Sheikh's Forbidden Queen: Zarif's Convenient Queen / Gambling with the Crown. Carol Marinelli
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At university, Jason had made friends with much wealthier students. Was that when her sibling had begun to succumb to the kind of driving ambition and greed that would only lead him into trouble? Or had that change taken place only after Jason had become a high-flying banker with a Porsche and a strong sense of entitlement? Whatever it was, Ella thought with newly learned bitterness, Jason had always wanted more and almost inevitably that craving for easily acquired riches had tempted him down the wrong path in life. But what she would never be able to forgive her brother for was dragging their parents down with him into the mire of debt and despair.
The worst had already happened though, Ella told herself in urgent consolation. Nothing could equal the horror of her mother’s collapse. Once the shock of their disastrous financial situation had finally kicked in, her mother had suffered a heart attack. Rushed into hospital the day before, Jennifer Gilchrist had had emergency surgery and was now mercifully in the recovery ward. Her father had tried hard to adjust to his sudden change in circumstances but, ultimately, it had been too much for him once he appreciated that he would not even be able to pay his staff the wages they were owed. Shock and shame had then overwhelmed him and he had broken down in the hospital waiting room and cried in his daughter’s arms, while blaming himself for not keeping a closer eye on his son’s activities within the firm.
A slight noise sent Ella’s head whipping round. Her brother, who had the thickset build of a rugby player and the portly outline of a man who wasted little time keeping fit, stood in the kitchen doorway nursing a glass of whisky. ‘How’s Mother?’ he asked gruffly.
‘Holding her own. The prognosis is good,’ Ella told him quietly and she turned back to the sink, keen to keep busy rather than dwell on the disquieting fact that her brother had neither accompanied her to the hospital nor made the effort to visit their mother since.
‘It’s not my fault she had the heart attack,’ Jason declared in a belligerent tone.
‘I didn’t say it was,’ Ella responded, determined not to get into an argument with her sibling, who even as a child would have argued twenty-four hours straight sooner than yield a point. ‘I’m not looking to blame anyone.’
‘I mean...Mother could’ve had an attack at any time and at least the way it happened we were here to deal with it and ensure she got to hospital quickly,’ Jason pointed out glibly.
‘Yes,’ Ella agreed soothingly for the sake of peace and she paused before continuing, ‘I wanted to ask you...that massive loan that you said you took out three years ago...’
‘What about it?’ Jason prompted with a harshness that suggested that he was in no mood to answer her questions.
‘Which bank was it with?’
‘No bank would’ve given me that amount of cash without collateral,’ Jason countered with a look that scorned her ignorance of such matters. ‘Zarif gave me the money.’
When he spoke that name out loud, the sink brush fell from Ella’s hand as her fingers lost their grip and she whirled round from the sink in shock. ‘Zarif?’ she repeated in disbelief, her voice breaking on the syllables.
‘After I was made redundant at the bank, Zarif offered me the cash to start up my own business. An interest-free loan, no repayments to be made for the first three years,’ Jason explained grudgingly. ‘Only an idiot would have refused to take advantage of such a sweet deal.’
‘That was very...kind of him,’ Ella remarked tightly, her lovely face pale and tight with control while she battled the far more powerful feelings struggling inside her. Reactions she had learned to suppress during three long years of fierce self-discipline, never ever allowing herself to look back to what had been the most agonising experience of her entire life. ‘But you didn’t start up your own business...you became Dad’s partner instead.’
‘Well, home’s where the heart is, or so they say,’ her brother quipped without shame. ‘The family firm was going nowhere until I stepped in.’
Ella bit back an angry rejoinder and compressed her lips in resolute silence. She wished Jason had chosen to set up his own business. Instead he had bankrupted a stable firm that had brought in a good, if not spectacular, income. ‘I can’t believe you accepted money from Zarif.’
‘When a billionaire flashes his cash in my direction, I’d be a fool to do otherwise,’ Jason informed her in a patronising tone. ‘Of course Zarif only offered the loan in the first place because he thought you were going to marry him and an unemployed brother-in-law would have been a serious embarrassment to him.’
The muscles in Ella’s slender back stretched taut as her brother voiced that unsettling claim. ‘If that’s true, you should’ve given the money back to him when we broke up.’
‘You didn’t break up, Ella,’ Jason interrupted scornfully. ‘You inexplicably refused to marry the catch of the century. Zarif was hardly going to come back and visit us after a slap in the face like that. So, if you’re looking for someone to blame for this mess, look at the part you played in setting us all up for this fall!’
Blue eyes flying wide with dismay, her delicate cheekbones flushed, Ella spun round again. ‘Are you trying to suggest that I’m in some way responsible for what’s happened?’
Bitter resentment flared in her brother’s bloodshot blue eyes. ‘You made an entirely selfish decision to reject Zarif, which not only offended him but also destroyed my friendship with him... I mean, he never contacted me again!’
Ella lowered her pounding head, loose waves of thick honey-coloured blonde hair concealing her discomfited face and deeply troubled eyes. Her brother’s friendship with Zarif had to all intents and purposes died the same day that Ella had refused Zarif’s proposal of marriage and she could not deny that fact. ‘I may have turned him down but it wasn’t a selfish decision—we weren’t right for each other,’ she declared awkwardly, staring at a hole in the tiled floor.
‘When I accepted that money from Zarif, I naturally assumed you were going to marry him and I had no worries about repaying it,’ Jason argued vehemently, tossing back another unappreciative slug of his father’s best whisky. ‘Obviously it’s your fault that we’re in trouble now. After all you’ve had your share of Zarif’s money too!’
Ella frowned, sharply disconcerted by that sudden accusation coming at her out of nowhere. ‘What money? I never touched Zarif’s money.’
‘Oh, yes, you did,’ Jason told her with galling satisfaction. ‘When you needed the cash to go into partnership with Cathy on the shop, where do you think I got it from?’
Ella studied her big brother in horror. ‘You told me it was your money, your savings!’ she protested strickenly. ‘Are you saying that the money came from Zarif’s loan?’
‘Where would I have got savings from?’ Jason demanded with vicious derision. ‘I was in debt to my eyeballs when I was made redundant. I had car loans, bank loans, a massive mortgage on my apartment...’
Ella was stunned by that blunt admission. After finishing college, she and her friend Cathy had opened a bookshop with a coffee area in the market town where they lived. Ella had borrowed from Jason to make her share of the investment and she made heavy monthly repayments to her brother in return for that initial financing. In fact, two and a half years on she was still as poor as a church mouse and couldn’t afford to move out of her parents’ house or run a car on her current share of the takings from the shop. The shop was doing well though, just not well enough to put icing on Ella’s cake and offer her any luxuries. Cathy, the only child of affluent parents who owned a chain of nursing homes, was in a much more comfortable position because the shop was not her only means of support.
‘You deliberately misled me,’ Ella condemned shakily. ‘I would never have accepted that money had I known it came from Zarif and you know it.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers. You were glad enough to get the money at the time.’
‘If