by Olivia Gates
“I said it was a dread, not a suspicion. She’s the most upstanding person I know, the most forthright.”
“She is. I share a bond with her that was forged in the fire of our lives’ worst experience and later nurtured by our kindred natures. There was never the least romantic involvement on either of our sides, as I told my foolish father. You should have both believed in my forthrightness and that if my emotions for her had been of that nature, I would never have denied them.”
“That’s why I’m going insane. Because I believe in her. And everything she did, said...indicated she’d forgiven me, proved she loved me now, even if she never truly did in the past.”
“She did love you in the past. So completely your deception destroyed her.”
He shook his head. “She told me what she felt for me wasn’t strong enough to counterbalance her aversion to commitment and her fear that I was a threat to her independence. Her discovery of my deception was just the last straw.”
“Then she told you a lie, so you wouldn’t know the depth of her past involvement and what your betrayal cost her.”
Mohab gaped at Najeeb, a vice squeezing around his heart. If this was true, then he had hurt her more than he’d ever realized. Which made her being with him again at all a miracle. Was that her revenge? To make him fall as fully in love with her as she’d fallen for him once, then give him a taste of his own poison?
But...no. She wouldn’t do that.
Najeeb went on, ending his confusion...and delivering a crippling blow. “When I told her the truth, she pretended that you hadn’t succeeded in seducing her, that I saved her in time to salvage her dignity. But then I discovered the depth of your exploitation of her when I stumbled on her in a relief mission in Colombia...and found her pregnant.”
* * *
By the time he arrived in Judar, Mohab felt he’d lost whatever remained of his sanity. On receiving him, Kamal had said he didn’t care how this had happened, only that Mohab resolve it or have him as an enemy for life.
Mohab had told him to stand in line.
Now he entered Jala’s quarters and found her standing at the French windows. She spoke as soon as he closed the door.
“I told you not to do this, Mohab, not to force another confrontation on me. I have nothing more to say to you.”
And all his shock and anguish bled out of him. “I almost went insane all those months I couldn’t find you after you left me. Now I know I couldn’t because you did everything to disappear. So I wouldn’t find out you were pregnant.”
“You went to Najeeb.” A ragged breath left her. “But you’re wrong. I disappeared so I wouldn’t cause my family a scandal. I didn’t think you would bother with me again.”
Every word made him realize he had dealt her an indelible injury.
But right now, there was one injury in particular that he needed to heal. “I want you to tell me what happened to our baby.”
“What do you think happened? That I gave him away?”
Him. It had been a boy. The knife hacking his vitals twisted. “I think you lost him. I want you to tell me how.”
“It was a landslide while driving up a mountain in Colombia. The jeep rolled over into the valley. One passenger died...and I lost the baby. I was seven months pregnant.”
Her telegraphic account, condensing her horrific experience, felt like bullets. “And you hated me that much, you didn’t think to tell me you were carrying my baby? Distrusted me so totally, you didn’t even think it a possibility I’d want to be there for you after your ordeal?”
Another ragged exhalation. “I believed I didn’t matter to you either way, so I assumed you wouldn’t have cared if I carried your baby. And that you would have probably been relieved I lost it.”
He squeezed his eyes. He’d hurt her even worse than his worst projections. “Is this why you’re leaving me? Because you still don’t believe I care?”
“I left because we had a deal.”
And he stormed toward her, his every nerve firing as he grasped her shoulders, felt her again. “To hell with that deal. I never really meant it when I first proposed it, and I faced the truth of what I always wanted right before our engagement. Ahwaaki, ya hayati, aashagek wa abghaki bekolli jawarehi. I love you, and I worship and crave you with every spark of my being. You’re not in my heart, you are my heart. And I can’t live without my heart.”
She wrenched herself free from his grasp, her features suddenly contorting out of control, her voice strangled with tears. “That’s what you say now, what you think you mean. But you’re not only a man, not only a prince, you’re a king now. You will need an heir. An heir I can’t give you.”
He gaped at her, a cascade of mutilating suspicions crashing in his mind. Her next words ended them, solidifying them into terrible reality.
“My miscarriage was so traumatic, at such an advanced stage, the doctors told me I’d never have children again.”
This was it. The dark secret that explained it all. All the pain he’d felt from her and could never account for.
When he’d learned she’d been pregnant, he’d thought losing their baby explained it. But it wasn’t only the loss, the injury, but the permanent scar. She’d lost their baby, and any hope of having another.
He stared at her as her tears began to flow, as her shoulders began to shake, at a total loss.
What could he do to mitigate her anguish?
He heard his voice, choking on his own agony. “I don’t want an heir, ya hayati. I didn’t inherit my title, I was chosen for it based on merit, and when the time comes for me to step down, I will pass the throne to whomever deserves it.”
A shaking hand wiped at her tears. “You do need an heir. Aliyah told me King Hassan is withholding signing any treaties until he knows the reason he blessed our marriage, the blood-mixing heir, is a reality. She wasn’t worried, but only because she thinks we’re postponing having children voluntarily.”
And then he exploded. “To hell with my uncle and Saraya and the peace treaty. To hell with Judar and Jareer and everyone in them. I only care about you.”
“You can’t say that. Now that you’re king, you owe it to your subjects to keep the peace in their kingdom. I’ll be what stands in the way of your achieving it.”
“I will keep the peace, and it won’t be by bowing to any backward tribal demands. I only pretended to so it would give me a chance to approach you again.”
She shook her head as she escaped his grasp, tears falling faster. “Even if you do, you will want a family....”
“We already have a family—me and you and our furry babies, and we’ll have as many more as you want. And if you long for the human kind of kid, we’ll try. The doctors’ verdict doesn’t have to be final....”
“It is. I didn’t use protection, hoping they were wrong. They weren’t. There is no hope.”
“Maybe there will be with minimum intervention. If there isn’t, or you don’t want even that, I don’t care.”
“I can’t, Mohab...I can’t let you give up your right to have a child. I can’t let you give anything up.”
“But I want to give up everything for you, ya habibat hayati.” She shook so hard, her tears splashed over his hands, burning him through to his marrow. He clamped her shaking head in trembling hands, tilted her face up toward his. He had to convince her, stop her from leaving him, destroying them both. “You carried my baby inside you, nourished and nurtured him in your body and
with your essence. You wanted him and loved him, even when you thought I never wanted or loved you. And I wasn’t there for you....”
A hiccup tore out of her. “I was the one who pushed you away, who made it impossible for you to find me. You looked for me, even thinking I never really loved you....”
“I should have looked more efficiently, not let my anxiety mess up my methods. You can’t imagine how much it hacks at me to know you were pregnant, without me, and then had to go through the pain and desolation and loss...Ya Ullah, ya rohi...if I can’t give you all my life in recompense, I would end it in penance.”
“Don’t say this.... Ya Ullah...don’t...feel this way.”
“I do feel this way. And as far as I am concerned, you have given me a son, and we lost him. And now I grieve with you as I should have at the time, and we cling to each other even more, and forever.”
“No.” Her shriek of agony pierced him as she stumbled around and staggered away.
He hurtled after her, caught her back and crushed her to him, out of his mind now with dread, begging her over and over. “La tseebeeni tani, la tseebeeni tani abaddan.”
* * *
Don’t leave me again, don’t leave me ever again.
Mohab’s litany sheared through her, and his tears—his tears—rained over her face, mingling with hers, singeing her soul. She never thought she’d ever see them. And now that she did, felt their agony rain down her flesh, she couldn’t bear them, would do anything to never see them again.
But she had to do this for him. He would come to regret his emotional outburst when his head cleared and his passion cooled. He’d sooner or later long for a child of his flesh and blood. And she’d be what deprived him of fulfilling this need. He’d come to resent her for it. It was better for her to die, to leave him now than to live with him till this came to pass.
She pushed out of his arms, shaking apart, tears a stream draining her life force. “I never suspected you loved me as much as I love you, Mohab. That was why I agreed to marry you. I wanted to have some more time with you, give you the closure you said you needed, then disappear from your life again. If I suspected you felt the same, I wouldn’t have done this to you.” A sob tore out of her depths. “Please, believe me, I never thought I’d hurt you. But once I realized you had become emotionally involved, I knew it was better to hurt you temporarily than hurt you for the rest of your life. When I’m gone, in time, you will forget me.”
He groaned as if she’d just stabbed him. “If I never forgot you when I thought you didn’t love me, when you weren’t my wife, you think I’d ever forget you now?”
“You have to.”
“Would you have left me? If you discovered I couldn’t give you a child? Especially if you knew I couldn’t on account of an injury you caused me?”
“You had nothing to do with my accident. I won’t have you feeling guilty over this.”
“I am guilty. Of injuring your belief in me and in your own self-worth. Anything that happened from that moment forward is my responsibility, my guilt.”
She wiped furiously at her streaming eyes. “I once held you responsible, too, but I was wrong. If there was guilt, then I share it in full. I didn’t give you a chance to defend yourself, intended to deprive you of your child. I deserve what happened to me....”
“B’Ellahi...you were a victim in all this, my victim.”
At his desperate shout, her sobs ratcheted until they drove her down to the ground.
Jala gazed up at him as he stood over her, looking as if his heart had spilled on the ground, and she wailed, “If you love me, Mohab, let me set you free. I’m not leaving you. This time I’m begging you to let me go.”
* * *
He let Jala go.
But only to set the plan to get her back in motion. Now that he knew she loved him, too, he was never letting her go.
He had called a summit of all the people who were players in this mess. His uncle, Najeeb and her family. They were all convened in Kamal’s stateroom. Jala was there, too. This had been the last favor Kamal had said he’d ever do for him.
He walked in, swept them all in a careless gaze, before he focused on Jala. She looked pinched and drained, her beloved eyes extinguished. It nearly drove him to his knees, how much she suffered, how injured and scarred she was. He wanted to lay down his life so she’d be whole again, so she’d stop feeling any deficiency. But since he couldn’t undo the damage, he could only move heaven and earth, dedicate his very life to making it up to her.
He started talking at once. He told them the truth about the past, what he’d done, what he’d cost Jala.
Feeling her brothers’ rage boiling over, he went on, “I want you to know that I will accept, even encourage, any punishment you exact from me. But that isn’t why I called you here. I did so to inform you that no matter what you do, no matter what happens, I’ll part from Jala only when I die.”
His uncle heaved up to his feet. “But you have to. I only agreed to the treaty, and the marriage...”
“Shut up, uncle.” His roar made King Hassan sag back to his chair. “You didn’t agree to anything, I was just humoring you, trying to save your face and avoid your folly. But if you make any more trouble, or if you don’t sign the treaty, I will be the one to declare war on you.”
“You don’t even have an army,” his uncle spluttered.
“I’ll make one. Or I’ll borrow one if it’s faster. Jareer is far more important to so many powers today than Saraya, and they would do anything for me if I ask. I bet they’d help me depose you just to be rid of your nuisance. So enough, uncle. You’ve already cost us what your very life doesn’t begin to make up for. Take my clemency and never let us hear from you again except as a voice corroborating peace.”
His uncle looked shocked to his core. Najeeb, while looking at his father pityingly, seemed to wholly approve.
And he couldn’t care less about either of them right now.
He turned to Jala’s family. “My happiness, honor and all my hopes lie in whatever will make Jala happy, will honor her and fulfill her hopes. If she wants to try to have children, this is what we’ll do. If she wants to adopt...”
“You can’t adopt!” That was his uncle again. “It’s prohibited by law in our region!”
“Uncle, you are now tampering with the gauge of your life. I won’t warn you again. We will adopt as many children as she wishes, if she wishes it. I will give up my throne and two nationalities, and acquire one that will allow me to fulfill her every need.” He walked up to Jala, knelt before her. Her whole frame was shaking, her tears like acid in his veins.
“Jala, you are my life. I want nothing but you, need nothing but your love. I would only have wanted a child as one more bond with you. I lost our baby, too, but my pain is over your loss. And the only loss that would finish me is if I lose you. Nothing is of any importance to me—not my throne, not my homelands, not my very life—if I don’t have you.”
Kamal suddenly heaved up to his feet. “This is not for our eyes or ears. Everybody, out.”
Kamal’s barked order had everyone rushing out, everyone except his bewildered uncle giving Mohab bolstering, approving glances. Kamal was the only one who stopped as he passed him, bent to squeeze his shoulder.
Then, dropping a kiss on Jala’s shuddering cheek, he whispered to her, “I know when a man would die without his woman, ya sugheerati. You got yourself a prime specimen of that rare species. As only you de
serve. So just take him back and keep him for life, if you don’t want to kill him.” He straightened, winked. “If you do want to kill him, then by all means, walk away.”
* * *
Everything that had happened in the past years, everything Jala had suffered, everything she’d shared with Mohab in the past months, everything he’d just said and offered, built inside her until she felt herself overloading. Then Kamal winked teasingly at her, and everything snapped inside her.
And she howled. With laughter.
Mohab’s jaw dropped. Kamal only bowed, as if he was taking applause for a job perfectly done, then with another wink, he walked out, too.
Recovering from the shock of her sudden transformation into a hyena, Mohab’s smile broke out as he surged up, enveloping her in his arms.
“Ah, ya habibati...how I missed your laughter, feared I’d never hear it again.”
A snort interrupted her howls. “You’re that desperate for me...you call this...laughter?”
This drew a chuckle from him before her raucous glee escalated it into laughter, then guffawing.
It was only when she sagged in his arms, still gurgling and sobbing at once, that he stopped, too, storming kisses all over her face, murmuring extravagant endearments and professions of worship before stilling her gasping lips beneath his.
Breathing life and certainty into her once more, he managed to quiet her down. Then, holding her face in his palms, he withdrew, his heart in his still-beseeching eyes.
“I am that desperate and more. I’m also desperate in case you will keep thinking you’d be doing me a favor by walking away, that I can forget you ‘in time.’ When I wanted you for over ten years, had you only for just over ten months out of those, and couldn’t forget you in between, that I never even thought of having anyone but you.”
Everything stilled, inside and out. “You mean...?”
“I mean just as you never had anyone else but me, I never had anyone else but you. I’m yours, whether you take me...or leave me. So will you have mercy on both of us and take me, and this time never leave me?”
