Heir to a Desert Legacy - By Maisey Yates Page 0,5
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