He glared at his so-called friend. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’
Bahir grinned. ‘So long as it’s not because she plays for the other team.’ He whistled. ‘That would be one cruel waste.’
The urge to laugh battled with the urge to growl. He didn’t want anyone speculating about his wife’s sexuality. Besides, if Bahir only knew which team she’d openly speculated they all played for he wouldn’t think it nearly as funny himself. He sighed. Clearly Bahir would not stop until he knew. ‘She says it’s because she doesn’t know me.’
‘What?’
He shrugged. ‘She says she won’t sleep with any man she doesn’t know. Apparently—’ he ground out the words between his teeth ‘—that includes her husband.’
‘But she has to. I thought you said so.’
‘I did. According to the terms of the pact she has no choice.’
‘Did you tell her that?’
He thought back to their argument and how bitter and twisted it had become at the end. ‘Under the circumstances, I really don’t think it would have helped if I had.’
‘But she has to eventually, right? She has to give you heirs and she knows that?’
‘True.’
‘So don’t tell anyone in the meantime,’ Bahir said, shrugging. ‘I won’t tell if you won’t, kind of thing.’
He shook his head. ‘That won’t work. I have to swear on the book of Al-Jirad that we are married in every sense of the word. ‘
‘So lie.’
He shook his head. ‘That is hardly an honourable way to start my reign.’ He’d spent hours last night trying to work a way around the requirement—had lingered some time over that very option—until finally concluding that lying would not work even if he could bring himself to act so dishonourably. Besides, she would know the truth and she could hold that over him the entire time. It would not work if she could bring down the kingdom at any moment she chose.
His friend nodded. ‘True. Still, I can see her point of view.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, it has all been kind of sudden.’
‘It’s been sudden for everyone. And it’s not as if she has a choice.’
‘So maybe that’s what this is all about. She wants to feel like it is her choice.’
Zoltan looked up. ‘What are you talking about? Why should that matter?’
‘She’s a woman.’ He shrugged. ‘They think differently. Especially Jemeyan princesses.’
Zoltan looked at him. ‘So what did happen between you and her sister?’
It was Bahir’s turn to look uncomfortable. ‘It’s history. It doesn’t matter. What you have to worry about is how your princess feels right now. She’s a princess in a desert kingdom who has probably been hanging out all these years for her prince to turn up. She wants to be romanced. Instead she gets lumbered with you and told she has to make babies.’ He shrugged. ‘Frankly, who could blame her? Nothing personal, but who wouldn’t be a tad disappointed?’
‘Thank you so much for that erudite summation of the situation.’
Bahir was back to his grinning best. ‘My pleasure. So, what are you going to do?’
He snorted. ‘I don’t have time to do anything. I’ve got too much to do before the coronation as it is.’
‘Well, you’d better do something, or by the sounds of it there won’t be a coronation and Mustafa would be within his rights to come steal that pretty bride right out from under your nose—and next time he won’t leave you a window open to rescue her.’
‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ Zoltan said. ‘What was Mustafa waiting for? If he’d slept with her that would have been the end of it.’
‘Maybe,’ Bahir mused, ‘he was waiting to be married?’
Zoltan shook his head. That didn’t sound like the Mustafa he knew. ‘More likely he was so sure that nobody could find them that he thought there was no rush; he could take his time torturing her by telling her in exquisite detail exactly what he had planned for her.’
‘Then it’s lucky we found her in time.’
Was it? Zoltan wondered as he padded back into the palace. She sure as hell didn’t think so. He was still thinking about the words Bahir had used.
‘She wants to feel like it is her choice.’
‘She wants to be romanced. ‘
How could he do that? What was the point of even trying? Here in the palace it was like being in a fishbowl, full of maids and footmen and the ever-present Hamzah, uncannily always to hand when he was needed and plenty of times when he was not. How was he supposed to romance her and somehow study the necessary texts to complete the formalities he was required to before he could be crowned King?
It was impossible.
And then he remembered it—a holiday his family had taken when he was just a child, a shared holiday with his uncle, the then-King, and his family. In a spot not far from the Blue Palace, a jewel of a location on a promontory reaching a sandy finger out into the sapphire-blue sea. They had slept in tents listening to the waves on the shore at night, woken to the early-morning calls of gulls, fished, swum and ridden horses along the long, sandy beach.
Maybe he could take her there, where she could unwind and relax and forget about duty and obligation for a while and maybe, just maybe, tolerate him long enough that they could consummate this marriage.
He could only hope.
‘Where are we going again?’ Aisha asked as the four-wheel drive tore up the desert highway. Outside the car was golden sands and shimmering heat, while inside was smooth leather and air-conditioned luxury. And the scent of him beside her was mixing with the leather, evocative, damnably alluring and much too likeable—much too annoying. She was almost tempted to open her window and risk the heat if it meant she wouldn’t have to endure it.
‘A place called Belshazzah on the coast,’ Zoltan said without shifting his gaze from the road. The tracks of her nails, thankfully, were fading on his cheek. He stared at the road ahead, dodging patches of sand where the dunes crept over the road on their inexorable travels. A man in control, she thought, looking at him behind the wheel. A man used to taking charge, she guessed, unable to let someone else drive for him, so that the necessary bodyguards were forced to squeeze into the supply vehicles that trailed behind them. He looked good, his dark hands on the wheel, the folded-back sleeves of his white shirt contrasting with his corded forearms and that damned scent everywhere.
‘How far is it?’
‘Not far from the Blue Palace. No more than two hours away.’
Aisha buzzed down her window a few inches and sniffed.
‘Are you cold?’ he said, immediately moving to adjust the temperature.
‘Not really,’ she said, gazing out behind her dark glasses at a horizon bubbling under the desert sun. Not at all. When he’d turned up at her door this morning and asked if she’d like to accompany him to the beach encampment, she’d remembered the things he’d said to her last night and how close he’d come to forcing himself upon her and she’d almost told him where he could shove his beach encampment.
But something had stopped her. Whether it was the look in his eyes, that this unexpected invitation was costing him something, or whether it was just because for the first time he was actually asking if she would accompany him rather than telling her and riding roughshod over her opinions and views as was his usual tactic—whatever it was—she’d said yes.
‘And remind me again why we’re going there?’
He shrugged. ‘The palace is too big, filled with too many people, too many advisers. I thought you might appreciate somewhere a little quieter.’ He turned to her then. ‘So we could get to know each other a little more.’
Even from behind his sunglasses she could feel the sizzle his eyes sent her all the way down to her toes.
‘You mean so you can finally get what you expected you would get last night?’
He didn’t look at her, but she caught his smile behind the wheel. ‘Do
you really think I need go to so much trouble when the palace is full of dark corners and secret places? Not exactly the kind of places you want to hang around and hold a meaningful conversation, but perfectly adequate for other, more carnal pleasures.’
Her window hummed even lower. She did not want to hear about dark places and carnal pleasures. Not when it made her body buzz with an electricity that felt uncannily like anticipation.
Impossible.
‘It’s not going to happen, you know,’ she said, as much for her benefit as his.
‘What?’
‘I’m not going to sleep with you.’
‘So you said.’
‘I hate you.’
‘You said that too. You made that more than plain last night.’
‘Good. So long as we understand each other.’
‘Oh,’ he said, taking his eyes off the road to throw her a lazy smile, ‘we may not know each other, but I think we understand each other perfectly.’
Dissatisfied with the way that conversation had ended, she fell silent for a while, looking out at the desert dunes, disappearing into the distance in all directions. She shuddered when she remembered another desert camp. ‘How do you know Mustafa’s not out here somewhere, waiting for you to make a mistake so he can steal me away and take the crown before you? Aren’t you worried about him?’
‘Are you scared, Princess? Are you worried now you should have consummated this marriage last night when you had the chance?’
She crossed her arms over her chest and turned her gaze pointedly out the window again. ‘Definitely not.’
‘Then you are braver than I thought. But you have nothing to fear. My sources say he’s moved out of Al-Jirad for now.’
‘So he knows he’s beaten and given up?’
‘Possibly.’
‘And he won’t be at the coronation?’
His jaw clenched, his hands tightening on the wheel. ‘He wouldn’t dare show his face.’
She hoped he was right. If she never saw the ugly slug again, it would be too soon. She looked around, wondering at the words he had spoken, about the punch his words had held. She wondered why he was so certain, and she guessed it was not all to do with her kidnapping.
‘What did he do to you?’
There was a pause before he spoke. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘You clearly hate him very much. He must have done something to deserve it.’
He snorted in response to that. ‘You could say that. I grew up with him. I got to see how his twisted mind works first-hand.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Are you sure you want to hear this, Princess?’
‘Is it so bad?’
‘It is not pretty. He is not a nice person.’
She swallowed. ‘I’m a big girl. I can handle it, surely.’
He nodded. ‘As you say.’ He looked back at the road for a moment before he began. ‘There was a blind man in the village where we grew up, a man called Saleem,’ he started. ‘He was old and frail and everyone in the village looked out for him, brought him meals or firewood. He had a dog, a mutt he’d found somewhere that was his eyes. We used to pass Saleem’s house on our way to school where Saleem was usually sitting outside, greeting everyone who passed. Mustafa never said anything, he just baited the dog every chance he got, teasing it, sometimes kicking it. One day he went too far and it bit him. I was with him that day, and I swear it was nothing more than a scratch, but Mustafa swore he would get even. Even when the old man told him that it was his fault—that even though he was blind he was not stupid. He knew Mustafa had been taunting his dog mercilessly all along.
‘One day not long after, the dog went missing. The whole village looked for it. Until someone found it—or, rather, what was left of it.’
She held her breath. ‘What happened to it?’
‘The dog had been tortured to within an inch of its life before something more horrible happened—something that said the killer had a grudge against not only the dog, but against its owner.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The dog had been blinded. So, even if it had somehow managed to survive the torture, it would have been useless to Saleem.’
She shuddered, feeling sick. ‘How could anyone do such a thing to an animal, a valued pet?’
‘That one could.’
‘You believe it was Mustafa?’
‘I know it was him. I overheard him boasting to a schoolfriend in graphic detail about what he had done. He had always been a bully. He was proud of what he had done to a helpless animal.’
‘Did you tell anyone?’
Her question brought the full pain and the injustice of the past crashing back. He remembered the fury of his father when he had told him what he had heard; fury directed not at Mustafa but at him for daring to speak ill of his favoured child. He remembered the savage beating he had endured for daring to speak the truth.
‘I told someone. For all the good it did me.’
Choose your battles.
His uncle had been so right. There had been no point picking that one. He had never been going to win where Mustafa was concerned. Not back then.
She waited for more but he went quiet then, staring fixedly at the road ahead, so she turned to look out her own window, staring at the passing dunes, wondering what kind of person did something like that for kicks and wondering about all the things Zoltan wasn’t telling her.
He was an enigma, this man she was married to, and, as much as she hated him for who and what he was and what he had forced her into, maybe she should be grateful she had been saved the alternative. Because she would have been Mustafa’s wife if this man had not come for her. She shuddered.
‘Princess?’
She looked around, blinking. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you all right? You missed my question.’
‘Oh.’ She sat up straight and lifted the heavy weight of the ponytail behind her head to cool her neck. ‘I’m sorry. What did you ask?’
He looked at her for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not, before looking back at the interminably long, straight road ahead. ‘Seeing as we were talking about Mustafa,’ he started.
‘Yes?’
‘There is something I don’t understand. Something you told me when we rescued you.’
‘Some rescue,’ she said, but her words sounded increasingly hollow in the wake of Zoltan’s revelations about his half-brother’s cruel nature. Maybe he had saved her from a fate worse than death after all. ‘What about it?’ she said before she could explore that revelation any further.
‘How did you convince Mustafa not to take you right then and there, while he had you in the camp? Why was he prepared to wait until the wedding? Because if Mustafa had laid claim to you that first night he held you captive, if he had had witnesses to the act, then no rescue could have prevented you from being his queen and him the new king.’
She swallowed back on a surge of memory-fed bile, not wanting to think back to those poisoned hours. ‘He told me he did not care to wait, you are right.’
‘So why did he? That does not sound like the Mustafa I know.’
She blinked against the sun now dipping low enough to intrude through her window and sat up straighter to avoid it, even if that meant she had to lean closer to him in the process, and closer to that damned evocative scent.
‘Simple, really. I told him that he would be cursed if he took me before our wedding night.’
‘You told him that and he believed you?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘But there must have been more reason than that. Why would he believe that he would be cursed?’
Beside him she swallowed. She didn’t want to have to admit to him the truth, although she rationalised he would find that truth out some time. And maybe he might at least understand her reluctance to jump into bed and spread her legs for him as if the act itself meant nothing.
‘Because I told him that, according to t
he Jemeyan tenets, if he took me before our wedding night the gods would curse him with a soft and shrivelled penis for evermore.’
‘Because you are a princess?’
‘Because I am a virgin.’
‘And he believed you?’ He laughed then as if it was the biggest joke in the world, and she wasn’t tempted in the least to rake her nails down his laughing face again—this time she wanted to strangle him.
Instead she turned away, pretending to stare out of the window and at the sea, fat tears squeezing from her eyes, but only half from the humiliating memories of being poked and parted and prodded by the wiry fingers of some old crone who smelt like camel dung.
The other half was because it never occurred to Zoltan to believe her. It never occurred to him that she might be telling the truth, that she might actually be a virgin. And the rank injustice of it all was almost too much to bear. She angled her body away from him to mask the dampness that suddenly welled in her eyes.
To think she had saved herself all this time only to be bound to someone like him instead. The one thing she had always thought hers to give; the one thing she had thought hers to control, and when all was said and done she had no control at all. No choice. It was not to be given as a gift, but a due.
What a waste.
‘It would seem your half-brother is superstitious,’ she managed to say through her wretchedness to cover the truth.
And from behind the wheel, Zoltan’s words sounded as though he was still smiling. ‘Yes. He always was a fool.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE could smell the salt on the air long before she could see the sea. They had left the highway some time ago. The track across the desert sands was slower going, until they topped one last dune and suddenly a dry desert world turned into paradise.
From their vantage point, she could see the rocky peninsula jutting into the crystal-clear sapphire waters, and where before she had seen no signs of vegetation beyond small, scrubby salt-bushes clinging to the sand for their meagre existence for miles, now the shores and rocks were dotted with palms, the rocky outcrops covered with lush, green vegetation.
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