The Desert Lord's Love-Child

She seemed to shrink in her seat. “There isn’t much to know. I was born to Ella and Aaron McArthur, a megawealthy businessman and his ex-P.A. second wife. Their marriage fell apart and I lived with my mother and her assortment of … strange men, until she died, then moved in with my father and his fourth wife till the day I turned eighteen. On acquiring my first boyfriend, whom I eventually married, a year later, my father, who hadn’t checked to see if I was still alive since I moved out, popped back in my life all eagerness and blessings. Turned out the marriage was part of a coveted merger. When it turned out I wasn’t the asset they all thought I would be, both the marriage and the merger were dissolved and my father moved to Japan with his fifth wife. When I was twenty-five, my mother’s estate became mine—her accumulated alimony and divorce settlement from my father, plus what she got from her ‘sponsors.’ It was a bundle, the fortune you intimated I got from a ‘sponsor’ of my own. I bought the apartment, put the rest for Mennah in a trust fund, since I earn enough to support us both in comfort. See, I overestimated the complexity of my life. That’s one page, triple-spaced.”

Farooq stared at her, thoughts rearranging, long-entrenched ones being forced out, new questions rushing at him.

She’d been born then had been married into money. But she’d implied her father hadn’t supported her after she’d moved out, that her ex-husband had divorced her without compensation. Was that why she’d accepted Tareq’s mission? Had she gotten so used to the good life her mother and her “sponsors” followed by her father and her ex’s wealthy family had provided that she couldn’t bear to wait months till she claimed her inheritance?

That no longer felt like enough of a motive. Or a motive at all. Not with her disinterest in anything material while she’d been with him replaying in his mind, another manifestation that had the conviction, the texture of truth.

So it hadn’t been about money after all? Had it been maybe a reckless lashing out after all the major relationships in her life had failed or ended, throwing herself into something dangerous, maybe even self-destructive? She could have easily been throwing herself into an abyss when she’d thrown herself in his arms. She’d had no way of knowing he’d turn out to be a civilized or even sane human being, let alone the lavish lover he’d been with her. He could have been a monster who lived to collect slaves, or to abuse beauties and maim them before snuffing out their lives.

Suddenly he was incensed. Far more so than he’d ever been. At her for endangering herself that way. Whether her goal had been financial gain or temporary rebellion or oblivion.

His rage deflated as fast as it had mushroomed.

No. She might have been groping for the catharsis of a wild fling with a sheikh prince, or the fantasy of playing Mata Hari or securing a quick fortune or all combined. But she hadn’t risked herself. She had known she’d be safe with him, would be cared for and catered to, pleasured and pampered. She’d known it, felt his nature and intentions with the first look into his eyes.

As he’d thought he’d felt her nature and intentions with the first look into hers?

But if what he’d seen was all she owned, and he could now find out the truth about her inheritance, if she still had to work, where had the money Tareq had said she’d cheated him for gone? Or had Tareq cheated her out of their agreed upon price?

Ya Ullah, was this how men went insane, revolving in unending loops of suspicion?

Kaffa. Enough. It didn’t matter anymore, how it had been.

Suheeh? Really? If he told himself that enough times, would it register so he could finally let it go?

Another question blasted through, proving that letting go didn’t seem possible. But then, it was a paramount question.

How had his people not found out all she’d just told him?

Before the question fully formed, the answer detonated in his mind. Tareq. His counterintelligence must have foiled Farooq’s investigations, in fear he’d find her, find Mennah, the final card pulverizing Tareq’s conspiracies to hang on to the succession.

B’Ellahi, how had he not seen this before?

Loathing for his cousin shot to a new zenith.

But anger and hatred aside, now that he knew what he had to counteract—what he might not need to counteract now that Tareq had no more reason to block his research into her past—it would be easy to check out her story. As she must know he would.

This meant one thing. She’d told him the truth.

His gaze clung to her averted profile. He no longer saw the seductress who’d breached his barriers, entrenched herself in his responses, his fantasies, his cravings, or the traitor who’d deprived him of his child, who’d almost let Judar’s throne fall into the hands of a man guaranteed to topple it. He saw only the little girl who’d been exposed to her parents’ damaging behavior, who grew up let down, neglected, used, maybe even abused, by everyone who should have cherished and protected her. He saw only a woman who’d suffered. A lot.

He gritted his teeth against a resurgence of fury, against all the people who’d blighted her life. Against the softening that assailed him toward her as he realized she’d been doing everything to protect her—their daughter, from all she’d suffered, living for Mennah, thinking only of her safety and happiness.

He might be starting to understand her motives, her psyche, but it made no difference. He couldn’t forget, nor would he ever forgive what she’d done.

He exhaled, casting away the weakening, pushed a button.

It was time to get back on track.

“Are we crashing?”

Farooq turned inquiring eyes on Carmen at her croak.

She gestured toward Hashem, who’d entered their compartment carrying what looked like a treasure chest right out of the times of genies and flying carpets. “You said that’s the only time we’d be disturbed.”

“This is a planned intrusion.” He beckoned to Hashem who strode forward, his eyes scanning her, ascertaining her condition before casting a look of disapproval on the untouched food.

Farooq rose, extended a hand to her. She must have taken it, risen, walked. Either that or he had hypnotic and/or teleportation powers, too. Without knowing how, she found herself sitting on a plush couch in yet another compartment drenched in sourceless lights and deep earth tones, in the serenity of sumptuousness and seclusion.

Hashem placed everything on a two foot-high, six-foot-wide, square polished mahogany table in front of her and Farooq. He opened the chest, produced two boxes, one the size of a shoebox, the other half its size, both like the larger chest, handmade, ornamented in complex mosaic patterns of gold, silver and mother-of-pearl. Next he produced a variegated brown leather folder and small drawstring pouch. Everything was in perfect condition, but looked ancient, heavy with history and significance.

An urge rose, to run her hands over the textures and shapes, feel their mystique and power flowing through her fingertips. She settled for soaking in each detail. The folder and pouch embossed with intricate gold-leaf borders, Judar’s royal crest at their center: an eagle depicted in painstaking detail, its wings arched up to enclose the kingdom’s name written in the ornamental muthanna or “doubled” calligraphy with each half of the design a mirror image of the other in a tear-drop oval. The boxes’ blend of repoussé, inlaid and engraved zakhrafa embellishments that married Arabian to Ottoman, Persian and Indian designs.

Hashem’s deep murmur tore her gaze back to him. She couldn’t believe how welcome his presence was. How she didn’t want him to leave. She couldn’t take more of Farooq undiluted.

Not that an army would make effective reinforcements. Not against Farooq. Or what she felt.

Sighing, she eyed Hashem in resignation as he bowed to them and retraced his steps out of the compartment.

Farooq opened the pouch, producing two brass keys that looked designed and forged in the Saladin era. He opened the small box, produced three stamps and an inkpad of the same design, before opening the folder and extracting two papyruslike papers and two crimson satin ribbons. Then he reached into his suit pocket—opposite the one she assumed held the photo—and extracted a gold pen.

He extended it to her. “Let’s see how well you write Arabic.”

She gaped from the pen to the papers to his eyes. “You’re giving me a written Arabic proficiency test?”

“I am interested to see your level, yes. But I’d hardly give you royal papers reserved for documenting state matters of the highest order to test your spelling and handwriting.”

So all this stuff was as momentous as she’d sensed. Her heart wrenched to a higher gear. “So what do you want me to write?”

He pushed the pen into her flaccid hand. “I’ll dictate to you.”

“Yeah, you live to do that, dictate,” she grumbled.

One side of his lips twitched. His eyes remained solemn. “Write, Carmen.”

The depth of the command, the gravity, squeezed her dry of breath. She sat forward, tremors buzzing through her like a current, took in the papers in front of her, handmade, each one a unique blend of beige-tan with multicolored fibers offsetting its pearly, heavy silk finish.

She put down the pen, wiped her hand on her pants. His clamped onto it. She bit her lip on the jolt as his other hand delved inside his jacket again, produced a monogrammed handkerchief, placed it on the paper, put the pen back in her hand.

As soon as the tremors allowed her to firm her grip on it, he started dictating. She geared her brain to the right-to-left writing of the exotic letters that always felt more like drawing.

She’d written a whole sentence before it registered.

This was a verse from a sacred scripture invocation.

She raised her hand off the paper, her eyes to his. “What is this? An incantation to sign over my soul?”

His eyes smiled now, a smile drenched in that overriding sensuality that was as integral to him as his DNA. And in seriousness. “Essentially, yes. This is az-zawaj al orfi language. You are free to add to the basic pledges, if you’re feeling creative, to express how eager you are—were—for our union.”

“This is the paper the cleric will read?”

“Yes. And along with my copy, it will reside in the royal files, proof of Mennah’s legitimacy.”

“So it’s an official document. And you want me to get creative.” The teeth sprouting in her stomach sank into its walls. “Just give me the exact language. Better yet, paraphrase.”

He pouted in mockery, continued dictating. She kept writing until he told her to sign her name. She did, raised her eyes. She’d only written two paragraphs. “That’s it?”

He shrugged one massive shoulder. “It takes only so many words to pledge oneself unto eternity.” He reached for the paper, ran his eyes over her efforts. “I’m impressed.”

Without waiting for her reaction to his praise—an upsurge of irritation for wanting it, for being so pleased at having it—he turned to his own paper, started writing the words he’d dictated her. And she forgot everything as she watched those fingers that had once owned her flesh, moving in the certainty of expertise and grace, producing a req’uh script of such beauty and elegance, such effect, it did feel like a spell.

After he signed both documents, had her sign his, she rasped, “So not only a prince, a tycoon, a philanthropist, a diplomat and a handyman but a calligrapher, too.”

“Yet another side-product of my unearned privileged existence.” His eyes mocked her, documented her chagrin at being caught out at a pettiness, at the need to apologize for it, at her anger at that need and at him.

Not that he waited for her to come to a decision about which urge to obey. He let go of her eyes, pressed three stamps to the inkpad, marked the documents with each. Judar’s royal insignia, the Aal Masood family crest and the date. The one he’d fixed to the day they’d first made lo—had sex.

She stared at the seals. The dark red ink became viscous as it dried, like congealing blood. She did feel she’d just signed a blood pact. A binding, unbreakable one.

He rolled up both documents, tied each with a ribbon, placed them in the larger box. “Those papers aren’t considered legitimate without two witnesses. As soon as we land in Judar, Shehab and Kamal, my brothers, will add their seals and signatures to ours.” He rose, extended a hand to her. “Now we’ll check on Mennah.”

Everything in Carmen squeezed. Fists, guts, lungs, heart.

Mennah. The reason he’d just taken her on.

The reason she’d just signed her life away.

Seven

A gentle nudge jogged Carmen out of the twilight between exhausted sleep and strung wakefulness.

It took her a second to realize they were touching down.

Her sandpaper-lined eyes scraped open. And there he was.

Farooq sprawled opposite her, an indulgent lion letting his overzealous cub crawl all over him. He was still watching her.

He scooped Mennah up with kisses and gentleness, rose, came to stand over her. They both looked down on her from what felt like ten feet, his face opaque, Mennah’s ablaze with glee.

“Do you need a few minutes to wake up, or shall we go?”

She shook her head, sprang to her feet. Her sight darkened, disappeared. His arm came around her, would have released her the moment she steadied if not for Mennah. Their daughter threw an arm over Carmen’s neck, bringing the three of them into an embrace.

Carmen went limp with the blow of longing at feeling him imprinting her in such tenderness, even if borrowed, at Mennah mashing herself against them as if seeking their protection, their union. At the hopelessness of it all.

She lurched away before her eyes leaked, held out her arms for Mennah. Mennah reached back.

Farooq only walked on. “I’ll carry her.”

She scampered, kept up with him. “But she wants me now.”

“Do you want your mother, ya gummuri?” he cooed to Mennah, who looked back on Carmen with dimples at full-blast, as if she thought her father was playing catch-me-if-you-can. Carmen gave him a glare from an angle Mennah wouldn’t witness. His Mennah-smile remained on his lips but his eyes frosted over. “She will see her land for the first time, be seen in it in my arms, a princess held up by her father the crown prince for all to see.”

Carmen’s legs gnarled with the power of image he projected, the poignancy. She rasped, “Put that way, you go right ahead.”

Not that he was awaiting her approval. His strides ate up a path to the exit, leaving it up to her to keep up or not.

She scrambled in his wake, looked at the multitime zone clock on the way out: 9 a.m. in New York, 5 p.m. here. It had been sixteen hours since she’d found Farooq standing on her doorstep.

Sixteen hours. They felt like sixteen days. Sixty. Far more. It felt as if her life before those hours had been someone else’s, her memories sloughing off to be replaced by another reality that had unfolded with his reappearance.

Then she stepped outside and into another world.

And it was. Though her life had taken her all over the world, Judar felt … unprecedented, hyperreal. The azure of its spring skies was clearer, more vibrant, the reds and vermilions starting to infuse the horizon as the sun descended were richer in range and depth, its breeze, even in the airport where jet exhaust should have masked everything, felt crisper, more fragrant, its very ambiance permeated by the echoes of history, the lure of roots that tugged at her through her connection with Mennah, whose blood ran thick with this kingdom’s legacy.

Mennah, who seemed to recognize the place, too.

Secure in her father’s power and love, she looked around, eyes wide, face rapt as she inhaled deep, as if to breathe in the new place, fathom it, make it a part of her.

Carmen knew how she felt. With her first lungful of Judarian air, she felt she’d breathed in fate.

Then she heard his voice, the voice that had steered her fate since she’d first heard it, that seemed would steer it forever, permeated with intensity and elation.

“Ahlann beeki fi darek, ya sagheerati.”

He was welcoming Mennah home. And only her.

Carmen groped for the railing of the stairway, feeling as if a wrecking ball had swung into her.

How stupid could she get? She wanted him to welcome her home, too? When it wasn’t her home, only Mennah’s? When the only reason he’d brought her here, where he didn’t want her, was Mennah? How could he welcome her where she wasn’t welcome?

She nearly gagged on the toxicity of her feelings of alienation. She had breathed in fate, could feel it all around her. Mennah’s. She was just its vehicle. Her fate was not even a consideration here.

Farooq’s arm came around her shoulder.

She couldn’t bear him to act the supportive husband, lurched away, continued her descent, blurted out, “I thought you were taking us to Judar, not to some space colony on another planet.”

A look of satisfaction chased away the watchfulness in his eyes as he glanced around. “The airport meets your approval?”

“Approval?” Her gaze swept the spread of structures extending as far as her vision reached into the horizon in all directions. “Try stupefaction. This place looks as if it covers all of Judar.”

“What you see is the rest of Judar Global Central, Judar’s latest and largest project, a Free Zone residential, commercial and manufacturing complex, the biggest and most advanced in the world. The airport is but part of this new community and is the world’s largest passenger and cargo hub.”

“Tell me about it. This is the first airport I’ve ever seen with …” She counted. “Ten parallel nonintersecting runways.”

“It is built for the future, designed to handle all next-generation aircraft. The parallel runways allow up to eight air-crafts to land simultaneously, minimizing in-air queuing. Last year it handled twenty-six million passengers. This year we plan on exceeding the thirty million mark.” He tickled Mennah, who was waving around, demanding his attention. “You want me to explain to you, too, ya sagheerati? You see those huge glass and steel buildings? Those are four passenger terminals, twelve hotels and I can’t remember how many malls. It’s lucky we have over two hundred thousand parking spaces, eh? And you see these signs? Each color leads to a transportation linking the airport to Durgham, Judar’s capital and your new home, a high-speed freeway, the rail system and the metro.”

He turned to Carmen, catching her elbow as her feet wobbled with her first step onto Judarian soil, on a red carpet, no less.

She averted her eyes to the black stretch limo parked at the end of the carpet as his entourage flitted in and out of her field of vision. “It’s amazing how everything feels—I don’t how to say this—steeped in the stuff of Arabian Nights fables. I don’t know how, when everything is so modern, futuristic even. It must be those subtle cultural touches to the designs.” She stopped because he did, shifted her feet on the ground, suppressed a shudder. “No, scratch that. It’s the land itself.”

He looked down at her, the declining sun infusing the gold of his irises with fire, or probably just revealing it. “You feel the land, don’t you? It’s calling to you. What is it saying?”

It’s saying, run now, or you’ll never leave. In life or death.

Before she confessed her thoughts out loud, a rumbling separated itself from the airport’s background noise, rose to the pitch of approaching thunder.

Caught and held by his probing gaze, she felt no alarm. Probably because he transmitted none, and Mennah seemed to fear nothing in his arms. Carmen interpreted the din only when he released her from his focus, turned it toward the source.

Her reaction still lagged until he said, “Here they are.”

It was the pleasure and affection in his voice that made her follow his gaze toward a helicopter the like of which she had never seen, a matte-black majestic alien lifeform.

In seconds it landed a few dozen feet from them in a storm of sound and wind, deafening her, sending her hair rioting, her loose clothes slapping against her flesh. Farooq and Mennah were all smiles as he pointed out the chopper to her, their hair flapping like raven wings. She heard Mennah’s screeches of excitement only when the rotors winded down as both doors opened and two bronze colossi descended and started toward them.

Both Farooq’s height, one maybe even taller, in body-molding casual chic, one in blacks, one in grays, they looked like the embodiment of the forces of darkness and twilight, modern-day gods descending from the heavens to rule the earth.

And she wasn’t being fanciful here. Not by much. She bet they inspired such hyperbole in everyone. She’d bet everyone felt everything holding its breath, slowing down like in movies to emphasize the gravity of their approach.

As the sun slanted golden light and shadows on them, worshipping every sinew of their bodies, every slash of their faces and strand of their hair, it was clear they didn’t possess only the same physical blessings and impact as Farooq, but like him they had power and the entitlement of an ancient birthright encoded in their genes. The same genes. Though they resembled him only vaguely, it was unmistakable that they were his blood.

And it was as unmistakable that they were both staring at her, giving her what felt like a total body and mind scan.

She found herself groping for Farooq, this time sagging into him when he contained her in the curve of his body.

As the two men came to a stop at arm’s length, they had mercy, terminated their visual and spiritual incursion of only her and instead took in the image of the nuclear family they made.

Did they know how far from the truth this image was?

They had eyes only for Mennah now, who was looking back at them with fascination. And excitement.

A shard of mortification drove in her heart.

Had Mennah’s agitation in the presence of strangers been her fault? Had she infected her daughter with her own fear, of losing her, transmitted her distrust of everything and everyone? Had she been influencing her into developing neuroses without knowing?

If she had, that was over now. With Farooq’s appearance in her life, Mennah had learned fast that she had a defender for life, one with the power to wrestle the world to its knees.

Gray man looked at Farooq before his gaze was dragged back to Mennah. But it was enough. In that moment as obsidian eyes had melded with gold ones, she’d seen a lifetime of understanding, of unbreakable loyalty and unshakable love. Though she’d never had anything like that in her life, she recognized the connection, understood its significance. Even had Farooq not told her about this meeting, she’d have known. This had to be his brother.

Curious about him now she was certain of that, she examined him as he initiated interaction with Mennah, an approach of both eagerness and sensitivity, which the baby responded to wholeheartedly.

He was Farooq’s height, with the same daunting proportions, but his face was more symmetrical, his hair a longer sweep down his collar, a rainfall of deepest black with strands kissed by indigo as if manifesting his electric aura, deepening the impact and darkness of his eyes. The eyes of a hypnotist.

He let out a harsh sigh, his rugged face becoming etched with tenderness and wonder as he flicked a finger down Mennah’s velvet cheek. “Ya Ullah, ma ajmalhah.”

Farooq exuded pride and pleasure as Mennah rewarded the ragged comment with a “squee” and a grab of the exploring finger. “Naffs kalami bed’dubt lamma ra’ait’ha.”