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

by Clare Connelly

  He would do what was right and good, not what was right for her. Just as he’d done the right thing by Amit – raising the boy as his own when he had no obligation to do so. He’d been responsible and principled when others had failed.

  He would be like that with her, but he’d always resent her. He’d always look at her as the woman who’d failed him. Particularly if Goran plunged their country into a civil war that a wife who could conceive might have prevented!

  And what of their intimacy? What of this hunger that flared between them? Would he extinguish it easily? Satiate himself with another?

  She groaned and sank to the floor, giving in, just for a moment, to the desperation that was thick inside of her.

  There was no alternative – none. No matter how long she spent analyzing the problem, nothing would fix this. She didn’t know how long she sat there, but at some point, she stood, and dusted her clothes off.

  She had to leave. And immediately, before she did something foolish like break down and tell Raffa the truth. She had to go. For if she told him, and he asked her to stay regardless, she would. And that would be so very wrong, for both of them.

  “Aysha?” She called from the door to her room, looking for her servant. She appeared after a few moments.

  “What is it, your highness? Are you well?” Aysha asked with a slight frown.

  “I’ve just had some news about a friend. I have to leave for America – at once. Would you have a jet prepared and send word to my husband?” Her voice cracked. “I’ll only be gone a few days; I’d appreciate it if you would let him know.”

  “His highness might wish…”

  “His highness had a busy day of meetings,” she demurred. “There’s no sense bothering him over something so trivial.”

  “Very well,” Aysha bowed low. “I’ll pack a suitcase and then we’ll leave.”

  “Thank you.”

  True to her word, Aysha took care of the practicalities, and then they were off, a limousine ride to the airport, and a smooth flight to Seattle via a refueling stop in London.

  Chloe had lived in close proximity to Aysha for almost three years, and she hated knowing that she would never see the woman again, as she hated the necessity of lying to her. She told herself, again and again, This is the right thing to do, repeating the incantation inside her mind until those words were all she heard, all she could focus on.

  “I need to use the restroom,” Chloe murmured, nodding towards a toilet stall in the busy airport. “I won’t be long.” She walked away before Aysha could say something. And though her security detail was following her, Chloe had the advantage. She’d used this airport many times, and she knew that the bathrooms had two access points. She walked in, and before they entered to see which stall she chose, she slipped out the other doors.

  The airport was frantic; it was not hard to be lost in the commotion. None of it was very hard, in the end. In one day, Chloe had ended her marriage – but her heart would never be the same again.

  Raffa nodded at something the German ambassador had said, and the intrusion of Fahir was unwelcome.

  “I said I am not to be disturbed,” he said, without looking up.

  But when his eyes met Fahir’s something like apprehension began to unfurl inside of him. For his servant’s face was very pale, his expression taut.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the ambassador, standing and crossing the room. In hushed tones, he implored Fahir: “Is it my father?”

  “No, sir. His excellency’s condition is unchanged. But…”

  “What?” Raffa had a sixth sense that something was badly, badly wrong, and he needed it to be assuaged.

  “It’s Her Highness, sir.”

  Raffa’s chest caved inwards. He felt as though he’d been winded. “What is it? Is she hurt?”

  Fahir’s expression was stricken.

  “Damn it,” Raffa demanded. “Tell me at once.”

  “She is not hurt. At least, not that I know of. Sir, she’s…”

  “Yes? For God’s sake, Fahir, tell me.”

  The servant nodded. “She’s missing.”

  Raffa began to relax, to calm, just a little. “Missing? Unlikely. She is more well-guarded than a palace…”

  “No, sir. Her security detail lost sight of her, and she cannot be found.”

  Raffa’s whole world tilted. Nothing made sense. Chloe? Missing? He thought back to the note he’d received that morning, that she was going to America. There had been nothing in that to alarm him – she’d taken to disappearing each month, and he understood her reasons for needing to be alone. He accepted that she took this time to accept that they hadn’t achieved their goal. Though he’d wished, for many months now, that she would turn to him instead, that she would lean on him when she needed support, when she needed to be told that everything would be okay.

  Not for the first time, a thunderbolt of guilt slashed him.

  He’d demanded an heir from his bride, and he’d set all this in motion. He could have had no way of knowing that they wouldn’t conceive quickly. Did it upset her more than he’d realized?

  He pushed those grim thoughts from his mind. That didn’t matter now. Where was his wife?

  “Get me a phone,” he said through clenched teeth, before turning to the ambassador and excusing himself from the room. “My aid will conclude this discussion,” he said, nodding across the room and forcing himself into the corridor.

  He could hardly breathe. His body felt slack, as though the bones inside of him were insufficient against the tsunami of his raging blood.

  Where was she? America, certainly, but then what? Had she been kidnapped? Or hurt?

  Fahir returned with a cell phone and Raffa snatched at it, dialing Chloe’s number. Odd that he remembered it by heart when he’d only called it a handful of times.

  It rung out.

  Gritting his teeth, he dialed once more, and this time, she answered.

  “Chloe?” He spun around, turning his back on Fahir and prowling down the corridor to a space where he could speak privately. “Where are you?”

  Silence. Anxiety overtook the surge of relief.

  “I’ve thought a lot about this.” She sounded strange. Wooden. Yet somehow manic too. “Our marriage was a ridiculous idea.” Raffa felt as though he’d been punched, hard, in the gut, but he didn’t react. He stood like a statue, letting her words rain down on him, hard and abhorrent. “I thought there was some sense here, but there’s not. Everything’s too complicated.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  She sighed heavily and it was such a familiar sound he could instantly picture her.

  “We’re surrounded by love’s graveyard. Everywhere we look are the relics of other people’s broken hopes. Your parents, my parents, Elena, Goran. I can’t bring a child into the world knowing what kind of marriage we have, what kind of family it would be coming into. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it’s better to reach this conclusion now rather than after,” her voice cracked, “conceiving a child.”

  Raffa’s eyes filled with white, as though the sun had flared and filled him with the heat of its solar body. “You’re being absurd. We need to speak about this. Wherever you are, come back here. Come and tell me this face to face.”

  “You need a fresh start, with someone new. Someone unconnected with your family, someone … else.”

  “Chloe, I meant what I said. This is not a conversation to be had over the phone. I demand you return to the palace.” He swept his eyes shut, knowing he was saying all the wrong things. “Come back to me.” The last was a plea. A need from deep within his being.

  “No.”

  And then, fear was like ice in his veins, for he heard the strength in the word and knew she was slipping far away from him.

  “You’re my wife.”

  “No. I’m just the woman you married.”

  Raffa hated her in that moment. No, he didn’t hate Chloe, he hated the words she was saying, he hated
the way she was describing their marriage.

  “Semantics,” he said darkly. “You are my wife, and for all I know, you have my child inside of you right now. Your place is here, in Ras el Kida…”

  “I’m not pregnant.” The words were hollow, and he understood her grief then.

  “Chloe, that’s fine,” he said, gruffly, wishing he’d had the foresight to discuss this with her before that moment. “So it’s taking a while to conceive. This doesn’t matter, habibte. You do not need to run away month after month. It will happen for us – and that baby will be the heir I need.”

  Silence met his pronouncement, so he continued. “You’re upset, and I understand that. You expected we would conceive before now.” He swept his eyes shut, hating himself for being relieved when they hadn’t. Hating himself for being so selfish that he’d actually relished the prospect of another month of trying. “But it’s only been six months. Soon, Chloe, we will have success.”

  Her sob was so faint he thought he’d imagined it, but no! He knew all her sounds, all her soft, gentle noises. “What is it?” He softened his own tone, taking a step closer to the window and pressing his forehead against it. “Have you changed your mind? You don’t want a child now? You’re not ready?” She was young. Too young for the responsibilities he’d thrust on her shoulders.

  “It’s not…” her voice, God! It was tortured. He ached to pull her into his arms. Hearing her grief and knowing he couldn’t comfort her, it was his own form of agony. She seemed to shake herself, for when she spoke again, it was with more steel and resolution. “We’ll divorce swiftly; I want nothing from you except my freedom. That will leave you able to marry someone else and continue … with … begetting an heir,” she finished unevenly.

  Raffa wanted to growl, he wanted to shout until the palace shook. He wanted to shake someone, something, punch a wall, anything! How could she possibly be thinking these things? Let alone saying them? “Do you think you are so easily replaced?”

  Her sharp intake of breath was another torture. How desperate he was to hold her in his arms, to say all of the things he’d been thinking for months. To ask her the questions that had begun to fire inside of him, to stare at the stars with their timelessness and admit to the confusions that were tearing him apart.

  “I think,” she said unevenly, “that you will replace me soon enough.”

  Her words were like a whip lashing at the base of his spine. He blinked his eyes open, focusing on the vista below, but saw nothing of the day’s warmth.

  “None of this makes sense.”

  Except it did, didn’t it?

  He’d known it was coming; he’d sensed he’d ruined everything beyond repair, and he hadn’t known how to fix that. He’d controlled every aspect of what they were, and now, she was responding in the only way she could.

  She’d run away from him.

  She’d run away and she wasn’t coming back.

  Emptiness spread before him like a receding wave. “Chloe,” he said with all the desperation that was drowning his being. “Listen to me.”

  “No.” The word was stern, growing in strength, but he heard her vulnerabilities. He understood. “It’s enough. It’s done.”

  “How can it be?”

  “Goodbye, Raffa.” She whispered, disconnecting the call.

  There was silence on the other end. He wrapped his fingers around the phone and he pitched it at the wall opposite. It crashed to the ground, shards of black on the ancient tiles.

  His eyes lifted to Fahir’s and his servant had the sense to look concerned. “Find her,” Raffa said, the words choked from deep within him. “Find her at all costs.”

  But Chloe, it seemed, was determined not to be found.

  At first, he thought she would change her mind; at least that she would make contact with him in some way, and if not him, Malik or Amit. He brooded for days, he went to her room and stared at her empty bed, he rode out across the desert to the ruins of Shakam al abut, and remembered the way she’d looked with wonderment at everything there. He fingered the objects she’d touched, as though in doing so he might be able to tether himself to a fragment of her in the present, rather than the ghost of her past. He held the jewels she’d marveled at, he ran his fingers over the ancient walls, he stared across the desert and wondered how things might have been different if Goran hadn’t come to the palace.

  If Raffa hadn’t fallen on his wife the second they’d gone to the tent and been alone. Yet again, he’d behaved like an animal, ripping her dress, desperate to be with her. Desperate to have her.

  He’d planned to make their time in the desert different. To forge a connection with her beyond the physical, and instead, he’d reduced what they were to sex – yet again.

  And yet, now that she was gone, it wasn’t her body he was missing. Oh, he was, but more than that, he was missing her. Her smile, her eyes, her laugh, the way she stood up to him even when he was being a monumental bastard. He missed her. He missed knowing she was in the palace and he missed knowing he would see her every evening. He missed sharing dinners with her and the way she’d tilt her head to the side when she had a question.

  He missed the way she cared for his father and Amit.

  He missed her. Every damned thing about her.

  Out in the desert, he roared like the animal he had morphed into around his wife. He pummeled his fists into the side of the ancient ruins they’d explored together until his fists were scraped and bleeding.

  He rode harder and faster than any man should.

  And it didn’t bring her back; it didn’t help.

  Nothing did.

  Where was she?

  And more importantly: was she okay?

  Chloe lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. Weak morning sunshine pushed into the room, creating a kaleidoscope of pink and yellows across her ceiling. She watched the patterns made by the shuffling of clouds, and wondered when she would start to think of American sun light as normal? When she would remember that these were the skies under which she’d been raised, this was the sun she’d grown up warming herself beneath. When would she stop thinking of Ras el Kida with a sense of longing that defied explanation?

  When would she be herself again?

  She tossed onto her side, squeezing her eyes shut, the now-familiar warmth behind them ebbing out of the corners.

  She’d cried often since leaving Raffa.

  She was mourning so much. Not just their marriage, but the hopes she’d cherished that they would become so much more. That one day he might feel for her as she did for him. That even if he didn’t, their child would be loved by both of them, that their child would be loved. And in making that wish, she knew how vitally important it had been to right the wrongs of her own past: to somehow magically reach through time and correct the neglect of her childhood by ensuring her children were always adored.

  There were to be no children.

  A sob escaped her, a sound that months ago she wouldn’t have been able to imagine she could make – crying wasn’t for Chloe. Now, Chloe cried often. Something inside her had snapped; she was broken. Nothing had done that to her before. Not losing her mother, not the neglect nor coldness of her father, not the distance from her half-brother, not her father’s death. Nothing.

  But now, it was as if everything had tumbled together and Chloe carried an ache low in her gut all the time.

  Three months. It had been three months since she’d left Ras el Kida and the days were passing as if weighted down by stone. Seconds seemed to take hours, and all the while, Chloe was on the periphery of existence. Cognizant of little, caring for even less.

  She’d sublet an apartment in Chicago, paying cash to her landlord to keep her name off a lease. It was childish to have hidden from Raffa instead of telling him the truth – but if she’d told him the truth, she knew he would have insisted on staying with her. On honouring their marriage, on doing the right thing. Because he was an honourable man, and she was his wife, as he’d sai
d over and over again.

  But Chloe didn’t want to be his burden, she wanted to be his everything – and now she was nothing to him.

  She groaned, rolling onto her back once more. The divorce papers had been sent a month ago. He should have signed them by now – any day and she’d receive notice from the lawyers she’d engaged. Any day now and she’d know it was officially done. And then, he would no doubt marry quickly.

  Vile, disgusting anger tore through her, a primal, possessive revulsion at the idea of Raffa making love to another woman. A surge of visceral disgust that he might ever possess someone else.

  Is this what his mother felt like, when she learned of his affair? Did she love Malik in the same way Chloe loved Raffa? She must have done, for Malik’s affair to have driven her away – even from her own son.

  And as a testament to how mixed up Chloe was about her decisions, guilt flashed low in her abdomen. Guilt at having abandoned Raffa without explaining why. His mother had abandoned him, Elena had run away from him, and now Chloe had done the exact same thing.

  She didn’t want to hurt him. Did he understand that? Did he understand that she’d made the only decision she could that would protect him and his kingdom?

  Did he know she’d left him even when it made her feel as though she’d been cleaved in two?

  She sobbed and dashed at her tears, pushing up to a sitting position with a hoarse cry.

  This was useless.

  She couldn’t just spend her life in bed feeling sorry for herself. Or could she?

  She slid her feet out of bed and padded, barefoot, towards the kitchen. The fridge was bare – a predictable occurrence given that she rarely remembered to go to the grocery store. She had a few apples, dropped off by a neighbor with a tree in her garden. Chloe lifted one and bit into it, tasting its sweetness without feeling any gratitude. It was simply muscle memory that led her to eat. Coffee, though, was essential. She slid a pod into the machine and stared out of the window, waiting for her drink to percolate through. Once it was done, she carried the apple and her coffee to the lounge area and flicked on the television out of habit.