by Olivia Gates
He still knew passion-induced amnesia would lift and she’d wake up pinched and troubled, and it would be déjà vu all over again.
But he wasn’t worried anymore.
He’d finally figured out why she tried to limit their involvement to a passion with a daily-extended expiration date.
His lifelong experience had been with women who’d wanted him for his status and wealth. But for Gwen, the reverse was true. Even though she appreciated everything that he was, the man and the surgeon, the very things that attracted other women repelled her. She’d made it clear how vital to her equality in a relationship was. How deeply disturbed she must be at what she perceived as the imbalance of power between them.
But now that he knew the source of her agitation and aversion, he had the perfect solution in mind.
Feeling secure next morning would break the cycle of her daily withdrawal, he snuggled with her and closed his eyes, contentment blanketing him.
“You can’t mean that!”
Fareed watched Gwen bolt up in bed, sighed. “Here we go again.”
Gwen groaned. “Don’t you start again, you know what I mean. But you still can’t mean that!”
He stroked the gleaming tresses that rained over the peaked perfection of her breasts. “I can and I do.”
She moaned as she caught his hands. “Don’t, Fareed. This is out of the question.”
“No, it’s not. You’re ideal, to say the least.”
Exasperation rose in her eyes again. “You’re just saying that because…”
And he turned serious. “Because I’m lucky beyond measure that the woman who blinds me with lust also arouses my utmost professional respect and satisfies my most demanding scientific standards.”
She gaped at him, then groaned, “Don’t exaggerate, please.”
He sighed again. “Do credit me with some professional integrity, ya roh galbi.”
“Don’t tell me you can’t find anyone better to be the head of R & D in your new multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical department. A job that seems to have just become available now.”
He shrugged. “It’s been available for a while and no one satisfied all my criteria. You do. Your narrow field of expertise, your body of work and future research plans, all which made me attend your presentation those years ago, fit the closest with my own practice’s best interests, and the center’s overall focus.” He ran a finger down her neck, between her breasts and lower. “What would you have me do? Look for someone less well-suited because you happen to be my specific libido trigger, too?”
She fidgeted in response to his words and touch. “Many would consider that a conflict of interest.”
“I’d consider it a conflagration of interest. Beside this…” He caught her against his chest, groaned his delight as her lush breasts flattened against him, as her breath caught and her body heated again. “I’d get the most innovative and intrepid researcher in the field I’m interested in, while you fulfill your professional aspirations. Think what you can achieve, for your own career, for me and the center, for the world, with all the resources I’ll put at your fingertips.”
She still shook her head. “I—I can’t stay here, Fareed.”
He chalked one point up to his cause. She was no longer contesting the position itself, was down to the next worry.
“I know some aspects of the kingdom and culture are alien to you, maybe even disturbing. But many aspects delight you, too, and you’ve assimilated into much of your surroundings. And then I will never let anything negative affect you, or Ryan or Rose, in any way.”
She bit her lip. He restrained his desire to replace them with his—he had to let her air her doubts so he could pulverize them.
She finally exhaled. “Nothing is really negative as much as it’s different. But you and your family… I just can’t get my head around how much power you wield here.”
He’d been right. She was disturbed by the extent of his and his family’s influence. She had seen the evidence of their almost absolute power in every aspect of life in the kingdom. “No one, including me and my family, will ever wield any power over you. You’ll always be free to make your own decisions, personally and professionally.”
“As evidenced by how I ended up doing everything you unilaterally thought was the only thing to be done?”
He cocked one eyebrow at her. “You’re saying I coerced you?”
“I’m saying free will and you are mutually exclusive.”
“I had to take charge of Ryan’s care. Then I had to make you act on our shared desire. But if I ever feel that being with me is no longer your priority or good for Ryan, if you ever have a better offer professionally, I won’t try to make you stay. This I promise you. On my honor.”
She looked as if she’d burst into tears.
Before he rushed to add something, anything, she choked out, “Oh, God, Fareed…you’re being so unfair. You’re…deluging me with so much. But I have to say no. I never dreamed it would go this far, but if you’re too blinded to care about your best interest, and ours, to end it now, I have to do it.”
He wanted to kick himself. He hadn’t considered those reasons for her reticence. That she believed he was compromising himself, and her, for something that would end. She was calculating the damages, to him, to her and Ryan, after such a finite, even if prolonged and powerful, interlude ended.
But he couldn’t make it clear he had no intention of ending this. Before he discussed permanence, he had to first resolve all her issues, about her and Ryan’s future here, give her more than offers and promises, show her how it would work in practice.
His cell phone rang. He ignored it, began, “Gwen, galbi…”
She grabbed his forearm. “Won’t you answer?”
“No.” He glared his annoyance at the phone on the dresser, tugged her nearer. “Now, Gwen…”
Her grip tightened. “That’s Emad’s ringtone.”
He shrugged. “He’ll call later. Gwen…”
“But he’s not hanging up,” she persisted. “It might be Ryan or Rose and my own phone is dead or something.”
She scrambled to get out of bed, and he stopped her, resigned that the moment was ruined.
“I’ll answer him.” He jumped out of bed, reveling in her hungry eyes on his aroused nakedness, despite her alarm. “And it’s not about Ryan or Rose, I’m sure, so you stay right there. I’m coming back as soon as I blast Emad to the farthest kingdom in the region.”
He felt steam rising from his skin as he snatched up the phone and put it to his ear.
Emad preempted his frustration. “I need to speak to you.”
“You couldn’t have picked a worse time,” he hissed.
Emad’s exhalation was weary. “That’s true, if not for the reason you mean. I am waiting downstairs in your office.”
“I’ll come down in an hour. Maybe two.”
“No, Somow’wak.” Emad sounded like never before. Blunt, brooking no arguments. “You’ll come down now.”
“Now” turned out to be twenty minutes later, the shortest time it took Fareed to dress and to take his leave of Gwen.
He strode into his office, displeasure roiling inside him. “You’d better have some unprecedented reason for this, Emad…”
Suddenly, Fareed’s blood froze in his arteries. The look on Emad’s face. This was momentous.
This was about Hesham’s family.
A lead had finally led somewhere. He could think of nothing else that would make Emad ask his presence so imperatively, or look so…so…
“You found them?” he rasped.
Emad gave a difficult nod.
Fareed’s heart crashed. “Something happened to them?”
Emad leveled grim eyes on him. “No, but it’s not much less terrible than if something had.”
“B’Ellahi, Emad, just tell me,” he roared.
Emad winced at his loss of control.
Then with regret heavy in his voice, he said, “I’ve found
proof that Hesham’s woman is…Gwen.”
Ten
“You’re insane.”
That was all Fareed could say, could think. That was the only explanation for what Emad had just uttered.
“Her given name was Gwendolyn. She changed it to Gwen in official documents since her college days.”
A dizzying mixture of relief and rage churned inside Fareed’s chest. “That’s your ‘proof’?”
Regret deepened in Emad’s eyes. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The doubts that made me investigate Gwen began when I became convinced she knew Arabic. She responded appropriately to things said in Arabic too many times, if only in that inimitable glint of understanding in her eyes, that I thought it strange she wouldn’t mention it. So I tested my theory by speaking Arabic on purpose when she was within earshot and observing her reaction. She was careful not to show that she understood, but I could see that she did. I became absolutely certain when I once calmly told a servant to walk out of the room naturally, then run like the wind to investigate the silent alarm I received from the southern guard post. Her alarm was unmistakable, and she tried to indirectly find out if anything was wrong. Because I spoke fast and idiomatically, I became certain she has knowledge of not only Arabic but our specific dialect.”
Fareed rejected Emad’s words as they exited his lips.
But another voice rose inside his mind, borne of the observations he’d never heeded. How she’d never asked what the things he said in Arabic meant, especially the endearments he deluged her in, how she seemed to respond appropriately…
No. She’d only understood his tone. He wasn’t letting Emad poison his mind with his crazy theory.
Emad continued. “I couldn’t find a reason why she’d hide her knowledge, but because I don’t believe in inexplicable, yet innocent, behavior, I tried to get more information from Rose.”
“That’s what you’ve been doing with Rose?” Fareed growled. “Leading her on so she’d supply you with possible dirt on Gwen? You went too far in your efforts to ‘protect’ me this time, Emad.”
“I was getting close to Rose for real, and I hope to get closer. Although I don’t know how I will, with the truth revealed…”
“This is not the truth. All you have to support this insane theory is circumstantial evidence.”
Pain etched deeper on Emad’s face. “I have new evidence that the places where Gwen lived are also where Hesham lived, at the same time, that she now lives in the same town he did when he died. She seemed to be living alone in all these places, but then so did Hesham. They must have kept separate residences in Hesham’s obsession to keep their relationship a secret. She became a freelance researcher for the past four years so she wouldn’t have a base. Then she left the job scene around the time she would have been in her last months of pregnancy and during Ryan’s first months. She went back to work only when Rose became Ryan’s nanny.
“And I didn’t get any of that from Rose. She might be shockingly open, but only with her own opinions. She wouldn’t have shared anything about Gwen. But she doesn’t know much anyway because she lived across the continent with her late ex-husband for the last five years. They divorced years ago, but when he had a stroke that paralyzed him, Rose went back to take care of him. He died two months before Gwen contacted her and asked her to become Ryan’s live-in nanny. Two weeks after Hesham died.”
Fareed shook his head, repeated what looped in his mind under the barrage of information. “Circumstantial evidence, all of it.”
Emad closed yet another escape route. “The one thing Rose mentioned was that a tragedy befell Gwen around the same time her ex-husband died. She wouldn’t elaborate and I couldn’t probe more than I did and have her suspect my motives.”
“Good thing you couldn’t afford to alienate the first woman to move your heart since your late wife.”
“I couldn’t afford to alert her to my suspicions and have her relay them to Gwen. If Gwen felt danger, we might lose Ryan.”
“Now I know you’re insane.”
“I would give anything to be wrong, but with you being who you are, with what’s at stake, I have to consider the worst possible explanation for her actions, until proven otherwise.”
Fareed gritted his teeth. “Just to see what kind of twisted ideas you can come up with, what would said explanation be?”
“The ideas I have are courtesy of the twisted fortune hunters who’ve pursued you since you turned eighteen.”
Outrage, on Gwen’s behalf, boiled his blood. “And you somehow suspect Gwen is one of those, among everything else?”
“It’s a theory, but it answers every question. She met Hesham in that conference…” At Fareed’s stunned glance, Emad grunted. “Yes, I realized why I felt inclined to give her a chance. Seemed I recognized her but failed to place her. Until I remembered that you spent a whole evening staring at her across that ballroom.”
So Emad had seen Gwen’s effect on him that day. And Hesham had come to see him during the end-of-conference party.
He still refused to sanction any of the accumulating evidence. “So they were in the same place once…”
“And my theory goes that she realized you were related. Once you left, she might have approached him to ask about you and their relationship began.”
Fareed groped for air. “That’s preposterous.”
“If you have a better explanation to fill the spaces in Hesham’s story, I’d be the first to grab at it. But we can’t afford to blind ourselves to what might be the truth. But if you find Gwen irresistible, Hesham, your closest brother in nature, would have found her so, too. It might have developed naturally between them, with the reason they met, you, unknown by him, and forgotten by her. Then everything went wrong and the king made his ultimatum, and Hesham went into hiding with her. Then he died and she walked away from the accident unscathed. Everything till that point could have been innocent and aboveboard. But I hit a wall trying to find any good reason why she didn’t come forward when you searched for her.
“With Hesham dead, from her perspective, the king’s threat to her was no more. Without a legal marriage, or the possibility of one, making her and Ryan legitimate heirs of a member of the royal family, she must have realized she’d be beneath his notice, therefore safe. But she was also in no position to demand anything from the Aal Zaafers, apart from your own voluntary support. As lavish as that would have been had she gotten it, she might have wanted more. And she had the perfect plan to get it.
“She must have known how she affected you all those years ago, so she approached you incognito through Ryan’s crisis. She could have used Hesham’s knowledge of you to make you fall under her spell, to have not only all you can provide, for Hesham’s and Ryan’s sake, but all that you are, for hers. And she succeeded, didn’t she?”
Fareed pulled at his hair, trying to counteract the pressure building inside his skull. “You’re sick, Emad. I thought you liked her, thought…thought…” He stopped, suffocating. “You’re wrong, about everything. She’s not Hesham’s woman.”
Emad eyed him bleakly. “And if she is? Will you consider the rest of my explanations?”
“No,” Fareed shouted. “Even if she is—and she isn’t—she’d have a reason, a good, even noble reason for hiding the truth.”
“You haven’t asked her to marry you yet, have you?”
Fareed blinked. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It explains her sudden persistence to leave. I know you’ve become…intimate, and she might have feared you might cool down. Threatening you with leaving might have been to push you to offer her what would make her stay forever.”
“No. No way. She doesn’t have one exploitative cell in her body. I don’t need to know facts. I know her. And I reject your evidence.” He bunched his fists, tried to bring his turmoil under control. “That will be all, Emad.”
“Forgive me, Somow’wak, but I have to voice my worst fears.”
Faree
d barely contained his fury. “And you have. I will ask her. She will refute it all. I will believe her and that will be that.”
“But we can’t afford for you to confront her, Somow’wak.”
“Why wouldn’t you want her to defend herself against your delusional deductions, except if you suspect they are just that?”
“Because if I’m right, confronting her would cost us Ryan.”
“There you go again with this…absurdity.”
“It’s anything but absurd, Somow’wak. I’ve marveled at the bond you forge deeper by the hour. Now I know you’ve both recognized the same blood running through your veins, the legacy of your most beloved sibling and his father. I’m certain part of your desire to have her is to have him, too. But she has full rights to him, and if any of the intentions I assigned to her were true, if she’s exposed you might enter an ugly fight over him. One you’re certain to lose.”
Fareed felt he was watching an explosion, played in reverse.
Emad’s revelations were the shrapnel hurtling back into place to re-form the bomb. Which might be the truth.
Not his macabre rationalization of Gwen’s motives and methods. But that she could be…be…
He couldn’t even think it. It would be beyond endurance.
But it would explain so much. Her wariness and resistance from the first moment, her distress when he’d asked her about Ryan’s father, his reaction to Ryan—which had the texture of what he’d felt for Hesham, the many similarities that did exist between the child Hesham had been and Ryan.
Then came Gwen’s continued emotional reticence, her persistent efforts to stop their intimacies, to leave…
The doubt Emad had sown felt like a virus replicating at cancerous speed, infecting his every cell and thought.
He couldn’t survive knowing. He wouldn’t survive not knowing.
