"Our blessed father gave me to Ghassan when I was seventeen. Told me it was my duty, that I would save everyone. That he really wanted to protect me, but had no choice."
Farid's jaw opened to speak, but after sixteen years, it was her turn to take the floor. A quick flick of the finger to MacIntyre and a beefy hand clamped down on her brother's shoulder.
"He said Ghassan would ruin the family if I didn't. Including you. But father clearly didn't tell you I was a heroine, did he? Didn't mention that you owed me, oh, you know…” Here she couldn't help pausing for dramatic effect. “Everything. That you should get down on your knees and thank me?"
"And now," she continued, "Sheikh Amin has offered the same bargain. A life of servitude so you can have the same benefits you've always enjoyed. At the expense of the woman you think is a whore.”
Okay, so maybe she was laying it on thick, but at this point, Farid deserved the hyperbole.
"Ghassan blackmailed our father? Arrgh." With that last noise, he winced, favoring the shoulder under MacIntyre's grip.
"Really?" she asked, giving the bodyguard a little wave to indicate he should release Farid. "That's what you got out of my story? That Ghassan is the villain here? Not that our father used me when he should have done anything to keep me safe? Just so he could keep his job and you could get a premium education when I got treated like people in the streets wanted to spit on me. You've got to be kidding me right now."
"Why should I believe anything you say?"
A humorless laugh popped out of her. "Because I hold your life in my hand now. If I refuse Sheikh Amin, well, let's just say I hope you socked some cash away for a rainy day. You said that gifts from whores go in the garbage. Guess what? Your entire life has been a gift from me."
Farid looked down on her like she was less than dirt. Really. The guy was insufferable. Why had she ever wanted a relationship with Farid? She didn't even want to share DNA with him. "Sheikh Amin would not do that to me for a woman so much older than himself. And he is not a man to do such a thing to another man."
"Ye-ah," she said, drawing out the word. "You don't know him that well. He's also a man who doesn't make toothless threats. If he says he'll do it, he will. Got another question for you. What would you do if Sheikh Amin asked you to give him one of the girls when she hit seventeen? Let's pretend your job depended on it."
The fact that Farid thought about this made her choke back a laugh. MacIntyre's barely contained snort let her know he found that idea equally dumb. Amin would never have anything to do with a teenager.
Farid sniffed the air. "Sometimes one must make a sacrifice for the good of others."
When the veins in MacIntyre's neck started popping out, she knew she had to get her broth—no, she stopped that thought. This guy was no brother of hers. She had to get Farid out of both their sights before his face was introduced to the tile floor. Repeatedly. With great force.
"But behind her back, you'd call her a whore."
She thought he'd deny it. He didn’t bother.
Sadness filled her. After this, Farid wouldn't let her see the twins anymore. And that was his decision. She had to respect it. He was their father.
He had taught them that she was a whore. Not a heroine.
She'd known that for years, and continued to hold to the idea that she was doing something noble for them while he poured poison in their ears about her. Taught them that women who did what she did were dirty.
Her father had sacrificed her to benefit himself and Farid. But in the past few years, she'd been the one doing the sacrifice. Denying her own choices to benefit everyone else: Farid, who hated her; the twins, who were taught to despise her; Ghassan.
Ghassan, who had needed her.
Her throat closed. He'd been so sick at the end. He'd clung to her hand in his final moments, his breaths rattling through his collapsing lungs. I should have married you, he'd said.
The last thing he'd ever said.
She'd put everyone else's needs above her own. Time to do the opposite. Time to stop being noble, to start being selfish. To get what she wanted for a change.
The way MacIntyre and Farid stared at her told her she'd been ruminating for far too long.
"Ghassan wanted to marry me, you know," she told them both. "At the end."
Farid's jaw dropped.
"Of course he did. Because you're awesome, Miss Rania."
"Thank you, MacIntyre. You're awesome yourself."
"What do you want me to do with this piece of shite?" He cocked his thumb in the direction of her brother.
"Escort him out of the palace," she directed. "Don't want him grabbing any valuables on the way out. He might give in to temptation, since he's about to lose his job."
She turned to the man who had once been her brother. "I would have done anything for your girls. In fact, I would have done anything for you if you'd only shown some appreciation. Goodbye, Farid. I suggest you dust off your résumé."
She didn’t bother knocking on Amin's door. He hadn't bothered asking for an invitation into her life, so why should she do any different to him?
He faced the door, sitting without a digital device in his hands for once, his eyelids lowered in lazy expectation. Despite the late hour, he still wore a suit, but his tie was long gone. His collar was open to show the hair at the divot in his collarbone. A crystal tumbler with an inch of amber liquid rested on a table at his fingertips. A dark scratch of beard shadowed his jaw. His feet were bare.
Her heartbeat ratcheted into the danger zone.
Farid had accused her of not respecting her body. Well, she respected it now. Enough to give her body exactly what it desired, right now. No regrets, no consequences.
Amin's lips moved. Some words came out, but she'd been too focused on their fascinating shape to comprehend what he'd said.
"Huh?" she asked, so very eloquently.
"Your grandmother. Do you have news?"
She crossed her arm over her chest and hugged herself. "She is stable. But…"
She couldn't bring herself to say the rest. The doctors had said Jeddah would not leave the hospital. The coming grief was already a hole under her ribs.
"Because of Ghassan," she blurted out.
He opened his mouth to ask for clarification. There were so many, many questions that had that same answer. Because of Ghassan.
She didn’t let him ask. "Why I sent you away. To school. It was because of Ghassan. You asked me before." She forced out each word through a closing throat. Maybe she should have denied it, told him she’d had nothing to do with the decision to send him to boarding school. Throw off all responsibility and just play the used mistress.
But no, the decision to send Amin to school might as well have been hers. She came up with it, planned it, and campaigned for it like a military commander. Ghassan had conceded, but that was all. Everything else had been her choice.
She squared herself, as she had done then. When the only thing she'd wanted more than to keep Amin close, to be his friend and his ally, was to make sure he had the childhood he deserved. "It was the right thing to do."
"To send me to a heartless place, away from the only person I cared for. Into the hands of strangers."
"To get you the hell away from the only person you cared for," she countered. "I know how much you think you owed him, but Ghassan would have—"
His eyes came alive, with twin wildfires in their depths. "Not Ghassan. The only person I cared for was you. Did you think I would take too much of Ghassan's attention? Did you want him to yourself?"
Want him to herself? Ha.
"No, Amin. I didn't want him to myself. And I thought about you every day. But yes, I did the right thing then, and I would do it again. Ghassan would have twisted you into something like himself. Willing to do anything to have his own way, to stomp on the feelings of other people for his own pleasure. It would have killed me to watch him do it. And you deserved so much more."
She remembered the ins
tant she'd made the decision to get him away. That she had to, had no choice.
"I found you alone with Ghassan one day. He was showing you a map, telling you about the eastern tribes, the ones who live along the Al Bar Wadi." Ghassan had always hated the nomads of that region, following the river as it dried to dust after the spring rains. She'd never known why. "You listened close while he told you how they were an infestation that should be erased so the clean people of Qena could live on that land. That was when I decided I had to get you away from him, no matter how much I would miss you."
Amin watched her, his face blank. Did he believe what she said? He gave zero clue.
"I won't apologize for my choice," she told him. "I did the right thing. I knew Mrs. Khan would take care of you."
His eyebrows clashed together over the bridge of his nose. "What do you know of her?"
A furnace clicked on in Rania's cheeks. Per bacco. She hadn't meant to say that out loud. To admit how deeply she’d planned the campaign, leaving nothing to chance. "She was one of my teachers when I was at school. She'd come to Qena to teach for a couple of years. When I needed to send you somewhere safe, I found where she'd gone and wrote to her."
"She was my second mother," he said.
"I know. I offered to pay her, but she said knowing you was payment enough. She was constantly writing to tell me how proud she was of you." And I couldn't have been more jealous, she didn’t add.
"I thought you couldn't wait to get rid of me."
"Then you were wrong. I wanted you with me. You would have made my time with Ghassan almost bearable. But I had to do what was right for you."
"You are very good at sacrificing things for others. Quite the martyr." He spat out the last word as if it tasted like sour milk. "What do you wish me to do with Farid? It is your choice."
Her choice. Of course it was. But Farid's future had always been in her hands. She'd just never closed her fist on him before. If she hadn't been too busy being an unnecessary martyr, she could have forced him into letting her have a relationship with his daughters.
"Why was he just here?"
"I summoned him to the palace to ask him the details of your agreement with Ghassan. His information was incorrect, I begin to suspect."
Rania took a deep breath. Telling Amin to fire her brother was completely justified. The lesson would do him good.
She looked to the floor for an instant, as if the answer lay in the pattern of the marble. If Farid ever had the chance, he would throw her under the nearest bus without even thinking.
She smiled. "Give him some crappy job to do for a while."
"He can fetch coffee for Fatima Khalil in Accounts," he suggested, as if he'd already thought it out.
Farid working for a woman. Nothing would be worse to him. She loved it.
"And you?" Amin asked. "What will you do?"
She took the chair across from Amin, seating herself without an invitation, something she never would have done with Ghassan.
"You didn't know the full terms of my agreement with Ghassan, did you? You didn't know he kept my passport so I wouldn't escape, or that he threatened to ruin my family if I didn’t do what he wanted."
"Your father's agreement with Ghassan, you mean?" He picked up the glass at his side, swirled the liquid, making the cubes of ice clink against the crystal, then put it back down. "I did not. If you had tried to tell me, I would have thought you a liar."
"Did you send the jewels I found in my apartment? The passport?"
"Your jewels, your passport. They belong to you." He began to rise from his chair, looking like he wanted to pace.
“Amin, please sit down and talk to me like a person," she requested. "I hate it when people loom over me."
Pure male annoyance twitched in his face. But then cleared as he seated himself.
He'd done as she asked. She'd made a demand and the world had not collapsed in on itself. The air in the palace tasted sweeter and clearer than ever before.
"The jewels and passport are not all that belong to you, Rania,” he continued. “I found the salary that Ghassan paid you."
"He didn't—"
"He did. You were on the books of ANI as his private assistant for six figures a year. He used you to siphon money from the company. Some of these funds, he spent. But some remains in the account."
He slid his drink off its white coaster, then handed her the coaster.
His fingers brushed hers, chilled from the crystal tumbler. When he'd last touched her, they'd both been naked, their skin warm from making love.
The tips of her ears heated in response. To one little touch. She'd been a mistress for sixteen years, and one inch of skin contact from Amin could set her aflame like she'd never felt before.
She fought her way back to the present, to the coaster—which turned out not to be a coaster at all. A piece of paper, folded into a neat square.
Opened, it revealed an unbelievable thing. A bank statement. In her name. For an account containing sixty-two hundred thousand, three hundred fifty-seven dollars. And ninety-one cents.
She had no words. She just blinked at the paper. If Amin hadn't given it to her, she would have laughed.
"You can likely auction your jewels for half a million more. At my estimate. And your apartment. Ghassan sold it to you three months ago." She heard Amin swirling his glass again. "For one dollar. It is in your name. He did care for you, Rania."
She nodded, still not looking up from the paper. Still trying to absorb the impact of what it meant. "I know."
"I am…" Amin's sentence faded away, incomplete.
She dragged her attention away from the account statement. Amin leaned forward in his chair and put his elbows on his knees. He bowed his head.
Then his head snapped up. He caught her gaze and held it. "I am sorry, Rania. The things I believed of you. I don't know how I could have—"
She raised a hand and interrupted. Something she'd never dared do to Ghassan. "You had evidence, Amin. I see where you got the idea."
"No," he said. "I should have suspected something was off when you asked me about your apartment. I should have known. Instead I pressed ahead. I hurt you."
"It's okay," she said. "I forgive you."
"Why? Why should you forgive me so easily when I believed you to be deceitful, to care for nothing but money?"
"Because I believed you were the kind of man who would extort me for sex, using my family as leverage.” She shrugged. “But you’re still that kid who hates wearing shoes.”
He looked down at his bare feet. “What does my dislike for footwear have to do with anything?”
“Not a thing,” she lied. “Let’s blame it all on Ghassan. He made us think of each other like this. He showed us a world through his eyes and made us live in it."
"Did you love him? Did I force you to sleep with me just days after the man you loved died?"
I should have married you, Ghassan said, in her memory.
She smiled, though her lips tightened. "No. I didn't love him. I can't even forgive him. But I’ve learned not to hate him. Now I just want to forget him."
Amin swirled his glass again, still not drinking.
"Over a million dollars," she said. "I can't believe it."
"You can have any future you desire. You should not refuse this out of pride, Rania. Taking the money does not make you a whore."
"Amin, I was a whore. This"—she waggled the paper—"is money I got for being Ghassan's mistress. And yes, I accept the money. I earned it."
"What will you do now, Rania?" he asked, his voice soft. "Will you do what your grandmother suggests and leave Qena?"
"I don't know," she said. "I'm not used to making choices for myself. I'm used to other people planning my future."
He nodded and said nothing.
He drew a hand through his flawless hair, leaving it… less than flawless. One lock fell over his right eye. He blew it away, but the stubborn hair fell right back.
"I do kno
w one choice I'm going to make," she informed him. "Something I've wanted to do since Ghassan's funeral."
Letting the account statement flutter to the floor, she got out of the chair and walked over to Amin. When he began to rise, she put her hand on his abs and shoved him back down.
And then she straddled him, sinking down onto his lap.
"Rani—"
She cut him off with a kiss.
Before the kiss could really get started, strong hands clamped her biceps, drawing her away.
"Rania." He licked his lips, as if he still tasted her mouth on his. "What are you doing? Is it not clear that you are free from having to do this?"
A smile exploded on her face. "Exactly. I’m free, Amin. No one can make me do anything I don't like. Managgia tua, I'm a millionaire. I get to do what I want now. And what I want is this. What I want is you. You said you found me attractive, though why you'd want someone so o—"
He covered her words with a heart-stopping kiss, using her own tactic against her.
Dio, his lips felt great against hers. Familiar and strange at the same time. Like coming home, but to a new home. Which made zero sense, of course. But with his firm, hot lips against hers, "sense" was a far-off country she had no desire to visit.
He pulled her close, until she felt the heat of his stomach against her own. "Rania, why would I not want you? Your beauty is only matched by your intelligence. I know now that you advised Ghassan on many of ANI's more successful investments. You have endured things that no other woman would have, and never lost your hope for the future. How you can have gone through what you did and not be touched by darkness and cynicism—you leave me in awe. You will never again tell me how old you are, do you hear me? Your age, and your past, have made you who you are."
Her heart went ker-thump under her ribs. Never again, he'd said. Never again. Exactly as if they were going to be together for a long time.
"And now, you will tell me why I should sleep with you,” he demanded.
"What?"
His fingers slid down her back. A sudden looseness in her dress told her that he'd dragged her zipper down. "Unless you are hard of hearing, I believe you mean ‘why.’" The intense stare he gave her seemed to scrub away all the defenses she'd built to keep Ghassan out. "I wish to know all the reasons you and I should be together, Rania. I want you to list every one, so that I know I am not some young toy you are using for your selfish pleasure."
Older Woman, Younger Sheikh Page 11