In the four months since he had practically dragged his brother to the palace, Azeez hadn’t stepped foot into the breakfast hall once. Despite Ayaan’s innumerable pleas. And today…
Ayaan signaled for the waiting staff to leave just as the sound of Azeez’s harsh breathing neared the vast table. He pushed his chair back and looked up. Suddenly, the morning seemed brighter. “Would you like some cof—”
He never saw the punch coming. Shooting pain danced up and down his jaw as it landed, his vision blanking out for a few seconds.
Her loud, abrasive curse word ringing around them, his wife reached him instantly. Ayaan rubbed his jaw and looked up just in time to see Zohra march around his chair and push his brother in the chest.
Azeez’s mouth was curved into a fiendish smile, and Ayaan was about to interfere, when Azeez stepped back from Zohra. He mocked a curtsy, his mouth curled into a sneer. “Good morning, Your Highness, you look…lovely.”
“You are acting like an uncivilized thug,” Zohra said, her gaze furious.
“I am an uncivilized thug, Princess Zohra,” his brother replied with a hollow laugh. “And it is your husband who is keeping me here.”
Flexing his jaw, Ayaan turned to his brother and froze.
Ferocious anger blazed out of that jet-black gaze he knew so well. The same gaze that had been filled with emptiness, indifference, for four months. The constant, hard knot in his gut relented just a little. “What was that for?”
“You are the future king of Dahaar, Ayaan, not of me. Keep your arrogant head out of my affairs.”
Settling back down into his chair, Ayaan took a sip of his coffee. “I have no idea what you refer to, Azeez.”
“I want her out of here.”
The vehemence in his brother’s words doubled his doubts. “Why are you so concerned about Nikhat’s presence?”
Leaning his hip on the solid wood, Azeez bent. “I think all this power is going to your head. Don’t manipulate me, little brother. Or I will—”
“What, Azeez?” Ayaan refused to back down. His cup clanged on the saucer in the ensuing silence, hot liquid spilling onto his fingers.
“You’ll shoot yourself? I fell for that until now, but not anymore. If you were going to kill yourself, you had numerous chances to do it over the past six years. You would have been killed by that bullet. And yet here you are, stubborn as ever and intent on destroying yourself the hard way.” Silence snarled between them. “Nikhat is not going anywhere. Not for at least six more months.”
Emotion flashed in his brother’s gaze but Ayaan had no idea which one.
“If your plan is to bring back memories that will suddenly fill me with a love for life, how about some good ones, Ayaan? Why don’t you invite one of the numerous women I slept with six years ago to the palace?” He slanted a wicked glance at Zohra before looking at Ayaan again. “There used to be a particularly sexy stripper in that nightclub in Monaco who could do the wildest things with her tongue. If you want to see me rejoin the living, send the starchy doctor away, build a pole in my wing and have that stripper on a…”
His words tapering off, his brother looked as if he was the one dealt a punch.
Nikhat stood at the entrance to the hall. Against the colorful, blood-red rug on the wall behind her, she looked deathly pale. Their gazes locked on each other, Azeez and Nikhat stood unmoving, as if they were bound to each other.
Tension coiled tighter and tighter in the air around them.
His brother recovered first. And watching him closely, seeing a dark light come to life in his eyes, Ayaan realized that he’d made a terrible mistake.
“I’m regaling my brother and his wife with stories about Monaco. Was it the year right after you left?”
Beneath the humor, something else reverberated in Azeez’s words, filling the vast hall with it.
“Does it matter when it was that you went around seducing the entire female population in Monaco, shaming Dahaar and your father with your wild exploits?” Nikhat delivered with equally lethal smoothness, even as her skin failed to recover its color.
Walking around Ayaan to Zohra’s side, Nikhat whispered something to her. And walked out of the hall without another glance at his brother.
“Enough games, Ayaan. Why is she here?” Azeez roared the moment she left.
“Zohra is pregnant and is having complications. Nikhat is one of the best obstetricians in the country today. I need her to take care of my wife.”
Azeez turned toward Zohra, his gaze assessing. “Congratulations to both of you. If she has to be here, keep her out of my way. Tell her she’s forbidden from seeing me.”
“I won’t tell her any such thing. Nikhat is practically a member of this family. And she’s doing me a favor. So unless you want to be my personal prisoner for the rest of your life, you better behave yourself.”
“You’ve become a damn bastard, brother.”
Ayaan laughed, the first in a long time he had truly done that. “I had to become one for Dahaar, Azeez. See, I wasn’t born one like you are. It’s the reason why you were so good at being the Crown Prince too. The minute you want it back, the crown’s yours.”
“That was a lifetime ago.” Tight lines fanning around his mouth, Azeez stepped back. As if Ayaan had asked him to jump into the fiery pit of hell. “It’s all yours now.”
Azeez left the room, leaving a dark silence in his wake.
Once, his brother would have given his life to Dahaar. Once, a fire had shone in his eyes at the mere mention of it.
“Something’s changed in him,” Zohra said, a hint of warning in her voice. “And…Nikhat looked like she would break apart with one word from him.”
Reaching for her outstretched hand on the table, Ayaan nodded. In four months of banging his head against the intractable wall that his brother had become, this was the first time there was a faint crack. He felt tremulous hope and excruciating guilt.
“Did you know if they were more than friends?”
Ayaan shook his head. He hadn’t known before, but something his servant Khaleef had said in a throwaway comment had stuck with him. So he had taken a gamble and commanded Nikhat’s father to summon her.
Being right had never left such an ugly taste in his mouth.
* * *
After a couple of wrong turns, Nikhat reached the courtyard behind the wing she had been shown to three days ago. High walls surrounded the courtyard, shielding it from any curious gazes.
It was only ten in the morning but the sun was already bright and hot. Wiping the beads of sweat on her forehead, she sat down on the bench near a magnificent fountain. The rhythmic swish of the water, the scent of roses coating the air…it was a feast for the senses, but she couldn’t get her stretched nerves to relax.
For three days, she had been busy with Princess Zohra and yet going out of her mind, intensely curious to see Azeez again.
She had dreamed of him so many times when she had thought him dead, had imagined all the things she would say if she had one more chance to see him, to touch him, to hold him…
Reality, however, didn’t afford her the same recklessness.
Closing her eyes, she leaned back and felt the sun caress her face. She couldn’t let him unsettle her any more than she could weave silly dreams again just because he was back from the dead.
She would be of no use to Ayaan either way.
Taking her Crocs off, she dipped her toes in the water. It was