Jen looked coolly between the two towering hunks who flanked her as they relinquished their visual and verbal duel and turned to gape at her.
Yep. She’d sure managed to shock them out of the impending explosion that had almost ignited out of nowhere.
Anyone might think she was insane, insisting on hiding the truth from her sisters, then blurting it out like that to Najeeb on sight. But though she hadn’t really given it any thought before doing it, she did think with Najeeb, the secret would certainly be in a bottomless well.
Najeeb was the most honorable person she’d ever known. Since she’d been a child, she’d always looked up to him, wished they could be closer. For he was exactly the older brother she’d always wished she’d had.
That was why she knew she could tell him anything. Najeeb was the material the knights of old had been made of. Those who would lay down their lives for you once you had their alliance.
Not that she wanted anything anywhere near that drastic from him. She just wanted to come clean to someone about her and Numair. Najeeb was the only one she could think of whom she could tell anything to and trust he’d never expose it at whatever price to himself.
Najeeb, surprisingly, was the first to recover from her bombshell. His gaze couldn’t decide what to be—stunned or amused. “Okay, Jenan, you achieved your purpose. You stopped me in my tracks. Very efficiently. I’m sorry I flew off the handle, but I was livid since I heard what my father made you agree to. I was ready to strike out at anything—” he flicked a withering glance at Numair “—or anyone in my path.”
Great. Najeeb had jumped right into denial, while Numair was over his surprise and seemed to grow bigger with Najeeb’s every word. The danger levels emanating from him entered a critical stage.
She sighed. “I did want to shock you into stopping, and that’s why I resorted to the truth. It’s always more shocking than any fabrication.”
Najeeb looked disbelieving for a few more moments, before he choked, “You’re not joking?”
“To borrow a favorite line from someone who’s standing right here, I’ve never been more serious.”
“How...?” He paused then realization dawned like a fireball in his sunlit eyes. He looked back at Numair with hostility turning to horror. “You’re Numair Al Aswad!”
“So now you recognize me.”
“Now I wish I don’t.” Najeeb turned to Jen in dismay. “How on earth did you get mixed up with a man like him?”
Something scary rolled from Numair’s gut. “You have questions, you have anything to say, you talk to me.”
Jen raised her hands. “Boys, please, hold your testosterone missiles. I’m standing right in the middle, and your aggression is literally turning my stomach.”
Both men apologized simultaneously, stopped, glared at each other, started again, overlapped each other’s words again, then fell silent. They stood there seething with frustration as they summed each other up. And she saw something she hadn’t realized before.
They looked so much alike.
If she’d been meeting them for the first time, she would have thought they were blood relatives, even brothers.
Apart from Najeeb having hazel eyes and close-cropped hair, what really distinguished them wasn’t genetic, but the result of their radically different characters and paths in life. Najeeb lacked the harshness that etched Numair’s features, the ruthless shrewdness that emanated from him. And while both men were almost the same breadth and height, their bodies displayed the difference between the supremely fit and powerful man that Najeeb was and the lethal juggernaut that Numair was.
But those differences only made them feel more kindred. She couldn’t explain why she felt that, but she did. And suddenly this whole situation became untenable.
As the men started arguing again, she clamped each by his arm. “Will you stop alarming everyone in a mile’s radius?” She looked from one to the other as they brooded down at her. “Can we now go have this out somewhere private, or do we need some internationally sanctioned neutral ground and peacekeeping forces to keep you two in line?”
* * *
They ended up in Numair’s place.
The “hideaway” he’d prepared for them. With no roads leading to it, the only transportation was by helicopter.
Though she’d lived in a royal palace, this place still stunned her. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t even known it existed in her own homeland.
Contributing to the uniqueness of this resort-size property was its seclusion. For a hundred square miles she saw nothing but desert conservation land all around.
Once they’d entered through the semifinished palm wood and bronze gates into this desert paradise, she felt they hadn’t only left city life behind, but modern life altogether, too. The understated luxury was so at one with the environment, the villa lacked any trace of the artificial elements that had always put her off in the opulent places she’d been in in Zafrana, from the palace to the houses of the nobility and big businessmen. While all those places strived to belong to an era in architecture and decoration, this place had a timelessness about it.
It was made of the desert, its materials, its color palette, of its majesty and tranquility. Of the many things that took her breath away were the free-roaming oryx and gazelles just outside the gates, and the incredible infinity pool at the back of the sprawling villa. It looked like a swimming pool at its near end, with mosaic walls, steps and ledges in blues and greens, but on its far end it looked like a spring, like those found in major oases, its edge seeming to abruptly disappear into another realm. A mile-long barricade of palm trees separated the back of the property from the rest of the desert that stretched in gently undulating dunes all the way to the Anshar mountains on the horizon.
Inside the villa, spaces flowed onto each other; balcony doors opened to all directions. Every surface was made of stone, colored glass and bronze, and all the furniture and upholstery handmade, ever