnant.”

He staggered as if she'd hit him with a bat.
“What?”

“That's what you always wanted, isn't it? To use me as an in to the Aal Shalaan gene pool? And when you gave up on that, you adjusted from matchmaking to conspiring. But now, through your power over the future king—aka your future grandchild's rattle toy—you'll have all the influence over Zohayd that you wished for, and without pissing off some of the world's most powerful men and plunging the region into a war whose first casualty would probably be you.”

Her father seemed to age two decades before her eyes. “It—it
isn't as it looks. And it all started with my seeking the best for you.”

“My ‘best' lay in usurping Amjad's throne?”

“I mean when I…offered you to him. The world might think Amjad mad, but I've always thought him the only one who is man enough for you. So I arranged for you to meet him, and knew I was right when he looked at you with something I'd never seen before in his eyes. I approached him because I knew he'd never make the first move. He refused me, but I knew he was resisting his true desires. I kept trying because you also thought him the only man for you. I was distraught when I failed, and more so when I thought I was wrong all along, when I thought he'd kidnapped you for real.”

Maram contemplated his revelations, discounted the best interpretation, one she would have jumped at a day ago. “So you didn't hope to gain anything from the alliance?”

“I didn't say that. Ossaylan is nowhere as powerful as Zohayd, and I need all the backup I can get to keep predators away.”

“That's why you targeted Haidar when you gave up on Amjad?”

He…blushed? “That…wasn't my idea.”

“Don't waste both of our time telling me it was Haidar's.”

His color deepened. “No.”

“Just…no? Fine, suit yourself. It isn't your matchmaking efforts I want you to own up to anyway.”

“I am not behind the theft of the Pride of Zohayd jewels.” His eyes grew imploring. “I was just the…tool.”

She almost said,
You're a tool, all right.

She didn't, shook her head. It would have been funny, if she could feel anything, seeing her father trying to exonerate himself from his potentially region-destroying actions like a kid trying to pin the responsibility of a schoolyard prank on his susceptibility and a bigger kid's influence.

“It doesn't matter what you were. You financed the whole thing, you have the jewels—”

“I
don't!
”

She stared at him. And no matter how lost her faith in him was, she was certain of one thing.

He was telling the truth.

“You didn't really believe I had them and wouldn't ransom you?” he exclaimed. “You think so little of my love, of me? I've been trying to contact Amjad to tell him that. I've been swearing it to his brothers.”

Something moved in her depths. Curiosity, she told herself. She wouldn't open herself for anything more…dangerous, ever again.

She held up her hands. “Okay, Father. Tell me the whole story. From the beginning.”

 

“Did you know my father was quite the Don Juan?”

Amjad watched Maram advance into his office, and the shackles he'd placed on himself so that he wouldn't rush her, hurl her over his shoulder and take her to his bed threatened to break.