The Sheikh's Destiny (Desert Nights 3)

“There was no charade,” he groaned, desperation taking over. “Every moment with you was the only real thing I ever had...”

Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, suffocating him. “But you couldn’t risk my family, especially Amjad, suspecting your motives, so you had to make me believe in your authenticity. But even with an heir binding you forever to the Aal Shalaans, you wouldn’t have risked a falling-out with them when you discarded me.” Her reddened eyes seemed to melt. “Did you plan another attack to get rid of me after I’d served my purpose?”

He’d taken a bullet in the gut before. He’d been showered in shrapnel. He’d been tortured beyond the limits of endurance and sanity. Her projections hurt, damaged him, far more.

He couldn’t even shout his denial, could only choke his horror. “Ya Ullah ya Laylah, laa—don’t even utter such ugliness...”

Those eyes that had bathed him in the balm of their belief, drilled into him now with bitterness and betrayal. “Ugliness is what you did to me, what you plunged me into. Now I’ll never feel anything untainted by its sordidness again.”

Disintegrating with the need to ward off the pain he’d inflicted on her, he extended a trembling hand to her. “You won’t believe anything I say now, but when you’re over the first rage and disillusion, remember what we shared...”

“We shared nothing.” Her voice was thick with disdain. “Nothing but your deceit and exploitation. But I can’t even blame you. I’m the one who threw myself at you. You only obliged and jerked me around. I deserve everything you did to me.”

And it was as if a dam broke. Sobs racked her body, tears ran in torrents down her cheeks.

“Y-you want me to remember? I do. Every thought and emotion as I loved you...craved you...and longed to be there for you. Every sensation as I touched you...as you touched me, moved inside me...until I felt you were part of me. How you must have despised me for...how easy I was, how cheaply I came...”

Her pain crushed his heart.

But his pain didn’t matter. Only hers did. He wanted to absorb her agony.

At his imploring touch, she tore herself away, quaking on sobs he feared would tear her insides apart. “I spent my whole life looking up to you... I thought you were made of honor, of integrity...that if there was a haven in this world for me...it would be you. But not even those who I thought would have raped and killed me could have...debased me like you did.”

He fell to his knees before her, insanity clawing at his mind, begging. “Don’t let pain take you that far, ya habibati, I beg you. Rage and rave and slash me apart...but don’t make me a demon when I’m only a pathetic fool. I did devise the plot, but I didn’t see it through...”

“You did,” she wailed. “That first night—ya Ullah—how did you do it? Anticipating me...adjusting your response on the fly to keep me hurtling...deeper into your trap. You had me in your bed in hours...thinking it was at my insistence. You stayed up all night, didn’t you? It was the only time you forced yourself to stay beside me...burning to close the deal. You must have wanted to strangle me when I...forced you to pretend to court me before I returned with you to Zohayd so ecstatic, I managed to fool...even Amjad for you. You would have seen it through to the end...if I hadn’t found out the truth.”

“That’s not the truth.” His protest strangled as she stumbled away from his begging hands only to collapse a foot away, ending up with her streaming face pressed against the wall, her whole body quaking. “But whatever else you think me guilty of, I beg you, believe I had nothing to do with the attack.”

“Do you know that my earliest memory is of you?”

He doubled over with the surprise confession.

Her sobs subsided by degrees. “It was my fourth birthday. You were standing behind Haidar, wearing light blue jeans and a black T-shirt. I thought you were the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen. As I blew out the candles I made one wish, for you to be my friend. I’ve made no other wish since.

“I idolized you, saw a wealth of beauty in everything about you, even the way you kept your distance. I thought we shared so much, both of us outsiders, with no one who loved us most or put us first. I lived dreaming of our being each other’s allies against all odds. Now all my memories are contaminated with the truth, and my past wasted in loving a figment of my imagination. My future will be consumed in regret over every moment and emotion I wasted on you.”

He crawled toward her, the ground burning him worse than the sands he’d once dragged himself over for days to a salvation that kept receding. Her feeble resistance died as his arms shook around her, taking her drenched face against his heaving chest.

“Don’t say that...don’t think it and make it real in your mind. Don’t do this to yourself, to us. I never lied about my feelings...”

Her head rolled against his shoulder, her eyes meeting his. For seconds he saw his Laylah, felt he might reach her again.

Then she whispered, “I would have laid my life down for you, Rashid. Now I would rather die than see you again.”

She pushed away from him, stumbled up to her feet.

Looking down at him as he remained on his knees, demolished, her eyes were as dead as her voice. “Wishing you the heartbreak you inflicted on me wouldn’t work when you have no heart. So I’ll settle for crippling you like you crippled me. I’ll make sure you lose the only thing that matters to you—the throne.”

Thirteen

“So how did you manage to lose that girl?”

Amjad’s sarcasm scraped across Rashid’s every screaming nerve.

He turned slowly toward Amjad. He’d been doing everything slowly since he’d followed Laylah back to Zohayd less than a day after she’d left him in Azmahar. Any sudden moves might set him off.

His trigger quivered as Amjad sauntered toward him from his office on the ground floor of the royal palace of Zohayd, his signature mockery hitting him between the eyes.

“You must have committed some nuclear-level stupidity to blast through her immutable worship of you.”

“Listen, King Amjad,” he snarled. “I have only been in anything approaching this state once in my life. I was cut open and my life was bleeding out. And I still managed to kill all my torturers. There were eight of them. I am now far more desperate.”

“Whoa. Are you aware you just threatened to kill a king right in his own palace? Or are you really as out of it as you look?”