Stolen by the Desert King

by Clare Connelly

  As if sensing the shift of fear in her, Khalifa held her tighter, carrying her away from the house, into the back of a waiting four wheel drive.

  He settled her into a seat first, and then sat beside her, his eyes on her profile. Kylie didn’t look at him. She couldn’t. Her emotions were rioting all over the place. Relief at having been rescued, fear at her captivity, worry, doubt, and anger. Anger at herself. Because Fayez had been right. She had been stupid.

  Unbelievably stupid and naïve; her whole life! Her whole life! Why had she never questioned her parents’ plan for her? Why hadn’t she fought, tooth and nail, to avoid marriage to a man she didn’t know?

  In part, she knew the answer to the last part of that question.

  She’d met Khalifa. She’d met him, and she’d believed him when he’d introduced himself as her fiancé. She’d probably fallen halfway into love with him that night on his yacht. What had loomed before her as a responsibility and an obligation was now something she understood she’d looked forward to. From the minute she’d known Khalifa to be her groom, she’d wanted the marriage.

  She’d wanted it with all her heart.

  But for him?

  She shivered again and Khalifa stiffened beside her. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, and closed it again.

  “How did you find us?” Kylie’s question was cold. Calm. She was in shock, she supposed. Didn’t that happen?

  “My agents tracked you aerially.”

  “Aerially?” She pulled a face. “Like something out of James Bond.”

  He dismissed the joke. “Kylie… did he … what happened?”

  She blinked her eyes shut, confused and exhausted. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Khalifa compressed his lips, staring out of the window with a growing sense of frustration. But Kylie didn’t care. She needed to be on her own. To be away from everyone. To shower. To bathe. To sleep. She felt sick and she felt angry and she felt confused.

  *

  “How is she?” Khalifa’s eyes didn’t leave his wife’s body. He watched her where she stood on the balcony, bathed in the fullness of the midday sun, her hair loose down her back, the dress flowing and angelic.

  “She hasn’t slept,” Capha, Aïna’s second mistress, reported. “Nor has she eaten.”

  Khalifa’s gut twisted. His expression was heavy as he studied her, wanting to reach for her, not knowing how to do so. “Leave us. And please ensure we are not disturbed.”

  Capha nodded. As she made to exit Kylie’s suite, Khalifa paused her with one last question. “How is Aïna?”

  “Insisting she is fine. Ready to return to work.”

  Khalifa’s smile was tight. “I want her to rest.” The last thing he needed was anyone who might remind his wife of her trauma.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Capha bowed low and then walked out of the room, clicking the door shut behind her. Khalifa sighed as he moved to the balcony, pulling the door inwards so that his wife blinked in his direction with surprise. As though she hadn’t realized he’d been watching her for the last ten minutes.

  His worries increased.

  “Hello,” the word was thick in his mouth. He cleared it and tried again. “Capha tells me you have not slept?”

  Kylie blinked, then looked back out at the desert. “Haven’t I?”

  “Kylie, we must speak.”

  She met his eyes slowly, a frown pulling at her lips. “What about?”

  “I want to help you. But I can’t until I understand…”

  “Understand what?” She turned away from him again and he fought the impulse to drag her face to his. To make her meet his eyes. Anything other than complete patience and gentleness would not get through to her.

  “What happened to you?”

  “You know what happened.” The words were so quiet, so soft, that he almost didn’t catch them.

  “I know that his men abducted you and drove you to the desert. That you were chained to the furniture like a dog.” Disgust churned his insides at the very idea. “I know that he is a man capable of treating women like objects in the worst kind of way.”

  She nodded. She knew that too. “But isn’t that what you do too?”

  The question lumbered between them like a dark rock of coal. Khalifa stared at her, uncharacteristically quiet in the face of her observation. “You mean...”

  “I mean,” she continued, “the real reason you married me.”

  Khalifa scanned his wife’s face, his mind not quite fast enough in that moment to fully comprehend her meaning. In fact, the past was yawning before him, loaded with confusion and wonder, with beliefs and uncertainties. What he had thought at what time, and when he’d started to think otherwise.

  He decided to play it safe. “Meaning?”

  She arched a brow, and the simple gesture, so scathing, was so refreshingly like Kylie that he felt a twinge of a smile. Totally inappropriate and in no way an indication of amusement so much as a natural response to relief.

  “You didn’t marry me because you were worried about a political threat, did you?”

  He’d told her that. And now, he wished more than anything, that he hadn’t lied. That he hadn’t manipulated her. That he hadn’t paid money to pressure her into marrying him.

  “Your family was once powerful. You know the history.”

  “Yes, yes. Ancient history. Since coming to Argenon I’ve seen how respected you are as a leader. How certain your position. And still, I never really questioned why you would have married me.”

  Bloody Fayez. Khalifa thought of the man with a rushing sense of fury. “I couldn’t let you marry him. He is a disgusting human.”

  “Yes. He is. And I’m glad you saved me from that fate. But you could have done that without marrying me. This had nothing to do with me. If you didn’t hate Fayez, if you hadn’t wanted to avenge the past, you would have left me to my fate. Wouldn’t you?”

  The idea now was anaethema to Khalifa. Kylie, married to Fayez? He shuddered at the thought.

  “All the while you made me feel like I should be so grateful to you for saving me from that life… and you were using me. Worse, you were putting me in the path of danger. He would never have kidnapped me if you hadn’t taken me from him.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” he pointed out. “If I had not married you, then you would have been his wife, and there would have been no need to kidnap you.”

  “Shut up,” she snapped. “I don’t mean that. You could have ended our engagement without making me your wife. The only reason to seduce me in Sydney and marry me was because you wanted to throw it in his face. Am I right?”

  Khalifa’s breath was uneven. He stared at his wife, her face pinched, her eyes clouded, and frustration gnawed a hold in his heart. “Initially, yes,” he said after a long pause. “Yes, okay? I wanted to hurt him.”

  “And he took from you a woman you loved, and you thought the only way to repay him was to take his fiancé? On his wedding day, in front of everyone he knows? You wanted to hurt him and humiliate him and you used me to do it.”

  A muscle jerked in Khalifa’s cheek as he looked towards the mountains. The memory of the perfect night they’d spent at the foot of the range was awkward in his mind, because it was such a contradiction to the darkness he now felt.

  “Yes.” How could he lie to her again? Her summation was truthful, after all.

  “I can’t believe… God! He was right. I’m such an idiot. A gullible, weak, stupid fool.” She spun away from him and paced to the other side of the balcony. Nausea bit through her. She gripped the railing and dipped her head forward, refusing to give into its sickening control. Needing not to vomit. To have some control over her body.

  “You are none of those things.”

  “Of course I am! I actually thought I was in love with you! Probably from the first moment we met, when I opened the door and saw you standing there and everything I’d ever known or felt zapped away and left only you. And the
n when we slept together, my God! Khalifa! That’s all this is! Sex! You were right! And stupid, idiotic fool that I am, I thought we were in love.”

  But no one loves me, Kylie thought with a shift of her head, the reality biting through her. No one. Not her parents, for they’d sold her into marriage as Khalifa had insisted all along. Not her husband, who’d used her for his own ends. She was alone in the world.

  She sniffed away a sob.

  Her words, though exactly what he’d been trying to convince her of for a long time, gave him no satisfaction. He crouched before her, shocked by the change in her face. The hard line of grief that marred her beauty. And yet she was all the more beautiful to him in that moment of haunted brokenness. “We are more than sex,” he conceded.

  She shook her head, rejecting the consolation he offered so reluctantly. “I wanted to love and be loved so badly that I imagined the feeling everywhere. I didn’t see that there are other forces just as strong – convenience. Need. Power. Revenge.” She stood straight, her body a taut line. “That’s what you wanted from me, right? Revenge. And I hate that. I hate that you used me… that you let me hope for more, all the while knowing that I was just a means to an end.”

  He shook his head, standing and pulling her into his arms at the same time his lips sought hers but she pushed away from him on a sob. “No!” She shoved at his chest, needing to be free from his touch altogether. “Don’t! Don’t you dare touch me.”

  Her outburst, completely unprecedented and unexpected, surprised him. He stood perfectly still, watching her from between shuttered eyes.

  “Don’t touch me.” It was more tremulous now. She spun away from him, wrapping her arms around her chest. “I can’t bear it.”

  Liar, her body taunted, for it was already missing his nearness, craving his touch. But she would no longer let a physical need for him control her. If she took away the sex, the power of sexual attraction, it was easy to see that there was very little between them. Certainly no trust nor truth, and what hope could there be without either?

  “Fayez Haddad hurt someone very badly. Someone I cared for.”

  “The woman you loved,” she murmured with a small nod of her head.

  Silence throbbed between them, heavy and accusatory. And then he nodded.

  “Yes. The woman I loved.” He lifted a hand to her shoulder but she jerked away. “You must understand, I have known Selena all my life. And Fayez brutalized her. I came to see only my hatred for him. It came to matter more to me than anything else. I needed to hurt him. To make him pay for what he’d done to her…”

  “Why couldn’t you put him in jail?”

  “Because I’m not a dictator, azeezi, and Selena would not press charges. She begged me not to pursue the matter and I didn’t. For many years, I let it go.”

  “And then you heard about me,” Kylie whispered. She turned around, her eyes clearly showing her betrayal. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth sooner? Why let me continue to believe it was all about some stupid political coup or something?”

  A frown dragged his lips downwards, yet he couldn’t answer. “It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  “It changes everything! Marrying me because it might secure your place as ruler of this country, sure. I get that. I understand why that kind of stability would matter. But marrying me because you wanted to take me from him, to hurt him, it’s disgusting. It cheapens me and us, and everything we’ve shared.” She tilted her chin defiantly, staring at him for several long seconds before turning away, her profile autocratic. “You should have respected me enough to tell me the truth. If I’d known…”

  “Yes?” He interrupted, impatience, holding him still.

  “I would have been different,” she said finally, her eyes sweeping shut. “I presume you no longer need me to play the part of your wife?”

  Khalifa’s expression was as tight as a drum. “Meaning?”

  “He kidnapped me. He kidnapped Aïna. He threatened… he threatened…” she shook her head, swallowing bile. “You have everything you need to put him in prison for a very long time. And the rest of his family, I presume. You did it. You’ve got your revenge. And now I’d like to go home.” Her voice cracked on the last word but her face remained stoic.

  Home.

  Home.

  Such a simple word with very complex connotations.

  “Is that really what you want?”

  Was it? To return to Sydney, to her life there, her apartment – an apartment that this man now technically owned, to Mel and the Harbour and her old life? To a life without Khalifa in it? Without these exotic fruits and desert nights?

  “Yes.” She forced herself to be brave; to be strong. “I want to pretend this never happened.”

  “Kylie…”

  “Please, Khalifa. Don’t.” Now she turned to face him, and there was such misery in her features that he lost whatever he had been about to say. “Don’t say anything else. I’ve been a blind fool, but I’m awake now. I’m seeing clearly. And I know what I need to do.”

  His eyes were impossible to read, his lips were pressed together and a pulse beat in his throat. He stared at her, and at his sides, his hands were clenched into fists. She felt the tension emanating him, and she understood the relief that he wasn’t expressing. What a neat little bow she had helped him tie things into! Yet still he seemed to hesitate. Perhaps he hadn’t completely thought through the ending of things. What he would do once he’d got his revenge.

  “Please, let me go home.”

  And that was his undoing. The soft, trembling way she begged him.

  Inwardly he groaned, but he felt himself nodding. “Of course, azeezi. If that’s what you want.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “FOR ONE WEEK I have languished in this cell and you have not had the guts to see me? For three days I have been here and what? You have been too afraid to see me? You do not want to fight me?”

  Khalifa’s lips twisted with a curl of derision. “Believe me, if I wanted to fight you, you would no longer be able to stand.”

  Fayez’s expression showed disbelief. “Well, then?”

  Khalifa took a step closer, but didn’t so much as lift a hand towards the smaller man. “It would be easy to cower you with my strength, as you do to those who are weaker than you. Don’t you get it? There is no strength in that – only weakness. Every time you hit a woman, every time you used your strength to force them into your bed, you have demeaned yourself. You have shown yourself to be powerless.”

  Fayez moved fast, his fist lifting towards Khalifa’s body, but the sheikh caught it with ease, holding Fayez’s fist in the palm of his hand, his eyes mocking as they met the smaller man’s.

  “So what?” Fayez spat. “You are a merciful King now, are you?”

  “Oh, no.” Khalifa almost laughed. “There is nothing merciful about how you will be treated. You will be prosecuted to the full extent of Argenon’s laws. You will never see the light of day again. Nor will you touch another woman for so long as you live.”

  Fayez smirked. “She liked me touching her.”

  Khalifa was very still, his eyes locking to the smaller man’s as something like violence curdled his blood and bent his resolve. “Selena was young. She believed your lies.”

  “I was not referring to Selena.”

  Khalifa’s nostrils flared angrily and he pushed breath from his lungs. “You do not get to speak of my wife. Ever.”

  He turned and left the room, his heart thumping, his head aching. He nodded to the guards as he left, just catching the sound of the locks clicking back into place as he left the cell, moving into the corridor. And then he stopped, dipping his head forward and staring at the ground.

  For the rest of his life, the idea of Fayez touching Kylie would fill Khalifa with a sense of drowning. A sense of ache and pain from which he’d never recover.

  *

  “YOU LOOK WELL,” Khalifa’s smile was tight, his eyes reading every detail of Aïna’s appe
arance. A week after her kidnapping and only the faintest line of her scar remained.

  “Thank you, your highness.”

  He nodded. “I’m pleased you agreed to meet with me.”

  It was such an odd turn of phrase for a man used to commanding at will that Aïna frowned. “Of course,” she dipped her head forward. “I presume you called to have me reassigned?”

  “Reassigned?”

  Aïna’s cheeks darkened with the slightest hint of a flush. “Now that Her Highness is no longer in Argenon…”

  Khalifa’s gut twisted again. She’d been gone for six nights.

  “No.” He grimaced. “I … wanted to ask you about your time in the desert.”

  Aïna frowned. “Of course.”

  “I appreciate this might be awkward for you but I need to know.”

  There was such vulnerability in his expression; Aïna had never seen the Sheikh Sultan in any mode other than confident. She took the seat he’d gestured towards, her hands clasped in her lap.

  “I need you to tell me everything, Aïna. Everything. Omit not a single detail no matter… no matter how uncomfortable it makes you, or how little you think I want to hear it.”

  And so Aïna told him. She told him about the morning at the library, and Kylie’s delight in all the ancient scrolls. About their relaxed enjoyment of the corridors, because the building was secure. About the moment they were blindsided by two men, dressed as library guards. About the smell of the chemical and the immediate effect it had of rendering them unconscious. Of the moment they’d woken to find themselves chained in the dark room. She told him about Kylie’s exchange with Fayez, the things the other man had said, and finally, the things he’d done. The way he’d forced Kylie to drink alcohol and kissed her; the way he had touched her and she’d tried to push him away. Though Aïna couldn’t meet his eyes as she described the latter, her own shame at having been unable to help something she knew she would carry forever.