“Nothing will make him forget.” Saeed’s harsh growl interrupted her torn words. “King Malek was born on my hands, as we say here. I never knew anyone more steadfast. He’s fastidious with his trust but, once won, his trust is for life, he’s wary to commit, but once he commits only death can make him break his commitments. With you he’s compounded total trust and commitment with what he’ll never give another woman—love.”
“Don’t—I can’t take this …” she almost screamed. “If I stay, and all hell breaks loose, he’ll end up hating me. Or he’ll be forced to take a wife to stem the conflicts and I—I.”
“You’re really thinking of yourself here, aren’t you?” Saeed lashed out. “You’re afraid he’ll come to hate you, so you want to save yourself possible future discomfort by breaking his heart now. You can’t bear the idea of sharing him with another woman even for the cause you claim to find so much bigger than yourself because you’re afraid he’ll find you wanting in contrast to his imposed wife. You want to save yourself the humiliation of a comparison you believe you’ll lose.”
His words fell on her like scythes. But it wasn’t their merci-lessness that she felt—it was the razor sharpness of the images they evoked.
Malek, in a royal ceremony, god-like, exchanging vows with the woman he’d settle on to appease his kingdom. Malek, running to her to make good on his pledge.
Then time passed and the pressure for an heir grew, and he went to his first wife, a woman to fit a king, raised from birth to be a queen, favored by all, the instrument of peace and prosperity, his equal in beauty and refinement, sharing his background and culture, versed in all the nuances Jay could never learn, and in the arts of seducing and servicing her man.
And he joined his body to hers, took his pleasure inside her, spilled his seed and came to covet her, even love her, with the bond of children cementing her hold over him.
While Jay became the woman he looked on in disappointment and confusion, wondering how he’d once contemplated risking so much for her, concluding that his emotional turmoil at the time and the ordeals they’d shared had deluded him, had coated her blandness with magic, a magic that drained away with each layer of stability his new family brought to his life, every encounter of true passion he shared with his rightful wife.
But though he no longer felt anything for her but pity for her dependence, regret for his unintentional exploitation, even revulsion for her continued hunger, he’d show her mercy.
And she finally understood what her mother had suffered. How she’d come to end her own life.
Not that she ever would. But she felt them now. The depths of desperation that could make a slow, painful death a release.
She rose to suddenly steady feet, her voice unwavering as she heard herself say, “You’re right.”
Saeed jerked as if she’d slapped him. He’d been goading her to rage against his accusations, to prove their falseness by staying near his master and forgetting her moment of weakness.
For a long moment he searched her now dry eyes. She knew he’d find nothing there. He’d shown her the future and everything she was had died just getting a glimpse at it.
“I always believed my master’s judgment unerring,” he finally drawled. “His belief in your worth formed a great part of my regard for you. But if you won’t lay down your life for a man of his greatness, let alone weather some hardships and uncertainties, it seems both of us have been wrong this time.”
It was another attempt to rouse her to self-defense. It had no effect. Neither did the contemptuous if still pleading accusation in his eyes.
So this was what her mother had sought in death. The anesthesia. The cessation. The nothingness.
She wiped the last of the wetness from her cheeks. “Then you should be glad that your master will be rid of such a fickle weakling so unfit of his passion and faith. Will you help me get out of Damhoor now? He assigned a dozen of his best men to my protection and service now he’s scared for my safety. I won’t be able to go anywhere without him knowing about it. And as he’s still under the spell of his misguided affections, he’ll come after me.”
Saeed still hesitated, unable to shake his own affection and faith that easily. Any minute now he’d conclude she was in the grip of understandable turmoil, would do her the merciful courtesy of forgetting her temporary lapse. Then she’d be trapped here. She’d end up destroying Malek, and Damhoor.
She lashed out in a last desperate attempt with the most vicious thing she could think of. “If you don’t help me out of here, I’ll call the American embassy and accuse Malek of holding me here against my will.”
And if she still had a life, she would have feared for it at that moment.
As it was, the flare of murderous fury in Saeed’s eyes only told her she’d be out of there before she knew what hit her.
She’d won.
And she’d lost. Everything.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I’M LOSING HER!” Jay shouted at her scrabbling team in the chaotic ER as she checked their car-crash casualty’s plummeting vitals. She turned to one of her three nurses. “Heather, get me an echocardiogram. Then I’m going for a pericardiocentesis under echocardiographic guidance.”
Mrs. Dobbs had all signs of cardiac tamponade. Engorged neck veins, absent heart sounds, plummeting blood pressure not responsive to treatment. Blood was pumping out of a tear in one of the heart’s chambers, filling the pericardium, compressing the ventricles to a standstill.
Jay had to introduce a needle through the chest, enter the pericardial sac and drain all she could of the blood.
“Sally, 20-gauge cardiac needle,” Jay ordered. “Fifty-mil syringe. Josh, ready the defibrillator. Then elevate bed to 45 degrees.”
She snatched the echocardiogram from Heather, found the tamponade. Massive. Rapidly fatal if left to accumulate further.
She dragged the echocardiogram machine nearer, looked at the images on the monitor, advanced the needle towards the shoulder, injected air. She detected the bubbles on the monitor within the pericardial sac. She was in!
She aspirated and blood gushed, filling the syringe.
After a drastic improvement in blood pressure and pulse, blood re-accumulated, and they aspirated again. On the fourth aspiration the woman fibrillated.
She snatched the charged defibrillator from Josh, shouted, “Clear.”
The woman responded with the first jolt, sinus rhythm resuming. But in minutes she fibrillated again.