A Secret Birthright

He leveled patient eyes on her. “Of course you are and you do. And there is still no cost involved.”

She shook her head. “I can’t accept a waiver of your fee. And then there are many other expenses besides that.”

His lips quirked, teasing, indulgent. “First, I’m a big boy, if you haven’t noticed, and I can waive my fee if I want to, which I mostly do. My ‘reputation’ isn’t totally hype, you know. Second, there won’t be any other expenses back home.”

She gaped at him. For a full minute.

She finally heard a strangled echo. “Back home?”

He rose to his feet with a smile. “Yes. You, Ryan and Rose are coming with me to Jizaan.”

Chapter Five

Gwen stared at the overwhelming force that was Fareed Aal Zaafer, and was certain of one of two things.

Either she’d finally lost her mind, or he was out of his.

She squeezed her eyes shut, as if that would stop the disintegration of this situation, set it back in the land of the acceptable. She opened her eyes again hoping she’d see on his face what should have been there from the start, polite forbearance with a patient’s hysterical mother.

But he was looking at her with that indulgent intensity that singed her. Worse, a new excitement was entering his gaze, as if he was realizing more benefits to his decision by the second.

“As soon as Rose and Emad return, we’ll go to your hotel and collect your luggage on our way to the airport. We’ll be in Jizaan in under twenty-four hours.”

He’d said it again. This Jizaan thing. She hadn’t imagined it the first time. This was real. He meant it.

But he couldn’t mean it. He had to be joking. He did have a wicked sense of humor.…

No. His humor, while unpredictable and lightning-fast, was not in any way mean, at least, not in any of the lectures and interviews she’d seen. It would be beyond cruel to joke now and he was the very opposite of that: magnanimous, compassionate, protective.

But he was also single-minded and autocratic and she had to stop him before this crazy idea became a solid intention.

He detailed said intention. “We’ll go to dinner first, or we can have it on board the jet.” He got out his cell phone, cocked his head at her. “What would you like to have? Real food this time, I promise. I can either reserve seats in a restaurant, or have your choice ready on the jet.”

“I can’t go to your kingdom!”

The shaky statement managed to do the job. It stopped him short.

For about a second. Then he smiled. “Of course, you can.”

She raised her hands. “Please, let’s not start another ‘I can’t’ ‘No, you can’ match. We just finished one about payment.”

“Yes, let’s not. You do remember how you fared in that last match? No point in repeating the same method and expecting different results, hmm?”

The definition of insanity, which also described this situation. She did feel her sanity slipping another notch. “You know what you’re proposing is impossible.”

“I know no such thing.”

She shook her head, disbelief deepening, dread taking root. “You’re asking me to just haul everyone halfway across the world.…”

“I’ll do the ‘hauling,’ so cross that out on your no-doubt alphabetized list of worries. I’m sure you have your affairs sorted out for as long as you thought would see Ryan’s medical situation resolved. But in case you’re not fully covered, and fear repercussions for prolonged or unexcused absence from work, one phone call from me should get you an open-ended leave, with pay.”

Her breathing had gone awry by the time he finished. “It’s not just my work, it’s…everything.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, someone who would not be denied, who had an answer to everything. “Like what?”

She groped for something, anything, latched on the first logical thing that occurred to her. “Like passports. We didn’t bring them on a trip we couldn’t have dreamed would take us outside the States.”

His daunting shoulder rose and fell. “You won’t need them to enter my kingdom.”

“But we’d need visas.…”

He intercepted that, too. “Not when you’re entering the kingdom with me, you don’t. And I’ll bring you back with me, so you won’t need more than your American IDs to re-enter the States.”

Her eyes darted around, as if looking for a way out. There was none. He kept neutralizing possible objections in advance. “And anyway, to make you feel better, once in Jizaan, I’ll have the American embassy there issue new passports for you and I’ll have visas stamped on them.”

She knew he could do that with a flick of a finger. Any country would bend over backward to accommodate him.

“And if you’re worried about your family, I’ll call them right now, give them all my contact info, so they’d be in touch with you at all times. I can even take any of them who wish to come along, too.”

Her heart emptied at his mention of her family. A subject she had to close before he probed it open. “Rose is my closest relative.”

And probe he did. “You said she was a maternal relative. So what happened to your mother?”

She could feel the familiar pain and loss expanding all over inside her. She had to get this over with, dissuade him from broaching the subject ever again. “She died from surgical complications just after I entered college. I have no one else.”

He looked thoughtful. “And that must have factored in your decision to have Ryan after your engagement fell through, so you’d form your own family.”

She let her silence convince him his deduction was right, when it was anything but.

“I’m very sorry to hear you were all alone in the world for so long. Coming from such an extensive family, I can’t imagine how it must have been for you.”

“I’m no longer alone.”

“Yes.” After a long moment when sympathy seemed to radiate off him, he smiled. “So we checked off passports, visas, fees and responsibility to family as reasons to resist my plans.”

“But these are not the only…” She stopped, panting now as if she’d been trying to outrun an out-of-control car. She was trying to escape his inexorable intentions. “What am I saying? I’m not debating the feasibility of something that’s not even an option. And the only thing that will make me feel better is that you drop this and…and…” She stopped again, feeling herself being backed into a trap her own capitulation would close shut. And he was standing there, waiting for her to succumb, knowing that she would. She groaned with helplessness, “Why even suggest this? Why not perform the surgery here? If it’s because you’re worried I’d be saddled with hospital expenses…”