MARRYING HER ENEMY & STOLEN BY THE DESERT KING

by Connelly, Clare

  After the tailer and the cobbler there’d been the Keeper of the Jewels, an intimidating man who must surely have been a century old, holding a leather diary in his waxy fingers. He sat beside Kylie and spoke reverentially – though his reverence was reserved for the subject matter of his book rather than his royal appointment.

  The photographs in the book showcased jewels – and not ordinary jewels, either. There were crowns and tiaras and chokers filled with diamonds, enormous gems that would be weighty and incredibly expensive.

  Kylie had flipped through the book, her bewilderment growing as the man insisted she choose which she preferred for ceremonial occasions and which she liked best for every day affairs.

  It was an enormous task, for Kylie would have preferred to go sans tiara as much as possible – an opinion that was not welcomed, apparently.

  “Please tell me that’s the end of it,” she’d said to Aïna when they were alone again.

  “No, your highness. But I can reschedule the rest for tomorrow, if you’re tired.”

  “Yes,” Kylie nodded, though she wasn’t tired so much as utterly out of her league. “Thank you.”

  The shelves in her room had been filled with books and there was also a Macbook and an iPad.

  She’d read on and off and emailed Mel, keeping the news bland and boring rather than admitting to the confusing change of events.

  But the day had seemed to drag forever and several times she found herself standing by The Door. The one that would lead back to his bedroom. She’d stood by it, listening, her heart paused, her pulse softened, her breath held.

  And then she’d realised what she was doing and forced herself to move away. To pretend interest in another book. Another email.

  But the charade had worn thin now.

  A frown tugged at her lips. Finally, the thoughts, the questions, the riddles she’d been nudging aside all day moved into the middle of her mind and refused to budge.

  Why had Khalifa interfered? Was it just to prevent her marriage into the powerful Haddad family? And was her family’s name so powerful that their marriage really would have posed a threat?

  She tried to remember the stories. The stories her father had told; her mother had repeated. Stories she’d grown up hearing and never really understood, but that she’d loved anyway because her parents had spoken softly, in hushed tones.

  She moved back inside and reached for the iPad on autopilot, then returned to the balcony. There was a low chair with a tapestried cushion on its base. She curled up into it, tucking her knees up to her chest and leaning back, typing into the google box:

  THE MAHA ISHAN FAMILY; ARGENON.

  It took only seconds and then thousands of sites appeared. She ignored Wikipedia and scrolled lower, finally landing on a geneology website that she knew to be reputable.

  She clicked on the link and drummed her fingers as she waited for the page to load. It didn’t take long.

  It was mainly text but about halfway down there was a reproduction of a painting – the couple were featured on their wedding day and, Kylie’s cheeks flushed pink, the woman wore a dress strikingly similar to the one Aïna had dressed her in.

  Her finger touched the picture lightly but the iPad flinched at the confusing instruction and she withdrew her hand, flicking to the top of the page instead and reading with an interest she couldn’t believe she’d never really had before.

  From the seventh century AD through to the nineteenth century, the Maha Ishan were considered one of the most powerful families of Argenon. Originally desert traders, skilled at crossing the sand dunes of Argenon, they established routes of commerce between the sea and the communities that were spread across the desert.

  In the sixteenth century, the family moved away from the desert and from trade, their wealth enormous. They settled into the capital city but it was not long before their wealth bred power and power unsettled the ruling family.

  War was inevitable and it was as vicious as it was barbaric.

  For a century the country battled before a truce was effected. But the military efforts were expensive and many lives were lost. A third family began to prosper and their power and influence almost challenged that of the Al Asouri and Maha Ishans. The Haddids – Kylie’s heart twisted. Though the spelling was different, surely it could only be referring to the Haddad? – mounted a challenge to the throne of the Kingdom and for seventeen days they succeeded, killing almost the entire ruling family before a party that had been hunting to the South returned and waged a late night ambush on the palace.

  The moat of the palace of Argenon was dug days later, and it is rumoured that the Haddids were made to serve as slaves for the construction. The Al Asouris were back in the palace but the threat of civil discontent rumbled beneath the surface for another hundred years. It was Lina Maha Ishan who sought to put her own family into power – she formed an alliance with a young member of the Haddid family and planned to marry him. If she’d succeeded, their marriage would have been a grave threat to the fragile power of the Al Asouris.

  The plans were discovered and the Maha Ishans were exiled from Argenon. The Haddids mostly left by choice, only a few members remained.

  It is believed the Maha Ishan family eventually settled in Australia but their ties to the country of Argenon are now relegated to the ancient past.

  Kylie flicked her eyes up to the desert, her expression troubled.

  If only.

  Nothing about the past felt ancient.

  It was reaching through the veils of time with offensive ease and wrapping fingers around her. Fingers that made her heart clutch.

  Why hadn’t she questioned her parents’ plans more?

  The piece she’d just read was simply the first act to her own life’s story. How was she still taking part in an ancient blood grudge?

  The desert winds changed direction, and they sped up, spinning with newfound intensity and sending sand across the sky and lifting it to her. It grated against her skin, into her eyes and she turned her back on it, moving inside, where a small amount had preceded her and formed a sort of gritty carpet at her feet.

  She shut the doors as the wind intensified further and she could hear the sand grinding against the doors and walls. With curiosity, she strode to one of the glass windows and climbed up so she could see through it.

  A sand storm?

  Surely it must have been. She could hardly see there was so much of the stuff in the air beyond the window. The night sky was black behind it, but the stars had disappeared; the clouds too.

  A shiver ran down her spine and she stepped backwards from the window, towards the bed. But she wasn’t tired.

  She lay down, staring at the ceiling, listening to the noise of sand against the palace, her hands curled across her stomach.

  The door stayed resolutely shut and she wondered at what Khalifa was doing. Was he thinking of her?

  Was he wanting her?

  Or was he regretting this marriage?

  How could they have done anything but marry, though? She saw now the impossibility of her union with the Haddads, and so too why they were so desperate for it to go ahead! What a fool she’d been! An impulsive idiot!

  And why had her parents gone along with it?

  They sold you, azeezi.

  His words pierced her brain, like tiny daggers she was powerless to ward off. She had no shield for the truth, but still, she almost couldn’t quite believe it.

  Her parents had loved her.

  She closed her eyes and snuggled into the luxurious linen sheets, breathing in the fragrance of vanilla and lavender. It wasn’t until she felt wetness on her cheeks that she realised she’d been crying.

  Why?

  Had shock made her dim-witted?

  She blinked her eyes open, staring at the laced walls that surrounded the bed, and she thought of Sydney. Of the apartment she’d lived in, knowing the Haddad family to be paying for it. Knowing that she was promised to a man. She thought of George Randal
l, the boy she’d had a huge crush on all through school and told herself she could never, ever speak to. She thought of when he’d finally asked her on a date, in senior year, and she’d looked down her nose at him – because it was easier to walk away from something if he thought – like everyone else did – that she was a boring snob.

  And was she?

  Kylie couldn’t really remember who she was. For years, only Mel had been her friend. Only Mel had seen beneath the façade and the veneer. Only Mel had persisted. She’d held a mirror up to Kylie that she’d so badly needed – a mirror that showed her who she was.

  Destined to marry a man she’d never met, sure, but so much more than that.

  She’d loved her degree, but had even that been an attempt to block herself from feeling? Mathematics. It was a systematic and ordered subject and she’d always been drawn to it for that reason. She loved the methodical ways numbers made sense.

  Because people didn’t.

  People were unreliable and confusing.

  Kylie had never really been good with people.

  Where was Khalifa? What was he doing?

  * * *

  The bed smelled like her. He inhaled her fragrance, staring up at the sky through the glass of his ceiling, watching as sand doused the palace. His body was tense, aroused with a need to bury itself in her, to feel her, taste her, smell her, pleasure her.

  But his mind was reaching through time, fingering the past in a way that made him uneasy.

  Selena would be furious with him.

  How many times had she told him to let the past go? To forgive and forget – just like she had apparently done?

  The painful truth of her relationship with Fayez was far from her mind, or so she claimed. But he saw the scars. He saw the way her confidence had fled, her easy smile deserted her; the way she jumped at anything above a whisper.

  He’d seen her as she’d been then, too. So in love with Fayez she’d forgive him anything. She forgave him the first time he’d hurt her – though he’d broken her arm by throwing her down a flight of marble stairs. She’d forgiven him the next time, when he’d wrapped his fist around her throat and held her under bath water. She’d forgiven him again and again, and as the injuries became more horrific and the atrocious acts more violent and bizarre, she’d lied for him, she’d hidden herself away so that her best friend hadn’t noticed. So that Khalifa had missed the obvious.

  Until one day he hadn’t. Until she’d fainted at his feet – days after Fayez had slammed her head into a wall – the concussion had lingered. With his physician overseeing her recovery, scars, wounds, badly-healed breaks were all obvious.

  With every bone in his body he had wanted to ignore the demands of the judicial system and throw Fayez in prison. Hell, he’d wanted to kill the man with his own bare hands. But even then, Selena had refused to testify, and without her testimony, he could not invoke the law.

  And he had so badly wanted to.

  But she’d been adamant. As the days had passed and the spell had lifted, she’d fallen steadily out of love with Fayez. Khalifa had done what he could – he’d kept her in his palace, making sure she didn’t see the arrogant bastard. And sure enough, time gave her the perspective to help her see things more clearly. To realise there was no love left between them. To understand how much better off she was away from his vile temper and horrible behaviour.

  More had come to light over the years.

  Of course, Selena wasn’t the first or only woman he’d treated to a regular outing with his fist. It was his standard operation but the family went to great lengths to pay off his victims; to buy their silence with such an attractive payment they’d never consider going to the police.

  When Fayez tired of them, tired of using them as a punching bag, they were richer than their wildest dreams could have made them.

  That was the other part of his pattern.

  He was careful to select women, generally, who had nothing.

  Selena had certainly fit that mould. The daughter of his father’s Principal (the male equivalent to a mistress like Aïna) she had grown up in the palace with Khalifa. And though they’d been firm friends, the difference in their social standing had always been apparent. He had; she had not. Except she’d had his heart.

  All of it.

  He’d adored her; worshipped her. He’d loved to make her laugh – there was no sound on earth he enjoyed more. And she’d laughed freely back then, running across the tiles, telling him tall tales about the alligators in the moat and the men who’d wrestled them.

  What cruel twist of fate had brought her into Fayez’s orbit? And worse, why had Khalifa been away at the time? His trip was only three weeks, but by the time he’d returned, she’d moved in with Fayez and was, as Selena was in all things, enthusiastically falling headlong in love with the other man.

  Jealousy had been his first reaction and because he’d been anxious to conceal it from Selena – he loved her too much to ruin her happiness with his own darkness – he had stayed away. He had given her the freedom to enjoy her love and lover even though the knowledge almost killed him.

  And very nearly killed her too.

  His hands tightened by his side.

  Fayez had stolen Selena from him, and though he’d rescued her once more, she was not the same. She never would be. Fayez had not killed her body but her spirit and joy were gone forever.

  So had Khalifa repaid him sufficiently? The removal of Kylie from beneath his nose, on his wedding day; was it enough?

  No, he found. It was a start, but his need to pain the man was deeply ingrained.

  He flipped onto his side and breathed in; her fragrance was soft but it was filling him up, making him long to possess her.

  His eyes drifted to the golden clock on the side of his bed. The hands were inlaid with rubies – a gift on his eighteenth birthday from his own Principal.

  It was past two in the morning. The sandstorm was fading.

  He stood restlessly and pushed to his feet.

  There was no point in dressing. He moved, naked, to the door that joined their rooms, and unlocked the key.

  He was sick of thinking of Selena, of Fayez.

  And he knew of only one way to drive those thoughts from his head.

  * * *

  She was asleep when he entered her room. A smile curved his lips – an involuntary smile – as he stood beside the bed and listened to her breathing. It was soft but thick – almost a snore.

  He ignored the softening of his heart.

  The marriage existed purely because he needed it to. But it was not born out of a political weakness or fear. No, Khalifa had more personal reasons than that. Motives of revenge. Of hatred and rage.

  Every time he made love to his wife he was taking something from Fayez and that felt good.

  Better than good.

  It was the sweetest revenge he’d ever known.

  He lifted the sheet from her body with confident fingers and she stirred, just enough to let her nightgown slip, and it revealed the top of a perfect breast. His erection jerked.

  He balled the skirt of her nightie into his fists and pushed it higher, then he straddled her.

  She moaned in her sleep and arched her back; he leaned down and kissed her lips.

  She whispered his name into his mouth, the word wrapping around his tongue as he kissed her. “Please,” she added to the incantation, her fingers digging into his back as she lifted herself to him, welcoming him, needing him as he did her.

  He pushed her underpants down just enough to reveal her naked core and then he took her, thrusting into her as though he was a starving man who had been given one chance to feast.

  He gripped her hips and her eyes opened, heavy and thick with the shadows of sleep. “Am I dreaming?”

  “No, azeezi. This is real.”

  Chapter 8

  THE SUN BURST THROUGH her bedroom with confusing brightness. She blinked and stretched, her body tender and heavy with satisfaction.
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  Had it been a dream?

  She pushed up on her elbows, looking for anything that would answer her questions. There was no sign that Khalifa had been in her bedroom. No sign that he’d pleasured her again and again, playing her body as a virtuoso might command an instrument.

  But when she stood, every single cell in her body groaned. With agony and ecstasy. With delight and desire.

  He’d made love to her.

  Could it be called that without love?

  Without words, without promises, without anything other than the primal fulfilment of desire and need? Of urgency and passion? No. It was sex. Hard and fast and toe-curlingly satisfying.

  Was this the relationship he wanted with her? Middle-of-the-night trysts that made her scream with heat and delirious pleasure but which were over almost immediately.

  She padded towards the bathroom on autopilot – it was bigger than her bedroom at home had been – and lifted the nightgown off her body. There were marks on her breasts – pink abrasions – from his stubble, his fingers, his kisses and touch. A mark low down on the flesh of her stomach showed where he’d sucked her over and over, tormenting her, and left a dark circle of possession. She ran her fingers over the evidence of their time together, trying to catch the memories. But they ran like liquid gold through her fingertips; hot and unattainable. Her neck had darkened as she’d expected, proof of passion borne of rage – proof of another man’s touch.

  “Sleep now, lanaria.” He’d stroked her arm gently as he’d pulled away from her and she’d been too tired to argue. Her body was heavy with pleasure and awareness, fully satiated by his expert touch.

  But now, in the light of day, other emotions bubbled through her. Anger. Impotence. Frustration.

  Need.

  She showered and ran the loofah over her skin, covering every inch of herself with foamy water, scrubbing hard then rinsing herself all over. She washed her hair and scrubbed her nails and then, when she could put it off no longer, she stepped out of the warmth of the shower, reaching for a soft towel.