The Sheikh's Bride

by Sophie Weston

  But then she thought about it. The guest list included some of the most illustrious charitable foundations in the world, including a high royalty quotient. Roy liked mingling at parties where he had a good chance of being photographed with the rich and famous. He called it networking.

  ‘Mother, you’re a genius. It’s just the thing for Roy,’ she said. She pulled out her mobile phone.

  All she got was his answering machine. Leo left a crisp message and rang off.

  ‘Right, that’s sorted. I’ll see you tonight. Now I’ve got to take a seventy-year-old from New Jersey to Giza.’

  Deborah muttered discontentedly.

  Leo looked down at her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Surely someone junior could take this woman to the pyramids?’

  Leo grinned. Deborah had been a rich man’s daughter when she married rising tycoon Gordon Groom. There had been someone junior to take care of tedious duties all her life. It was one of the reasons Gordon had fought so hard for the custody of his only child.

  ‘As long as I’m a member of the team, I do my share of the chores,’ she said equably.

  ‘Sometimes you are so like your father,’ Deborah grumbled.

  Leo laughed. ‘Thank you.’

  Deborah ignored that. ‘I don’t know why he had to buy Adventures in Time, anyway. Why couldn’t he stick to hotels? And civilised places? What does he want with a travel agency?’

  ‘Diversify or die,’ Leo said cheerfully. ‘You know Pops—’ She broke off. ‘Whoops.’

  In the Viennese café Mrs Silverstein was chatting to an alarmed-looking man in a grey suit. Leo was almost certain he was a member of Sheikh el-Barbary’s entourage.

  ‘It looks as if my client is getting bored. I’ll pick you up at eight this evening, Mother.’

  She darted into the crowd. It was a relief.

  Deborah’s divorce from Gordon Groom had been relatively amicable and her settlement kept her luxuriously provided for, but she could still be waspish about her workaholic ex-husband. It was the one subject that she and Leo were guaranteed to argue about every time they got together.

  Tonight, Leo promised herself, she was not going to let Deborah mention Gordon once. Leo was beginning to have her own misgivings about her father’s plans for her. But she was going to keep that from Deborah until she was absolutely certain herself. So they would talk about clothes and makeup and boyfriends and all the things that Deborah complained that Leo wasn’t interested in.

  One fun evening, thought Leo wryly, after another wonderful day. She went to rescue the security man.

  The Sheikh’s party swept into the suite like an invading army. One security man went straight to the balcony. The other disappeared into the bedroom. The manager, bowing, started to demonstrate the room’s luxurious facilities. He found the Sheikh was not listening.

  An assistant, still clutching his brief-case and laptop computer, nodded gravely and backed the manager towards the door.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the Sheikh’s assistant. ‘And now the other rooms?’

  The manager bowed again and led the way. The security men followed.

  The Sheikh was left alone. He went out to the balcony and stood looking across the Nile. The river was sinuous and glittering as a lazy snake in the morning sun. There was a dhow in midstream, he saw. Its triangular sail was curved like scimitar. It looked like a small dark toy.

  He closed his eyes briefly. It was against more than the glare reflected off the water. Why did everything look like toys, these days?

  Even the people. Moustafa, his chief bodyguard, looked like a prototype security robot. And the woman he was seeing tonight. He intended quitting the boring conference dinner with an excuse he did not care if they believed or not in order to see her. But for an uncomfortable moment, he allowed himself to realise that she reminded him of nothing so much as a designer-dressed doll. In fact, all the women he had seen recently looked like that.

  Except—he had a fleeting image of the girl who had tumbled against the pillar in the hotel lobby. She was too tall, of course. And badly turned out, with her hair full of dust and a dark suit that was half-way to a uniform. But uniform or not, she had not looked like a doll. Not with those wide, startled eyes. The sudden shock in them had been intense—and unmistakeably real.

  The Sheikh’s brows twitched together in a quick frown. Why had she looked so shocked? He suddenly, passionately, wanted to know. But of course he never would, now. He grunted bad temperedly.

  His personal assistant came back into the suite. He hesitated in the doorway.

  The Sheikh straightened his shoulders. ‘Out here, Hari,’ he called. There was resignation in his tone.

  The assistant cautiously joined him on the balcony.

  ‘Everything appears to be in order,’ he reported.

  The Sheikh took off his dark glasses. His eyes were amused but terribly weary.

  ‘Sure? Have the guys checked thoroughly? No bugs in the telephone? No poison in the honey cakes?’

  The assistant smiled. ‘Moustafa can take his job too seriously,’ he admitted. ‘But better safe than sorry.’

  His employer’s expression was scathing. ‘This is nonsense and we both know it.’

  ‘The kidnappings have increased,’ Hari pointed out in a neutral tone.

  ‘At home,’ said the Sheikh impatiently. ‘They haven’t got the money to track me round the world, poor devils. Anyway, they take prosperous foreign visitors who will pay ransom. Not a local like me. My father would not pay a penny to have me back.’ He thought about it. ‘Probably pay them to keep me.’

  Hari bit back a smile. He had not been present at the interview between father and son before Amer left Dalmun this time. But the reverberations had shaken the city.

  A terminal fight, said the palace. The father would never speak to the son again. An ultimatum, said Amer’s household; the son had told his father he would tolerate no more interference and was not coming back to Dalmun until the old Sheikh accepted it.

  Amer eyed him. ‘And you can stop looking like a stuffed camel. I know you know all about it.’

  Hari disclaimed gracefully. ‘I just hear the gossip in the bazaars, like everyone else,’ he murmured.

  Amer was sardonic. ‘Good for business, is it?’

  ‘Gossip brings a lot of traders into town, I’m told,’ Hari agreed.

  ‘Buy a kilo of rice and get the latest palace dirt thrown in.’ Amer gave a short laugh. ‘What are they saying?’

  Hari ticked the rumours off on his fingers. ‘Your father wants to kill you. You want to kill your father. You have refused to marry again. You are insisting on marrying again.’ He stopped, his face solemn but his lively eyes dancing. ‘You want to go to Hollywood and make a movie.’

  ‘Good God.’ Amer was genuinely startled. He let out a peal of delighted laughter. ‘Where did that one come from?’

  Hari was not only his personal assistant. He was also a genuine friend. He told him the truth. ‘Cannes last year, I should think.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Amer, understanding at once. ‘We are speaking of the delicious Catherine.’

  ‘Or,’ said Hari judiciously, ‘the delicious Julie, Kim or Michelle.’

  Amer laughed. ‘I like Cannes.’

  ‘That shows in the photographs,’ Hari agreed.

  ‘Disapproval, Hari?’

  ‘Not up to me to approve or disapprove,’ Hari said hastily. ‘I just wonder—’

  ‘I like women.’

  Hari thought about Amer’s adamant refusal to marry again after his wife was killed in that horse riding accident. He kept his inevitable reflections to himself.

  ‘I like the crazy way their minds work,’ Amer went on. ‘It makes me laugh. I like the way they try to pretend they don’t know when you’re looking at them. I like the way they smell.’

  Hari was surprised into pointing out, ‘Not all women smell of silk and French perfume like your Julies and your Catherines.’
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br />   ‘Dolls,’ said Amer obscurely.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Has it occurred to you how many animated dummies I know? Oh they look like people. They walk and talk and even sound like people. But when you talk to them they just say the things they’ve been programmed to say.’

  Hari was unmoved. ‘Presumably they’re the things you want them to say. So who did the programming?’

  Amer shifted his shoulders impatiently. ‘Not me. I don’t want—’

  ‘To date a woman who has not been programmed to say you are wonderful?’ Hari pursued ruthlessly. He regarded his friend with faint scorn. ‘Why don’t you try it, some time?’

  Amer was not offended. But he was not impressed, either.

  ‘Get real,’ he said wearily.

  Hari warmed to his idea. ‘No, I mean it. Take that girl down stairs in the lobby just now.’

  Amer was startled. ‘Have you started mind reading, Hari?’

  ‘I saw you looking her way,’ Hari explained simply. ‘I admit I was surprised. She’s hardly your type.’

  Amer gave a mock shudder. ‘No French perfume there, you mean. I know. More like dust and cheap sun-tan lotion.’ A reminiscent smile curved his handsome mouth suddenly. ‘But even so, she has all the feminine tricks. Did you see her trying to pretend she didn’t know I was looking at her?’

  Hari was intrigued. ‘So why were you?’

  Amer hesitated, his eyes unreadable for an instant. Then he shrugged. ‘Three months in Dalmun, I expect,’ he said in his hardest voice. ‘Show a starving man stale bread and he forgets he ever knew the taste of caviar.’

  ‘Stale bread? Poor lady.’

  ‘I’ll remember caviar as soon as I have some to jog my memory,’ Amer murmured mischievously.

  Hari knew his boss. ‘I’ll book the hotel in Cannes.’

  It was not a successful visit to the pyramids. As Leo expected, Mrs Silverstein insisted on walking round every pyramid and could not be persuaded to pass on the burial chamber of Cheops. Since that involved a steep climb, a good third of which had to be done in a crouching position, the older woman was in considerable pain by the end of the trip. Not that she would admit it.

  Ever since Mrs Silverstein arrived in Egypt on her Adventures in Time tour, she had wanted to see everything and, in spite of her age and rheumatic joints, made a spirited attempt to do so. When other members of the group took to shaded rooms in the heat of the afternoon, Mrs Silverstein was out there looking at desert plants or rooting affronted Arabs out of their afternoon snooze to bargain over carpets or papyrus.

  ‘The woman never stops,’ Roy Ormerod complained, looking at the couriers’ reports. ‘She’ll collapse and then we’ll be responsible. For Heaven’s sake get her to slow down.’

  But Leo, joining one of the party’s trips, found she had a sneaking sympathy for Mrs Silverstein. She was a lively and cultivated woman with a hunger for new experience that a lifetime of bringing up a family had denied her. She also, as Leo found late one night when the local courier thankfully surrendered her problem client and retired to bed, had a startling courage.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit more than rheumatism,’ Mrs Silverstein admitted under the influence of honey cakes and mint tea. ‘And it’s going to get worse. I thought, I’ve got to do as much as I can while I can. So I’ll have some things to remember.’

  Leo was impressed. She said so.

  ‘You see I always wanted to travel,’ Mrs Silverstein confided. ‘But Sidney was such a homebody. And then there were the children. When they all got married I thought now. But then Sidney got sick. And first Alice was divorced and then Richard and the grandchildren would come and stay…’ She sighed. ‘When Dr Burnham told me what was wrong I thought—it’s now or never, Pat.’

  Leo could only admire her. So, instead of following Roy’s instructions, she did her best to make sure that Mrs Silverstein visited every single thing she wanted to see in Egypt, just taking a little extra care of her. It was not easy.

  By the time Leo got her back to the hotel she was breathing hard and had turned an alarming colour. Leo took her up to her room and stayed while Mrs Silverstein lay on the well-sprung bed, fighting for breath. Leo called room service and ordered a refreshing drink while she applied cool damp towels to Mrs Silverstein’s pink forehead.

  ‘I think I should call a doctor,’ she said worriedly.

  Mrs Silverstein shook her head. ‘Pills,’ she said. ‘In my bag.’

  Leo got them. Mrs Silverstein swallowed three and then lay back with her eyes closed. Her colour slowly returned to normal.

  The phone rang. Leo picked it up.

  ‘Mrs Silverstein?’ said a harsh voice she knew all too well. Even when Roy Ormerod was trying to be conciliating he sounded angry. ‘I wonder if you can tell me where Miss Roberts went when she left you?’

  Leo braced herself. ‘This is me, Roy. Mrs Silverstein wasn’t feeling well, so I—’

  He did not give her the chance to finish.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? I told you to stop that old bat going on excursions, not give her personal guided tours. You should be back at the office. And what do you mean, leaving me a message that you won’t be at the dinner, tonight? You’ve got to be there. It’s part of your job….’

  He ranted for several more minutes. Mrs Silverstein opened her eyes and began to look alarmed.

  Leo interrupted him. ‘We’ll talk about this at the office,’ she said firmly. She looked at her watch. ‘I’ll come over now. See you in half an hour.’

  ‘No you won’t. I’m already—’

  But she had cut him off.

  ‘Trouble?’ said Mrs Silverstein.

  ‘None I can’t handle.’

  ‘Is it my fault?’

  ‘No,’ said Leo.

  Because it was not. Roy had been spoiling for a fight ever since she first arrived from London.

  Forgetting professional discretion, Leo said as much. Mrs Silverstein looked thoughtful. She had met Roy.

  ‘And he doesn’t like it that you’re not attracted to him,’ she said wisely.

  Leo stared. ‘What? Oh, surely not.’

  Mrs Silverstein shrugged. ‘Good at your job. Independent. Clients like you. All sounds too much like competition to me, honey.’ She struggled up among the pillows. ‘The only way you could put yourself right with the man is by falling at his feet.’

  Leo stared, equally fascinated and repelled.

  ‘I hope you’re wrong,’ she said with feeling.

  There was a knock at the door. Leo got off the side of the bed.

  ‘That must be your lemon sherbet.’

  But it was not. It was Roy. His eyes were bulging with fury.

  ‘Oh, you were calling from the desk,’ said Leo, enlightened.

  He brushed that aside. ‘Look here—’ he began loudly.

  Leo barred his way, giving thanks for the carved screen behind the tiny entrance area. It masked the doorway from Mrs Silverstein’s view.

  ‘You can’t make a scene here,’ she hissed. ‘She’s not well.’

  But Roy was beyond rationality. He took Leo by the wrist and pulled her out into the corridor. He was shouting. He even took her by the shoulders and shook her.

  An authoritative voice said, ‘That is enough.’

  They both turned, Leo blindly, Roy with blundering aggression.

  The speaker was a man with a haughty profile and an air of effortless command. A business man, Leo thought. Someone who had paid for expensive quiet on this executive floor and was going to see that he got what he paid for. The dark eyes resting on Roy were coldly contemptuous.

  Roy did not like his intervention. ‘Who are you? The floor manager?’ he sneered.

  Leo winced for him. On the face of it, the stranger’s impeccable dark suit was indistinguishable from any of the other business suits in the hotel. But Leo’s upbringing had taught her to distinguish at a glance between the prosperous and the seriously rich. The suit wa
s hand tailored and, for all its conservative lines, individually designed as well. Add to that the air of being in charge of the world, and you clearly had someone to reckon with.

  But Roy had never been able to read nonverbal signs.

  He said pugnaciously, ‘This is a private conversation.’

  ‘Then you should conduct it in private,’ the man said. His courtesy bit deeper than any invective would have done. ‘You have a room here?’

  ‘No,’ said Leo, alarmed at the thought of being alone with Roy in this mood.

  For the first time the man took his eyes off the belligerent Roy. He sent her a quick, cool look. And did a double take.

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ he said blankly.

  Leo did not recognise him. She tried to pull herself together and search her memory. But Roy’s shaking of her seemed to have scrambled her brains.

  Meanwhile, the fact that the stranger seemed to recognise her had sent Roy into a frenzy.

  ‘You want to be careful with that one, friend,’ he said. ‘She’ll stab you in the back as soon as look at you.’

  Leo’s head spun as if she had been shot. All she could think of was that Roy must have found out who her father was.

  ‘What?’ she said hoarsely.

  The stranger sent her a narrow-eyed look. ‘It is perhaps that I intrude unnecessarily,’ he said, his accent pronounced. ‘Mademoiselle?’

  Leo shook her confused head.

  Roy snarled, ‘You’re fired.’

  Leo paled. She could just imagine what her father would say to this news.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ she said with foreboding.

  This time the stranger did not bother to look at her.

  ‘Your discussion would benefit from a more constructive approach,’ he told Roy austerely.

  Roy snorted. ‘Discussion over,’ he snapped. He sent Leo one last flaming look. ‘You don’t want to come to the dinner tonight? Fine. Don’t. And don’t come near the office again, either. Or any of my staff.’

  Leo began to be alarmed. She shared an apartment with two of his staff.

  ‘Roy—’

  But he was on a roll. ‘And don’t ask me for a reference.’

  Leo was not as alarmed about that as he clearly thought she should have been. When she said, ‘Look, let’s talk about this,’ in a soothing voice, two bright spots of colour appeared on Roy’s cheeks.