Sheikh's Ransom
ALEXANDRA SELLERS
“Am I A Hostage?” (#u250d77d1-6deb-5847-a7a0-bf92a5bb28e6)Letter to Reader (#u4c78a66a-c3e7-55b5-a815-bd2785b32e79)Title Page (#uf17394de-d177-5a2d-96cf-e0421fb81233)Dedication (#ud58063f8-e63c-5a8e-8e00-78e2b264168e)About the Author (#u6df13195-cdd1-500d-bca5-8cabd542e73c)Karim’s Inheritance The Jewel Seal of Shakur (#ud2d59aca-36c4-59fa-83a9-89a6290fa7d7)Chapter One (#uafba754e-8eed-54a6-8b2f-960b8a0fd4c4)Chapter Two (#ua9e272ac-20b9-5264-acb3-c92a1053f060)Chapter Three (#u6542b283-1c9a-57d4-8d88-32b542f7a364)Chapter Four (#u50ff1f91-effa-5763-becf-e9421ed726d2)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Am I A Hostage?”
Caroline stared at Karim while a million unnamed dreams shattered into dust.
“It is natural that you will feel anger.”
“Why do they say you are a prince? Are you?” Her voice seemed to be coming from a distance.
“Caroline, come upstairs where we can talk in comfort,” he urged her. “There is much to tell you, much for you to understand.”
“If I have a choice, it is to leave this place now. If I have no choice, I await Your Majesty’s order. But I will not pretend that I go anywhere willingly in your company.”
“Then I order you upstairs,” he replied calmly.
Without a word she turned and preceded him through the arched entry that only a few hours ago had seemed like the doorway to magic to her....
Dear Reader,
April brings showers, and this month Silhouette Desire wants to shower you with six new, passionate love stories!
Cait Lordon’s popular Blaylock family returns in our April MAN OF THE MONTH title, Blaylock’s Bride. Honorable Roman Blaylock grapples with a secret that puts him in a conflict between confiding in the woman he loves and fulfilling a last wish.
The provocative series FORTUNE’S CHILDREN: THE BRIDES continues with Leanne Banks’s The Secretary and the Millionaire, when a wealthy CEO turns to his assistant for help in caring for his little girl.
Beverly Barton’s next tale in her 3 BABIES FOR 3 BROTHERS miniseries, His Woman, His Child, shows a rugged heartbreaker transformed by the heroine’s pregnancy. Powerful sheikhs abound in Sheikh’s Ransom, the Desire debut title of Alexandra Sellers’s dramatic new series, SONS OF THE DESERT. A marine gets a second chance at love in Colonel Daddy, continuing Maureen Child’s popular series BACHELOR BATTALION. And in Christy Lockhart’s Let’s Have a Baby!, our BACHELORS AND BABIES selection, the hero must dissuade the heroine from going to a sperm bank and convince her to let him father her child—the old-fashioned way!
Allow Silhouette Desire to give you the ultimate indulgence—all six of these fabulous April romance books!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
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Sheikh’s Ransom
Alexandra Sellers
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Lilia
who looks just like a Greek statue, and
who understood because her mother is an artist
ALEXANDRA SELLERS was born in Ontario, and raised in Ontario and Saskatchewan. She first came to London to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and fell in love with the city. Later, she returned to make it her permanent home. Now married to an Englishman, she lives near Hampstead Heath. As well as writing romance, she teaches a course called “How To Write a Romance Novel” in London several times a year.
Because of a much-regretted allergy, she can have no resident cat, but she receives regular charitable visits from three cats who are neighbors.
Readers can write to her at PO. Box 9449, London, NW3 2WH, England.
THE BARAKAT EMIRATES
SHEIKH’S RANSOM, Prince Karim’s story, April 1999
THE SOLITARY SHEIKH, Prince Omar’s story, May 1999
BELOVED SHEIKH, Prince Rafi’s story. June 1999
Available only from Silhouette Desire.
Karim’s Inheritance The Jewel Seal of Shakur
There was once a king of ancient and noble lineage who ruled over a land that had been blessed by God. This land, Barakat, lying on the route of one of the old Silk Roads, had for centuries received the cultural influences of many different worlds. Its geography, too, was diverse: it bordered the sea; then the desert, sometimes bleak with its ancient ruins, sometimes golden and studded with oases, stretched inland for many miles, before meeting the foothills of snow-capped mountains that captured the rain clouds and forced them to deliver their burden in the rich valleys. It was a land of magic and plenty and a rich and diverse heritage.
But it was also a land of tribal rivalries and not infrequent skirmishes. Because the king had the ancient blood of the Quraishi kings in his veins, no one challenged his right to the throne, but many of the tribal chieftains whom he ruled were in constant jealousy over their lands and rights against the others.
One day, the king of this land fell in love with a foreign woman. Promising her that he would never take another wife, he married her and made her his queen. This beloved wife gave him two handsome sons. The king loved them as his own right hand. Crown Prince Zaid and his brother were all that he could wish for in his sons—handsome. noble, brave warriors, and popular with his people. As they attained the age of majority, the sheikh could look forward to his own death without fear for his country, for if anything should happen to the Crown Prince, his brother Aziz would step into his shoes and be equally popular with the people and equally strong among the tribes.
Then one day, tragedy struck the sheikh and his wife. Both their sons were killed in the same accident. Now his own death became the great enemy to the old man, for with it, he knew, would come certain civil war as the tribal chieftains vied for supremacy.
His beloved wife understood all his fears, but she was by now too old to hope to give him another heir. One day, when all the rituals of mourning were complete, the queen said to her husband, “According to the law, you are entitled to four wives. Take, therefore, my husband, three new wives, that God may bless one of them with a son to inherit your throne.”
The sheikh thanked her for releasing him from his promise. A few weeks later, on the same day so that none should afterwards claim supremacy, the sheikh married three beautiful young women, and that night, virile even in his old age, he visited each wife in turn, no one save himself knowing in which order he visited them. To each wife he promised that if she gave him a son, her son would inherit the throne of Barakat.
The sheikh was more virile than he knew. Each of his new wives conceived, and gave birth, nine months later, to a lusty son. And each was jealous for her own son’s inheritance. From that moment the sheikh’s life became a burden to him, for each of his new young wives had different reasons for believing that her own son should be named the rightful heir to the throne.
The Princess Goldar, whose exotically hooded green eyes she had bequeathed to her son, Omar, based her claim on the fact that she herself was a descendant of the ancient royal family of her own homeland, Parvan.
The Princess Nargis, mother of Rafi and descended from the old Mughal emperors of India, had in addition given birth two days before the other two wives, thus making her son the firstborn.
The Princess Noor, mother of Karim, claimed the inheritance for her son by right of blood—she alone of the wives was an Arab of noble descent, like the sheikh himself. Who but her son to rule the desert tribesmen?
The sheikh hoped that his sons would solve his dilemma for him, that one would prove more princely than the others. But as they grew to manhood, he saw that each of them was, in his own way, worthy of the throne, that each had the nobility the people would look for in their king, and talents that would benefit the kingdom were he to rule.
When his sons were eighteen years old, the sheikh knew that he was facing death. As he lay dying, he saw each of his young wives in turn. To each of them again he promised that her son would inherit. Then he saw his three sons together, and on them he laid his last command. Then, last of all, he saw the wife and companion of his life, with whom he had seen such happiness and such sorrow. To her willing care he committed his young wives and their sons, with the assistance of his vizier Nizam al Mulk; whom he appointed Regent jointly with her.
When he died the old sheikh’s will was revealed: the kingdom was to be divided into three principalities. Each of his sons inherited one principality and its palace. In addition. they each inherited one of the ancient Signs of Kingship.
It was the will of their father that they should consult the Grand Vizier Nizam al Mulk for as long as he lived, and appoint another mutual Grand Vizier upon his death, so that none would have partisan advice in the last resort. Their father’s last command had been this: that his sons should never take up arms against each other or any of their descendants, and that his sons and their descendants should always come to each other’s aid in times of trouble. The sheikh’s dying curse would be upon the head of any who violated this command, and upon his descendants for seven generations.
So the three princes grew to maturity under the eye of the old queen and the vizier, who did their best to prepare the princes for the future. When they reached the age of twenty-five, they came into their inheritance. Then each prince took his own Sign of Kingship and departed to his own palace and his own kingdom, where they lived in peace and accord with one another, as their father had commanded
To Prince Karim’s lot fell the seaside palace of the country now called West Barakat, and the protection of the Great Jewel Seal of Shakur. This emerald seal, made for an ancient king of the lineage, was the subject of a legend that warned that if the Seal were lost, the kingdom would be lost. Karim knew that his people were superstitious, and that he must ever guard and keep the Seal if he valued his kingdom.
One
October 1994
“A historic moment in the Barakat Emirates today,” the NewsBreakers anchorman announced. “A landmark agreement, opening the Emirates to foreign investment for the first time in modern history, is being signed this morning by the representatives of four countries and the three new Barakati princes. In a few moments, NewsBreakers will take you live to the capital of the Barakat Emirates for the ceremony of signing. Except for a few diplomats over the centuries, this marks the first time that Westerners have seen inside the historic palace.” He turned to his partner. “It’s going to be quite an occasion, Marta.”
“Yes, Barry, it is! Barakat has been virtually closed to Western interests for most of the past two centuries. Even the old sheikh, who was relatively modern in his views, restricted foreign investment and even tourism throughout a reign that began in 1937, effectively cutting Barakat off from the modern world. When he died—”
“Marta, sorry to interrupt, I think we’re going live now—to the palace in the capital, Barakat al Barakat, where television cameras have been allowed into the Throne Room for the first time in history. Paul, are you there?”
“Hello, Barry, yes, the representatives of the Four Nations are already at the signing table as you see, and we’ve just had word that the princes are on their way,” a reporter’s voice murmured, over the image of a magnificent marble hall filled with milling dignitaries. “At this moment they have apparently just left the private apartments and are making their way to the Throne Room along a corridor—it’s called the Corridor of Decision—that their ancestors have used on state occasions since this palace was built in 1545. They will enter the Throne Room by the huge double doors that you see in the centre of the screen, behind the signing table. That’s the massive Lion Throne to the right of the doors.”
“Massive seems to be an understatement,” said Marta.
“We tried to get some statistics on the value and weight of the throne, Marta, and what kind of baubles are embedded in it, but the habit of secrecy...all right, the doors are opening now—those doors are being opened, by the way, by high courtiers, not by menials, and it’s a task they vie for—and first through the door, we’ve been briefed, will be the Grand Vizier Nizam al Mulk, the favorite advisor of the last sheikh and joint Regent during the minority of the princes, which ended only last year...and there he is! The Grand Vizier of the Barakat Emirates.”
A white-bearded old man of impressive dignity, his costume sparkling with jewels, was seen walking through the great doorway. He paused briefly and moved down the steps towards the table below.
Paul murmured, “That, we’re told, is the traditional ceremonial dress of the Grand Vizier on state occasions, but you can believe the princes’ own regalia will put his in the shade. And of course the aura of power you sense is just that. Nizam was the Regent for seven years, his regency ending only last year, as I said, and he still has the very important role of advisor to all three princes.
“Just behind him are coming now the Prime Minister and the members of the Cabinet, all elected officials. Barakat is what they call a democratic monarchy...and following them, twelve men who hold the ceremonial office still called the Cup Companions, looking very magnificent in their own fabulous ceremonial robes. By tradition the king has twelve Cup Companions, and I believe each of the three princes does still appoint twelve, but to...ah, limit the formality of the occasion, we’re told,” Paul said dryly, “a representative joint twelve has been chosen on this occasion.
“And a dramatic pause, of course, because the next to appear—they will step over the threshold neatly abreast to show that they share power equally—will be the three princes themselves.
“And there they are!” In spite of a jaded outlook and, in the course of fifteen years in television news, having seen it all, Paul could not keep the excitement from his voice.
“Oh my God!” exclaimed Marta involuntarily. She had been anchorwoman only two years and had not quite attained the ideal of journalistic impassivity.
Across the threshold into the ancestral Throne Room stepped the three princes, equal but very individual exemplars of regal bearing, handsome countenance, and staggering magnificence. Those watching, both in the Throne Room and in front of their television sets, fell unconsciously silent for a few telling seconds.
“Well, if you’d asked me, I would have said it wasn’t possible in the modern age,” said Barry faintly, and in Barakat Paul merely murmured, “Yes, I think words would be superfluous here. That is a truly breathtaking sight.”
Framed by the graceful decorated arch of the ancient entrance, the three princes paused, smiling at the applauding crowd in the room below. Dressed in coats of heavy cloth of gold, trousers of gold-embroidered silk, and rings and necklaces studded with glittering jewels and glowing pearls, each also wore a magnificent and unusual turban of pleated cloth of gold, each adorned with a central jewel the size of a fist—one ruby, one emerald, one sapphire.
A camera angled for a closeup of all three at once, for the handsome faces, individually quite different, together seemed to present almost the embodiment of masculine beauty. Prince Omar, with his broad forehead, thin, aristocratic cheeks, haughty green eyes and neat beard, Prince Rafi, as handsome as a Persian miniature painting, with a dark mustache, and Prince Karim, with the clean-shaven dark good looks of an ancient desert warrior. They left no doubt as to their masculine as well as their political power.
“What a trio! Strong women are fainting all over this country as I speak,” Marta opined.
“Those three faces, as you see them there, with their ceremonial turbans, decorate every piece of money in the three kingdoms,” Paul told the viewers. “There is a communal currency as well as a central Parliament in the Emirates. Karim on the left, wearing the sapphire on his turban, rules West Barakat, Rafi in the centre, under the ruby, is the Emir of East Barakat, and Omar is the ruler of Central Barakat. Those are the divisions their father made when, like King Lear, he divided his kingdom so that all his sons should inherit. It has worked better than King Lear’s arrangement, though, it has to be said.”
“How old are the princes, Paul?”
“They all turn twenty-six next week, Marta, but in case any of our female viewers is thinking about throwing herself in front of their horses, I should point out that Prince Omar is already married and has two young children.”
“But it’s open season on Prince Rafi and Prince Karim?”
“You can safely put on your hunting jacket for them, Marta.”
As one, the three princes moved forward and down the red carpeted marble steps to the signing table as the ranks of the world’s photographers parted before them. The members of the Four Nations, looking oddly plain in black dinner suits, stepped forward, and all shook hands with one other.
“If you’re interested,” Paul said, “that’s a total of seventeen handshakes taking place there now, but of course, it’s all going on simultaneously, in keeping with the strict public protocol that keeps the princes equal.”
At the long, polished black table, six men and a woman took their seats in a row facing the cameras of the world. In front of each place was a large closed book, its gold cover embossed with the insignia of Barakat, the mythical bird called the Senmurgh.
“Now each of the signatories to the agreement will sign each of the seven books and take one home,” Paul explained. Onscreen seven assistants could be seen like a small troupe of dancers in an almost perfectly choreographed grapevine step, picking up a book after each signature and weaving through his or her partners in the dance to place it in front of the next dignitary. “This, by the way, is what’s referred to here as ‘approval in the Western tradition.’ By tradition it is not considered binding for a Sheikh of Barakat merely to sign a document.”
At the end, to another gentle round of applause from courtiers and observers, the seven assistants, each clutching a book, bowed to the table and moved to one side of the Throne Room.
“And now for the ceremony without which no treaty or state document has been legal in Barakat for hundreds of years,” said Paul. “No document is binding on any Barakat monarch until the monarch has stamped the document with the Great Jewel Seal of Shakur and drawn the Sword of Rostam over it, and finally, all the signatories have drunk from the Cup of Jalal.
“All of these ancient items have been the property of the Barakat royal house for six hundred years or more. In addition to dividing the kingdom, Sheikh Daud’s will decreed that his sons should each individually inherit one of what are, for their subjects at least, powerfully evocative symbols of monarchy.”
A large ivory-colored parchment was now carried by the Grand Vizier to a marble table that stood to one side of the Lion Throne, placed on it, and unrolled. It was covered with ornate Arabic calligraphy of the highest quality, and, with its gold leaf and beautiful ink colours, resembled, to the Western audience, nothing so much as a page from a medieval illuminated Bible. It was held in place with two flat heavy sticks of ivory.
A courtier moved to stand beside the Grand Vizier, holding a small jar on a gold-and-silver engraved tray. Nizam al Mulk lifted the tiny golden urn and tilted it over the parchment. A thick, viscous red substance formed a pool in the centre of the top of the document.
Silence fell as Prince Karim approached. Just above his elbow the Great Jewel Seal of Shakur clung to his arm like a massive bracelet. He drew it off, then pressed the seal’s face firmly into the pool of sealing wax on the parchment paper. When he lifted the seal again it had left behind the impression of a raised profile portrait of a crowned head. With a glance at the red seal and another at the Jewel, he restored the seal to its place on his arm.
“That’s Prince Karim making the most of that particular ceremony,” Paul informed his audience in an even lower murmur now, as though impressed in spite of himself. “The portrait is of Sultan Shakur, the direct ancestor of the three princes, who died about 1030, and the inscription surrounding the head reads in part, ‘Great King, Sun of the Age, the Full Moon, World Conqueror, World Burner, the Throne of Mercy, the Sword of Justice, Defender of the Faith’ and a lot more. The entire bracelet was cut by a master craftsman from a single giant emerald. And, Marta, it weighs almost two pounds!”
“Oooh!” The anchorwoman shivered with affected greed. “Must be worth a king’s ransom!”
“Its worth is literally incalculable, because there is nothing else in the world to compare it to. The weight of the jewel alone puts it out of reach of most of us, but add to that the work of the sculpture—which is said, by those who have been privileged to study the ancient documents of this country, to be miraculously lifelike and artistic—and its value as a completely unique thousand-year-old artefact, and you’re looking at what they call ‘inestimable value.’ I asked three jewellers for a ballpark figure, and the closest I could get was—in open auction, the sky’s the limit.
“Now, there’s Prince Rafi, I believe, stepping forward. He will draw the sword over the document, and then lay the naked steel right across the parchment,” Paul murmured helpfully, as Prince Rafi did just that.
“The origins of that ritual are lost in the mists of time, and although it is now said to symbolize the monarch’s determination to defend a treaty with arms if necessary, it is thought by some that there was once another symbolism attached to it. Certainly it is true that if Prince Rafi were to draw the Sword of Rostam through the seal it would render the agreement instantly invalid. If he draws it against an enemy it signals a fight to the death.”
“How on earth do they keep track of all these customs?” Marta marvelled.
“Don’t forget they haven’t changed for a millennium. And now the Cup of Jalal is brought forward,” Paul spoke over her, “and now it’s Prince Omar’s turn. He will drink from the cup, sometimes called the Cup of the Soul, which is said by tradition to guarantee happiness to its owner, and then offer it to the signatories of the Four Nations, and lastly to his brothers. There’s the Grand Vizier Nizam al Mulk carrying the cup to the foreign leaders—the contents, by the way, are a dark secret. Only the signatories will ever know what they drank—that’s meant to be another form of protecting the treaty. And now Prince Rafi is drinking, and Prince Karim.
“And that is what is called ‘sealing in the Barakati tradition,’ so this historic agreement has now been formally signed and sealed, Marta, in one of the most impressive marriages of Eastern and Western tradition in modern times.”
Two
July 1998
“Will Mr. David Percy and Miss Caroline Langley please meet their driver at the Information Desk. Will Mr. Percy and Miss Langley—”
Caroline was hot. They had been left standing in the Royal Barakat Air plane for twenty minutes after something went wrong with the doors, but that hadn’t stopped the captain turning off the air conditioning. Then there had been an endless wait before the luggage from their flight made its appearance on the mile-long conveyor belt, and everyone had been pressing so close that Caroline—with a new appreciation of what it meant to say that people from the Middle East had a smaller “personal territory” than Westerners—had found it impossible to see her own bags till they were half the arrivals hall away. While she was wrestling them off the belt someone had filched her trolley, and rather than hunt down another one, she had simply carried her bags, a mistake she would not make again soon in an inadequately air-conditioned building.
Her neat white linen travel suit was smudged, damp and badly creased, her skin was beaded with sweat all over her body, her makeup was history, her short honey-gold hair now clustered in unruly curls around her head, her always volatile temper was in rags.
It didn’t help to know that if David had been with her, her arrival in this little-known country would have been very different. The smell of money generally ensured that for David things ran smoothly. But at the last minute David had called to say that he could not make the trip—and Caroline had come alone.
She had not really been surprised when David cancelled. She had almost been expecting it. There was something about this trip that David hadn’t liked right from the beginning. He had even tried to talk her out of buying the raffle ticket.
“I’ve never yet met anyone who won a raffle, Caroline,” he had said with raised eyebrows, as though the only reason for parting with money must be in the hope of getting a return.
“Well, it’s for a charity, David,” she had smiled pacifically, pulling out the few dollars that was the price of three tickets. They were being sold in aid of a hospital being built in the Barakat Emirates. “I don’t mind not winning.”
He picked up the ticket stub. “The Queen Halimah Hospital, Barakat al Barakat!” he read with derision. “Do you really believe that your money is actually going towards such a purpose?”
But she had already taken out the money, and the child selling the tickets—by the pool at the exclusive club where David was a member—had said indignantly, “Yes, it is! They’re building a new children’s wing!” And she had passed the money over and written her name and phone number on three pale green tickets.
When she won, it had been a small triumph of feeling over logic. She had been thrilled with her prize—a first class, all-expenses-paid visit to the new resort in West Barakat—but she had managed to damp down her excitement before telling anyone about it. David no more liked to see evidence of her volatile nature and easily touched feelings than did her parents. He had predicted a chaotic holiday where nothing ran on time, but he had agreed to come along.
When he had cancelled, only a few hours before their flight, he had made it clear he expected Caroline to give it up, too. It was too late for her to invite anyone else along in his place, and he was sure she would not want to go to a somewhat remote Islamic country on her own. He would take her “somewhere equally exotic” within a week or two.
But Caroline, unusually for her, had dug her heels in.
“Oh, darling, are you sure you should?” her mother had asked nervously, but Caroline had gone on packing.
“The condemned man ate a hearty meal, Mother,” she said. “I’m sick and tired of holidays paid for by someone else. I won this, it’s my holiday, and I’m going to take it,” she said. For years now they had been entirely dependent on someone else for everything, Caroline impatiently felt, and she hated it.
Caroline’s parents had been born into East Coast aristocracy. Both had generations of breeding, wealth and influence behind them. But Thomas Langley had not inherited the business brain of his forebears, nor, more fatally, the wit to recognize the fact. On the advice of his son, he had attempted to shore up his failing business with investment in the junk bond market during the eighties. When that bubble burst, his son had died late one night as his car hit a bridge. No one said the word except the insurance company, but even if the policy had paid the double indemnity due in cases of accident, the money would have been a drop in the sea of Thom Langley Senior’s mounting debts. And he had followed that catastrophe with a steady string of bad decisions that had finally wiped him out.
Those terrible years had naturally taken a disastrous toll on Caroline. She was a straight-A’s student, but her marks had gone into instant decline in the months after Thom Junior’s suicide. She had won no scholarships, and she certainly wouldn’t have been accepted to any of the top universities she had once confidently dreamed of attending.
But she wasn’t going to university anyway. It was one thing for her parents to live on family handouts, and her sister Dara was still in high school; it was another thing entirely for Caroline. In spite of protests from her long-suffering uncles that there was of course no objection to paying for Caroline’s education, she had declined to apply for university and had taken a job.
She had wanted to leave home at the same time, but her mother had begged her to stay on in the family mansion, the one thing to have survived the disaster. Her salary helped against the ridiculous expense of running the place, her domestic labours increasingly helped make up for departing servants, and her presence seemed to give her mother “moral comfort, darling.”
If she had stuck to her plans to go, she would never have met David.
There were several men striding up and down in front of the Information Desk when she got there, and she eyed them with a sinking heart as she approached. Most were jingling car keys. There wasn’t one who looked like someone she cared to entrust her health and safety to; young and fleshy, with their strutting self-importance, they looked too heedless to be chauffeurs.
The men stood aside to let her approach the desk, eyeing her with a wet-eyed interest as if hoping she was their fare and wondering what kind of tip they could extort from her.
“My name is Caroline Langley,” she said, when the woman behind the desk turned to give her her attention. “You paged me.”
“Ah, yes!” said the young woman, consulting her pad. “Your driver is here, Miss Langley...where did he go? Oh, yes, there!” She smiled and pointed, and Caroline, following her gesture, gasped slightly as her eyes fell on a man who was not in the least like the others.
He was well-built, tall, with an air of purpose and decision, and an unconsciously aristocratic bearing that would have put David in the shade. He stood by a pillar, quietly talking to another man. Caroline blew a damp curl out of her eye and smiled involuntarily just with the pleasure of looking at him.
His hair was dark and cut close against a well-shaped head, his wide, well-shaped mouth not quite hidden by a neatly curling black beard. Big as he was, there seemed to be not a spare ounce of flesh on his frame. Except for the beard, he looked like a glossy magazine photo of a polo player. He had straight, heavy black eyebrows, and curling black lashes clustered thickly around eyes that now, as if intuitively, rested on Caroline.
She smiled; he frowned. Then, under his lowered eyebrows, his dark eyes widened in an intent look, his gaze questioning, and more than questioning. Caroline shivered with awareness of his sheer physical presence and unconsciously drew herself up straighter, her shoulders back, as if he were a threat. As if his look was a challenge and she must not show any sign of weakness.
He spoke to his companion, who also whirled to stare at her, and left him standing by the pillar as he moved to approach her. “Miss Langley?” he enquired in a deep, strong voice that, except for a certain throaty emphasis on the consonants, had little trace of accent. “Miss Caroline Langley?”
She had the craziest urge to deny it, and run. The smile faltered on Caroline’s lips, but she submitted to the human reluctance to make a scene on inadequate grounds. “Are you from the hotel?” she temporized.
“Not precisely the hotel, but rather the Royal Barakat Tour Agency. My name is Kaifar, Miss Langley. I am your personal guide. It is my job to liaise for you and your fiancé with the hotel and all the other sites you choose to visit to make sure that your trip is an enjoyable one.”
“I see.” His voice was deep and warm, rippling along her nerves. Perhaps it was just being alone in a very unfamiliar country that made her so nervous, not his presence at all.
“Your fiancé, Mr. Percy—where is he?” he continued. “He has been detained at Customs?”
His gaze was clear and steady. He was a very good-looking man. She swallowed. “David had to cancel, I’m afraid. I’m here alone.”
The strong black eyebrows snapped together. “He did not come?” He was frowning almost fiercely, his gaze piercing her, yet why should he be angry? It must be a cultural misunderstanding. Or perhaps in his experience women were not such good tippers.
“David couldn’t make it. Is there a problem with my being on my own here?” She had been told that the Barakat Emirates were secular and moderate, but maybe as an unaccompanied woman she should be wearing chador or have a chaperone or something. She hoped not.
He laughed at her, his teeth white against the black beard, charismatic as a fairy-tale brigand. “Certainly not!” he assured her. “I am merely surprised. I was prepared to pick up two people. One moment.”
He moved over beside the man to whom he had been speaking a minute ago and spoke a few words in a language she took to be Arabic. The companion flicked her a glance, and then began to argue. But the chauffeur merely held up his hand and said something in a very autocratic manner, and his companion fell silent, shaking his head. The man named Kaifar returned to her.
“My companion will bring your bags.” At his request Caroline pointed to where her luggage sat. “Follow me. Please,” he added as an afterthought, and with an arm not quite touching her he guided her through the thronging mass of humanity and baggage that was between them and the door.
And then, with her dark guide beside her, Caroline stepped out of the airport into the heat and beauty of the exotic, exciting, little-known land that was called, in the language of its people, Blessing.
Kaifar led her to a vintage Rolls Royce and installed her in the back seat while the other man stowed her luggage. The two men spoke together for a moment, then bid each other farewell as Kaifar climbed into the driver’s seat. But instead of starting the car, he sat for a long moment, stroking his beard, his eyes shuttered, deep in thought. Caroline shivered.
She leaned forward abruptly. “What is the problem?”
He came out of his trance in some surprise, and looked haughtily over his shoulder at her, as if she had no right to question his actions. Caroline thought dryly, Well, if West Barakat wants to attract tourists, the guides are going to have to get used to women who know what they want.
But his next words indicated that he was already aware of that. “I beg your pardon, Miss Langley,” he said with a brief nod.
She felt a sensation of unease that she could not pinpoint. Belatedly she saw that she had only Kaifar’s word for it that he had been officially sent to pick her up. She had seen no identification. And he was not in uniform, merely a white shirt and dark trousers. He could be anyone. She thought about his reaction to the news that David had not come. He spoke good English—he might easily have discovered that David was rich. Suppose he was planning something?
“Where are you taking me?” she challenged, realizing that she was in a position from which it would now be almost impossible to escape. Why hadn’t she asked him for some I.D. inside?
He leaned forward and pressed the car into life. He spoke over his shoulder without turning his head to look at her as the car moved forward.
“I am taking you to your hotel, where else?” he said shortly.
“What is the name of the hotel?” she said, but it was too little, too late if her nameless fears were right. The car was already picking up speed.
He smiled in the mirror at her, looking like nothing so much as a desert bandit in a fairy tale. “The name of the hotel is the Sheikh Daud, Miss Langley. It is on the Royal Road that runs near the coast to the west of the city. Please calm your fears. Not all dark Arabs are desert sheikhs carrying off beautiful women to their harems. Some of us are so civilised we would even consider many of your own compatriots barbarian.”
His teeth looked white and strong behind the black beard. He seemed to be inviting her to smile with him at her own foolish, unfounded nervousness. Kaifar slowed the car and turned out of the airport onto a wide, palm-lined boulevard, and this might be her last chance to leap out of the car. Caroline tensed.
Kaifar turned slightly to look at her. “You will find the hotel very pleasant, Miss Langley. It is the best and most exclusive hotel in the Barakat Emirates. You were very lucky to win such a prize, yes?”
She felt the buzz of his smile, the impact of the arrogant, effortless masculinity against her feeble guard, and thought, Is that what I’m afraid of? The fact that he’s so masculine and sexy?
Maybe she should have listened to David. Maybe it had not been wise to come on her own. She had suspected that there was something David was worried about, though he had denied it. Had it been a fear that she would fall for some attractive foreigner?
Someone like Kaifar.
The airport was northeast of the city. “Shall I tell you about our country as we pass?” Kaifar enquired. He waved a hand and without waiting for an answer, began pointing out the sights to her an ancient ruined fortress almost buried by blown sand; a wadi in the distance, palm trees against golden dunes; a small desert village, looking as though it were still in the Iron Age, except for the single satellite dish.
“That is the house of the chief man of the village. Once the possession of two mules marked his wealth. Now it is a television set,” he told her, smiling again. Yet she couldn’t relax.
Soon they were in the city. The car entered a large leafy square, and a fabulously decorated, magical building of blue mosaic tile and mirrored glass came into view. “This is our Great Mosque,” he said grandly. “It was built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by m—” he paused, as if seeking the name “—Queen Halimah. Her tomb also is here.”
Caroline gazed at it, entranced by her first live sight of such exotic beauty. After a glance at her rapt face, Kaifar slowed the car and drew in at the curb. The broad stone-paved courtyard was shaded by trees and cooled by fountains, and she watched the people—tourists and the worshippers together—strolling about. The place cast a spell of peace. A sense of wonder crept over her at the magnificence of the architecture, followed by a curious feeling of recognition. Her mouth opened in a little gasp.
“What is it, Miss Langley?”
“I think my fiancé has a miniature of this scene, painted on ivory! Is that possible?” How different, how unimaginably more impressive the place was in real life.
“Anything is possible, is it not? That a man in New York should have a miniature of such a building is not very astonishing, even if one wonders why he wants it. Has your fiancé visited my country?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
“Yet he wants a painting of the Great Mosque.”
“My fiancé is a collector.”
Kaifar was silent.
“An antiques collector, you know,” she said, thinking he might not understand the term. “He buys ancient works of art and...objects. Mostly Greek and Roman, but he does have some oriental things.”
“Ah, he buys them?” He stuck his arm out the window to wave an old man on a wobbling bicycle past. In the bicycle basket she was fascinated to see a dirty, battered computer monitor.
She smiled at his naivete. “How else could he collect them?”
He shrugged. “People have things that have been given to them. Or that they have stolen.”
Caroline bristled. “I am quite sure that David has paid for everything in his collection,” she said coldly. “Believe me, he is rich enough to buy the whole mosque, he doesn’t have to—”
His voice cut harshly across hers. “No one is rich enough to buy the Great Mosque. It is not for sale.” He sounded furious, and Caroline could have kicked herself. She didn’t want to make an enemy of her guide before her trip had even begun. Some foreigners, she knew, were offended by the casual assumption that everything, including their heritage, had a price.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that literally. Of course such a thing would never be for sale,” she said hastily.
Kaifar turned his head. “They come in the night, and they steal the treasures of the mosques and museums—even, they chip away the ancient tiles and stone monuments. Now we have a guard on many sites, and those who make the attempt and are caught are put in prison. But it is impossible to guard everything, and the danger only puts the price so high that someone can always be found to make the attempt. This is what foreign collectors do to my country’s heritage.”
Caroline was hot with a sense of communal guilt. “I’m sure David’s never done anything like that!”
“Are you?” he asked, as if the subject already bored him. “Well, then, we must not blame your fiancé for our troubles.”
In fact she knew nothing at all of David’s business practices. She said, as her father might have done, “Anyway, if people are willing to pillage their own heritage for money, that’s hardly the fault of the buyer, is it?”
He hit the brakes at an orange light so that she was flung forward against the seat belt, but when she looked in the mirror his face was impassive, and his voice when he spoke was casual.
“You yourself have no experience of what desperate things people will do for money?”
She stared at him as a slow, hot blush crept up under her skin. It was impossible, she told herself. His remark could not have been meant ironically—he probably believed she was rich. But he had scored a bull’s-eye.
Caroline had many feelings about her engagement, but never, until this moment, had she felt shame. Shame that she should be allowing David to buy her, a human being, exactly as he bought the pieces for his collection. And for just the reason Kaifar cited—because of desperation for money.
Three
Twenty minutes later she was standing in a cool, comfortable room, looking out through a glass door onto a shaded balcony and the sea beyond.
“You will want to relax, have a drink, bathe and change,” Kaifar informed her, waving at the terrace where he had instructed a porter to place a tray of ice and drinks. “I will return for you in three hours. Then we will have dinner.”
She frowned in surprise. “What do you mean? Why are you taking me to dinner?”
He shrugged. “I am a part of your prize, Miss Langley,” he said, with a smile that made her turn nervously away. “Would you like to go to a European restaurant, or do you prefer to try the foods of my country?”
What was she complaining about? She certainly didn’t want to dine alone. “Well, then, the food of the country, thank you.”
Kaifar nodded once and withdrew, leaving her on her own. Caroline went to the exotically arched patio door, drew it open, and stepped out onto terra cotta tiles delicately interspersed with a pattern in white and blue. She sighed in deep satisfaction. How good it was to get away, to be alone, to think. She seemed to have had no time for thinking since her father had first told her of David’s offer.
Far in the distance, scarcely discernible, a muezzin was calling the faithful of the city to prayer. Ahead of her stretched the fabulous blue waters of the Gulf of Barakat. Palm trees, planted in the courtyard below, stretched up to the vaulted, pillared canopy that protected half the terrace from the sun. There were plants everywhere her eye fell. A table and chairs nestled against the trunk of one of the trees, and Caroline sank down, dropped ice into a glass, and poured herself some mineral water.
The surroundings were so soothing. Her troubles and responsibilities seemed miles away. She had no choices to make, no unpleasant facts to face, tasks to perform. She was facing two weeks where she need please no one save herself.
Sayed Hajji Karim ibn Daud ibn Hassan al Quraishi reached a deceptively lazy hand out to the bowl of glistening fruit and detached a grape. He examined the grape, his curving lids hiding the expression in his eyes. The fruit was plump and purple-black, but not nearly as deeply dark as the monarch’s angry eyes, a fact which Nasir could verify a moment later, when Prince Karim slipped the juicy globelet between his white teeth and raised his piercing gaze to his secretary.
“In truth, Lord, no one save yourself and Prince Rafi and I know what your intentions are. Who could have revealed them? Only I myself have knowingly been engaged in the execution of these plans. The truth has been disguised from all the others. All has been as secretly done as you ordered, Lord.”
“And yet he did not come,” said Prince Karim.
The secretary bowed. “If I may speak plainly,” he began, but he scarcely paused for the permission the ritual question implied. He was a trusted advisor and he spoke freely in conference with his prince. “This may easily be the action of a guilty man who fears some nameless coincidence, or a busy man contemptuous of the arrangements and desires of others. It is not necessarily the action of a man who has been warned of trouble.”
“He is a man who subverted one of my own staff,” Karim said flatly. The monotone did not fool the secretary. Prince Karim advertised his anger only when there was something to be gained from a show of royal rage.
The secretary bowed his head. “True, Lord. By my eyes, he has not subverted me.”
Prince Karim lifted a hand. “No such suspicion has crossed my mind, Nasir.”
Prince Rafi spoke. “Good! Then we must operate on the assumption that there has been no leak of information, and alter our plans to suit the circumstance. All is not yet lost! The woman is here, after all!”
The sun set as she waited; the air was cooler, and a breeze moved beguilingly across the terrace. The transformation from light to dark happened quickly, a bucket of molten gold dropping down into the navy ocean and drawing after it night and a thousand stars. Now the world was magical.
She was waiting, half for Kaifar, half for a phone call to go through. She had tried and failed to call David earlier, then had given up, showered and dressed. She was wearing a green cotton sundress with wide straps and a bodice cut not too low across her breasts; a gauzy, gold-shot scarf patterned in greens with pinks and blues and yellows would cover her shoulders if necessary. Her hair was clean and obedient again, swept back from her forehead and neck as smoothly as the vibrant natural curls would allow. She wore a gold chain, gold studs, and her engagement ring.
Caroline had been absolutely astonished when her father had approached her with David Percy’s proposal of marriage. She hardly knew the man, although she was aware that he was a friend of her father’s, an antiques dealer and collector who had sold Thom Langley a few things in the old days. They had met only once or twice. She believed then that he had fallen in love with her from a distance, and she had been ready to laugh with her father over David’s middle-aged foolishness.
Then she had seen that her father wanted her to marry David Percy. And when her mother came in, Louise had made no effort to pretend her husband had not already informed her of the great news. “Oh, Caroline, isn’t it a miracle! Who would have thought that a man like David Percy would want you!” she had burst out with such relief and gratitude in her tone that Caroline understood that for both of them David Percy’s offer represented a salvation worth any sacrifice. Even a daughter’s happiness.
“But Mother, he’s so—” Caroline stopped, because she couldn’t find the words to describe the awful coldness that she felt from David. Worse, much worse, than her own father’s.
Thomas Langley had always disapproved of his elder daughter’s “emotional extremes,” her capacity for deep feeling and unguarded responses, so unlike his own nature or even that of his wife’s. Whether she was touched by the plight of a stray cat in a Caribbean resort, or moved to tears by a painting in an Italian church, her father frowned. Caroline had grown up under the constant pressure to contain her laughter, restrain her tears, to walk sedately and talk quietly.
“Darling, it’s not forever,” Louise had hastily assured her. She had talked fast, not giving Caroline time to express objections. “David won’t expect you to stay married to him for long. He knows better than that. You’ll be divorced by the time you’re thirty!”
Caroline shuddered. “And who will get custody of the children?”
“Darling, you’re looking for problems! David may not even want children. And at thirty, look where you’ll be. You’ll have serious money—you can trust your father to see to that—and you probably won’t look a day older than you do now. The cosmetic aids you’ll be able to afford! The massage, the clinics! Whereas I’m aging a little more with every day that passes.”
“Being eternally young isn’t really high on my list of priorities,” Caroline responded dryly, but her mother overrode her.
“Caroline, you’ll have money. Don’t underestimate it. Money is the power to do whatever you like. You will have total freedom, Caroline.” She emphasised each word of the last sentence.
Caroline had frowned as something whispered in the back of her mind that she would have total freedom now if she left her parents to the fate which their own foolish actions and constant living beyond their means had brought upon them.
And as though she sensed that, Louise had added quickly, with a pathetic catch to her voice, “We’ll have freedom, too, Caroline. You can purchase our freedom as no one else can. And think of Dara. She’ll be able to go to university, and I know you want her to be able to do that....”
But she would not have agreed to the engagement if she had not believed that David wanted to marry her because he loved her.
David had begun taking her to museums to introduce her to his way of life and her future, and one fine day he had introduced her to “herself”—a marble bust thought to be Alexander the Great. And that was when she discovered just what it was about his fiancée that David loved: Caroline looked like a Greek statue.
In profile her broad forehead sloped down into a finely carved nose with scarcely any change in angle; her slim eyebrows, set low, followed the line of her large, wide-spaced, grey eyes; her cheeks and jaw, though delicately moulded, curved with a fullness that was nothing like the fashionable gaunt hollowness of a Vogue model; her upper lip was slender and beautifully drawn, her lower lip full, curving up at the corners. And in addition there was the riot of curls over her well-shaped head and down the back of her neck. Her only flaw, if you were looking for physical perfection, was the slightly crooked front tooth.
The bust was, in fact, eerily like her. She was looking at her own death mask—or, she told herself, because the sculptor had been a great artist and the statue was certainly “alive,” herself frozen in the mirror of time.
David had insisted on buying her a wardrobe suited to her new position as his fiancée. Caroline by then had felt out of control of events; she had been unable to protest at the arrangement, let alone the way that David dictated her choices. She had some very smart, and rather original, ivory and cream outfits in her wardrobe now. And a gold upper arm bracelet and heavy gold necklace that had cost as much as her year’s salary.
When he had effected a certain amount of transformation, David threw a midsummer masquerade party to celebrate the public announcement of their engagement. For that he had designed Caroline’s costume himself. Or, had hired a designer to execute what he wanted.
And what he wanted was Caroline looking as much like a Greek statue as possible. Intricately pleated ivory silk toga with flowing folds, ivory leather sandals, a wreath of ivory-coloured leaves in her hair, her skin painted to look like marble...when she stood perfectly still, she really had almost looked like marble.
“Don’t smile with your teeth tonight, Caroline,” David had ordered, with no apology for his air of command. “It spoils the illusion. Serenity, my dear.” It was then that she had finally put all the pieces together. David did not love her. He didn’t even imagine that he did. What he wanted was to add her to his collection. He wanted to own her.
In that moment she wondered whether it would be possible to recover from the personality changes David would exact from her.
A steady voice in her head had whispered, Get out now. Tell him you’ve changed your mind tell him not to make the announcement tonight. But Caroline had stifled the thought. Her mother was right. A few years of sacrifice was not too much for her family to ask.
Of course, the couple’s photograph had illustrated the story of the engagement in the newspaper. David Percy Adds “The Jewel in the Crown” To His Private Collection was the headline.
When she had learned, while she was in the midst of packing her bags for this trip, that David would not be coming, Caroline had taken out of her case all the clothes he had bought her and packed instead her own clothes, bought at a discount where she worked. She would not have much chance to wear them once she was married.
Caroline liked colour. She was fairly sure the ancient Greeks had, too. Lots of the statues she had seen during her recent crash course in classical art under David’s tutelage had obviously once been painted in very bright, intense colours, and she had read somewhere that it was possible that even what David called “the elegant proportions of the Parthenon” had been covered in bright red and turquoise and gold leaf. And as for emotions, in the ancient legends the Greeks seemed anything but serene. Even their gods had been wildly passionate and overly emotional... but she did not put that point of view to David.
Caroline sighed and slipped into the present. David was not here now, and if the phone didn’t ring soon, she wouldn’t have to talk to him. She was suddenly wildly grateful that David had not come on this trip. He would have insisted on New York standards everywhere. She wanted to see, to experience the East, its beauty, its passion, its legendary contradictions.
“The woman is very much younger than he,” Nasir reported. “It is said that he paid her father a large amount of money for her.” He passed a faxed copy of a newspaper photograph to the two princes.
“ ‘The jewel in his crown!’ ” Karim read the caption headline.
“Ah, a Mona Lisa!” exclaimed Prince Rafi with interest.
Karim gazed at the photo. It showed a pale, grave-eyed young woman in costume half smiling at someone beyond the camera, beside a smooth-skinned man of middle age. He looked up and met the eyes of his secretary. “And this is what he thinks of this woman?” he asked, indicating the headline. The secretary only bowed his head. “He adds her to his collection?” Karim pursued.
“Allowances must of course be made for the inaccuracies of gossip and the liberties taken by the press,” the secretary offered diffidently.
Prince Karim nodded, his black eyes glittering. His face took on the harsh look of a desert tribesman riding to battle as he turned back to the photograph. “Excellent! It may be, then, that Mr. Percy would like to make an exchange.”
Nasir showed no surprise, but nothing ever did surprise him.
“The jewel of my collection for the jewel of his,” went on Prince Karim. “First, of course, we will have to gain possession of Mr. Percy’s jewel.”
When Kaifar appeared at her door, he was wearing a suit of white cotton trousers and shirt that was “neither of the East nor of the West” but looked as though it would be comfortable anywhere. But still, with his dark skin and black beard, he looked richly exotic to her eyes. On his strong bare feet he wore the kind of thong sandals that she had earlier noticed men and women in the city wearing.
They stood for a moment in the doorway, not speaking. Then Caroline dropped her gaze and said, “I’ll get my bag.” Her voice came out sounding weak, almost breathless. Leaving the door open, she turned and went back into the sitting room, where her scarf and evening bag lay on a chair.
The phone rang.
Kaifar stepped inside the room, closed the door, and picked up the receiver. For a moment he spoke in Arabic, then was silent, waiting.
Surprised at this autocratic action—had he given out her room number as a contact for himself?—Caroline frowned, but he smiled blandly at her and turned to speak into the mouthpiece. “Good evening, Mr. Percy! This is Kaifar speaking! We are very sorry that you are in New York and not here in our beautiful country.”
Caroline gasped. “Give me the phone!” In two quick steps she was beside him. He was tall; her eyes were on a level with the curling black beard that covered his chin. “Give it to—” she began again, but an imperious hand went up and in spite of herself she was silenced.
Suddenly his teeth flashed in a wide grin, and she involuntarily fell back a step, as if a wolf had smiled. But the smile was not meant for her. “My name is Kaifar, Mr. Percy,” he repeated with a curious emphasis. “Doubtless we shall speak again. In the meantime, here is Miss Langley.”
“Hello, David,” she said, taking the phone with a speaking look and then turning away as she pressed it to her ear.
“Caroline? Where are you, my dear?”
And she lied. When she should have said, In my hotel suite, out of a purely instinctive reaction she said instead, “In the lobby of the hotel, David.” She had simply no idea how David would react to the thought of a strange foreigner in her hotel room answering her phone, and she shrank from knowing.
“And who was that man? I understood they were putting me through—”
“Kaifar is the guide whose services I won as part of the prize.” There was a curious pause as the word “services” echoed slightly, and then David spoke again, as if he had decided to ignore whatever impact he had felt from her last statement.
“Did you have a good night?”
“Very comfortable.”
They chatted only a few moments, just long enough for David to ascertain that she had arrived safely. Caroline never had very much to say to David, but she would have kept him if she could. She was suddenly afraid of what would happen when she put the phone down. But there was no way to prevent David bidding her a calm goodbye and hanging up.
Caroline held on to the phone for a long moment afterwards, pretending to listen, but at last she said a feeble goodbye to the dial tone and hung up.
Then she lifted her head and met Kaifar’s eyes, knowing that the lie to David had been a terrible mistake.
He was staring at her. He said, “Your dress is the colour of the emeralds that come from the mines in the mountains of Noor. They are the most beautiful emeralds in the world.”
The words struck her like an unexpected wave, leaving her breathless. The lamp cast chiaroscuro light and shadow on him, his face and his hands richly toned, perfectly painted by the master, his eyes mysterious as they watched her, the rest of him shadowed. She felt that the whole universe was waiting for something; as if her whole future might be written in the next moment. Nothing outside the circle of light that embraced them had any relevance.
Something she could not name seemed to course between them. Her gaze moved from his shadowed eyes to his hands, and then, drawn by the magnet of his focus, back up to his eyes again. Her breasts rose and fell with her shallow breathing. There was another rhythm, too, under those of heart and breath and feeling: a deeper, mysterious rhythm as of life itself.
In the silence he stepped around her to pick up her scarf. It fell gracefully in his grasp, the gold threads glittering in lamplighted shadow. Caroline’s lips parted in a small, audible breath as he lifted his hands to drape it around her shoulders. His touch was sure but light. His hands did not pause to rest on her bare skin beneath the gauzy silk.
“This way, Miss Langley,” he said, and opened the door.
Four
“We have surveillance?” Prince Karim asked Nasir.
“Three teams of two, Lord—at all times. Others as necessary. Forgive me, but even—you know such precautions are necessary.”
Prince Karim nodded in absent agreement “And all is prepared?”
“Everything is in readiness, Lord. Jamil has all in hand.”
“You are leaving when?”
“Tomorrow, Lord, at first light.”
She awoke restless and disturbed, wondering where she was, who she was, not knowing her own name. In a panic, she sat up, flailing for the lamp that must be near. She knew that much, that beside beds you found lamps.... Her eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness, sought out the glitter of stars through the patio door, and she staggered up and opened it.
By the time she felt the soft breeze caress her forehead she was fully awake. Caroline. She was Caroline Langley and she was on vacation in the Barakat Emirates. She was fully clothed; she must have fallen asleep on the sofa. She had sat there thinking for hours after Kaifar brought her back. She must have slipped down and dozed off. She had a vague memory of putting out the lamp. Her dream had woken her.
It was Kaifar’s fault. Dining with him tonight had disturbed her. Just being with him oppressed her. With a shiver Caroline found the overhead light switch and pressed it, welcoming the assault of the too-bright light on her wide-open eyes.
He was like that, like the light. The pupils of her inner self’s eyes were wide—looking for something?—and Kaifar was too bright, blinding her, unbalancing her. So she awoke without knowing her name....
He had put her in the back seat of the Rolls Royce limousine and driven her to the most wonderful restaurant—in a hidden courtyard, tables under sweet-smelling trees, the food utterly sensual, the darkness scarcely disturbed by the candlelight on each table. A white-haired old woman sitting in a corner had sung hauntingly, pure sounds that did not seem a human voice at all. She accompanied herself with a stringed instrument that entwined her song with tendrils of such beauty Caroline’s heart contracted.
“What is she singing?” she finally whispered.
“She sings about love. About a man in love with his best friend’s daughter. He fears to ask his friend for what he most desires, the girl for his wife.”
Caroline’s heart leapt painfully at the parallel, because David did not love her, and had not feared to ask for what he wanted.
“While he waits, the friend dies. In his will he leaves him his parrot—and the guardianship of the very daughter whom the man loves.”
He paused, listening to the song. She wanted to smile, to say something light, but she felt locked inside herself, imprisoned by something she couldn’t name.
“‘Goodbye Marjan my wife, for instead you are my daughter.”’ Kaifar, having caught up with the story, was translating in a low voice as the singer sang. He bent over the table towards her, speaking so softly she was forced to lean towards him, his voice for her ear alone. It was too intimate, but she could not draw back. “ ‘A daughter does not become a wife. My love must be hidden even from my own eyes, from my heart.’ ”
“But why?” Caroline breathed.
Kaifar merely shook his head. “It is a matter of honour. As her guardian he may not take advantage of her.”
“Oh,” said Caroline. She wondered about her father’s honour, about David’s. The haunting song went on, with Kaifar’s deep gentle voice a counterpoint.
“She came to him, she came at his request.
Whatever he asked Marjan, it was her pleasure to obey.
She smiled, white teeth and rosebud lips.
‘What do you have to say to me?’ she asked her father’s dear friend.
‘Marjan, my daughter,’ he begins. ‘Marjan.’
‘Am I your daughter?’ Marjan asks,
Smiling with white teeth and rosebud lips.
Her hair is a bouquet of blackness, petal on petal, A night flower.
‘Am I your daughter, are you my father?’
He hears the hidden message and turns away.
She puts her white hand on his sleeve.
‘You are not my father, though I have loved you all my life.
Though I love you best.’
‘Marjan, your father must find a husband for you.
The time is right. I must find you a husband.’
The smile flees her rosebud lips.
‘What husband do I need when I have you? I wish for no husband.” ’
The singer broke off, and the music built to a crescendo and stopped. “It’s not swished?” Caroline whispered, hardly able to speak under the joint spell of her thoughts, his words, the singer’s voice and the music.
Kaifar sipped his wine. “No.” The woman set aside her instrument, rose to her feet and approached a nearby table. A man gave her money, they exchanged a few words and then she came to their table and Kaifar spoke with her and gave her money, too.
Caroline was able to smile at last. “If she is paid enough, she goes on with the story?” she joked gently.
“The storyteller’s art has always partly involved knowing how to build to moments of tension and then stop.”
Caroline smiled. “Scheherazade being the foremost exponent of the art?”
Kaifar nodded encouragingly.
The waiter brought them the first course, naan with fresh green herbs and white goat’s cheese and several other small dishes that were unfamiliar to her. She tore off some of the flat bread and, following Kaifar’s lead, took a delicate sprig of herb and rolled it in the bread. The freshness of the herb exploded in her mouth.
“Do you know the ending?” she asked after a moment. The singer was still moving from table to table.
“Everyone knows the ending. It is a famous story.”
“Tell me how it ends.”
Kaifar set down his naan and leaned forward on his elbows. He smiled, a warm smile; and she remembered the way he had spoken to her, looked at her earlier in her room. She drew back slightly, but Kaifar began speaking again in a low voice, and in spite of herself Caroline was drawn forward to put her ear closer to his mouth.
“Marjan tries to tell her father’s friend that she loves him as a husband and not a father, but he pretends not to understand. Then she begs him to wait, not to marry her off yet. But he chooses a handsome young man to be her husband, and believing that her love is hopeless, she marries the man he has chosen for her. Her father’s friend falls sick with unrequited love. Marjan visits him, but even on his deathbed he manages to keep his secret. When he dies, Marjan takes charge of the parrot that was, to the last, his companion. As she sits mourning the man she loved, the parrot recites the words it has heard so many times. ‘Marjan! I die for love of you!’ So Marjan discovers the truth.”
Caroline was suffocating. Tears burned her eyelids and she couldn’t speak, though it was stupid to be so affected by a story. “Why?” she whispered at last. “Why couldn’t he tell her?”
Kaifar watched her with eyes as shadowy as the night. “He believed in his duty, perhaps. People betray love for many reasons, some good, some bad.”
People betray love. Did he mean she was betraying love, marrying David? Was that why the story affected her so fiercely? David was her father’s friend, but he did not love her, nor she him. How could that be a betrayal of love? There was no man she loved now, even if one day there might be.
No, a part of her whispered. Not if you marry David. This seemed clear to her suddenly, sitting here with Kaifar’s eyes on her—eyes that saw everything, that showed her her own soul. Marriage to David would kill her heart, her ability to love deeply. How had she failed to see this? They were not asking merely for the sacrifice of a few years of her life. It might be the sacrifice of her heart’s future.
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