Chapter 1
“What have you done now?” Lila whispered, as her uncle’s features crumbled. His desolation didn’t move her. Not this time!
“I didn’t mean to!” he sobbed, hiding his haggard features in his hands. “I tried to stop!”
Lila bit back her impatience with difficulty. Shifting on the worn carpet, she glared at the bent-over figure of a man. “Uncle Ibid, if you don’t start explaining, then I can’t fix this.” She kept her tone soft, trying to be comforting. But the man drove her nuts! The man seemed to find himself in one bad situation after another. “What did you do that you couldn’t stop?”
Drugs came to mind first. Was he doing drugs? His ashen pallor suggested illegal drugs were definitely a possibility. “Alcohol?” she offered, hoping…praying…it wasn’t drugs. His bald head glistened with sweat. From his efforts to convince her that he was repentant? Or because he was coming off of a “high”? Tensing, she waited impatiently for his explanation.
“Gambling,” he whispered, not bothering to look up so the words were still muffled. The man even managed to add a slight wobble to that word, as if he hoped to gain her sympathy for his humiliation.
Gambling. Oh dear heaven!
“How much did you lose?”
There was no sympathy for the man. None! Rage? Oh yes. Lila had plenty of rage towards her wretched uncle!
He named a sum that made her stomach churn. He peeked at her through his fingers, and nodded when he took in her stunned expression. “I know! It’s a lot!” When she didn’t scream at him, Ibid pulled his chubby fingers away from his face and straightened up. Sweat still beaded his forehead and upper lip, but his dark eyes were hopeful as he waited for her response.
Lila nodded slowly, trying to absorb the enormous amount and not exactly sure what to say. Clasping her hands in front of her, she took in a slow, deep breath. Okay, gambling. A lot of gambling! There had to be a silver lining in this problem.
A silver lining was…?
Shuddering, Lila tried, and failed, to come up with something positive. It was hard since she was still reeling from the amount Uncle Ibid had just said.
At least it wasn’t drugs, she told herself. Yes, that was the silver lining. It wasn’t drugs. However, gambling was still an addiction. From the amount he’d just stated, it was an out of control addiction.
“How long have you been gambling?” she asked her uncle.
He shrugged, leaning backwards against the chair in her office to stare at the ceiling. However, she suspected his eyes were closed. He’d never liked to face the world, or his problems, so closing his eyes was one solution. Not a particularly effective one, she mentally grumbled. But everyone had their own coping mechanisms.
“A while,” he admitted in a tiny voice, rubbing his grubby hands over the wrinkled linen of his very expensive slacks. “Off and on for years now.” He tried to look her in the eye as he adjusted his collar. “But I’ve kept it under control! I swear to you!”
Lila lifted a dark eyebrow, stunned by his ridiculous assertion. “You owe a significant amount of money, Uncle Ibid,” she pointed out. “I highly doubt that your addiction has ever been ‘under control’.”
He huffed a bit, clearly offended by her accusation. His jowls jiggled with indignation as he insisted, “I am not addicted to gambling! I dabble in the sport a bit, that’s all!” Ibid smoothed a hand over his rounded belly, but his linen shirt was too sweat-stained and wrinkled to look anything other than pathetic.
Lila rolled her eyes. “Uncle, you owe more money than most people pay for an entire house. And you’ve already said that you can’t stop. That’s the very definition of an addiction.”
“No!” he roared and stood up, pacing around her office. “I’m not an addict. I had everything under control!” He sliced his hand through the air as if that might validate his claim. “It’s just…well, things got out of hand a few months ago, and…” he sighed, shaking his head so hard that his jowls jiggled. He was obviously too tired to even stand up because he stopped his pacing and leaned heavily against the sage green wall of her small office. He extended his fleshy hands, pleading with her to understand his predicament and give him sympathy instead of her anger and scorn. “I started winning, don’t you see? I won huge amounts!”
She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. “Then why do you owe so much money? If you’re winning, then shouldn’t the gambling establishments owe you money?” Her stomach tightened, sickened by the man and not wanting to hear his defense.
Ibid mumbled something under his breath that sounded vaguely like, “Bastards cheated.” But he turned to the window, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I kept going back. Gambling is…exhilarating, you see. The thrill of winning was just…!” He looked at her now, his mouth opening and closing as he struggled to help her understand. “When I was winning, it was the most glorious experience I’d ever enjoyed! The thrill and the rush of triumph! It was s
o exciting.” He grinned, but his features were so pale, so haggard and sweaty, that there was no joy in the smile. “And the women were all over me.” He chuckled, looking down at his feet as if remembering the glory of the women in his mind. “I felt like a king!”
Lila shuddered, crossing her arms over her chest as she glared at him. “You mean you paid for sex?”
Ibid’s head lifted swiftly and he glared at her. “Absolutely not!” he growled and huffed again. He threw his hands in the air impatiently. “The women in my past were ladies! If I gave some of them a portion of my winnings, that was a gift and doesn’t make them prostitutes!” He sighed, his shoulders curling in slightly. “Why are you making this sound so tawdry?”
Lila shrugged, unimpressed with his gesticulations and anger. “Because it is tawdry?” she offered with a wry tone.
Uncle Ibid straightened his shoulders, offended and valiantly trying to regain some dignity. “I came to you for help!” he snapped, dark eyebrows furrowing over equally dark, if blood-shot, eyes. “Not judgment.”
Lila chuckled, adding a small, one-shouldered shrug. “Well, I’m able to multitask. I can offer you judgment as well as help, once I get the whole story.”
“I didn’t pay for sex!” he asserted again, his puffy lips pressed tightly together.
“Okay, so you didn’t pay for sex. Beautiful women always fawn over men who are a hundred pounds overweight.” She shrugged. “Go on. Tell me what happened next.” She didn’t really need to hear his explanation. She knew what he was going to say next.
After a small hesitation, his indignation collapsed. He seemed to deflate, even his head dropped as the weight of his problem returned. “I lost it. All of it,” he admitted quietly, slumping down into the chair again. He gripped the arms of the chair that Lila had found on the side of the road, stuffed into her tiny car, and brought home to lovingly refinish and re-upholster. The beautiful chair looked brand new now and Ibid had no idea that he was abusing a project that had taken her weeks to finish.
Ignoring the chair and focusing on Ibid’s problem, she uncrossed her legs and leaned her elbows onto her desk, lacing her fingers together as she watched her uncle carefully. “And more,” Lila pointed out. “You lost all of your winnings, and then continued to lose.”
Ibid started to argue, opening his mouth. But his whole body froze in that position, then deflated once again. “Yes.”
She sighed, wondering why he’d come to her. “Okay, so what do you want me to do? I have about a thousand dollars I can offer to help you pay off the amount.” She didn’t offer a ‘loan’. If she gave her uncle money, Lila knew that she’d never see it again.
His eyes widened, those rough-beard-covered jowls jiggling as he shook his head. “That’s not enough! That won’t even cover the interest on our debt for this week!”
Immediately, she shook her head and she unlaced her fingers, pointing at him emphatically. “Let me be clear, Uncle Ibid. This is your debt. Not ‘our’ debt. I didn’t gamble away a fortune. You did. So whatever mess you’re in, leave me out of it.”
He leaned forward, his red-rimmed eyes wide now. “That’s the thing! I think I know how to get us out of this mess.”
The man was incredible! Had he even heard a word she’d said? “Get you out of this mess. I’m not in a mess,” she told him firmly.
Once again, the man ignored her assertions. “If you could just…go to the palace and ask…”
She lifted a hand, palm out, as she closed her eyes and turned away. Lila already knew what he was going to say. “NO!” she interrupted. “Not a chance!” Just the thought of returning to the palace was a non-starter. Tazir, Prince Tazir…no, wait! He wasn’t a prince anymore. His father had passed away last year. He was now Sheik Tazir el Mitra, Ruler of Fahre. He was the most powerful man in the country! And the amount of power he wielded in the world was…well, she couldn’t even fathom that level of power
There were a couple of leaders in the neighboring countries that were just as powerful, but she didn’t know them. They were strangers.
Tazir…he wasn’t a stranger. He was…well, she mentally shook herself, banishing the image of the tall, gorgeous man from her thoughts. Tazir was out of her reach. Had been for years now!
“Lila, you owe me this!” Ibid vigorously asserted.
Her uncle’s words brought her back to the present. She stared at him for a long moment, unaware of her mouth falling open. “I owe you…why?” she demanded, her tone icy even as she tried to suppress her fury.
He licked his lips nervously, then shrugged, as if the answer should be obvious. “Because I raised you, Lila! My wife and I raised you!”
She laughed, shaking her head. “No, Aunt Mona raised me. You were always off doing whatever it was that you did. Aunt Mona is gone.” She paused, the pain of her loss still a fresh wound. The remembered pain and the current loneliness only came back when she was vulnerable. All other times, she was good. She was confident and…well, she was fine. She missed her aunt terribly. Lila’s beautiful Aunt Mona had raised Lila from a baby after her mother died in childbirth. Aunt Mona had been a wonderful, amazing, incredible woman.
“I was there!” Ibid argued, pushing the painful memories away. “I just worked in the background.”
Lila sighed, her patience running thin now. She rubbed her forehead, trying to find the last vestiges of her patience. “Uncle Ibid, I can’t just go to the palace and, what would be the point anyway? Aunt Lizl passed away as well,” she explained, referring to Aunt Mona’s older sister who had been married to Sheik Tazir’s father for a brief period. ...
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