The sheikh's chosen wife (11 page)

'Just like that.' she
said shakily, and looked away from him as so many things began to fall into
place. 'I felt their eyes on me.' she murmured. 'I knew they were there."

'I suspected that you
would do,' Hassan quietly commended. 'It is the kind of training we instilled
into you that you never forget."

'But this was different.'
She got up, wrapped her arms around her body. 'I knew it felt different. I
should have heeded that!"

'No—don't get upset.'
Following suit, Hassan stood up and reached for her. She was as pale as a ghost
and shaking like a leaf. 'My people were also there watching over you,' he
assured. 'The car driver was my man, as was the man at the gate. I had people
watching their people. There was not a single moment when you were not
perfectly safe."

'But to dislike me so
much that they should want to take me!" Hurt beyond belief by that
knowledge, Leona pushed him away, unwilling to accept his comfort. It had been
hard enough to come to terms with it, when she'd believed he had snatched her
back for his own purposes. But to discover now that he had done it because
there was a plot against her was just too much to take. 'What is it with you
people that you can't behave in a normal, rational manner?' she threw at him,
eyes bright, hurt and accusing. 'You should have phoned me not my father!"
she cried. 'You should have agreed to a divorce in the first place, then none
of this would have happened at all!'

The you people sent
Hassan's spine erect; the mention of divorce hardened his face. 'You are one of
my people,' he reminded her curtly.

'No, I am not!" she
denied with an angry shake of her head. 'I am just an ordinary person who had
the misfortune to fall in love with the extraordinary!'

'At least you are not
going back to denying you love this extraordinary person,' he noted arrogantly.
'And stop glaring at me like that!" he snapped. 'I am not your enemy!'

'Yes, you are!' Oh, why
had she ever set eyes on this man? It would have been so much easier to have
lived her life without ever having known him! 'So what happens now?' she
demanded. 'Where do we go from here? Do I spend the rest of my days hiding from
dark strangers just because you are too stubborn to let me go?"

'Of course not.' He was
standing there frowning impatiently. 'Stop trying to build this into more than
it actually more? 'Don't you think it is enough to know that I wasn't safe to
be walking the streets in San Esteban? That my life and my basic human rights
can be reduced to being worth nothing more than a mere pawn in some wretched
person's power game?'

'I am sorry it has to
come to this—'

Well, that just wasn't
good enough! 'But you are no belter yourself!' she threw at him angrily. 'Up to
now you've used abduction, seduction and now you've moved onto intimidation to
bring the wayward wife into line." She listed. 'Should I be looking for
the hidden cameras you are using so that you can show all of Rahman what a
strong man you can be? Do I need to smile now?" she asked, watching his
face grow darker with the sarcasm she tossed at him—and she just didn't care!
'Which way?" she goaded. 'Do I need to let Rafiq shroud me in an abaya again
and even go as far as to abase myself at your exalted feet just to save your
wretched face?'

'Say any more and you are
likely to regret it," he warned very grimly.

'I regret knowing you
already!' Her eyes flashed, her body shook and her anger sparkled in the very
air surrounding her. 'Next I suppose you will have me thrown into prison until
I learn to behave myself!'

'This is it—' he
responded, spreading his arms out wide in what was an outright provocation.
'Your prison. Now stop

shouting at me like some
undignified fishwife,' he snapped. ‘We need to—'

'I want my life back
without you in it!' Leona cut loudly across him.

What she got was the
prince. The face, the eyes, his mood and his manner changed with the single
blink of his long dark eyelashes. When his shoulders flexed it was like a dangerous
animal slowly raising its hackles, and the fine hairs on her body suddenly
became magnetised as she watched the metamorphosis take place. Her breathing
snagged; her throat grew tight. He was standing perhaps three yards away from
her but she could suddenly feel his presence as deeply as if he was a
disturbing inch away.

'You want to live your
life without me, then you may do so,' he announced. 'I will let you go, give
you your divorce. There, it is done. Inshaliah’ With a flick of the hand he
strode across the room and calmly ordered tea!

It was retaliation at its
most ruthless and it left her standing there utterly frozen with dismay. Inshaliah.
She couldn't even wince at what that single word represented. The will of
Allah. Acceptance. A decision. The end. Hassan was agreeing to let her go and
she could neither move nor breathe as the full power of that decree made its
stunning impact.

She had not deserved
that, Hassan was thinking impatiently as he stood glaring down at the
telephone. She had been shocked, angry, hurt. Who would not be when they discovered
that people they cared about, people they had tried to put before themselves,
had been plotting to use them ruthlessly in a nasty game called politics? She
had every right to vent her feelings—he had expected it! It was the reason why
he had found them privacy before telling her the truth!

Or part of the truth, he
then amended, all too grimly aware that there was yet more to come. But the
rest was going to have to wait for a calmer time, for this moment might be
silent but it certainly was not calm, because—

Damn it, despite the
sensible lecture he was angry! There was not another person on this planet who
dared to speak to him as she had just done, and the hell if he was going to
apologise for responding to that!

He flicked a glance at
her. She hadn't moved. If she was even breathing he could see no evidence of
it. Her hair was untidy. Long silken tendrils had escaped from the band she'd
had it tied up in all day and were now caressing her nape, framing her stark
white profile to add a vulnerability to her beauty that wrenched hard on his
heart-strings. Her feet were bare, as were her slender arms and long slender
legs. And she was emulating a statue again, only this time instead of art-deco
she portrayed the discarded waif.

He liked the waif. His
body quickened; another prohibited sigh tightened his chest. Curiosity replaced
anger, though pride held his arrogant refusal to be the first one to retract
his words firmly in place. She moved him like no other woman. She always had
done. Angry or sad, hot with searing passion or frozen like ice as she was now.

Inshaliah.
It was Allah's will that
he loved this woman above all others. Let her go? Not while he had enough
breath in his body to fight to hold onto what was his! Though he wished he
could see evidence that there was breath inside hers.

He picked up an ornament
measured the weight of the beautifully sculpted smooth sandstone camel then put
it back down again to pick up another one of a falcon preparing to take off on
the wing. And all the time the silence throbbed like a living pulse in the air
all around them.

Say something—talk to me,
he willed silently. Show me that my woman is still alive in there, he wanted to
say. But that pride again was insisting he would not be the one to break the
stunning deadlock they were now gripped in.

The light tap at the door
meant the ordered tea he didn't even want had arrived. It was a relief to have
something to do. She didn't move as he went to open the door, still hadn't
moved when he closed it again on the steward he'd left firmly outside. Carrying
the tray to the low table, he put it down, then turned to look at her. She
still hadn't moved.

Inshallah,
he thought again, and
gave up the battle. Walking over to her, he placed a hand against her pale
cheek, stroked his thumb along the length of her smooth throat then settled it
beneath her chin so he could lift her face up that small inch it required to
make her look at him.

Eyes of a lush dark
vulnerable green gazed into sombre night-dark brown. Her soft mouth parted; at
last she took a breath he could hear and see. 'Be careful what you wish for,'
she whispered helplessly.

His legs went hollow. He
understood. It was the way it had always been with them. 'If true love could be
made to order, we would still be standing here,' he told her gravely.

At which point the ice
melted, the gates opened and in a single painfully hopeless move she coiled her
arms around his neck, buried her face into his chest and began to weep.

So what do you do with a
woman who breaks her heart for you? You take her to bed. You wrap her in
yourself. You make love to her until it is the only thing that matters any
more. Afterwards, you face reality again. Afterwards you pick up from where you
should never have let things go astray.

The tea stewed in the
pot. Evening settled slowly over the room with a display of sunset colours that
changed with each deepening stage of their sensual journey. Afterwards, he carried
her into the shower and kept reality at bay by loving her there. Then they
washed each other, dried each other, touched and kissed and spoke no words that
could risk intrusion for as long as they possibly could.

It was Leona who
eventually approached reality. 'What now?' she asked him.

'We sail the ocean on our
self-made island, and keep the rest of the world out,' he answered huskily.

'For how long?'

'As long as we possibly
can.' He didn't have the heart to tell her he knew exactly how long. The rest
would wait, he told himself.

It was a huge tactical
error, though he did not know that yet. For he had not retracted what he had
decreed in a moment of anger. And, although Leona might appear to have set the
words aside, she had not forgotten them. Nor had she forgotten the reason she
was here at all: there were people out there who wanted to harm her.

But for now they
pretended that everything was wonderful. Like a second honeymoon in fact—if an
unusual one with Rafiq and Faysal along for company. They laughed a lot and
played like any other set of holidaymakers would. Matters of state took a back
seat to other more pleasurable pursuits. They windsurfed off the Greek islands,
snorkelled over shipwrecks, jet-skied in parts of the Mediterranean that were
so empty of other human life that they could have had the sea to themselves.

One week slid stealthily
into a second week Leona regained the weight she had lost during the empty
months without Hassan, and her skin took on a healthy golden hue. When matters
of state refused to be completely ignored, Rafiq was always on hand to help
keep up the pretence that everything was suddenly and miraculously okay.

Then it came. One
heat-misted afternoon when Hassan was locked away in his office, and Faysal,
Leona and Rafiq were lazing on the shade deck sipping tall cool drinks and
reading a book each. She happened to glance up and received the shock of her
life when she saw that they were sailing so close to land it felt as if she
could almost reach out and touch it.

'Oh, good grief,' Getting
up she went to stand by the rail. 'Where are we, Rafiq?'

'At the end of our time here
alone together,' a very different voice replied.

CHAPTER SIX

Leona turned to find
Hassan was standing not far away and Rafiq was in the process of rising to his
feet. One man was looking at her; the other one was making sure that he didn't.
Hassan's words shimmered in the air separating them and Rafiq's murmured,
'Excuse me, I will leave you to it,' was as revealing as the speed with which
he left.

The silence that followed
his departure pulsed with the flurried pace of her heartbeat while Leona waited
for Hassan to clarify what he had just said.

He was still in the same
casual shorts and shirt he had been wearing when she had last seen him, she
noticed. But there, the similarity between this man and the man who had kissed
the top of her head and strolled away to answer Faysal's call to work a short
hour ago ended. For there was a tension about him that was almost palpable, and
in his hand he held a gold fountain pen which offered up an image of him
getting up from his desk to come back here at such speed that he hadn't even
had time to drop the pen.

'We arrived here sooner
than I had anticipated,' he said, confirming her last thought.

'It would be helpful for
me to know where here is,' she replied in a voice laden with the weight of
whatever it was that was about to come at her.

And come it did. 'Port
Said,' he provided, saw her startled response of recognition and lowered his
eyes on an acknowledging grimace that more or less said the rest.

Port Said lay at the
mouth of the Suez Canal, which linked the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. If
they were coming into the port, then there could only be one reason for it.

Hassan was ready to go
home and their self-made, sea-borne paradise was about to disintegrate.

He had noticed the pen in
his hand and went to drop it on the lounger next to the book she had left
there. Then he walked over to the long white table at which they had eaten most
of their evening meals over the last two weeks. Pulling out a chair, he sat
down, released a sigh, then put up a hand to rub the back of his neck as if he
was trying to iron out a crick.