She’d turned his barren existence into a life of fulfillment, every day bringing with it deeper meanings, invigorating discoveries and uplifting experiences.

  The only reason he’d fleetingly considered Shaheen’s offer had been for the possibility of filling his emptiness with a new purpose in life and the proximity of his family. Now he found little reason to change his status quo. For what could possibly be better than this?

  It was just perfection between them.

  So when Shaheen had asked for an update, really asking about projected developments, he couldn’t bear thinking of any. How could he when any might tamper with this blissful state? He was terrified anything would happen to change it.

  They were both unconcerned about the world and its conventions, and things were flourishing between them. He only hoped they would continue to deepen in the exact same way. So even if he wanted to, he certainly wasn’t introducing any new variable that might fracture the flawlessness.

  For now, the only change he wanted to introduce was removing the last barrier inside him. He wanted to let her into his being, fully and totally.

  So he did. “There’s something I haven’t told you yet. Something nobody knows.”

  She turned to him, her glorious mass of hair rustling as if it was alive, those unique obsidian eyes delving deep inside his recesses, letting him know she was there for him always.

  Just gazing into them he felt invincible. And secure that he could share everything with her, even his shame.

  “It happened a few months after I left Zohayd….” He paused, the long-repressed confession searing out of his depths. He braced himself against the pain, spit it out. “I got involved in something…that turned out to be illegal, with very dangerous people. I ended up in prison.”

  That had her sitting up. And what he saw on her face rocked through him. Instantaneous reassurance that, whatever had happened, whatever he told her, it wouldn’t change her opinion of him. She was on his side. Unequivocally.

  And as he’d needed to more frequently of late, he took a moment to suppress the desire to haul her to him and crush her in the depths of his embrace with all his strength.

  The need to physically express his feelings for her had been intensifying every day. But she’d made no indication that she’d accept that. Worse. She didn’t seem to want it.

  It kept him from initiating anything, even as much as a touch. For what if even a caress on her cheek or hair changed the dynamic between them? What if it made her uneasy and put her on her guard around him? What if he then couldn’t take it back and convince her that he’d settle for their previous hands-off status quo, forever if need be?

  He brought the urge under control with even more difficulty than he had the last time it had assailed him, his voice sounding as harsh as broken glass as he went on, “I was sentenced to three years. I was paroled after only one.”

  Her solemn eyes were now meshed with his. He felt he was sinking into the depths of their unconditional support, felt understood, cosseted, protected. It was as if she was reaching to him through time, to offer him her strength to tide him through the incarceration, to soothe the wounds and erase his scars.

  “For good behavior?” Her voice was the gentlest he’d ever heard it.

  He barked a mirthless laugh. “Actually, they probably wanted me out to get rid of me. I was too much trouble, gave them too many inmates to patch up. I almost killed a couple. I spent over nine months of that year in solitary. The moment they let me out, I put more inmates in the infirmary and I was shoved back there.”

  “You ended up being…solitary too many times throughout your life.”

  She’d mused that as if to herself. But he felt her soft, pondering words reaching down inside him to tear out the talons he’d long felt sunk into his heart. Making him realize that it hadn’t been the solitude itself that had eaten at him but the notion that he’d never stop being alone.

  But now she was here, and he’d never be alone again.

  Her smile suddenly dawned, and it lit up his entire world. “But you still managed to make the best of a disastrous situation in your own inimitable way.”

  “It wasn’t only my danger to criminal life-forms that got me out. I was a first-time offender, and I was lucky to find people who believed that I had made a mistake, not committed a crime. Those allies helped me get out, and afterward, they supported my efforts to…expunge my record.”

  The radiance of her smile intensified, scorching away any remnants of the ordeal’s despondency and indignity. “So you’re an old hand at expunging your record. And I wasn’t the first one who believed in you.”

  He didn’t know how he stopped himself from grabbing her hands, burying his lips and face in them, grabbing her and burying his whole being in her magnanimity and faith.

  He expended the urge on a ragged breath. “You’re the first and only one who did with only the evidence of my word.”

  She waved that away. “As you so astutely pointed out the first night, I do know Maysoon. That was a load of evidence in your favor, once I’d heard both sides of the story.”

  He wasn’t about to accept her qualification. “No. You employed this unerring truth-and-justice detector of yours without any backing evidence. You read me. You believed me.”

  Her eyes gleamed with that indulgence that melted him to his core. “Okay, okay, I did. Boy, you’re pushy.”

  “And you believed me again now,” he insisted, needing to hear her say it. “When I said I didn’t knowingly commit a crime, even when I gave you no details, let alone evidence.”

  Teasing ebbed, as if she felt he needed the assurance of her seriousness. “Yes, I did, because I know you’d always tell me the truth, the bad before the good. If you’d been guilty, you would have told me. Because you know I can’t accept anything but the truth and because you know that whatever it was, it wouldn’t make a difference to me.”

  Hot thorns sprouted behind his eyes, inside his heart. Everything inside him surged, needing to mingle with her.

  He had to end these sublime moments before he…expressed how moved he was by them, shattering them instead.

  He first had to try to tell her what her belief meant to him. “Your trust in me is a privilege and a responsibility that I will always nurture with pride and pleasure.”

  Her gaze suddenly escaped his, flowed down his body.

  By the time they rose back, he was hard all over. Thankfully, her eyes were intent on his, full of contemplation.

  “Though you’re so big, with no doubt proportionate strength, it never occurred to me you’d be that capable of physical violence.”

  The vice that had released his heart suddenly clamped around it again. “Does this…disturb you?”

  Her laugh rang out. “Hello? Have you met me? It thrills me. I would have loved to see you decimate a few thugs and neuter some bullies.”

  His hands, his whole being itched, ached. He just wanted to squeeze the hell out of her. He wanted to contain her, assimilate her and never let her go again.

  He again held back with all he had, then drawled, “And to think something so minuscule could be so bloodthirsty.”

  She grinned impishly. “You’ve got a lot to learn about just what this deceptive exterior hides, big man.”

  Though her words tickled him and her smile was unfettered, he was still unsettled. “Is it really no problem for you to change your perception of me from someone who’s too civilized to use his brute strength to someone who relishes physical violence?”

  She shook her head, her long, thick hair falling over her slight shoulders down to her waist. “I don’t believe you ‘relish’ it, but you’ll always do ‘what works best.’ At the time, violence was the one thing that would keep the sharks away. So you used it, and to maximum efficiency, as is your way with everything. I’m only lamenting that there’s no video documentation of those events for me to cheer over.”

  The delight she always struck in his heart overflowed in an unbridled guffaw. “I can just see you, grabbing the popcorn and hollering at the screen for more gore. But I might be able to do something about your desire to see me on a rampage. I can pull some strings at the prison and get some surveillance-camera footage.”

  She jumped up to her knees on the couch, nimble and keen as a cat. “Yes, yes, please!”

  “Uh…I’m already regretting making the offer. You might think you can withstand what you’d see, but it was no staged fight like those you see on TV. There was no showmanship involved, just brutality with only the intent to survive at whatever cost.”

  She tucked her legs as if she was starting a meditation session, her gaze ultraserious. “That only makes it even more imperative to see it, Aram. It was the ugliest, harshest, most humiliating test you’ve ever endured and your deepest scar. I need to experience it in more than imagination, even if in the cold distance of past images, so I’d be able to share it with you in the most profound way I need to.”

  Stirred through to his soul, he swallowed a jagged lump of gratitude. “You just have to want it and it’s done.”

  “Oh, I so want it. Thank you.” Before he pounced with a thank-you, she probed, “You’ve really been needing to confide this all this time. Why didn’t you?”

  She was killing him with her ability to see right into his depths. She was reviving him with it, reanimating him.

  “I was…ashamed. Of my weakness and stupidity. I wanted to prove to Shaheen and his brothers that I didn’t need their help after all, that I’d make it on my own. And I got myself involved in something that looked too good to be true because I was in such a hurry to do it. And I paid the price.”

  She tilted her head to the side, as if to look at him from another perspective. “I can’t even imagine what it was like. When you were arrested, when you were sentenced, when you realized you might have destroyed your future, maybe even tainted that of your family. That year in prison…”

  He wanted to tell her that she was imagining it just fine, that her compassion was dissipating the lingering darkness of that period, erasing the scars it had left behind. But his throat was closed, his voice gone.

  The empathy in her gaze rose until it razed him. “But I can understand the ordeal was a link in the chain that led to your eventual decline. Not the experience itself as much as the reinforcement of your segregation. You couldn’t share such a life-changing experience with your loved ones, mainly because you wanted to protect them from the agony they would have felt on your behalf. But that very inability to bare your soul to them made you pull further away emotionally, and actually exacerbated your solitude.”

  When he finally found his voice, it was a hoarse, ragged whisper. “See? You do know everything.”

  Her eyes gentled even more. “Not everything. I’m still unable to fill some spaces. You were going strong for years after your imprisonment. Was that only halawet el roh?”

  Literally sweetness of the soul. What was said in Zohayd to describe a state of deceptive vigor, a clinging to life when warding off inevitable deterioration or death.

  “Now that you mention it, that’s the best explanation. I came out of prison with a rabid drive to wipe out what happened, to right my path, to make up for lost time. I guess I was trying to run hard and fast enough to escape the memories, to accumulate enough success and security to fix the chasm the experience had ripped inside me and that threatened to tear me open at any moment.”

  Her eyes now soothed him, had him almost begging her to let her hand join in their caress. “Johara told me you were at the peak of fitness, at least physically, three years ago when you attended their wedding in Zohayd. From her observations, you started deteriorating about two years ago. Was there a triggering event? Like when it sank in that they were a family now? Did their togetherness—especially with your parents’ reconciliation—leave you feeling more alone than ever?”

  He squeezed his eyes on a spasm of poignancy. “You get me so completely. You get me better than I get myself.”

  Wryness touched her lips. “It was Johara who gave me the code to decipher your hieroglyphics when she said she felt as if her and Shaheen’s intimacy left you unable to connect with either of them on the same level as you used to.”

  “She’s probably right. But it’s not only my own hang-ups. Neither of them has enough left to devote to anyone else. A love like that fills up your being. And then there’s the massive emotional investment in Gharam and their coming baby.”

  Something inscrutable came into her eyes, intensifying their already absolute darkness.

  Seeming to shake herself out of it, whatever it was, she continued searching his recesses. “So was there a triggering physical event? That made your health start to deteriorate?”

  “Nothing specific. I just started being unable to sleep well, to eat as I should. Everything became harder, took longer and I did it worse. Then each time I got even a headache or caught a cold, it took me ages to bounce back. My focus, my stamina, my immunity were just shot. I guess my whole being was disintegrating.”

  “But you’re back in tip-top shape now.”

  It was a question, not a statement, worry tingeing it.

  He let his gaze cup her elfin face in lieu of his hands. “I’ve never been better. And it’s thanks to you.”

  Her smile faltered as she again waved his assertion away. “There you go again, crediting me with miracles.”

  “You are a miracle. My Minute Miracle. Not that size has anything to do with your effect. That’s supreme.”

  He jumped to his feet, feeling younger and more alive than he’d ever felt, needing to dive headfirst into the world, doing everything under the sun with her. He rushed to fetch their jackets, then dashed back to her. “Let’s go run in the rain. Then let’s hop on my jet and go have breakfast anywhere you want. Europe. South America. Australia. Anywhere.”

  She donned her jacket and ran after him out of the apartment with just as much zeal. “How about the moon?”

  Delighted at her willingness to oblige him in whatever he got it in his mind to say or do, he said, “If it’s what you want, then I’ll make it happen.”

  She pulled one of those funny faces that he adored. “And I wouldn’t put it past you, too. Nah…I’ll settle for something on terra firma. And close by. I have to work in the morning, even if you’re so big and important now you no longer have to.”

  He consulted his watch. “If we leave for Barbados in an hour, I’ll have you at work by ten.”

  Her disbelief lasted only moments before mischief and excitement replaced it. “You’re on.”

  Nine

  “It’s…good to hear your voice, Father.”

  Kanza hated that hesitation in her voice. Whatever her father’s faults, she did love him. Did miss him.

  Yeah. She did. But, and it was a huge but, after ten minutes of basking in the nostalgia of early and oblivious childhood when her father had been her hero, she always thudded back to reality and was ready not to see him again for months.

  “It’s great to hear yours, ya bnayti.”

  His calling her my daughter, instead of bestowing a personalized greeting with her name included, annoyed her. He called his other eight daughters that, with the same indiscrimination. She thought he used it most times because he forgot the name of the one he was talking to.

  Curbing her irritation, and knowing her father never called unless he had something to ask of her, she said, “Anything I can do for you, Father?”

  “Ya Ullah, yes. Only you can help me now, ya bnayti. I need you to come back to Zohayd at once.”

  Ten minutes later, she sat staring numbly into space.

  She’d tried to wriggle out of saying yes. She’d failed.

  She was really going back to Zohayd. Tonight.

  Her father had begged her to board the first flight to Zohayd. Beyond confirming that no one was dead or severely injured, he’d said no more about why he needed her back so urgently.

  She reserved a ticket online, then packed a few essentials. She wouldn’t stay a minute longer than necessary.

  Not that there was a reason to hurry back.

  Not from the evidence of the past two weeks anyway.

  It had been then, six weeks after that magical time in Aram’s new apartment and the breakfast in Barbados, that Aram had suddenly become insanely busy. He’d neglected his work so much that the accumulation had become critical.

  She understood. Of course, she did. She knew exactly how many people depended on him, what kind of money rode on his presence and expertise. She’d been neglecting her work, too, but Johara had picked up the slack, and she was not so indispensable that her absence would cause the same widespread ripples his had. She appreciated this fully. Mentally. But otherwise…

  The fact was, he’d spoiled her. She’d gotten reliant on seeing him each and every day, on being able to pick up the phone, day or night, and he’d be eager and willing to grant her every wish, to be there with her at no notice. When that had suddenly come to an abrupt end, she’d gone into withdrawal.

  God. She’d turned into one of those clingy, needy females. At least in her own mind and psyche. Outwardly, she was her devil-may-care self. At least, she hoped she was.

  But she was something else, too. Moronic. The man had a life outside her, even if for three months straight it had seemed as if he didn’t. She’d known real life would reassert itself at one point. So she should stop whining now.

  And now that she thought of it without self-pity, going to Zohayd was a good thing. She’d been twiddling her thumbs until she and Johara started the next project. And by the time she was back, he would have sorted himself enough to be able to see her again—at least more than he had the past two weeks.

  She speed-dialed his number. The voice she now lived to hear poured into her brain after the second ring.

  “Kanza—a moment please…” His voice was muffled as he talked to someone.

 

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