Johara gaped at Shaheen as the realization sank through her, splashed like a rock into her gut.She should have known that he wouldn’t.Why should he? He’d probably forgotten she existed.Even if he hadn’t, she looked nothing like the fourteen-year-old he’d known.That was due in part to her own late blooming and in part to her mother’s influence. In Zohayd, Jacqueline Nazaryan had always downplayed Johara’s looks. Her mother had later told her she’d known that Johara, having inherited her height and luminescent coloring and her father’s bone structure and eyes, would become a tall, curvaceous blonde who possessed a paradoxical brand of beauty. And in the brunette, petite-woman–dominated Zohayd, a woman like Johara would be both a prized jewel and a source of endless trouble. If she’d learned to emphasize her looks, she would have become the target of dangerous desires and illicit offers, heaping trouble on her and her father’s head. Her mother had left her in Zohayd secure that Johara had no desire and no means of achieving her potential and would continue looking nondescript.Once she’d joined her mother in France, Jacqueline had encouraged her to showcase her beauty and had done everything she and her fashion-industry colleagues could to help Johara blossom into a woman who knew how to wield what she was told were considerable assets.As Johara became a successful designer and business-woman herself, she learned her mother had been right.
