The Sheikh Who Blackmailed Her: Desert Prince, Blackmailed Bride / The Sheikh and the Bought Bride / At the Sheikh's Bidding

It was a view he had looked at countless times, but never before had his appreciation of the beauty held this bitter poignancy.

Zantara had grown beyond recognition in the last few years, but there was still so much to be done—and he had assumed he would be there to do it, to guide his country into the twenty-first century, treading the delicate path between tradition and progress … Frustration and a sense of loss so profound he had no words to describe it clenched around his heart like an iron fist. He closed his eyes, his strong-boned features reflecting the emotions he had fought to subdue since receiving the prognosis earlier.

He jaw hardened, and he dragged a hand through his dark hair while squaring his broad shoulders. He could not afford to indulge in emotional reaction. He needed to stay focused. There was much to do and very little time to do it in.

His task and his title would fall on the shoulders of his younger brother, and his affection for his likeable sibling did not blind him to the fact that Hakim was utterly unsuited to the task.

Zantara was a land richly endowed with natural resources. As well as oil, there were vast mineral deposits as yet untouched. Properly managed, they guaranteed the long-term prosperity of Zantara and its people—but there were many in high places who only paid lip service to the long-term aims that he and his father had always worked towards.

They smiled and applauded reform, but given the chance they would not let morality or ideals get in the way of exploiting the country for their personal gain.

As the heir, over the years Rafiq had been the target of influential families on the make, who would have liked nothing better than to see him marry one of their own, thus automatically gaining—or so they imagined—unprecedented access to the throne.

Zantara had a political stability that was the envy of surrounding countries, but Rafiq was only too aware of how easily things could change—how little it would take to unbalance that delicate harmony. Introducing a perceived advantage to one of the country’s powerful families might be all it took.

Rafiq, who had no intention of allowing that situation to occur, was amused rather than threatened by political manoeuvring. But Hakim was so eager to please, so malleable—in fact all the things that made his brother so much more likeable a person than he was—and he would be putty in the hands of those circling sharks. When Hakim became heir he would become their new target … It was a disaster waiting to happen.

What Hakim needed, he mused, was someone to guide him—someone with backbone, someone behind the throne giving his brother the strength to make tough decisions and see through the sycophants and con-men.

It came to Rafiq in a blinding flash. It was simple, but obvious. His brother needed a wife—the right sort of wife, obviously—who could be groomed for the role of power behind the throne.

Rafiq straightened up as he mentally skimmed the list of possible candidates…

A frown of dissatisfaction furrowed his brow as he methodically discarded them all. It would take a very special woman.

He rubbed a hand over the brown skin of his neck, feeling the grit that remained after his solitary ride through the desert earlier.

It had required all his considerable skill to stay in the saddle as his Arab stallion, the pride of the stables, possibly picking up on the mood of his master, had spent all the time he wasn’t thundering across the desert as though pursued by devils trying to unseat his rider.

The only possible candidate who even began to fill his requirements was—

Rafiq did not complete the thought, because at that moment he heard a voice—a very distinct and very feminine voice.

‘So what happens next, Gabby?’

Rafiq knew what was going to happen next, but he could identify with the desperation in that voice.

Either auditory hallucinations were a symptom of the disease the doctor had forgotten to mention, or someone had had the audacity to invade what was his private sanctum. The tower room was the place he retreated to when the weight of the formality involved in fulfilling his duties became too stifling and oppressive—it was his retreat, tucked away in this remote corner of the palace, simply furnished and totally out of bounds.

Utterly astounded that anyone would have such impudence, and curious to see the owner of the very English voice, Rafiq pulled aside the heavy curtain that screened the small balcony from the room beyond.

Chin resting on her knees, Gabby’s eyes lifted as the big heavy curtain was swept back, flooding the room with golden light and revealing a balcony surrounded by an elaborately carved railing.

Gabby’s eyes carried on up. The golden-skinned man who stood framed in the light-filled arch was seriously tall.

He was also quite spectacularly good to look at.

He wore a knee-length robe in a thin white fabric—thin enough, as a gust of wind plastered it close to his lean torso, for her to make out the shadow of a dark drift of body hair across his broad chest. The riding breeches he wore beneath the robe were tucked into dusty boots. His head was bare and the dusky gloss of his hair outlined by a nimbus of sunlight—which seemed appropriate, as there was something of the fallen angel about his achingly perfect features. Gabby was disastrously sidetracked from her personal dilemma by the combined impact of chiselled cheekbones, a clean-shaven square jaw, a broad, intelligent forehead, aquiline nose, a wide and disturbingly sensual mouth, and incredible wide-spaced black eyes shot with flecks of platinum and framed by long curling sooty lashes.

Wow!

No man had a right to be that good-looking.

He arched a dark brow and drawled. ‘Gabby …?’

His voice was deep, and the velvet tones only slightly accented, but for some reason it made the hairs on the nape of Gabby’s neck stand on end. Probably the male arrogance he was oozing had got under her skin. Something had. She rubbed her hands along her forearms, troubled by the prickling sensation under her skin.

‘No … Yes …’ Aware that she was blushing like a schoolgirl, she closed her mouth. Unable to break the mesmeric hold of his bold pewter-flecked stare, she gave up trying to sound like someone with an IQ in single figures.

‘You are perhaps bad with names?’

It was not unusual to see a woman in Zantara wearing Western clothes, even though less commonly they wore jeans. But it was very unusual to find one who was blue-eyed or blonde. The young woman sitting on the floor was both.

The startled azure eyes fixed on his face suggested their owner was just as surprised to see him as he was to see her—so this wasn’t an engineered meeting …

That had been his initial assumption, and Rafiq still reserved judgement. He had been frequently pursued over the years, and the women who set their sights on him constantly managed to surprise him with their ingenuity—not to mention their acting ability.

His vanity, or lack of it, was such that he didn’t imagine for one second that it was his personal magnetism that made these women humiliate themselves by going to such embarrassingly elaborate lengths to gain his attention. It was his title, his position that attracted them. The old adage that power was a strong aphrodisiac was not far from the mark.

He had occasionally wondered in the past if he would ever find a woman who wanted him and not what he represented, or even wanted him despite what he represented.

Those thoughts had never gone beyond casual speculation, because he had always known that in reality his choice of bride would be a political decision, not a romantic one. His own parents’ marriage had been such a one, and despite a considerable age-gap the marriage had been a success. They both respected one another, and neither had entered into the arrangement with any false expectations.

The union had produced two sons, and had done much to negate the political fallout from his father’s first marriage. That marriage had been a love-match—not in itself a problem, but King Zafir’s first wife’s inability to supply him with an heir had been. When the King had steadfastly refused to put aside the love of his life, the monarchy that had lasted so many generations had been in real danger. Then, against all the odds, the Queen had conceived, but the country’s and the King’s delight had been short-lived. Queen Sadira had gone into premature labour and died of complications. The baby—a boy—had died a week later.

By all accounts his father had been almost mad with grief, and without his powerful hand at the reins the country had divided into warring factions. It had been a time of deep political unrest.

Rafiq had never been able to imagine the man he knew today being so blindly besotted that he’d put romantic love ahead of duty. Even less could he imagine himself repeating that mistake.

Now, of course, the subject was irrelevant. For him there would be no marriage, no wife and no future.

Cutting short this line of thought before he became lost in a morass of despondency, Rafiq dragged a hand though his hair, smoothing the dark strands into the nape of his neck. A frown of distaste drew his brows into a straight line. He despised self-pity in himself even more than in others.

Besides being a pointless emotion, it smacked of self-indulgence—more productive by far to focus on things he could control. Like the blonde …

The blonde whose astonishing neon blue eyes had not yet left his face.

She really was not the sort of woman you would miss in a crowd—not with those eyes and that head of decadent blonde curls that spilled down her back, framing a vivid little face that reminded him of a Titian portrait. But below the neck, he decided, staying with the art analogy, she was pure Degas. Her slim, supple and gently rounded body might have belonged to one of that artist’s ethereal ballet dancers.

She looked like a wilted rose, with her grubby face and the purple smudge of exhaustion beneath her eyes. She was the delicate, petite type of female that aroused the protective instinct in a lot of men.

Rafiq’s assessing glance drifted from her stubborn chin and defiant, wary eyes to the pouting lower lip, and he thought they would be the same men who failed to notice that she had stroppy written all over her.

She began to struggle to her feet. Rafiq noted the tremor in the hand that reached to clutch for support and extended his own. She looked at it for a moment with the sort of enthusiasm that most people reserved for a striking snake, then deliberately ignored it, carrying on struggling.

Rafiq withdrew his hand and with a derisive shrug made no further attempt to help her, even though she looked about as weak and shaky as a newborn kitten.

He liked independent women—but not when they felt the need to make pointless displays of self-sufficiency.