Desert Fantasies: Duty and the Beast / Cinderella and the Sheikh / Marrying the Scarred Sheikh

She swallowed. ‘I’m a big girl. I can handle it, surely.’

He nodded. ‘As you say.’ He looked back at the road for a moment before he began. ‘There was a blind man in the village where we grew up, a man called Saleem,’ he started. ‘He was old and frail and everyone in the village looked out for him, brought him meals or firewood. He had a dog, a mutt he’d found somewhere that was his eyes. We used to pass Saleem’s house on our way to school where Saleem was usually sitting outside, greeting everyone who passed. Mustafa never said anything, he just baited the dog every chance he got, teasing it, sometimes kicking it. One day he went too far and it bit him. I was with him that day, and I swear it was nothing more than a scratch, but Mustafa swore he would get even. Even when the old man told him that it was his fault—that even though he was blind he was not stupid. He knew Mustafa had been taunting his dog mercilessly all along.

‘One day not long after, the dog went missing. The whole village looked for it. Until someone found it—or, rather, what was left of it.’

She held her breath. ‘What happened to it?’

‘The dog had been tortured to within an inch of its life before something more horrible happened—something that said the killer had a grudge against not only the dog, but against its owner.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The dog had been blinded. So, even if it had somehow managed to survive the torture, it would have been useless to Saleem.’

She shuddered, feeling sick. ‘How could anyone do such a thing to an animal, a valued pet?’

‘That one could.’

‘You believe it was Mustafa?’

‘I know it was him. I overheard him boasting to a schoolfriend in graphic detail about what he had done. He had always been a bully. He was proud of what he had done to a helpless animal.’

‘Did you tell anyone?’

Her question brought the full pain and the injustice of the past crashing back. He remembered the fury of his father when he had told him what he had heard; fury directed not at Mustafa but at him for daring to speak ill of his favoured child. He remembered the savage beating he had endured for daring to speak the truth.

‘I told someone. For all the good it did me.’

Choose your battles.

His uncle had been so right. There had been no point picking that one. He had never been going to win where Mustafa was concerned. Not back then.

She waited for more but he went quiet then, staring fixedly at the road ahead, so she turned to look out her own window, staring at the passing dunes, wondering what kind of person did something like that for kicks and wondering about all the things Zoltan wasn’t telling her.

He was an enigma, this man she was married to, and, as much as she hated him for who and what he was and what he had forced her into, maybe she should be grateful she had been saved the alternative. Because she would have been Mustafa’s wife if this man had not come for her. She shuddered.

‘Princess?’

She looked around, blinking. ‘Yes?’

‘Are you all right? You missed my question.’

‘Oh.’ She sat up straight and lifted the heavy weight of the ponytail behind her head to cool her neck. ‘I’m sorry. What did you ask?’

He looked at her for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not, before looking back at the interminably long, straight road ahead. ‘Seeing as we were talking about Mustafa,’ he started.

‘Yes?’

‘There is something I don’t understand. Something you told me when we rescued you.’

‘Some rescue,’ she said, but her words sounded increasingly hollow in the wake of Zoltan’s revelations about his half-brother’s cruel nature. Maybe he had saved her from a fate worse than death after all. ‘What about it?’ she said before she could explore that revelation any further.

‘How did you convince Mustafa not to take you right then and there, while he had you in the camp? Why was he prepared to wait until the wedding? Because if Mustafa had laid claim to you that first night he held you captive, if he had had witnesses to the act, then no rescue could have prevented you from being his queen and him the new king.’

She swallowed back on a surge of memory-fed bile, not wanting to think back to those poisoned hours. ‘He told me he did not care to wait, you are right.’

‘So why did he? That does not sound like the Mustafa I know.’

She blinked against the sun now dipping low enough to intrude through her window and sat up straighter to avoid it, even if that meant she had to lean closer to him in the process, and closer to that damned evocative scent.

‘Simple, really. I told him that he would be cursed if he took me before our wedding night.’

‘You told him that and he believed you?’

‘Apparently so.’

‘But there must have been more reason than that. Why would he believe that he would be cursed?’

Beside him she swallowed. She didn’t want to have to admit to him the truth, although she rationalised he would find that truth out some time. And maybe he might at least understand her reluctance to jump into bed and spread her legs for him as if the act itself meant nothing.

‘Because I told him that, according to the Jemeyan tenets, if he took me before our wedding night the gods would curse him with a soft and shrivelled penis for evermore.’

‘Because you are a princess?’

‘Because I am a virgin.’

‘And he believed you?’ He laughed then as if it was the biggest joke in the world, and she wasn’t tempted in the least to rake her nails down his laughing face again—this time she wanted to strangle him.

Instead she turned away, pretending to stare out of the window and at the sea, fat tears squeezing from her eyes, but only half from the humiliating memories of being poked and parted and prodded by the wiry fingers of some old crone who smelt like camel dung.

The other half was because it never occurred to Zoltan to believe her. It never occurred to him that she might be telling the truth, that she might actually be a virgin. And the rank injustice of it all was almost too much to bear. She angled her body away from him to mask the dampness that suddenly welled in her eyes.

To think she had saved herself all this time only to be bound to someone like him instead. The one thing she had always thought hers to give; the one thing she had thought hers to control, and when all was said and done she had no control at all. No choice. It was not to be given as a gift, but a due.

What a waste.

‘It would seem your half-brother is superstitious,’ she managed to say through her wretchedness to cover the truth.

And from behind the wheel, Zoltan’s words sounded as though he was still smiling. ‘Yes. He always was a fool.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

SHE could smell the salt on the air long before she could see the sea. They had left the highway some time ago. The track across the desert sands was slower going, until they topped one last dune and suddenly a dry desert world turned into paradise.

From their vantage point, she could see the rocky peninsula jutting into the crystal-clear sapphire waters, and where before she had seen no signs of vegetation beyond small, scrubby salt-bushes clinging to the sand for their meagre existence for miles, now the shores and rocks were dotted with palms, the rocky outcrops covered with lush, green vegetation.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said as they descended, heading for the long, white strip of sandy beach. ‘But how?’

‘A natural spring feeds this area. If you like, I will take you and show you where the water runs clean and pure from the earth. If I try hard enough, I’m sure I’ll remember the way.’