He was wrong. He had been wrong. About everything he’d felt or thought since he’d found out she’d been Hesham’s woman.

What she had been didn’t matter. What she was did.

She was the woman he’d loved on sight, the only one who’d ever aroused his unadulterated desire, possessed his unqualified trust and admiration. She had been a selfless lover to his brother, then as sacrificing a mother to Ryan. She’d been the best thing that had ever happened to him, too, his life’s first absolute intimacy. And he had been willing to give up anything, risk anything for her. His assets, his peace of mind, his hopes, his life. He now realized he could give up even more. He would.

He’d give up his jealousy, that Hesham had loved her first. His guilt over loving her when Hesham no longer could. His anguish over surviving when Hesham was no longer there.

But maybe she was already meeting him halfway. With this confession she wanted to make. He gestured for her to go ahead.

“You didn’t question the reasons I stated for hiding Ryan’s paternity…” She stopped, her agitation mounting.

He had to spare her. “There was nothing to question. You were doing what Hesham would have wanted you to do. He lived in fear of our father finding him and spoiling his life and yours. He clearly knew what Emad did, that our father was looking for him, not in the way I thought, out of anger. When he knew he’d die, he knew if he ever found you, you could lose Ryan to the man who almost destroyed him. My siblings and I were lucky because we had our mothers, whom everyone called the lioness, the Amazon and the harpy, to fend for us. But Hesham didn’t. His mother died giving birth to him.”

Her gaze wavered. “Hesham said your father never let anyone mention her to him as he grew up.”

Fareed exhaled another of his frustrations with his father. “It was whispered around the kingdom that she couldn’t withstand him, being this artistic, ethereal creature. It did seem that our father was so furious with her for being different from what he’d wanted, then for dying, that he banned any mention of her. When he realized Hesham was turning out like her, he did everything to force him into the mold he thought acceptable for a son of his. Hesham was right to fear our father and to instill that fear in you. If Ryan had fallen into his hands, he would have suffered an even worse fate because Hesham at least had us, older siblings who’d done all we could to temper his autocratic upbringing. So I understand that you had to hide the truth with all you had. I only wish you’d trusted me. At least, trusted Hesham’s decision to entrust your and Ryan’s futures to me.”

She grabbed his forearm, urgency emanating from her. “I trusted you with Ryan’s life, with both our lives when I came to the land I feared most on the strength of nothing but my belief in you. But it’s more complicated than you think. And when we…we…”

“Became lovers?” He placed his hand on top of hers before she could retract it. “I can see how this made you feel more trapped. But after I was furious with Emad when he revealed the truth, then told my father, I can’t be more thankful to him now. Like we say here, assa an takraho shai wa hwa khayronn lakom.”

She nodded. “You may hate something and it’s for your best.”

He smiled. “I’ll never stop being impressed by how good your Arabic is. Hesham taught you well.”

She blushed. Blushed. With pleasure at his praise. And at the ease with which he now referred to Hesham, and the beauty of the relationship she’d shared with him?

Then her color deepened to distress again. “But Emad didn’t find out the full truth. And when you know it, you won’t find acceptable excuses for my half truths.”

He took her by the shoulders. “No, Gwen, whatever you hid, I’m on your side, and only on your side, always.”

The tears gathered in her eyes slipped down the velvet of her cheeks as she nodded. “Hesham said your father told him his life story when he was fifteen. He said he married three women, one after the other for political and tribal obligations, had children from each, sometimes almost simultaneously.” Fareed knew well the story of his father and his four wives and ten children. He had a feeling she’d tell him things he didn’t know. “But he didn’t love any of them.”

“It was mutual, I assure you.”

Gwen winced. “Yes. Then he met Hesham’s mother and they fell in love on sight.” Fareed’s jaw dropped. That he surely didn’t know. He believed his father was love-proof, let alone to the on-sight variety. “But even if his marriages were to serve the kingdom, she wouldn’t be a fourth wife. So he divorced his wives wholesale, and dealt with the catastrophic political fallout.”

He was only six when this happened. He still remembered the upheavals. “My mother and the other two women say it was the best day of their lives when they finally got rid of him.”

She nodded. “It was how he convinced Hesham’s mother to marry him. She feared if he could divorce the mothers of his children so easily, that she couldn’t trust him. So he let her interview them and they told her it was what they longed for, how they, like him, had felt trapped in the marriages, that he’d never loved anyone but her in his life. He pledged only death would part them.

“Their marriage was deliriously happy, and when she got pregnant, he told her he’d love her child the most of his children. But she died, and he almost went insane. He at first hated the son he blamed for killing his love. Then as Hesham grew up and he saw her in him, he transferred all his love and expectations and obsessions to him. He ordered no one to mention her because it made him crazy with grief.”

Fareed felt more disoriented than when his father’s guard had struck him. “And it seems I will keep finding that I know nothing about those I considered my closest people.”

She shut her eyes. “Th-there’s more. Much more.”

“Then arjooki, please, tell me everything.”

She drew in a shaky breath. “What nobody knew is that a few years after Hesham’s mother’s death, her tribe, the royal family of Durrah, invoked an ancient Jizaanian law. That if a king married more than one woman, the sons of his highest-ranking wife would succeed him to the throne, with no respect to age. Since Hesham’s mother was a pureblood princess, that made Hesham the crown prince.”

He stared at her, beyond flabbergasted.

This…this…explained so much. Yet was totally inexplicable.

Not that he considered disbelieving her for a second.

But he had to ask. “Kaif? How could my father hide something like this? How is that not common knowledge?”

“Your father pledged to Hesham’s maternal relatives that Hesham would be his crown prince. On one condition—that they reveal this to no one until he prepared his kingdom and his other sons, especially the one who lived his life believing he was his heir, for the change in succession. But most important, until he prepared Hesham for the role he’d be required to fill. They agreed, in a binding blood oath. The king told Hesham when he turned fifteen and your oldest brother, although still in confidence. Hesham said Abbas was sorry for him, if relieved for himself. He didn’t relish being crown prince.”

Fareed could believe that. Abbas was a swashbuckling, extreme-sport-loving, corporate-raiding daredevil. He dreaded the day he’d have to give up the wildness and freedom of his existence to step into their father’s shoes. He always said, only half-jokingly, that the day of his joloos on the throne he’d turn the kingdom into a democracy and be on his way.

But it was making more sense by the second, explaining the infuriating enigma of his father.

“So this was why Father pressured Hesham to that extent. He was trying to turn him into the crown prince he knew he wasn’t equipped to become.”