Ultimate Heroes Collection

by Various Authors

  Malek always demanded that only one served him and only when asked, but he’d ordered the full fanfare of service the restaurant was known for for her benefit, felt the spreading coolness of satisfaction in his chest at her delightfully flustered reaction at being waited on like that.

  She went on to delight him further, not picking at her food or getting finicky about ingredients that experience told him foreigners balked at, at least at first exposure.

  She attacked her meal with relish, kept reporting her experience with every mouthful. She enthused at the assorted grilled goat and sheep, including liver and brain, and the kapsa, the spiced rice with fried nuts and raisins, and the date wine. At trying gahwa, the cardamom Arabian coffee, her eyes widened at its bitterness, got even wider when he instructed her to drink it with the ultra-sweet chewy agwa dates. She went on to wash down a whole pack with a full carafe of coffee.

  By the time logmet el guadi arrived, he was sure such a flat stomach couldn’t hold any more food. But it did. She popped one of the crunchy, chewy golden spheres of fried dough dipped in thick syrup into her mouth and moaned. She washed it down with goat milk, murmuring “Sinful” and reaching for another one.

  He didn’t know why, but he thought this was the moment to tell her. “I cancelled the security checks.”

  She choked. He thumped her on the back to stop her coughing paroxysm. Her eyes glittered up at him from a bed of tears. “You mean into my dark past? Why did you do that?”

  “Because I want to hear about it from your lips.” In fact, he needed to. “And Janaan, this is not an interview.”

  “But you said—”

  His lips twisted. “I would have said anything to get you to agree to come here with me.”

  “You conned me?” He only shrugged and held her eyes, unrepentant. At length she tossed her hair, sending the sunlit waterfall thudding down her back. “You deserve that I wolf down this mouth-watering food in silence.”

  And he guffawed. “You mean you still haven’t?”

  She popped another piece of logmet el guadi into her mouth and chewed defiantly.

  He leaned closer, brushing her exposed forearm with his, took a piece himself, mimicking her actions.

  After their logmet el guadi eating competition had emptied the plate, with her still looking up at the thirty-foot-high tented ceiling, he drawled, “You won’t last. You can’t be silent. Not with me.”

  She swung her eyes back to his, defiant, irritated—magnificent. Then she drawled back, “If this isn’t work-related any more, why should I tell you anything?”

  “No reason.” He shrugged, knowing that his nonchalance was a flimsy act. Especially when he added, “Except for me.”

  For him. Was there a better incentive? Jay thought.

  She sighed, wondered when she’d finally stumble back out of this fantasy dimension she’d spilled into the moment she’d plopped into his car and he’d materialized out of the darkness.

  It had felt just as mystic as sharing this with him, the best meal—the best experience—of her life. Incense fumes shrouded them, echoes of past and future twining with distant live music, the reed-like lamenting naay weaving with the oud, the melancholy of the quarter-tones of the music deepening the feeling of unreality.

  She leaned on one of those incredible cushions, resuming her surrender to this out-of-sanity, out-of-life encounter. “So—what do you want to hear? The highlights in bullet form?”

  “We have all evening—as long as we want.”

  She watched him unfold his magnificent body, hers throbbing as he bent one endless leg on the floor, the other at the knee with his forearm resting there, like a sultan preparing to watch a show thousands had sweated their lives away to provide him with. He’d taken off his jacket and tie, rolled up his sleeves and undone his shirt. She’d been right. His body was that of a higher being. His beauty made her ache.

  And he, this perfect creature, was asking her to reveal herself to him, of all people, when she’d never done so to anyone. It was one thing he’d find out her secrets from a security report, another that she’d tell him her story herself, in words she’d never tried to formulate—and see pity or even distaste forming in his eyes.

  He reached out, ran a finger over the hands entwined tightly on her lap, startling her out of her chaos.

  “Listen,” she blurted out. “Just get on with your security checks. I’m sure your people will give you a far more accurate rundown of my life than I ever will.”

  “They would, if I wanted a background check, which I don’t. I want to hear about you from you.”

  “There’s not much to tell, really. It’s all very boring.”

  “As boring as you’ve been so far? I’m certain it’s an impossibility that you, or anything about you, can be boring.”

  What she’d thought about him earlier.

  She fought to the surface, tried one last time. “I assure you a professionally gathered and written report will be far more entertaining.”

  He shook his head, dislodging a thick, glossy lock from his slicked-back mane. She thought she’d tell him anything for the privilege of smoothing it back. “Tell me, Janaan. Please.”

  It was the “please” that undid her.

  “Oh, all right,” she muttered. “But I’m shutting up at the first yawn.”

  He chuckled, did to her what she was dying to do to him and tucked back a lock of hair behind her ear, electrifying her. “If I yawn, it will be because in forty-eight hours I’ve only shut my eyes for the minutes it took for the accident to occur. You are the only thing keeping me awake.”

  “Oh … OK.” With her last escape blocked she tried to think where to start, her heart bobbing in her throat.

  He twined another lock of hair around two fingers, gave an almost imperceptible tug and whispered, “Start at the beginning.”

  He’d read her mind! Or maybe she was just too predictable.

  But anyway, he’d given the only logical place to start.

  She exhaled. “I was born twenty-eight years ago next month in Chicago to a twenty-year-old single mother. She never married, so I was an only child. With no family herself, it was all she could do to take care of an infant as she studied and worked as a nurse. When I was ten, she stopped working and we subsisted on unemployment pay. I guess even then she’d started the plunge into depression, that it was why she couldn’t hold a job anymore. But she was only diagnosed with a major depressive disorder when I was fifteen. By then I was working in two part-time jobs to boost our meager income, had already jumped grades and had a scholarship to pre-med school. Once I entered med school, the scholarship lasted only one more year as I no longer qualified for it with my scores plummeting. By that time my mother was almost totally dependent as she started abusing alcohol and anything else she could lay her hands on. Soon we were in debt, and I had to work in any job I found just to keep us off the street.”

  She stopped, groaned. God—she didn’t have to tell him all that, not this explicitly, this intimately.

  But she wanted to. For the first time in her life, she wanted. needed to share with another. With him.

  What about him? He couldn’t possibly want this level of personal detail imposed on him.

  She ventured a look at him, whispered, “Sorry that you asked already? I told you it was boring. I neglected to mention it was pathetic too.”

  His hand wrapped around both of hers, squeezed, silencing her. “Don’t. Depression is devastating to any family when any member is afflicted by it, but for it to be the mother, and for you to have had no family members to help you carry the ever-increasing burden! That you became in effect parent to a mother who was incapacitated by psychological illness, and at such a young age, is nothing short of heroic.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she scoffed. “So heroic my mother kept plunging deeper, and I did less and less to pull her back as I kept getting busier. So heroic she ended up killing herself.”

  Silence crashed, splintering all aroun
d them, shredding her worse than the burst of relived anguish had.

  She endured it for an overflowing moment, almost flinched when his fingers came beneath her chin, coaxing her face up to his. He insisted, moving closer, his body a protective barrier blockading her, warding off her torment, sympathy—empathy—blazing on his face. He’d known loss, helplessness to stop it, to reverse it. She knew it. And he was reaching out with the understanding that had been scarred into his own psyche, defusing her own guilt and agony.

  “When?” His whisper was compassion itself.

  She gulped, forced an answer. “T-two months ago.”

  “You’re still in mourning.” It was a statement.

  She exhaled a tear-laden breath. “I’ve been mourning my mother’s loss for over a decade. And the worst part was I never really got it—what was wrong with her. A friend once told me we take our psychological health for granted, that we never grasp how someone with a disorder feels. It’s true. I lived with her suffering but, no matter what I go through in life, I’ll never understand the prison of torment and despair she lived in. I can only hope she found peace. I still can’t find any, can’t stop thinking if I’d just listened to everyone’s advice and put her in an institution, instead of insisting on taking care of her myself, they may have succeeded where I failed and pulled her back from that final act of desperation.”

  Her words petered out at the ferocity that appeared in his eyes. Or was it a rogue beam from the setting sun igniting the gold?

  Then he spoke and there was no doubt what she’d seen.

  “Never think that,” he ground out. “You did everything beyond right and into outright self-sacrifice.”

  She shook her head, mortification sizzling in her cheeks. “There’s no self-sacrifice in taking care of your family. She would have done the same for me if she’d been the healthy one and I had been the one with the affliction.”

  “It was self-sacrifice,” he gritted, his eyes adamant, brooking no argument. “You didn’t abandon her, someone who I’m sure people, starting with her doctors, labeled a lost cause to the care of strangers. You knew she wouldn’t have been better off in an institution. As canny as addicts are, you knew they wouldn’t have stopped her from abusing chemical substances. And she would have had the added torment of feeling abandoned by you. She would have suffered far more, before ending her life just the same. But most people would have gone that route, convincing themselves they were doing the best for their loved one while buying themselves a shot at an unburdened life. While I can’t presume to condemn them for such a choice, I can’t commend you enough for making the toughest one of all, and sticking with it. Your mother could have lived forty more years and you would have sacrificed your chance of a normal life, of building a family, for her.”

  She lowered eyes that felt about to burst. Not with remembering the ever-increasing burdens or the suffocating helplessness but with Malek’s total understanding, with his assurance that she hadn’t harmed her mother, who people had called a lost cause, by refusing to institutionalize her.

  When she spoke, her tear-soaked voice was almost unintelligible with anguish. “You make it sound so noble, like I gave up my chance of building a family, when in reality I never thought of having one. It must have been my mother’s disastrous experience tingeing my views of romantic involvements and domestic bliss.”

  “I find it impossible to believe hordes of men didn’t try to change your mind,” he drawled, his gaze burning down her body and back to her face.

  Heat rose to her face, held for a second before flooding her body. She gave him a tremulous smile, desperate to lighten the mood. “Not sure about hordes, but some tried, the so-called serious ones, while letting it drop that a man didn’t want a woman who came with such a burden.”

  “So only men in pursuit of flings didn’t care about your situation,” he bit off. “While men interested in a future and a family let you know they want you only as long as you came with no burdens.”

  She stared at him, stunned yet again at his laser-accurate insight. Then she shrugged. “I think any man has a right not to sacrifice the normality of his life for a stranger, to want an emotionally available—an available, period—wife.”

  His lips thinned. “I think any man who wants a woman to share his life must take her with her own better and worse, not demand or expect that she gets rid of her responsibilities to provide him with peace of mind.”

  To that ferocious declaration she had no answer.

  She stared at him helplessly for a moment then exhaled. “Actually, none of that really mattered after all. When my mother died, I figured out the most important reason why I’d never thought of having a family. One is supposed to live first before thinking of that. I realized I never have.”

  Silence thickened, along with the magma smoldering in his eyes. She felt it filling her lungs, slithering down her nerves, burning, besieging.

  Then he finally drawled, “And to live, you came here. And instead of securing a lucrative job and enjoying the luxurious lifestyle Damhoor can offer someone of your assets and skills, you joined GAO. You have a singular definition of living, Janaan Latimer.”

  Her lips twitched in relief at his lighter tone. “Oh, there is method to my madness. I thought that to live I had to find out who I am. I thought I had to start with exploring the other half of my heritage. So I came here to find my father.”

  “Your father is Damhoorian?” She nodded and he shook his head in amazement. Then he drawled, his voice dropping to fathomless reaches, “Janaan of the ceaseless surprises.” He looked at her for a long moment, as if he were studying a multi-faceted gem. Then he cocked his head, making her heart tilt to the same angle inside her chest. “When did you find out about him?”

  “All my life,” she said. “It was him who named me, though he couldn’t give me his name. He was the only man in my mother’s life, and though her psyche must have been fragile to start with, I think his loss and my birth were the catalysts that initiated her descent. She fell in love with him when she was here as an exchange student, but it turned out he was married, had children already and his family forbade him to take her as a second wife. Or to acknowledge me. He visited us a few times when I was growing up, phoned frequently, always telling me how much he loved me, how sorry was he couldn’t be with us. He helped financially by paying into a trust fund. Towards the end he called more, saying he was hoping to finally have us with him. Then he suddenly stopped calling. A few months later my mother killed herself. I think it was giving up on him that made her give up on life.”

  She paused for breath, the breath the intensity of his gaze was knocking out of her lungs. She needed it, to get it all out, to lay her innermost self bare before him. “So after all the investigations into my mother’s death had been concluded, I felt like the foundation of my life had been yanked from underneath me and I was dangling in a vacuum. I guess I needed a new foundation, and just five days ago I made a decision to use the money he’d saved for me to come here, find my roots so to speak, in the country I lived my life dreaming I’d one day live in, with a miraculously healed mother, a father and siblings. Problem was, I found out the reason for my father’s silence. He was dead. And my half-siblings understandably don’t want to know about me …”

  He took her hand when she faltered, enveloped it, infusing her with his power, giving her the strength to finish her story.

  She went on, “But I fell in love with this land the moment I set foot here, really began to understand the hold it had on my father. I was torn about leaving, wanted to stay, to try to get to know him by getting to know the culture that had ruled his life and choices. But stay to do what? I wasn’t up to applying for a job, didn’t even want one. Then practically on my way to the airport just two days ago, I stumbled on GAO’s ad, asking for volunteers. And it was like a prayer answered and a dream come true in one. I always wanted to join GAO, but my responsibility to my mother tied me to one place with a regular job. Now I
no longer have to provide for her, I’m doing what I always wanted while also getting my chance to stay here. And with the money my father left me I can afford to stay here as a volunteer for at least a couple of months, quite comfortably.” She gave him another wavering smile. “So that’s my whole life story, till the moment you drove me off the road.”

  Malek stared at her, his heart staggering in his chest.

  He’d never known such honesty, such unadorned recounting of such heart-wrenching events. He’d never known that such compassion towards those who’d ruined one’s life could exist. She’d given them all forbearance and forgiveness, when she didn’t extend half the mercy to herself. The mother who’d deprived her of her childhood and youth, of normality and peace, the father who’d abandoned her to the custody of a damaged mother while he’d lavished his all on his legitimate children, those who had taken it all and refused to even recognize her as their blood kin.

  How he felt the need to avenge her, to erase her suffering.

  Not that she acknowledged she’d suffered or sacrificed. She’d cited her ordeals matter-of-factly, and now they were over she was moving on to the next chore. Joining GAO so she’d spend heaven knew how much more of her life giving to others, with no expectation of pay or thanks or even acknowledgement.

  She’d already made him feel what he’d never felt before, but this insight into the depths of her suffering and strength increased her appeal a thousand fold.

  And it went beyond passion. Beyond compassion. She moved him, shook him. On every level.

  Nothing was left in him but the need to comfort her, connect with her, erase all damage, imbue her with all he had of healing and succor. It was no use resisting any more.

  He reached for her, watched her eyes widening, her flushed lips parting on a tiny cry of surprise and, he knew, surrender, as he swept her over his body, folded her in his lap and contained her in a hug. It felt as if she had been made to fit within him, as if he had been made to wrap around her.