Sheikhs: Rich, powerful desert kings and the women who bring them to their knees...

by Clare Connelly

  “They married for love?” She prompted, cutting to the heart of what she wanted to know.

  He expelled an angry breath. “Yes. And it was the undoing of them both.”

  He poured two glasses of wine, a rich mulberry purple in colour, but didn’t touch his.

  “In what way?”

  His eyes lingered on her face for so long that goosebumps danced along her spine. “You want to speak of my parents?” He’d left his hair down, after she’d run her fingers through it, and now he pushed it back from his forehead. A gesture that showed his frustration but didn’t deter her for even a moment.

  “They would have been my child’s grandparents,” she held his gaze. “If we’re to bring a baby into this world, don’t you think I should know about his heritage?”

  He frowned, and she knew why. That same instinctive understanding she had passed through her once more. It was strange for him – as it was her - to think beyond a pregnancy – to imagine an actual baby and then, one day, a child. An adult. A being that would bind them for all time, that would form a string in the broad, ancient tapestry of Ras el Kidan royalty and rule.

  A frisson of wonder ran the length of her spine. This was an ancient kingdom, and their child would one day take up a place on its throne. The job of carrying, birthing and raising that person fell to her. Having a child under any circumstances must be awe-inspiring, but this?

  The enormity of what they were doing filled her now with a deep sense of amazement. The beginning of a pregnancy might already be flourishing inside of her! At the very thought, she pressed a flat palm to her stomach, and a clear image of what their baby might look like flooded her mind.

  “They married impetuously and against my grandfather’s will. She was engaged to someone else, but then, she met my father. They fell in love.” He said the final sentence with derision, an indictment of such a foolish notion.

  “You think there’s something wrong with that?”

  His eyes contained raw cynicism as they lifted to clash with her. “Yes.”

  She laughed, despite the cool disdain emanating from him. “So love is bad?”

  He was watchful now, and he reached for his wine, his long fingers curving around the glass, his eyes not leaving her face. “Surely you’ve had sufficient reasons to form this conclusion yourself?”

  Chloe was careful not to react. In truth, it had been a long time since anyone had spoken to her – albeit obliquely – of her parents’ affair, and she found that Raffa’s knowledge of this matter was strangely unsettling. “Sometimes I forget that you’re not just my husband.” Her smile was wry. “You aren’t simply a man I’ve married, nor a stranger who knows nothing about me. You know all my secrets, all my truths, and yet none of them by my own admission.”

  “That bothers you?”

  “It disadvantages me,” she agreed quietly. “You know that my mother and father were miserable together. That he came to hate her, and me as a result of that. That the older I got and the more I looked like her the harder he found it to be around me. You know that his hatred made her miserable…” Her voice faltered a little.

  “And you?” He asked silkily, the question surprising her.

  Chloe guarded the pain fiercely. “Their relationship had nothing to do with me.”

  “You’re their child.”

  And despite the fact she didn’t easily blush, Chloe felt heat rising into her cheeks and she found it hard to meet his eyes. “We were talking about you.”

  His laugh was a jolt of warm treacle into polarized muscles. “Because you find it easier to interrogate me than be interrogated?”

  “Do you intend to interrogate me?”

  His eyes locked to hers, and a jolt of sensual heat travelled from one to the other. “Definitely. Later. And I intend to be very persuasive.”

  She couldn’t answer; words failed her.

  “So?” Lazily, he reached for his fork and speared a piece of octopus. “You were only a child when they separated?” His frown showed his attempts at recollection. “Apollo told me he was fifteen? So you were, what? Five?”

  She nodded jerkily. “Six.” She cleared her throat, fixing him with a clear gaze that disguised the tormented direction of her own thoughts. “My father was always a busy man. Even when they were happy together, he still had very little time to give us.”

  Raffa’s smile was grim. “Yet you chose to marry the ruler of a kingdom? Did you imagine I would be any different to your father, habibti?”

  “No,” she answered instantly. “I believed you’d be very much the same.”

  The defiant tilt of her chin intrigued him. “And you welcomed that?”

  A brittle laugh escaped her. “I like certainty,” she said after a moment’s consideration. And refusing to be cowered by the directness of his stare, she continued, “I knew what I was getting when we married. I knew you would have your concerns, your life, and that you wouldn’t want me to be a part of it. Not more than was necessary, in any event.” Unconsciously, she lifted her left hand and stared at the enormous engagement ring. “And while you were busy being Sheikh, I would be free to live my own life.”

  There was a hollow ring to the words that had the Sheikh wondering at what kind of messed up lack of independence had led her to believe that a royal lifestyle, under the microscope of a fascinated press and adoring public, would be preferable to being single?

  “So despite your parents, you still have faith in the institution of marriage?”

  “Our marriage is nothing like theirs,” she said with a grim smile.

  “How did it differ?”

  “Our marriage is barely a marriage,” she pointed out, distracting herself by reaching for a small wedge of peach and sliding it between her lips. His focused attention on the action almost threw her train of thought. “Up until a few nights ago, we hadn’t seen one another in six months.”

  “Whose fault is that?” He prompted.

  She laughed in spite of herself. “Oh, no, you don’t! You don’t get to rewrite history, Rafiq Al-Khalil. You wanted me here about as much as I wanted to be here – which is to say, barely at all. I think it suited us both to have a degree of separation in our marriage.”

  He nodded slowly, but there was something like regret in his face. “And yet how quickly you’ve become an addiction in my blood. How did that happen?”

  She was startled – startled, shocked, pleased, surprised. She swallowed, and looked upwards, towards the stars overhead.

  “I like to know what’s expected of me,” she said, returning to their earlier, safer conversation.

  “You like safety,” he said with a nod that was rich with approval.

  “Yes.”

  “I understand that.” He pushed up a little straighter. “In this way, we are the same. For me, surprises are to be abhorred. Even the good ones.”

  She shifted her shoulders. “I don’t think there’s any such thing.”

  “True.”

  “It was hard on me, though. The divorce. Then again, what six year old wouldn’t have been devastated?”

  “Did you want to stay with your father?”

  “No.” Her shiver was involuntary. “I hardly knew him. Besides, my mother was adamant.”

  “He was saddened by the breakup.”

  “Don’t.” Her look was unspeakably intense. “Don’t make excuses for him. I know your father adored him, and you probably did too. But my father was a serial womanizer. A philanderer. He broke every heart that ever gave itself to him…”

  “Yours included.”

  She wanted to deny it, but there was something about the space they were in, the clarity of the night sky, the connection they’d forged in bed and now, over dinner, that had her nodding. She couldn’t meet his eyes though. “Mine too, yes.”

  “Your mother didn’t remarry?”

  “No.”

  “She never met anyone else?”

  “Oh, she met many someone elses,” Chloe whispered gravely.
“A different man every week. Sometimes two.” Chloe sighed. “My mother was very beautiful, Raffa.” She bit down on her full, lower lip, but Raffa didn’t notice. His eyes were trained on her face, her anguished, haunted face. “She had no shortage of men who caught her eye, and vice versa. But none of them lasted long. She told me once, after she’d had a bottle of champagne, that there was no one on earth like Diego. My father, she told me, was the only man alive who’d ever made her heart sing.” Chloe rolled her eyes. “And so she drank herself into an early grave, sleeping with whomever took her fancy, never caring for what a sad spectacle she’d made of herself.”

  To her surprise, tears had pricked Chloe’s eyes without her notice. It wasn’t until one rolled down her cheek and Raffa reached across the table to pad his thumb over it, catching the moistness on his tip and dragging it sideways, that she recognized her emotional state.

  “Sorry,” she murmured. “I make it a rule never to talk about my messed-up family.”

  “Why?”

  She pulled away from his touch, shaking her head and lifting her own palms to dash at her cheeks. “Because apparently it brings me to tears and I despise crying.”

  He laughed again. “Crying is nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Oh, really? When was the last time you cried, your highness?”

  He frowned. “It’s different. I’m ...”

  “Oh, let me guess? A big, brave, macho man?”

  “I was going to say,” he corrected with a grimace, “a man who was raised knowing he would be Sheikh. Tears weren’t tolerated – ever – in my upbringing.”

  It was enough of a revelation to have Chloe’s mind changing courses, uncovering the stones of this. Her own upbringing had been lonely, cold, devoid of the kind of family interactions most people took for granted. But what had it been like for Raffa?

  “I have a problem with that,” she said, reaching for some cheese and grapes and placing them on her plate.

  “Oh?”

  “Firstly, I don’t think you would ever have been prone to crying. It’s just not… you. And secondly, you are definitely not the kind of man who, even as a boy, would have been dictated to. In fact, I dare say that had someone urged you to stop crying, you would have carried on for days, just to spite them.”

  He dipped his head forward but Chloe was certain she saw the hint of a smile on his face. “I cried,” he said after a moment, “when my mother died. And when your father died.”

  “I was angry when he died,” she said with a twist of her lips. “I was angry about the article, angry that it must been the last thing he saw. You know they found him with it in bed? He’d read it, and then he had a heart attack.”

  Raffa nodded. “I had heard that. Your brother was similarly furious. Devastated, too. So many revelations that should have stayed private…”

  “It was just conjecture,” she brushed it aside. “How could a journalist know the details she claimed to?”

  Apollo remained silent, unable to disclose what he knew of the situation – unable to tell his young wife that the article was, indeed, accurate. That the journalist’s source had been correctly quoted: that the source of the article was Apollo himself. He could tell her none of these things, because his friend had sworn him to secrecy, and even now, even with Chloe as his wife in every sense of the word, he couldn’t break the bonds of trust that he and Apollo had forged years earlier.

  “I didn’t.” Chloe continued speaking, unaware of the direction of her husband’s thoughts. “Cry when my father died, I mean.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know why. I just don’t cry often. I was sad, I think – but because of an imagined future I had lost, rather than any special bond we’d shared. Death is sad – always. An old man who’s lived well and fast and long? It’s hard to see grief in that.”

  “Will you feel that way when my own father goes?”

  Chloe paled, her face instantly rejecting his words.

  “So it is not so natural after all?” he prompted, his point well-made.

  “Malik is so dynamic. It’s hard to imagine his body turning to dust and memory.”

  “Your father was just as much so.”

  “Not to me.” She speared a piece of octopus and ate it without tasting its salty sweetness.

  “What was he like to you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Indulge me.”

  And for a flash of a second, just an instant wedged in time, she remembered the way they’d indulged one another only an hour earlier. The way he’d stormed into her room and taken her because it had seemed as though he couldn’t live and breathe for a moment longer in a world that didn’t have their bodies intimately intertwined. She wanted more of that; not this. And yet, hadn’t it been Chloe’s insistence that they get to know one another?

  She licked her lower lip, and exhaled slowly. “I told you already. He was busy.”

  “When he was married. Then he divorced and your mother spent every spare minute with random men. You saw your father when?”

  “Once a year, if that. I didn’t see him at all from my eighth birthday to my eleventh.”

  Raffa did the math. “The Veronica years?”

  She grimaced. “Yes. Of course, I never met that stepmother.”

  “I did. You haven’t missed anything special.”

  Chloe shrugged. “Diego didn’t want me.” She took a sip of her wine and then met Raffa’s eyes. “It took me a long time to come to terms with that; to accept that he wished I hadn’t been born. It’s somewhat freeing to be able to say that now, without fear, without grief. As a statement of fact, as it is. He didn’t want me.”

  Raffa was as still as stone, and just as silent.

  “Apollo he wanted. Apollo he loved. Apollo he was proud of. And how I wished he’d felt that for me! I spent years wishing, wanting, trying so hard. Do you know the happiest I’d ever seen him?”

  “No?” Raffa asked, though he feared, in fact, he did.

  “When I said I’d marry you. For just a moment – barely even a moment, actually, his eyes glowed with something like the indulgence he afforded my brother at all times.” She swallowed. “I’ll never regret this marriage.”

  Raffa, across the table, felt his gut shift as though it were being tumbled through stone. “He wanted this marriage for us.”

  “I know.”

  It didn’t assuage the sense of darkness that was beginning to spin inside of him; a growing feeling of being somehow out of control. “And what did you want?”

  She frowned, her beautiful face pulled taut by a need to be strong and smart and right all the time. He understood those compulsions, for he shared them. “I wanted to be happy.”

  “And are you?”

  She had a habit of pulling her lower lip between her teeth when she was thinking. It was a small gesture, but one that he’d come to recognize as her way of prevaricating.

  “Don’t think. Answer.”

  “Is that a command?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought the interrogation was to come after?”

  “I’m King. I get to choose.”

  “Oh, I see.” She lifted her glass and sipped again. A breeze lifted off the desert, bringing with it the fragrance of heat and the sound of a night bird, flying in the distance.

  “Answer me, or pay the consequences.”

  Chloe wasn’t sure she could even remember what he’d asked, she knew only that her breath was burning inside her lungs and all she could think about was the way his body felt when it moved within her. Heat spread from cell to cell, a contagion of desire making thought and speech difficult.

  After several seconds of silence, he released a growl. “You choose consequences?”

  She nodded slowly, a smile playing around her lips, so that he pushed up to standing and rounded the table. He extended his hands to her and she put hers in them without hesitation. When he pulled her to standing, her body cleaved to his.

  “Dance with me.”
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br />   “That’s my consequence?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no music.”

  “Isn’t there?”

  She frowned.

  “Listen.” He lifted a finger to her lips, to encourage silence, and then smiled as he wrapped his hand around her waist, holding her flush to his body.

  He moved slowly, his hips nudging hers, and she did as he said: listening.

  And she heard it.

  The whispering of the wind, fast and insistent, melodious as it passed through the windows of this carved building; the desert animals – tigers sprinting and calling to one another, birds flying overhead, their songs filled with the magic of this ancient land.

  She pressed her cheek to his chest and danced with him, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  His body moved and hers responded; a silent call they answered together, in perfect unison.

  “Why haven’t you ever asked me any of this before?” She murmured, the words adding to the sense of music surrounding them.

  “When would I have had time?”

  She exhaled once more, pressed her cheek to his chest, and shifted as the rhythm of his body dictated.

  “You make it sound as though you were burning up with curiosity. Until a week ago, you didn’t even recognize I existed.”

  “That’s definitely not true.”

  “You didn’t recognize me as a woman.”

  “No. You were my wife.”

  She rolled her eyes, leaning back a little so she could see his face more clearly. “An odd distinction.” The moon shifted from behind a cloud, highlighting his face in silver light, making shadows and planes of his features. “Did you want to marry her?”

  “Who?”

  “Elena.” His grip around her waist loosened for a moment but when her eyes flew to his face, there was nothing there to suggest he was emotionally disturbed by her question. “Amit’s mother,” she explained. As though he could have forgotten who she was referring to.

  “No.”

  Chloe frowned. “You loved her?”

  Raffa stopped moving his hips, standing still, holding Chloe to him. “I thought we just discussed this.”