He stopped less than a foot away, bearing down on her with his overwhelming beauty and rising exasperation. “What kind of game are you playing now? What’s with the indignant act? According to you, we had only a sexual liaison, and you ended it. Now that it would be feasible and pleasurable for both of us to resurrect it, why are you behaving as if I once betrayed you? As if I’m degrading you and trying to take advantage of you?”
“Because you did. And you are.”
He stared at her as if she’d grown a third eye.
And everything she’d spent years holding back came flooding out.
“Being honest about how you’ll take what you want and give nothing in return doesn’t make you honorable. And it sure as hell doesn’t make you the wronged party here. It only makes you an unfeeling bastard who cares only about getting what you want, who would use anyone in the most horrible way for your own purposes, even the trivial one of telling someone ‘I told you so.’”
Every word fell on him with the visible effect of a slap. “B’haggej’jaheem, what the hell are you talking about?”
And she shouted, “I’m talking about your bet.”
He stumbled back, his face going slack with shock, reactions rioting across his eyes.
Then he finally rasped, “You know.”
It was a statement. An admission. At last.
She’d thought it would bring her relief. It didn’t.
Feeling hers eyes tearing, she tore her gaze away, looked feverishly around for her sandals.
She shoved her feet into them, tried to regain her shaky balance. “Thank you for not insulting me more by pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“You heard me and Jalal that night.”
The same conclusion Jalal had come to. She hadn’t refined his deduction.
She did Haidar’s. “That was only how I made sure.”
He blocked her path as she tried to head for the door. “How did you find out in the first place?”
“I don’t owe you anything, least of all an explanation. And if you want someone to play sexual games with, I can recommend dozens for you to pick from. I’m sure you have your own waiting list.”
He spread his arms, stopping her from circumventing him, his face gripped in urgency and frustration. “B’Ellahi, Roxanne, just tell me!”
Her chest heaved with the remembered humiliation, her eyes threatening to pour long-dried tears. “How do you think?”
Realization detonated in his eyes. Certainty. He dropped his arms, staggered away. “My mother.”
She let the entrenched fury in her eyes confirm.
“How did she know?” he groaned.
She shrugged. “She said she knows everything about you and Jalal. But especially you.”
Agitation receded in his eyes, determination filtering into its place. “I need to know everything she said.”
“I’ll tell you what my mother said. When you approached me at that ball expecting me to fall at your feet.”
Heated recollection overlapped agitation in his eyes. “Your words were cool but your eyes were incendiary. I could think of nothing but erasing your reluctance, making you admit that your desire was as instant and as powerful as mine.”
She backed away as if from the memories. “The jury will remain out on that similarity. But my mother saw you for what you are. She also saw that you had me blinded and realized that to stop me from falling for your seduction, she had to tell me a secret.”
“What secret could she have told you? I have none.”
“Of course you don’t. You keep your vices and transgressions proudly out in the open.”
That silenced him. His steel eyes, so like his mother’s, turned black. As if her opinion hurt.
She ignored the spasm of guilt at what she had to admit was a gross exaggeration. “It was a secret of hers. During her first stint in Azmahar. She was beginning her career, and she fell madly in love with a royal. She discovered his illegal activities, yet still couldn’t walk away. But he fabricated evidence against her, preempting her in case she attempted to expose him, forcing her to leave the kingdom in silence or she would have been publicly disgraced and prosecuted.”
His eyes narrowed. “Was that man your father?”
It was the first time he had asked her about her parentage. “No. My father was a one-night stand she had when she returned home from Azmahar heartbroken. But years later, that royal found himself in need of her support and got her an even better post in Azmahar. She was in no position to say no. That was when we came here. He tried to weasel himself back into her good opinion and bed, but she told him where he could put his lies and platitudes.”
He said nothing, waiting for the punch line.
She delivered it. “Moral of the story—don’t get involved with a royal. He will use you for his whims and abuse you for his benefit. And when I didn’t listen, worse happened to me.”
His frown turned spectacular. “What do you mean, worse?”
“You didn’t even notice that my life was being messed up and my future destroyed. The one thing that mattered to you was that I showed up for your scheduled sex sessions.”
“Are you talking about the setbacks you had in your studies?”
Her heart lurched. “So you knew. And you didn’t ask me about it, or even offer a word of concern or encouragement.”
His already black frown darkened. “Jalal informed me you’d started out so far at the top of your class, you were in one of your own. He made it sound as if I was the reason you were falling behind. I…didn’t know what to say. Or do.”
“You thought our liaison and the hoops you made me jump through to maintain its secrecy were taking their toll on me, but tough for me, right? You had your pleasure and your convenience, and to hell with me and my future.”
He grimaced again. “All I saw at the time was that you’d told Jalal, but not me.”
“And we’re back to the one thing that matters to you. Your rivalry with Jalal.”
“It wasn’t like that. This was about you.”
“Sure. It was so about me you didn’t care that my academic progress was in jeopardy, even when you believed you were the reason for the deterioration. You knew me so little you believed I’d let an affair stop me from excelling in my work.”
“But…if I wasn’t the reason, then…” He stopped, shock blossoming in his gaze all over again.
“And he sees the light. Yep, your mother again. She had more influence in Azmahar than the rest of the royal family put together. Your efforts at secrecy worked on my mother and the rest of the kingdom, but your mother knew everything about us and decided to rectify the situation. I found out how when I was protesting my inexplicable grades to my favorite professor. She confessed she and the rest of the staff had instructions to increase pressure until I had to leave to save what I could of my future. She said I would harm her if I didn’t keep it a secret and advised me to stop whatever I was doing to be on your mother’s bad side. You were the only thing I was…doing.”
“And you never told me.”
“I didn’t know if I could. You always seemed to be…hers.” His face became stone, his eyes flint. She didn’t care if that affronted him. It was the truth. “But I was guilty of romanticizing you, believing I mattered to you, against all proof to the contrary. I ended up deciding to tell you, thought you might intervene, stop her from destroying my education. Uncanny woman that she is, she seemed to smell my intention and preempted me. She had me brought to her. It was quite an eye-opener, meeting her in the flesh. I understood so much about you, then.
“She prefaced her venom by saying she’d tried to be merciful, tried to let me leave with my pride intact. But since I was so foolish as to invite a confrontation, she had to destroy it. She informed me of your bet with Jalal. She was very proud of your talent for manipulation, which you inherited from her and honed with your rivalry with Jalal. I might not have seen it that way then, but I do now. I owe her a ton of gratitude.”
His nonexpression, which she’d once thought indicated he felt nothing, cracked, and bewilderment flooded in.
She explained. “Though she was—and no doubt still is—a vile snob, it was her wish to get rid of me sooner rather than later that stopped me from being the unwitting pawn in your power games with Jalal any longer. She read my disbelief, told me to go demand the truth from your own mouth.
“Before I could, you called me and ordered me to drop everything and go to you. I was stupid enough to hope you’d say it wasn’t true, or at least have some excuse to mitigate the sheer petty evil of it all. I was so anxious to clear everything up, I arrived at the apartment before you did.”
His eyes closed for a moment, opened. “You were there all along. You heard everything Jalal and I said.”
Hot needles pushed behind her eyes. “It was only then that I realized the depth of your resemblance to her. And I decided I wouldn’t give either of you that last triumph over me. You wouldn’t see me humiliated and heartbroken, and she wouldn’t see me running off with my tail between my legs. Your mother raised you to use everyone in your power games—mine raised me to never relinquish equal ground.”