Читать книгу One Night with a Seductive Sheikh: The Sheikh's Redemption / Falling for the Sheikh She Shouldn't / The Sheikh and the Surrogate Mum - Fiona McArthur - Страница 9

Twenty-four years ago

The slap fell on Haidar’s face, stinging it on fire.

Before he could gasp, another fell on his other cheek, harder, backhanded this time. A ring encrusted in precious stones dragged a ragged line of pain into his flesh.

Disoriented, he heard a crack of thunder as tears misted his sight. Admonishments boomed again as more slaps tossed Haidar’s head from side to side. One finally shattered his balance, sent him crashing to his knees. Tears singed the fresh cut like a harsh antiseptic, mingling with the blood.

A tranquil voice broke over him. “Shed more tears, Haidar, and I’ll have you thrown in the dungeon. For a week.”

He swallowed, stared up at the person he loved most in life, incomprehension paralyzing him.

Why was she doing this?

His mother had never laid a hand on him. He’d never even gotten the knuckle raps or ear twists his twin, Jalal, drove her to reward his mischief with. He was her favorite. She told him so, showed him her esteem and preference in every way.

But there had been times lately when she’d been displeased with him, when he’d done nothing wrong. Actually, when he’d done something praiseworthy. It had bewildered him. Still, nothing could have prepared him for her out-of-the-blue, ice-cold fury just when he’d expected her to shower him with approval.

She stared down from her majestic height, looking as he’d always imagined a goddess of myth would, her eyes arctic. “Don’t compound your stupidity with whimpering. Stand up and take your punishment like your twin always does—with dignity and courage.”

Haidar almost blurted out that it was Jalal—and their cousin Rashid—who deserved the punishment. The “experiment” he’d warned them against and had refused to take part in had caused the fire that had consumed a whole chamber in the palace and ruined his and Jalal’s tenth birthday party.

Being habitually wild and reckless, Jalal and Rashid had long depleted their second chances with their elders. Their punishment would have been severe. Being the one with a track record of caution and commitment, his reserve of leniency was intact. So he’d stepped forward as the accidental culprit.

Just when his confession had garnered what he’d expected from his and Jalal’s father and Rashid’s guardian—surprise followed by acceptance of his explanation and dismissal of the whole debacle—his mother had walked up to him.

Her eyes had told him she knew what had really happened, and why he’d stepped forward. He’d expected admiration to follow the shrewdness that made him feel she could read his slightest thought. What had followed were the slaps that hadn’t stopped even when her husband, the king of Zohayd, had ordered her to cease.

Haidar rose and lifted a trembling hand to the sticky warmth oozing across his left cheekbone. She swatted it away.

“Now beg your twin’s and cousin’s forgiveness for being slow in coming clean about your thoughtless transgression, almost causing them to be punished in your stead.”

Disbelief numbed him, chagrin seared his chest. It was one thing to take punishment for them, another to apologize to them, and in front of everyone present, relatives, servants … girls!

His mother clamped his face in a vicious grip, her long nails digging into his wound. “Do it.”

She released him with a shove, made him stumble around to face Jalal and Rashid. They were staring at their feet, faces red, chests heaving.

“Jalal, Rashid, look at Haidar.” His mother now spoke as Queen Sondoss of Zohayd, her voice clear and commanding, carrying to the whole ballroom. “Don’t spare him the disgrace of groveling for your forgiveness in front of everyone.”

Jalal’s and Rashid’s gazes wavered up to her before turning to him, apology and contrition blazing in their eyes.

His mother prodded him with a head whack. “Tell them you’re sorry, that you’ll never do anything like this again.”

Burning with mortification, he looked into his twin’s eyes, then into his distant cousin and best friend’s, and repeated her words.

“I didn’t do it!”

Haidar blurted the words out as his mother finished dressing his wound. Now that they were in the privacy of her chambers, he had to exonerate himself, if only in her eyes.

Her smile was filled with pride and love as she kissed the injury she’d inflicted. “I know.” So he’d been right! “I know everything. Certainly about you and Jalal and that rascal Rashid.”

His confusion deepened. “Then … why?”

She cupped his cheek tenderly. “It was a lesson, Haidar. I wanted to show you that even your twin and best friend wouldn’t say a word to spare you. Now you know that no one deserves your intervention or sacrifice. Now you know to trust no one. Most important, you know what humiliation feels like, and you’ll always do anything you must to never suffer it again.”

His head spun at her explanations, their implications.

He didn’t want to believe her, but—she was always right.

Was she about this, too?

She came down beside him, hugged him. “You’re the only true part of me and I’ll do anything so that you never get hurt, so that you become the man who will get everything you deserve. This world at your feet. Do you understand why I had to hurt you?”

Shaken by the new perspective she’d shown him, he nodded. Mainly because he wanted to get away, to think.

She stroked his hair and crooned, “That’s my boy.”

Eight years ago

“You’re just like Mother.”

Haidar flinched as if from a teeth-loosening slap.

Jalal was twisting the knife that had been embedded in his chest ever since they’d been old enough to realize what their mother was. What she was called. The Demon Queen.

To Haidar’s heartache, no matter his personal feelings for her, he’d been forced to concede the title had been well earned.

While his mother possessed unearthly beauty and breathtaking intelligence and talents, she wielded her endowments like lethal weapons. She flaunted being unpolluted by the foolish weakness of benevolence. Instead of using her blessings to gain allies, she collected cowed servants and cohorts. And she relished making enemies, the first of which being her own husband.

If it weren’t for her fierce love for her sons, or for him mainly and to a lesser degree, for Jalal, he would have doubted she was human at all.

But what had always tormented Haidar was that the older he got, the more he realized what a “true part” of her he was. He’d felt the taint of her temperament, the chronic disease of her traits spreading inside him. He’d lived in fear that they’d one day obliterate his decent and compassionate components.

It was ironic that Jalal had thrown that similarity in his face now, when he’d been feeling his mother’s shadow recede, her legacy loosening its noose from around his thoughts and inclinations. Ever since he’d met Roxanne …

“I take it back.” Jalal, the twin who resembled him the least of probably anyone in the world, shook his head in disgust. “You’re worse than her. And that I didn’t think was possible.”

“You talk as if she’s a monster.”

They’d never spoken this openly about their mother. They’d been speaking less and less about anything at all.

Jalal shrugged, the movement nonchalant but eloquent with leashed force. A reminder that though they were similar in size and strength, Jalal was the … physical one.

“And I love her nonetheless. But that’s the unreasoning affection a mother wrings from her child. You don’t get the same leniency. Not on this. This is one instance where I cannot, will not, rationalize or forgive your heartlessness.”

Unable to deal with his twin’s disapproval any better than he ever had, he let the fury and suspicion that had brought him to this confrontation take over. “So this is your strategy? Like they say in Azmahar, ‘Yell accusations lest your opponent beats you’?”

“It’s you who are resorting to ‘Hit and weep, preempt and cry foul.’”

Jalal’s derision scraped his already raw nerves. “I never suspected you’d be such a sore loser when Roxanne chose me.”

Jalal snorted, his eyes smoldering like black ice. “You mean when she was manipulated by you. Conned by you.”

Haidar suppressed another spurt of indignation, the frost at his core resurfacing. “Can’t find a more realistic excuse for trying to steal her from me? We both know I can get any woman I want without even trying, no manipulation involved.”

“You couldn’t have gotten Roxanne without it. She saw you for the ice-cold fish that you are that first night. It must have taken some Academy Award–winning acting to create the fictional character that she fell for.”

Haidar had never resorted to violence, not even while growing up among an abundance of male-only relatives who relished rough … resolutions. He’d always suppressed his temper, used cold deliberation to outmaneuver them. Now he wanted to smash in Jalal’s well-arranged face.

He gritted down on the urge. “The fact remains—she’s mine.”

“And you have been treating her like property. Worse, like a dirty secret, making her hide your intimacies from even her mother, forcing her to watch you flaunt the other women ‘you have without even trying’ in public. You told her they’re decoys to draw suspicion away from her, right? It must be killing her, even if she believes your self-serving lies. I can’t imagine what it would do to her if she knew you’d been playing her from the start, that she’s just another source to feed your monstrous ego.”

Haidar vibrated with a charge that seemed as if it would burst his every cell if it wasn’t released. “And you know all about her supposed turmoil because you’re her selfless confidant, right? And you want to take your so-called friendship from your squash dates into her bed. Well, hard luck. That’s where I am. Constantly.”

Jalal’s snarl felt like an uppercut. “Very gentlemanly of you, to kiss and tell.”

“No need for evasions since you know we’re intimate. And still you try to take her away from me.”

“You don’t even want her,” Jalal hissed. “You seduced her to beat me. She’s just a pawn in another of your power games.”

“You were the one who started that game, as you’ve conveniently forgotten.”

“I forgot about that silly bet in five minutes. But you took it like you take everything, with obsessive competition. You went all out to entrap her.”

“And you’re out to save her from monstrous me? You’re admitting you want her for yourself?”

Jalal’s jaw hardened. “I won’t let you use her anymore.”

Rage blotched Haidar’s vision. He wanted to pulverize Jalal’s convictions. Arguments and defenses pummeled his mind. Then he opened his mouth and something from the repertoire of his lifelong rivalry with his closest yet furthest person came out.

A taunt. “How are you going to stop me?”

Jalal shot him a lethal glance. “I’ll tell her everything.”

His head almost burst.

Out of the rants clanging there, he snarled only “Good luck.”

If he’d thought he’d seen antipathy in his twin’s eyes before, he was wrong. This was the real thing. “Nothing good can come of this. You’re not only like Mother—you inherited the worst of both sides of our families. You’re manipulative and jealous, cold and controlling, and you have to win no matter the cost. It’s time I exposed your true face to her.”

Haidar’s blood charred with the futility of watching this train wreck. “There’s one hitch in that plan. If you do, it won’t only be my face she won’t want to see again, but yours, too.”

“I’m okay with losing Roxanne, as long as you lose her, too.”

The detonation of fury and frustration shattered his brakes. “If you tell her, Jalal, never show me your face again.”

Bleakness spread in Jalal’s eyes. “I’m okay with that, too.”

A door closed, aborting the salvo of reckless bitterness he would have volleyed at his twin’s intention.

Roxanne.

As she walked into the sitting room, his blood heated, his breath shortened. Her effect on him deepened with every exposure. Even when he had thought theirs would be a mutually satisfying liaison that would end when his fascination dissipated. Until her, he hadn’t suspected himself capable of attaining such heights of emotion, plumbing such depths of passion.

She was fire made flesh, incandescent in beauty, tempestuous in spirit, consuming in power. And she was his.

He had to prove it, know it, once and for all.

The fear that she had feelings for Jalal had been compromising his sanity. His mother’s passing comment about how Roxanne and Jalal shared so much had colored his view of their deepening closeness. But dread had taken root when he’d realized Roxanne had revealed the essence of her self to Jalal but not him. That had snapped his restraint, forced him to have this confrontation with both of them.

Jalal had made his position clear.

But it wouldn’t matter, not if she chose him. As she had to.

He tried to get confirmation from the hunger that always ignited in her eyes at the sight of him. But for the second she spared him the touch of her focus, her eyes were blank. Then they swept to Jalal.

Haidar pounced on her, his fingers digging into her flesh, almost vicious in their urgency, his heart thundering. “Tell Jalal that he can’t come between us no matter what he does or says. Tell him that you’re mine.”

Her face became a canvas of stupefaction. Then it set in hardness, her eyes becoming emerald icicles. She knocked his hands off as if they soiled her. “That’s why you so imperatively demanded I drop everything? How creepy can you get?”

It was his turn to gape. “Creepy? And this is imperative. I’ve sensed Jalal developing … misconceptions about you. I had to nip them in the bud.”

Her eyes narrowed into lasers of anger and disgust. “I don’t care what you ‘sensed.’ You don’t get to summon me as if I’m one of your lackeys, and you can’t trick me into a confrontation where you go all territorial on me and demand I parrot back what you say. You’re the one who’s under the misconception that you have any claim to me.”

His heart slowed to an excruciating thud, the pillars of his mind shuddering. “I have a claim. The one you gave me when you came to my bed, when you said you love me.”

“You do remember when I said it, don’t you?” When he’d been arousing her to insanity and driving her to shattering orgasms. “But thanks for bringing things to a head. I’m going back to the States, and I was debating how to say goodbye. You men always take a woman walking away as a blow to your sexual ego, and it gets messy. I was worried that it would get extra messy with you, being the Prince of Two Kingdoms with an ego the size of both.”

His shook his head, as if from too many blows. “Stop it.”

She gave a careless shrug. “Sure, let’s do stop it. You were the best candidate for the exotic fling I wanted to have while living here. But since I decided to move back to the States, I knew I had to end it with you. I have needs, as you know, and no matter how good in bed you are, I’m not about to wait until you drop by to satisfy them. I have to find a new regularly available stud. Or three. But a word of advice—don’t pull that territorial crap on your new women. It’s really off-putting. And it makes me unable to say goodbye with any goodwill. Now that I know what kind of power you imagined you had over me, I’m so turned off I don’t want to ever see or hear from you again.”

He watched her turn around, walk in measured steps out of the room.

In seconds the penthouse door closed with a muted thud, the very sound of rejection, of humiliation.

From the end of a collapsing tunnel he heard a macabre distortion of Jalal’s voice. “What do you know? She has sharper instincts than I gave her credit for, took you only as seriously as you took her. Seems I shouldn’t have worried about her.”

He looked at Jalal through what felt like a stranger’s eyes. “You should worry about yourself. If you ever show me your face again.”

The twin he barely recognized now looked back at him with the same deadness. “Don’t worry. I think it’s time I detoxified my life of your presence.”

Haidar stared into nothingness long after Jalal had disappeared. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

Jalal should have told him he’d never trespass on the sanctity of his relationship with his woman. Roxanne should have denounced his doubts as ludicrous.

He should have had his twin back and his lover forever.

Those he’d thought closest to him shouldn’t have walked away from him. But they had.

Trust no one.

His mother’s words reverberated in his head. She’d been right.

He’d ignored her wisdom at a cost he might not survive.

Never again.