One Night with The Sheikh: An accident of fate brought them together, and it would bind them for the rest of their lives.

by Clare Connelly

  Charlotte was not often startled, but now, she felt an unravelling kernel of surprise. His voice had been mesmerising. Far too beautiful for an amateur. “You’re not a singer?”

  His laugh was rich and throaty at the same time. “Absolutely not. I’m a victim of a dare, that’s all.”

  “But your voice…”. She swallowed down the lavish praise she’d been about to unleash. “You’re very talented,” she said, finally, thinking what an insipid description it was for his breath taking sound.

  “And you must be aiming to flatter me,” he responded with a half-smile.

  “Not at all,” she retorted. “If you knew me, you’d know I don’t go in for flattery and untruthful compliments.”

  “Why is that?” He probed effortlessly, and in such a way that she lost her conversational footing.

  A small furrow developed between her brows. “We were talking about you.”

  “I would far prefer to talk about you. And what you’re doing in a place like this.” He gestured around them, to the room dotted with elegant guests.

  She arched a brow. “You don’t think I should be here?”

  His shrug was pure elegance, his shoulders broad as they rippled inside his shirt. “You’re a breath of fresh air in a room full of stuffed shirts and gold diggers.”

  Her smile was mysterious. “How do you know I’m not a gold digger?”

  “Because you thought me to be a poor musician and still singled me out to have a drink with.”

  Now it was Charlotte’s turn to laugh. She leaned towards him thoughtfully. “You really are very handsome.”

  “And you are the sexiest woman I’ve ever met.”

  A beat passed between them, and the air seemed to hum with an electric awareness. “Liar,” she whispered, finally, with the hint of a grin on her lips.

  He dipped his head, merely to disguise the expression on his face, which he knew must mirror his total desire for her. “I don’t go in for flattery and, what was it? Untruthful compliments?”

  “Touche,” she acknowledged with a laugh. “I guess it must be true then.”

  “Yes.” His eyes were no longer laughing. They held a dark speculation.

  Her voice was unsteady when she spoke. She needed to change the subject. Fast. “So, you’re not a singer. I’m guessing you’re... a lawyer,” she supposed, taking in his expensive suit, and those of the men he was there with.

  “No,” his laugh showed genuine amusement. “Guess again.”

  She put a finger to her cheek, feigning deep thought. “A scientist?” She looked at his hands. Hands that were tanned, and boasted long and lean fingers. They were not pampered hands, but nor were they those of someone who engaged in manual labour.

  “Wrong. Too many more incorrect guesses and I might have to devise a penalty scheme.”

  Her body swirled with awakening senses as his words dripped through her like lava. A pulse strummed thick and fast but she forced herself to stand, on legs that were wobbly like jelly. She wanted to lean back in her chair and watch him all night. To flirt with him like this; with a dangerous, dark sexual promise hanging between them.

  Which was exactly why she had to go.

  “I… I came here for something.” She frowned. Thinking of her father and the mystery he had left her to solve. “I can’t be distracted.”

  Malik stood just as swiftly as Charlotte had. “But you do want to be distracted,” he almost growled, and he moved his body closer to hers, aware that she was fighting a war within herself. Her mind was trying to wrestle control back, but her body was unmistakably enthralled. “You want to be distracted by me.”

  She shook her head slowly, from side to side, so that her blonde hair puffed around her face. He longed to smooth it behind her ears, simply to touch her. But he held his distance. So close he could smell her delicate scent, but not so close that they were touching.

  “I can’t afford to be distracted,” she said with a quiet strength, more to herself than to the handsome stranger who was doing odd things to her nervous system.

  “And yet,” he said, moving infinitesimally nearer, so that she could almost feel the warmth from his body, emanating in waves towards her. “You are tempted, are you not?”

  “Tempted to what?” Her eyes lifted to his, and then immediately dropped lower, to his lips, parted slightly to reveal a row of even, white teeth. She sucked in a deep breath as, out of nowhere, she imagined what it would be like to be kissed by those lips.

  “I have to go,” she said urgently, her expression plagued with guilt as she spun and walked swiftly towards the entrance of the bar.

  “Charlotte,” he called quietly yet insistently after her.

  She didn’t turn around. She hadn’t come all this way to be thrown off course by the first good looking man she met. Even if he happened to be the most attractive man she’d ever seen, her loyalty to her father’s mystery was more important. She burst into the frigid night air, pausing for the briefest of moments to admire the sparkly fairy lights that hung in huge, swathing garlands from lamppost to lamppost. A selection of cars – Lamborghinis, Maseratis, Beamers, were scored along the footpath, all covered in a blanket of snow.

  Charlotte brushed past them quickly, wrapping her arms around herself as she went. It was icy that night.

  She’d been foolish to think she’d be able to find the answers to her father’s parentage simply by walking into the jazz bar. If his mystery was so easy to solve, he would have done so already.

  When Arnold Faber had passed away, Charlotte had discovered the extent of his research. He had been meticulous in every aspect of his life, including the quest to discover who his biological parents were, and why they had abandoned him as a mewling newborn.

  His sense of failure at having been cast aside was not diminished by his placement in the seriously lacking British foster care system. Arnold had rarely spoken of his childhood, and had gently insisted to Charlotte, whenever she’d asked questions about his boyhood, that his life began the day he met her mother. His beloved Matilda had been the beginning and end of his family, until Charlotte had appeared a year after their wedding.

  His death had been untimely and devastating; all the more so for Charlotte had discovered that his inability to discuss his childhood had not meant he didn’t think about it. Often. His memoirs of those pained stints in foster homes and boarding facilities made for harrowing reading.

  It was little wonder he’d been determined to make her life as perfect as a postcard.

  And he’d died, right before he could see his dreams come true. Two weeks before Charlotte had been accepted into Oxford on a scholarship to study literature, he’d been jostled in front of a tube train and died in one of the most dreadful ways Charlotte could imagine.

  She shivered, forcefully shaking her head to clear the dark thoughts.

  Charlotte had almost graduated now, and Matilda had finally recovered from the loss of her beloved husband. Life, as everyone had promised at the traumatic time, had gone on. But his absence was a pain Charlotte could never ignore. Never forget.

  Her accommodation was on the outskirts of the skiing village. A small and rather depressing room above a ski shop was all she’d been able to afford, but it was a bed and a place to make a warm cup of tea. She reached into her pocket for the key, and then made a strangled noise of frustration.

  The key was in her coat. The coat she’d left hanging in the cloak room of the swanky bar, because she’d been so distracted by the gloriously gorgeous man she’d met.

  She groaned again and pressed her forehead against the ice cold door. “Darn it,” she muttered with a small stamp of her foot. “Why does this kind of thing always happen to me?” She thought about the man who owned the shop. He had given her his number in case of emergencies, but he’d also told her that he lived in a neighbouring village. The inference had been clear. The twenty minute drive on a snowy night was not one he was willing to make for a minor problem. And her own stupidity, s
he feared, would not pass his test.

  She reached for her phone and then realised that it, too, was in her coat. In a cloak room. On the other side of town. There was nothing for it. She simply had to walk back and reclaim it.

  Cursing her idiocy for being so wrapped up in the handsome stranger that she hadn’t even realised the reason she was frozen to the core was because she was dressed for a spring day, she strode down the steps and began to retrace her steps. The snow was falling hard and fast now and her footsteps were almost completely whitened out.

  Headlights beamed towards her and she paused. It was truly freezing. Perhaps if she flagged the car down, the person would drive her back to the bar. Or perhaps he’d be an axe murderer, she mused, ignoring temptation and pushing her head down, concentrating on where the footpath would be, buried beneath all the snow.

  The car, though, didn’t seem to realise she was sending out the universal signal for ‘leave me alone’. It slowed down, then made a U-turn with remarkable skill on a road that was thick with snow. As the powerful car purred beside her, she continued to stare straight ahead. For the second time that night, her heart was jack hammering in her chest painfully fast.

  “Hello again.”

  She whipped her head around at the sound of Mal’s voice, unmistakable. He was smiling at her, and though the smile was perfectly normal, something about him felt predatory. Terrifying. And it had nothing to do with danger in the traditional sense. No, his was a sort of sensual threat, one that she wasn’t sure how to handle. Her history of brief, casual relationships left her completely unprepared for someone of his dynamic magnitude.

  “Hi.” She wrapped her arms around her chest, shivering uncontrollably.

  “For God’s sake,” he urged, pushing his door open and stepping out of the vehicle, “Get in before you turn into an ice sculpture.”

  She’d been raised well. Getting into a car with a stranger was a ‘no no’. But she wouldn’t be alone with him. There was a big, broad shouldered man crammed into the driver’s seat. Though he certainly looked capable of murder, even if Mal wasn’t.

  “Miss Faber, your lips are a shade of indigo and your arms are covered in goose bumps. If you do not get into my car, I will throw you in myself.”

  The glare she tossed his way, as she marched towards the warmth of his luxury vehicle, was pure indignation. Mal chuckled as she slid into the back seat and moved as far into the corner as she could. He leaned forward and spoke to his driver in a foreign language, though presumably he’d asked for the heating to be turned up as a blast of warmth hit her body in response, and she gratefully relaxed into the leather seat.

  “Do you make a habit of strolling around snow-covered towns wearing nothing but a flimsy t-shirt and jeans?”

  Her features were dripping with derision as she looked him up and down. “I do not,” she muttered, feeling every bit as foolish as he’d intended. “I’ll have you know, I forgot my coat at the bar. I was just going back to get it. So if you would be so kind as to drop me off, without the lecture, I would appreciate it.”

  “But surely you need a lecture, Charlotte. For a young woman to walk around on a freezing cold night, wearing what you are, is a crime. Do you have no respect for yourself? No care for your body?”

  Charlotte’s jaw dropped. “What the hell?” She glared across at him angrily, trying not to think about how handsome he was with angry color slashed across his cheeks. “I just told you, you big... big... jerk! I forgot it! It wasn’t intentional. Haven’t you ever forgotten something?”

  “Not something as obvious as my coat on a winter’s night.” He countered, flickering his eyes across her face with chagrin.

  Charlotte, feeling buoyed by the warmth of the car, and the fact that her internal temperature was returning to normal, focussed her eyes on him. “Are you going to take me back to the bar or do I need to walk there myself?”

  He didn’t back away from her stare. His dark eyes remained locked on hers, and Charlotte had the strangest sense that he was probing her innermost thoughts and feelings. She blinked and looked away, acknowledging that, in a sparring match between them, there was no competition.

  Finally, he waved his hand in the air. “It is not necessary. I have your coat.”

  “You... what?” She rolled her eyes. “So what was this stunt for? Simply to embarrass me? To scold me like an errant school girl?”

  Charlotte was imagining it, but it felt as though he had moved closer to her. “No. Though imagining you as an errant school girl does hold some appeal,” he said with a wink.

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re teasing me.”

  “Yes.”

  She forced a smile to her face. After all, he’d done her a favour. He was trying to be nice. It wasn’t his fault that he seemed to have a massive God complex.

  “Well, then,” she shrugged. “If you give me my coat, I’ll be on my way.”

  “Not so fast.” His smile was slow, and again, she had that sense of being in some sort of exciting danger.

  Was he going to kill her after all? He didn’t look like a crazed serial killer. In fact, she’d thawed out enough now to pay some greater attention to her surroundings. The vehicle was the last word in luxury. It was a car make she hadn’t even heard of. The seats were a white leather, so soft and supple that she wondered if the buttons on the back pockets of her jeans would leave scratches. It was big, too. Not just a normal sedan, this had the proportions of the Rolls Royce her dad had hired to take her to her high school matriculation dance in.

  “What? Are you holding me for ransom for the coat? Because you can keep it. I just need the hotel key in the pocket.”

  His laugh made her skin prickle. “You can have the coat and the key.” Now, she wasn’t imagining it. He moved closer to her in the car. “But in my country, it is customary to thank someone when they do you a service.”

  Her mind skittered in confusion. “I see.” She could hardly think. His proximity had created a magnetic field, and it seemed to repel rational concentration. She wondered, distractedly, where he was from. His accent was unfamiliar to her. His complexion was swarthy, his eyes like something out of a fairy tale. “What country is that?”

  “Ashan,” he said, his eyes probing hers for a reaction.

  She’d heard of the country, of course. Just the name conjured images of Bedouin tents and stunning desert landscapes. She thought with a wistful smile of how it must feel, to grow up in a country so sparkling with sunshine. It was renowned for its stable government and progressive attitudes; and its incredible wealth attributed not only to its large oil reserves but also several diamond mines that were owned by the ruling family. In fact, she’d read a translation of a wonderful story, in her first year at Oxford. The Diamond Princess, it had been called, and it had been written several hundred years ago. She tried to recall the details. A woman, a pauper, spotted in a small fishing village, and married to the ruling Sheikh, who was so pure of body and spirit that the child she bore was deemed to be part angel, with eyes that sparkled with diamond dust.

  “You have heard of it?” He asked seriously.

  “Of course,” she nodded. “It sounds like a beautiful country.” She cleared her throat, trying to remember what they’d been talking about. He had been asking to be thanked. That was simple, then. “Thank you for my coat.”

  Again, he laughed, and the action brought his head closer to hers. “You were in such a hurry to leave the bar.”

  She nodded awkwardly. He was doing it again. Distracting her. Hypnotizing her.

  “You didn’t even finish your drink.”

  She was still nodding. Like one of those annoying bobble head dogs people put on their car dash boards.

  “Let’s remedy that now.” He spoke in his own language again, and the driver pressed a button, erecting a dark tinted shield between himself and his passengers. Mal then moved back, creating essential space between them. He reached into a panel and pulled a bottle of Dom Perignon from the co
nsole, and two frosted crystal flutes.

  “Fancy,” she said with a dry tone, as he effortlessly uncorked the bottle, smothering the loud ‘pop’ with the palm of his hand.

  “You don’t like champagne?” He asked, pausing in the act of filling a glass for her.

  “It’s just a bit of a step down from the Ukrainian wine I usually drink.”

  He laughed throatily. “You are being sarcastic.”

  She shrugged. “This is so not the norm for me. Riding in the back of some space-ship car, drinking a bottle of champagne that probably costs a month’s rent on my flat, with a strange man, who I can’t decide if I’m annoyed at or...” she tapered off, her cheeks warm as she realised what she’d been about to say. Wildly attracted to.

  “Yes?” He urged, his lips tilted in undisguised amusement.

  “Even more annoyed at.” She substituted crossly, but his mocking glance showed he understood exactly what she’d been thinking.

  The silence was anything but comfortable for Charlotte. Every second she spent in his company was doing strange things to her central nervous system. She could have sworn her skin had begun to tingle. Finally, he spoke. “So because this is unusual, you want to end it?”

  “No,” she contradicted. “I am not ending anything. You kindly returned my coat, and that’s the end of our business together.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” he said quietly, handing the champagne to her.

  “Oh, do you?” She was surprised that her fingertips wrapped around the fine stem of the glass. Even more so when she lifted it to her lips and tasted the incredibly fine liquid.

  “I think our business together is just beginning.”

  She laughed, in spite of the way her bones seemed to melt at his softly spoken words. “That’s such a cheesy line,” she chided. Who cared that it had the exact effect he’d intended? Her heart was racing, her nipples were straining against the soft fabric of her shirt. She was excited. Very excited.

  “Not one I’ve ever used before,” he promised huskily.

  She found his declaration difficult to believe. He was too effortlessly charming. Too confidently suave. “That doesn’t matter. I’m not the kind of woman you think I am.”