The flight attendant spoke in Kalasi, the words almost musical seeming. Violet listened, picking up most of the words, though it had been a long time since she’d heard the language.
“We are to take off.”
“I gathered.” She began to move through the plane, choosing a bank of seats near the back. They were reclining arm chairs, and she sunk into one gratefully. She hadn’t realised how tired she was, but the heat of the day and the mad rushing of her afternoon had robber her of her usual energy.
To her surprise, he took the seat opposite, his long legs stretched out so that she consciously shifted hers backwards. She noticed that there were seatbelts in the chair, but that he did not fasten his.
“You will have a tutor in Kalastan.”
“A tutor?” She murmured, her eyes shifting to his.
“There is much you will have to learn about our ways. I will not have time to teach you.”
She ignored the barb of pain. What had she expected? That he’d hold her hand through this? “I see.”
“Tell me what you were taught as a child.”
Her smile was beautiful. A flicker of light that glowed on her face, like magic and moondust. “Well, I learned the primary colours. And to count to ten. Then twenty. I learned to spell. I learned to share.”
He was not amused; his expression was like carved granite. “You were groomed to be my bride.”
Fire slashed her temper. “Yes.”
“I presume your grandfather employed someone to guide you in our ways.”
“It wasn’t like that.” She crossed her legs at the ankles, her hands folded in her lap. She looked every bit the royal bride and Zahir could only presume it was a byproduct of her upbringing. She had been raised with this duty in mind.
He expelled a sigh, frustrated at the difficulty they were having in forming an understanding. He had papers to look over before they landed and he could not waste more time than was necessary ensuring his bride was ready. The aeroplane picked up speed, moving quickly down the runway now. “I need to identify the gaps in your knowledge so that I can best direct your staff. You cannot imagine how different your life is about to become.”
“Can’t I?” She arched a brow and pointedly turned to study the glamorous interior of his jet.
“This is nothing to the Palace. The building itself is one of the largest and oldest palaces in the East. It is made from marble and sandstone and sprawls almost a thousand metres end to end. There are over one thousand staff. You will personally have over fifty servants. And there are protocols you must observe with them. Rules to guide your behaviour.”
Violet was drowning but she didn’t show it. “I had servants growing up,” she pointed out, her voice only slightly clouded by panic.
“Household servants,” he said with a dismissive shrug. “At the palace, you will have four ladies in waiting, whose job it will be to dress you each day and whenever there is an event we are to attend. You will have your own chef to ensure your diet adapts to our cuisine. There will be a valet to attend to your needs. A driver, seven bodyguards, your tutors – and that’s before you express a need for anything else.”
Violet’s eyes were two enormous puddles of ink in her face. “I don’t need all that.”
“It comes with the job,” he said, moving on with lightning fast speed. “You will adapt.”
You will adapt.
She nodded. He was right, she would. “Fine. Servants. What else?”
He ignored his grudging sense of respect. “You speak the language.”
“I used to,” she nodded. “But it’s been a long time since I’ve tried, or heard it.” When he’d married Anna, Violet had turned her back on everything to do with Kalastan.
“You will learn,” he said simply. “It will be spoken all around you. Does your sister also speak it?”
“No.”
“It will be a difficult transition for her.”
Violet sliced him a look of wry amusement. “Life is a difficult transition for her at the moment.” And then a sense of guilt at having betrayed her sister’s confidence jarred her into saying, “Just the usual teenage stuff.”
He nodded, apparently having little interest in whatever issues Lilly was facing. “She will also have servants and security. Once you have spoken to her and decided how you would like to progress her education, you can let Malik know.”
“Malik?”
“My chief aid,” he said with a nod. “He will be the best way to contact me.”
Violet’s eyes narrowed, turning her face almost feline. “You mean I don’t get to speak to my own husband any time I want?”
He arched a brow, leaning back further in his chair and staring at her with a directness that was instantly unsettling. “Ours will not be that type of marriage,” he said after a long, heavy pause.
The aeroplane was rising through clouds and it bumped a little. Violet gripped the armrests, her eyes shifting to the windows. London was bathed in darkening dusk. It was reassuringly still visible – a string from her to her real life. The life she was walking away from – no, flying away from. The plane lurched again and she squeezed her eyes shut.
“It is just turbulence.”
Just turbulence. Yes. She nodded, but her mouth was parched. Whether he had somehow intuited her discomfort or simply understood, he pressed a button in his armrest. The woman in the dress appeared almost instantly. “Please bring Miss Covington some water.”
The woman nodded and disappeared. Violet watched her go then turned back to Zahir. He was studying her. His eyes were dark in his face; his expression showed little pleasure. “I never understood why it was you.”
She frowned. “Why what was me?”
“Why you were selected to be my bride,” he said with a shake of his head. “You are so English.”
“My grandfather was Kalasi.”
“Yes, yes, but there is none of him in you.”
The woman reappeared with a crystal glass of water balanced on a tray. Violet took it and sipped gratefully. “Thank you,” she murmured to the woman’s retreating back.
Zahir was still studying her, his dark eyes scrutinising every detail of her face.
“We are more alike than my looks would lead you to believe,” Violet said finally. “To my detriment, in some ways,” she smiled, thinking fondly of Efani’s stubborn nature.
“Yet you were raised in England. You have pale skin and pale hair. You will not be used to the ways of my country. This is foolish in the extreme.” His lips compressed in frustration.
“Having regrets?” She murmured, tracing the rim of the cup with her finger.
“I have been having regrets for years,” he said honestly. “If there had been any way to put this idea out of my father’s head I would have done so.”
“Gee, thanks,” she said waspishly, with mock anger to hide the very real hurt he had inflicted.
“You know I feel this. You know this marriage is anathema to me.”
“Why?” She asked, pressing her hands into the armrests and forcing herself to meet and hold his stare. But he seemed to have moved on. His expression shifted to one of curiosity now. His eyes roamed her face and then dropped lower, to the swell of her breasts that was covered by fabric.
“You said you have a life in England. What does that life entail?”
His swift conversation changes could make her head spin. “I thought you knew everything about me,” she responded archly.
“I know that you work as a librarian. That you live in the apartment your grandfather left for you. That you are a member of a local gym and that your best friend’s name is Whitney.”
Violet froze, her face pink, her eyes huge in her face. “Jeez. You really have done your homework.”
He shrugged. “There was a chance you might have become … unsuitable … as a bride.”
She understood what he wasn’t saying and it stung. “And what? Then you’d have been able to go to your father and throw my un
suitability in his face?”
“He is not in a position to have anything thrown in his face,” Zahir said frankly.
“Okay, but you would have got out of this?”
His brow furrowed as though he genuinely couldn’t understand why that bothered her. “Yes.”
Those feelings of being unwanted travelled the length of her spine and for one dangerous moment she flirted with the idea of making him want her. Of letting him kiss her next time he wanted to. Of making it impossible for him to ignore her as a woman, and as his wife.
But only for a second. Violet was pretty sure that trying to flirt with Zahir was a bad idea. That getting physically involved with Zahir would be like jumping out of a plane without a parachute. Only someone truly mad would do it. Right?
CHAPTER THREE
Ten years earlier.
He was more handsome than she’d known it possible for any man to be. Young and vibrant, dressed in a dark robe, his eyes seemed to shine with a tangle of emotions. It was easy to imagine them to be good emotions – at thirteen, Violet didn’t know any better, and the world view she held had been shaped by only those influences her grandfather accepted on her behalf.
She smiled at the man, a smile that spread across her whole face, digging a perfect dimple deep into one cheek. She wasn’t shy; why would she be? He was going to be her husband one day, and her grandfather clearly adored the Sheikh.
“How is your father?” Efani spoke in English for her benefit, though her Kalasi was competent enough.
“Worried.” Zahir didn’t bother to conceal the truth from the man his father loved almost as a brother.
“I was told she’s in remission.”
Zahir nodded, his eyes shifting once more to the girl opposite him. With her hair so pale it was like gold and her eyes that seemed to see too much. Frustration gnawed at the edges of his being. “Mother has been in remission twice before. Her cancer is aggressive. I don’t doubt it is determined to claim victory.”
Compassion vibrated around the room; Violet was its epicentre. Her expression softened with palpable anguish. Perhaps it was that she too was a child of loss – a child who had mourned her parents – that made her understand the specific agony of what he was facing. She held her hands in her lap tightly, though her fingers itched to reach across and touch his.
“She is strong.” Efani spoke quietly and Violet turned her head to look at him. His profile was etched from lead; set and resolute.
“Yes.” Zahir shifted in his chair as if to signal that the conversation was at an end. “The papers are in order.” He nodded towards the thick contracts that sat between them. Documents that looked like they should refer to the sale of an apartment block rather than the agreement for two strangers to marry.
“Good,” Efani smiled. “Your father will be pleased.”
“He is.” Zahir nodded. He couldn’t help but look at her again. His bride to be. The child. Revulsion turned his gut and he knew by her sharp intake of breath that he hadn’t concealed it well-enough. Damn those eyes of hers! Enormous and perceptive, and far too understanding of what made his soul tick. Even if he were to wait ten years to fulfil this arrangement, she would still be only twenty three. Too young to bear the weight of being his Sheikha, surely. And neither of the men who had brokered this deal would be satisfied with that delay. Five years, perhaps, but not ten. He compressed his lips and reached for the pen. He ran his finger over its cool, dark edge, his eyes holding hers without realising it.
“You’ll have a coffee.” Efani stood and moved with a spry spring in his step that a man of his years had no business possessing towards the kitchen. There were several servants in the Knightsbridge townhouse, so the fact the old man had absented himself was a heavy handed invitation to speak privately with the young woman. The girl.
More than confident with women, he found that he had nothing to say to a teenager.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” she spoke first, and her face – it was a beautiful face, yet he felt utterly creepy for appreciating the fact – twisted with genuine pity. “It must be hard to face each piece of good news knowing that it may be only a precursor to bad.”
He startled at her insight, his eyes narrowing. “It is the way of the beast,” he said simply.
She nodded. “That makes it no less difficult to bear. You have a brother?”
“Syed,” he supplied.
“How is he coping with it?”
Zahir tapped the pen lightly on the edge of the contracts. “He is very close to her. He will find it almost impossible to accept when she does … die.” He choked on the word a little.
“Most of us expect to bury our parents; but naturally we hope it to be at the end of their long, fulfilled lives.” Her smile was wistful. “Sadly, that’s not always the case.”
“You know more about this than most.”
Her face shuttered; the light in her eyes seemed to extinguish and he felt a swooping sense of loss out of nowhere. “My parents had the misfortune to die when I was only eight. I barely remember them – not as I ought to. Photos have ensured I know their faces but it is like remembering a stranger. It would be far harder to love a parent and see them suffer, as you are.”
He arched a brow and leaned back a little in his chair. “I was not inviting you to compete with me.”
Her lips parted in surprise. Full lips. Pink. Inwardly he groaned. She was a child! A child. “Only a fool would try to compete in something so subjective as grief.”
He was quiet for a long time. The muted sounds of movement coming from elsewhere in the house formed a background noise but in the elegant saloon they sat, the air crackled with discomfort.
“You speak … You are … There is something unsettling about the way you speak,” he said finally.
“Unsettling?” The smile flickered at her lips. He liked it.
“You are still a child,” he murmured. “And yet you easily act like my contemporary.”
“Is thirteen a child?”
“Yes.” He was emphatic, convincing both her and himself.
“I don’t feel like it.” And she didn’t. From that morning, when she’d woken and dressed to meet her husband, she’d been filled with a sense of curiosity and maturity.
“Yet you are.”
She studied him for a moment. “What were you doing at thirteen?”
He resisted the impulse to point out he would need to go back eleven years in his mind. “It is another comparison I do not invite,” he said simply. “I was born with the expectation I would one day rule Kalastan. My childhood was steeped in responsibility.”
“And for many years I have known I would marry the ruler of Kalastan,” she responded with quiet insistence. “Is there such a difference?”
They stared at one another; the air prickled. It was swirling around Zahir, stinging his skin, softening his brain. He was not used to being challenged and he certainly hadn’t expected it in this quarter.
What had he expected? Not this. Not this strange hybrid child-adult with her eloquent opinions, clear skin, thoughtful expressions and those eyes. Those eyes!
Efani returned, and not a moment too soon. Zahir needed to leave. He could not sit opposite this fascinating child-creature for a moment longer. Deep down, he knew he couldn’t marry her. Though it might bring some pain to her, it would also give her a chance at a new life.
And he would be free of that intense violet stare that made him want to stop the world spinning and fall deep into the pool of whatever the hell she was swimming in.
He would be free of her.
* * *
“What are those?”
He startled back to the present with a bump, looking up from his papers at the moment Violet stood from her seat and moved to the window. She leaned over, peering out at the passing scenery. From where he sat, everything was dark, but they were nearing the end of the flight. They must have been close to landing, in fact.
“These?” She spun to face him
for a brief moment, then turned back. “These little lights?”
He expelled a sigh of impatience and stood, moving to her side. He had to lean close to her in order to see what she was looking at, and the proximity made her startle. She shifted to the side, giving him greater space, and he filed her reaction away in the folds of his brain.
That she was attracted to him was a complication he didn’t want or need. That he could easily be persuaded to feel the same for her was even worse. “They are the fires of the Badawi.”
“Badawi?” She cast her mind, trying to find meaning for the word.
“The nomads who live in these mountain ranges. They survive according to ancient lore, moving on foot, resisting modern technology, surviving as our Bedouin ancestors did.”
She looked out of the window once more. There were hundreds of the little fires, littered over a great space. They looked like tiny fireflies from their height.
She lifted her face, turning to look at him, only they were too close. Only inches separated them. “I haven’t heard about the Badawi,” she said quietly, her eyes dropping, of their own accord, to his lips. Lips that could convey a hundred things with the smallest twitch. Happiness, despair, frustration, impatience.
“I presumed your grandfather had educated you about our land,” he said, his disapproval unintentional.
“He did.” She turned away, the ache of need dissipating in the face of his condescension.
He pushed past the temptation to argue. “These tribes are our heritage; they offer a rare insight into our forebears.”
“Do they have any involvement with modern life?”
“Minimal.” He straightened, returning to his seat. Reluctantly she did the same. “They suffer my visits when I request them,” He smiled. “We have a mobile health clinic that offers vaccinations to the children, and help when needed. Pregnancy care, this type of thing. The Badawi are reluctant to make use of these tools, though.”
Violet crossed one leg over the other, inadvertently brushing his calf with her toe. She appeared not to notice. “You don’t approve.”
The Sheikh's Contract Bride: Theirs was an ancient debt, and the time had come to settle it... (The Sheikhs' Brides Book 1) Page 3