To Touch a Sheikh (5 page)

He strode to the kitchen, flicked switches. Droning started, a generator, then a pump. He turned on the tap. After a few coughs and spurts, water flowed. Her parched insides tingled at the sight. She teetered over to him, took the glass he'd filled for her.

“I've had the well water tested…” He paused as she gulped it down in one go, continued the assurance she hadn't needed. “And it passes through filters and purifiers.” He downed his own glass. “And for the record, this place is about forty miles from where we were. We could have covered the distance in less time under better conditions, but as it was, it was a damn good rate.
So
sorry my efforts didn't meet Your Royal Grumpiness's timetable.”

She felt her lips would split if she smiled. She gulped down her third glass of water, settled for twitching them at him. “I
wasn't
complaining, Your Royal Snarkiness.”

“Why not? It isn't as if I can send you back now.”

“Nope.” She chuckled and watched his strong throat work as he drank, wondered how it would feel beneath her lips, if his skin would taste as intoxicating as he smelled. She sighed, knowing it wouldn't be soon enough before she could find out. “But I would have appreciated it if, among your prolific commentary on the human condition, you'd told me how long you expected our ride to be. Not knowing made it feel like it would never end, made it harder to take.”

“And what would you have done if I'd estimated four hours and those became five or six? You would have spent that extra time going nuts thinking we were lost.”

“Not if you told me we weren't.”

“As if you would have believed me.”

“I absolutely would have.”

That seemed to do the impossible—had him stymied for a comeback. Those spectacular eyebrows swooped down as if he, too, couldn't believe it. As if he couldn't believe she'd trust his word that undeniably. He'd soon learn otherwise.

She saw right through his masterfully off-putting facade to the core of valor inside. She more than trusted him. She believed in him.

She decided to put him out of his sarcasmless misery. “But you wanted to spare me anxiety, so your intentions were good.”

“And we all know where those lead.” He flicked a mocking look around. “Even though
there
wouldn't be much worse than here.”

“Stop insulting this wonderful place. If you no longer want it for a lair, I'll take it off your hands. Just name your price.”

A moment stretched as he brooded at her. “You're barely standing upright and I'm not carrying you again if you collapse. Do so inside while I take care of business. Help yourself to the jet-powered shower.”

“And you dare badmouth this place. I would have been ecstatic with rudimentary indoor plumbing. A jet shower is nirvana.”

“It's nothing like you're used to…” She opened her mouth to
remind him that she hadn't always been a prince's daughter. He overrode her. “And don't expect anything fancy to eat. Provisions are all dried, powdered and canned.”

“It comes with food, too? A veritable five-star hotel, then.”

“Go.”

“Why do I get the feeling you want to get rid of me?” He rumbled something dangerous in his gut. She raised her hands in teasing placation. “I'll go, but only because what you're offering is irresistible. Rest, cleanliness, anything edible—” and
being alone with you,
she added inwardly “—constitutes heaven to me.”

With a last impish glance, she did her best not to wobble to the “inside” his stern finger had pointed to.

She entered a shock of a futuristic bathroom encased in pearly black marble, with a white onyx tub and toilet, a tempered-glass sink and a shower cubicle and brushed-steel fixtures and accents. It felt constructed to suit another facet of him, the ultramodern desert knight, where he—

Worry detonated inside her, aborting her fantasies.

She rushed back out. “Where's Dahabeya?”

Amjad had been standing where she'd left him, staring at the ceiling. Nonchalance descended at her reappearance, masking what she'd seen on his face. But she
had
seen it. A terrible bleakness.

He shrugged. “In her stable, fed and watered. I'll go wash her down and treat any injuries she sustained.”

With that he started fortifying himself again. She walked back slowly to the bathroom, her nerves rattling.

What could have warranted such an expression?

He's exhausted,
she answered herself. She'd just caught him not hiding it.
She
should stop gorging on his every breath and overanalyzing his every expression.

 

She exited a stinging, reviving shower, was drying herself with towels she'd found bagged and smelling of freshness when another scent hit her. Ambrosia, by the smell of it.

She scooped up her clothes, and the scent of fear and exhaustion rising from
them
made her groan in disgust. And she'd been clinging to him smelling like that.

She peeked around the wall. Amjad had his back to her in the kitchen. She bolted across the corridor.

She raided his closet, picked a shirt that fell to her knees. She didn't find any underwear, put her own, washed and wet, on.

She pattered out over the warm, wonderful stone texture of the floor on bare feet, almost dizzy with hunger as the scent intensified on approaching the kitchen.

Her return was rewarded by a look of disinterest.

She smiled. She was on to him. He was anything but disinterested. In anything. From beneath that lazy, bored facade, he watched everything like a hawk, avid, analyzing. And he was anything but uninterested in her. She'd prove it.

“I've changed my mind.” She craned her neck around him to get a closer whiff of the edible delight he was stirring. “This place is a hundred-star hotel. It's got its own crown-prince chef.”

He peered down his sculpted nose at her. “Don't be so quick to promote me to chefdom. You haven't tasted this mess yet.”

“Nothing that smells that good can taste bad. What is it?”

“You mean you've never seen lentils before? Your diet consists solely of carnivorous delicacies and men?”

He wouldn't stop goading her about her supposed mandevouring activities, would he? He'd learn different. Until then, nothing he said could touch her. Even if it always tickled her.

“I'll have you know I'm a vegetarian.” She served generous portions into the bowls he'd put out. “And lentils are one of my favorite foods. I'm asking about the spices that give it that heavenly aroma.”

“You're asking me to reveal my secrets? Tsk. If you must know, it's a protective concoction. For XY-chromosome bearers.”

She giggled. “Protecting huge, power-laden you from XX me, now that I got you stranded in the middle of the desert?”

She laughed again at the notion, before a heady sensation spread inside her.
She
would have been the one fearing for her
safety, or at least feeling uncomfortable, with any other man. But with Amjad she felt totally safe, totally at ease.

She blew into her simmering spoon, licked at its surface. She groaned as the complex flavor hit her taste buds. She hoovered the rest, yelping as it scalded her, then did the same thing again and again.

After a moment of watching her ravenous demonstration, he said, “It's nutmeg, chives, garlic, lime shavings and sumac. But you'll understand if I don't reveal the exact ratio.”

“What good would that be, if I don't know the counter-concoction?”

He gave her a mock-conceding nod, began to eat.

She'd attended banquets he'd organized in the past, forgetting to eat as she lost herself in the pleasure of watching his feline focus and fastidiousness. She suspected he used the absorption in his meal to discourage interaction.

She couldn't let it discourage her now.

“Thank you.”

She felt her whisper hit him like a jolt of electricity.

He hid his start in a rising movement, took his bowl to the sink, throwing over his shoulder, “Nothing to thank me for.”

“Just the inconsequential matter of saving my life.”

“It was incidental to saving my own.”

“Someone else could have thought taking me along would lessen their chance of survival.”

“I'm the Mad Prince, not the Craven one.”

“We both
know
you'd go to any lengths to save someone's life, at the possible price of your own. You did that during that bomb scare. You're the Hero Prince, too, even if you would rather be steamrolled than called that.”

His eyes flared. He'd never given her a chance to bring up the bomb scare before.

She knew why. Not because her side of the story would destroy the reputation he worked so hard to cultivate. The incident was widely known, yet people dismissed the evidence of his heroism and chose to believe what he wanted them to
believe—that he wouldn't lift a finger to save someone drowning at his feet.

It was because he wouldn't acknowledge what had happened between them during and after the incident. He wanted to forget the turning point they'd almost reached. Good luck with that.
She'd
never forget.

He finally smirked. “Watch where you wave those euphemisms. You'll hurt yourself.”

“Oh, just accept my thanks, Amjad. I promise,
you
won't hurt yourself if you do.”

“If it'll make you drop those fanciful interpretations of my actions and character, by all means.” He bowed in mock chivalry. “You honor me with your gratitude and good opinion, Princess Aal Wicked. I'll do whatever it takes to prove I'm not worthy.”

As she chuckled, he turned, started brewing coffee, tossed back at her, “Now that the interesting part of this escapade is over, we begin the dull part of being safe and bored out of our minds.”

“Trust
me
when I say this,” she said. “With both of us here, boredom is a literal impossibility.”

“Boor-dom isn't, so that leaves me hope.”

She laughed again. He wasn't giving an inch. Which would make it more worthwhile when he gave all seventy-seven of his inches.

A minute later, his back still to her, he said, “I called your father.”

Maram started. She'd forgotten about her father, let alone about reassuring him. “Oh, thanks. He must have been worried sick.”

“No.” He walked back, put the mug in front of her without looking at her. “He hadn't had news of the sandstorm yet.”

He took his mug to the laptop. Before he sat on the floor, booted it up and ignored her presence, he added, “I told him we're safe here until the storm subsides.”

And now that they were, Maram was in no hurry for that to happen.

She'd wished for a couple of hours with him over two days. Now she would be secluded from the world with him, all day long, for as long as the sandstorm raged, long may it do so.

She would use every minute to chip away at his condescending resistance and maddening distance. And she
would
do it.

H
ow would he do it?

That was what Amjad wondered again as he watched Maram puttering in the kitchen, humming perky melodies in her smoky-silk voice.

How would he survive having her permeate his every breath, overwhelm his senses and chip away at his good sense, for as long as it took to see his plan through?

His original plan had been to keep her father here until he was willing to negotiate. He'd estimated one night of isolation with him in the desert, aided by the unrelenting sandstorm outside, would bring him around. Yusuf Aal Waaked wasn't a strong man, physically or mentally. Amjad had no doubt he would cave.

That knowledge convinced him Yusuf wasn't the mastermind of the conspiracy. Amjad sensed a more complex, ruthless mind behind it. Probably the informer who'd lured Talia Burke into Zohayd.

Said informer had exposed Yusuf to Talia, Amjad's brother Harres's seductress and future bride, probably because he doubted Yusuf would not go through with the dethroning according to the informer's preferred timetable.

This informer had counted on Talia running to the press with Yusuf's identity and the news of the jewels' theft to get back at the Aal Shalaans, whom she'd then believed had been behind her own brother's arrest and imprisonment. Once exposed, Yusuf would have been forced to fall in with the informer's wishes, which seemed to be
not
to wait for Exhibition Day.

But they'd thwarted the informer. Talia had revealed Yusuf's identity only to Harres, and they hadn't even confronted him.

Yusuf, secure his plans were safe and bound on pursuing his original timetable, had accepted Amjad's annual invitation. Once he'd arrived, Amjad would have taken it from there.

That
had been his best-laid plan.

Now he had Maram instead, even though he preferred braving the sandstorm naked and on foot rather than risk prolonged exposure to her.

His new plan was to call her father in a few days, when he was sure to be desperate for news, and dictate his terms. The moment Harres and Shaheen confirmed the return of the jewels, he would ride to the nearest town with Maram, have a helicopter fly her back to her father. She'd never know she'd been his hostage. He'd advise Yusuf for future self-preservation to never let her suspect anything.

In essence, he'd keep his word. Nothing would harm her.

And now that she believed her father had been reassured of her safety, that this was an adventure, she was enjoying the situation to no end. He wasn't.

This haboob would last days. And if her father hadn't relented by then, he would have to keep her here, unaware of what was really going on, until he did.

It had only been
six damn hours.

Two
if he didn't count the four hours she'd slept.

But he did count them. Knowing she was sleeping in his bed, wearing his shirt, with nothing but that wisp of a panty drying on her hot flesh had made him unable to acknowledge his own exhaustion, to get the rest that would put everything back in
perspective. He'd kept worrying she might suffer some delayed effect of the brutal ride. But he couldn't check on her and see her asleep either. What he'd seen of her legs, of her body where the shirt had clung to the panties' dampness, had been enough. He couldn't risk seeing more.

He'd come to adopt her view of eternity. It felt as if they'd been there that long.

And that was before she woke up. All tousled and creamy and recharged, the vibes she emanated even in her sleep ratcheting up, deluging him, making him forget the tumult raging outside.

At least now she was fully dressed.

He busied himself around the place, fixing shorted-out light sconces, filling and lighting the oil lamps that Maram said she preferred in the sitting/dining area, making an inventory of the pantry's contents, tagging each. All through, she was in every cubic inch of air in this insulated, isolated, doorless cabin he'd built with solitude in mind.

He was feeling as if it were she who'd taken him hostage.

He'd just given up trying to work on his computer, gone to stretch out on the settee. He couldn't concentrate on anything with her singing that medley of sappy songs between asking him about food items and spices she didn't recognize even with the tags, then about his preferences for dinner.

He would have prepared the meal himself, but he knew she'd “help.” Her radiation was bad enough at this distance.

She'd finally decided to make them black-eyed pea stew, hummus tahini and dried-fruit salad. She went all out with the spices and by the time the food was ready, the aromas had turned his hunger to voracity.

She strolled toward him now, bringing plates and utensils, the flickering lamplight casting her beauty through the prism of its fiery illumination. As always, she hijacked his responses, causing the knot in his gut to travel lower, deeper.

“You know, we're quite a pair.” She straightened from setting the table, the swish of her hair—which he shouldn't have heard
over the lament of the storm—tightening his lungs. “People call me Shagaret Ad'Durr while you're known as Shahrayar.”

Amjad knew his namesake. He considered hers as he sat up and she walked back to get the food.

Shagaret Ad'Durr, literally Tree of Pearls, was a historical figure who'd ruled in the region after her husband's death. After she was pressured to take a husband to rule by her side, she learned his loyalty lay with a first wife and had him killed. She was eventually killed herself, by said first wife and her slave women, beaten to death by their dainty wooden clogs.

Maram served the food, then sat on a pile of cushions on the floor across from him. He eyed the table.

So she could make the best of whatever she had to work with. Not to mention the artful presentation. Not a spoiled princess who needed someone to file her nails for her, like Salmah.

And far more dangerous for it. He'd better never forget it.

He dipped the sun-dried bread in the tahini. “Very apt likenesses. Only
I
didn't kill anyone. Not literally anyway.”

She didn't rise to his dig about her fatal activities, grinned at him as she dipped her own bread. “I don't think they were going for historical accuracy, just the general slanderous connotation. I certainly didn't rule alone after Uncle Ziad's death, didn't dispatch my next husband either, and there are no first wives looking to off me with their footwear.”

The delicious creamy tahini turned to dust in his mouth. “Do you realize how…creepy it is to hear you call your late-husband uncle?”

She chewed her food for a while, then sat back, leveling her golden gaze at him, serious for the first time since he'd laid eyes on her. “Okay, so you say you know my whole story. Tell me.”

“Maybe I should wait until you digest your food.” She gave him an imperative gesture. He raised his eyebrows with an it's-your-funeral nonchalance, continued to eat, talking slowly in between bites and spoonfuls of the cordon-bleu-chef-worthy meal. “You and your father managed to make the widowed, depressed and frail ruling prince of your emirate marry you.
The marriage bounced your father over the two men who were before him in line to the throne, making him ruling prince after Ziad's death. End of story.”

“That's all you have? The rumor mill's version?” She cocked her head, sending her waterfall of luminous silk swaying over one shoulder. He felt his heart veer in his chest in the same direction. “Gotta say, it has the tinge of fact required for its fabrications to be taken as the truth.”

She continued eating for a while, seemingly deep in unpleasant thought. Then she raised her eyes again, and the shadows there spread tentacles through him of something he'd long forgotten. Shame? Sympathy?

She exhaled. “So what do you know about
me?
My life before I came to Ossaylan?”

The oppressive feelings made his mockery colder. “You were raised in the States by your single mother till you were twelve and she trapped husband number three, sent you packing to your biological father, Prince Ass-ef. Six years later, he arranged your marriage to his cousin many times removed. Fast forward six more years, ‘Uncle Ziad' croaked, and your father became ruling prince, per the above machinations. You fled to the States, flaunting mourning laws, found a barely legal loaded stud. After a highly publicized affair of a whole
week,
you married him, despite his family's tantrums. Within three months, in their effort to free him from your tentacles, his family disinherited him. It worked, too, because you divorced him almost the next day. After a couple of years during which you set up a booming business peddling sense to senseless politicians and businessmen, you returned to the region to become your father's missing brain.”

A stream of reactions had flowed across her features as he'd talked. Dejection was replaced by astonishment before amusement chased everything away. When he started eating again, she prodded him to go on. He signaled he was done.

Her face split on a smile that flooded his insides in heat and light. “Phew. You make me sound so…interesting.”

His made his answering smile as demolishing as he could. “You are. As interesting as a fatal disease.”

A laugh burst from her. She really was immune to insult. “And you make me sound so…powerful. So dangerous. I almost wish you were right. But boy, I'm nowhere near that colorful or lethal.”

“Sure. Says the tigress before she devours her next kill.”

Her smile was all forbearance and indulgence. “Would you like to hear the real story?”

She
was
unstoppable, wasn't she? “Your version, you mean?”

“Since it's my story, my version should be sanctioned.”

“If it had anything to do with actual events, maybe.”

“How about you stop me if you think I'm substituting fact with fiction?”

“Ready to be constantly interrupted?”

She gave him that bring-it-on grin of hers, rose to her knees to dish out dessert. She'd soaked the dried apricots, raisins, plums and dates and garnished them with toasted almonds. She served the crunchy dried banana and apple with sprinklings of cinnamon and cloves. Just as he preferred.

Because no one knew that about him, it must be her own preference, too. And that was more disturbing than anything.

She settled back. “During my first twelve years, my mom moved from one minimum-wage job to another, from one city to another—always in the north for some reason—and from one man to another. She kept getting engaged in between her divorces. I had the impression she was always looking for the ‘love of her life,' who would provide for her and make her life an ongoing romantic adventure.”

“First fictional substitution,” he said. “A desert prince would have provided all she was looking for, and she didn't snap him up. Or was it that she couldn't sink her fangs into him, even after bearing his child? If so, then Ass-ef actually has more sense than the frog prince I always believed him to be.”

She gave him a softly chiding look that made him want to take back everything he'd said. “First, my father isn't as inept as you
paint him to be. Second, a ‘desert prince' doesn't provide any of what my mother was looking for. As I'm qualified to judge. There's nothing romantic about being forced to live by a tribal court's suffocating rules, with you and your husband's wishes not even coming into consideration from the minutest details of what to wear, who to mingle with, what functions to attend, to the huge decisions, like how many children to have and how to raise them.

“My mother was looking for romance and security, only with the freedom to live her daily life as she pleased, to make her own tiny decisions, to not be shackled down to one place. I guess that was why she never had a career, never tried to buy a house, so she could up and leave if her Prince Charming came along, no regrets. Her one tie was me. But I became independent, then indispensable to her very early on, and she stopped telling me she wished she'd never had me.”

Something churned inside him, more violent than the ideals that drove him to decimate some of the world's biggest bullies.

He hissed, “She told you that?”

“When I was totally dependent and the going got tough for her. But on the whole she did okay by me. I don't think there was more that a nineteen-year-old single mother could have done. She eventually became a good mother to my half siblings. She had me too early, from the wrong man, under the wrong circumstances.”

His blood still sizzled. Not even his mother, a renowned Medusa, had scarred her children that way. “I bet you weren't always so accepting of her self-pitying tantrums.”

“It wasn't easy sometimes, but she was all I had, and I loved her no matter what.”

He fought the compulsion to lunge, take her by the shoulders, shake her out of her acceptance of the injustice the person who should have been closest to her had dealt her, before crushing her to him.

Had she put something in the food?

Great. He was looking for supernatural reasons for her effect on him. When her spell was all-natural. All her.

He huffed his disgust at his hormonal-driven foolishness. “You disappoint me. I thought you were too shrewd to spout such mushy nonsense, to sanction the stupidity of loving someone who should only be despised.”

“Tell that to the child I was.”

“Then you should at least despise her in retrospect now.”

“She wasn't perfect, but she wasn't all bad. She did love me—does love me.”

“That's why she kept you living in poverty, didn't tell you you had a rich father who wanted you?”

“It wasn't that simple. I was the result of a fling she had with my father. An eighteen-year-old who pretended to be older to be with this exotic man who captivated her with his good looks and foreign accent, with his expansive endearments and extravagant gifts and outings. Then he asked her to marry him, took her on a tour of his home. You know Ossaylan thirty years ago was nothing like it is today. She was horrified when she realized what marrying him would mean. No driving, no drinking, no dancing, no friends—no miniskirts, per her specific horror. So, even penniless and with no prospects, she refused his proposal, even when she found out she was pregnant. She informed him she'd have me, yet refused even his financial help. That at least proves she wasn't mercenary. She wouldn't give him power over her, over me, and wind up dragged into the country she abhorred.