Sheikh's Unlikely Desire (3 page)

“Very well,” Zayn said, smiling tolerantly. “I have no food restrictions, so simply order what you think we would both enjoy.”

She grinned. “LA has some of the most interesting food in the world. Let me make a call. You won't be sorry.”

She had food ordered in less than five minutes, and now she settled down to work.

“So tell me about what's going on,” she said, pulling out her tablet. “I need to hear all about it.”

For a moment, Zayn looked startled. She realized with surprise that he had been watching her while she ordered. For a self-conscious moment, she wondered what he had seen, but then she reminded herself that he was paying for her skills not her looks.

He sighed a little. “At the bottom of it, it is very simple. A production company here in LA called Ice Fields is creating a movie, and I want it stopped.”

Leah waited to hear more, but he simply looked at her expectantly.

“I'll need to know more than that,” she said. “Are they infringing on something that belongs to you? Have you or a family member written a story or film that is very close to the plot? These are hard things to prove, and the more you tell me, the better off I am going to be...”

Zayn's jaw clenched, and those extraordinary green eyes darkened like the storm coming over a glassy sea. “In many ways, all those things are true. To begin from the beginning, the head of Ice Fields and some of his men came to Almira a year ago. They came as part of a cultural exchange, and at first it was going quite well. They learned, we learned from them, and when we sent them home, it was with a great deal of celebration and thanks. I assumed that we had learned from each other a mutual respect of each other's ways and culture. A month ago, I find that this is far from the case.”

A brief look of pain crossed Zayn's face, making Leah reach out to touch his hand. It was more than she would have done otherwise, but when she touched his warm skin, she knew it was right.

He smiled at her briefly before he continued. “I received word from one of my cultural attaches that Ice Fields was making a movie set in Almira and... well, it is based on some truly abhorrent gossip.”

Leah was starting to see the shape of things, but she couldn't go to war based on hurt feelings and injured pride. Whatever Ice Fields was doing, it upset Zayn greatly, but so far, it wasn't something they could stop.

“I'm very sorry,” she said softly, “but if I'm to help you...”

“You need to know more, of course.” Zayn nodded, suddenly looking quite tired. “The story is about my mother and my father. In brief, my mother was an English woman who came to Almira when she was just a teenager, the daughter of a diplomat. During that time, there was a great deal of strife in the country. The diplomatic corps was moved to the palace, and that was where she met my father, Safir al-Fasi. He was older than she was, much older, but she was taken. When she described that time, she spoke of herself like a lioness stalking its prey, and she would not rest until he was hers. They loved each other very much, and they married when she was eighteen.”

“What happened to them?” Leah could see it, the teenage girl, headstrong and wild in a strange land. She could feel the love and passion that must have driven her to follow a man who looked like Zayn around the palace, learning his ways and finding the nerve to speak with him, and then to speak to him again when he rebuffed her for her youth.

Zayn's smile was wry. “What happens to us all if we are very lucky,” he said. “They married and they ruled together for almost thirty-five years. She was his rock, the power that kept his back straight and his eyes bright even when affairs of state wanted to devour him whole. He was her passion, and whenever he was in the room, her eyes followed him. Almost three years ago, she died of cancer, and my father, well, he was uninterested in living without her.”

Leah flinched at that bald assessment, and she had to make herself speak. “That sounds like a wonderful story,” she hazarded.

Zayn's laugh was bitter. “Yes, it was, and if that was the story they wished to tell, I would let them film in Almira without asking for a single cent. No, what they want to film is a travesty, based on ancient gossip that has been spun by my family's enemies for so long that it's become threadbare.”

“What do you mean?”

Zayn flinched, and when he spoke next, it was as if the words were being dragged from him.

“The story they wish to tell is a pack of lies. They want to tell about a brave English girl who came to a savage land that was torn by war. They want to reduce my mother to a frightened child who was terrified of gunfire, and who came to the attention of a man who was as much an animal as he was a soldier. She is an innocent that he captures and rapes, and then he makes her his wife and the queen of a monstrous land. She sees the terrible land she has come to rule, and she is caught, frozen until she births a son that changes everything.”

“You,” Leah guessed with a flinch.

“Yes, much to my dismay. So a son appears, and she knows that she must change everything. She goes to kill the evil king, but before she can kill him, he kills her as well, and they die together, leaving a child who will carry his mother's good English ideals forward into the barbarity of a savage, backward land.”

Leah flinched, because she could see it. It was like any number of forgettable movies that had come out over the past years. She could even guess what starlets might be tapped to play the brave Englishwoman who suffers and loses all. When there were real people behind it, it became a real travesty.

“And you want this story stopped. You want production to cease, is that correct?”

Something dark flashes through Zayn's eyes. “I want this ended,” he spat. “If this were a different age and a different time, I would show them what it meant to trifle with the family of a sheik of Almira. I would show them how a real barbarian behaves. But no. I want this stopped.”

Leah nodded slowly. This was a place she had definitely been before. She had worked with people on similar jobs, though none of them had been as important as Ice Fields or Zayn.

“I think I know what the answer will be, but I have to ask,” she said. “Are you willing to settle for a sum of cash? That's going to be the first thing that they offer.”

Zayn snorted. “Of course they would seek to buy me out. No. that is not something that I will allow.”

“All right. Just so I'm clear going forward. This is just about the shape of what I need. Tonight I can start putting together my brief, and in the meantime, I'll send a cease and desist letter to Ice Fields. In a perfect world, they see that they're overstepping and they back the hell off, but they're not going to. This is just a formality.”

Zayn eyed her with something new in his eyes. It looked like respect and a kind of regard she did not usually see in men, particularly ones who were rich and powerful.

“You sound like you are ready to go off to war for me,” he noted.

Leah grinned. “In many ways, that's exactly what I'm doing.”

She paused. One of the first rules of the business was that she should not let her heart overrule her common sense. She should never let passion take the front seat when she needed a cool head. However, there was something about Zayn that told her that if he respected anything, he would respect passion. He would understand this.

“I am going to do everything I can to stop this movie from being produced,” she said. “I will not stop until they have given up. It may not be easy, and I'm sure there will be some parts where it will look very dark, but I will do my best for you. I'll give you everything I have.”

Zayn nodded slowly. “In the long history of Almira, we have gone to many wars, countless struggles. In the last generation, we have kept ourselves well away from them. How strange it is to come to another land and to brace myself for a battle with you as my knight. Very well, Ms. Montgomery. I put my faith, my honor and my will in your hands.”

There was something startlingly formal about it, as if it was a real ceremony where she was being invested with real powers. Leah felt a dull blush come up to her cheeks, but she nodded.

“I will be worthy of it,” she said. “Now, it's getting a little late in the day, and I'm sure that you are going to want some time to yourself to recover.”

Zayn arched one dark brow at her. Some watchful part of her noted how dark it was and how beautiful, as if it had been inked in by the hand of a gifted artist.

“Leaving so soon? I'm afraid that if you are going to be my knight, there is one more part of the service that you must submit to.”

Something in Leah trembled at the idea of submission, but she shook it off. “What do you need?” she asked instead.

He smiled, showing those sharp white teeth. “I need you to join me, and together we will eat and drink. Breaking bread is sacred all over the world, and that is what we need to do.”

Leah bit her lip. Nothing excited her more than the idea of going to join Zayn, but there was a great deal of work to be done. “This evening, I need to draw up some paperwork and get that cease and desist letter out the door. I need to brief Hiller and Hiller about what's going on. But tonight at ten, I'll be all yours.”

Mutinous clouds formed over his face. The sheik was not a man who was used to being denied. Tough. He was on her turf now, and he needed to play by her rules. She squared her shoulders, ready to fight him if she needed to. Instead, he smiled again, and shrugged.

“You are going to fight for me. It is good that you have teeth. Very well. Come to the hotel gates at ten, and I will show you exactly why committing yourself to my service is the right choice.”

Leah barely prevented herself from saluting smartly at his words. Instead, she limited herself to a smile and a nod. “Tonight, then.”

CHAPTER THREE

The next few hours passed in a blur. If Leah had a dozen arms, she still would have found something for every single one of them to do. With her headset on, she was able to talk with Grant, and more alarmingly, with Bryce. Grant trusted her, but Bryce wasn't at all sure about letting such a big account go to a lawyer who was still, as he put it “wet behind the ears and dumb as a box of hammers.”

“I'm the one he wants,” she said, speaking more bravely than she had dared to do before. “Go ahead and talk him out of it if that's what you want to do.”

For a moment, she could hear the old war machine in Bryce's mind turn. She knew he was deliberating doing just that. This was the place where, if she were less certain about what she was doing, she would have let him take her off the case. Instead, she waited in silence.

“Right. It's yours, but God help you if you don't close it. I mean it, Montgomery. You get with that man, and you stay as close to him as his own shadow while he's in Los Angeles, all right?”

“Roger that,” she responded flippantly.

She got a number of similar cases pulled up by their excellent paralegal department, and she sent off the cease and desist order to Ice Fields. Just glancing through the production company's history, she could see they had done similar things before, taking supposedly true stories and turning them into melodramatic tragedies that were forgotten just a few months later. She wondered bitterly if any of the people who’d had their lives picked apart by Ice Fields had the power to do anything about it. Well, if she had anything to say about it, she was going to make sure they didn't do it again.

Leah was just freshly showered and heading for her closet when her phone rang again. For a moment, she was convinced it must be Zayn, and that he had found more suitable company for the evening than his lawyer.

 To her surprise, it was Daisy.

“Daisy? What time is it over there?”

“Oh, I'm just enjoying some brunch, but don't worry about it. So how's it going?” What could have been a generic greeting from her cousin buzzed with expectation and excitement.

“If you're asking about a copyright case turned libel and defamation lawsuit, that's going just fine. If you're talking about... actually, I give up. What are you talking about?”

Daisy groaned. Being married to Rashad, the ruler of Marat, had truly brought her cousin out of her shell. For years, she had languished in Mira's shadow, but now that she was a queen in her own right, she bloomed. “I'm talking about Zayn! What did you think of him?”

“He's... he's very passionate, very devoted to what we're doing here... Daisy, what the hell do you have in mind?”

Daisy's laugh was excited. “Rashad took me to meet Zayn just a few months ago. The first time I saw him, he was trying to ride this desert stallion that had been roaming the area for years, this big beautiful white animal. He got on its back, stuck on like a burr, and when it was tired, he spoke to it so sweetly that it did just what he said.”

“That... sounds like a lie, Daisy.”

“Believe it or not, whatever you like. Rashad told me that all of Zayn's family has a way with horses, but more than that, they have a way with horses because they understand passion. Then I thought, who do I know who has lots of passion...”

 Something about Daisy's description of Zayn taming a wild horse made Leah blush, but she brushed it off. “Daisy, tell me you didn't send this man halfway across the world so you could play matchmaker!”

Daisy's voice grew serious. “No, or at least, not just for that. You've heard the story about his family?”

“He told me, yes.”

“The story of his parents meeting and marrying is one that is very dear to him, and to many of his people, as well. It's... it's part of who they are, a story that belongs to them, the way that King Arthur belongs to England, you know? You're the only person I could think of who would defend it right. Who would understand. I knew that you of all people weren't going to let him down.”

Despite herself, Leah was touched by her cousin's regard. “I have no intention of doing so,” she promised. “Just... if you send any other handsome sheiks my way, a little warning would maybe be nice?”

Daisy's laugh was her only response, and then Leah was left to get ready. The clock was ticking, and as she had told Zayn, it would take her twenty minutes to get back to his hotel. Suddenly everything in her closet looked far too suburban, far too dull. She was going to meet with a man who was known around the world for his power and wealth, and she was going to look like...a lawyer.