The sheikh's chosen wife (18 page)

'Why is it you have to do
this to me?' he shouted at her furiously.

'Hassan.' someone said
gruffly. He looked up. saw hi brother's face, saw Samir looking like a ghost, saw
the inflatable   almost  upon   them,   then   saw—really  saw—the woman he
held crushed in his arms. After that the world took on a blur as Rafiq and
Samir joined them in the water and helped to lift Leona into the boat. Hassan
followed, then asked Raschid and the crewman to bring in the other two men on
the jet-skis. As soon as the jet-skis left the inflatable, he turned it round
and, instead of making for the yacht, he headed out in the Red Sea.

Leona didn't notice, she
was lying in a huddle still sobbing her heart out on top of a mound of towels
someone had had the foresight to toss into the boat, and he was shaking from
teeth to fingertips. His mind was shot, his eyes blinded by an emotion he had
never experienced before in his life.

When he eventually
stopped the boat in the middle of nowhere, he just sat there and tried hard to
calm whatever it was that was raging inside of him while Leona tried to calm
her frightened tears.

'You know,' he muttered
after a while, 'for the first time since I was a boy, I think I am going to
weep. You have no idea what you do to me, no idea at all. Sometimes I wonder if
you even care."

'It was an accident,' she
whispered hoarsely

'So was the trip on the
gangway! So was the headlong fall down the stairs! What difference does it make
if it was an accident? You still have no idea what you do to me!'

Sitting up, she plucked
up one the towels and wrapped it around her shivering frame.

'Are you listening to
me?' he grated.

'No,' she replied. 'Where
are we?"

'In the middle of nowhere
where I can shout if I want to, cry if I want to, and tell the rest of the
world to get out of my life!' he raged. 'I am sick of other people meddling in
it. I am sick of playing stupid, political games. And I am sick and tired of
watching you do stupid madcap things just because you are angry with me!'

'Hassan—'

'What?' he lashed back
furiously, black eyes burning, body so taut it looked ready to snap in two. He
was soaking wet and he was trembling—not shivering like herself.

'I'm all right,' she told
him gently.

He fell on her like a
ravaging wolf, setting the tiny boat rocking and not seeming to care if they
both ended up in the water again. 'Four minutes you were under the water—I
timed it!' he bit out between tense kisses.

'I'm accident prone; you
know I am,' she reminded him. 'The first time we met I tripped over someone's
foot and landed on your lap.'

'No.' He denied it. 'I
helped you there with a guiding hand.'

She frowned. He grimaced.
He had never admitted that before. 'I had been watching you all evening,
wondering how I could get to meet you without making myself appear over-eager.
So it was an opportunity sent from Allah when you tripped just in front of me.'

Leona let loose a small,
tear-choked chuckle. 'I tripped in front of you on purpose,' she confessed.
'Someone said you were an Arabian sheikh, rich as sin, so I thought to myself.
That will do for me!'

'Liar,' he murmured.

'Maybe.' She smiled.

Then the teasing vanished
from both of them. Eyes darkened, drew closer, then dived into each other's to
dip into a place so very special it actually hurt to make contact with so much
feeling at once.

'Don't leave me—ever.' He
begged her promise.

Leona sighed as she ran
her fingers through his wet hair. Her throat felt tight and her heart felt
heavy. 'I'm frightened that one day you will change your mind about me and want
more from your life. Then what will I be left with?'

'Ethan Hayes is in love
with you,' he said.

'What has that got to do
with this?' She frowned. 'And, no, he is not.'

'You are frightened I
will leave you. Well, I am frightened that you will one day see a normal man
like Ethan and decide he has more to offer you than I ever can."

'You are joking,' she
drawled.

'No, I am not.' He sat
up, long fingers reaching out to pluck absently at the rope work around the
sides of the boat. 'What do I offer you beside a lot of personal restrictions,
political games that can get nasty enough to put your well-being at risk, and a
social circle of friends you would not pass the day with if you did not feel
obliged to do so for my sake.'

'I liked most of our
friends in Rahman,' she protested, sitting up to drape one of the towels around
her head because the sun was too hot. 'Those I didn't like, you don't particularly
like, and we only used to see them at formal functions.

'Or when we became stuck
on a boat with them with no means of escape."

'Why are we having this
conversation in this small boat in the middle of the Red Sea?' she questioned
wearily.

'Where else?' He
shrugged. 'In our stateroom where there is a convenient bed to divert us away
from what needs to be said?"

'It's another abduction,'
she murmured ruefully.

'You belong to me. A man
cannot abduct what is already his.'

'And you're arrogant.'
She sighed.

'Loving you is arrogant
of me?' he challenged.

Leona just shook her head
and used the comer of the towel to dry her wet face. Her fingers were
trembling, and she was still having a struggle to calm her breathing. 'Last
night you promised me a divorce.'

'Today I am taking that
promise back.'

'Here...' she held her
arm out towards him. '...can you do something about this?'

Part of the netting she
had been tangled in was still clinging to her wrist. The delicate skin beneath
it was red and chafed. 'I'm sorry I said what I did last night,' he murmured.

'I'm sorry I said what I
did.' Leona returned. 'I didn't even mean it the way it came out. It's just
that sometimes you look so very...'

'Children are a precious
gift from Allah,' Hassan interrupted, dark head sombrely bent over his task.
'But so is love. Very few people are fortunate enough to have both, and most
only get the children. If I had to choose then I would choose, to have love.'

'But you are an Arabian
sheikh with a duty to produce the next successor to follow on from you, and the
choice no longer belongs to you.'

'If we find we want
children then we will get some,' he said complacently, lifting up her wrist to
break the stubborn cord with the sharp snap of his teeth. 'IVF, adoption... But
only if we want them.' He made that fine but important point. 'Otherwise let
Rafiq do his bit for his country,' he concluded with an indifferent shrug.

'He would give you one of
his stares if he heard you saying that.' Leona smiled.

'He is an Al-Qadim,
though he chooses to believe he is not."

'He's half-French.'

'I am one quarter
Spanish, and one quarter Al-Kadah,' he informed her. 'You, I believe, are one
half rampaging Celt. I do not see us ringing bells about it."

'All right, I will stay,'
she murmured.

Dark eyes shrouded by a
troubled frown lifted to look at her. 'You mean stay as in for ever, no more
argument?' He demanded clarification.

Reaching up, she stroked
her fingers through his hair again. 'As in you've got me for good, my lord
Sheikh,' she said soberly. 'Just make sure you don't make me regret it.'

'Huh.' The short laugh
was full of bewildered incredulity. 'What suddenly brought on this change of
heart?'

'The heart has always
wanted to stay, it was the mind that was causing me problems. But...look at us,
Hassan.' She sighed 'sitting out in the middle of the sea in a stupid little boat
beneath the heat of a noon-day sun because we would rather be here, together
like this, than anywhere else.' She gave him her eyes again, and what always
happened to them happened when he looked deep inside. 'If you believe love can
sustain us through whatever is waiting for us back there, then I am going to
let myself believe it too.'

'Courage,' he murmured,
reaching out to gently cup her cheek. 'I never doubted your courage.'

'No,' she protested when
he went to kiss her. 'Not here, when I can feel about twenty pairs of eyes
trained on us from the yacht."

'Let them watch,' he
decreed, and kissed her anyway. 'Now I want the privacy of our stateroom, with
its very large bed," he said as he drew away again.

'Then, let's go and find
it.'

They were halfway back to
the yacht before she remembered Samir telling her about the planned meeting.
'What happened?' she asked anxiously.

Hassan smiled a brief,
not particularly pleased smile. 'I won the support I was looking for. The fight
is over. Now we can begin to relax a little.'

As a statement of
triumph, it didn't have much satisfaction running through it. Leona wanted to
question him about it, but they were nearing the yacht, so she decided to wait
until later because she could now clearly see the sea of faces watching their
approach—some anxious, some curious, some wearing expressions that set her
shivering all over again. Not everyone was relieved that Hassan had plucked her
out of the ocean, she realised ruefully.

Rafiq and a crewman were
waiting on the platform to help them back on board the yacht. 'I'll walk,' she
insisted when Hassan went to lift her into his arms. ‘I think I have looked
foolish enough for one day.'

So they walked side by
side through the boat, wrapped in towels over their wet clothing. Neither
spoke, neither touched, and no one accosted them on their journey to their
stateroom. The door shut them in. Hassan broke away from her side and strode
into the bathroom. Leona followed, found the jets in the shower already
running. She dropped the towels, Hassan silently helped her out of the
buoyancy aid that had not been buoyant enough and tossed it in disgust to the
tiled floor. Next came her tee shirt, her shorts, the blue one-piece swimsuit
she was wearing beneath.

It was another of those
calms before the storm, Leona recognised as she watched him drag his shirt off
over his head and step out of the rest of his clothes. His face was composed,
his manner almost aloof, and there wasn't a single cell in her body that wasn't
charged, ready to accept what had to come.

Tall and dark, lean and
sleek. 'In,' he commanded, holding open the shower-cubicle door so that she
could step inside. He followed, closed the door. And as the white-tiled space
engulfed them in steam he was reaching for her and engulfing her in another
way.

Think of asking questions
about how much he had conceded to win his support from the other sheikhs? Why
think about anything when this was warm and soft and slow and so intense that
the yacht could sink and they would not have noticed. This was love, a renewal
of love; touching, tasting, living, breathing, feeling love. From the shower
they took it with them to the bed, from there they took it with them into a
slumber which filtered the rest of the day away.

Questions? Who needed
questions when they had this depth of communication? No more empty silences
between the loving. No more fights with each other or with themselves about
the wiseness of being together like this. When she received him inside her she
did so with her eyes wide open and brimming with love and his name sounding
softly on her lips.

Beyond the room, in
another part of the yacht. Raschid looked at Rafiq. 'Do you think he has
realised yet that today's victory has only put Leona at greater risk from her
enemies?' he questioned.

'Sheikh Abdul would be a
fool to show his hand now, when he must know that Hassan has chosen to pretend
he had no concept of his plot to take her.'

'I was not thinking of
Abdul, but his ambitious wife,' Raschid murmured grimly. "The woman wants
to see her daughter in Leona's place. One only had to glimpse her expression
when Hassan brought them back to the yacht to know that she has not yet had the
sense to give up the fight...'

CHAPTER NINE

Leona was thinking much
the same thing when she found herself faced by Zafina later that evening.

Before the confrontation
the evening had been surprisingly pleasant. Leona made light of her spill into
the sea, and the others made light of the meeting that had taken place as if
the battle, now decided, had given everyone the excuse to relax their guard.

It was only when the
women left the men at the table after dinner that things took a nasty turn for
the worse. Evie had gone to check on her children and Leona used the moment to
pop back to the stateroom to freshen up. The last person she expected to see as
she stepped out of the bathroom was Zafina Al-Yasin, standing there waiting for
her.

Dressed in a traditional
jewel-blue dara'a and matching thobe heavily embroidered with silver studs,
Zafina was here to cause trouble. It did not take more than a glance into her
black opal eyes to see that.