“If you have a better explanation to fill the spaces in Hesham’s story, I’d be the first to grab at it. But we can’t afford to blind ourselves to what might be the truth. But if you find Gwen irresistible, Hesham, your closest brother in nature, would have found her so, too. It might have developed naturally between them, with the reason they met, you, unknown by him, and forgotten by her. Then everything went wrong and the king made his ultimatum, and Hesham went into hiding with her. Then he died and she walked away from the accident unscathed. Everything till that point could have been innocent and aboveboard. But I hit a wall trying to find any good reason why she didn’t come forward when you searched for her.
“With Hesham dead, from her perspective, the king’s threat to her was no more. Without a legal marriage, or the possibility of one, making her and Ryan legitimate heirs of a member of the royal family, she must have realized she’d be beneath his notice, therefore safe. But she was also in no position to demand anything from the Aal Zaafers, apart from your own voluntary support. As lavish as that would have been had she gotten it, she might have wanted more. And she had the perfect plan to get it.
“She must have known how she affected you all those years ago, so she approached you incognito through Ryan’s crisis. She could have used Hesham’s knowledge of you to make you fall under her spell, to have not only all you can provide, for Hesham’s and Ryan’s sake, but all that you are, for hers. And she succeeded, didn’t she?”
Fareed pulled at his hair, trying to counteract the pressure building inside his skull. “You’re sick, Emad. I thought you liked her, thought…thought…” He stopped, suffocating. “You’re wrong, about everything. She’s not Hesham’s woman.”
Emad eyed him bleakly. “And if she is? Will you consider the rest of my explanations?”
“No,” Fareed shouted. “Even if she is—and she isn’t—she’d have a reason, a good, even noble reason for hiding the truth.”
“You haven’t asked her to marry you yet, have you?”
Fareed blinked. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It explains her sudden persistence to leave. I know you’ve become…intimate, and she might have feared you might cool down. Threatening you with leaving might have been to push you to offer her what would make her stay forever.”
“No. No way. She doesn’t have one exploitative cell in her body. I don’t need to know facts. I know her. And I reject your evidence.” He bunched his fists, tried to bring his turmoil under control. “That will be all, Emad.”
“Forgive me, Somow’wak, but I have to voice my worst fears.”
Fareed barely contained his fury. “And you have. I will ask her. She will refute it all. I will believe her and that will be that.”
“But we can’t afford for you to confront her, Somow’wak.”
“Why wouldn’t you want her to defend herself against your delusional deductions, except if you suspect they are just that?”
“Because if I’m right, confronting her would cost us Ryan.”
“There you go again with this…absurdity.”
“It’s anything but absurd, Somow’wak. I’ve marveled at the bond you forge deeper by the hour. Now I know you’ve both recognized the same blood running through your veins, the legacy of your most beloved sibling and his father. I’m certain part of your desire to have her is to have him, too. But she has full rights to him, and if any of the intentions I assigned to her were true, if she’s exposed you might enter an ugly fight over him. One you’re certain to lose.”
Fareed felt he was watching an explosion, played in reverse.
Emad’s revelations were the shrapnel hurtling back into place to re-form the bomb. Which might be the truth.
Not his macabre rationalization of Gwen’s motives and methods. But that she could be…be…
He couldn’t even think it. It would be beyond endurance.
But it would explain so much. Her wariness and resistance from the first moment, her distress when he’d asked her about Ryan’s father, his reaction to Ryan—which had the texture of what he’d felt for Hesham, the many similarities that did exist between the child Hesham had been and Ryan.
Then came Gwen’s continued emotional reticence, her persistent efforts to stop their intimacies, to leave…
The doubt Emad had sown felt like a virus replicating at cancerous speed, infecting his every cell and thought.
He couldn’t survive knowing. He wouldn’t survive not knowing.
He stopped again. He didn’t want his steps to take him back to her. He’d always rushed to her as if every step separating him from her dimmed his life force. Now…now…
Now those remaining steps were his last refuge. They could be what separated him from finding out that he couldn’t love her.
Emad had tried his best to dissuade him from taking those steps. His parting advice still cut into his mind, paring away every belief in anything good and pure, painting his world with the ugliness of manipulation and deceit.
Marry her. Without confronting her. Make her give you all rights to Ryan, secure Hesham’s son. Then deal with her, according to her innocence or guilt.
His steps ran out. They’d taken him where he’d experienced his life’s first true happiness, the consummation of his most profound bond. Where he might now end it all.
He opened the door, stepped inside. She wasn’t there.
He’d have the respite of ignorance, of hope, a bit longer.
A vase swayed as he bumped into it. It crashed, broke into countless, useless shards. Just like his heart might moments from now.
A door slammed and footsteps spilled onto the hardwood floor.
She emerged from the chamber leading to the bathroom, half-running, the face of all his hopes and dreams, alarmed, concerned, sublime in beauty. “Fareed, what…”
She faltered as she saw the ruins at his feet, took in his frozen stance.
Then it was there in her eyes. The realization. The desperation. The fear. Of exposure.
Certainty flooded him, drowned anything else inside him.
She was Hesham’s woman.
Gwen stared at the stranger who looked back at her out of Fareed’s eyes, desperation detonating in her heart.
He’d somehow found out.
“Laish?”
“Fareed, please…”
They’d spoken at the same moment. But he’d finished even as she stumbled to find words to implore him with.