The Desert Lord's Baby

by Olivia Gates

  This was Farooq as he really was, the heir to a legacy rooted in fables, a shaper of destiny, the embodiment of the desert and the sea, the incarnation of their might and wealth, their majesty and beauty.

  And he was her groom, the man who’d given her what had made life real—the agony of loving him—and what had made it worth living, her miraculous Mennah. He was the man she still loved beyond sanity or hope.

  He stood there, his eyes branding her as his. As she was, had been from the first moment.

  Her heart had restarted at some point, propelling her toward him faster with each beat. His hand rose, asking for hers. She ran the last few steps, flew, both hands held out, grabbed his as if afraid he’d fade away.

  “Carmen.” She heard his rumble over the din, felt it in her bones, his astonishment, his possessiveness, his hunger as he crushed her hands in the assuagement of his reality.

  Needing more proof, she burrowed into his side. His arm convulsed around her as the other ended the zaffah with a wave. He looked down at her, bombarding her with ferocity. She buried her face into his chest, seeking refuge from him in him.

  His heart, his groan thundered below her ear. “Let’s get this done before I give in, Carmen.”

  Without giving her time to wonder what he meant, he had her striding beside him on the royal-blue carpet, down the expansive path lined with stunning plant and flower arrangements ending in a dozen cream satin-covered steps. They climbed up to the kooshah, where bride and groom sit during the ceremony. Theirs was a massive gazebolike structure with clusters of exquisite Arabesque woodwork hanging from its eight corners like pendent stalactites, gilded on the outside, the color of cedar on the inside. Within its pillars was a huge curved cream-satin couch ensconcing an antique worked bronze table. The ma’zoon sat in the middle with their orfi marriage scrolls in front of him, and a book that looked like some ancient tome of prophecy open to empty pages where their destiny was still to be written.

  The live music came to an end as Farooq led her to the edge of the stage and all her resolutions to be the seasoned professional boiled away. Being the designing mind behind such events was realms away from literally being centerstage in one.

  Her arrhythmia somehow didn’t shake her apart as she cast her gaze around the expansive gardens, even when it took a further plunge into irregularity. The gardens were decorated in the exact way she’d imagined and told Farooq about yesterday. Hundreds of lanterns undulated in the twilight breeze between symmetrically planted palm trees. Hundreds of torches flamed on top of polished brass poles, all intertwined between two hundred tables set in a level of luxury she’d only ever dreamed of achieving in her own enterprises, occupied by people who made the world go ’round.

  And they were all looking at her. In resounding silence.

  Her hand squeezed Farooq’s. He squeezed back, leaned to put his lips to her ear. “Your beauty has stunned them, ya jameelati.”

  Breath left her. Not at his assertion, as touched as she was by it, but at his endearment. Not because it was “my beauty,” but because she’d given up on hearing one from his lips again. It was like gulping crisp water after months in the desert.

  Then he murmured, “Let’s work the crowd, ya helweti.”

  Elation at yet another endearment, my sweet, bubbled over. She smiled with all her body, surged forward with him to wave to the attendees, who’d all stood up and started clapping.

  Smiling wide, he winked. “Now let’s play our trump card.”

  He turned and Ameenah came forward with Mennah, who launched herself into his arms. He held her up, showing her off, pride and love radiating from him. The crowd succumbed in collective to Mennah’s cuteness and excitement, awing at the sight of her, chuckling at Farooq’s intentional Lion King reference. Their clapping rose when he handed Mennah back to Carmen and bowed before her, branding her hand on both sides in kisses.

  As he withdrew his lips, straightened, her heart stuttered, felt it would stop again, for real, if she lost contact with him.

  She surged to maintain it, threw herself at him, Mennah and all. He went rigid. Silence descended.

  She closed her eyes. Oh God. Way to be a professional limpet. Had she deepened his anger at her? Did all those people who mattered to him and to Judar on so many levels think the crown prince had settled on an impulsive moron for a wife, casting doubts on his judgment, damaging his image…?

  Agitation came to an abrupt end as Farooq swept her, Mennah and all, high in his arms. The crowd roared with approval.

  Sagging in his hold in relief, she opened her eyes, sought his, found them roiling with hunger and delight.

  “If you’re trying to make your bill too huge to pay, you’ve only succeeded in enlarging the installments I’ll exact from you. But now you have to cater to all those poor power brokers whose jaded senses you’ve jogged. They’re clamoring for more.”

  He let her feet touch ground, gave her a slight push. He wanted her to go salute their guests alone, the so-called estranged princess laying claim to her rightful status.

  Holding the waving Mennah tighter in her arms, she let her fingers and gaze trail off his, started across the stage, an out-of-body feeling coming over her. It was as if she was in the crowd watching that confident woman in the thousands of dollars outfit and priceless jewelry waving and smiling to the people who shaped and ruled earth as if she was one of them.

  In the first row she recognized oil, shipping, and technology magnates. The German chancellor. The French president. The king and queen of Bidalya. And…was that the king of Judar…?

  Sick electricity arced from her armpits, flooding her body. He looked so unwell, she almost hadn’t recognized him. And he didn’t look happy. Displeasure came off him in waves. There was no question in her mind. He didn’t want Farooq to marry her.

  Was Farooq going against his king’s wishes? Or had the king given his consent on terms of it being a finite union? How finite?

  And why was she wondering? She’d already known her days with Farooq were numbered. Again. Had she been fooling herself into thinking they might not be? Where had she learned that mutilating practice? When had she learned to hope?

  A blacker wave of unease crashed into her. She traced its source to a man she’d seen only once. Tareq.

  He’d seemed to suck up positive energy then, too, but she’d thought her condition when she’d stumbled into him during her life’s darkest hour had imparted its oppression and grimness on him. It had seemed the only logical explanation when the man had gone out of his way to be accommodating when he’d found her staggering out of Farooq’s skyscraper that night, weeping and lost. He hadn’t probed when she’d said she needed to get away, had done all he could to help her. She’d never thought about why he had.

  Now she felt his maliciousness focus on her, on Farooq, and she knew. He’d hoped it would hurt Farooq, or at least anger him greatly.

  Insight became conviction. He’d introduced himself as Farooq’s older cousin. That was why she’d accepted his offer of a ride. But that meant he must have been the first in line to the throne. And he’d been bypassed for Farooq. He Farooq’s his enemy. He hated him, would do anything to hurt him. Would he go as far as physical harm…?

  Suddenly she was suffocating with dread and hatred.

  Farooq took Mennah from her, handed her back to Ameenah, and reached for her frozen-in-sweat hand, stilled its shaking. She found his gaze fixed on Tareq, his face turned to stone as he met his cousin’s menace.

  “Farooq…” She wanted to beg for reassurance, that he was safe, that Mennah was as he turned her to the kooshah, where Shehab and Kamal flanked the couch, in full traditional regalia. She caught their eyes, hers begging, for some reason believing they’d understand her fears, defuse them. They cast their gazes behind her, she just knew at Tareq. Then Shehab gave her a reinforcing glance, Kamal a ferocious one, as if each was telling her in his way not to worry.

  Farooq’s gaze was once more inscrutable as
he seated her on one side of the ma’zoon before sitting on the other.

  “Carmen, give me your hand,” Farooq said, starting the ritual of katb ek-ketaab, literally writing the book, of matrimony. They’d hold hands, oppose thumbs, and the ma’zoon would place a pristine piece of cloth over their hands, place his on top and recite the marriage vows for each to repeat after him.

  Overcome, by emotion, by everything, she gave him her hand.

  Farooq stared at Carmen’s hand. Was that…?

  It was. His name. She’d written his name on her hand. And wait…that was his name, too. There. And there. It was everywhere. All over her hands. In Arabic and the other languages she spoke. He’d bet that Chinese script was it, too. Written in a way as to be the building blocks of the exquisite patterns, and to be almost indecipherable. He saw it right away.

  It wasn’t a custom here to kiss the bride. He’d make it one. He’d make kissing the bride within an inch of her life the new rage. He’d end up hauling her over his shoulder and giving the international assembly a reason to think Judar would one day have a king who would revert it to the days of desert raiders.

  Everyone should be grateful he was suffering through the motions at all. The moment he’d seen her descending those stairs, with that distressing outfit hugging her lushness, constricting her waist, echoing her magnificent colors, intensifying them, he’d wanted to charge her, lug her back to their quarters, end the waiting and to hell with everything.

  He would have done it and thought of his king and other guests only after he’d taken the edge off the hunger enough to regain coherence. Then she’d tampered with his desire further, as always doing the last thing he’d expected. She’d run to him.

  Ya Ullah, she’d run, as if she was his old Carmen, as if he was everything she had or could ever want. She’d groped for his hand, cleaved to his side like a vital part of him that had been hacked out and then restored.

  And now her hands. Those hands that had once weaved spells and wrung sanity from him were doing so again with the incantation of his name in all the tongues she commanded, in an unprecedented confession. As her offer of herself, her every act of generosity had once done.

  This was no plea for a clean slate. This was a command for carte blanche. One he wanted to obey with everything in him. Especially now that his king had succumbed to Tareq’s insistence on attending the ceremony and he’d seen how she’d looked at him.

  Her reaction had been unmistakable. Revulsion. Dread.

  Had Tareq been blackmailing her? Threatening her? This was a new motive he hadn’t thought of before. One that would make her a victim rather than an accomplice. Dare he believe it? That this time she had no ulterior motive? That she’d always been coerced, that the only truth had been her desire for him?

  The jewels of Carmen’s eyes corroborated her hands’ silent confession. Fanned the flames of hunger. And of hope…?

  No. He hoped for nothing. But he hungered for everything.

  He nodded to the ma’zoon, watched him place the monogrammed House of Aal Masood handkerchief over their hands, hers bearing her passive weapon of mass destruction, heard him clear his throat.

  “Somow’el Ameerah Carmen, repeat after me…”

  It was done. And he was trapped.

  At his king’s side. In the mire of protocol. Unable to roar to everyone that they’d done their bid for foreign policy, and to go away now so he could ravish his bride.

  The bride who, besides entrancing the crowd en masse before proceeding to entrench her effect one-on-one, was in the advance stages of wrapping his king around her finger. The king who’d told him last night what a time bomb he considered her.

  Having Carmen now was a necessary evil, he’d said, to secure the succession, but didn’t Farooq realize that, as a woman not of their culture and creed, she might be the lit fuse to set off the volatile mess Judar was mired in?

  Then, ten minutes in her company and she’d had him laughing as he hadn’t laughed in years. Two hours later, as they’d made the rounds of all the heads of state, he was showing her off as if she were one of his daughters.

  Farooq had given Carmen two more hours to work her magic on the crowd, bringing poles together, riding the currents of the rife-with-potential-pitfalls situation, milking it for all the boons it could yield. In testimony to her effect, after talking to her at length in his mother tongue, an Argentinean magnate who’d formerly decided not to set his next worth billions IT project on Judarian soil had approached Farooq with his change of heart.

  But even if she’d manage to negotiate an end to major conflicts if she circulated longer, he wasn’t waiting one more second. He turned on the mike clipped to his abaya’s collar.

  “My king, venerable guests…” Everyone turned to him. “I thank you for the honor of your presence and the generosity of your blessings. I hope you’ll continue to enjoy yourselves longer, but I have an urgent matter to attend to…” He dragged Carmen to him, stabbed his fingers into her garnet waterfall beneath its flowing veil, crashed his lips down on hers. He invaded her, consumed her in the kiss he’d been depriving himself of, the one he intended to go down in history. He reeled with her reaction, taste, feel, with the incongruity of hearing hoots from such a congregation. Those people welcomed the spontaneity for once, didn’t they? He kicked to the surface with all he had, swept the half-fainting Carmen up in his arms. “I’m sure you’ll all see the pressing urgency of putting my estranged wife where she belongs. Back in my bed.”

  Ten

  Carmen felt no heavier than Mennah, felt airborne, invincible, felt cherished and craved, and everything that wasn’t real all the way to Farooq’s quarters.

  Or were they? She’d been lost in the tumult of marveling at his beauty as he swept through the palace, in the single-mindedness of his intentions and the way he’d announced them to everyone. Now she was no longer sure where he’d taken her. The sleeping quarters she’d seen this morning had been the utilitarian space of a man who had few needs and not much time for luxuries. This place was a cross between a sultan’s chambers of erotic decadence and a bridal suite from another reality.

  But it was the same place, if only judging by its structure. Not one piece of the furniture she’d seen remained. On the right wing was a sitting area of wine-red couches over acres of handwoven silk Persian carpets of complementing colors. On the left was a dining area for two with a polished hand-carved mahogany round table set with an incredible dinner. Separating the wings, from previously bare ceilings rained cascades of extensively pleated, cream-colored voile drapes that caught and suffused the lights from hundreds of candles burning at the base of each of the arabesque columns ringing the huge space. Sweet-spicy ood incense burned in urns below the arches, its fumes swirling up in the blazing candlelight like scented ghosts. In the background, evocative recorded music droned, on an instrument also called ood, Spanish guitarlike but with more exotic intonations, adding to the mystic lasciviousness that permeated the place.

  Farooq crossed the intricate woodwork floor toward a square bed that spread below the dome, surrounded on two sides by drapes, with a gigantic mirror in a gilded, elaborately carved frame as headboard. It was the largest, thickest mattress she’d ever seen, layered in cream and white sheets, looking like a huge mille-feuille, with the last layer the frosting of a cream lace cover. Dozens of colorful pillows of all sizes were scattered all over it and around it, like fruits surrounding an indulgence.

  She tried to cling to him, bring him down with her, on her, as he placed her on it. He pulled back. Her arms fell away, stinging with the need to be filled with his bulk, with the letdown. He circled the bed, then did something that sent her heartbeats scattering. He mounted it, stood there at its far end. Just stared at her. She couldn’t take it, held out her arms again, begging for him, risking another rebuff.

  It was as if a switch was hit, pushing everything inside him to maximum, the intensity emanating from him marrow-jarring.

  Yet he
still didn’t move, stood there, containing it all, his body clenched with the effort, examining her abandoned pose.

  He waited until she lowered her arms, her hands fisting on the hollow pain inside her chest, before he drawled, “What changed your mind, to borrow a question of yours?”

  He meant about wanting him. She told him the truth, as she would from now on. “I haven’t. I never said I don’t want you.”

  His jaw tightened. “I remember statements to that effect.”

  “I only lied to you about that once, Farooq. Anything I said or implied since then was because it seemed best not to complicate matters by bringing up what I thought you no longer wanted from me.”

  “So you want me.” She came up on one shaking elbow, reached out a hand in confession, in supplication. “No. I must have more than silent invitation and surrender. More than my name all over your hands. Say it, Carmen. I must have the words. The words you once lavished on me.”

  And she gave them to him. “I wanted you from the moment I saw you. I never knew there was wanting like that, that I was equipped to feel something so fierce, so total. I never stopped, and I can never stop craving you, Farooq. God knows how hard I tried. Whatever I said since we met again was me trying to spare myself pain and humiliation.”

  His pupils, his whole body expanded in affront. “You’re saying I hurt and humiliated you?”

  “No,” she cried out. “You only ever gave me every satisfaction and consideration. Even when you found me again and had every reason to feel betrayed and insulted, to exact punishment, you still treated me with restraint, gave me rights another man would have considered forfeit. You even wanted to give me much more than I could ever accept. I wasn’t protecting myself from you. I realize now I never feared you. I feared circumstances, reality, your complex status and existence, my own hang-ups. But I knew I would be injured anyway. I couldn’t afford to get hurt when I must be the mother Mennah needs and deserves.”