A Secret Birthright

chapter Ten

“You’re insane.”

That was all Fareed could say, could think. That was the only explanation for what Emad had just uttered.

“Her given name was Gwendolyn. She changed it to Gwen in official documents since her college days.”

A dizzying mixture of relief and rage churned inside Fareed’s chest. “That’s your ‘proof’?”

Regret deepened in Emad’s eyes. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The doubts that made me investigate Gwen began when I became convinced she knew Arabic. She responded appropriately to things said in Arabic too many times, if only in that inimitable glint of understanding in her eyes, that I thought it strange she wouldn’t mention it. So I tested my theory by speaking Arabic on purpose when she was within earshot and observing her reaction. She was careful not to show that she understood, but I could see that she did. I became absolutely certain when I once calmly told a servant to walk out of the room naturally, then run like the wind to investigate the silent alarm I received from the southern guard post. Her alarm was unmistakable, and she tried to indirectly find out if anything was wrong. Because I spoke fast and idiomatically, I became certain she has knowledge of not only Arabic but our specific dialect.”

Fareed rejected Emad’s words as they exited his lips.

But another voice rose inside his mind, borne of the observations he’d never heeded. How she’d never asked what the things he said in Arabic meant, especially the endearments he deluged her in, how she seemed to respond appropriately…

No. She’d only understood his tone. He wasn’t letting Emad poison his mind with his crazy theory.

Emad continued. “I couldn’t find a reason why she’d hide her knowledge, but because I don’t believe in inexplicable, yet innocent, behavior, I tried to get more information from Rose.”

“That’s what you’ve been doing with Rose?” Fareed growled. “Leading her on so she’d supply you with possible dirt on Gwen? You went too far in your efforts to ‘protect’ me this time, Emad.”

“I was getting close to Rose for real, and I hope to get closer. Although I don’t know how I will, with the truth revealed…”

“This is not the truth. All you have to support this insane theory is circumstantial evidence.”

Pain etched deeper on Emad’s face. “I have new evidence that the places where Gwen lived are also where Hesham lived, at the same time, that she now lives in the same town he did when he died. She seemed to be living alone in all these places, but then so did Hesham. They must have kept separate residences in Hesham’s obsession to keep their relationship a secret. She became a freelance researcher for the past four years so she wouldn’t have a base. Then she left the job scene around the time she would have been in her last months of pregnancy and during Ryan’s first months. She went back to work only when Rose became Ryan’s nanny.

“And I didn’t get any of that from Rose. She might be shockingly open, but only with her own opinions. She wouldn’t have shared anything about Gwen. But she doesn’t know much anyway because she lived across the continent with her late ex-husband for the last five years. They divorced years ago, but when he had a stroke that paralyzed him, Rose went back to take care of him. He died two months before Gwen contacted her and asked her to become Ryan’s live-in nanny. Two weeks after Hesham died.”

Fareed shook his head, repeated what looped in his mind under the barrage of information. “Circumstantial evidence, all of it.”

Emad closed yet another escape route. “The one thing Rose mentioned was that a tragedy befell Gwen around the same time her ex-husband died. She wouldn’t elaborate and I couldn’t probe more than I did and have her suspect my motives.”

“Good thing you couldn’t afford to alienate the first woman to move your heart since your late wife.”

“I couldn’t afford to alert her to my suspicions and have her relay them to Gwen. If Gwen felt danger, we might lose Ryan.”

“Now I know you’re insane.”

“I would give anything to be wrong, but with you being who you are, with what’s at stake, I have to consider the worst possible explanation for her actions, until proven otherwise.”

Fareed gritted his teeth. “Just to see what kind of twisted ideas you can come up with, what would said explanation be?”

“The ideas I have are courtesy of the twisted fortune hunters who’ve pursued you since you turned eighteen.”

Outrage, on Gwen’s behalf, boiled his blood. “And you somehow suspect Gwen is one of those, among everything else?”

“It’s a theory, but it answers every question. She met Hesham in that conference…” At Fareed’s stunned glance, Emad grunted. “Yes, I realized why I felt inclined to give her a chance. Seemed I recognized her but failed to place her. Until I remembered that you spent a whole evening staring at her across that ballroom.”

So Emad had seen Gwen’s effect on him that day. And Hesham had come to see him during the end-of-conference party.

He still refused to sanction any of the accumulating evidence. “So they were in the same place once…”

“And my theory goes that she realized you were related. Once you left, she might have approached him to ask about you and their relationship began.”

Fareed groped for air. “That’s preposterous.”

“If you have a better explanation to fill the spaces in Hesham’s story, I’d be the first to grab at it. But we can’t afford to blind ourselves to what might be the truth. But if you find Gwen irresistible, Hesham, your closest brother in nature, would have found her so, too. It might have developed naturally between them, with the reason they met, you, unknown by him, and forgotten by her. Then everything went wrong and the king made his ultimatum, and Hesham went into hiding with her. Then he died and she walked away from the accident unscathed. Everything till that point could have been innocent and aboveboard. But I hit a wall trying to find any good reason why she didn’t come forward when you searched for her.

“With Hesham dead, from her perspective, the king’s threat to her was no more. Without a legal marriage, or the possibility of one, making her and Ryan legitimate heirs of a member of the royal family, she must have realized she’d be beneath his notice, therefore safe. But she was also in no position to demand anything from the Aal Zaafers, apart from your own voluntary support. As lavish as that would have been had she gotten it, she might have wanted more. And she had the perfect plan to get it.

“She must have known how she affected you all those years ago, so she approached you incognito through Ryan’s crisis. She could have used Hesham’s knowledge of you to make you fall under her spell, to have not only all you can provide, for Hesham’s and Ryan’s sake, but all that you are, for hers. And she succeeded, didn’t she?”

Fareed pulled at his hair, trying to counteract the pressure building inside his skull. “You’re sick, Emad. I thought you liked her, thought…thought…” He stopped, suffocating. “You’re wrong, about everything. She’s not Hesham’s woman.”

Emad eyed him bleakly. “And if she is? Will you consider the rest of my explanations?”

“No,” Fareed shouted. “Even if she is—and she isn’t—she’d have a reason, a good, even noble reason for hiding the truth.”

“You haven’t asked her to marry you yet, have you?”

Fareed blinked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“It explains her sudden persistence to leave. I know you’ve become…intimate, and she might have feared you might cool down. Threatening you with leaving might have been to push you to offer her what would make her stay forever.”

“No. No way. She doesn’t have one exploitative cell in her body. I don’t need to know facts. I know her. And I reject your evidence.” He bunched his fists, tried to bring his turmoil under control. “That will be all, Emad.”

“Forgive me, Somow’wak, but I have to voice my worst fears.”

Fareed barely contained his fury. “And you have. I will ask her. She will refute it all. I will believe her and that will be that.”

“But we can’t afford for you to confront her, Somow’wak.”

“Why wouldn’t you want her to defend herself against your delusional deductions, except if you suspect they are just that?”

“Because if I’m right, confronting her would cost us Ryan.”

“There you go again with this…absurdity.”

“It’s anything but absurd, Somow’wak. I’ve marveled at the bond you forge deeper by the hour. Now I know you’ve both recognized the same blood running through your veins, the legacy of your most beloved sibling and his father. I’m certain part of your desire to have her is to have him, too. But she has full rights to him, and if any of the intentions I assigned to her were true, if she’s exposed you might enter an ugly fight over him. One you’re certain to lose.”

Fareed felt he was watching an explosion, played in reverse.

Emad’s revelations were the shrapnel hurtling back into place to re-form the bomb. Which might be the truth.

Not his macabre rationalization of Gwen’s motives and methods. But that she could be…be…

He couldn’t even think it. It would be beyond endurance.

But it would explain so much. Her wariness and resistance from the first moment, her distress when he’d asked her about Ryan’s father, his reaction to Ryan—which had the texture of what he’d felt for Hesham, the many similarities that did exist between the child Hesham had been and Ryan.

Then came Gwen’s continued emotional reticence, her persistent efforts to stop their intimacies, to leave…

The doubt Emad had sown felt like a virus replicating at cancerous speed, infecting his every cell and thought.

He couldn’t survive knowing. He wouldn’t survive not knowing.

He stopped again. He didn’t want his steps to take him back to her. He’d always rushed to her as if every step separating him from her dimmed his life force. Now…now…

Now those remaining steps were his last refuge. They could be what separated him from finding out that he couldn’t love her.

Emad had tried his best to dissuade him from taking those steps. His parting advice still cut into his mind, paring away every belief in anything good and pure, painting his world with the ugliness of manipulation and deceit.

Marry her. Without confronting her. Make her give you all rights to Ryan, secure Hesham’s son. Then deal with her, according to her innocence or guilt.

His steps ran out. They’d taken him where he’d experienced his life’s first true happiness, the consummation of his most profound bond. Where he might now end it all.

He opened the door, stepped inside. She wasn’t there.

He’d have the respite of ignorance, of hope, a bit longer.

A vase swayed as he bumped into it. It crashed, broke into countless, useless shards. Just like his heart might moments from now.

A door slammed and footsteps spilled onto the hardwood floor.

She emerged from the chamber leading to the bathroom, half-running, the face of all his hopes and dreams, alarmed, concerned, sublime in beauty. “Fareed, what…”

She faltered as she saw the ruins at his feet, took in his frozen stance.

Then it was there in her eyes. The realization. The desperation. The fear. Of exposure.

Certainty flooded him, drowned anything else inside him.

She was Hesham’s woman.

Gwen stared at the stranger who looked back at her out of Fareed’s eyes, desperation detonating in her heart.

He’d somehow found out.

“Laish?”

“Fareed, please…”

They’d spoken at the same moment. But he’d finished even as she stumbled to find words to implore him with.

He’d said all he was going to say.

He’d only asked, “Why?”

Why she’d lied. Why she’d kept lying.

She could only ask her own burning question, “How?”

The stranger who now inhabited Fareed’s body said, “Emad.”

She had no idea how Emad had found out, where she’d gone wrong. He couldn’t have gotten it out of Rose. She didn’t know.

“This is why you kept pushing me away, insisting on leaving.”

Statements. She could do nothing but nod.

She’d trapped herself the day she’d withheld the truth from him. And only sealed her fate when she’d grabbed at that one night with him and hadn’t left right afterward, when she’d kept telling herself, just one more night.

“Ryan lahmi w’dammi. Laish khabbaiti?”

Ryan is my flesh and blood. Why did you hide it?

The way he said that, that haunted look in his eyes crushed her. She’d seen him in that videotaped request for her to come forward. He’d looked and sounded wrecked over his brother’s death. He looked like that again, as if he’d lost him all over again.

She still couldn’t tell him why.

But his eyes weren’t only deadened with that grief she’d experienced for as long and as intensely. In them still lay his inexorableness. He’d have an answer.

She gave him all she could. “I was abiding by Hesham’s will.”

The moment she uttered Hesham’s name, Fareed swayed like a building in a massive earthquake.

And if she’d thought his eyes had gone dead before, she knew how wrong she’d been. He now looked at her as someone would at his own murderer.

She couldn’t survive his pain and disillusion. She had to try to alleviate them, with what she could reveal.

“I had to keep on doing what he did. You know the lengths he went to to hide his family’s whereabouts and identity.”

In that same deep-as-death voice, he asked, “Gallek laish?”

He’d always spoken Arabic unintentionally, to express his hunger and appreciation with the spontaneity and accuracy he could only achieve in his mother tongue. He’d usually been too submerged in passion to explain.

Now he spoke Arabic as if he was convinced she understood, wanted more proof of the depth of her deception.

Her heart twisted until it felt it would tear out its tethers. “He—he was convinced it would ruin his family to have…your family know of…our existence. This is why he hid. This is why I did, too. I—I only sought you out because of Ryan’s problem, thought I’d get your opinion and leave. But things kept snowballing, then things between us…ignited, turning my position from difficult to impossible and I kept wanting to leave, to disappear, so you’d never know, never feel like this…”

“Too late now.”

Silence crashed after his monotone statement.

She waited for him to add something, to restart her heart or still it forever.

He only said, “Tell me everything about the last years since I lost my brother. Tell me about your life with Hesham.”

Gwen looked as if he’d asked her to take a scalpel to her own neck.

Fareed felt he’d be doing the same. Worse. That he’d be cutting out his heart. But he had to know. Even if it killed him.

He no longer recognized that dreadful drone that issued from him. “You met him in that conference?”

She cast her eyes downward. It was an unbearable moment before she nodded.

He felt as if a bullet had ripped through his heart, stilling its last jerking attempts at a beat.

He’d thought she’d recognized him that day, had ended her engagement because she couldn’t be with anyone else.

All that time, it had been Hesham.

“Did you love him?”

She collapsed on the bed, dropped her face in her hands.

She had loved him. The grief he felt from her now was the same he’d felt at first. Her anguish for Ryan seemed an insufficient explanation, if that could be said. It had been due to the loss of Hesham, the father of her son.

And even though it shredded his heart, he had to tell her. “He loved you. He lived for you, and when he was dying, his only thoughts were of you. Even though he gave up his name and family and whole life to be with you, he thought you deserved more. His dying words were that he was sorry he couldn’t give it to you.”

Tears came then. Hers. He wished he could shed any.

He bled instead, dark torrents of loss.

Two things had been sustaining him. The hope of finding Hesham’s family. And finding her and Ryan.

But they were one and the same, and his hopes for a blissful future for all were doomed to be forever tainted by the past.

It wasn’t because he believed the ulterior motives Emad had assigned her secrecy. He wished he could. It would have been a far lesser blow to believe her a self-serving manipulator. He would have been relieved Hesham had died clinging to his false belief in her and at peace. As for his agony at losing his faith in her, it would have been ameliorated if he could have coveted her knowing what she truly was.

But she was everything he could love and respect, the answer to all his fantasies and needs. And that she’d been the same to his brother, had been his in such an abiding love that she’d become a fugitive to be with him…that was despair.

For even if he could survive the guilt—and may Ullah forgive him, the jealousy—how could he survive knowing she might never feel the same for him? What did she feel for him? Beyond physical hunger? Had he been unable to fathom her emotions because they didn’t exist? Had she been unable to deny her body’s needs, while her heart remained buried with Hesham?

If it had, had everything she’d had with him been an attempt to resurrect what she’d had with Hesham? Had she found solace in their minor resemblances, taken comfort in sensing the love he had for him?

Had she ever felt anything that was purely for him?

He had to get away from her before whatever held him together disintegrated.

He found himself at the door, heard himself saying, “I’ll be at the center. Don’t try to leave.”

He couldn’t make this a request. It could no longer be one.

Even if it would kill him, she was staying. Forever.

Gwen raised swollen eyes to the door that had closed behind Fareed. Heartbeats fractured inside her chest as she expected him to walk back, take her with him where he could keep an eye on her.

After moments of frozen dread, she tried to rise.

She sagged back to the bed. The bed she’d never share with Fareed again. In the apartment she’d realized wasn’t his.

He hadn’t taken her to his private domain, had kept her in what was to him, for all its wonders, an impersonal space.

Relief had trumped the pain of knowing he hadn’t thought her worthy of sharing his own bed. She didn’t wish the depth of her involvement on him, wished him only the mildness of fond memories when she left his life, not the harshness of unquenchable longing she’d live with.

But as he’d said, it was too late. Whatever he’d felt for her had now been forever soiled and soured.

It wasn’t too late to escape. This time, she wouldn’t let anything stop her. She’d at least spirit Ryan and Rose away.

Panic finally got her legs working. At the door, her hand slipped on the handle…then she stumbled back.

The door was opening. Fareed. He’d come back as she’d feared.…

Next moment, she stood gaping at the stranger…strangers on the other side of the door.

The dark, imposing man who looked like the highest-ranking among them, advanced on her, said without preamble, “You will come with us. The king has summoned you.”

The ride to the royal palace passed in harrowing silence.

Her escorts wouldn’t answer her questions. They’d said the king had summoned her, but in reality, she was being abducted.

Even if she hadn’t heard enough from Hesham about his father, this act of blatant disregard for her most basic rights made her expect the worst.

She’d long dreaded this man. Her fear only deepened with every step through his palace’s impossible opulence and extravagance.

Then she was ushered into his state room.

As the door closed behind her, she felt engulfed by malice.

It didn’t matter. She’d fight him, king or not.…

“Harlots always had the intelligence and self-preservation to try to entrap my sons outside my domain.”

The voice was pure wrath and mercilessness, short-circuiting her resolve. It issued from the deep shadows at the far end of the gigantic room.

The owner of the voice rose from a throne-like seat and advanced to the relatively illuminated part where she stood. She almost cringed. Almost. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“But you’re here to steal Fareed under my very nose. You’re either recklessly stupid or unbelievably cunning. I’d go with the second interpretation because you managed to have my most-level-headed son eating out of your hand.”

This was about Fareed? He didn’t know who she was?

Relief almost burst out of her, but she couldn’t give any outward sign of it. She stood staring ahead, face blank.

This provoked him even more. She felt his rage encompassing her as he stormed toward her. Then she saw him clearly for the first time. It took all that remained of her tattered control not to recoil.

The man was an older version of Fareed, as tall but bulkier, must have been as blessed by nature once upon a time, but ruthlessness had degraded his looks, turning him forbidding, almost sinister. And he was incensed.

“You think I’ll lose another son to another American hussy? One who wants to foist her bastard child on him, too?” He snatched at her. Her heart hit her throat as she stumbled out of reach. He brought himself under control. “But I’ll give you the choice I would have given the trash who deprived me of my youngest son. Leave, disappear, and I’ll leave you alone. If you don’t, what happens to you and yours will be your fault.”

And she knew. That the lengths Hesham had gone to, to hide from that man, what she’d always suspected had been at least a little exaggerated, had been warranted, and then some.

But ironically, because of the king’s ignorance of her true identity, he was giving her a way out of this horrific mess. He’d even provided the means for her to leave against Fareed’s will, what she might have never secured on her own.

“What will it be?” the king rumbled, a predator about to pounce and to hell with giving his opponent a running chance.

She looked him in the eyes, made her answer a solemn pledge. “I’ll leave. And I’ll disappear. Fareed will never find me again.”

The king had believed her.

But knowing that Fareed wouldn’t just let her go, he’d said he would give her every assistance in her disappearance efforts.

His men had delivered her to Fareed’s mansion to collect Rose and Ryan on her way to the king’s private airstrip. She’d phoned Rose ahead, told her to be ready, wouldn’t answer her confusion.

She now ran into the mansion, had reached the bottom of the stairs when his voice came out of nowhere.

“If you’re still trying to leave, Gwen, don’t bother.”

She stumbled with the force of the déjà vu.

Fareed was separating from the shadows at the top of the stairs like that first night he’d made her his.

God, no. Now this wouldn’t be the clean surgical amputation she’d hoped it would be.

He was coming down the stairs now, as deliberate, as determined as that other night. But instead of the passion that had buffeted her then, the void emanating from him did now.

“I’m not letting you and Ryan go, Gwen. And that’s final.”

She took one step back for each he took closer. But nothing stopped his advance. He was now mere feet away.…

Then two things happened at once.

Rose appeared at the top of the stairs with Ryan. And the king’s men, all six of them, who’d been waiting for her outside, entered the mansion in force.

Fareed swerved to advance on them in steps loaded with danger, putting himself between her and them, his expression thunderous.

“What’s the meaning of this, Zayed?”

The man who’d led the task force that had taken her to the king gave him a curt bow.

“Forgive me for the intrusion, Prince Fareed, but the king has changed our orders. Only this woman and her female companion will leave the kingdom. The child, Prince Hesham’s son, will remain—will be taken to him.”