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

The words she heard chilled her blood and made her dizzy with shock and disbelief. ‘But, Papa, I do not understand.’ And this time he said the words slower, so there could be no mistake, so she could not misunderstand.

‘Aisha, you are not going home. Why has no-one told you yet? You must marry Zoltan.’

She made the mistake of looking up, caught the suddenly smug look on Zoltan’s face, as if he had caught the gist of her conversation and knew it was not in her favour. Then again, he had probably read her reaction on her face. She spun around, turning her back on him, hating his air of casual boredom, hating the sudden curve she’d witnessed on his lips.

Hating everything about him.

‘But, Papa …’ she pleaded into the receiver, curving her free hand around the mouthpiece, shielding the panic in her voice and cursing her impulse to let Zoltan stay in the room while she took the call. But she was not done yet. ‘I don’t want to marry him!’

He wanted to choke. Did she for one moment actually imagine that he actually wanted to marry her? Laughable. But it wasn’t laughable. It was painful, really, having to listen to one half of a conversation when that half was clearly going so wrong.

There were plenty more ‘but, Papa’s, a fair sprinkling of ‘but why?’s and a lot of time where she said nothing but listened to what her father was telling her before she tried to get a word in. He had to admit the one that almost plucked at his heart strings was the ‘Please, Papa, please!’

Said in her Poor Little Princess voice, it was quite touching, really. If you cared.

Even if you did, what could anyone do? Hadn’t he explored every option himself?

But then the final cruncher—the ‘Yes, Papa,’ in a voice that sounded like a child’s who had just been rebuked and told to be good—before she turned back to the desk and put the receiver down.

It was awkward witnessing someone else’s humiliation, especially after they’d insisted you stayed and had acted as if it was going to be some kind of victory for them.

Awkward and yet, at the same time, supremely satisfying.

She didn’t look up at him, but she didn’t have to for him to realise she’d been crying. Her long lashes were clumped into thick black spikes, moisture glazed her eyes and he had to wonder why she insisted on making it so difficult for herself.

He’d learned early in life that some things were worth fighting for and some things were a lost cause from day one. ‘Choose your battles,’ his uncle, the King, had told him when he was just a young boy and still steaming after his father had, as usual, accepted Mustafa’s side in a dispute. ‘Don’t waste your time on the things you can’t change. Save your energy for the battles that count.’

He hadn’t really understood the message back then; it had all just seemed so unfair that his father had never taken his word, no matter the truth of the matter. But bit by bit he’d learned that nothing would ever change and that arguing only made things worse.

Gradually he’d learned to accept the inevitable and save his energies for the battles he could win.

Someone should have told this woman the same thing.

Didn’t she see there was no changing this? She was stuck. As stuck as he was in this centuries-old time warp. There was no getting out of it. There was no escape.

‘So you managed to sort it all out?’ he asked when she had stood there, her hands on the replaced receiver, for way too long.

She drew in a long breath then, blinked, straightened and made the tiniest concession she could to her tears by flicking them from the corners of her eye while making out as though she was pushing the weight of her long, dark hair back behind her ears.

‘My father will be here tomorrow, as you said.’ Her voice was low and flat, as if all the stuffing had been knocked out of it, all the life.

He waited longer still, struck by how much this admission of defeat cost her in her too-stiff spine and forced control, almost—if he had to admit it—admiring her. Maybe she wasn’t as fragile as he had supposed or she would have been wailing on the end of the phone, dissolved into shrieks and fits of tears by now. Facing him after the instruction to stay, only for it to mean he had witnessed her humiliation, would be no easy task. Not for anyone, let alone some brittle, spoilt princess.

She blinked then as she looked up at him. ‘My father—Sheikh Ashar—says I have no choice. Apparently neither of us do. It seems it is more complicated than a mere alliance. He says our countries are inexorably linked and that if this marriage doesn’t happen both of our families forfeit their right to their respective thrones. So, if I say no, it will not only be Al-Jirad without a king.’

He waited. He had known this to be the truth, but she would never have believed him if he had told her. It was better coming from her father.

‘So then, it is settled. There is no escaping this marriage, for either of us.’

She blinked up at him, her eyes as empty as her voice. ‘Not unless I wish my father to lose the crown and my brothers to lose their birthright.’

She drew in breath and seemed to grow taller then, her chin raised, her eyes resigned but still, he noted, with a glimmer of defiance, even if still glassy. ‘I would not do that to my family, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘In which case, it seems there is no choice. Apparently I am stuck with this marriage.’ Her chin grew higher then, her eyes grew colder, with an icy surface you could skate over. ‘And so, it would seem, stuck with you.’

He watched her leave, her head held high, her posture impossibly straight and regal.

Haughtiness becomes you, he thought as she swept from the room, back to her princessly best, if you didn’t count the riotous freefall of her hair tumbling down her back, hair that had felt like a silk curtain in his hands. He remembered the feel of her in his arms, the heat from her mouth, the softness and suppleness of her body against his, and he growled low and deep in his throat.

For all her protests, for all her pretence, there was a live woman under that haughty exterior, hot and wanting, and he would take great pleasure in peeling that harsh shell away piece by inevitable piece.

‘What happened to you?’ There was laughter in Rashid’s words as he led the other two friends into the library and caught sight of Zoltan’s cheek.

‘Let me guess,’ Bahir said with a knowing grin. ‘The princess happened to him.’

Kadar perched himself on the edge of the desk where Zoltan sat and studied the three lines down his friend’s cheek. ‘No wonder she wasn’t impressed by my fire-works. Looks like she’s packing her own.’

Zoltan leaned back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers, his head full of ancient verse after hours of study. No surprise that his friends would find this intensely amusing. They would no doubt find it doubly so if they knew exactly what he had been doing right before she had raked her claws down his cheek.

‘I’m glad you all find this so entertaining. What are you doing here anyway? I thought you were falconing today.’

‘We thought you might be lonely,’ Rashid said, picking up a paperweight from the table and tossing it from one hand to the other. ‘Didn’t realise you were otherwise occupied.’

‘Don’t drop that,’ Zoltan warned, thankful for the opportunity to change the subject. ‘It’s Murano glass, three-hundred years old. A present from the then-king to his sheikha. Worth a fortune, apparently.’

Bahir stopped tossing the paperweight for a moment, peering into the colours of its mysterious depths. ‘Oh well,’ he said, tossing it in Rashid’s direction. ‘Easy come, easy go.’

Kadar spun around the heavy tome sitting in front of Zoltan and peered down. ‘What’s this?’

‘The Sacred Book of Al-Jirad. I have to know it by the coronation.’

‘What? All of it?’

‘The entire thing, chapter and verse. Ready to be quoted from at the appropriate moment, to spout the wisdom of the ages.’

Rashid whistled. ‘Then, brother, you really do need rescuing.’

Kadar slammed the book shut before Zoltan could stop him. ‘Come on, then,’ he said, jumping to his feet.

‘I don’t have time,’ he growled. ‘I’ll see you at dinner.’

‘What, you’re too busy to spend a few minutes with your best friends when we’ve all come so far to help you? Nice one.’

‘Lame,’ Rashid agreed, tossing the paperweight casually in one hand. ‘Besides, you have to exercise some time. We’re heading for the pool.’ And he threw the paperweight at Zoltan so fast he almost fumbled the catch and dropped it to the marble floor.

‘Reflexes a bit slow today?’ he teased, looking at his cheek. Zoltan knew he wasn’t talking about the paperweight. ‘I reckon I might actually beat you over twenty laps today. What do you say?’