Seducing His Princess (Married by Royal Decree 3)

“What promise?”

“Not to be your enemy. But now I will be, Mohab. I knew you were manipulating her when you announced your engagement out of the blue, but I couldn’t object since I realized she was making a decision knowing full well that you were. Then it seemed as if your marriage was real, and happy, and I no longer knew what to think.” He narrowed his eyes to dangerous slits. “But if she left you, then you must have dealt her another unspeakable injury. And for that alone, Mohab, no matter what it takes, I will destroy you.”

“B’Ellahi...what are you talking about?”

“About how you set her up in the past. She made me promise never to confront you, wanted the ugly page turned and forgotten. I honored her request till this moment.”

Mohab shook his head. “I know you found out and told her, and that was one of the reasons she left me then. She told me everything the very first night I saw her again. It’s why I thought it might have been something you said to her that made her end it this time, too.” He exhaled roughly. “This...and the dread that never went away—that I did come between you in the past, that your feelings for each other went beyond friendship....”

Najeeb wrenched his shoulder, his face contemptuous. “You think Jala could have had emotions for me and still came to your bed? Betraying us both?”

“I said it was a dread, not a suspicion. She’s the most upstanding person I know, the most forthright.”

“She is. I share a bond with her that was forged in the fire of our lives’ worst experience and later nurtured by our kindred natures. There was never the least romantic involvement on either of our sides, as I told my foolish father. You should have both believed in my forthrightness and that if my emotions for her had been of that nature, I would never have denied them.”

“That’s why I’m going insane. Because I believe in her. And everything she did, said...indicated she’d forgiven me, proved she loved me now, even if she never truly did in the past.”

“She did love you in the past. So completely your deception destroyed her.”

He shook his head. “She told me what she felt for me wasn’t strong enough to counterbalance her aversion to commitment and her fear that I was a threat to her independence. Her discovery of my deception was just the last straw.”

“Then she told you a lie, so you wouldn’t know the depth of her past involvement and what your betrayal cost her.”

Mohab gaped at Najeeb, a vice squeezing around his heart. If this was true, then he had hurt her more than he’d ever realized. Which made her being with him again at all a miracle. Was that her revenge? To make him fall as fully in love with her as she’d fallen for him once, then give him a taste of his own poison?

But...no. She wouldn’t do that.

Najeeb went on, ending his confusion...and delivering a crippling blow. “When I told her the truth, she pretended that you hadn’t succeeded in seducing her, that I saved her in time to salvage her dignity. But then I discovered the depth of your exploitation of her when I stumbled on her in a relief mission in Colombia...and found her pregnant.”

* * *

By the time he arrived in Judar, Mohab felt he’d lost whatever remained of his sanity. On receiving him, Kamal had said he didn’t care how this had happened, only that Mohab resolve it or have him as an enemy for life.

Mohab had told him to stand in line.

Now he entered Jala’s quarters and found her standing at the French windows. She spoke as soon as he closed the door.

“I told you not to do this, Mohab, not to force another confrontation on me. I have nothing more to say to you.”

And all his shock and anguish bled out of him. “I almost went insane all those months I couldn’t find you after you left me. Now I know I couldn’t because you did everything to disappear. So I wouldn’t find out you were pregnant.”

“You went to Najeeb.” A ragged breath left her. “But you’re wrong. I disappeared so I wouldn’t cause my family a scandal. I didn’t think you would bother with me again.”

Every word made him realize he had dealt her an indelible injury.

But right now, there was one injury in particular that he needed to heal. “I want you to tell me what happened to our baby.”

“What do you think happened? That I gave him away?”

Him. It had been a boy. The knife hacking his vitals twisted. “I think you lost him. I want you to tell me how.”

“It was a landslide while driving up a mountain in Colombia. The jeep rolled over into the valley. One passenger died...and I lost the baby. I was seven months pregnant.”

Her telegraphic account, condensing her horrific experience, felt like bullets. “And you hated me that much, you didn’t think to tell me you were carrying my baby? Distrusted me so totally, you didn’t even think it a possibility I’d want to be there for you after your ordeal?”

Another ragged exhalation. “I believed I didn’t matter to you either way, so I assumed you wouldn’t have cared if I carried your baby. And that you would have probably been relieved I lost it.”

He squeezed his eyes. He’d hurt her even worse than his worst projections. “Is this why you’re leaving me? Because you still don’t believe I care?”

“I left because we had a deal.”

And he stormed toward her, his every nerve firing as he grasped her shoulders, felt her again. “To hell with that deal. I never really meant it when I first proposed it, and I faced the truth of what I always wanted right before our engagement. Ahwaaki, ya hayati, aashagek wa abghaki bekolli jawarehi. I love you, and I worship and crave you with every spark of my being. You’re not in my heart, you are my heart. And I can’t live without my heart.”

She wrenched herself free from his grasp, her features suddenly contorting out of control, her voice strangled with tears. “That’s what you say now, what you think you mean. But you’re not only a man, not only a prince, you’re a king now. You will need an heir. An heir I can’t give you.”

He gaped at her, a cascade of mutilating suspicions crashing in his mind. Her next words ended them, solidifying them into terrible reality.

“My miscarriage was so traumatic, at such an advanced stage, the doctors told me I’d never have children again.”

This was it. The dark secret that explained it all. All the pain he’d felt from her and could never account for.