10
“We’d be divorced by now if we’d ever gotten married, Marissa. So please spare me the act. Now, what is it you want? Why are you here?” the Sheikh asked, his green eyes going dark when he saw his ex-fiancée perched like an elegant bird of prey on the red divan in the anteroom of Johaar’s Royal Palace. She had black hair and blue eyes, a striking combination that the Sheikh had once found captivating. Now it just sickened him.
“Amir,” she said. “It’s been three years. Things are different now. I’m different now. I wasn’t ready back then. In some ways I was still a child, still just—”
“Please stop right there,” said the Sheikh, raising a hand and glaring at his attendants before waving them out of the room. “You were very much a woman back then, and you are very much a woman right now. What you did was unconscionable, and it is over, Marissa. Once and forever. You made your choice back then, and there is no going back.”
Marissa’s blue eyes flashed as she stood and walked through the anteroom and into the Palace’s day-chambers. The Sheikh watched her strut across the floor like she owned the damned place, and for a moment he considered having her physically thrown out the front gates. But he took a breath and slowly followed her instead, glancing at her slender buttocks move beneath the dark blue sundress that seemed a bit too short for her height.
She stopped in the center of the room and turned, glancing at him with a half-smile that he knew she’d rehearsed in front of the mirror a hundred times. He’d seen her do it. Amir had no problem with vanity—hell, he enjoyed looking at himself in the mirror too. But Marissa was at a different level. An unhealthy level. Perhaps a dangerous level.
“Amir,” she said, still in that half-turned stance, bottoms sticking up, chest pushed out, lips full and red. “Everyone deserves a second chance.”
“Tell that to the child whose chance at life you took away,” Amir said without blinking, his voice dead, his eyes cold. “My child. Your child!”
Marissa blinked but remained fixed in her pose. “I understand you’re living in the world of a hundred years ago,” she said, “but nowadays a woman has the right to have an abortion.”
“Agreed,” said the Sheikh. “And a man has the right to walk away from a woman and never look back. Which is what I did three years ago. Goodbye, Marissa. It would be polite to offer you some tea and refreshments, but I am choosing to offer you nothing more than an escort to the front door and perhaps a car to the airport.”
“You’re still angry after all these years,” she said softly, shaking her head. “Amir, we can have another child. Ten more children. I’m ready now. I wasn’t then. Everyone deserves to be forgiven. How can you be so cold-hearted?”
“Marissa,” the Sheikh said, walking up to her but not close enough for her to touch him. “Three years ago you were pregnant with my child. Then you decided you did not want to look fat in your wedding dress, and you chose to have an abortion.” He clenched his fists and closed his eyes as he tried not to raise his voice. “A woman who ends a life so she can look good in a photograph dares to call me cold-hearted?”
Marissa blinked again, and the Sheikh could see the wheels turning behind those blue eyes. “I did it for you, Amir. I knew it would look bad to have the Sheikh’s wife pregnant before marriage. I made the decision to preserve your reputation! The reputation of the Royal Families of Johaar and Monestonia.”
The Sheikh paused as he considered her words. He didn’t believe her for a moment, but he was trying to figure out why she was here. It certainly wasn’t because she was pining away for him. Perhaps she thought she loved him, but he knew she was not capable of truly loving anyone but herself. And her showing up here was too sudden to be a coincidence.
Slowly he circled her as he rubbed his stubble and thought. Marissa was a minor Princess of the small European kingdom of Monestonia. She was not in line for the throne: There were two cousins in the direct line of ascension, and she could not realistically hope to be queen. Was that why she was here? Was she hearing the clock tick? Not her biological clock—she was still barely twenty-six—but the clock that told her time was running out if she wanted to wear a crown on her head. Had she decided that Amir was her best bet at getting a crown? Had she spent the past three years weighing her options before deciding that her best bet was still to be Queen of Johaar because she wasn’t going to be Queen of Monestonia or anything else?
“Drop the charade, Marissa,” he whispered, finally getting close enough where he could smell her French perfume, see the makeup laid thick on her fragile white skin. “You’re here because you want something.”
“I want you, Amir,” she said, her blue eyes softening to where he almost believed her.
“Do not waste my time. Yes, clearly you do want me, but not in the way you would have me believe. What is your game here? You may as well just tell me, because I am not going to believe any manufactured stories about how you are a changed woman or how ready you are to be a mother or whatever else you have scripted for this visit.”
Her blue eyes almost flashed red as her lips tightened. But she stayed quiet for a long moment, blinking twice as if considering her options once again. Then she nodded and walked over to the set of green velvet couches with old teakwood frames and sat herself down, crossing her legs and then uncrossing them as she made herself comfortable.
“All right, Amir,” she said, her tone signaling that perhaps she was indeed ready to come clean. “Here goes. Have you been following the news about Monestonia?”
Amir raised an eyebrow. He’d barely been following the news about his own kingdom, let alone some inconsequential monarchy in Eastern Europe. He blinked and shook his head.
“My cousins have both announced their intentions to abdicate,” Marissa said, her blue eyes almost changing color again in a way that made the Sheikh wonder if she was human. “They’ve made public statements that the age of kings and queens is past, and once their father and mother pass on, it will be the end of the monarchy. They have no interest in becoming figureheads sitting on thrones, they say.”
Amir grunted and shrugged. “That is not shocking,” he said. “Monestonia’s monarchy has been mostly for show anyway. Your uncle and aunt never did exercise the full extent of their power. Your country already holds elections for some state officials. I can see it becoming similar to the situation in England. The monarchy is just for show.”
“But the show is important!” Marissa said, leaning forward on her seat, her tight cleavage aimed squarely at the Sheikh. “The show is everything!”
Amir sighed. “All right, Marissa. Go on. What do you want?”
“I told you,” Marissa replied firmly. “I want you. As my husband.”
“You know that is impossible,” Amir replied without a moment’s hesitation. “That will never happen. We do not love each other, and we never will.”
“Who gives a damn about love? This is about something bigger, Amir.”
“Yes. Your ego. Now get out before I have you unceremoniously thrown out.”
Marissa calmly leaned back on the green velvet, crossing one leg over her knee and folding her arms across her chest. “You’re still so angry, Amir.” She paused and narrowed her eyes. “And it’s not just anger at what I did three years ago. You’re angry with yourself too.”
“Yes. For ever trusting you. Now I told you to get out, did I not?”
Marissa laughed and shook her head. “You are still a child, aren’t you? Just a hot-headed teenage boy with big muscles and a crown on your head. You say I have a big ego, insist that I am a horrible person. Perhaps. But at least I know who I am and I accept it. I know that I get pleasure from looking good and feeling good and getting my good side photographed for the glamour magazines. You, on the other hand, Great Sheikh, have no idea what you want to be when you grow up.” She paused, those blue eyes narrowing in triumph. “Am I right? I am, aren’t I? You’re so angry at yourself right now, and you’re taking it out on me because you can’t face whatever it is you hate yourself for! What is it that you can’t forgive yourself for? Your father? Your mother? Some other woman?”
Amir almost stumbled over a wooden figurine as he took two steps towards Marissa. She was a shallow, vain woman, but there was something in what she’d said that hit home. He blinked as he took a seat across from her and stared into her cold blue eyes. The past three years had been very hard for him in a way he couldn’t quite understand. Perhaps he’d never really come to terms with his father’s death. Perhaps it was that same old fear that he’d end up like the old man before his time. Perhaps it was something else.
Or perhaps . . . perhaps it was someone else.
An image of a woman in a yellow sundress whipped past his mind’s eye as he stared at Marissa, and suddenly he could taste that woman’s lips again, smell her feminine scent again, feel the warmth in her big brown eyes once more. He could picture her walking into his chambers the day before her wedding, partly terrified, partly excited. And he could hear himself telling her that her marriage would fail, that she was marrying a man who did not give a damn about her.
And here I am, in a room with a woman I do not give a damn about, a woman who never loved me but is here to ask me to marry her. What kind of twisted lives are we all leading where we pass by the people who excite us and end up with those who suck the life from us?
That is why I hate myself, the Sheikh thought. Because I let that woman pass me by. Because I did not fight for her at the time, did not do what my body and soul wanted me to do. Is that the source of all this? Is that one mistake the reason I am sitting here with Marissa, facing my own past, heading towards a future with a woman who is incapable of loving anyone but herself?
Where is she now, I wonder, the Sheikh thought as he rubbed his stubble and listened to Marissa talk excitedly about how she wanted to convince her uncle and aunt to name her as the heir to the throne, about how it would make the deal sweeter if she could tell them she was marrying a Middle-Eastern Sheikh, creating an alliance of East and West that would look so good on the news—just like it had in recent past with several Sheikhs marrying American women.
I invoked Sheikh’s Privilege with that woman, he thought as he absentmindedly nodded while Marissa droned on. And so by the traditions of Johaar, I am in fact bound to follow up on my word, follow up and make sure that the marriage I allowed to take place is indeed successful. Because if it is not . . . if it has failed . . . ya Allah, then by the tradition of Sheikh’s Privilege I am bound to her, am I not?
By God, I am bound to her, came the thought again as he stared at Marissa even though his thoughts were of someone else, an American librarian whose kiss was still fresh on his lips.