The Fierce and Tender Sheikh

by Alexandra Sellers

  “I didn’t know, at first. I only knew that she was an al Jawadi. And that I knew because she looks like the family. It is a very distinctive thing.”

  “It’s what they call ‘the al Jawadi look,’ I understand. We’ve got some pictures, haven’t we? Princess, I think we’ve managed to get a photograph of you from the records of the detention centre where His Excellency found you…”

  Something between a gasp and a moan went up from the studio audience as the gaunt face of Hani flashed up on the monitors. A thin and hungry boy, his skull too emphasized, cheeks and temples hollow, eyes ringed with shadow, black with hostility. A split screen suddenly showed Shakira in the studio side by side with the Hani photograph.

  The contrast between the two faces provoked applause and cheering, and this time it was prolonged.

  “Is that the way the Princess looked the first time you saw her?”

  “Yes, that was Hani,” Sharif replied, with a possessive note in his voice that seemed to wrap her in security. Shakira unconsciously turned to him again, a yearning in her eyes that all save herself could see.

  “Have we got a picture of the Sultan of Bagestan? There he is.”

  Ash’s face replaced Shakira’s beside Hani. “Forgive me, Excellency, but I don’t see much resemblance between that boy and the Sultan. It’s a good thing it wasn’t up to me, because I think the Princess might still be in that camp.”

  More applause and laughter.

  “It comes with certain expressions,” Sharif explained. “I was lucky that a particular look on the Princess’s face reminded me very strongly of the Sultan.”

  “It sounds to me as if this was a life-changing experience for more than the Princess, Excellency,” the hostess pressed. “Was it?”

  He turned to look at Shakira, and she smiled again. Possessive hunger burned in him, and he knew he should control the feeling that showed in his eyes, but could not. He swallowed and opened his mouth, then closed it again.

  Again Shakira was lost in his gaze. On the edge of consciousness lay the knowledge that that look in Sharif’s eyes was everything she needed, and she smiled all her heart at him.

  A murmuring sigh rose from the tiered seats to fill the silence.

  “I think I see,” commented the hostess, with a smile that sparked the audience into applause.

  “Now you’re concerned about a particular group of refugees, aren’t you, Your Highness?” she continued. “The people called the Gulf Islanders. Can you give us the background?”

  Pulling her gaze back to the hostess, Shakira nodded. “Yes. They have a very tragic story.” She carefully outlined the situation. “And now they can’t go home until the issue of the turtles is settled. So we are working very hard to establish the facts and judge what is the best thing in this situation as quickly as possible. And we also want to convince Mystery Resorts to drop their lawsuit and forget their plans for the islands. Ghasib did not sign that agreement for the people, but for himself. Why should the people now have to honour it?”

  “I suppose it’s hard for you to understand that something like a rare turtle should keep displaced people from their traditional lands.”

  Shakira nodded vigorously. “I know how desperate they feel. Other Bagestani refugees are coming home now. Their villages are being rebuilt, but not the islanders’. Maybe we will have to build another camp for them while this argument is decided. How horrible if they have to become refugees in their own country! And where will they go? You can’t just put one tribe in the territory of another and tell them to get along.

  “Farida, the woman who was my mother in the last camp, is from the island of Solomon’s Foot. Her family and her husband’s have lived on that island for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Her husband was arrested and imprisoned by Ghasib on false charges so that the island could be evacuated for Mystery Resorts, and he is still not found. Their home was burned to the ground by the evacuation teams. Farida wants to go back and rebuild, and wait for her husband there. But she has to continue as a refugee.”

  “And she’s staying in the palace with you while she waits?”

  “Even in a palace it is hard to be a refugee,” Shakira countered firmly. “What good is a palace if it is not your home?”

  More applause.

  “You know, the turtles have survived alongside the human inhabitants of the islands for thousands of years, or they would not be there now. The islanders have always been very careful of the environment, because they harvest wild herbs for use in their traditional medicines. It is their biggest source of income. People from all over Bagestan use the island herbs.”

  “What is your own opinion of how this issue should be resolved, then, Princess?”

  “Don’t go there, Princess,” Gazi begged softly. “Remember, ‘The claims have to investigated…’”

  But in the heat of the moment Shakira forgot his coaching. She threw up her head. “How are the people suddenly a danger to the environment that they have cherished for so long? I think this story about the turtles is all made up because Mystery Resorts still want the islands for their exclusive resort. And I think it is evil if they put their profits before a whole people’s right to go home.”

  “Oh!” said the hostess.

  “They are just camel-stuffers,” said the Princess.

  “I’m sorry I got excited,” said Shakira. “But why shouldn’t I tell the truth? Why shouldn’t it be said?”

  They were sitting in the hotel suite, watching the broadcast of the show—Shakira and Sharif, Gazi al Hamzeh and his wife, Anna.

  “So long as they don’t sue for defamation,” Gazi said, with humour.

  Not a word had been cut. They watched to the end, including the prolonged, enthusiastic applause which guaranteed that the phones would be ringing with new invitations. Lazily scratching his beard shadow, Gazi picked up the remote and shut off the TV. He tossed it down, slapped his hands down on the seat beside him.

  “By tomorrow morning we’ll have a list of interview requests as long as your arm,” he announced. “You did extremely well. Shakira is a natural, and Sharif, you come across with terrific authority. We’ve got a winning team,” he said. “Now let’s go out and celebrate.”

  It was clear from the small buzz that went around the room at their entrance that some of the patrons in the club had watched the show. This was Shakira’s first visit to a Western nightclub, so she was staring, too.

  “What do people do in a nightclub?” she asked Anna when they were seated.

  “Eat, drink, dance, smoke and talk,” Anna said succinctly, taking the menu from the waiter. As the other three consulted over the menu, Shakira looked around. The band started playing and people got up to dance.

  Shakira watched the dancers for several minutes. “Do you like to dance, Shakira?” Anna asked with a smile.

  Shakira smiled and nodded. “We used to dance in the camps sometimes. People had instruments, or they made them, and we would dance when they played. I liked those times—people seemed always happy and laughing.” She paused to watch. “I used to think that we didn’t do it right, that out in the world dancing would be different. But it’s just the same—people jumping around.”

  Sharif watched the bright eyes for a moment and set his menu aside. “Would you like to jump around now?”

  He led her out to the dance floor and Shakira, who, it soon became clear, had inherited a certain musical instinct from her grandmother, began her own particular dance.

  She was wearing a dress in emerald-green silk organza, another of Kamila’s special designs. A wide jewelled band encircled her throat, the halter-top exposed her shoulders and back. A snug bodice clung to her small breasts and over her stomach to another jewelled band around her hips. The circular skirt was composed of a dozen layers of gauzy silk, the top layer spangled all over with beads and pearls.

  Around her ankles her sandals carried matching bands of clustered jewels. The effect, as with most of the wardrobe Kamila had
designed for her, was primitive elegance, an effect that was matched now by her part ballet, part belly, part tribal dancing.

  Sharif was wearing a tuxedo. “Going native,” Gazi and Sharif had called it, when Shakira had challenged their Western evening gear. “Why do men in the West dress like crows?” she’d asked, but no one had an answer. “I don’t like it!”

  He looked very dark and handsome in the black suit, but Shakira liked him better in the silk jacket and jewels that comprised the dress uniform of the Cup Companions—what he had been wearing the night of the reception given in her honour, when he had told her she was beautiful.

  He watched her dance, graceful and unconsciously sensuous, with a tight jaw. Time, he knew. He had to give her time. And yet—there would be plenty of other men now, men who wouldn’t necessarily have the patience, or the sense, to give her time. Men were watching her here with eyes that told their own story. If she succumbed to another man while he, Sharif, waited and watched and was careful…

  But he would kill any man who came near her.

  The sentiment must have been written large on his face, for a man who’d been watching hungrily, catching his eye, suddenly turned to his companion, put his arm around her and leaned into her ear.

  The musicians slipped into something slow, and around them the floor emptied. Half a dozen couples remained, moving into each other’s arms to begin the slow sway of public sex.

  He had waited too long to hold her.

  She put her hand in his because he seemed to expect it, but as he drew her closer, she protested nervously, “I never danced with a man before. I don’t know what you do.”

  Then she caught her breath, because Sharif drew her close and put his arm around her. He seemed very tall suddenly: her head just reached his heart, and almost of its own accord nestled there. One arm was around her waist; with the other he held her hand firmly against his chest.

  “It’s like walking. Shift your weight back and forth between your feet, and let me give you your direction.” His voice rumbled in her ear, like a cat’s purr, and she felt it all down her spine.

  “Oh,” she said, on a note of surprise, but she didn’t resist, and he wrapped his arm more securely around her, drawing her firmly into his embrace.

  She felt enclosed and safe, and a drowsy happiness seemed to flow through her, making her lazy. She did what he had instructed, lifting one foot and then the other, and the movement of his body told hers where to put it down.

  The music seemed to flow through them, wrap around them, binding them together, so that after a time she seemed to herself not to be moving from her own volition. As if something else—the music, perhaps—created the dance, using their bodies.

  A singeing heat tingled on her skin when he touched her. His hand moved against her bare back, and she felt a shivering response all down her spine. He bent his head to murmur something, and even his breath against her neck caused a delicious melting in her, and her blood flowed with warm sweetness like the taste of honey.

  Then he dropped his hands and stood a little away from her, and she knew she had been wrong about the bonds that linked them. They were not the product of the music, but something else. Because they were still there, strong and vibrant, and binding her to him, when the music stopped.

  Fifteen

  She was a hit, a very palpable hit. A tiny, perfect princess, a survivor from hell who had kept her humour, her truth…and her predilection for straight talk and plain, pungent language, which after months of tutoring no one had quite been able to eradicate in her. The world loved what it saw and wanted more.

  After that interview, as Gazi had predicted, the demand for appearances by the Bagestani princess and her rescuer went nuclear, and the Gulf Island campaign was to be stepped up and taken all over the world.

  “We’ll need some support,” Gazi insisted. “We don’t want anyone getting burn-out, and Shakira is new to all this.”

  So other members of the royal family were drafted, and Farida, too. “A B-list celebrity,” Noor said with a grin one day, overhearing Gazi on his mobile with a chat show producer who wanted Shakira and Sharif and was being offered Noor and Farida and Jamila instead. “Just what I always dreamed of.”

  Gazi hung up and shook his head. “You’re not B-list, Princess. It’s just that they hadn’t realized yet that you’re on offer. What a blessing you were so reclusive when you got back from your adventure with Bari! Believe me, they jumped at the chance to get the heiress who bolted from her wedding and spent her honeymoon with her fiancé on a desert island.”

  “I did not bolt from my wedding,” Noor denied primly. “Bari’s grandfather withdrew his permission.”

  He grinned. “That’s the ticket, Princess.”

  It seemed strange to her that she should have discovered love, real love, not with her family, not for the Sultan or even her grandmother, but for Sharif. She had believed that she loved her family, because she wanted to love them. But when her heart opened for Sharif she learned that love was very different from a feeling of wanting to love. And now she loved not just Sharif, but her family, too.

  It was mysterious, inexplicable, but something had happened when he told her her name—earlier, even, for when she stole his wallet, hadn’t she been half glad then that he had come after her? But she hadn’t begun to understand herself until that night she had danced with him, and felt how her heart cleaved to his.

  Her heart had been closed before Sharif. But every moment she was with him, it opened a little more. Like a dark, locked room, she told herself. And he unlocked the door and came in with a light, and looked at things that no one has ever seen.

  But he hadn’t seen everything, she reminded herself anxiously. Now she knew what love really was—but would Sharif love her, if he knew?

  What the family called in private The Al Jawadi Islands-for-the-Islanders Road Show went from success to raging success. They were capturing the public imagination. Between the Princesses, the Cup Companions, and the islanders themselves, as represented by Farida and her daughter, the campaign caught fire. Someone started selling T-shirts over the Internet, and sent a dozen samples to the palace.

  “Why not?” said Gazi, and on the next chat show Noor, Farida and Jamila had People Need Sanctuary Too emblazoned on their chests. After that the T-shirts began appearing on the streets.

  It had been Gazi’s idea that Noor and Farida would make a good team, since Noor had been shipwrecked on the island, Solomon’s Foot, where Farida’s family had lived for generations. On the practical front, Noor could translate when Farida was interviewed in English. On the bums-on-seats front, as Gazi put it, Farida and Jamila pulled the heartstrings, and Noor added the glitter.

  “Shakira, of course, does both,” Gazi confided to Sharif. “Her kind are few and far between, Sharif. She’s one of a kind, and they’re all after her.”

  The two Cup Companions looked at each other.

  “Do you think I don’t know that?”

  “What do they say? ‘You’d better hurry, ’cause it’s going fast.’”

  “Over my dead body.” Sharif showed his teeth.

  Gazi’s hands went up. “Okay, okay. So long as you’re on the case. A person would have to be blind not to know how you feel, and the way she looks at you, you’re miles ahead of the rest of the field. But are you making your advantage good?”

  “She’s unique, Gazi, as you say. She looks great—sometimes you’d swear she’d recovered as if it all had never happened. But underneath Princess Shakira is still Hani half the time, an urchin fighting the world for the right to live. She needs room to find herself a little more before I start labelling her as mine. She’s got a right to discover herself.”

  It was killing him to wait, but he knew he was right. And giving Shakira time didn’t mean giving anyone else a chance. He could keep the others away.

  Farida’s husband was found, in a prison far from the capital, where the prison superintendent had destroyed the prison reco
rds before fleeing. Hashim Sabzi was thin, weak and ill, but at least he had not been tortured. The prison superintendent, a far-seeing man, had noted the direction of the wind a couple of years before the Return, and tailored his activities accordingly.

  Hashim moved to the palace to be with Farida, where he was under medical observation. He wasn’t well enough to make the next talk show appearance with his family, as the producer had hoped.

  But Farida and Jamila went, as scheduled.

  What happened was completely unexpected. It was Noor’s own idea to take along the doll she had found under the burnt house on Solomon’s Foot, the doll she had given the name Laqiya, the foundling. Gazi had given the idea the thumbs-up, telling her to bring the doll out if the moment was good. But no one had mentioned it to Farida.

  “Tell us what you ate, Princess, because I think that’s what most people worry about—did you have to eat grubs while you were shipwrecked?”

  Noor laughed. “No, but it was a close-run thing! We survived on turtles’ eggs and fish and what we could forage in the forest,” she said. “Then we found the tragic remains of the village. Farida’s village, I know now. The houses had all been burnt, but even so there was some useful material for the shelter we were building. And it was great to find some self-seeded vegetables in the abandoned gardens.”

  “So you—”

  “And there was one more thing I found, and I think this speaks louder than anything for the unspeakable nature of what Ghasib and Mystery Resorts committed on those islands,” Noor went on. “I brought it today and I’d like to show it to you.”

  “Of course.”

  Noor bent down to the smart carryall she had brought with her, lifted out a plastic bag, and opened it.

  “As long as I live, I will never forget the day I found this, in the ruins of a wrecked, half-burnt house. For me, this little doll said it all.”

  She drew Laqiya out of the plastic shroud and sat the little rag doll on her knee. “To me this doll is a symbol of—”