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Yana sat at the edge of the pool, praising Zara for everything she did right and for things she tried under the swimming instructor’s tutelage. When Yana stood up, Nasir’s breath left his body.
Her skin gleamed with a golden-brown sheen that came out of no bottle. The bright orange bikini she wore was basically three triangles that should come with a libido overload warning. Every movement sensuality in motion, she looked like a Bond girl from the eighties, all wild and free and innately sensual.
The swimming instructor and Yana struck up a relaxed conversation. Then she bent and lifted Zara out of the pool and wrapped her in one big towel, tying a turban-esque smaller one around her hair before the nanny came over to fetch the little girl for her nap.
“Do you see how she flirts with that boy? Is this the kind of behavior you want around Zara?”
Nasir’s irritation leaped into dangerous territory at his mother’s open insults. Of course, he saw the casual flirting, the laughter, the swat on the arm and how her body inevitably bowed toward the younger guy as she chatted to him, how she naturally made him open up and smile back at her.
What he hadn’t understood until now was how that effervescence, that wildness, was an intrinsic part of her. Like lightning, she either illuminated or burned everything she touched. And just the idea of burning with her made arousal flood his body.
He cast his mother a quelling look. “Don’t, Ammi.”
“You will regret—”
“Stop, please.”
In just a few minutes Yana had pinned down his mother’s inconsolable grief and the outlet of bitter rage she used to channel it. The past year he had given in to his mother’s demands to stay with Zara because he understood the sheer magnitude of her loss. He’d lost a woman he’d loved once. While Fatima’s face was nothing but a distorted memory now, the hollow loss of it remained.
But now his mother’s words were directly harming his own motherless child. That he hadn’t seen Zara’s reticence with her until Yana had pointed it out...made his very foundation flounder. “If you cannot be civil to Yana, I’ll send you away.”
“I’m Zara’s grandmother. I’ve helped you look after her all these months.”
“And for that,” he said, “I’m forever grateful. I want Zara to know you, to love you. Jacqueline’s parents are long gone anyway. But everything you say, everything you don’t say, about her mother, and now about her precious Auntie Yana... Zara processes all this.”
“She is only—”
“You can’t have missed that any time Zara spends with you has to be overseen by me at her request, that it’s out of obligation.”
He could see her heart breaking at his harsh words but the truth had to be said. If she didn’t fix her behavior, the damage would soon be irrevocable.
“You’re choosing that woman who’s a liar and cheater and...whose mother ruined my marriage over me?”
And there was the crux of the matter. “The only one I’m choosing here is Zara. I’m doing what I should’ve done from the moment Jacqueline told me she was expecting. If you can set your grief aside for one moment—” he raised his palms to hold her protest off “—you’ll acknowledge that Zara flourishes when Yana is around. Yana’s going to be a permanent part of our life, and I want you there, too. That means you have to let the past go. Yana was only a child herself when Abba and Diana met.”
“What about the lies she told about you?”
“She was young and naive, and the only one she had to teach her right from wrong was Diana, who we both know has no moral compass. And I had just dealt her a brutal rejection.” He’d never been able to get her stricken face out of his head. He’d turned on her, when he could have dealt the same rejection with a little grace and a lot more kindness.
Instead, mindless with grief and guilt over losing Fatima, he’d shredded Yana to bits. He saw the truth finally, clearly now. Yana had loved him with all the urgency and naiveté and fierceness of a nineteen-year-old.
“If I can let it go, then you can. And Yana’s not responsible for Abba leaving you.”
“You are attracted to her,” his mother whispered in a shaken voice. “How just like a man!”
He didn’t dignify that with a response.
“She is not right for you.”
Nasir laughed. “I chose Jacqueline but she cheated on me again and again. And believe me, I was no great husband, so I very possibly drove her to it. Yana’s suitability is moot because she loathes the very sight of me.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No wonder my ego has always flourished, Ammi.”
“If she’s that important to Zara,” she said, having to have the last word before she walked off, “then you’d better keep your distance.”
Having been celibate for more than three years, Nasir wondered if part of what was driving him might just simply be sexual frustration. But he knew it wasn’t just a need for release.
