Married for the Sheikh's Duty(14)

He had never met a more opinionated woman in his life. Raising a hand, he preempted her. The tight purse of her mouth made him smile. “I know you’re about to launch into one of your lengthy opinions about what an old, dying beast Sintar and its administrative policy is, but I’m famished.”

“Your country is a contradiction, Sheikh. Just like you are.”

Did the woman not know her limits? Or was this her agenda, to infuriate and annoy him so much that he released her brother? “My country, Amalia?”

She raised a brow casually while her up-tilted chin betrayed her defiance. Two could play at the perception game, he decided with a smile.

“This will only take a minute, and the food is not here yet. And really, Sheikh, I didn’t realize that your ego needed so much validation that you only surround yourself with yes-men.”

He sighed. For all she looked like an angelic wraith, the woman was like a pit bull when she got her teeth into something. “Go ahead. You have three minutes before you lose my attention.”

“That’s not enough!”

“That’s how long people usually have to convince me.”

“You’re a—”

“Two minutes and counting.”

She looked down at the screen and back at him, determination written all over her face. “I don’t think you should refuse to fund the Arts and Education Foundation in Sintar. Khaleej needs the kind of human development this foundation promises.”

The depth of her passion reminded Zayn of himself when he had been younger and idealistic. For all she seemed self-sufficient, there was a charming naïveté to her. “Those funds will be more useful channeled toward health care. Education Reform will get its time.”

“But you just signed off on what equates—” she scrunched her brow and Zayn’s mouth twitched “—to ten million dollars for just the next three years toward reforms in health care.”

“I just proposed it. The cabinet will still have to approve it. And the reason you’re interested in that foundation is because it promises the kind of academic freedom for both sexes in all fields that is seen in the West. As progressive as my father and I have been, things move slowly here. I will alienate a bunch of cabinet members if I give the green signal on that.”

“I say this threefold mission of education, scientific research and community development is just as necessary for Sintar. I’ve seen the development in infrastructure and health care in the two months I’ve been here. And I know that it is all attributable to you, Zayn, but Khaleej is going to be left behind in the global world if it does not also embrace a more global approach toward arts and education. This wealth that Khaleej enjoys because of its oil and gas reserves is not going to last long.

“You will need an educated, qualified workforce that includes both sexes if Khaleej wants to continue its current healthy financial growth, and this center seems to be the right step in that direction.”

“You are very passionate about this. Why?”

“Does there have to be a reason for pure common sense?”

“The more something is important to you, the more flippant you get. If that is your answer—”

“There is no other reason than that women should be allowed to pursue academic interests just as men do.”

“Is that what your mother and father split about?” The question fell from his mouth despite his intention to stay out of her personal matters.

A bitterness he didn’t like seeing at all entered her beautiful eyes. “For as long as I can remember of their marriage even before they divorced, they fought about everything. Prestige and perception was a big deal to my father and his family, and he forbade her from going back to her former profession. Her definition in life was to be a wife and mother. As long as her ambition or her dream did not interfere with those duties, she was allowed to have them.”

Her placid eyes blazed when she said forbade. Within minutes, she transformed from an efficient PA to a tigress.

“How old were you when they divorced?”

“Thirteen.”

“You were a mere child, Amalia. Things always look black-and-white. How can you be so sure why their marriage fell apart?”

“Because I was the one who lived with the fallout. For years, I listened to her while she...she grieved the loss of him.”

“What was her profession?”

“She was a model at the height of her career when she met him.”

“Then he was right to forbid her.”

“Of all the—”

“This is not our fight, Amalia. But I’m being realistic. Professor Hadid is a venerated historian, a man with a powerful public image. Your mother would have known the sacrifices she’d have to make when she married him. I cannot see how she thought she could continue with such a controversial career and still be his wife.”

“I don’t think she cared so much about the modeling as much as being boxed in the little space he had for her in his life, the little he allowed her to do. That they were both strong personalities and came from different cultures, I’m sure, didn’t help. It’s a wonder that they fell in love at all.”

“Lots of couples mistake good old lust with love. It is possible—”

Defiance radiated off her. And it was vulnerability, pain, that she hid beneath that defiance. “She never stopped loving him. Not until her last breath last year. He never once...” She closed her eyes, fighting for control over herself. “She made herself weak by loving him while he remarried and just made himself a new family.”

Something in her tone broke through Zayn’s hands-off policy and he clutched her hand on the desk.

The jolt from the contact was instant. Never had he felt a connection like this before. The more he tried to ignore it, the sharper his awareness of her became. Her hand was soft and slender in his big one and yet, there was strength in her grip.

Eyes wide pools in her face locked with his, brimming with emotion. The rawness of it went through Zayn like lightning shifted the entire picture of the sky. Her hand gentled in his, a little trusting, a little searching, and he felt some core of ice inside him, a place that he hadn’t even known existed, thaw a little.

This new emotion that surged through him, urging him to take her in his arms...was this tenderness for her?

“Was her passing hard for you?”

She shrugged and pulled her hand from his. When she looked at him again, there was none of that vulnerability in her eyes. Curiously, Zayn felt both relief and a strange sense of loss. As if he had been granted a glimpse of something intense, something real, something he had never known before but it was taken away from him before he could fully comprehend it.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to see that vulnerability in her eyes again. For it made him forget that she was not to be trusted.

“She gave up on life a long time ago.” Guilt pinched her features. “Is it horrible of me to say I felt a sense of relief when the end came?”

Zayn could not answer her. Why had her father not shared this responsibility with her? If not for his wife, he still had some duty owed to his daughter. Even his parents, who were coldly practical with their own children and barely had any time or interest in parenting him or Mirah, still made sure they were taken care of by others.

He had been taught early on in life that he wasn’t supposed to have any emotional vulnerability. And he completely agreed with that policy for someone in his position. Whereas Amalia, he was realizing, had seen only that in her parent.

“Just because he remarried does not mean he did not love her.” He gritted his teeth hearing how sentimental he sounded.

Damn it, he had no taste for playing a hero, her hero, and he was sure as the bright desert sun neither did Amalia want one.

“Whether he truly loved her at all, now that... I doubt.” Challenge glimmered in her eyes. “Powerful men, men who are used to having the world at their feet, I fear, will say and do anything to have a woman they fancy. Did you know my father is a great lover of objects of beauty? I remember our home used to be littered with them, people from all over the country coming to see him. I have no doubt he thought her another collectible he should own. When she refused to sit on the shelf he provided for her, he discarded her.”

And me. The unsaid words hung in the air, full of a pain she would never admit to. The more he learned of her, the more Zayn was sure that Amalia was one of those complex women he had no use for.

Still, the depth of her bitterness stunned him. “That is a twisted view to have of one’s father.”

“It’s a realistic view of my father and what love can do when it is not returned in the same way. Don’t tell me that you’re a closet romantic, Sheikh. That you’re privately agonizing over having to choose a docile, traditional bride.” A brittle smile came to her lips, a determined glint in her eyes.

Her little remark bounced off his hide. “I heartily agree with you that the whole concept of love only complicates marriage. My parents’ marriage is a success only because they had no expectations of each other. And so no complaints, either.”

“What does that mean?”

“They married because it was an advantageous match for both of them. My father would get a bride from an aristocratic family and she her own sphere of powerful people to command. An heir for the country was the one common goal and once they had me, they pursued their own lives. My father had his mistress and his politics, and my mother, her own pursuits. Everything else, even Mirah, was a byproduct of the main goal of the marriage.”