Zarif's Convenient Queen

by Lynne Graham

  Within minutes, the fire-engine-red Ferrari was parked out on the forecourt, paintwork gleaming in the hot sunlight. Ella breathed in deep and slow and got behind the wheel. It was a very powerful car. As she drove towards the gates she travelled slowly while she familiarised herself with the steering and the controls. There was no way she would take it into the city centre, she conceded, shrinking from the prospect of all that traffic, but she could certainly take it for a spin on the desert highway that encircled the walls of the old city.

  The gate guards made no attempt to hide their shock when they saw her seated behind the wheel driving and without a team of bodyguards in tow. Obedience, however, was engrained in the royal staff and they opened the gates, although she had not the smallest doubt that the minute she drove out the guards would be on the phone informing the powers-that-be that she had left the grounds and, even worse, was breaking the law by driving herself. Indeed she had only travelled a couple of hundred yards before she glanced in her rear-view mirror and saw two army vehicles hurtling out onto the road behind her. The sight made her foot press down on the accelerator.

  * * *

  ‘Your wife has just driven out of the gates in your Ferrari!’ Hamid informed Zarif, huffing and puffing and red-faced from the speed with which he had mounted the stairs to deliver that explosive news.

  Cold sweat drenched Zarif at the thought of Ella behind the wheel of so powerful a car. He closed his eyes and for a split second he prayed, warding off the images of the aftermath of Azel’s fatal crash, the wreckage scattered across the road, the poignant sight of his son’s tiny jacket lying by the roadside covered in sand.

  ‘I must follow her.’

  ‘I have put the army in pursuit.’

  Zarif spun in disbelief. ‘Are you crazy? I don’t want anyone chasing her, panicking her into crashing!’ he exclaimed in horror. ‘Tell them to keep their distance from her and not to try to stop her because I don’t want her speeding up to escape them.’

  Hamid was already on the phone muttering fervent apologies, regretful eyes locked to Zarif, who was already racing for the stairs and the fastest means of transport he possessed.

  * * *

  Ella was relieved that the army escort stayed well back from her. Two cars loaded with teenagers, however, overtook the Ferrari. They waved and honked horns noisily, poked their heads through their sun roofs to take photos of her and, even though she was deliberately driving slowly to be safe, Ella was childishly affronted at being overtaken in Zarif’s high-performance car.

  On her first loop of the city walls, she glimpsed a police car parked at the entrance to the old city with its roof light flashing and it was at that point that two other cars fell in behind her. She peered in the rear-view mirror, registering that the nearest car definitely had a female driver at the wheel, and she grinned. Without warning, the police car appeared on the road behind her, travelling at great speed to overtake her, and she was about to pull off the road feeling that she had made her point when the police car simply moved into the lane in front of her, slowing her down but taking up pole position.

  Hamid was on the phone to Zarif, who was airborne. ‘Women are pouring out of the shops and the offices and getting behind car wheels all over the city to follow the Queen’s car. It’s turning into a mass demonstration on the desert highway and the police and the army say there is a danger of public disorder and they want to arrest everybody involved.’

  ‘No woman is to be stopped or arrested,’ Zarif decreed. ‘Interference would only raise the risk of an accident occurring.’

  ‘My wife is out there in a car too,’ Hamid confided in a small voice.

  ‘We married gutsy women, Hamid. They have a good side and a bad side, or should I call it an exciting side?’ Zarif sighed, trying to work out how best to get Ella off the road safely.

  He could not phone her. He would not risk phoning her. Azel had been on the phone when she crashed.

  The noise of hundreds of car horns blaring made Ella look in the rear-view mirror and she almost jumped on the brakes because there was a whole procession of cars following her. Overhead she could hear more than one helicopter hovering. Swallowing hard, she drove on behind the leading police car, wishing they would step on it a bit. She was ready to head back to the palace. She had made her statement but she had not intended to cause traffic chaos or involve other women in her protest.

  It was a stupid sexist law and it ought to be changed but she didn’t want to get anyone else into trouble. She looked on in disbelief as a pickup truck with a large film camera mounted on the back overtook the police and what she assumed to be the news crew proceeded to film the parade of cars. It was a very dangerous manoeuvre, which convinced Ella that it was time for her to wind down the tension by quietly bowing out.

  Ella pulled off the road onto the stony, sandy desert plain. Her army escort followed. Before she could even climb out of the Ferrari a ring of soldiers surrounded the vehicle and there was the truly deafening noise of a helicopter landing nearby. The car horns were still going like mad. Barely a minute later, the ring of soldiers parted and Zarif strode towards her, his lean, breathtakingly beautiful face taut and informative.

  Anxiety exploded inside Ella. She had done what she had done. It was a senseless law and she had made a mockery of it but she had not realised that she might inspire other women into staging a massive demonstration alongside her. That made her feel guilty. That was more of a lesson than she had intended to teach and, although she had known her protest would embarrass Zarif, she was suddenly not proud of what she had evidently achieved. In fact the huge fuss and the pull on resources that her simple drive had created suddenly made her feel ashamed and about one inch tall.

  ‘Zarif...’ she began hesitantly.

  Without a word he bent down and scooped her bodily up into his strong arms and carted her back to the helicopter he had evidently landed in. He settled her into the passenger seat and did up the safety belt in a series of silent determined movements.

  ‘You’re furious with me,’ she breathed shakily.

  ‘No, I was more afraid for your safety in the mood you were in,’ Zarif contradicted. ‘I’m a natural worrier... Azel and my son died on that same stretch of road.’

  Ella turned pale. ‘I’m so sorry...I didn’t think.’

  His strong jaw line clenched. ‘She was a new driver. I told her that she needed more practice before she took to the road but she was determined to meet me at the airport. She was on the phone, something may have distracted her...possibly the baby. We’ll never know. She crashed head-on into a truck. And because of a tragedy that could have been foreseen, Halim drew up an unjust law forbidding women from driving. It was the only law he put forward in all his years as Regent and, in the light of what had happened to his daughter and grandson, nobody had the heart to say no to him,’ he proffered heavily as he vaulted back out of the helicopter and stood by the door talking to her. ‘But I should’ve had the strength to oppose him. When I saw all those women driving behind you, determined to show solidarity with you, I finally realised what a huge source of resentment that law has become. Regardless of how Halim feels about it, the law will be removed from the statute books as soon as possible. The taxi drivers will be furious but there are always losers in every scenario.’

  Slamming the door on her, Zarif strode round the nose of the helicopter and climbed into the pilot’s seat.

  ‘You’re flying us?’ she prompted in surprise.

  ‘I’ve been flying for many years,’ Zarif told her gently.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she said as he fiddled with the controls and spoke into the radio.

  ‘Changing the law is the right thing to do,’ she told him as the whine of the whirling rotor blades began. ‘But it wasn’t fair for me to do something like that in public to embarrass you.’

  ‘I wasn
’t embarrassed. I was surprisingly proud of you for standing up for what you believed in,’ Zarif admitted with a sidelong glance at her from black-fringed dark eyes. ‘Why did you pull off the road and stop it?’

  ‘When that film crew thrust their vehicle in front of us, I realised it was getting dangerous and I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. How the heck did people find out about what I was doing so fast?’

  ‘It was plastered all over Facebook and Twitter within minutes of you leaving the palace. You’re a heroine now. Why did you do it?’ he shot at her loudly and abruptly when they were airborne.

  ‘I thought it would make you divorce me and that that would be for the best.’

  ‘Never!’ he rebutted succinctly and that was the last word exchanged for some time.

  They landed in the desert, the real desert, which she had only seen in pictures, a place of deep rolling golden dunes and grey rocky outcrops, and it was like stepping out into a cocoon of unbelievable heat. ‘Where on earth are we?’ she asked as Zarif lifted her out of the passenger seat.

  ‘Honeymoon Central,’ Zarif quipped as he tucked something that might have been a book under one arm.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Ella gasped, her head whipping round as she stared in disconcertion at the great steep-walled and turreted grey fortress built on top of the stony hill that lay directly ahead of them.

  ‘The Old Fort, once used as a hunting lodge, latterly as my grandparents’ holiday home. It was a special place for them,’ Zarif told her. ‘There’s a long route in by road and our luggage will be coming in that way tonight.’

  ‘We’re going to stay here?’ Ella queried in bewilderment, worry stirring that this could be the first step in his threat to lock her up and throw away the key. Would he really maroon her in this remote place on her own?

  ‘Yes, until we get everything ironed out between us. It’s peaceful here and there are no distractions,’ Zarif pointed out smoothly as he stood back for her to precede him up the flight of steps carved out of the rock face. ‘You go first and take your time because it’s a long climb. We’re not in a hurry.’

  She was so out of breath that he had to carry her up the last flight of steps. At the top she found herself in a surprisingly pretty cobbled courtyard. Urns overflowed with colourful flowers in the shade below the arches. An old gardener was watering the plants in a corner bed and he greeted Zarif with a toothless smile and a very low bow.

  The solid wooden doors of the entrance already stood open on a wonderfully cool blue and white tiled hallway. ‘This is very pretty and not at all what I expected from the outside of this place,’ Ella confided.

  ‘My grandmother renovated it. I’m afraid it’s a little old-fashioned now,’ Zarif warned, urging her into an elegant salon furnished very much in the British style. The curtains and the paintings and the wallpaper all looked sadly faded but a gracious atmospheric charm remained.

  ‘You never told me how your grandmother met and married your grandfather,’ she remarked, perching on a window seat to catch her breath.

  ‘She and her father were hired to conserve the library at the old palace where we used to store many very old and valuable documents. Now they’re in the latest temperature-controlled environment in the new palace. For my grandfather, Karim, it was a case of love at first sight. Her name was Violet,’ Zarif divulged. ‘But Violet refused to have anything to do with him because he kept a harem full of concubines.’

  ‘Oh, my word, even I didn’t have an excuse to say no that was that good!’ Ella could not resist gasping.

  ‘He offered to reduce the harem by half.’

  ‘Whoopy-do!’ Ella carolled, unimpressed.

  ‘Then he endowed all his concubines with dowries and found them husbands and thought that Violet would finally agree to be his.’

  ‘And she didn’t?’

  ‘No, she wanted the assurance that she would be his one and only wife because, of course, the Qu’ran allows a Muslim four. The council were very much against him giving such an undertaking before there was proof that Violet could give him children but Karim rebelled and went ahead and married her.’

  ‘And were they happy?’ Ella prompted.

  ‘Very much so and that, you must understand, is the example that I grew up with. A happy loving marriage conducted very much in the Western style. Violet was a daredevil. She jumped out of aeroplanes, raced camels and deep-sea dived. She would have driven that car today just like you did. And she would have stopped for the same reason.’ Zarif’s lean dark face shadowed. ‘Yet she and Karim, who had such a caring relationship, thrust me into an arranged marriage as a teenager. It was a done deal to unite the two different factions in Vashir. Those who preferred Halim’s conservatism to the risk of the unknown rule of a young man, who was the son of an absentee Vashiri princess and an Italian playboy.’

  Ella was tense and afraid of saying something that might offend but she was finally beginning to suspect that Zarif’s marriage had not been as idyllic a match as he had led her to assume. ‘But your marriage worked, didn’t it?’

  ‘After a fashion,’ Zarif conceded uncomfortably. ‘It was far from ideal.’

  ‘But you loved her,’ Ella reminded him staunchly, not wanting him to try and deny that truth for the sake of soothing her feelings of jealousy.

  ‘Not in the way Azel wanted me to love her. I loved her as a childhood playmate, a cousin.’ His expressive mouth curled and he lifted his hands in a sudden violent gesture of frustration. ‘How can I tell you the truth without betraying her memory?’ Zarif spun away from her before continuing harshly. ‘To me, she felt more like a sister than a wife because we spent too many years being raised together in her father’s home. There was no chemistry, no romance. I didn’t want to marry her but I did my duty to the best of my ability.’

  Ella was so shocked by that admission that she literally stared at him with wide incredulous eyes. ‘I thought you adored her...’

  ‘She was my best friend and very supportive,’ Zarif hastened to assure her. ‘But I could not return her idealised feelings for me and that made me feel very guilty. I felt as though I was taking all the time while she did all the giving.’

  ‘But if she gave that was her choice,’ Ella whispered. ‘And if she loved you she may well have been content.’

  ‘She was content but I was not happy with her,’ Zarif confessed in a ragged and reluctant confession. ‘I hid it as best I could. I would have done anything rather than hurt her. But I was always aware that there was a big empty pit of nothingness at the centre of our marriage and the one thing we could have shared...our son, she preferred to keep to herself.’

  Ella stared steadily back at him. ‘So, if you weren’t that happy with her, why did you go out of your way to stress how much you loved her three years ago?’

  ‘Blame my guilty conscience for that piece of foolishness. I was sincerely devastated when she died. That was the main reason why I left Vashir to study abroad. I needed a change of scene and the chance to occupy my brain, but that is not what I ultimately found there,’ Zarif told her flatly.

  ‘I don’t think I want to talk about the past any more,’ Ella admitted ruefully. ‘I think our current troubles are very much of the present.’

  ‘I should have told you how happy I am about the baby,’ Zarif replied instantly, resting tawny eyes on her with extraordinary intensity. ‘Yes, I was shocked but I do very much want our child.’

  Ella sighed. ‘I never doubted that, Zarif.’

  ‘But you do doubt that I want to retain you as my wife. And yet I have always wanted you, habibti.’ Zarif withdrew the object she had assumed was a book from below his arm and set it on the coffee table where she could see that it was a leather-bound photo album. ‘It shames me to show you this but I hope that revealing one of my biggest secrets to you will persuade you that I am te
lling you the truth.’

  Ella was frowning. ‘What secret?’ she questioned.

  Zarif bent down and flipped open the photo album at random and she stood up to approach, recognising even from a distance of several feet that she was looking at a photograph of her younger self. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, walking along the street beside Cathy. ‘Who took that and when?’ she demanded in bewilderment.

  ‘I paid someone to take a collection of discreet photos of you when you were eighteen. It was...my secret stash. I could not have you—you were too young for me. I needed something and the photos were the only consolation I dared to take,’ he framed with a ragged edge to his deep drawl. ‘The first time I saw you was the first weekend Jason brought me to your home with him. You were seventeen and in the garden with your mother. You were wearing shorts and a pink top and you were laughing and you were literally the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. I was obsessed from that moment on...’

  Ella was stunned by that speech. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she told him bluntly even though she remembered that same first meeting. He might have said she was a beautiful sight but her memory was different. She had been mortified that a very hot and fanciable male should see her in shorts that she was convinced showed far too much of her chubby thighs and bottom. She reached for the album and flicked through it, finding photo after photo taken without her awareness. She was shocked, disbelieving.

  ‘Let’s face it—I behaved like a stalker,’ Zarif breathed, dark blood lining his spectacular cheekbones. ‘I have no excuse.’

  ‘But you never showed the slightest interest in me!’ Ella reminded him helplessly.

  ‘I couldn’t. You were still at school when we first met. I had to wait for you to grow up and exist on very occasional glimpses of you,’ Zarif countered grimly. ‘It was an obsession that didn’t fade. I didn’t want any other woman. I waited for you.’

  Ella viewed him wide-eyed. ‘You waited four blasted years for me to grow up?’ she prompted. ‘Were you crazy? I wanted you too! Eighteen would have been fine!’