It was no use. She was unable to stem the racking laughter, to muster breath enough to form a coherent sentence.
The man stood before her, watching her with heavy eyes that seemed to fathom her to her psyche’s last spark, until she lay back in her seat, trembling with the passing of the fit as if in the aftermath of a seizure.
“God, you must think me a total flake,” she wheezed.
“I think no such thing,” he countered at once, his voice a soothing flow of empathy that jarred her.
God, she would have preferred anything to bristle at, to brace against. His kindness only knocked her support from beneath her, left her sinking. She hated it. She’d survived by counting on no one’s goodwill, by doing without support of any kind. She had to keep it that way, now more than ever. Or she’d be destroyed.
“I apologize if my surprise gave you the impression that such an unfavorable opinion crossed my mind for a second, when the exact opposite is true. I fully realize how overwhelmed you must be. Everything has happened so fast, and Maolai Walai’el Ahd is formidable—and, when he has his sights on a goal, inexorable.” This man was all-seeing. And they sure saw eye to eye in evaluating Farooq. “But he is also magnanimous and just. You have no reason to feel apprehensive, ya Ameerati. Everything will be fine.”
Okay, here was where their concord ended. Even if she agreed the qualities mitigating Farooq’s ruthlessness existed, Hashem didn’t know that Farooq no longer considered her entitled to his magnanimity, was dealing out his brand of justice by using Mennah to pressure her into giving up her freedom and choices. She was also not buying Hashem’s prognosis for a second.
How could everything be fine? Ever again?
She could only pray it would one day grow tolerable.
To have Hashem’s allegiance as an extension of his to Farooq, mixed in with his pity for her as a casualty of his master’s inescapability, a man of such insight and importance in Farooq’s life, might grow comforting. Right now she had to make him leave her to her turmoil.
She answered his original question. “Thank you, Hashem. I promise to avail myself of your services if I think of anything.”
With a last probing look, he bowed and walked away, obviously loath to leave her in her state without offering service or solace.
Instead of relief, the moment he disappeared from her field of vision, chaos rushed in to fill the vacuum he’d left behind. Everything her eyes fell on contributed to her imbalance.
In both her personal and professional lives, she’d lived and worked where power brokers weaved their pacts, where billionaires flaunted their assets in an addiction to competition and for leverage in business. She’d been in the bowels of private citadels, of diplomatic and hospitality fortresses. She’d studied beauty and luxury, learned their secrets and power and how to utilize their nuances to enthrall the most jaded senses, smoothing her clients’ path to winning their objectives through the goodwill engendered by perfectly designed and realized events.
This jet surpassed anything she’d ever experienced in taste and sheer, mind-numbing opulence. She’d had an idea it would be something unprecedented when she’d laid eyes on it. It was surely the first bronze-finished Boeing 737 she’d ever seen. Then she’d set foot on its plush carpeting and had plunged deeper into the surrealism of being with Farooq, being introduced as his wife and deluged in the veneration of a culture that revered its royals. All her knowledge of the best that money could buy had only sent her mind boggling in appreciation of every detail around her.
She gaped again at every article of genuine art, every flawless reproduction in design, everything spanning centuries and cultures, the classical meshing with the modern, the Western with the Middle Eastern, disparate forms of beauty melding with luxury and futuristic technology in a symphony of unlikely harmony.
She fingered her seat’s armrest. A panel slid open, exposing a set of buttons. Hashem had said they gave her control over all amenities, from service to entertainment to climate control. She pushed one with a screen icon. Her head snapped to the left as an eighteenth-century mural disappeared with a smooth whir to reveal a screen of a size she hadn’t known had been manufactured yet.
No need to experiment further. There’d only be more wonders, a refresher course as well as a first-time close-up of Farooq’s affluence and power. And this was only his transportation …
She was staring down at her sweaty palms, fighting another wave of dizziness when her senses overloaded. She almost moaned at the force of the breach. Farooq.
She didn’t want to raise her eyes. Didn’t want to watch him approaching, obliterating her autonomy, shrinking the world into the parameters of his presence, his desires, his decrees.
She did, saw his eyes firing with satisfaction at her slumped pose. He closed in on her like a force of nature, two men from his extensive entourage trying to keep up with him, documenting his muttered orders. They’d disappeared by the time he reached her, a partition sliding behind them to isolate the dining area where he’d seated her before going to “arrange matters” from the rest of the jet.
He looked down at her with the same intensity as he had when he’d been on top of her, demanding she repeat his land’s ancient marriage rite.
Her heart lurched like a captured bird in her chest.
Oh God, she’d really done it.
She’d really married him.
She’d lain beneath him, feeling him imprinting her, hard with an indiscriminate reaction to feeling a female body beneath him, had repeated the words that had bound her to him in a marriage without love or respect—or anything, really. A sham. A cold-blooded ruling on his part, a capitulation on hers.
It’s all for Mennah. It’s all for Mennah.
Maybe if she repeated the mantra enough she could endure this. The feeling of forever plummeting into an abyss.
She snatched her gaze away from his, fingered Mennah’s baby monitor receiver, praying for her daughter to wake up so she could run to her and be spared another exposure to Farooq.
All she heard over the amazingly low drone of the jet’s engines was the soothing Middle Eastern music through the surround sound system, and Mennah’s soft breathing.
Mennah had awakened during their departure, had bubbled with excitement in response to Farooq’s delight in her all through the trip in his limousine right up to the jet and through takeoff. She’d executed her sudden sleeping maneuver an hour ago, and he’d secured her car seat in one of the jet’s bedroom suites.
“You haven’t eaten.”
At his rebuke, her eyes fell on the masculine, square-cut silver service set and cutlery, laid out before her on midnight-blue silk tablecloth, nestling among sparkling crystal and crisp white napkins. She’d picked something from the extensive menu Hashem had provided. It had been served with great fanfare under polished brass domes, placed to simmer over gentle flames. Hashem had raised the covers to show her the cookbook perfection below and the aromas of the haute cuisine creations had hit her salivary glands. Her stomach had fed on its emptiness, churned with revulsion against being catered to as if she was a beloved mistress when she was just a necessary evil, an abhorred hostage.
Corrosion surged again in her throat. “I’m not hungry.”
His jaw hardened. “You haven’t eaten in the last seven hours. Your stomach must be feeding on itself by now.”
Gee. What was it with men suddenly being able to read her mind? Or was she just too predictable to live?
“You’ll have to excuse my stomach if it isn’t functioning to your calculated expectations. After all that’s