Ultimate Heroes Collection

by Various Authors

  She went to the dressing room, put on her summer coat. Her personal thermostat had been shot to hell of late. She was freezing now.

  She came out, found him standing in the same spot where she’d left him, a stoop to his wide shoulders, and her heart almost knocked her off her feet. She’d seen him exhausted, agitated, uncertain, but seeing him defeated, lost.

  Oh, Malek, my love, not on my account, I beg you.

  Determined more than ever to end this, to send him back to his life, and out of hers, forever this time, she forced a brittle smile. “So how did you find me?”

  “You’re asking because you hoped I wouldn’t, right?” This was said with such pain she almost fell to her knees to beg his forgiveness. “You hid well. It took my intelligence machine, aided by the American one, all this time to find you.”

  She attempted a smile. “Hope the CIA and FBI didn’t think you wanted me for some crime committed on Damhoorian soil.”

  His only answer was a grimace before he bent his head, examined his feet in utter bleakness for a moment.

  Then he straightened, like someone bracing himself for a fatal blow. “I guess as you didn’t want me to find you, you’re not exactly happy I’m here.” He stopped, a vulnerability she’d never seen entering his eyes, his posture, as if he was begging her to contradict him. She managed not to at the price of years off her life. He went on, his jaw muscles working, the rest of his face barely under control, “Happy or not, I don’t think it’s too much to ask to talk. If you’ll, please, come with me, where we can be alone.”

  Alone. Didn’t he know she’d always remain so without him? He should never know. But to be alone with him again.

  The decision overtook her, left her lips. “OK.”

  His tension deflated as if with a gut punch. Then he strode towards her, his intention to take her in his arms explicit in every ravenous line and move. She pretended to spin around to fetch her bag. She straightened to find him two steps away, bewilderment and hurt coming off of him in waves.

  And she made a second mistake. “Would you like to come to my place?”

  He staggered a step backward, confusion twisting his beloved face. Then determination hardened it and he took her arm, gripped it harder than necessary as he guided her out of the hospital, as if afraid she’d dissolve if he loosened his hold.

  People turned to gape at him. Not only was he the most magnificent male on earth, they must recognize him, too, must be wondering what a king was doing there, and with her to boot.

  Outside, the limo awaiting them wasn’t a diplomatic one. Saeed was the driver. She met his eyes as he opened the door for them, saw that the accusation and the fury of their last encounter had turned into something akin to hatred.

  She faltered. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea after all …”

  Malek’s hand tightened. “No, Janaan. You’re not running out on me again. Not before we talk. Get in, please.”

  He’d said “please”, but she knew he’d haul her over his shoulder all the way to her condo if she refused. She got in.

  She kept her eyes averted, looking into nothingness as Seattle zoomed by.

  She didn’t need to give her address. He already knew it. She wondered how much more he knew. Wondered what would happen once they were alone.

  Nothing, she railed at herself. Nothing would happen, then he’d be the one to walk out on her this time. This time forever.

  In thirty minutes he was taking her key from her, unlocking her door and pushing it open for her.

  She walked into her utilitarian space on rigid, numb legs and her bag dropped out of her nerveless fingers. It fell on the couch she passed by, didn’t betray her collapsing condition.

  She leaned on the first wall she reached, asked with forced brightness, “Would you like something to drink?”

  “I would like you to stop behaving as if we’re strangers,” he grated, waited for a reaction. When there was none, he prowled into her reception area, shrinking it, making everything look drab and insignificant in comparison, her neat place, herself—life. Then his gaze suddenly slammed into her, pinned her to the wall like a butterfly on a board.

  Then he finally rasped, “Did you see the ceremony?”

  And Jay felt her world ending all over again.

  She’d been waiting for the guillotine blade to fall, but it still hacked her to pieces when it did. She’d been avoiding all media—and people—like the plague. Anyone who’d known she’d been to Damhoor had wanted to relate news of the country and its exciting new hunk of a king. She’d shut herself out, unable to bear hearing any mention of him or his country.

  And here he was, forcing the news on her.

  So he’d had a ceremony. Had chosen a wife. The wife considered suitable, the wife he’d now take to bed, or might have already taken to bed, the one who’d bear him heirs, or might already be bearing the first of many.

  But it seemed his new wife’s charms hadn’t worked yet. Or was he not giving the woman a chance, because he was still pining for her? Or maybe he was there to appease his honor, fulfill his pledge, offer her the best he could provide, a position as his second wife. And he was waiting for an answer.

  She could only give an uncoordinated shrug that could be read as yes or no, as if it didn’t matter to her which.

  Malek watched Jan with a heart that had shriveled to a husk since the moment he’d discovered her disappearance. He’d exploded in rages, mobilized all the kingdom’s resources in searches and investigations, had even threatened all the tribes with retribution if anyone had had a hand in her disappearance.

  It had been then that Saeed had confessed, had tried to convince him the Janaan he loved didn’t exist, that the real woman had shown her true colors at the first hurdle. The accusations hadn’t even registered, had only incensed him into being ruthless in his punishment of Saeed.

  Then he’d swept the earth looking for her.

  But all through the soul-gnawing, mind-eroding desperation, dread, fury, and longing, he’d had no doubt. Not a shadow of one. His self-sacrificing Janaan loved him with all her soul, had left him thinking she was doing what was best for him and Damhoor.

  Then she’d looked at him with cool, distant eyes, treated him as if they didn’t mean life and beyond to each other, and his world had smashed around him. He’d never known such helplessness, such fear, such defeat.

  Could it have been true? She’d left him because she didn’t love him enough? Didn’t love him at all?

  Then he’d asked if she’d seen the ceremony. And she’d only shrugged. Ya Ruhmaan—she didn’t care?

  What would he do if she didn’t? He could no longer make a rational thought without her being the main pillar in his mind, could no longer exist if she wasn’t at the core of his reasons and goals.

  Then everything evaporated from his mind. She was taking off her coat and—and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed before.

  She was pregnant!

  His incomparable Janaan, carrying a child! His child.

  The only child he wanted. The child he’d hoped they’d been making each time they’d made love. He’d rejoiced when she hadn’t brought up the matter of protection. The meticulous doctor would have insisted on it if it hadn’t been her ultimate method of showing him she’d wanted his seed to take root inside her, had trusted him with her body, her future and that of her child’s. Their child.

  Then mortification rose in a black tide.

  Had she suspected it when she’d left him? Was that why she had? She’d sacrificed herself for what she believed was the best for him, intending to go through pregnancy, childbirth and his child’s upbringing without his love and support?

  No more. Never again. He’d be her support and succor for every moment from now on. The next baby, he’d be there from the first moment, for every second after that till his last breath.

  He hadn’t felt himself move, but he was all around her, cascading passion and protection and tears of gratitude and pr
ide over her down to where his child was growing healthy and strong inside her.

  But she was pushing him away, frantic, feeble fingers trying to terminate his homage, her sobs drowning his ragged rasps. “Don’t, Malek. I’m—I’m four months pregnant …”

  It didn’t make sense at first. Then the words mushroomed in his mind like a nuclear detonation. Four months.

  Four.

  His hands convulsed in her flesh, an instinctive spasm, warding off the horror, the devastation, the fatal blow.

  He raised his eyes to hers, begging for a renunciation, a stay of execution of all his hopes and dreams, his faith, but found nothing but tears. Of guilt? Of pity?

  A white-hot vice crushed his chest.

  He willed it to complete the job, still its beating.

  It didn’t. Why? So he’d live with it?

  He couldn’t! He couldn’t live at all.

  Janaan’s child wasn’t his.

  She’d forgotten him in days—days. Had craved another, had opened her body to his invasion, taken his seed, wanting it to bear fruit not his.

  He heard something crackling, congealing with agony and madness, a butchered maniac ranting his last breaths away.

  “All for nothing. All the certainty, the invincibility in her—for worse than nothing. For an illusion. Not mine—not mine …”

  Jay reeled as Malek fragmented before her eyes.

  But this isn’t what I meant to do, she wanted to scream.

  She’d die to never see him in pain.

  She flew after him, threw herself at his feet. He staggered, looked down at her with the eyes of a man in the process of losing his coherence. And she begged.

  “Forgive me, Malek, please, please—forgive me. I lied, lied—only to set you free. I thought you’d just despise me, walk away, be free of me. I swear I never dreamed it would hurt you this much. My baby is yours, Malek, as I am, as I will always be. I just want you strong and in peace—please, Malek, please …”

  The look in his eyes changed to the wild one of someone way past his limit, the tears she’d never thought to see pouring from them, and she panicked, her words colliding with each other in her fright.

  “You said I had to have a family, and now I do, Malek—I do! Your child will be all the family I need. You shouldn’t worry about me, about us. I’m a good provider and I’ll be a good mother. I am nothing like my mother—please, please, never worry on that account. And if you want and find it possible to participate in your child’s life in any way, you can. You can do anything you want or see fit to. Anything at all.”

  Malek looked down at Janaan, his salvation and destruction, demolished twice over. With the devastation of her sacrifice, after the devastation of her attempt to drive him away.

  He fell to his knees before her, shaken to his foundations that she was all he’d believed and more, that he’d never be able to love her hard or long enough, never have enough, never.

  “Hada kateer—kateer. This is too much …” he reiterated as it all merged into a dream sequence, after the harrowing plunge into the nightmare of annihilation, and she was cleaved to him, her tears mingling with his, her passion a chain reaction with his, melting their barriers, their flesh together.

  Then he went home, plunged inside her, drove in a ferocious rhythm, weeping at the poignancy of union, of reunion, of souls and bodies sundered and now remade into one.

  At the peak he drew away to watch her, his Janaan, his heart and mind and soul in name and reality, taking her fill of him, at the mercy of the pleasure he inundated her with, magnanimous with her captivation of him, with her surrender.

  Only when she started tumbling down the vortex of pleasure, crying out her love, convulsing around him, wrenching his release from his every cell, he joined her, spilled his seed, branded her as his forever, only sorry that he couldn’t give her another child right now.

  Then there was peace. For the first true time in his life.

  Their union had started with their first eye melding, but this was the beginning of an inseparable life together.

  He lay curved around her, his lips traveling over her neck and shoulders, her hand luxuriating in the evidence of his love growing inside her, pride blazing through him, spilling on words of worship, pledges of forever.

  Her quivering finally stopped, her caresses, too. He growled with deprivation, took her hands back to his body, urged them to resume their ownership. She resisted him. A black spot began to grow in the perfection again. He drew himself up on one elbow.

  “Malek—this was a lapse …”

  His heart contracted at her choking statement.

  He no longer understood anything. There was no logic to grasp at here. He gathered her tighter to his body. “The most powerful intimacy we’ve ever shared, a lapse?”

  She was panting, peach-flushed, her eyes turquoise in the bedside light, slumberous with the drug of pleasure, bleak with the admission of defeat. “Yes—one I’ll keep making if you don’t leave me alone. I know what you came to offer me, and I can’t accept. So, please, leave me alone, Malek, please …”

  The black spot was expanding, about to consume his world again. “You’re having my child, you say you’re mine forever, you just made soul-shattering love with me, but you won’t marry me? Is this what you’re saying? What is this? Pregnancy hormones?”

  She turned her face into the pillow, bit her lip to stop its trembling. “I’m trying not to intrude in your life, take you from your duties and your wife. I can’t be the other woman in your life. It will destroy me as it destroyed my mother.” She turned a tear-drenched face of overpowering beauty and poignancy to him. “If you stay away long enough, we may be able to grow a thick scab over the wound to live with it, but if you keep reopening the wound, letting the hunger bleed out, it will keep eating at us until nothing is left. I want to have your baby, Malek, I want to be whole and strong and nurturing. Please, my love, help me retain my sanity, don’t keep reminding me how much I’m losing, how much I can’t have.”

  Malek reeled, everything inside his head in chaos. “What are you talking about? What duties? What wife? You said—at least implied—that you’d seen the ceremony! The ceremony where I abdicated and handed the crown to my cousin!”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Jay was convinced now. This was all a psychotic breakdown.

  She couldn’t have heard Malek correctly.

  “Abdicated?” She heard the explosive word, realized it had just erupted from her lips. “I thought you meant a marriage ceremony and … Abdicated! God—how? Why? How could you?”

  The distressed bewilderment in his eyes slowly gave way to amusement. Then suddenly he threw his head back and laughed. Peal after peal of cruelly masculine merriment that was all him.

  Her inarticulate cry of chagrin and impatience brought a reluctant end to his fit.

  He still chuckled as he trailed a hand heavy with possession over her ripeness. “Ahen ya habibat galbi. If you only saw what I see now, you’d excuse me if I made love to you again now and explained later.” At her warning growl he took his hand off her, held it up. “All right. As for how, not at all easily, and that was what kept me the past six months from tearing the world apart with my own hands to find you. I had to make everyone agree to my decision, to agree on who best to replace me. They were so desperate for me to remain on the throne they even agreed to let me take you as my wife.”

  Would she have any reason left when he was through with her?

  “They agreed that you can marry me and remain king?” she paraphrased slowly, as if to make sure she hadn’t imagined hearing it. Then she shouted, “So why did you abdicate?”

  He smiled in indulgence at her distraught reaction. “Simply because I would have married you, then barely seen you, as duties deluged me in a totally different sphere from the one you move in as a doctor. They tried to convince me I could still be a doctor, work with you, but I realistically know I can’t be both a hands-on doctor and a king, and I had to
choose. Not only you as my life-mate, but the kind of life we’ll lead together.

  “I chose the only life where we’ll be happy, together and fulfilled. What I have to offer the world of medicine and healthcare is something no one else can. My cousin is a better statesman than I am. It was decreed that he won’t make pivotal decisions without my approval, that I’ll still have massive sway in the kingdom. And I plan to use that power, with you, to be the driving force behind advancement and moderation.

  “We’ll be together, living each day to the full in each other’s nearness and nurturing, doing what we do best, being healers. Though we may have to take it a bit easier when each of our children is too young. I hope to have one more.”

  And she wept. Felt like she’d dissolve.

  What he was saying, what he’d done was so huge it left her shocked, mute, awed, humbled, elated. Oppressed.

  She launched herself at him, sobbed the excess of emotions into his chest. “How did I ever deserve all that? How can I ever deserve that?”

  “Without the least effort,” he insisted, all pride and indulgence. “Just being yourself, the woman who enslaved me with your selflessness and courage and generosity from the first moment. The woman who owns me by right of saving my life, by right of giving me my first real taste of what life means. My life started for real after we met. I only ever knew every heart-rending emotion with you and on your account. And you are the only one who shares my vision, my drive, my soul. Together we’ll be an unstoppable force for good.” He hugged her fiercely. “It’s a relief you’re giving me a child, ya rohi. I hope a daughter, who can act as a safety valve for the dangerous accumulation of love I have for you.” He pinched her cheek softly. “I wouldn’t want to exhaust you.”

  Stumbling deeper in stunned, humble ecstasy, drowning, soaring with so many things that she’d need her lifetime to fully register and savor them, Jay hugged him, took his lips.

  “Our child will have to be satisfied with a separate reservoir of love,” she said, her voice ragged, drenched in tears and smiles. “My love for you is all yours. As for exhausting me, no way. In fact, I’m so well rested it constitutes an emergency. You should do something about it.”