For an interminable time, he believed he responded when addressed, monosyllables that he vaguely thought were appropriate, shook hands and grimaced at eager female faces and fawning family members, all the time trying to catch glimpses of her, desperately trying to get her to look at him again.
At one point, his older brother Harres appeared at his side.
“You look out of it, bro. Got stoned to get through this?”
Shaheen felt the urge to deck him. “And what if I did, Mr. Immune-From-This-Abominable-Fate Minister of Interior?”
Harres grimaced. “I did offer to do it myself again. I told them that, unlike you, I don’t care one way or another, and I’d certainly remain neutral in my post since I would never get attached to whatever wife they saddled me with. They still refused.”
Shaheen’s aggression drained. Harres had tried to take his place time and again. He would spare him if he could.
He exhaled. “They know you’d get attached to your children.”
Harres shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. I really can’t imagine being a husband let alone a father.” He put an arm around Shaheen’s shoulder, gave him a hard squeeze of consolation, the golden eyes that could have been their father’s flaring with empathy. “I would have done anything to spare you this.”
Which Shaheen had just thought. “Aih, I know.”
He again caught sight of Gemma among the shifting crowd, took an involuntary step nearer as if to force her acknowledgment, resurrect her hunger with his eagerness.
“And I know who you’re looking at. Who would have thought our little Johara would turn out to be such a stunner?”
Harres’s words made no sense. Had Shaheen’s mind started to deteriorate from the stress?
Shaheen looked at Harres, seeing him for the first time since they’d started talking, the juggernaut knight the kingdom had entrusted with its security, and who’d done the best job in its history. An expression softened his hewn, desert-weathered features, one Shaheen had never seen there except around their female family members. A rare gentleness, a proud indulgence.
And he’d thought Harres had said … No. He couldn’t have said that name. Where would it come from, anyway?
He shook his head, desperate to clear it. “What are you talking about?”
“The vision in gold over there. Our Johara … or I should say your Johara all grown-up.” Harres gave a nod in Gemma’s direction. “You’ve been looking nowhere else since you walked in. And I can’t blame you. I gaped at her for a solid ten seconds when Nazaryan greeted me with her on his arm. Who would have thought, eh?”
Shaheen stared at Harres as if he’d started talking in a language he’d never heard before. “Nazaryan?”
Harres snapped his fingers in front of his eyes. “Snap out of it. You’re scaring me.”
Shaheen shook his head again. “What do you mean Nazaryan?”
“I mean Berj Nazaryan, our royal jeweler, her father.”
Shaheen’s eyes slid from Harres’s, as sluggish and impeded as his thoughts, followed the direction of his earlier nod.
Gemma was the only one in that direction dressed in gold. Harres was talking about her. And he was calling her … calling her …
Johara.
The bubble of incomprehension trembled inside Shaheen. Then it burst.
Gemma was Johara.
Shock mushroomed through him like a nuclear detonation.
His mysterious Gemma was Johara. Berj Nazaryan’s daughter. Aram’s sister. The girl he’d known since she was six. Who’d become his shadow since the day he’d plucked her out of the air from a thirty-foot fall.
No wonder he’d felt he’d known her forever. He had. He had recognized her with that first look, even if not consciously.
And no wonder. She looked nothing like the fourteen-year-old she’d been when he’d last seen her. Skinny with glasses and braces, with no ability to wield her femininity the way girls in Zohayd learned to from a very early age. She hadn’t only realized her potential, she’d become the total opposite of her former self.
He’d thought he’d seen every brand of beauty this world had to offer. But she was something he’d never thought would be gathered in one woman, all his tastes and fantasies come to life. And that was just on the surface. Deeper, where it counted most, little Johara, as Harres had called her, had become the woman who’d seduced Shaheen on sight, had possessed him in a single night.
He rocked on his feet with the mushrooming realization. Only Harres’s hand on his arm steadied him.
Among the storm tossing him about, he managed to answer Harres’s worried question. “No, I don’t need air. I’m fine.”
But he was so far from fine he could be on another planet. He might never be fine again.
He’d taken Johara to his bed.
He’d taken her, in every way, repeatedly.
Just as he thought shock couldn’t engulf him any further, his eyes captured her incredible dark ones again. And the final piece of the puzzle crashed down in place. It should have been the first thing he understood the moment he realized who she really was.
He might not have recognized her, but she had known who he was from the first moment. She’d given him enough clues. Her first word to him had been a gasp of his name. She’d later told him all about herself, which had amounted to what he did know of her family history, without the names, dates and places.
And when he hadn’t clued in, so bowled over by her he hadn’t even connected the sun-size dots, she’d chosen to leave him in the dark. The apprehension he felt from her must be her anxiety about his reaction now that she knew he’d finally wised up.
“Now that you’ve met your potential brides, how is your stomach holding up?”
“Can we give you tips who not to choose?”
Shaheen dazedly turned toward the two warm, musical female voices. Aliyah and Laylah flowed to him, hugging him on both sides, reaching up to kiss a cheek each, their exquisite faces brimming with vitality and joie de vivre.
He automatically hugged and kissed them back as the ramifications of what had happened between him and Gemma … Johara expanded inside him, squeezing all his vitals.
“The beauty in emerald over there, the one with the incredible black hair down to her feet?” Laylah pinched his cheek playfully as she turned his head in the direction of the woman she was describing, before turning his face back to her quickly. “Don’t even look at her again. Her unbelievable locks will turn to serpents at the first opportune moment.”
“And the redhead over there.” Aliyah directed his gaze toward the woman she was mentioning with more discreet taps on his cheek. “Run if you ever see her again. She grows scales and blowtorches anyone within a mile radius.”
Harres laughed. “If you’re trying to make Shaheen feel better about this, you’re going about it in bizarro fashion.”
Laylah poked a teasing elbow into Harres’s abdomen. “Hey, we’re saving him from settling on the prettiest flower and being devoured alive.”
“So now that you’ve eliminated the most beautiful flowers, do I surmise you think he should go for the ugliest one?”
Aliyah