by Olivia Gates
“But next time, it will be on my turf. And on my terms.”
He touched his tongue to the lip she’d bitten, as if tasting her passion. Then, with one last inflaming look, he whispered, “Until then.”
Three
“I’d give an arm to know your secret, Roxanne.”
Roxanne stared at Kareemah Al Sabahi. Hers was the third and last door she’d knocked on to explain away Haidar’s shenanigans.
She hadn’t been up to facing another day, let alone those who’d witnessed Haidar’s innovative blackmail tactics. But damn him to an as-novel hell, she had to live among them, as he’d said.
Kareemah was the only one who hadn’t needed explanations, having watched developments through her intercom camera. Cherie’s arrival had had her mind going into hyperdrive. But Haidar had left minutes later, aborting her visions of threesomes. She’d opened her door, hoping for an explanation, when he’d suddenly turned. In his real voice, he’d said he hoped she’d enjoyed the show, had her giggling like a fool as he’d bowed to her before he’d walked away.
“I mean, you’re gorgeous and all, but it can’t only be that. You have to have a secret. Women everywhere would kill for a tip.”
Roxanne shook her head. She wasn’t up to deciphering neighbors’ riddles. Now that Haidar had rematerialized in her life with the force of a live warhead and left promising further destruction, her brain was officially fried.
Either that, or Kareemah was talking gibberish. Which was an imminent possibility. The woman had been exposed to Haidar, too.
“So what do you do to get gods knocking down your door?”
“Uh, Kareemah, if you mean Haidar, I already explained—”
“And I might have bought you explaining one god away. But how do you explain another?”
Suddenly, she realized Kareemah wasn’t looking at her. Her eyes were glued to a point in the distance.
Someone was standing behind her.
She whirled around. And her heart hit the base of her throat.
No. Not another Aal Shalaan “hybrid.”
Jalal.
He was standing by the door she’d left open, in a charcoal suit with a shirt the color of his golden eyes, hands languidly in his pockets, looking as if he’d teleported off a GQ magazine cover.
That might not be far-fetched. She hadn’t heard the whir of the elevator or the fall of his footsteps.
For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, one of the two men she never wanted to see again had managed to sneak up on her.
Kareemah tugged on her arm, made her stagger around. “Like we say here, ‘the neighbor takes precedence in charity.’ I anxiously await a glimpse at your methods.”
With that, she cast Jalal another starstruck glance and stepped back into her apartment.
Roxanne stared at the door Kareemah had just closed, her mind in a jumble.
“Koll hadi’s’seneen, kammetman’nait ashoofek menejdeed.” All these years, how I wished to see you again.
Her heart squeezed so hard she felt it would implode.
Suddenly fury spurted inside it, incinerating all shock and nostalgia. She wasn’t letting another Aal Shalaan twin mess her up all over again. She’d hit her limit last night.
She turned, hoping she didn’t look as shaky as she felt. “If it isn’t one of the region’s two most eligible bastards.”
The warmth infusing his face didn’t waver as he slipped his hands out of his pockets, spread his arms in a gesture that had always had her running into them. “Ullah yehay’yeeki, ya Roxanne.”
Ullah yehay’yeeki—literally, may God hail you, one of the not-quite-translatable colloquial praises he’d once lavished on her, usually when she’d said something that had resonated with his demanding intellect and wit. Which had been almost every time she’d opened her mouth. They’d been so alike, so in tune, it had been incredible. It had also turned out to be a lie.
For years afterward, she hadn’t known which betrayal had hurt more, his or Haidar’s.
She stuck her fists at her sides. “Listen, buddy, I had one hell of a night, and I’m expecting a spiral of steady deterioration for the foreseeable future. So why don’t you just piss off. Whatever made you pop up here, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Not even if it’s me groveling for forgiveness?”
She walked toward him, each step intensifying her anger. “I’ve heard that before. Still not in the least interested.”
He’d called her out of the blue two years ago, begging her for a face-to-face meeting. She’d hung up on him.
He hadn’t called back.
She came to a stop a foot away, had to still look way up, even when boosted by her highest heels.
In response to her glare, he did something that made her heart stagger inside her chest. He cupped her cheek, his touch the essence of gentleness, his face, his voice that of cherishing.
“Alhamdu’lel’lah—thank God the years have been as nurturing as you deserve. You’ve grown into a phenomenal woman, Roxy.”
Only the drowning wave of longing stopping her from scoffing, Look who’s talking.
Jalal was another case where time had conspired to turn an example of virile perfection into something that was description defying. While the younger man she’d known had been as gorgeous as she’d thought humanly possible, possessing an equal, if totally different, brand of beauty from his twin and a diametrically opposite effect, too, the mature Jalal had become a juggernaut out of an Arabian Nights fable.
“Even if you scratch my eyes out for it, you have to hear it, to know it. Kamm awhashtini, ya sudeequtti al habibah.” How I missed you, my beloved friend.
And God, how she’d missed him, too.
She grabbed his hand, removed it from her face, tugged him by it. He let her lead him, offering no resistance even when it became clear she was taking him to the elevators.
In seconds, an elevator swished silently open. She gestured for him to enter. With one last pained, resigned look, he complied. And she made up her mind.
She dragged him back out, led him to her apartment.
She let him close the door, walked ahead to her spacious home office, threw herself down on the L-shaped cream leather couch/recliner, looked up at him as he came to stand before her.
She made a hurry-up gesture. “Go ahead. Grovel. Just try to make it interesting.”
His expression turned whimsical. “That will be hard. Will you accept pathetic?”
“I’m sure it will be that.”
He sighed, nodded. “But I want to make sure of something first. That day—you arrived before you made your presence known, right? You overheard me and Haidar talking about our bet?”
He was only half right about how it had happened. She wasn’t about to volunteer more insights. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s the only explanation for what you said and did. Even if you were angry with Haidar for his overbearing tactics, even if you’d told the truth about the limit of your involvement with him, you had no reason to cut me off, too. Except if you heard. And misinterpreted what you heard.”
Heat rose as she relived the humiliation and heartbreak all over again. “Don’t even try the misinterpretation card. What I heard was the truth, and I acted accordingly to get rid of both of you competition-sick bastards. End of story.”
Her insults had no effect on him. Just as they hadn’t on Haidar.
But while Haidar had been bedeviling and goading, Jalal was accepting and forbearing. He’d let her beat him to a pulp if it would make her feel better.
“You of all people know there are too many sides to any situation for one to be the whole truth.”
But she didn’t want to hear more sides to this mess. Hope was more damaging than resignat
ion. She’d built her stability around accepting the worst, dealing with the pain and moving on.
But…hadn’t she spent years wishing there were more sides? Ones that might prove that not everything they’d shared had been a means to a “pathetic” end, so she could free a measure of her memories from the pall of bitterness and resentment?
His wolf’s eyes felt as if they were probing her mind, following her every thought. Which they probably were. They’d always been on the same wavelength.
Just as the scales teetered toward foolish hope, his gaze grew relieved. He was reading her like a hundred-foot billboard.
“Will I get socked if I sit down beside you?”
She flung him an ill-tempered gesture. “Take your chances like the colossal man that you are.”
He sat down inches away with controlled strength and poise, cocooning her in warmth and power and a nostalgia so encompassing her throat closed.
She took refuge in sarcasm. “This couch is so low most people flop down on it. Still doing thousands of squats per day?”
“Takes one exercise junkie to know another. You’re looking fitter than ever, Roxy.” Before she hissed that he’d lost the right to call her that, he silenced her with something totally unexpected. “I need to explain something I should have long ago. My relationship with Haidar.”
Her heart blipped in distress at Haidar’s name. At the way Jalal said it. At the bleakness in his eyes.
She attempted a nonchalant shrug. “While neither of you ever talked about the other, I gathered the relevant facts myself. You live to compete with each other.”
“Aren’t you at all curious to know how we got that way?”
“Standard sibling rivalry, how else? As you said, pathetic. But most of all, boring.”
“How I wish it was. Maddening, unsolvable, heart-wrenching more like.” He wiped a hand down his face in a weary gesture. “You’ve seen how radically different we are, and we were born that way. But we were inseparable in spite of that. Maybe because of it. Until it all started going wrong. I can trace the beginning of the friction, the rivalry, to one incident. Our tenth birthday party.”
Here was her first misconception destroyed. She’d always assumed their rivalry started at birth.
“I almost burned down the palace, and Haidar volunteered to take the blame. Instead of stepping forward, I…let him take the punishment meant for me. Things were never the same afterward.”
Their conflict had an origin, one in which Haidar was the wronged party? That was surprising. Disturbing.
“He began to treat me with a reserve I wasn’t used to, put distance between us. Once I became certain it wasn’t a passing thing, I was furious, then anxious, then lost. I needed my twin back. I tried to force the closeness I depended on, dogging his every move, demanding to share everything he did, for him to share everything I did, like we used to. When that only resulted in more distance, I became desperate. I started to do anything that would provoke an emotional reaction from him. He retaliated by demonstrating in ingenious ways that I couldn’t get to him. Then he learned a new trick, wielded a new weapon—he started showing me, and everyone else, that he was better than me. In just about everything. And it was so easy for him.
“He got the highest grades without trying, while I had to struggle to keep up. He was a favorite with our elders for being so methodical and achieving. He was a sweeping success with girls for being so good-looking, yet so cool and detached. The only thing I could trounce him in was sports, and he came close to equaling me even in those by mere cunning.”
He gave a deprecating laugh. “And of course, all through, our mother was praising the hell out of his every breath. As a boy who then idolized his mother, I grew frantic for equal appreciation, and when I despaired of that, for any at all. She did show me some on occasion, but it always felt like the crumbs that were left over from Haidar’s feast. It took me years to outgrow the need for her validation, to be resigned to who she was, and the kind of relationship I had with her. But I could never become resigned to my and Haidar’s relationship.
“It was a paradox. I wanted to be with him the most of anyone in the world, yet no one could drive me out of my cool, collected mind but him…at least, no one then…” A dark, distracted look settled in his eyes. Before she could ask who else had later done the same to him, he shook his head slightly as if to rid himself of disturbing memories, resumed his focus. “He seemed to want my company as much, in his own contradictory way, showing me moments of emotional closeness before shutting me out again.”
You, too? she almost scoffed. Haidar had subjected her to the same dizzying, confusing, addicting pattern.
Jalal sat back, fists braced on his knees, eyes seeming to gaze into his own past. “As we got older, we showed the world a unified front, for the sake of the rest of our family, politics and business. But when we were alone, we butted heads like two stupid rams on steroids. And I think we both were addicted to the conflict. I believed that was who we were, the only relationship we could have, and I had to accept it.”
Roxanne gaped at his grim profile. She’d never thought things were that complex and complicated between them. It was fascinating in the most terrible way to learn how these two twins who had everything they needed to forge an unparalleled bond had been driven apart. Needing to reach out to each other yet held back by something inescapable.
And why was she including them both in that assessment? She’d bet Haidar felt no equal anguish for the state of affairs with his twin. She’d bet Haidar didn’t feel at all.
But where Jalal was concerned, so much now made sense. The wistfulness and guardedness that had come over him when Haidar was mentioned, the snarkiness that took over when his twin was around.
No matter if this snowball had started with an incident in which Jalal was the culprit—that Haidar had set out to punish his twin for it for the rest of their lives proved what a twisted, vindictive bastard he was. He’d even been proud of the fact that he made one hell of an unforgiving enemy.
Jalal threw his head back on the couch. “But accepting it didn’t mean I could handle it. Being unreasonable isn’t part of my makeup, but I became that with Haidar. And I no longer knew how much of our rivalry was due to what had turned him against me early on, or to my self-defeating tactics in trying to get him back, our mother’s divisive influence, or who we are, our choices, actions and reactions. Then we met you at that royal ball.”
Her heart did its best to flip over inside her rib cage.
How she remembered that night.
It had been in her first month in Azmahar. She’d thanked the fates for the job that had gotten her mother and herself here. When they were invited to that ball, she’d felt like a Disney heroine entering a world of wonders way beyond her wildest dreams. The impression had grown stronger when she’d met Jalal.
Then she’d seen Haidar.
Just the sight of him, an apparition of aloof, distant grandeur, had kicked to life every contradictory emotion inside her. She’d bristled with defensiveness, burned with challenge and melted with desire.
Jalal turned to her now, taking his account from the profoundly personal to the shared past. “I saw your instant attraction to him, and out of habit, I challenged him for you. We both know how far he took that challenge. But I swear to you, I forgot that silly bet in minutes. Everything you and I shared was real. You were the friend I could share everything with, the sister I never had.”
And he’d been her confidant, champion and the brother she’d always longed for.
Still afraid of reopening her heart and letting him seal the hole losing him had blown in it, she narrowed her eyes. “So why did you wait six years to approach me? And even then, give up after just one phone call?”
“Because after you walked out and didn’t call me, I assumed you’d overheard us and include
d me in your hostility. My first impulse was to run to you, tell you what I just told you now. But as I was heading out to your house the next morning, I learned that your mother had been…dishonorably discharged. I held back then because I believed further contact with me might cause you more…damage.”
She blinked her surprise. “Why did you think that?”
“Didn’t you ever suspect why your mother was fired?”
“Sure I did. I suspected Haidar.”
It was his turn to be shocked. “You thought he was punishing you for walking out on him through her?”
“You find that far-fetched?”
He clearly did, found her suspicion very disturbing. “I prefer to think there are some lines he wouldn’t cross.”
“You think seducing me for a bet was an okay line to cross, but destroying my mother’s career to get back at me wasn’t?”
“I…” He drove his fingers into his sable mane in agitation. “I guess it’s not impossible, considering he must have been enraged at the time, but it just doesn’t…feel like him.”
“So if it wasn’t Haidar you were worried would harm us more if you maintained a relationship with me, who were you afraid of?”
“My mother.” He grimaced when her jaw dropped. “I don’t have proof, but I felt her hand in this. She employed similar tactics to drive those she didn’t approve of away from Haidar and me. Again, I never found proof, but I just knew she was behind all those incidents. That’s why I ventured to contact you only when she was exiled. Until then, there was no telling how far she’d go if she learned you were still in my life.”
She gaped at him. This was a scenario she hadn’t considered. Not because she didn’t have the worst possible opinion of former queen Sondoss. But she’d thought the queen had already been done with her, had no more reason to go after her or her own.
Then again, knowing that woman, why not?
Could it be? All these years she’d been so busy demonizing Haidar, she’d missed the mother of all demons at work?