The Sheikh's Claim

To her shame, that hadn’t been what had finally made her walk away.

After all, he’d promised her nothing to justify her feeling bad, let alone betrayed.

Cursing herself for regurgitating those sordid memories, her eyes darted around the hotel suite. She’d reserved it for the coming weeks as it was within walking distance of the hospital so she’d be constantly available for her aunt.

She’d just come back from starting arrangements at the hospital. Just thinking of what lay ahead filled her with dread. No wonder Aliyah’s call had shaken her. She was already in turmoil. And it had nothing to do with any other Aal Shalaan.

She rose and headed to the kitchenette to make a cup of herbal tea. She needed to be calm for the drive back to her aunt’s at the outskirts of Durrat al Sahel. Traffic in the capital had gotten far worse than she remembered.

With the first sip from her hibiscus brew, a loud, melodious noise shattered the suite’s silence. She gulped the hot liquid, scalded her tongue and choked.

She was coughing her lungs out when the noise went off again. A doorbell. She hadn’t even realized the suite had one!

It must be housekeeping. And she hadn’t thought of hanging a Do Not Disturb sign—she’d planned to stay only an hour.

She stalked to the door, flung it open, intending to let them in and herself out … and froze. Her heart did, too.

Filling the door, dwarfing her and causing the world to shrink, stood Jalal. The reason behind every tumult in her life since she’d laid eyes on him.

But he wasn’t only that man. He was … more.

She’d once thought nothing could surpass him in beauty and magnificence. And nothing had. And during their affair, he’d proved only he could best his own standards. That six-foot-six broad-shouldered, divinely proportioned body she’d thought the epitome of manhood had kept maturing to godlike levels, as she’d had hands-on proof. Every day they’d had together had hewn his face further with the chisel of maturity and virility, manifesting his intelligence and sensuality and dominance in its every slash and angle and expression.

But something had happened to him since she’d last seen him two years ago. As if the darkness and danger she’d long suspected he’d hidden beneath the facade of graciousness and gorgeousness had manifested in his looks, emanated from his every nuance. It turned his beauty, his impact, from breathtaking to heartbreaking.

He was staring down at her as if he, too, was shocked to see her. When he was the one who’d almost given her a heart attack just by showing up.

After what felt like an hour of suspended thought and escalating distress, his whiskey-colored eyes narrowed, singeing her. Then his voice poured over her, feeling like a dip in lava.

“I said I’d delete you from my memory, but it appears there is no forgetting you without erasing it altogether. So I’ve decided to stop trying, to go all the way in the opposite direction. I now think my only cure is to revive every memory, to reenact every single intimacy we ever shared.”

Three

Lujayn stood paralyzed as Jalal pushed past her. The door clicked closed, sounded like a gun going off at close range.

She still couldn’t move. Speak. Breathe. Reactions deluged her as she watched him walk farther into the suite, memories and sensations and compulsions tangling, trapping her volition in their maze. It had always taken him just a look to neutralize her will, her sense of self-preservation.

And that he still retained the same influence over her, after all she’d suffered and lost and continued to struggle with because of him, made her spitting, foaming mad.

The moment he turned to face her, his eyes sweeping her in tranquil appreciation and intent, she seethed, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get out.”

“I will. At some point.” His shoulders moved in a languid shrug. “But since it won’t be now, how about saving your obligatory apoplectic tirade and getting on with discussing the particulars of my proposition?”

“How about I revive our first memory? Reenact the first ‘intimacy’ I shared with you?”

His wolf’s eyes flared with remembrance as he walked back to her. “When I first saw you hiding behind Aliyah and watching me like a wary, hungry kitten? Or is it when I walked up to you and took your hand in mine—” his hands clenched and unclenched, as if reliving the sensations “—and it shook from the power of your response, with the promise of what it would later do to me?”

A ragged scoff escaped her. “Way to go rewriting history. I was at a loss at how to react to a stranger’s forwardness.”

“I was never a stranger to you. You’ve known who I was probably since you were old enough to know anyone.”

“I knew of you. And what I knew accounted for the wary part of my reaction.”

“What about the hungry part?” His eyes turned goading. “And I never asked—didn’t Aliyah sing my praises? How … un-cousinly of her at the time, if she didn’t.”

“If she’d sung anything about you, I bet it wouldn’t have been praises. And since you went to great lengths to divert her from your intentions concerning me, she never did the cousinly thing for me, and warn me to keep you at world’s length.”

“I diverted her in the interest of preserving the eyes you said you adored.”

And those eyes, damn him, were as magnificent as ever, emitting the golden lust that put common sense on the fritz whenever he trained them on her.

“From the mother cat routine she had going with you, she would have scratched them out had she known my ‘intentions.’” A frown gathered the spectacular slashes of his eyebrows. “So which first intimacy were you talking about?” Suddenly his eyes blazed with sensual challenge. “You mean when you sucker punched me?”

“I did no such thing. I gave you plenty of warning.”

“Aih, to let you go or else. When I wasn’t holding you against your will. I wasn’t even touching you.”

“You were backing me into a corner.”

“I was walking toward you. You were the one who kept retreating, cornering yourself.”

“Because you had me alone in your hotel suite.”

“Where you came under your own power and of your own free will.”

“I came to attend a party, with Aliyah.”

“My party, in my suite. And I wasn’t the one who made Aliyah leave you there to bail out one of her other lost souls.”

“I was never a lost soul of hers. And I only stayed because she said she’d be back in thirty minutes.”

“You still didn’t leave when she was much later than that.”

“I was new in New York and I thought I was safer in your suite than I would be on the streets alone at night.”

“And you were.”

“It didn’t look like that when everyone left me alone with you. A man twice my size, twenty times as strong, not to mention a prince with diplomatic immunity and god-level entitlement.”

“And you thought I sent them away to have you to myself.”

“I was right.”

“Not about the sinister intentions that earned me that one-two combo.”

“Don’t exaggerate. That follow-up punch didn’t even connect.”

“Only because the first one almost felled me.” His hand wrapped around his throat as if feeling it again. “Not to mention the shock of the angel I couldn’t wait to have turning into a harpy. Ya Ullah, if I wanted you one karat before that, I wanted you twenty-four then.”

She’d been horrified at what she’d done, had tried to run out. He’d stopped her. Without touching her still. Just by calling to her. It had been the first time he’d called her his “silver eyes.”

And just like that, her fears of who he was, of the kind of power he wielded and the unbridgeable gap that existed between them, had disappeared. He’d stopped being the son of a woman she’d grown up hating and become something far more dangerous. The personification of every forbidden desire she’d never thought she harbored. He’d been warm and accessible, witty and eloquent in ways she’d never encountered, admiring her beauty, her spunk, then teasing her about her attack, leaving her in no doubt he knew what had fueled it. Frightening attraction, which he shared in full.

He hadn’t taken her to bed that night, but they both knew he could have. He’d waited two months, driving her out of her mind with wanting him in the interim. After that first time in his bed, serviced and pleasured, devoured and dominated, she’d become addicted, had wanted him with an intensity and an obsession that had sent her in a tailspin. For the next four years.

Their intimacies had been wild, greedy, explosive. But the escalating physical gratification had only plunged her deeper into emotional and psychological deprivation …

“Not that you ever need to punch me again,” he said. “You knock me out just by looking at me with those spellbinding eyes, by wanting me as much as I want you.” She opened her mouth to contradict him and a caressing hand below her chin closed it for her. “Don’t bother. This is the one incontrovertible fact we share. So are you sure this is the intimacy you want to reenact, with so many to choose from? Like the first time we made love…. ”

Her assertion that they’d never “made love” went un-scoffed as he again placed a finger on her lips and the heat of his flesh almost fused them shut.

She staggered back and he sighed, dropping his hand, his eyes growing hotter as minute details of that first time replayed in their depths. “I remember every glide of skin on skin, every press of flesh into flesh, every sensation as you opened yourself to me, surrendered your every response, begged for my possession and pleasuring, as if it were encoded in my every cell. I remember each and every time after that.”

She stared at him, shock and fury giving way to languor. It was as if his nearness produced chemicals inside her body that were more potent than any mind-altering drug.

No. She wasn’t ever going to fall under his influence again. He’d cost her too much. And not only her …

Anxiety started to bubble and seethe inside her. She had to make sure he walked away forever this time and would avoid thinking of her for the rest of his life. But she’d been going about this all wrong.

The best way to do that was to not give him a challenge. Wounding his massive pride might have driven him away, had kept him there for a while, but the need to satisfy it had driven him back. She had to learn from her mistakes, if only this once.

“Memories are nice, I’m sure,” she said. “But you’re focusing on inconsequential memories and forgetting relevant ones. Like why you intended to delete me from your memory in the first place.”

Ice suddenly extinguished the embers of sensual fire in his eyes. “I forget nothing. It’s a curse Aal Shalaans suffer from. It’s also why I failed to perform that deletion I intended. The moment I knew you were back here, I admitted that I never would.”

She’d known about Aliyah’s amazing eidetic memory but this was the first time he’d mentioned possessing something similar. But then, what had he ever told her? He’d talked, a lot, but it had all been about passion, both sexual and contentious. Besides that … nothing.

She shrugged. “This infallible memory must also mean you haven’t forgotten the bad parts. And those were ugly enough to douse anything you imagine was so wonderful.”

“You mean the parts where you got close to one of my best friends and conned him into marrying you, only to dispatch him in record time? Though maybe I shouldn’t call ‘almost two years’ record time. As always, I salute your tenacity. You must have wanted to get rid of him sooner.”

“So you assume.”

At the reigniting challenge and enjoyment in his eyes, she almost smacked herself. Focus. Just be a neutral bore and defuse his confrontational circuits.

“So why don’t you fix my assumptions?”

She wanted to tell him to go fix himself.

Instead, she decided to deflate the misapprehension that clearly fueled his perverse interest in her.

She released her breath in a resigned exhalation. “I wasn’t at liberty to disclose the matter when we … last met. I’m still not comfortable talking about it, but I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret anymore, at least from you.”

“Is that your oblique way of warning me to keep this a secret? Because I’m known to be such a blabbermouth?”

“You mean you won’t run to the media with my disclosures, or rush to tweet about them?” She tamped down another wave of bitterness, lips twisting with it. “But you’re right. The way you keep secrets, I bet anything I tell you would be even safer than it would with a corpse. But I wasn’t thinking about your ironclad discretion when you showed up two months after Patrick’s death. With the turmoil I was in and the dangers I was facing, not to mention your added aggravation, sharing the truth with you was pretty low on my list of considerations.”

“Are you going to share said truth now? About how he ‘really’ died? If it’s what you told the police, don’t bother.”

“I don’t know how the police work in this region, O Prince of Two Kingdoms, but in New York they don’t care what you ‘tell’ them. They only listen to solid evidence. Especially when someone so rich and young dies of unnatural causes.”

“But they found no evidence of foul play, hence my accusation a couple of years ago.”

“About getting away with murder?” She cocked her head at him, hating the way her heart sputtered as his eyes followed the movement of her hair when he was more or less accusing her of being a murderess. “So you think I’m capable of it?”

“I know you’re capable of driving a man to take his own life.”

“Based on what? My infamous former career as a woman who used my body to make a living? Or as the woman who dared to end things with you?”

She stopped, cursing herself silently, viciously. She was sliding into inciting recriminations again.

“How about as the woman who ‘used her body’ to trap herself a billionaire when I didn’t make the bid you were after?”

It was no use. This man could goad a rock into hurtling itself at him. “You’re saying I was after a proposal? As in marriage? Did it seem to you like I thought fairy-tale movies were based on true stories? Last time I looked, those and rom-coms were the only realms where the prince married the servant’s daughter.”

“When you said you wanted a man who ‘wouldn’t hide you like a dirty secret,’ who’d ‘walk with you in the sun,’ you meant you wanted a proposal. You let me know I was useless to you if I didn’t cough up one only when you had a suitable substitute secured.”

“Suitable substitute secured? I bet you can’t say that five times in a row.” She coughed a furious laugh. “It never crossed my mind that our … liaison would be more than what it was—trivial, sporadic, not to mention base. And that’s why I decided to end it. Sex was no longer enough to put up with the degradation.”

“Degradation?” he hissed. “I went to every effort to make sure our … liaison, as you put it, remained only between us so you wouldn’t be exposed to anything of the sort.”

Bile rose again. “And I knew it couldn’t have been different between us. But that doesn’t mean it was okay or even sane. I was trapped in a vicious circle, wanting to end it then letting you walk back into my life anytime you pleased, to lure me back into that … toxic compulsion. That’s why I ended it. The inequality, the unbridgeable gap, the pointlessness, on every level, was corroding my self-esteem and psychological health.”

“And the only cure for both was a besotted billionaire husband.”

She snorted. “That’s your favorite assumption, isn’t it? You have to find a mercenary, borderline criminal rationalization to explain that a woman would choose to deprive herself of you, don’t you?”

“When I’m left with no explanation, apart from an ambiguous rant, I had to fill in the blanks, before and after the event.”

“And you couldn’t find a rationalization where you were in any way to blame, right?”

“If I were, you should have aired specific grievances and given me the chance to undo them. Instead, you chose to become hysterical before storming out. And you promptly ended any chance for me to approach you with reconciliation efforts. What could I do but adopt the harshest explanations?”

“Wow, your Cambridge English major is sure coming out to play, isn’t it?”

His smile turned lethal. “So you’re telling me that blowup wasn’t a pretext to get me out of the picture while you grabbed the opportunity to land a far more malleable man with almost as much money?”

“Patrick was far more of a man, period, and a human being than you can ever dream of being.” And she was pathetic, because knowing that had never extinguished the hunger that consumed her alive. Not that she’d let it steer her now that she had far more than herself to safeguard, to defend. “And I certainly didn’t marry him for his money and assets. In fact, he married me for them.”

After that first punch, Jalal had managed to anticipate Lujayn for the next two years. Her pattern had changed in the following two, but after some readjustment, he’d still charted it.

Then had come that day two years ago. Nothing had happened according to his expectations then or ever since. It was as if he’d lost his insight where she was concerned.

She kept throwing curves he remained unprepared for. She’d just insulted his manhood, his humanity. But that wasn’t what he’d taken issue with. It was that riddle she’d hurled at him.

Suddenly, every frustration of the past four years blew away his intention to play this cool and seductive. The suaveness he’d maintained till now became a seething mass of urgency.

“You prefaced all this with your intention to tell me the truth. So b’haggej’ jaheem, skip the cryptic teasers. What in hell do you mean he married you for his money and assets?”

Those unique eyes of hers echoed his ire and passion. “Nothing cryptic to it. He wanted to make sure his wealth and projects didn’t go to his so-called family after he died.”

He’d demanded she give it to him straight. But he hadn’t expected she would, or that much. It was so straight that his mind stalled with implications he’d never considered.

“If you were any kind of friend to Patrick, let alone one of his best friends as you like to claim, you must know his relationship with his family was … pathological, to say the least.”

He nodded slowly. After Patrick’s mother died, his father had married a woman who turned out to be a wicked stepmother straight out of a fairy tale. Her evil became even more evident when she had children. She did everything she could to destroy Patrick’s relationship with his father to make him cut Patrick off from his inheritance. To her fury, Owen McDermott did the opposite. Unlike a typical, oblivious fictional father, he was aware of his new wife’s flaws and that their children shared her hatred of Patrick. His will cut them off from the bulk of his fortune, leaving it to the honorable Patrick to give them what he saw fit.

And Patrick had given. But nothing had ever been enough.

She continued, “Patrick told me his life story the first night we met.”

How he remembered that night. It had been one of the handful of times he’d gone out with her, meeting in a secluded restaurant. They’d stumbled upon Patrick who’d been out drinking alone. Jalal had been called away to handle a business emergency, and Lujayn had driven the intoxicated Patrick home. He’d thought nothing of it in his certainty of their exclusive interest in each other.

His heart clenched at the expression that came over her, as if she were looking into the past with longing and regret.

“We became friends from that night. He started coming with me on my vacations to Ireland, the homeland he hadn’t returned to since his mother died. He found a new family there.”

“Yours.”

He didn’t need her nod of corroboration. All the time they’d been together, she’d been taking another man home.

“He and my father grew very close, and along the way, Dad gave him advice that multiplied his inheritance a dozen times. His so-called family came swarming back, demanding their ‘share.’”

“And he didn’t want to give them any more.” Her poignancy chafed him so badly he wanted to shake her out of this melancholy over another man. He clenched his fists on the urge. “So you’re saying he married you to give it to you instead.”

“Me and my family. We were the ones he trusted.”

“Why should he have wanted to trust anyone with his fortune?”

“It wasn’t simply money. He had many projects, companies and charities. He knew if his stepmother and half brother and half sisters got their hands on those, they would liquidate everything and go somewhere tropical and live like retired despots. He wanted to make sure they didn’t have legal claim to any of it.”

“Thanks for the elucidation, but that wasn’t what I asked. Why would he prepare alternative heirs when he was so young? It’s as if he knew he was going to die. Did he have psychiatric problems? Was he suicidal?”

“He certainly was not!”

Her denial barreled into him. It felt real. Too real. As if an emotional charge was building inside her as she talked about Patrick, remembered him. The mere mention of something she considered insulting to Patrick had her on the verge of another attack.

The blackness that had been roiling inside him ever since she’d left him and married Patrick spread. She’d once been passionate about her displeasure with him, but now she treated him with cold contempt. Patrick commanded her respect and allegiance, even in death. Had he been so wrong about what he’d thought they’d shared? About her relationship with Patrick?

Scowling at him as if she’d like to give him another one-two combo, she said, “Patrick was the most psychologically healthy person I’ve ever known. He was also the most benevolent. He would never have done anything to harm himself, not only because he was stable as a rock, but because so many people depended on him.”

That he knew to be true. He’d admired Patrick from the day they’d met, over fifteen years ago, for his boundless energy and enthusiasm, his progressive views, but mostly for his unswerving humanitarianism. It had been bitterness over Lujayn that had driven him to sever all ties with him, business and otherwise. That was what he’d regretted most when Patrick had died. That he had died with them at odds.

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