To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)

“Shut up, Prince Aal Worthless. You have something of mine. Return it and we’ll…forget this ever happened. The only call I’ll take again is my brothers’, telling me you’ve come to your senses and complied.”

He almost drove his finger through the screen, hurled the phone to the settee, dragged his hands down his face, reversed the path of exasperation until he bunched his hair in a vicious grip.

She couldn’t even tremble. Couldn’t think. Wouldn’t. If she did…if what she’d heard, what it meant, registered…

He leveled suddenly bloodshot eyes on her. “I’m sorry, Maram. I forgot to turn the ringer off when I last used the phone, forgot to take it with me.”

That was what he was sorry about? That his oversight led to her making contact with her father, hearing his accusations?

Not sorry that they were…true?

And her world collapsed in on her. They were true.

After a frozen eternity, she heard a voice. Alien, and hers. Asking the one thing to be asked now.

“Am I your hostage, Amjad?”

He flinched. “You weren’t supposed to know any of this.”

“I’ll bet. But I know now.”

His looked as if he wanted to hurt himself for being so stupid that she now did. “This is between me and your father. It has nothing to do with you. With us.”

She again heard the lifeless voice that was all she could produce now. “You’re holding me hostage to extort him. How is that nothing to do with me?”

“Stop saying that. You’re not my hostage.”

“What am I then?”

“You’re my…” He stopped, seemed unable to go on.

And she realized. Why he couldn’t bring himself to say she was his lover. Even to placate her.

Because she wasn’t. Never was, never would be.

It had all been a lie.

He spoke again, words sounding like broken glass shredding their way out of him. “However it started, we both know everything has changed irrevocably.”

“Turns out everything I thought I knew is not true.”

“You know plenty that is. What matters. What you don’t know is irrelevant.”

“How can it be irrelevant after you went to such lengths to plan this? Why did you? What is it of yours that my father has?”

“It’s just dirty, petty politics. Please, stay out of it.”

“Even if I wasn’t a ‘dirty, petty’ political adviser, how can I stay out when you’ve dragged me into the middle of it? The least you can do is tell me what you’ve made me a pawn for.”

“You’re not a pawn. Stop saying that. Stop thinking it.”

“I heard you, Amjad. Your implied threat that the return of what’s his—me—depends on that of what’s yours, whatever it is…deafened me.”

His whole face contorted. “That was for your father’s ears only. You know I would do anything to keep you safe.”

She shook her head, numbness deepening. “I thought I knew many things. They were wrong. Maybe all I know is wrong.”

He reached urgent hands out to her. She stumbled back.

Everything was collapsing inside her as this new reality overlapped with her illusion, what she’d been living in so wholeheartedly, what he’d constructed so seamlessly.

And she had to know. The reason behind his systematic deception of her. “It can’t be politics. There’s nothing going on politically between Ossaylan and Zohayd. Is this over GulfTech Futures? You want back the stocks you threw away and he acquired?”

“You think I’d even lift a finger over something so trivial?”

“It isn’t trivial. The stocks have appreciated half a billion dollars since you let them go.”

“They could appreciate a hundred billion and it wouldn’t have made me consider going after your father.”

She shook her head. “I can no longer believe anything you say.”

He looked as if she’d turned a knife in his gut.

Wow. She was still seeing and feeling what he wanted her to see and feel. Even now that she knew the truth.

He finally rasped, “Then believe evidence you can make sure of yourself. I let them go because their growth is based on leaked false data and the conglomerate will crash and burn within the year. I even advised your father, before I knew what he was up to, to cut the stocks loose while he had the chance.”

“What was he up to?”

He held up his hands. “Maram, arjooki, there’s no reason to dredge it all up. I should have dealt with this from day one, should have resolved it by now. But I was bent on seeing through my stupid plans, then I forgot all about them, landing myself deeper in this mess. But I’ll make sure it’s over in no time.”

“You mean if my father ‘comes to his senses and complies.’ What if he doesn’t?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what he does anymore. Maram—”

Everything inside her snapped. “Just tell me!”

After a moment during which his body seemed to expand with the need to force her to relinquish her quest for the truth, he squeezed his eyes shut, let out a ragged exhalation. Then, bleakly, he told her.

She’d thought nothing could be worse than what she’d already learned. She’d been too wrong to bear.

Her father, stealing the Pride of Zohayd jewels, plotting the downfall of the Aal Shalaans to usurp the throne of Zohayd, caring nothing for the devastation he’d cause in his quest for power.

It was incomprehensible that he could formulate a conspiracy of such magnitude. She knew her father. He was incapable of such convoluted coldness and overriding ambition. The most he was capable of had been the manipulations of using his daughter for a promotion up the princely ladder and the entrenching of his standing in the region, things he’d believed had been for the general best, hers included.

But maybe she didn’t know him after all. As it turned out she didn’t know Amjad. Amjad, the man she’d thought incapable of anything but extreme honesty, who’d instead been lying to her with every breath for the last ten days.

She still had to know one more thing. “You thought I was in on my father’s conspiracy? That was why you had no problem with kidnapping me?”

His eyes dulled with what so uncannily simulated dejection. “You know what I thought you were in on.”

“Yeah, my father’s schemes to ‘acquire’ you and Haidar. So you didn’t even need justification to use me as a stick to bludgeon my father with. Everyone always said you were an indiscriminating raider who would do anything to gain your objective. Turns out only I was blind about you.”