Sienna felt as if she was operating on some kind of autopilot as she continued with the ritual of decorating cupcakes with Cara. She realised that she was waiting for something, but was not quite sure how she knew—or what, indeed, she was waiting for.
But then her mobile phone rang, and she knew who it would be even before she saw ‘Hashim’ flashing on the screen. Her heart started beating fit to burst.
‘Sienna?’
‘Abdul has been to see me,’ she blurted out.
‘I know he has.’
‘You didn’t think to warn me?’
‘Did you need me to?’ he questioned coolly.
‘He says you’re going to broadcast to the nation.’
‘Indeed I am.’
‘He wanted me to try and stop you.’
‘And are you?’
Sienna laughed. ‘It would be like trying to stop the sun from rising if you had your heart set on something.’
Oh, how true her words. Hashim smiled. ‘Good,’ he murmured. ‘I am glad that we understand one another.’
‘Hashim…’ Sienna hesitated. ‘You aren’t going to do anythingfoolish , are you?’
Well, that was all down to which way you looked at it. But that was not the answer she needed to hear right now. ‘No, Sienna.’ His voice sounded strangely controlled, but there was a hint of mockery underpinning it. ‘If I send a jet for you then will you fly out to Qudamah?’
Her world spun. A jet? To Qudamah? ‘Why?’ she breathed.
There was a pause. ‘My mother wishes to meet you.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SIENNA’Sfirst sight of Hashim’s palace was against a backdrop of stars—like a distant castle in a fairy tale—and she touched her fingers to her lips in disbelief and a growing sense of wonder. As if this could not be happening. Not now, and not to her.
But it was.
She was summoned to a room all golden and sapphire-blue, but she was scarcely aware of the lavish and opulent décor for only one figure dominated her line of vision. As he always did. Tall and lean and proud—the beautiful-ugly face tense. His flowing white robes made him look like a stranger, but his eyes were oh-so-familiar. Burning into her like smouldering coals that heated her skin and warmed her heart.
He nodded when he saw her, as if she had just confirmed something in his mind, but Sienna was terribly aware of protocol and of the presence of his servants—even though they had their eyes averted. And so she simply nodded back—as if they were two commuters who passed each other on the train platform every morning.
With a curt, clipped statement in his native tongue he dismissed the servants, and after the room was emptied he stood staring at her for long, countless seconds.
‘Now come to me,’ he commanded.
She went like a woman willingly sleepwalking. Towards him. Summoned by her Sheikh. Into his arms. The place where she most wanted to be.
There was no kiss, just a fierce embrace which seemed to force all the breath out of her lungs. He clasped her against him and pressed his face to her scented hair. His words were muffled.
‘You know that I love you, don’t you, Sienna?’
Sienna pulled away and stared up at him, her eyes blinking rapidly, certain that she must have misheard him. ‘Hashim?’
‘Can’t you feel it in the beating of my heart?’ He placed her palm over his chest, where the rapid thundering of his life-blood made her eyes widen in dawning realisation. ‘It is no good, Sienna—for I have tried. By the mountains and the rivers, I have tried! I have attempted the impossible and have failed. To forget you. To imagine life without you. And I cannot.I will not .’
‘Butlove ?’ she whispered.
‘Yes, love.’ He smiled. ‘More powerful than the eagle—a force as powerful as life itself—can you not feel it gathering strength, Sienna—as the bird itself does just before flight?’
He waited.
But Sienna felt tongue-tied and strangely humble—and scared too, in these imposing surroundings. A declaration she had longed for and never thought to hear—and now that it had been made she was shaken. It was as if dust had turned to gold before her eyes, and she was terrified that it would change back to dust again.
Yet he was right. She could feel the strength emanating from him—waves of it washing over her barely believing self. She touched her fingertips to the charm at her neck, as if it could give her the courage to say the words to him. Words she had once had tossed back in her face. Words she had grown inside her for so long, all the while trying to deny them.
‘I love you too,’ Hashim,’ she said brokenly. ‘I have done right from the very start, and it never changed—never dimmed—even when I prayed that it would.’ She stared into the black eyes which had softened now. ‘But you knew that, didn’t you? You could read it in my eyes.’
‘Yes.’
‘And it doesn’t actuallychange anything, does it? Not practically. You’re still a sheikh and I’m still a—’
‘No!’ He cut her words off with brutal force. ‘Do not say it! You are more and then much more—but you are not that! A youthful folly does not define a person for the rest of their lives!’
‘But that is how I will be perceived.’
‘And that,’ he said grimly, ‘thatis why I am making the broadcast. They are setting up cameras in the small Throne Room.’ He tilted his head—handsome and irresistible. ‘Will you come in with me?’
‘What are you going to say?’
‘Will you come in with me?’ he repeated inexorably.
‘Yes.’
‘And I must ask you something else, Sienna—and this is important. The life you live in England is incompatible with mine. My home is here. My place is here—increasingly more so. Could you renounce much of the freedom you enjoy in England? Is your love for me strong enough to embrace my life here? For if you decide to, you must do so without reservation. There can be no trial period, no waiting to see whether or not you can adapt. It must be a leap of faith and nothing less. You must decide whether your love for me is strong enough to commit to me, and to commit for the rest of your life. When you marry me,’ he finished deliberately, his gaze fixed firmly on her face.
‘Marryyou?’ she echoed, genuinely shocked.
Wry amusement vied with outrage in his black eyes. ‘You think that I would contemplate any alternative to marriage?’ he demanded. ‘That I should not want you as my wife? Assuming,’ he added arrogantly, ‘that you wish to be my wife? But if you do then you will be taking on more than most women do, and you must be certain in your heart that your destiny is beside me.’
Sienna licked her lips. She thought of the eagle which hung around her neck—powerful and fearless—the symbol of his country. This strange land with a tongue that was foreign to her. A place so very different from all that she had known—and yet it contained the only thing which was important to her.
Hashim.
Was she fearless enough in her love to grasp it tightly and never let it go? To make her vows to him and mean them? Never to leave his side? To promise to be true, no matter what life threw in their path? But wasn’t that whatall marriages were supposed to mean?
‘Oh, yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes, yes, and a million times yes.’ There was an odd kind of lump in her throat. ‘But will your people accept me?’
‘If they want me as their Ruler, then they will have to.’
‘Do you want to take that chance?’
‘I can’t not,’ he said simply. But he knew that he could never rule—nor would be fit to rule—if he allowed his people to prevent him from seizing his heart’s desire. Because any man who turned away from one of life’s greatest mysteries could never be a complete man.
‘But…’ Sienna bit her lip, not wanting to destroy the beautiful magic his words of love had created, but knowing that she must not hide behind her fears, must face them head-on—even if expressing them might put paid to all her future happiness.
‘But what, my beautiful Sien
na?’ he prompted softly as he saw the hurt and the pain in her eyes.
‘The photos.’ It came out in a bitter sigh. ‘What if your people see that calendar—how on earth would they ever accept me then?’
‘They shall not see it,’ he breathed. ‘Not now and not ever.’
He sounded so certain that she stared up at him in bewilderment. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because I have bought up all the rights to those photos—they are now exclusively mine. No newspaper will ever publish them, the calendar shall never be reprinted, and the negatives have been destroyed. I have even made sure that they will never appear on the infernal internet,’ he finished grimly.
She opened her mouth to ask how, but then changed her mind. When you were as rich and as powerful and as determined as Hashim, then Sienna supposed anything was possible. Instead, she gave a rather wobbly smile, needing something more than words or reassurance now. Something which she had missed so unbearably. She was aching to have him touch her again. ‘Won’t you please kiss me?’ she whispered.
He felt a strange kick to his heart as he bent his face to hers. Was it a kind of weakness for a man to be so in thrall to one woman? ‘You wish your Sheikh to go before the cameras in a state of arousal?’ he murmured.
‘Oh, Hashim—I never thought of that! I’ve got so much to learn. Maybe we’d better not…’
He gave a low, rumbling laugh. ‘And you think that I have not been aroused since the moment you first walked in, my love? That I can look at you without wanting you? Then, yes, you still have much to learn! Now, come here.’
It was a brief kiss, fuelled by a sense of coming home rather than passion—though that was bubbling away beneath the surface as his lips brushed over hers.
‘Now,’ he said firmly, and, bending down, rang a small golden bell.
A stream of people began to appear. Men in flowing robes who bowed briefly to her and then deeper still to Hashim. And then they were walking along cool marble corridors towards the ‘small’ Throne Room—which seemed pretty vast to Sienna, but there again she hadn’t had much experience of them.
She had been in TV studios before, but never when everyone had been behaving with such genuine deference towards the interviewee.
Hashim settled her in a chair at the back of the room and she watched while the camera lights lit up his face like the brightest sunshine. And then the red light flashed and the cameras began to roll, and suddenly he was speaking live to the nation.
She watched on the screen, so that she could read the English subtitles, and much of it she missed, because her heart was beating so fast with nerves and excitement and protectiveness.
But key phrases would stay in her mind and her heart for ever.
‘I have been charged with the running of our country.’His face grew very serious at this point.‘An awesome responsibility which I have always embraced and cherished. But your Ruler must be allowed to fulfil his own personal destiny in order to best discharge his duties to his homeland.’
He sent her the briefest of looks before continuing.‘In Qudamah, your Sheikh is permitted by law to have a harem of up to sixty women.’
Sienna sat bolt upright. She hadn’t knownthat !
‘But I do not wish to have sixty women. I wish for only one, for I believe in monogamy.’
There was an unmistakable ripple in the room—as if he had just come out and declared that he had converted to cannibalism!
Now his eyes were on her, and they were very steady.
‘For I have found my very own houri, and I intend to make her my wife.’
Later, Sienna would discover the significance of that particular word. A houri was a beautiful young woman but—far more crucially—she was avirgin . He was telling his people that he had found a bride who, although she might not at first appear so, was actually a suitable bride for their Sheikh.
She would also learn that Abdul-Aziz had travelled to England with the intention of attempting to bribe her with unimaginable riches to stay away from the Sheikh. But then he had seen her playing with Cara in the homespun tranquillity of her mother’s house.
‘I realised that I had never allowed myself to think beyond the stereotype of what I believed you to be,’ he told her. ‘And of course by then I realised that my Sheikh had grown to love you—and suddenly I could see why.’
And it didn’t take long to realise that Hashim’s mother wanted only her son’s happiness.
For when it all came down to it palaces and different cultures counted for very little. In the end, the human spirit was the same the world over.
EPILOGUE
ADOLLOPof mashed banana landed in a slimy lump on the back of her hand and Sienna giggled as she wiped it away, looking up into the bemused black eyes of her husband as he surveyed the breakfast scene before him.
Hashim smiled. How his life had been transformed! Gone was the starchy formality and the slow glide of numerous servants who catered to his every whim. Instead, there sat his beautiful Sienna, with their gorgeous wriggling son on her lap.
‘What a merry dance he leads you,’ he observed ruefully.
‘Ah, but what wonderful co-ordination he has,’ cooed Sienna. ‘Only eight months old, and he’s practically feeding himself!’
‘Indeed,’ he murmured diplomatically, as another dollop of fruit was relayed across the linen tablecloth by the lively Prince Marzug.
Hashim had long given up trying to get Sienna to bring their son up in the conventional manner of royal princes, and she had resolutely refused to have child-care except when strictly necessary.
‘No one can love a baby like his mother,’ she had told him firmly. ‘Or his father,’ she had added impishly.
And in that he could not argue with her—though he enjoyed trying. For Marzug had stolen his heart the moment he had made his first lusty bawl. There was so much love in Hashim’s world now. His senses were raw and on fire with it. And Sienna had started it all. He looked at her.
Hard to believe as she sat in this scene of cosy domesticity, despite the grand dimensions of the room, that last night she had stunned the visiting French Ambassador at a reception given at the Palace in his honour. Hashim had watched with pride and love and lust as she had danced—slender and graceful as a flower swayed by the summer breeze. And alone afterwards, in the glorious privacy of their apartment, she had…she had…Hashim swallowed.
‘Are you all right, darling?’ Sienna questioned innocently, her words cutting in to a train of thought which was probably not advisable when he was due to inspect the Qudamah army in a little under an hour.
‘Yes, my beauty,’ he murmured, watching her pick up a cream sheet of paper. ‘What are you reading now?’
Absently, Sienna dropped a kiss onto Marzug’s curly black hair. ‘Oh, just a request—asking if I will be patron of the new children’s charity which is being set up in Nasim.’
‘Anothercharity?’ Hashim frowned. ‘But you do enough already.’
‘I know. But some of the work is extra-special, and…’ She put the letter down on the table, out of Marzug’s reach, and smiled at him. ‘I’m just flattered to be asked,’ she said simply.
And he understood. Perfectly.
Because it hadn’t been all plain sailing to get to where she was today. Sienna had had to work hard to get the people of Qudamah to accept her. Some of them hadn’t—certainly not straight away—but she had understood their doubts and fears about their beloved Sheikh marrying a woman from so far away, who knew little of their culture.
And there were some who had not finally thawed until she had produced the plump and bouncing olive-skinned infant Prince and fireworks had lit up the skies behind the Palace. Then they had finally taken her into their hearts.
The wedding itself had been a bit of a challenge, too—there had been a civil ceremony and then a religious one, after her conversion to Hashim’s faith. She’d had to memorise all her vows in Qudamahesh and she had spent the night before the marri
age saying them over and over again, until she was word perfect. Learning the ancient language was something she had immediately set about doing—and was even more of a challenge!
But she was young and bright and eager to learn. And she was in love. Just as she was loved. And that put everything in its proper perspective.
She had been a bag of nerves before her first meeting with Hashim’s mother—for the Princess was deeply revered by all who knew her. But their shared love for one man had been enough to unite them in a harmony which had soon grown into genuine regard.
She was both a wise and a perceptive woman. She had allayed some of Sienna’s fears—recounting the tale of one of Hashim’s ancestors, who had married the daughter of his fiercest enemy despite much opposition. ‘So, you see, there is nothing new under the sun, Sienna,’ she had said softly. ‘No matter where they live, nor what they do, people are the same; they never change. They fall in love and they fight for that love, and that is just how it should be.’
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