The Sheikh's Claim

by Olivia Gates

  Now he closed the doors after the last departing guest.

  “What’s this? Detention?” she seethed as he turned to her. “For talking back to the headmaster? You did have us sitting there like kids who had to placate you or risk failing. Worse, like hostages forced to put up with the theatrics of our captor in fear of our lives.”

  He stopped steps away, his eyes like turbid honey, something unsettled and unsettling buzzing. “I didn’t see you placating me or putting up with anything.”

  A frisson of danger skewered through her.

  Which was ridiculous because she’d never feared him. But his inexplicable intensity had her heart quivering. And it made her even angrier. If he thought he could intimidate her into cowering or simpering like he did all the others, as someone who didn’t give two figs about his rank, wealth and power, she was obliged to adjust his inflated view of his importance.

  “You got enough of that from the others to turn the strongest stomach,” she hissed. “Not to mention the truckloads of adulation you got from my family. I always knew your family screwed mine over in so many ways, but to find out the real depth of their abuse, their…crimes, and to have the sordid details accompanied by my family’s gratitude and martyrdom was just too much. So if you detained me to chastise me for daring to voice my disgust in front of the thralls you call your campaign managers, let me tell you I’m only sorry that I didn’t get to say more before my family’s grossly misplaced sense of decorum and their impending collective stroke silenced me.”

  The ferocity in his gaze rose with her every word. It made her barrel on. “Here, let me tell you what I would have said. I would have moved from condemning your family to condemning you directly. Your family members were straightforward in their subjugation of mine, showed them the kindness of open cruelty, leaving them the dignity of knowing their enemy and the relief of being able to hate them in their hearts. But your pretense of compassion and generosity is far worse since it makes them unaware of your abuse, and tricks them into being your slaves by choice.”

  His stare remained unwavering, as if he were trying to read her mind, to decipher her last thought and impulse. But why, when she was whacking him over the head with it all?

  Maybe she needed to be even more explicit. “You must think you’ve succeeded in using them to have me where you want me, since they almost pleaded for me to stay when you ordered me to. So enjoy this triumph because it’ll never be repeated. From now on, they know to leave me out of any feet-kissing rituals. And if you’re thinking of new ways to pressure me, let me tell you now nothing else will work. This Prince of Two Kingdoms thing clearly works on Azmaharians programmed to bow down to their royalty. But even if I wasn’t now a businesswoman who’s long left behind any tendencies to be bowled over by you, I’m an American and we generally have allergic reactions to royal entitlement.”

  “Is that all you are, Lujayn?”

  She blinked. His voice. She’d never heard it like that. Like the roll of approaching thunder. And what did he mean…?

  “A businesswoman, an American. Aren’t you leaving something vital out?”

  She frowned at that searing spike of emotion in his eyes, her heart starting to thud with confusion and wariness. “If you’re talking about my Azmaharian side, think I might have royalty-worshipping tendencies to unearth, save it. My only local ingredients are some genes and a passport that I never use.”

  Suddenly he was closer, and not because he’d moved. It felt as if he’d expanded, as if everything inside him had reached out to engulf her. She felt him all over her, inside her head.

  Then in that heart-snatching tone, he said, “I’m talking about your maternal side. I’m talking about the ingredients that make you a mother.”

  * * *

  Jalal had no idea what it was.

  Maybe it was the stiffness that invaded her body, or the pulse going haywire in her throat, or the blast of horror in her eyes. Or it was all of that and myriad other instantaneous, involuntary signs that coalesced and painted a picture worth a thousand confessions.

  It all added up to one thing. One thing that lodged in his mind with the force of an ax. Something devastating. The truth.

  Lujayn’s child was his.

  Seven

  The knowledge mushroomed in Jalal’s skull.

  Lujayn had had his child.

  He had a child.

  “Jalal…”

  Numb to his recesses, paralyzed in soul before body, he stared at her stricken eyes, his ears ringing with the softness of the dread in her voice. His heart, his mind, everything he was made of, swelled with the enormity of the belief, unraveled with the scope of its implications.

  Moments ago he’d been just himself, the man he’d been struggling to formulate a peace treaty with all his life. And she’d just been herself. The one woman he wanted, and with whom peace seemed an ever-receding mirage.

  Now he no longer knew who either of them were.

  They were no longer the once-lovers who sparred and parried with nothing but consuming passion at stake between them. They were two people who shared far more than their unquenchable, if according to her, better-off-suppressed needs.

  They shared a life. They had since she’d conceived his child. But by hiding the fact, she’d stopped it from becoming a reality to him. It had only become one the moment he’d known of it.

  The instant freeze that had struck him, buried him under layers of icy shock, started to crack under the heat of her dismay. Then she relinquished his gaze, swung around. The curtain of raven gloss cascading down her back arced with the force of the motion, lashed his cheek. Then she was receding like a wobbly image from a dream.

  He found himself launching after her, his need to stop her, to demand…everything, propelling him.

  He caught her at the door, his fingers digging in her flesh through her long-sleeved jacket, felt like they’d sunk into lava. She twisted in his hold and he brought both arms crossing beneath her heavy breasts, felt as if he’d enfolded a live wire as he subdued her against his vibrating body.

  “No more fighting me off, Lujayn.” Was that his voice? That wounded beast’s? “I’m never going to let you walk away from me again.” He turned her around, not knowing if it was his hands that were shaking or the shoulders he held her by, or both. “This is no longer a game.”

  She tried to shake off his hands, her eyes escaping his. “Thanks for admitting it was a game all along. But you’re right. It’s not, because I’m not playing. Game over, Jalal.”

  He almost ground his teeth to powder as the last vestiges of shock melted in the blast of rising rage. “It was you who’ve played me all along. You never told me you had my child.”

  Her gaze met his at his shout, attempted derision, but the dread she’d managed to leash blossomed again, betraying her. “Don’t be ridiculous....”

  “No, you don’t.” He gave her back her earlier fury. “Don’t you dare try to misdirect me again. It won’t work. Not only did you have my child and didn’t tell me, you were never going to tell me.”

  The acknowledgment in her eyes incinerated any wisps of uncertainty into nothingness.

  And he realized. That he’d hoped. For some indication that she’d hesitated in that decision. That it had weighed on her. That she’d afforded him a trace of consideration before ruling him out.

  She hadn’t.

  He let go of her shoulders, stumbled back under the cruelty of realization, his eyes burning as they searched hers. “Ya Ullah, ya Lujayn…b’Ellahi…laish? Why?”

  Her eyes wavered. The vulnerability of consternation gave way to the toughness of control again.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she scoffed. “The question is, why should I have told you?”

  She truly didn’t see why. How could this be? “You didn’t think I should know I’ve fathered a child?”

  Her stiff shoulders jerked. “You’ve probably fathered a dozen children you don’t know or care about. What’s one more
?”

  His hand rose to his chest, almost convinced he’d encounter something sharp sticking out of it. “Is this what you think? That I’m not only indiscriminately promiscuous, but that I go around having unsafe sex?”

  “Seeing as how safe sex wasn’t one of your considerations with me, why should I think other women warranted any better?”

  He’d only ever had “unsafe” sex with her. She’d been a virgin and he’d unfailingly observed safety before her. He’d only protected her from pregnancy at first then she’d done so later. He’d thought employing contraceptive measures herself had meant she’d wanted to enjoy full intimacy, something he’d never considered doing before her. What he’d gotten addicted to with her.

  And she’d thought he was… “…so callous I care nothing about the consequences, to the women I bed, and to children I must occasionally sire?”

  “So you ‘care’? And engage in that delightful practice you royalty types favor in this region, giving your illicit spawn the coveted title of mansoob? So generous of you to ‘occasionally,’ ‘sort of’ proclaim responsibility for your offspring from unsuitable wombs. The children of your servants or anyone inferior to you must be so grateful to be declared illegitimate but ‘associated’ with you. So isn’t it just lucky for me that I don’t need your ‘association’? And neither does Adam.”

  Adam. His child was a boy. And he was nineteen months old.

  The extent of what he’d missed in that time felt like a noose tightening against his windpipe, suffocating him. And for the first time in his life he knew what it meant to be helpless.

  This chunk of his child’s life was gone, and he could never get it back, for either of them.

  It must have showed on his face, the anguish and defeat. It twisted her stony expression into a grimace.

  “Let’s not pretend this was something you considered at all, let alone with me. You didn’t even acknowledge me, but you would have my baby? But it wasn’t your fault I got pregnant. You probably thought I was protected. I wasn’t. I let contraception go when I married Patrick.”

  So if it had been her choice, her child would have been her husband’s. She’d had his only by mistake.

  “Then he died, and sex was the last thing on my mind, so when you popped up out of nowhere and we ended up in bed, repercussions didn’t even occur to me except when my period was a month late. So it’s really none of your business that I got pregnant. Adam is none of your business, just like I never was.”

  Bitterness choked him. “You were never my business? I was unable to have a moment, waking or sleeping, for eight years without thinking of you, craving you…obsessing about you.”

  “Lighten up on the exaggerations, please,” she sneered. “I was there, remember? At least through the years we had together. I know for a fact that during those, you spent weeks, sometimes months, without doing any of that.”

  “I never stayed away by choice, and all the time we were apart, I did all that. Then you left me, and the moment I thought it possible to come to you again, I did.”

  Her eyes flared silver fire. “And you came to have closure or sex or both, not father a child.”

  “I told myself I came for the first. But what I really wanted was to clear away the bitterness, at least come to terms with it so I can…reconnect with you, claim you again.”

  “You never connected with me or claimed me to start with.”

  “That’s your version. Or maybe it was the truth, for you. My truth was that I did. As much as you claimed me. I was yours.”

  She looked as if he’d punched her in the gut.

  When she spoke, her voice was as strangled as if he had. “Are you implying that during our time together you had no one but me?”

  “That’s not an implication. That’s a fact.”

  She gaped at him as if she’d never heard anything so preposterous.

  Heart aching with affront and frustration he hissed, “What could have possibly raised any doubts about my faithfulness to you?”

  That shattered the stasis of incredulity, hardening her eyes and voice again. “Oh, I don’t know. Probably the dozens of nubile, and let’s not forget to mention ‘suitably ranked,’ bodies hanging on your arm in every public appearance. While I was safely tucked a world away to be brought out to play with, in secret.”

  “Those ‘bodies’ sought me out, because of who I am, not for myself. I didn’t want anyone, starting with my mother, to speculate if I rebuffed their public advances. I told you that.” Disappointment seared through him as he saw it in her eyes. She hadn’t considered believing him, then or now. “So you believed I was sleeping around, yet took me back into your arms, welcomed me into your body when I came back to you?”

  “Pathetic, isn’t it? What’s more sickening is that I would have indefinitely put up with being one of your steady stream of exchangeable bodies if I wasn’t the only one you wouldn’t stoop to associating with in public. Now you know that my anger and disgust weren’t all directed toward you.”

  His lips twisted. “You gifted me with more than enough of it. You started by leaving me, then turned Patrick against me....”

  Her eyes turned to steel at Patrick’s mention. “It was your unethical business practices that cultivated his enmity, not me.”

  Everything inside him went still, to ward off yet another unexpected and unearned blow. “He told you that?”

  Her gaze wavered. No. Patrick hadn’t told her that. She would have said yes if she could. But she couldn’t lie—for Patrick. She wouldn’t mind saying anything to hurt him.

  Was all this hatred for him? Or was he paying the collective price for his family?

  Her shoulders jerked. “Patrick only made me face facts I’d been avoiding for years—about how you manipulated me for your conveniences, made me consent to being one of your…entertainments. I applied your methods with me to your dealings with Patrick and extrapolated his reasons for ending your partnerships. Why else would he have endured all those losses if it wasn’t to stop you from manipulating him anymore?”

  “How about that he was so jealous of me, he was making sure I was out of your life, even after he was gone?” Bile filled him up to his eyes. “And I thought him a good friend and a man of honor. All the time he’d been plotting to take you away from me. And he did.”

  “I had to be with you in the first place for him to take me away from you. I never was.”

  “B’Ellahi, that’s a lie. You were closer to me than any other person in my life.”

  “That is a testimony to how superficial it all was. You’re light-years distant from everyone in your life. You have formed no closeness with anyone starting with your twin. As for what we shared, it was nothing resembling a relationship.”

  “What did you think I was doing with you for four years, if that wasn’t a relationship?”

  “Anyone hearing you saying four years over and over would think we lived together or something. Do you know how many days out of those four years we had together?”

  His heart compressed at yet another proof of how differently they’d perceived the past, how much she held against him that he’d been unaware of. “You counted?”

  “Not at the time, but I went back and looked over my schedule, and all the last-minute cancellations I had to make when you had an opening and could grace me with your presence. You acted with the conviction that my life and commitments were of no consequence, and the only one who should be accommodated at the drop of a hat was you.”

  “You never told me you had to cancel plans to be with me.”

  She gave a furious laugh. “So you didn’t listen when I did. Or you did and it only fed your ego, that I’d drop everything, at whatever cost to me, to jump back in bed with you.”

  Had they both lived through the same past? Or was she talking about some parallel earth to his?

  “I believed you only rescheduled. You never made it sound important, so I assumed your plans were flexible, unlike mine.”

/>   “And he says that with a straight face. Wow. You’re really something. You assumed that I, a struggling model trying to build a name for myself in a sea of women with better qualifications and looks, had the luxury of canceling shoots or even rescheduling them? While you, the prince whom everyone would sacrifice their firstborn for a handshake from, couldn’t change your plans at your whim? If you gave it a moment’s thought you would have seen the truth, but you didn’t bother. You had everything compartmentalized for your convenience. Your business and power games, your sports tournaments, your political and promotional schmoozing, and when you needed to unwind in a sex marathon, you called me, expected me to be there where and when you dictated. And self-degrading fool that I was, I was there. Every single time.”

  A kaleidoscope of agony spun inside him at her every slashing word. “So you thought I didn’t care about you one way or another, thought I’d feel the same about the child you bore me. So why didn’t you tell me anyway? Just to make sure? Why were you so anxious to divert me from the truth?”

  Sarcasm emptied from her eyes, discomfort replacing it. “Because this way Adam remained mine alone and your reaction to his existence wouldn’t…taint him. I thought if you knew and rejected him, he’d somehow feel it. I didn’t want to make that rejection real, and it would only be real if you knew....”

  Her words petered out, her cream complexion blotching with crimson agitation.

  “So this was how you rationalized it all. You painted me as exploitative, cheating scum so you could walk out on me with a clear conscience. Then you condemned me as an unfeeling monster so you could justify depriving me of my child.”

  Silence crashed after his last butchered growl.

  Nothing fractured its suffocation but the sounds of his thundering heartbeats and her labored breathing.