“I mean, you’re gorgeous and all, but it can’t only be that. You have to have a secret. Women everywhere would kill for a tip.”
Roxanne shook her head. She wasn’t up to deciphering neighbors’ riddles. Now that Haidar had rematerialized in her life with the force of a live warhead and left promising further destruction, her brain was officially fried.
Either that, or Kareemah was talking gibberish. Which was an imminent possibility. The woman had been exposed to Haidar, too.
“So what do you do to get gods knocking down your door?”
“Uh, Kareemah, if you mean Haidar, I already explained—”
“And I might have bought you explaining one god away. But how do you explain another?”
Suddenly, she realized Kareemah wasn’t looking at her. Her eyes were glued to a point in the distance.
Someone was standing behind her.
She whirled around. And her heart hit the base of her throat.
No. Not another Aal Shalaan “hybrid.”
Jalal.
He was standing by the door she’d left open, in a charcoal suit with a shirt the color of his golden eyes, hands languidly in his pockets, looking as if he’d teleported off a GQ magazine cover.
That might not be far-fetched. She hadn’t heard the whir of the elevator or the fall of his footsteps.
For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, one of the two men she never wanted to see again had managed to sneak up on her.
Kareemah tugged on her arm, made her stagger around. “Like we say here, ‘the neighbor takes precedence in charity.’ I anxiously await a glimpse at your methods.”
With that, she cast Jalal another starstruck glance and stepped back into her apartment.
Roxanne stared at the door Kareemah had just closed, her mind in a jumble.
“Koll hadi’s’seneen, kammetman’nait ashoofek menejdeed.” All these years, how I wished to see you again.
Her heart squeezed so hard she felt it would implode.
Suddenly fury spurted inside it, incinerating all shock and nostalgia. She wasn’t letting another Aal Shalaan twin mess her up all over again. She’d hit her limit last night.
She turned, hoping she didn’t look as shaky as she felt. “If it isn’t one of the region’s two most eligible bastards.”
The warmth infusing his face didn’t waver as he slipped his hands out of his pockets, spread his arms in a gesture that had always had her running into them. “Ullah yehay’yeeki, ya Roxanne.”
Ullah yehay’yeeki—literally, may God hail you, one of the not-quite-translatable colloquial praises he’d once lavished on her, usually when she’d said something that had resonated with his demanding intellect and wit. Which had been almost every time she’d opened her mouth. They’d been so alike, so in tune, it had been incredible. It had also turned out to be a lie.
For years afterward, she hadn’t known which betrayal had hurt more, his or Haidar’s.
She stuck her fists at her sides. “Listen, buddy, I had one hell of a night, and I’m expecting a spiral of steady deterioration for the foreseeable future. So why don’t you just piss off. Whatever made you pop up here, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Not even if it’s me groveling for forgiveness?”
She walked toward him, each step intensifying her anger. “I’ve heard that before. Still not in the least interested.”
He’d called her out of the blue two years ago, begging her for a face-to-face meeting. She’d hung up on him.
He hadn’t called back.
She came to a stop a foot away, had to still look way up, even when boosted by her highest heels.
In response to her glare, he did something that made her heart stagger inside her chest. He cupped her cheek, his touch the essence of gentleness, his face, his voice that of cherishing.
“Alhamdu’lel’lah—thank God the years have been as nurturing as you deserve. You’ve grown into a phenomenal woman, Roxy.”
Only the drowning wave of longing stopping her from scoffing, Look who’s talking.
Jalal was another case where time had conspired to turn an example of virile perfection into something that was description defying. While the younger man she’d known had been as gorgeous as she’d thought humanly possible, possessing an equal, if totally different, brand of beauty from his twin and a diametrically opposite effect, too, the mature Jalal had become a juggernaut out of an Arabian Nights fable.
“Even if you scratch my eyes out for it, you have to hear it, to know it. Kamm awhashtini, ya sudeequtti al habibah.” How I missed you, my beloved friend.
And God, how she’d missed him, too.
She grabbed his hand, removed it from her face, tugged him by it. He let her lead him, offering no resistance even when it became clear she was taking him to the elevators.
In seconds, an elevator swished silently open. She gestured for him to enter. With one last pained, resigned look, he complied. And she made up her mind.
She dragged him back out, led him to her apartment.
She let him close the door, walked ahead to her spacious home office, threw herself down on the L-shaped cream leather couch/recliner, looked up at him as he came to stand before her.
She made a hurry-up gesture. “Go ahead. Grovel. Just try to make it interesting.”
His expression turned whimsical. “That will be hard. Will you accept pathetic?”
“I’m sure it will be that.”
He sighed, nodded. “But I want to make sure of something first. That day—you arrived before you made your presence known, right? You overheard me and Haidar talking about our bet?”
He was only half right about how it had happened. She wasn’t about to volunteer more insights. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s the only explanation for what you said and did. Even if you were angry with Haidar for his overbearing tactics, even if you’d told the truth about the limit of your involvement with him, you had no reason to cut me off, too. Except if you heard. And misinterpreted what you heard.”
Heat rose as she relived the humiliation and heartbreak all over again. “Don’t even try the misinterpretation card. What I heard was the truth, and I acted accordingly to get rid of both of you competition-sick bastards. End of story.”
Her insults had no effect on him. Just as they hadn’t on Haidar.
But while Haidar had been bedeviling and goading, Jalal was accepting and forbearing. He’d let her beat him to a pulp if it would make her feel better.
“You of all people know there are too many sides to any situation for one to be the whole truth.”
But she didn’t want to hear more sides to this mess. Hope was more damaging than resignation. She’d built her stability around accepting the worst, dealing with the pain and moving on.
But…hadn’t she spent years wishing there were more sides? Ones that might prove that not everything they’d shared had been a means to a “pathetic” end, so she could free a measure of her memories from the pall of bitterness and resentment?
His wolf’s eyes felt as if they were probing her mind, following her every thought. Which they probably were. They’d always been on the same wavelength.
Just as the scales teetered toward foolish hope, his gaze grew relieved. He was reading her like a hundred-foot billboard.
“Will I get socked if I sit down beside you?”
She flung him an ill-tempered gesture. “Take your chances like the colossal man that you are.”
He sat down inches away with controlled strength and poise, cocooning her in warmth and power and a nostalgia so encompassing her throat closed.
She took refuge in sarcasm. “This couch is so low most people flop down on it. Still doing thousands of squats per day?”
“Takes one exercise junkie to know another. You’re looking fitter than ever, Roxy.” Before she hissed that he’d lost the right to call her that, he silenced her with something totally unexpected. “I need to explain something I should have long ago. My relationship with Haidar.”
Her heart blipped in distress at Haidar’s name. At the way Jalal said it. At the bleakness in his eyes.
She attempted a nonchalant shrug. “While neither of you ever talked about the other, I gathered the relevant facts myself. You live to compete with each other.”
“Aren’t you at all curious to know how we got that way?”
“Standard sibling rivalry, how else? As you said, pathetic. But most of all, boring.”
“How I wish it was. Maddening, unsolvable, heart-wrenching more like.” He wiped a hand down his face in a weary gesture. “You’ve seen how radically different we are, and we were born that way. But we were inseparable in spite of that. Maybe because of it. Until it all started going wrong. I can trace the beginning of the friction, the rivalry, to one incident. Our tenth birthday party.”
Here was her first misconception destroyed. She’d always assumed their rivalry started at birth.
“I almost burned down the palace, and Haidar volunteered to take the blame. Instead of stepping forward, I…let him take the punishment meant for me. Things were never the same afterward.”
Their conflict had an origin, one in which Haidar was the wronged party? That was surprising. Disturbing.
“He began to treat me with a reserve I wasn’t used to, put distance between us. Once I became certain it wasn’t a passing thing, I was furious, then anxious, then lost. I needed my twin back. I tried to force the closeness I depended on, dogging his every move, demanding to share everything he did, for him to share everything I did, like we used to. When that only resulted in more distance, I became desperate. I started to do anything that would provoke an emotional reaction from him. He retaliated by demonstrating in ingenious ways that I couldn’t get to him. Then he learned a new trick, wielded a new weapon—he started showing me, and everyone else, that he was better than me. In just about everything. And it was so easy for him.