The Sheikh's Claim

by Olivia Gates

  Then she croaked, “You—you’re really upset?”

  “Upset?” A mirthless laugh shredded out of him. “Upset?”

  His laugh died. He pressed his fist against his chest where it felt it had been ripped open.

  She stared up at him, horror settling into her eyes by degrees. “I—I really…really believed it would be the last thing you’d want, to know you had a baby, from me. Y-you did walk out that day saying you’d delete me from your memory.”

  “You’d just told me that you hated me, hated yourself when you were with me. You said that after I told you how I couldn’t forget you, after we almost died of pleasure in each other’s arms. What did you expect me to say? If you’d given me any hope, I would have never given up. And if you’d told me when you found out you were pregnant with Adam…” A lump pushed its way up his throat.

  “Wh-what would you have done if I’d told you?”

  “Ya Ullah, what wouldn’t I have done? Had I been the second one to know that you carried my child, as I should have been, I would have been there with you, for you, for him, every moment of the past twenty-eight months. And you deprived me of all that.”

  The silver of her eyes dimmed until it was eclipsed in a wave of reddened realization and blackening contrition.

  Suddenly she staggered around and collapsed on the couch.

  “I didn’t realize, never believed…” She dropped her face into her palms on a hiccuped gasp.

  He looked down at her, witnessing the distress shaking her frame, chopping her breathing for the first time. His own was wildfire that razed through his every nerve.

  He walked to her slowly, feeling if he went any faster, he’d keel over. He went down on his knees before her.

  She gasped as he took her clammy, trembling hands in his. Tears streaked a pale track down the velvet of her flushed cheeks as she raised her face level with his. Her lips contorted to form words, her voice a thick, tear-clogged tremolo. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Jalal....”

  One hand pressed against her lips, silencing the flow of her regret. He couldn’t bear her apologies. He didn’t think he deserved them. Didn’t want them even if he did.

  He needed only one thing. “I want to see my son, Lujayn. Take me to him. Now.”

  Eight

  Lujayn snatched her hand from his, heaved up to her feet and wiped away the tears that had abruptly stopped. “I can’t do that.”

  He rose to stand, feeling as unsteady as she seemed. His lips and heart compressed on the anger condensing inside him. “Even now, you still persist in trying to deprive me of my son? Zain, kaif ma tebbi—as you wish. I only asked you as a courtesy. I don’t need your permission or your cooperation to see my son. I’ll go to your uncle’s to see him, right now.”

  She lunged at him, caught his arm in a frantic grasp, her face urgent. “You can’t. They have no idea you’re his father.”

  A suspicion skewered him in the chest. “You told them he was Patrick’s?”

  Her color rose into the danger zone. “N-no, they knew he couldn’t have been Adam’s father. I—I told them it was someone else, but it wasn’t important who he was.”

  Would everything she said keep hurting more? “And they just accepted that?”

  She winced. “My father’s side of the family did. My mother’s, being conservative Azmaharians, were mortified. They rationalized my ‘lapse’ by my grief, and placated themselves that I’d make it…lawful. When I told them there was no hope of that and I’d decided to keep the baby and would disappear from their lives forever if they couldn’t deal with it, they eventually succumbed.”

  “Decided to keep the baby?” He caught her by the shoulders, each heartbeat a wrecking ball inside his chest. “You considered…terminating your pregnancy?”

  “No.” Her eyes filled again. “It was a shock to find myself pregnant, under the circumstances, but no matter how difficult I knew it would be, how it would change my life forever, I wanted Adam more than I wanted to live.”

  A mixture of overwhelming sweetness and bitterness, of longing and regret, expanded inside his chest. He wanted to crush her into him, assuage the alienation, wanted to push her away feeling her nearness would cause him permanent injury.

  He did neither, kept holding her at arm’s length.

  Then he rasped, “Do you have photos?”

  “O-of Adam?” Her eyes widened, brightened as if he’d handed her a lifeline. She stumbled out of his hold and to her purse, produced her phone, her hands trembling as she accessed her photos. “I should have thought of this.”

  She thought he’d be satisfied with seeing his son in photos.

  His hand covered the phone’s screen as she extended it to him. This wouldn’t be how he’d first lay eyes on his son.

  “Photos of yourself. When you were pregnant.”

  The relief on her face drained as hard as her arm fell to her side. “I wasn’t in any condition to think of posing for photos. I’d decided to have Adam, but I wasn’t exactly…”

  “Happy?”

  She shook her head, her eyes filling with the days of anxiety and anguish she’d lived, a woman becoming a single mother.

  Suddenly it was vital for him to find something out. “Did you stay in the Hamptons during your pregnancy?”

  He’d known from Fadi’s reports that she’d put the mansion up for sale around the time she must have given birth. He’d had Fadi acquire it for him, through a third party so she wouldn’t refuse to sell. Now, imagining her there, pregnant with his child in Patrick’s house, was another turn of the lance embedded in his gut.

  “Leaving the mansion and leaving the States was the first thing I did after I discovered my pregnancy. I was too high profile there, and I didn’t want anyone finding out.”

  “By anyone, you mean me.”

  Her exhalation was laden with resignation. “Actually, you weren’t my main concern. Your mother was.”

  His mother’s mention, when he least expected it, was another blow out of blue sky. “Why would you have worried about her?”

  “Because she would have realized it’s your baby.”

  “Why would she have?” Confusion screeched inside his head, picking up momentum, churning his thoughts to a sickening mess. “She had no more access to you after your mother left her service, probably never had any interest in you to start with. Why would she have followed your news? And if she had, you’d been married, and she couldn’t have found out the exact stage of your pregnancy.” He shook his head. “What am I saying? She wouldn’t have suspected a thing even had she known the baby wasn’t Patrick’s. There’d been no reason for her to suspect me being the father. She knew nothing about us.”

  “She knew everything.”

  The quiet assertion went off in his head. Time slowed, filled with the debris of the history he’d thought he’d lived as each fragment flew in his face, crashed into him with the force of realization.

  His mother had known.

  But how? Did he want to know? He’d found out enough crimes his family had perpetrated against hers. Could he bear knowing more?

  Aih. He owed it to her, to them, to his son, to know everything, set straight as much of it as he could.

  Yet… “I find it impossible to believe she’d known about us and hadn’t done something about it.”

  Her body and expression tensed defensively. “You can believe what you like.”

  “I am not disbelieving you, I’m…boggled that she knew and just…let us be. She was the main reason I kept us such a heavily guarded secret. She had a way of making anyone we ever came close to…disappear. Admittedly, it was worse with Haidar, qorrat enha—the apple of her eye, and she was downright vicious in what she’d done to Roxanne. But I am still her son, and I knew she’d do the same to anyone I came close to that she didn’t approve of. And she approved of no one. But when it came to you…”

  Her lush lips twisted. “Yeah, her servant’s daughter.”

  “You were never t
hat to me. But I knew you were that to her, warranting a whole new level of disapproval if she knew, and consequently an even more…creative intervention.”

  Her eyes cleared of the rawness of agitation, filled with the mist of contemplation. “You thought she’d harm my family?”

  He let out his breath on a ragged exhalation. “I didn’t even want to think what she might do if she knew.”

  Her shrug was dismissive, assertive. “She knew. She told me.”

  He should be getting used to the constant turmoil being with Lujayn created. If he hadn’t till now, he never would.

  “And she never did anything,” he said. “All right, there goes another corner pillar of my belief system.”

  “She didn’t think she had to do a thing. She thought you were taking care of not sullying your image or family name with such an abominable liaison well enough. She commended you for knowing what my kind was good for, and keeping me where I belonged, in the dark, unacknowledged and reviled.”

  His blood burned cell by cell as every vicious word that reeked of authenticity bludgeoned him.

  He had no doubt those had been his mother’s words. What remained to know was… “When did she tell you that?”

  She attempted a shrug of nonchalance, failed miserably. “Oh, a bit over six years ago.”

  When she’d started being contentious and ill-tempered. Now he knew the reason, he thought it a miracle she hadn’t walked out on him on that same day. That it had taken her two more years of what must have looked like proof of his mother’s words.

  So his mother had managed to spoil another vital thing to him. In an even more evil and damaging way than he’d feared.

  “It wasn’t true, what she said,” he finally rasped. “I am now realizing my actions could have been interpreted in a way to validate everything she’d said, and I bet she was counting on that, too, but none of it was in any way true.”

  Her arms went around her body, as if hugging herself against sudden cold. “She was so proud of what you’d done to me. She said you did what she’d promised me she’d do one day, put me in my place.”

  “When did she say that?”

  “Ten years before I met you.”

  This time it was he who staggered around to find the nearest surface to collapse on.

  Lujayn had been only eleven when his mother had threatened her.

  After sitting down with the stiff care of someone who had trouble coordinating her movements, she said, “On one of her trips to the States, she called my mother. My mother was in turmoil over answering her ‘summons’ but she buckled under her conditioning and went. She took me with her. Without inviting us to sit, your mother demanded that she leave her family and come back to her service.

  “God, I’ve never seen Mom like that, couldn’t imagine that my vivacious, outspoken mother could stand before anyone so shaken and unable to stand up for herself. She stood there, head bent, taking your mother’s cruelty as she hacked at her, saying she’d deserted her in a pathetic attempt for independence that only landed her with a slob of a husband who’d never be out of debt. That she’d gone from a highly paid lady-in-waiting to a queen to the servant of a bum and his children for free. I saw my mother shriveling under her barrage, and I couldn’t bear it.”

  He couldn’t either. Was there no end to his mother’s transgressions? Had he ever had a chance with Lujayn? He must have always been inextricable in her mind from his mother, and her feelings toward him had no doubt been tainted by his mother’s degradation of hers. Then she went on, and he realized there was always worse than the worst he could think of.

  “I put myself in front of my mother, as if I’d protect her from your mother’s attack. My mother tried to stop me, but I walked up to your mother and told her I never thought anyone could be as beautiful as her. Or as mean. I told her she was scary and ugly inside and that my mother left her because she made her miserable like she made others, and that everyone hated her. And I could see why. Then I told my mother that I wouldn’t let her go back to work for this woman, that I’ll give up everything, my ballet and piano lessons and get work to help her.”

  He could see her, a slip of a girl, standing up to his dragoness of a mother, to defend her family. His heart slowed to a painful thud as she went on.

  “Your mother looked at me in contemplation all through my tirade. Then she said that as a princess from birth, then a queen by marriage, it was her duty to maintain order, restore balance. She took it upon herself to put people in their correct places. But to do so, it took time and patience, so she was not in any hurry. But she never forgot her purpose, refused to stop until she saw it through. And she would put me in my place, no matter how long it took, since I clearly had no idea what it was.”

  He wanted to shout, enough! But he knew it wasn’t, not for her. She had to let this all out once and for all.

  Gritting his teeth on the sharpening pain in his chest, he willed her to go on.

  She did. “But I was too young and didn’t believe anyone would be as vindictive and long-term as that. Mom begged Sondoss to please forgive us, me for my foolishness and her for not being able to leave her family. Sondoss only said my mother would change her mind, when life with us, her miserable family, became impossible.

  “Mom was a wreck as we left, and remained one for the next year. Dad lost his latest job, and couldn’t find another. Soon, what had been a barely manageable situation became impossible as per your mother’s predictions. Mom had to go back to her service, while Dad had to go back to his family in Ireland. Mom took my younger sister and brother, while Dad took me, tearing apart our family. Dad asked Mom to take me, too, said I shouldn’t be away from my mother and siblings. But it wasn’t for him that Mom let me go. She knew if she took me with her, your mother would find ways to ‘put me in my place.’ I cried for days, begging her to take me with her, saying I would do anything to make your mother forgive me. But she knew. Your mother never forgot, or forgave. So your infallible memory comes from both sides of your heritage.”

  He’d already known his mother had orchestrated a conspiracy that could have only played out in endless bloodshed. Why would he consider this premeditated cruelty any more shocking?

  But it was. Her conspiracy had been, to her, justified, to give her sons, those she considered the ones worthy of being kings, the thrones they deserved. What she’d done to Lujayn and her mother had been nothing but pure malice.

  Lujayn angrily wiped at the fresh flow of tears. “But Mom promised it would only be for a couple years. Sondoss was a slave driver, but she paid her servants very well. Mom estimated she’d be able to put aside the capital Dad needed to start the business he’d always dreamed of. But as if knowing Mom’s plan in advance, your mother offered a salary only large enough to support us and pay a portion of our debts.”

  His mother had known. She had a way of knowing everything. And using it to her advantage. To everybody else’s loss.

  The voice that had steadied began to shake again. “Dad kept losing every job he got, to his growing despair. He’d think he was doing so well then he’d be let go. He believed he was jinxed.”

  A jinx called Sondoss. This had his mother’s claws all over it. No need to draw her attention to that conclusion if she hadn’t reached it herself. Nothing to be gained from infecting her soul with even more rage and hatred.

  “I did give up everything I was involved in, started to work when I was fourteen. But by the time I was eighteen, I knew the jobs I kept getting were hand-to-mouth solutions. There was no way I could afford college and even if I could, I couldn’t wait for the well-paying jobs a degree would afford me. I needed something that didn’t take long training, something that would pay well fast. I had nothing to use but ‘my body’ as you put it. I always had people complimenting my ‘exotic’ looks, saying I could be a model. But it wasn’t as easy as that. It took me a whole year before I landed my first paying job. It paid enough to buy a new outfit to wear to auditions, and a bottl
e of cheap champagne to celebrate with Dad. Not that there was much to celebrate.

  “I was exposed to some…scary situations. People started coming out of the woodwork, wanting to be my ‘agent,’ ‘manager’ or ‘entourage.’ I’d just decided to admit defeat and get the first shop-clerk job I could find, when I met Aliyah again and told her I saw why she’d left modeling. She offered to help financially first, but when I refused she decided to teach me to ‘fish.’ She took me under her wing, showed me the ropes, introduced me to the right people and I started working, making money, started paying our debts, and I thought my life was finally on the right track. Then I met you.”

  His eyes squeezed without volition. The way she’d said that. What he considered the best memory of his life, she considered the worst. Forcing his eyes open, so he’d see for himself how totally wrong he’d been about everything he’d ever shared with her, he watched her struggle to continue her account.

  “I was horrified. You were the son of my mother’s enslaver, a part of the reason I didn’t have my family in my life, and might never have them. To my mortification, I found you fascinating. I’d seen you so many times from afar before that....”

  “You did?”

  “I’d been in Azmahar many times to visit Mom, when your mother was too busy. Then after that first meeting, after every exposure, I found myself unable to think of anything else but you. I told myself I’d have some more time with you before the inevitable end, because the moment I told you who I was, you’d be the one to walk away.”

  “And you told me.”

  “Yeah. And instead of coming to your senses as I thought you would, you decided to have your cake and eat it, too. And it kept eating at me, how I wanted you, when I shouldn’t.

  “At first, it was because I couldn’t let my family find out about you. I felt I was betraying them, not only by being with the son of the woman who’d torn us apart, but because I was acting like anything but the person they’d raised. I was ashamed of the way I breathlessly did anything you even hinted at, accommodated your whims at my expense. I cut myself off from them because I couldn’t bear the shame of lying to them with every breath, since that was how frequently I thought of you.