To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)

“How about you stop me if you think I’m substituting fact with fiction?”

“Ready to be constantly interrupted?”

She gave him that bring-it-on grin of hers, rose to her knees to dish out dessert. She’d soaked the dried apricots, raisins, plums and dates and garnished them with toasted almonds. She served the crunchy dried banana and apple with sprinklings of cinnamon and cloves. Just as he preferred.

Because no one knew that about him, it must be her own preference, too. And that was more disturbing than anything.

She settled back. “During my first twelve years, my mom moved from one minimum-wage job to another, from one city to another—always in the north for some reason—and from one man to another. She kept getting engaged in between her divorces. I had the impression she was always looking for the ‘love of her life,’ who would provide for her and make her life an ongoing romantic adventure.”

“First fictional substitution,” he said. “A desert prince would have provided all she was looking for, and she didn’t snap him up. Or was it that she couldn’t sink her fangs into him, even after bearing his child? If so, then Ass-ef actually has more sense than the frog prince I always believed him to be.”

She gave him a softly chiding look that made him want to take back everything he’d said. “First, my father isn’t as inept as you paint him to be. Second, a ‘desert prince’ doesn’t provide any of what my mother was looking for. As I’m qualified to judge. There’s nothing romantic about being forced to live by a tribal court’s suffocating rules, with you and your husband’s wishes not even coming into consideration from the minutest details of what to wear, who to mingle with, what functions to attend, to the huge decisions, like how many children to have and how to raise them.

“My mother was looking for romance and security, only with the freedom to live her daily life as she pleased, to make her own tiny decisions, to not be shackled down to one place. I guess that was why she never had a career, never tried to buy a house, so she could up and leave if her Prince Charming came along, no regrets. Her one tie was me. But I became independent, then indispensable to her very early on, and she stopped telling me she wished she’d never had me.”

Something churned inside him, more violent than the ideals that drove him to decimate some of the world’s biggest bullies.

He hissed, “She told you that?”

“When I was totally dependent and the going got tough for her. But on the whole she did okay by me. I don’t think there was more that a nineteen-year-old single mother could have done. She eventually became a good mother to my half siblings. She had me too early, from the wrong man, under the wrong circumstances.”

His blood still sizzled. Not even his mother, a renowned Medusa, had scarred her children that way. “I bet you weren’t always so accepting of her self-pitying tantrums.”

“It wasn’t easy sometimes, but she was all I had, and I loved her no matter what.”

He fought the compulsion to lunge, take her by the shoulders, shake her out of her acceptance of the injustice the person who should have been closest to her had dealt her, before crushing her to him.

Had she put something in the food?

Great. He was looking for supernatural reasons for her effect on him. When her spell was all-natural. All her.

He huffed his disgust at his hormonal-driven foolishness. “You disappoint me. I thought you were too shrewd to spout such mushy nonsense, to sanction the stupidity of loving someone who should only be despised.”

“Tell that to the child I was.”

“Then you should at least despise her in retrospect now.”

“She wasn’t perfect, but she wasn’t all bad. She did love me—does love me.”

“That’s why she kept you living in poverty, didn’t tell you you had a rich father who wanted you?”

“It wasn’t that simple. I was the result of a fling she had with my father. An eighteen-year-old who pretended to be older to be with this exotic man who captivated her with his good looks and foreign accent, with his expansive endearments and extravagant gifts and outings. Then he asked her to marry him, took her on a tour of his home. You know Ossaylan thirty years ago was nothing like it is today. She was horrified when she realized what marrying him would mean. No driving, no drinking, no dancing, no friends—no miniskirts, per her specific horror. So, even penniless and with no prospects, she refused his proposal, even when she found out she was pregnant. She informed him she’d have me, yet refused even his financial help. That at least proves she wasn’t mercenary. She wouldn’t give him power over her, over me, and wind up dragged into the country she abhorred.

“She never told me anything about him until my twelfth birthday. You can imagine what it was like to a fatherless girl to hear I not only had a father, but that he was a desert prince and he wanted me to live with him. At that time my mother wanted to marry ‘the’ love of her life. His job entailed continuous traveling, which would have disrupted my life, so it was a perfect solution for me to go live with my father.”

He clutched a pillow, imagining it was that woman’s neck. “So she dumped her only daughter in the country she so dreaded and went off to live her life as if she’d never had you. Admirable. Women like her make child peddlers look humane.”

She shook her head, her expression understanding itself.

Was this real? Did she always search for the best in everyone, in every situation? Did she choose only to see the most favorable angle?

“She didn’t dump me,” she said. “My father assured her that Ossaylan had come a long way since she’d visited, that he would see to it I didn’t miss any of the freedoms I was used to. He’d been begging her for years to let him have me, so she knew he would be good to me. As for me, I was excited, especially since I didn’t like my mother’s fiancé much. I was scared, too, but that disappeared when I met my father and adored him on sight. It seemed like a fairy tale come true, the small-town girl becoming a princess of Ossaylan overnight.

“And there was no rude awakening for the next six years. I was entranced by the incredible differences between my former and current lives, did everything to learn the new culture, language, to blend in with my surroundings even when my father kept telling me not to try too hard, that my appeal, my strength lay in being the child of two worlds. But I wanted to please him so much, to make him glad that he took me in. And the more he deluged me with love and pride, the more I was willing to do anything for him.