To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)

“Then I learned why he was so focused on me, and it took the wind out of my sails. He’d married twice, too, but hadn’t had more children. Turned out he’d developed leukemia after his fling with my mom and the treatments affected his fertility. It became clear to him that he’d never have more children.

“I confronted him with my disappointment, accused him of wanting me only because I was his only shot at having a child. In time he convinced me that it didn’t matter why he’d valued me to start with, that he ended up loving me for me.”

“Aih.” His lips twisted. “He loved you for the you he could use. And the moment you turned eighteen, he did.”

She sighed again, unfazed. “When he first proposed I marry ‘Uncle’ Ziad, I was horrified. I didn’t want to marry at all. I had plans, degrees, a career in mind. My father assured me it would be in name only so that he could succeed Uncle Ziad to the throne. Uncle Ziad wanted him to—he believed the first two men in line for the throne would destroy everything he’d strived to build in Ossaylan, and probably Ossaylan itself.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Ossaylan had it bad, didn’t it? Othman, the first in line then, is a lowlife who would have auctioned the emirate and its people to the highest bidder and skipped to the Caribbean. The second in line, Labib, is a dangerous idiot with the emotional continence of a four-year-old. Those two do make your father look like a slightly better fate.”

Her eyes reproached him again, making him feel the moronic urge to qualify his insults.

“But Uncle Ziad could only bypass them if he married me, because the marriage would make his relationship to my father the closest. They told me we had to rush because Uncle Ziad was ill and wouldn’t live longer than six months. I was apprehensive with a capital A. But I wanted to serve my new country and my father, wanted to be there for the uncle I loved in his last days.” She pushed away the plate she’d hardly touched. “But as the princess of Ossaylan, the freedoms I enjoyed as a minor princess went poof. And instead of six months, six years passed by, the last two with me tied to Uncle Ziad’s bedside.”

The churning in his chest and gut intensified.

He could picture her then, this being of energy and enthusiasm, of vitality and vivaciousness, wilting day after day, oppressed by unforgiving custom, imprisoned by the machinations of power-peddling men.

Seemed Yusuf Aal Waaked had more to answer for than he’d thought. And even more, because Maram seemed to exonerate him of any wrongdoing. Worse, kept on loving him in spite of the damage he’d caused her, the exploitation he’d subjected her to.

If any of what she was telling him was the truth.

But if it was, what else had he been misinformed about? What else had happened without her knowledge? Without her consent?

“Once he died, I…went a bit crazy. I felt I’d been…robbed. I wanted to make up for lost time, so I flew back home against my father’s wishes. I backpacked across the States, gulping freedom and just…living. Then I met Brad, and he was everything the men in Ossaylan weren’t. Outgoing and easy to talk to and caring nothing about the world or what it thought of him. After what I’d been through, boy, was that attractive. It didn’t hurt that he was a ‘stud.’ And he wasn’t in diapers. He was two freaking years younger than me. And handsome and enthusiastic and adventurous.”

Every word fell on Amjad like a lash. He imagined himself knocking that “stud” out for every adjective praising his assets.

She went on. “But Brad was…too adventurous. He gambled with just about everything, the worst of it being his and others’ safety. That was why I left him. And that’s what got him disinherited, not me.”

He huffed a humorless laugh. “So the poor jerk tried his all to impress you and you left him for it.”

Again she gave him that soft, chastising look that twisted him inside out. “So when someone acts criminally stupid, you stick someone else with the responsibility for their actions?”

No, damn her. He didn’t. He was trying not to let her drag him into the deep waters of untimely reassessments.

Those dainty lips pouted with self-deprecation. “Not that I’m innocent in this mess. I saw the signs from the start and disregarded them. I knew we were all wrong for each other and still married him. I would have married anyone, to flout the mourning laws, to get rid of that oppressive First Princess title sooner, because it didn’t seem my father would marry again and take it off my back. I only hope Brad grows out of his compulsive thrill-seeking before he harms himself or others irreversibly.”

“Big of you.”

Her eyes said “Jerk,” in the most indulgent way possible, before she went on, “Afterward I concentrated on my post graduate studies and set up my consultancy business. It might seem strange, but my relationship with my father got deeper and better. Yet it wasn’t until four years ago that I decided to go back to live in Ossaylan. And though I don’t agree that his brain is missing, I will take your comment as a compliment to my positive effect on his decisions and Ossaylan since I returned.”

He raised an eyebrow. She shrugged a shoulder. She was done.

He whistled, long and low. “That was some story. You should be renamed Shahrazad.”

“Lulling her Mad Prince with convoluted tales that only segue into more exciting and labyrinthine new ones? But in my case, the tale doesn’t have any more shocking twists to keep the story going.”

“But it does, in the form of your convoluted self, in every word from your lips, scripted by your inscrutable mind and designed for compulsive listening.”

She looked around for a nonexistent audience. “Anyone see anyone being compelled around here?” She looked back at him, eyes singeing him with gold-hot teasing. “Not you, from the way you kept interrupting me.”

“But that was all poor Shahrayar could do as Shahrazad smothered him in her web of mental manipulation. Interrupt with comments and questions she led him into making. Like her, you know how to influence your listeners’ thoughts and sympathies.”

She sat up. “Since you can’t be influenced, if yours have been moved, does that mean you’re considering sanctioning my version?”

He could feel the effect of her words—of her—seeping through his gray matter, altering the pathway of his beliefs. And he was damned if he’d let her change his mind that easily.