To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)

He exhaled in resignation. There was no getting through to her. Not now. But her contacting him again at all gave him hope there might be.

He could only try to keep her involved. “So why are you going back to your father? If you can revise your stance on uprooting him from your life, I submit that I deserve the same leniency.”

“Neither you nor he deserve any. You were the two people I loved and trusted most and you both used and abused my love and trust in ways I’m still unable to fully grasp. I think I will hate you more as the implications hit me.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. This he believed.

He tried again. “Then at least try to understand—”

“Of course, I do.”

“You do?” he echoed, floundering.

“You had overpowering reasons.” She thought so? “You, and he, will always have those, in your own minds, to take whatever measures you must to get what you want, no matter who you use or abuse. And I have learned that what I thought to be my bottomless genetic capacity to rationalize and accept being both has come to an end.”

Her calmness drove her pain deeper into his heart.

She went on. “You asked why I’m going back. One reason. To convince Father to give you back the jewels.”

His heart stopped. This time he felt it wouldn’t restart.

His unbelievable, unpredictable Maram.

“You would do that?” he choked, going light-headed.

“I hope you don’t think I’m doing it for you. I’m done doing anything for you. I want to stop my father from seeing through a catastrophe I know he hasn’t fully calculated and can’t handle.”

He digested this for one heart-pounding moment, seeing only one significance. “If you’re worried about what he’s getting himself into, and you’re going back to again act as his misplaced-at-birth brain, it seems you have forgiven him.”

“I haven’t. And I won’t. I’m not doing it for him either. You both can take flying leaps from your respective capitals’ tallest skyscrapers. I’m doing this because I, unlike both of you, am not blinded by my ambition. I am thinking of the whole region. I might emotionally wish it to go to hell as it deserves, but rationally, humanitarianly, I can’t let the situation explode into petty, escalating tribal wars if those damn trinkets aren’t returned to your family’s grimy royal hands.”

Exactly what he thought of the whole situation. Even if she thought he’d done what he had to protect “his” future throne.

His heart swelled with pride in her even as it did with the ache of yet another manifestation of her loss of faith in him.

“But you know me so well, you probably knew I would do this the moment you ‘let me go.’ It’s probably why you did.”

“Now, wait a minute—”

“But maybe you don’t know me well enough.” She steamrolled over his outburst with her tranquility. “If you did, you would have known you didn’t need to kidnap me, but needed only to explain the situation to get me to help you. I would have gone back and squeezed my father until he coughed up the jewels. But no harm done. At least to your interests. I’ll do that now. Once he does, I’ll call you to arrange their return.”

It nearly suffocated him, the need to reach inside the phone and rip her out of her disillusion and into his assuagement.

He exhaled the raggedness of his frustration. “You really expect him to hand them over?”

“If his brain truly is nonexistent and he resists, I’ll do something drastic. I’ll tell him I’m having your baby.”

Before his heart could fracture on the next heartbeat, the line went dead.

The agony and longing and regret of her words echoed inside his head, almost rupturing it.

He’d wondered, when she’d rushed into his trap, what kind of catastrophe would befall him in repayment for that unsettling ease. He’d thought it had hit when she’d found out about his deception and had been inconsolable.

Seemed that had only been the first blow.

Maram looked around the opulence of her father’s stateroom.

She felt as if someone else had inhabited her body when she’d last been here. The Maram who’d left this palace on that Amjad-bound trip hadn’t returned.

She’d been lost in that desert. As she deserved to be. Putting all her faith, emotions, desires and hopes in someone like that. In Amjad, the man the world had unanimously elected its coldest raider.

But that world had also thought him honest to the point of insanity. No one had detected the deception that had created that illusion. He’d conned everyone, not just her. But she’d seen his every vice as uniqueness, wonder. And she’d paid the price…

Running steps beat on the palace’s marble floors before the ornate oak double doors burst open and her father spilled in.

Maram watched the man who’d meant the world to her since she was twelve. Tall and lithe and distinguished, with those eyes that were like looking back into her own, and those streaks setting his temples and trimmed beard on silver fire. Before she’d seen Amjad, she’d thought him the most magnificent man on earth. Yes, she’d been a confirmed daddy’s girl.

Too bad he’d never been a “daughter’s dad,” as she’d so stupidly thought no matter how many times he’d proved he wasn’t.

She observed him from behind her new barrier of frost. It had descended on her after a storm of weeping had almost drained away her sanity after she’d left Amjad. She prayed it would never lift.

Her father’s face shuddered as he snatched her into arms trembling with simulated debilitating relief and draining anxiety.

“Maram, b’nayti.” His voice choked in her ear, his breathing rioted in her hair. “You’re here…”

She removed his arms from her, calmly. “No thanks to you. I could have been fossilized in the desert for all you cared.”

His eyes widened as if she’d punched him. “How can you say that? I’ve been in constant negotiations with Harres and Shaheen.”

She eyed him with detachment, wondering at how different he appeared to her through the dispassionate prism of disillusion. “Right. Negotiating not to ransom me.”

He took an urgent step toward her. Her cold stare aborted his momentum. He stopped, looking suddenly defeated, fragile. “I begged them to convince their brother to return you to me.”

“Sure. Out of the goodness of his heart.”