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Of course, once the morning sickness had hit the “easy” thing had seemed a long-ago, laughable thought. Then there had been the weight gain, the sore breasts, the stretch marks. And of course, labor and delivery.
Nothing about it had been easy.
But in the peaceful quiet just after giving birth, that brief surreal moment in time, before she’d found out about Tamara and Rashid’s deaths, as she’d looked down at the tiny, screaming baby in her arms, all of the fragmented pieces in her life had seemed to unite, to create a clear and beautiful picture. As if she’d done what she was here to do. As if Aden was her finest, most important achievement. Now or ever.
That was before the world had broken apart again, before things had been smashed, destroyed so utterly and completely that she had no idea how it would ever be fixed again.
She’d been a zombie for six weeks. Caring for Aden, caring for herself when she could, studying, sort of. Slipping beneath the surface, certain that she was going to drown.
Sayid’s appearance was both a salvation and damnation rolled into one.
“I know. But right now he…. What do you want to do with him?”
“I intend to do what was always meant to be done. To take him back to his home. To his people. His palace. It is his right, and it is my duty to protect those rights.”
“And who will raise him?”
“Tamara had hired the best nannies already, the very best caregivers in the world. After I announce that he is… alive, everything will go as it was meant to.” There was a strange sort of calm to his voice, one that made her wonder what was going on beneath the surface.
“When did you find out?” she asked.
“Yesterday. I was going through my brother’s safe, his most private documents, and I found the surrogacy agreement. For the first time in six weeks… some hope.”
“You really did find us quickly.”
“I have sources. More than that, you aren’t very well hidden.”
“I was afraid,” she said, her voice a choked whisper.
“Of what?” he asked.
“Everything.” That was the honest truth. Her life had been marked by gut-churning anxiety and fear since Tamara’s death. Every day felt temporary, and like an eternity. “I was afraid you wouldn’t want the competition. That you wouldn’t want to lose your new position.”
Sayid’s dark eyes hardened, his lips thinning. “I was not raised to rule, Chloe James, I was raised to fight. In my country, that is the function of the second born son. I am a warrior. The High Sheikh must have compassion and strength. Fairness. I was not trained to have those things. I was trained to carry out orders, to be merciless in my pursuit of preserving my people and my country. Which I will do now, at any cost. This is not about what I want, it is about what is best.”
She believed him. The evidence of the truth was there in his voice, in the flat, emotionlessness. He was a soldier, a machine created to carry out orders with swift, efficient execution.
And he wanted to take Aden with him.
She blinked, feeling dizzy. “So, essentially, you’re the ax man of the al Kadar family?” It just slipped out. She wasn’t prone to speaking without thinking. Thinking was her stock-in-trade. But she felt off balance now, not sure what to say or do. There was no textbook for this situation, no amount of studying that could have prepared her for it. No amount of reasoning.
“My path was set from my first breath.”
“And so is Aden’s,” she said, her lips numb, cold shock spreading through her. She’d always known that the little boy sleeping in the bassinet in her bedroom was meant for greatness, greatness that had nothing to do with her. But these past weeks… they had been out of time. Something so different from anything else she’d experienced. Miserable, and beautiful. Temporary. And in them, it had been easy, necessary even, to ignore the reality of his destiny.
“He needs to come back home. Your life can go back to the way it was. To the way you planned for it to be.”
She could finished school, get her doctorate. Take a teaching position at a university, or maybe get a job at a research institute. A girl and her whiteboard. It would be a beautiful and simple existence. One where she spent her time analyzing mysteries of the universe that had a hope of actually being solved, something that seemed impossible in interpersonal relationships. Which was one reason she rarely bothered with those, not beyond casual friendships at least.
That was the future that Sayid was offering right now. The chance to go back to the way things were. Like nothing had changed.
She looked down, saw the rounded bump where once her stomach had been flat. And she thought of the child, sleeping in the next room, the child who had grown inside of her body, the child she’d given birth to, and she knew that everything had changed. Everything.
There was no going back.
“I can’t just let you take him.”
“You were going to let Rashid and Tamara take him.”
“They were his parents, and they were… meant to be with him.”
“His place in Attar goes deeper than that,” he said, his voice uncompromising.
“He’ll be confused, I… I’m the only mother he knows.” She’d never put voice to that thought until now. But she’d been caring for him. Breastfeeding him. She’d given birth to him, and even though, genetically, he was not her son, he was something, something that was essential in some ways.
“You do not wish to go back to your old life? To get back to how it was?”
In some ways she did. Badly. Just thinking about it, about what she’d have to give up, to either have Aden or to have things the way they were, made her feel as if she was being torn in two.
“I don’t think it can,” she said, the truth, another thing she’d left unacknowledged for as long as possible. “It’s not the same. It never will be again.” A fact, irrefutable as far as she was concerned, no mathematical equations required to prove it.
“Then what do you propose?” he asked, muscular arms crossed over his broad chest.
Just then, Aden stirred, his sharp cry loud in the silence of the apartment. That single, shrill cry, pierced her heart, made her ache everywhere.
“Take me to Attar.”
CHAPTER TWO
“ABSOLUTELY NOT,” SAYID said, striding from the living room and heading toward the bedroom, where Aden was crying plaintively.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Something inside of her snapped, watching that large, predatory body walking toward the baby’s room.
He stopped, turning to face her. “I am going to collect my nephew, as is my right.” He held the papers out, the surrogacy agreement, which she had signed, knowing full well what it meant. Papers she’d signed without regret. Papers that said Aden belonged to the royal family, to Attar, and not to her. Never to her.
He turned away again and her feet carried her, without her volition, quickly, to where he was going. She put her hands on his shoulders and tugged him backward. His shoulders were thick and muscled, his frame solid and immovable beneath her hands. The kind of man she normally feared.
For a blinding second, she had a flash of what it would be like if he swept the back of his hand across her face. She knew just how that looked. Hard packed muscle coming up against a petite frame. Knew what it looked like to see a woman crumbled on the ground, broken and bleeding, the victim of masculine power.
Sayid didn’t do that. He stopped, not because she’d had any effect on him. He could have shrugged her off of him with ease, but he didn’t. Instead, he turned back to her slowly, his eyes dark, filled with heat and fury. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“You’re not just going to go in there and scoop him up and carry him off to the desert,” she said, her pulse pounding in her throat. “You might be the sheikh in your country but here you’re just an intruder in my house and if I have to mace your ass and then call the cops I will do it.” Anger drove her, a rage that made her shake, made her body quiver down to her bones. It banished her fear, fear of retribution, of violence at his hands.
Because right now, Aden was the weakest one here. And if she didn’t stand for him then no one would.
“Interesting,” he said, his voice coated in ice, “your file said you were a scientist, I expected more reserve.”
“And you’re supposed to be a leader, I expected you to have a little more of a deft hand at negotiation.” For some reason, he reacted to that. A small reaction, a small flare of something much deeper and more frightening than the anger from before. But it didn’t stop her. “Did you honestly think I would let you walk in and take my baby?”
Sayid straightened, his eyes black, blank again, absent of malice, or anything else. “He is not your baby.”
The truth hit, cold and hard, at the same time as the realization of what she’d said. “I know that. But I’ve been caring for him. I breastfeed him,” she said, desperation building in her chest, “you can’t just come in and take him.”
“You were meant to surrender him, and you know it to be true.”
“To Tamara,” she said, her voice rough. “I was meant to hand him to his mother, my sister, but she wasn’t there. His mother is dead. And no one knew about him. I didn’t know what to do, who to tell. The only other person who’s ever held him have been medical personnel, and you want to… to take him away.”
“I don’t want to take him from you,” he said, his jaw tight, his tone hard. “I must do what is best for Attar. I am not here to disrupt your little game of house. But Aden is not your son, and he does not belong here.”
“Then let me go there.”
“And reveal the secret that Rashid was so desperate to protect?”
She shook her head. “No. No… I could be… the nanny.”
“For the next sixteen years? Until he comes of age?”
She didn’t have the next sixteen years to spend in Attar. She had a life here. She had friends. And school. A student teacher position starting in the fall. All she had to do was wean herself away. There was no other choice, no other choice beyond making a clean break now, and that she knew she couldn’t do.
She shook her head. “No… not that I…” She swallowed and looked down. “But maybe… if he could be here with me for a few months even. Six months.” She didn’t know why she’d said six months. Only that it was time. More time to try and wrap her head around everything that had happened to her. More time to hold on to Aden when she really should just let go.
She started to walk into the room, toward Aden, and Sayid caught her arm, dark eyes blazing into hers. “Tell me this,” he said, his tone hard, “and be honest. You were only the surrogate, right? There was nothing between you and my brother?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“I need to know. Because there can be no surprises. No scandal.”
“Rashid loved Tamara. He would never…”
Sayid nodded. “He did. It’s true. But I have seen the things men can do, thoughtless things that cause a world of pain, and I would not put it past him. Not even him. Everyone is capable of evil.”
Evil, she had seen. In the most seemingly innocuous of men. His hard hold on her, fingers biting into her skin, was a reminder of that. “Even you?”
“Everyone is capable of evil,” he repeated.
“Well, your brother did no such evil. Not with me.” The idea was completely laughable. Or it would have been if Sayid hadn’t been so serious. “I did this because of Tamara. Because she was my family. And now Aden is my family.”
He released his hold on her. “Good. I cannot afford any complications.”
Anger spiked in her again, a welcome reprieve from the hopelessness that was starting to overwhelm her. “Well, I couldn’t afford any complications, either, Your Royal Sheikhiness. Yet I seem to have nothing but complications at the moment.”
“I could make them go away,” he said, his voice cold, uncompromising. “Can make it so your life goes back to the way it was before.”
“Could you take the pain with you?” she said, desperation tearing at her as she realized, fully, just how impossible a situation she was in. “Can you make it so it’s like it never happened? Make me forget that I carried a child and gave birth to him? That I cared for him for the first six weeks of his life? Can you make him forget?”
“He will be given everything in Attar. No comfort will be denied him. This is not a decision to make with your emotions. This is a decision that you must think about logically.”
Logic had long been a comfort to her. Fact, reason, had carried her through a childhood filled with chaos. But logic couldn’t win here. For the first time, her heart was louder than her head. “Will you love him?” she asked.
His black eyes were cold. “I would die for him.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“But it is the promise I can make.” Men, men and their promises, had been something she’d spent a lifetime avoiding. She’d watched men break their promises, again and again, and as an adult she’d chosen to never put stock in them. But this promise, this vow, that seemed to come from deep inside of him, from his soul, was something she couldn’t doubt. She felt it echoing inside of her, down on a subatomic level. “He is my king. The heir to the throne of Attar. He has my allegiance, both as my future leader and as a member of my family.”
“He’s a baby,” she said, the word catching in her throat. “Right now, that’s the important thing.”
“He is a child,” Sayid said, “I know that. But he will never be like other children. He is meant to rule, it is a part of who he is. Who he was born to be. We all have a burden to bear in this life,” he continued, his voice softer now. “We all have a purpose that must be met. This is his.”
“But… but,” she stuttered, desperation digging its claws into her. She took a breath and redirected, scrolling through her mind for information she could use. Knowledge was power, now and always. “I understand that he’s the heir, but fundamentally, he’s a baby. Taking him from me, from his care-giver, now could cause damage, especially as I assume there will be staff caring for him?”
Sayid shrugged broad shoulders. “Of course.” Because Sayid would not be involved, not on a personal level. He might be willing to lay down his life for his nephew, but changing diapers was another thing altogether.
“I grant you, child development, and biology in general, are not my areas of expertise, but I know they’ve done studies on these early life experiences and they’re crucial to the emotional well-being of a person. If they aren’t given the proper attention now, they may never be able to form attachments in the future.”
Sayid regarded her, his eyes dark, fathomless. “That I believe.”
“I mean, they’ve actually looked at CAT scans of the brains of children who have experienced stable nurturing and those who haven’t. It changes them on a physical level. Parts of their brain cease to function properly and… and… I doubt you want that for a ruler, do you?”
“Naturally not,” he said, clipped.
“I’ve been… I’ve been taking care of him,” she said, her throat tightening. “Breastfeeding him. What do you think it would do to him to be separated from me? I’m his only stability.”
“And what do you think letting him cry is doing to his psyche?” he asked, his tone hard.
She brushed past him and went toward the bassinet, her heart in her throat. She bent down and pulled him gently into her arms. Holding him still didn’t feel natural. It made her nervous. Always afraid she wasn’t supporting his head just right. And the soft spot. Yes, she knew there was a reason for it to be there, but it terrified her to the core. It highlighted just how vulnerable he was. How breakable.
Sayid watched Chloe pull the child in to her body, her arms wrapped around him securely but gently. She didn’t look like a natural, didn’t look at ease. Her blue eyes were huge, her lips tightened into a firm line, denoting her fear and concentration.
The sight created a strange tightness in his chest, a heaviness that made it difficult to breathe. Her discomfort was evident. The fact that she didn’t want to do this, or that she, at the very least, didn’t love it, was evident. Yet she felt compelled to fight to stay in Aden’s life. Had cared for him, protected him, from the moment he was born. Because she was bonded to him, her loyalty deep and strong.
Loyalty he understood. Honor. The need to protect others at the expense of yourself. He saw it all in that moment, etched across her face.
“Six months,” he said.
She looked up at him, her expression cautious. “Six months of what?”
“You may come back to Attar, to the palace, for six months and serve as his nanny for the purposes of maintaining the fiction of his birth for the public eye. It’s a reasonable step. Logical to believe we secured a woman who is able to nurse the child, as he’s lost his mother.”
“I… oh… I…”
“I will make the announcement to the press that Aden was born just before Tamara’s death and that until we knew his health was stable we wanted no intrusion.”
“What will people think… that you kept something like that from them?”
“They will understand,” he said, his voice, his certainty, echoing in the room. “There is no other option. Rashid wished to keep it a secret, and so it will be kept secret.”
“Tamara said… she said if people knew they might think that it was down to some sort of faithlessness on her part.”
He shook his head once. “Not everyone. Anyone who knew her would never have thought so. But certainly yes, you have factions of the population who regard infertility as a link to some sort of sin on the woman’s part.”
“They wanted to avoid that,” she said. “And now… now it’s even more important, isn’t it? Now that he’s the only one left.”
She looked down at the top of Aden’s fuzzy head, her expression dazed.
“Yes,” he said. The helplessness of the child, his tiny size, delicate body, filled him with a sense of unease. He had the sense of fingers being curled around his neck, cutting off his air. He had felt ill at ease ever since assuming the throne. He was not a diplomat, not a man to sit and do paperwork or make polite conversation with visiting dignitaries.
The press knew it. Took every chance to compare him with the sheikh they had lost. The sheikh that had been born to rule with the one that had only been bred to fight.
And now there was this. This baby. This woman. The child might very well be his salvation, the one that would take his place on the throne. But right now… now he was a baby. Small. Helpless.
It made him think of another helpless life, one he had been powerless to save. And it added another brick to the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. He shook the feeling off. Emotion, regret, the pain of the past, had no place in his life, not even in such a small capacity.
He had learned that lesson early, and he had learned it well. When a man felt much, he could lose much. And so he had been shaped into a man who had nothing left to lose. A man who could act decisively, quickly. He couldn’t worry about his own safety. Could worry about being good. He had to find lighter shades of gray in the darkness. Do what was the most right, and the least wrong. Without regret.
Looking at Aden, his nephew, the last piece of his brother’s legacy, tested him. But he could not afford to break now, couldn’t afford a crack in his defenses. So he crushed it tight inside of him, buried it deep, beneath the rock and stone walls he had built up around his heart.
“Six months?” she asked, raising blue eyes to meet his.
“Six months. And after that you will carry on as you intended to. That is what you want ultimately, isn’t it?”
She nodded slowly, her fingers drifting idly over Aden’s back. “Yes. That’s what I want.”
“And that’s what you will have. Now pack your things, we need to leave.”
“But… I have midterms… I…”
“I can call your professors and arrange to have you take the tests remotely.”
“I don’t know if they’ll let me.”
That made him laugh. “They will not tell me no.”
“You don’t have to fight my battles for me,” she said.
“I fight everyone’s battles for them,” he said. “It’s who I am. As you will soon discover.”
Sayid’s parting words rang in her ears as she packed, her fingers numb while she folded her clothes and stuffed them into her suitcase. She still felt that same numbness as she boarded the private plane that was sitting on the tarmac at Portland International Airport. It had spread to her face, her lips. And she felt cold.
Shock, maybe. Or, judging by the sharp stab of pain that assaulted her when the door to the plush, private airplane closed, maybe the shock from the past six weeks was finally wearing off. She wanted it back. Wanted to be wrapped up in the fuzzy cocoon she’d been living in, where she hadn’t been able to see more than an hour ahead. One foot in front of the other, just trying to survive. Trying to look at the future as a whole was too demanding.
Six months.
She held Aden a little bit closer and leaned back in the plush, roomy seat, examining the cabin of the plane. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever seen before. Being in Attar would feel like being in another world, and she’d expected that. She hadn’t expected everything to feel so different the moment she stepped into Sayid’s domain, even on American soil.
Sayid sat across from the seat she sat in with Aden. His arms were resting on the back of the couch, his body in a pose that she imagined was meant to mimic relaxation. She wasn’t fooled, even for a moment. Sayid wasn’t a man who relaxed easily, if ever. His eyes were sharp, his body clearly on alert.
He looked as though he could spring into deadly, efficient action at any moment. Like a panther preparing for a strike.
“Handy that you had a passport ready, expediting Aden’s was much easier than having to do it for the both of you. Have you done a lot of traveling?” he asked.
She knew these weren’t idle questions. He still didn’t trust her, not really. Which was fine since she certainly didn’t trust him.
“I went to see the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland a couple of years ago. It was a brilliant opportunity.”
The left side of his mouth lifted upward in a poor imitation of a smile. “Most women I’ve known would consider a sale on a designer handbag a brilliant opportunity.”
She could tell he was trying to make her angry. She wasn’t sure why he was trying to make her angry, only that he was. “I like a good handbag as much as the next woman. But if you really want to watch my eyes light up talk string theory to me.”
“I am afraid I would be outmatched,” he said, inclining his head. She’d earned some respect with that response.
He was testing her. Jackass. Nothing she wasn’t used to. Men didn’t like being shown up by women. The men in her academic circle were threatened by her mind, by her successes. So they were always looking for a weakness. Good thing she didn’t have one. Not when it came to her mind, at least.
“You ought to be,” she said. “But if you wanted to talk… I don’t know, Arabian stallions I might be outmatched.”
He laughed. “You think my expertise lies in stallions?”
“A guess. A stereotypical guess, I confess.”
He shrugged. “I’m not one for horses myself. Military vehicles are more my domain. Weapons. Artillery. How to stage an ambush in the dunes. Things like that.”
The statement maybe should have shocked her, but it didn’t. There was nothing that seemed remotely safe about Sayid al Kadar. He exuded danger, darkness. She wasn’t one to cultivate a lot of interpersonal relationships, but danger was one thing she’d learned to see early on. A matter of survival.
“Well, I can’t make much conversation about that.”
“Silence would be your solution, then?” he asked, arching one dark brow.
“I wouldn’t say no to it. It’s been a long twenty-four hours.” It had taken some time to get the documentation to allow Aden to fly.