by Annie O'Neil
“Yes, we need your help.” Robyn signed something to Amira, who turned her expression, now very grave, toward him. “We’ve got a bit of a language barrier and hoped you could help.”
Amira mouthed and signed their “secret” language. They’d developed it over the years as a sort of father-daughter shorthand. And right now his daughter was very emphatically telling him Robyn’s shoes were silly, too hot to be worn in Da’har, and needed to be changed. As was her suit. They should go to the souk.
Idris’s eyes widened.
She’d never asked such a thing before.
They rarely left the palace grounds excepting public celebrations where he and his security team could keep their watchful eyes upon her.
“We can get someone to fetch everything Robyn needs,” Idris replied.
“It could be fun!” Robyn interjected. “I’ve never been to the souk,” she added, her shy smile prizing apart his decision not to leave the grounds.
“Nor has Amira.” Idris addressed this solely to Robyn in a tone few would mistake as approving. There was a reason this was so. Why her outings were predominantly only for state occasions.
The crowds, the frenetic bustle, the chaotic mayhem the market could burst into without a moment’s notice. Even with bodyguards he had never thought the journey appropriate. Not for a little girl. Not his little girl.
“It would be madness if we were to just appear at the souk.” He pressed his heels against the tiled floors, rising to his full height. “Not fun.”
He felt a tug on his hand.
Amira’s fingers wrapped around just one of his as her other hand curled into a soft little fist and rubbed in a circle over her heart.
Please.
Sign language was an evocative thing.
Her expression mirrored the word.
Please.
He thought back to his own childhood. Free of bodyguards. Endless hours wandering the souks and sprawling communities fanning out from the exquisitely designed city center. Speaking to the people whose lives he would one day hold responsibility for. Listening...
Exactly!
Listening.
It would be difficult for Amira. Too difficult. Too many people who would crowd and surround her, keen to tell her their stories with no means of communicating.
Stories she might one day hear if this infuriating blond woman standing in front of him, elbows akimbo, loosely curled hands propped on hips, would see some ruddy sense in the decisions he made.
No souk.
Not today.
He felt a tug on his fingers and looked down at the little, expectant face tipped up toward his.
Two against one.
He rolled his eyes heavenward only to have them land on a smiling Robyn upon their descent.
This, he was beginning to think, was going to be an awfully long fortnight.
* * *
“This is such fun, don’t you think?” Robyn smiled cheerfully, seemingly immune to Idris’s increasingly dark mood as they obeyed his daughter’s insistent beckoning to enter another clothing store.
Idris made a noncommittal grunt. Fun wasn’t exactly the word he would’ve chosen. The perfect recipe for an ulcer was more like it. Ditching the security guards at his daughter’s insistence meant he was the one weighted with the bags and boxes of clothing and scarves Robyn had accrued.
Thus far.
Or should he say, the items Amira had accrued on Robyn’s behalf. The poor woman was as powerless as he was in the face of Amira’s untapped shopping gene.
Idris ruled, with meticulous detail, an entire kingdom, for goodness’ sake! And here he was being pulled willy-nilly down the never-ending twists and turns of the maze that was the capital city’s largest souk.
“Just one more?” His daughter struck her most forlorn and wide-eyed expression.
He had to smile as she didn’t bother waiting for an answer and tugged him into the store—walls all but hidden by silks, tunics and headscarves.
Robyn’s arrival seemed to have transfigured his serious little girl into little less than a high-powered personal shopper as she inspected the beautiful fabrics and clothing items on display, then casting an appraising eye over Robyn, who was, he had to admit, playing along rather wonderfully.
She would turn and sashay and kneel down so Amira could hold the fabrics up to her strawberries-and-cream complexion, every now and again, flicking those amber eyes up to meet his for what exactly he wasn’t sure.
Approval?
The stirrings of something he hadn’t felt in a long time—seven years to be precise—told him all he needed to know. They’d done enough shopping for today.
“I think your daughter would do well in Paris!” Robyn stood up, laughing, when Amira rejected another ream of richly colored sarwals—the formfitting trousers that drew a man’s attention directly to a woman’s ankle.
He could feel his jaw tighten at the thought of Amira growing up at all. His little girl. His precious little girl.
“My daughter does perfectly well in Da’har.”
“I wasn’t suggesting—” Robyn protested, then stopped, her eyes glued to his as if trying to divine why he’d gone all prickly. “Of course she does,” she said gently. “Just look at her.”
His eyes stayed on Robyn just a moment longer as she turned to watch Amira inspecting pairs of traditional leather shoes much to the shopkeeper’s delight. She used her own form of communicating, a mix of mouthing the words in the local Da’harian dialect and miming movements or pointing. She was never inhibited by her inability to communicate in the traditional fashion. Never one to behave as though she had a disability. For her, this was normal. A normal Idris couldn’t bear for her to endure. She deserved every gift of the senses he had and more! She was his daughter, for heaven’s sake! The woman standing next to him was the one who could make it possible. He hadn’t realized how frightening it would be to invest so much faith in one person. So much hope.
For her part, Robyn appeared openly charmed with Amira’s mad-dash shopping bonanza, her eyes shining with unchecked delight. What she didn’t know was that the little girl, beaming, expertly folding and unfolding the headscarves, was bargaining, for heaven’s sake, negotiating for this dishdasha or that pair of harem trousers—she wasn’t the little girl he saw very often. And watching her come to life as she did with Robyn was more painful than he could have imagined.
They were moments Amira should be having with her mother. The mother she would never know. He turned again as Robyn joined his daughter, each of them running an appraising finger along the intricately designed sandals, their heads bent together—one black as midnight, the other impossibly golden—and his heart cinched even tighter.
“All right, then.” His voice sounded jagged amid the happy buzz and hum that had filled the shop mere seconds earlier. “Time to go.”
* * *
Drawing any sort of banter out of Idris on the car ride home was proving next to impossible. The pulling-blood-from-a-stone variety.
His jet-black eyes were trained on the roads as they whizzed past the beautiful structures that made up the old town. A vividly modern section of the city lay closer to the airport, looking every bit the hotbed of Middle Eastern business Da’har was purported to be.
She turned to peek at Amira, who had fallen asleep amid the tumble of boxes and shopping bags, her beautiful little face framed in tissue paper and silk ribbons.
Focusing very stoically on the beautiful capital city was the only way Robyn could stem a sudden stingy tickle and tease of tears. She scratched her nails along her legs as they balled into fists.
You can love her from a distance.
She squeezed her eyes tight.
You shouldn’t let yourself love her at all.
�
��Everything all right?”
“Yes, fine.” She looked up, surprised Idris had noticed her change of mood at all. “Just a long day, is all.” An endless future without a child of my own...
“If you look just over to your right—” he slowed the speed of the four-by-four “—you will see the Museum of Swords.”
“Of swords?”
“Absolutely. There are a few of my father’s in there and—” he chuckled more to himself than her as if remembering the rake of a man he may once have been “—one or two of mine.”
Clear as day she saw Idris tugging not one but two wide-lipped scimitars from horn-and-ivory cases, crossing the flashing blades in front of him, shielding Robyn and Amira from...camel-riding marauders intent on kidnapping them from their Bedouin tent—carpets and all!
“Goodness.”
Idris unleashed a full-throated laugh at her prim, English response. Little did he know she was busy A-Thousand-and-One-Nighting it now that she had a more appropriate wardrobe. Or was it the someone playing the dashing knight who’d unbuckled her imagination?
She felt her lips purse at the thought, barely hearing him as he talked her through each of the buildings they passed.
She didn’t fancy Idris.
He was too...too gorgeously unattainable to plain old crush on.
Unh-unh. Apart from which, there was the very obvious point that men like him didn’t desire people like her. He was serious to her scatty. He could do limelight. She’d rather hide in an operating theater than be the object of attention. He was a sun, she was an orbiting moon—happy to enjoy the light and heat and electricity of his presence from afar.
Hmm. Maybe she did fancy him. Just a little.
Her gaze lowered and slid toward him as she tilted her chin to make it look like she was memorizing the facts he was rattling off rather than ogling him.
Idris Al Khalil was beautifully sensuous in the most masculine of ways. Strong-featured. Stoic. Commanding. And she? While they were about the same age, she felt past any sort of prime she might have had. No, she wasn’t old, but...losing the ability to have children all that time ago seemed to have stolen something from her. Perhaps as losing his wife had stolen that rare, wonderful laugh from Idris. Her fingers pressed into her lips to stem a sigh.
“And this, over here—” she followed his fingers as they lifted off the steering wheel and pointed to her left “—is the Old Castle.”
The structure rose from the ground as if it had been there a thousand years. More opulent fortress than French château, there were acres of towers and soaring walls, wooden shuttered windows closed against the late-afternoon sun that made the air smell hot and heavily spiced.
“So, you live in the...New Castle?”
Again, Idris laughed, but as it faded away, so, too, did the light she’d seen in his eyes as he pointed out the architectural jewels in his family’s crown.
“No,” he replied. Then again, harder. Flintier. “No.”
He turned a corner from one street to the next, the light shifting to a rosy golden hue as the sunset caught the harbor city in its full glory.
“This was the New Castle.”
A broad avenue stretched out before them. Something akin to the Mall leading up to Buckingham Palace. Something fit for a king. At the top of the avenue was a gloriously modern structure, resplendent in its nod to traditional architecture, unerring in its thrust toward the future.
It was a modern-day Taj Mahal, she knew at once. No longer a palace to be lived in, but a seven-year-old testament to love.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Amira stir and wake, her eyes blinking into understanding as to where she was. Her little hands pressing against the window as she blew kisses to her mother’s tomb.
Another hit of emotion burned the rims of Robyn’s eyes so strongly she was forced to turn away from it all. Idris’s stoic profile, the little girl lost in thought over a mother she’d never know and a palace standing in the midst of Da’har’s many people—empty and alone.
CHAPTER FIVE
“LET’S HAVE A fashion show, shall we?”
Robyn looked as astonished as Idris felt hearing that collection of words coming out of his mouth.
Fashion show?
And yet...
All of their moods had taken a discernible dip after they returned but somehow the somber atmosphere didn’t seem fitting with Robyn around.
He’d had seven years of walking around like the god of thunder and retribution, perhaps a new turn as...something else was in order.
“Come along.” He nodded toward the large pile of untouched boxes and paper-wrapped packages. “We weren’t dragged across Sanhella’s largest souk just to sit here watching you grow more and more uncomfortable in that suit of yours.”
A hot flash of primal instinct took hold of him as he pictured Robyn revealing for them, veil by veil, the layers of delicate silks and diaphanous wraps concealing her slender figure, currently unartfully hidden in the boxy suit she’d arrived in.
“I really don’t think that’s necessary.” Robyn shook her head, clearly uninterested in displaying her wares, silken or otherwise.
A flush crept up the length of her neck as she busied herself with finishing off a savory pastry parcel they’d brought home from the souk, a parting gift from a vendor who’d spotted them loading up Robyn’s purchases.
“I insist,” he said, wincing at the unintended harshness in his tone, and tacked on smile, hoping it would soften the moment. He’d have to work on his “order” voice before Amira could hear. He’d have to work on a lot of things.
He glanced over at his daughter innocently finishing the picnic dinner they’d opted to have in the central atrium, her little brows furrowed together in their usual cinch as she worked out the spices and scents each savory morsel afforded.
There were servants and formal dining rooms and even more formal rooms for impressing visitors in the government buildings—not too far away—but this house he’d designed after Amira was born was their sanctuary.
He was surprised to realize having Robyn in his home felt right. As if she were someone who immediately saw it for what it was—a retreat from the world and a reminder of everything that was beautiful as his heart fought the darkness that so often threatened to consume him.
“Would a single showing along the catwalk suffice?” Robyn asked as a put-upon soldier might inquire of a general demanding his boots be polished every fifteen minutes.
He nodded curtly. Too curtly given the internal ticking off he was giving himself for just that sort of brusque behavior. Behavior that had near enough held everyone he had once loved at arm’s length. Friends, advisers—aunts and uncles who no longer knew how to deal with the coldness he knew exuded from him the day his heart had all but withered and died. The only thing that had kept him alive was the little girl sitting across from him. The one throwing him a “fix it now, Daddy” look as Robyn’s discomfort increased.
“Please,” Idris asked, palms turned upward in an open appeal to her generous spirit. “Please show us how you look in your new outfits.”
* * *
Under Idris’s dark-eyed gaze...Robyn felt as if there was no escape. As if he were looking straight through to her very soul. His long-lashed eyes easily swept aside the bluster and Englishness she hid behind, seeing instead the particles making up the invisible essence that was her spirit. The very kernel of who she’d become in the aftermath of her painful loss. And yet he didn’t know a thing.
That she was a woman who ached. A woman who felt the loss of her unborn child as if it had happened yesterday.
Idris moved his hands forward in a genuine entreaty for her indulgence, eyes shifting toward Amira, then back to hers.
The request wasn’t just for him. It was for his daughter,
and no points for guessing how powerless she was in that department.
Little Amira had all but wrapped her around her finger and she’d only been in the country a handful of hours. Ridiculous!
She swept some invisible crumbs off her cheeks, hoping the gesture made excuses for the pink she knew was there, and pushed up from the cluster of pillows she’d been leaning on while they ate.
“There’s a powder room off to the left,” Idris directed once she’d filled her arms with packages, much to Amira’s delight.
Of course there was.
And, if she asked, there would probably be someone to come along and help her figure out how to make the best of the meters and meters of fabric Amira had selected. The fact there wasn’t a collection of servants lining the atrium had her feeling grateful, if not a little surprised, that Idris seemed to live so privately.
The palace bore a far more personal touch than she would have suspected. Idris was all cut glass and black marble, but this place—this home—looked as if someone had conjured up the mythical Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But, as he’d told her over supper, it had all come from Idris—from his thesis project in university where he’d studied architecture and, of course, politics.
What a project! A love letter to the traditional architecture of his land, with secret, little hidden-away connections to the modern world. Wi-Fi, built in radios, tablets lying out of sight, but always within reach, if ever a person wondered what if...and the answer was only a tip and a tap of a keyboard away.
The more he spoke, the more she saw this place was the dream child of his complicated mind, the heart that had known such sorrow and a mind that bore, surprisingly, an extraordinary imagination. For a man who came across as being utterly rigid about his beliefs and ways, his home was almost whimsical.
She turned just before going into the changing room and saw he was watching her. Two of the boxes tumbled out of her hands and as she lurched to catch them she managed to lose her grip on the bags dangling precariously from her fingertips.