And it was even worse. He didn’t know her last name.
Just what had he been thinking last night?
That was it. He hadn’t been thinking. Of anything but her, what they’d shared from first sight onward. He had, for the first time in his life, lived totally in the moment.
He’d always held back from fully trusting others, even his closest people, despite believing in their best intentions. He’d guarded himself against the consequences of their mistakes and misdemeanors. But with Gemma, he hadn’t only dropped his guard—it hadn’t been raised in the first place. He’d not had a moment of doubt. She was the woman he’d dreamed of but never truly thought he’d find.
The one.
And she was gone. After giving him the most perfect night of his life, after giving him herself and a glimpse of a magnificent future filled with an unprecedented connection, she was just … gone.
Calm down. She’d have an explanation, a perfectly reasonable one, for leaving without waking him up. It had to be the only thing she could have done, or she wouldn’t have done it. She wouldn’t have left him like that if it weren’t.
So he should cool it. He might not know her last name or her whereabouts, but she knew his. All he had to do was wait for her.
She’d come back the moment she could.
Gemma didn’t come back.
It seemed she’d disappeared off the face of the earth.
He’d thought his security detail would have kept tabs on her. But when they’d seen her leave in the early-morning hours, all they’d worried about was him. They’d called to make sure he was okay, and when he’d answered, what he’d remembered doing only when they reminded him, clearly fine but sleepy and brooking no further interruption, they’d let her go. They hadn’t seen any reason to follow her. That had destroyed his biggest hope of finding her, and the hope of doing so was becoming dimmer by the minute.
He’d widened his search until it had encompassed the whole United States. No one had heard of her.
With the evidence suggesting that she’d never existed on American soil, he’d begun to think that she and the enchanted night they’d spent together had been a figment of his imagination. Even with his one proof of her existence—the photo he’d taken of her—everyone insisted they’d never seen her. Everyone his people had questioned had commented that they would have remembered someone like her. And they didn’t. As for her name, it rang no bells.
It was as if she’d never existed.
An explanation had reared its head constantly during his frantic search. He’d knocked it out of the way, determined not to let it have a hearing. But once he’d breathed again with the certainty that she hadn’t had an accident or worse, he found his options narrowing down until they’d dwindled to nothing.
Nothing but that explanation made sense.
There was no escaping it anymore. He had to face it, no matter how mutilating it was.
She didn’t want to see him again.
She might have been the woman who’d turned his life upside down, but it seemed he’d been nothing to her but a one-night stand. A man she’d chosen to initiate her nubile body into the rites of passion and unlock her limitless sexual potential. Perhaps he’d seemed exotic to her, a man from a different culture and country whom she could cut out of her life once the adventure was over.
Now that resignation had replaced desperation and he’d given up on the dream of her, there was nothing to fight for anymore, nothing to keep him here.
It was time he returned to Zohayd to confront his duty.
To embrace his nightmare.
“Shaheen.”
That was all his father said, minutes after Shaheen had walked into his office.
It was enough. Disappointment and exasperation blared in the toneless delivery of his name.
Shaheen didn’t blame him. He had ignored his father and the rest of the world for the past eight weeks. After that single phone call telling his father he was not coming home as promised, he’d made himself unavailable to anyone. He hadn’t explained why.
His father had left him a dozen messages, had sent emissaries to bring him back or to at least get him to explain his reneging on the decision he’d arrived at only days before.
His father rose from behind his desk, majestic and packed with power and ire and wreathed in the full-blown regalia of the King of Zohayd.
Shaheen held his gaze as his father approached him. King Atef Aal Shalaan made no attempt to hug him as he usually did, but instead stood there, flaying him with his displeasure-radiating glower. His father was a couple of inches shorter, yet broader with more than three decades head start in maturity and responsibility. Shaheen had always thought his shoulders broad enough to carry the weight of the kingdom’s fate on them. And that was not to mention his overwhelming presence.
Yet King Atef needed far more than presence to keep the kingdom at peace, to keep his enemies in check and his allies in line. More than ever, he had to appease the most powerful of those who constantly snapped at the heels of the ruling house, demanding their cut of power, prestige and proceeds. And that was something only Shaheen could deliver by sacrificing himself at the literal altar.
His father exhaled, the golden eyes he’d passed down only to Shaheen’s brother Harres glittering from below intimidating eyebrows. “I won’t ask what made you disappear. Or what brought you back.”
“Good.” Shaheen didn’t attempt to temper his terse mutter. His father would have to be content that he had come back. Nothing else was his business.
“But,” his father went on, “I’m letting it go only because this is not the time to take you to task over your potentially catastrophic behavior. The reception is in full swing.”
The reception. Aka the bridal parade his father had put together the moment he’d been informed Shaheen was on his way to Zohayd onboard his private jet. He was trapping him into it, before he had a chance to change his mind again.
And there it was, brewing in the main ceremony hall—the storm that would destroy his life. Two thousand people were in attendance, all those with a stake in the marriage and all those involved in the negotiations and manipulations and coercions.
But Shaheen wasn’t expected to just flip through the women like he might a mail-order catalog and circle the model he thought most bearable. He was supposed to assess the merchandise in a more comprehensive fashion.
With marriages being what they were in Zohayd—especially the higher you went up the social scale—it was families who married, not individuals. He would have an extended family for a wife. And every potential family was here so that he could decide which one he could best stomach having as a constant presence in his life through their influence on his wife’s and children’s every thought and action.
“You’re not dressed appropriately.” His father’s reprimand brought him out of his distasteful musings. “I told your kabeer el yaweran what was expected of you tonight.”
Shaheen’s head of entourage had said his father wanted him to wear Zohaydan royal garb. He’d scowled at the man and resumed staring blindly at the clauses in his latest business contract.
Now he scowled at his business suit and then at his father with the same leashed aggravation followed by the same pointed dismissal.
His father drew in an equally annoyed breath. “Since you’re flaunting yet another expectation, I demand that you at least wear an expression that doesn’t reveal your abhorrence for being here.”
Shaheen exhaled in resignation. “Don’t ask more of me, Father. A pretense that this isn’t torture is foremost among the things I don’t have to give.”
“You’re being unreasonable. You’re not the first or last royal to enter a marriage of state for his kingdom’s sake.”
“And you did it twice, so why not me, eh?” Shaheen knew he was stepping over the line talking to his father, and king, this harshly. But he didn’t care. He had no more stamina for observing protocol. “And I am here to do it, Fath
er. So why should I even attend this farce at all? Why not spare me this added torment? I’d rather not choose the method of my own execution. I’ll leave it up to you to pick the most humane one.”
King Atef winced at his analogy. “That’s the problem. Many candidates have pros and cons that weigh each other out. It has to be your personal preference that tips the balance in one’s favor.”
“You think I care if I’m shot or electrocuted or cut to pieces? They’re all equal and interchangeable to me. Just pick one.”
“You’re exaggerating now. All your bridal candidates are fine young women. Beautiful, well-bred, highly educated, pleasant. You’ll get to like your bride, and maybe in time love her.”
“Like you love Queen Sondoss? And loved my mother?”
His father’s scowl deepened at Shaheen’s ready counter. The best he’d reached with Shaheen’s mother was peaceful coexistence. As for Queen Sondoss, leashed hostility was all he could hope for on a good day.
“There are Aliyah and Kamal. I believe no one can be any happier than they are.”
“Don’t bring them up, Father. They were already crazy in love when they married. Circumstances just forced them apart, and thankfully, forced them back together.”
His father’s gaze wavered. Then he let go of his kingly veneer.
Nothing remained but the loving father who looked and sounded pained at what he couldn’t save his son from. “I can’t tell you how much I regret that you’ll have to walk in my footsteps. But there’s no way around it. And that is why I’m asking you to pay attention to the candidates. At least you have more than one to choose from. I had no say in choosing either your mother or Sondoss. You may have better luck finding someone who’s compatible with you among the dozen possible brides.”
Shaheen’s teeth ground together. He’d already found someone who was compatible with him in every way.
Gemma had clearly not thought the same. She hadn’t even thought him worthy of a goodbye.
That didn’t change anything for him. He knew now that everything he’d ever dreamed of existed, even if she didn’t want him, even if he could never have her. What were the chances that fate would gift him with another woman who was even close?
He not only believed it wouldn’t, he didn’t want it to.
He refrained from saying anything. His father would have to roll the dice and decide Shaheen’s fate himself.
Finally his father gave up, brushed past him and walked out with heavy steps.
Shaheen watched him, compassion flickering through the deadness inside him.
His father hadn’t had an easy life. Certainly not a contented one. Shaheen had grown up believing that his father had never known happiness or love outside of what he felt for his job and children. It had been only a couple of years ago that they’d found out he’d once tasted that happiness and love, with a woman. Anna Beaumont.
He’d had an affair with her during his separation from Queen Sondoss two years after Haidar and Jalal were born. Then Anna had fallen pregnant, and his efforts to end his marriage to Sondoss had failed. And though it had nearly destroyed him, he’d left Anna, telling her he could never be with her again, due to the threat of war with Sondoss’s home kingdom of Azmahar, and that it was imperative to abort their child.
Instead, Anna had put her baby up for adoption. Shaheen’s aunt Bahiyah, secretly knowing about her brother’s affair, had adopted Aliyah and passed her off as hers.
It was only many years later, while his father was recovering from a heart attack, that he’d searched for Anna again and discovered the truth. It was a timely discovery, as another flare of unrest in the region could only be resolved if a daughter of King Atef’s married the king of Judar. Now Aliyah was King Kamal’s worshipped wife and Judar’s beloved queen, and Anna Beaumont had become a constant presence in Aliyah’s and, by association, his father’s lives.
Shaheen believed that had only deepened his father’s unhappiness. For he could never have the only woman he’d ever wanted, and as Shaheen sensed, still did.
He and his father had that in common, too.
Shaheen kept his eyes fixed on his father’s slumped shoulders as they reached their destination, braced himself as they stepped into the ceremony hall.
Brightness and buzzing seemed to rise at their entry, but he couldn’t register the magnificent surroundings beyond the darkness and ugliness inside him. It was reflected on every surface, on every face that turned to look at him.
Suddenly every hair on his body stood on end.
What now?
His eyes panned the room, seeking the source of the disturbance that had drenched him. It now felt as if a laser beam was drilling through his gut.
Then everything came to a grinding halt.
His heart almost ruptured with one startled detonation.
There, at the farthest end of the hall …
Gemma.
Five
Shaheen’s 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 y
ou’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.
Desert Jewels & Rising Stars Page 68
