by Tara Pammi
Utterly covered up as every inch of her skin was, it still hadn’t stopped him from losing his focus more than once. Her skin gleamed with the tan she had acquired, no doubt trudging through the city streets of Sintar and harrying unsuspecting males into answering her questions about her twin.
Even now, all he could think of was unbuttoning those buttons slowly while he kissed every inch of the silky-smooth skin he exposed.
He’d always compartmentalized his private life and his public one. Which was why everyone including his father and Farid’s family had been so thoroughly shocked at some of the lurid stuff that Celebrity Spy! had said about him.
This had to be the same. Amalia was part of his public life, even though his reasons were personal. Ergo, he couldn’t indulge in fantasies about her.
“Okay, how does this sound?” she interrupted him, her brow thoughtful. And then rattled off the press release she had volunteered to put together about a donation he was making to the Sintar General Hospital.
“It’s perfect,” he said, a little jolted again at the quiet efficiency with which she finished her tasks. Apparently, the woman was just as good at her job as she had claimed. Could he believe her word that he could trust her? “We’ll break for lunch and start in a half hour again.”
“No, I want to finish this summary for why you’re denying the proposal for the Art and Education Center in downtown Sintar.”
With a shrug, Zayn leaned back in his seat. He checked his watch and realized that they had been at it for three hours without a break.
Once he had realized how supremely capable she was, there had been no point in not using her abilities.
And of course, Amalia being Amalia didn’t work in silence or peace. She offered opinions, sometimes in drastic opposite to his, and to their mutual shock, thoroughly agreeing with him on some foreign policy matter.
Piles of what he’d considered boring, menial tasks had been completed in a most engaging way, thanks to her efficiency and her interesting opinions.
True to her word, she hadn’t even blinked at the grueling pace he had set. For a woman who wasn’t aware of the intricacies of palace policy, she’d learned the administration’s priorities and his personal policies on some of the administrative matters superfast. But of course, he had forgotten that she was very learned about Khaleej and its history and politics.
He wasn’t fooled by her rejection of everything that was her father’s heritage. Her anger only hid some deep-rooted pain but Zayn had no need to know or understand what it stemmed from. Her issues with her father were of no interest to him except for how they affected the outcome he wanted.
Amazing as it was that it had come from her, she was right. They needed to call a truce, if he wanted to pull this off. But the truce did not have to extend to exchanging their every dream and fear. She had surprised him that day in his wing but he would not veer off course again.
Zayn had never been allowed a confidant before and he was too rigid in his ways to want one now.
He ordered lunch and drinks for both of them just as Amalia finished and looked up. The little knot in her brow and the way she met his gaze head-on, he knew she was going to disagree with him again.
He had never met a more opinionated woman in his life. Raising a hand, he preempted her. The tight purse of her mouth made him smile. “I know you’re about to launch into one of your lengthy opinions about what an old, dying beast Sintar and its administrative policy is, but I’m famished.”
“Your country is a contradiction, Sheikh. Just like you are.”
Did the woman not know her limits? Or was this her agenda, to infuriate and annoy him so much that he released her brother? “My country, Amalia?”
She raised a brow casually while her up-tilted chin betrayed her defiance. Two could play at the perception game, he decided with a smile.
“This will only take a minute, and the food is not here yet. And really, Sheikh, I didn’t realize that your ego needed so much validation that you only surround yourself with yes-men.”
He sighed. For all she looked like an angelic wraith, the woman was like a pit bull when she got her teeth into something. “Go ahead. You have three minutes before you lose my attention.”
“That’s not enough!”
“That’s how long people usually have to convince me.”
“You’re a—”
“Two minutes and counting.”
She looked down at the screen and back at him, determination written all over her face. “I don’t think you should refuse to fund the Arts and Education Foundation in Sintar. Khaleej needs the kind of human development this foundation promises.”
The depth of her passion reminded Zayn of himself when he had been younger and idealistic. For all she seemed self-sufficient, there was a charming naïveté to her. “Those funds will be more useful channeled toward health care. Education Reform will get its time.”
“But you just signed off on what equates—” she scrunched her brow and Zayn’s mouth twitched “—to ten million dollars for just the next three years toward reforms in health care.”
“I just proposed it. The cabinet will still have to approve it. And the reason you’re interested in that foundation is because it promises the kind of academic freedom for both sexes in all fields that is seen in the West. As progressive as my father and I have been, things move slowly here. I will alienate a bunch of cabinet members if I give the green signal on that.”
“I say this threefold mission of education, scientific research and community development is just as necessary for Sintar. I’ve seen the development in infrastructure and health care in the two months I’ve been here. And I know that it is all attributable to you, Zayn, but Khaleej is going to be left behind in the global world if it does not also embrace a more global approach toward arts and education. This wealth that Khaleej enjoys because of its oil and gas reserves is not going to last long.
“You will need an educated, qualified workforce that includes both sexes if Khaleej wants to continue its current healthy financial growth, and this center seems to be the right step in that direction.”
“You are very passionate about this. Why?”
“Does there have to be a reason for pure common sense?”
“The more something is important to you, the more flippant you get. If that is your answer—”
“There is no other reason than that women should be allowed to pursue academic interests just as men do.”
“Is that what your mother and father split about?” The question fell from his mouth despite his intention to stay out of her personal matters.
A bitterness he didn’t like seeing at all entered her beautiful eyes. “For as long as I can remember of their marriage even before they divorced, they fought about everything. Prestige and perception was a big deal to my father and his family, and he forbade her from going back to her former profession. Her definition in life was to be a wife and mother. As long as her ambition or her dream did not interfere with those duties, she was allowed to have them.”
Her placid eyes blazed when she said forbade. Within minutes, she transformed from an efficient PA to a tigress.
“How old were you when they divorced?”
“Thirteen.”
“You were a mere child, Amalia. Things always look black-and-white. How can you be so sure why their marriage fell apart?”
“Because I was the one who lived with the fallout. For years, I listened to her while she...she grieved the loss of him.”
“What was her profession?”
“She was a model at the height of her career when she met him.”
“Then he was right to forbid her.”
“Of all the—”
“This is not our fight, Amalia. But I’m being realistic. Professor Hadid is a venerated
historian, a man with a powerful public image. Your mother would have known the sacrifices she’d have to make when she married him. I cannot see how she thought she could continue with such a controversial career and still be his wife.”
“I don’t think she cared so much about the modeling as much as being boxed in the little space he had for her in his life, the little he allowed her to do. That they were both strong personalities and came from different cultures, I’m sure, didn’t help. It’s a wonder that they fell in love at all.”
“Lots of couples mistake good old lust with love. It is possible—”
Defiance radiated off her. And it was vulnerability, pain, that she hid beneath that defiance. “She never stopped loving him. Not until her last breath last year. He never once...” She closed her eyes, fighting for control over herself. “She made herself weak by loving him while he remarried and just made himself a new family.”
Something in her tone broke through Zayn’s hands-off policy and he clutched her hand on the desk.
The jolt from the contact was instant. Never had he felt a connection like this before. The more he tried to ignore it, the sharper his awareness of her became. Her hand was soft and slender in his big one and yet, there was strength in her grip.
Eyes wide pools in her face locked with his, brimming with emotion. The rawness of it went through Zayn like lightning shifted the entire picture of the sky. Her hand gentled in his, a little trusting, a little searching, and he felt some core of ice inside him, a place that he hadn’t even known existed, thaw a little.
This new emotion that surged through him, urging him to take her in his arms...was this tenderness for her?
“Was her passing hard for you?”
She shrugged and pulled her hand from his. When she looked at him again, there was none of that vulnerability in her eyes. Curiously, Zayn felt both relief and a strange sense of loss. As if he had been granted a glimpse of something intense, something real, something he had never known before but it was taken away from him before he could fully comprehend it.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to see that vulnerability in her eyes again. For it made him forget that she was not to be trusted.
“She gave up on life a long time ago.” Guilt pinched her features. “Is it horrible of me to say I felt a sense of relief when the end came?”
Zayn could not answer her. Why had her father not shared this responsibility with her? If not for his wife, he still had some duty owed to his daughter. Even his parents, who were coldly practical with their own children and barely had any time or interest in parenting him or Mirah, still made sure they were taken care of by others.
He had been taught early on in life that he wasn’t supposed to have any emotional vulnerability. And he completely agreed with that policy for someone in his position. Whereas Amalia, he was realizing, had seen only that in her parent.
“Just because he remarried does not mean he did not love her.” He gritted his teeth hearing how sentimental he sounded.
Damn it, he had no taste for playing a hero, her hero, and he was sure as the bright desert sun neither did Amalia want one.
“Whether he truly loved her at all, now that... I doubt.” Challenge glimmered in her eyes. “Powerful men, men who are used to having the world at their feet, I fear, will say and do anything to have a woman they fancy. Did you know my father is a great lover of objects of beauty? I remember our home used to be littered with them, people from all over the country coming to see him. I have no doubt he thought her another collectible he should own. When she refused to sit on the shelf he provided for her, he discarded her.”
And me. The unsaid words hung in the air, full of a pain she would never admit to. The more he learned of her, the more Zayn was sure that Amalia was one of those complex women he had no use for.
Still, the depth of her bitterness stunned him. “That is a twisted view to have of one’s father.”
“It’s a realistic view of my father and what love can do when it is not returned in the same way. Don’t tell me that you’re a closet romantic, Sheikh. That you’re privately agonizing over having to choose a docile, traditional bride.” A brittle smile came to her lips, a determined glint in her eyes.
Her little remark bounced off his hide. “I heartily agree with you that the whole concept of love only complicates marriage. My parents’ marriage is a success only because they had no expectations of each other. And so no complaints, either.”
“What does that mean?”
“They married because it was an advantageous match for both of them. My father would get a bride from an aristocratic family and she her own sphere of powerful people to command. An heir for the country was the one common goal and once they had me, they pursued their own lives. My father had his mistress and his politics, and my mother, her own pursuits. Everything else, even Mirah, was a byproduct of the main goal of the marriage.”
The look in her eyes made Zayn laugh. It was refreshing and a little addictive to see a woman not cater to his personality or his status. But he was sure it would soon lose its charm. Sooner or later, Amalia would lose her appeal to him. He was too used to docile, pleasing women who didn’t question their role in his life. After all, no one woman had ever swayed his control, ever. “Why do you look so...combative even when I agree with you?”
“Because that’s not what I said at all. That does not sound like marriage at all. That sounds like...a clinical agreement in a science-fiction novel. This is what you’re modeling your marriage on, too, isn’t it?”
“By all measures, their union continues to be a success, so why not?”
“If you don’t even want your wife’s companionship, why marry?”
“To produce legitimate heirs.”
“And then you set the wife aside?” She didn’t even wait for his nod. “Did your mother not mind it? I can’t believe that any woman would willingly walk into a marriage like that.”
He shrugged. “The number of women Ms. Young found for me says otherwise. As to Mother, if she didn’t know it at the beginning, I’m sure she learned it soon.”
“I could never marry a man like that.”
“My wife will want for nothing. She will never have to work a day in her life, will be independently wealthy beyond imagination and will lead a life of globe-trotting, couture-shopping and feasting on mussels and duck confit of the highest order. And to top it all, she will have me in her bed, for as long as she wants me, to fulfill every little heated fantasy she might have ever had.” Zayn had no idea why he was goading her like that, or why he wanted to hear her admit that she wanted him. Was it only a stroke to his ego as she had claimed?
Or was it all the confidences they had exchanged, this talk about marriage and love that stirred something inside him? That gave him a vague sense of disquiet in his gut?
All he knew was that he wanted to muss up Amalia’s self-sufficiency, to push past the prickles and see what she was made of beneath it all.
He could see Amalia in that role, especially in that last scene. Amalia, whose heated fantasies he was making true. Amalia, who stared at him with naked longing, her long, silky limbs splayed invitingly over his bed, Amalia submitting that fiery temper and that steel core to him.
“Tell me you’re not a little tempted.” The hoarse need in his voice shocked him, the languorous heat flaring through him coming up against the self-control he prided himself on.
She tipped her chin, her gaze sweeping over him in a thorough appraisal that Zayn found incredibly arousing. As if she was weighing all the benefits of going to bed with him against everything else, as if she was imagining the same incredibly erotic scene... Was she so thoroughly naive that she didn’t know the signals she was sending?
And yet, even as her topaz-colored eyes flared into wide pools, her sensuous lower lip trembled, she would even deny admit
ting it.
How thoroughly aggravating could this woman be! And yet, Zayn’s awareness of her, his desire for her, only grew sharper.
He had months of this pretense, months of sparring with this woman before he would be able to remove her from his life. Before he could go back to the path that had been decided for him even before he’d been born.
Her openly hungry gaze said she was more than tempted, by him at least if not by his wealth, while her lush mouth said, “No. Not in the least bit. I have no romantic illusions, but I want a marriage between equals. I want affection, respect, a man who will deem my ambitions equally important as his own.”
“That will never work in reality. Even if my duty to Khaleej didn’t come before my personal desires, I would always be the aggressor in my relationship with a woman.”
He saw the tremor that went through her slender shoulders, the shift to sensible reality as her gaze cleared. “Fortunately, not every man on the planet is so rampantly, aggressively masculine that he demands complete submission in every aspect of life, including...”
“Including?”
She looked at him and then away, but he caught her glance. Abashed.
The sound of his laughter reverberated in the confines of the jet. Feral satisfaction coated every breath he released as color poured into her cheeks. Her mouth pursed, her eyes flashing topaz fire at him, her lithe body radiating barely suppressed outrage, she made a delicious picture.
Zayn had never been so satisfied that his aggressive masculinity apparently could drive a woman nuts. Nor had the exposé been the source of anything but a headache. Until now. “So how many times did you read the part about my...voracious appetites?”
He wondered if smoke would come out of her ears if he teased her any more. “It’s not a compliment, Sheikh,” she offered in a dull voice. “It’s more...a statement of fact.”
“What will you do if you never find this ideal man?”
She shrugged, but by the little frown on her head, Zayn knew she had never really thought about any of this. He wondered if her mother’s poison had forever turned her off men, or if it was justification to never commit herself to one man. That meant she was either untouched or was one of those modern women who could have sex for the pleasure it afforded. Like he did.
