The Sheikh's Contract Bride: Theirs was an ancient debt, and the time had come to settle it... (The Sheikhs' Brides Book 1)

by Clare Connelly

  She arched her head back and he kissed the column of her neck hungrily, grazing his teeth against her soft flesh, tasting her sweetness before moving to her mouth and driving his tongue into her with the same passion as his body moved.

  Her orgasm was fierce and sudden. She screamed into the empty hallways and he chased after her, his body always ready to respond to her command. They held each other, coated in satisfaction and a fine sheen of perspiration, until their breathing seemed almost normal.

  “You are under my skin,” he said with a shake of his head. “I cannot control this.”

  Pleasure. Total pleasure. How many statements like that would it be before the dreams began to fade? “Do you want to?”

  He nodded, his expression unreadable. “I need to.”

  “But this is so much fun,” she purred.

  His laugh was uncomfortable. “It is definitely fun,” he agreed, slowly easing her back to the ground. The separation made her ache for him all over again. She turned away so that she could straighten her knickers and skirt – it was strange, she supposed, to be self-conscious about such things, given what they’d shared.

  “Why did you remain a virgin?”

  She stilled, her eyes blinking shut.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” he spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “Why have you not slept with anyone? You are twenty three and by far the most beautiful woman I have ever known.” More pleasure. It soaked through her, pushing Anna way back in her mind.

  “I’ve been a little too busy,” she murmured. “Studying, then working, raising Lilly.”

  “Yes, but apart from Lilly, most women do these things and still date.”

  She swallowed. “I’m not most women.”

  “Obviously. And yet, you are a very sexual person. How did you fight this part of your nature?”

  She stared at him, aghast. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  He arched a brow, wordlessly encouraging her to continue. “To me, it isn’t.”

  “Well, Zahir, my husband, until I met you, I had no idea I was sexual. I truly had no interest in it. I mean none. Until our wedding day, I’d never even kissed a man.”

  He stared at her, his expression one of abject shock. “Not at all?”

  “Well, I’d kissed Efani on the cheek,” she teased, slightly amused by his confusion.

  “I meant romantically.”

  “Okay, that doesn’t count then.” She made a show of straightening her dress once more and then looked up at him. “Is it so strange?”

  He laughed coarsely. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Even in Kalastan, a very conservative country, women are not so … prudish.”

  “Prudish?” She snapped, her cheeks colouring. “I thought we just agreed I am sexual.”

  “Yes, but only in the last week. Before that, you were …”

  “Busy,” she snapped.

  “Okay, okay.” He lifted his hands in silent surrender, but didn’t pull away. “Let me just say how honoured I am that I have been your first everything. Your first kiss. Your first lover.”

  My first love, she added silently, remembering how certain she’d been that he was her other half. What a childish notion!

  “Yeah, well.” She cleared her throat. “Weren’t we going somewhere?”

  He nodded. “This way.” He began to walk, but the pleasant companionable air seemed to have turned sour.

  No, not sour, he thought carefully, seeking a better word. It was tense. As though it could be carved with a sabre. His questions had upset her; it hadn’t been his intention. He just couldn’t fathom how she’d repressed her natural interest in her body and its desires.

  They were almost at their destination. Gradually the tiles gave way to golden slabs that were pressed into the walls, and the corridor opened out into a room. It was large and quite obviously special. He knew it would be overawing. The first time he had come here he’d been twelve and he had thought himself to be dreaming or dead.

  “What is this place?” She stammered, her mauve eyes drifting from the golden walls to the shelves and shelves of books, the artefacts that were stored behind glass, the boxes that held relics and collectables that were beyond compare – items that were too rare to be given a financial value.

  “It is our vault,” he said quietly. “Since the Ottoman incursion of the early fifteenth century, successive Sheikhs have stored the rarest historical artefacts here, beneath the palace.”

  She drew in a shaky gasp of breath and lifted her eyes to face him. “I don’t understand. You mean when they’re not in a museum?”

  His smile was a faint smudge on his handsome face. “Many of these are too fragile to be transported.”

  “Are they archived? Recorded?” She swallowed. “Documented?”

  “No. Not properly. There are records, but they make little sense to the untrained eye.” He pinned her with a thoughtful gaze. “Of course, it should be done, but finding someone we could trust with such a monumental wealth of treasure who possessed the right skill set is difficult to imagine.”

  “Oh, I see.” She punched his upper-arm playfully. “So perhaps you had an ulterior motive in pursuing me for marriage?”

  “Definitely,” he murmured. “The sex is just a silver lining.”

  She swallowed, pretending fascination with a coffee pot on a nearby table.

  Why did it bother her that his strongest characterisation of their relationship boiled down to sex? It was a perfectly reasonable way to feel. How could they be anything else?

  “My experience is primarily with documents,” she said quietly, drawn to a collection of crude dolls. They were small; no larger than her palm, carved from wood with paint that had long ago begun to fade. “Books, letters, records. That kind of thing.”

  She lifted one, running her finger over its smooth edges, smiling at the ornament.

  “They belonged to a Princess in the early fifteen hundreds.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I made it my business to know,” he said with a shrug. “I had thought that if our baby was a girl, I would give one to her. To keep in a safe place, of course. Not to be played with nor gnawed.”

  Our baby. Every hair on the back of Violet’s neck stood on end as images of having a baby with Zahir flooded her mind, heart and soul, and she felt her happiness soar. Only reality was there, waiting to crash back down to earth.

  He meant his baby with Anna.

  The emptiness both crushed her and revived her. It was not a time for her to indulge foolish, maudlin resentments. This was his loss; his alone. She had no part in it.

  “It must have been impossible for you,” she said softly, placing the doll back in its nest of dust.

  He didn’t answer. There was no need. She turned slowly. A chasm seemed to open before them. The grief on his face was profound; the sense of loss impossible to miss.

  “I know I’ve said how sorry I am,” she whispered, “But I don’t know what else to say. I wish you’d never gone through that.”

  He seemed to come back to her from a long way away, as though blinking past the cobwebs of time. “Thank you.”

  His shoulders were straight; his body tense. She looked at him, her mind swimming. How could she comfort him past this? There was no way.

  * * *

  “You are lost in thought, Violet.”

  She blinked and lifted her gaze to Adin’s face. “I’m sorry.” She scanned the board and moved her knight forward, knowing full well it was an ill-conceived manoeuvre and not able to care.

  “You are distracted today.”

  Four weeks after her wedding and chess with Adin had become something of a regular affair. Most afternoons she found herself in his room, labouring over which piece to move where. It was a bittersweet occasion, for it reminded her sharply of similar times spent with her own grandfather.

  “I met your sister this morning.”

  Violet startled. “You did?”
/>
  “Mmm.” A grumbling sound that came out almost as a cough. “She came to plead her case to me.”

  A smile tickled Violet’s lips, but deep down, she was far from amused. The argument they’d had the day before had been their worst yet, culminating in Violet removing Lilly’s mobile phone and instructing her servants she wasn’t to access the internet. Though she’d been loathe to take it so far, discovering more unsuitable photographs on her phone and emails back and forth with Simon had made her feel that surely she had no choice?

  “Her case?”

  “Oh, yes. Very –,” he broke off to cough and she waited, her eyes settled on the board, calculating their next options. “Very eloquent,” he said, reaching for his water and drinking it sparingly. “She complained most skilfully on her plight and begged me to prevail upon you to see reason.” He coughed once more. “Apparently you have restricted her communication with anyone but her servants.”

  Violet nodded. “I have blocked her from using the internet.” Her cheeks flushed as she began to feel an unflattering kinship with a tyrannical dictator. “It wasn’t a decision I took lightly.”

  “And she tells me she would like to petition to be removed from your guardianship.”

  Violet shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry you were bothered by her.”

  “On the contrary, I found it all very entertaining. Apparently she is under the impression that it is I who wields the power in Kalastan and not your husband.”

  “Don’t tell her that or she’ll run straight to Zahir,” Violet moaned, only half-joking.

  Adin slid his King into a safe-hold and Violet read several moves ahead, to where he would check mate her if she didn’t immediately subvert him.

  “What is it?” He fell back against his pillows, his intelligent eyes locking to her face.

  Violet lifted her fingers to a pawn and then dropped them again, mirroring his image but leaning backwards in her chair. “Oh, Adin.” She had long ago been ordered not to call him Sir or Your Highness. “She is going to be the death of me.”

  “She is very like Efani,” Adin murmured. “Just as pig-headed and arrogant.”

  Surprise shot Violet’s brows skyward. “I thought you two were the best of friends.”

  Adin’s laugh was punctured by air. “I would have forfeited my life for his in an instant, true. But he was a son of a bitch to argue with. Always had to have it his way. Only ever gave in to Sophie. And you, I believe. He would swear to me that the sky was red if he believed it.” Adin shook his head. “She is just the same.”

  “Yes,” Violet went to move a piece but Adin put his hand on the chess board.

  “Leave it. Your head is not here. I do not want my first victory to be a hollow one because you are distracted.”

  Violet wrinkled her nose. “Our score board doesn’t reflet the tenor of our games.”

  “You are very kind,” Adin murmured. “Why does your sister trouble you?”

  Violet expelled a deep breath. “She’s a teenager,” she said finally. “She hates the world and everyone in it. Me, most of all, because I am calling the shots in her life and she hates that. Well, I hate it too. I would love to just be her sister! I would love to just enjoy her successes and sympathise with her losses but she makes that impossible. There is no middle ground with her. She believes she is an adult and yet she makes the worst possible decisions.”

  “What did you feel at her age,” he prompted gently.

  “I felt how I should have felt,” Violet was quick to respond. “I felt appropriately grateful and respectful. I was circumspect and thoughtful. I didn’t…” she cut herself off, just in time, before revealing the true disgrace of Lilly’s actions.

  “But everyone is different. Look at Syed and Zahir. One so bound by duty that I think he forgets to live. The other a little too fond of living and life to remember duty. From the same man and woman they were created, yet they have little in common.”

  She thought of Syed, who she had got to know a little over the intervening month. “They both seem to fall on a spectrum of sensible, though. Lilly is a whole new planet. She just doesn’t understand that there are other people in the world besides her.”

  Adin was about to say something when the door pushed inwards and they turned to it as one.

  Zahir swept in and stopped in the middle of the carpet at the sight of his father and wife in the middle of a chess game. Confusion furrowed his brow.

  Adin’s laugh punctuated the silence. “Ah. Well. I suppose our secret is out,” he murmured with an exaggerated wink at Violet. “It could not last forever, azeezi.”

  “So,” Zahir drawled, crossing the room and putting a hand on Violet’s shoulder. “This is where you sneak off to in the evenings.”

  Her cheeks pink, she mumbled, “I hardly sneak.”

  “What is it, Zahir?” Adin swapped to their native tongue and Violet stood, preparing to excuse herself.

  “A moment,” he murmured, turning back to his father. “It can wait. I shall call tomorrow morning. Does that suit?”

  “Any time, Zahir.” His eyes seemed to have regained more than a hint of their spark as they lifted to Violet. “Your wife was an excellent choice, was she not?”

  Beside Zahir, Violet stiffened. He felt it and hated it.

  “Good night, Adin.”

  Violet moved away from her husband and reached for the chess board. But Adin shook his head. “Leave it. I want to study it. How is it you keep doing this to me?”

  She stared down at the board and saw the perfect trap that was in waiting for him. “A turn ago and you were three moves away from check mate.”

  “You were never going to allow that to come to pass, were you, dear?”

  She bit down on her lip and shook her head.

  He smiled at her, one eye watery. “He taught you well.”

  “A fact he came to regret.”

  Zahir put a hand in the small of her back and guided her from the room. It was only once on the other side, back in the corridor, that she realised he was barely concealing a dark, strong emotion.

  “What is it?” She stopped walking, then slapped a palm to her forehead. “Don’t tell me Lilly came to you too?”

  “Lilly?” He stared at her, obviously at a loss.

  “Never mind,” she rushed with relief, moving her hand to her temple and rubbing at her aching head. “Is everything okay?”

  “I cannot say. Come.” He moved ahead of her, walking quickly so that she had to almost jog to keep up. At the wide doors to his suite, he slowed finally, pausing to allow her to enter ahead of him.

  Once in the sanctuary of his wing, which she was beginning to think of almost equally as hers, he turned to face her.

  “I will not be lied to.”

  Violet stared at him, her mind swirling. For the life of her she could think of only one lie she’d ever told him, and it was one she had no intention of owning. That she loved him fiercely was a secret that would go to the grave with her. Only Zahir didn’t seem to have any intention of letting the matter rest.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Is there something you wish to tell me?”

  Violet frowned, and shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Give me an idea.”

  “We were married over a month ago.”

  She nodded, a smile curving one side of her mouth. “I remember.”

  “Do you also remember it was the first night we made love?”

  Made love. Her heart swelled.

  “Of course.”

  “And we have made love every night since.”

  Her cheeks flushed, but she nodded.

  “Something that should not have been possible.”

  A frown pulled at her pink lips. When it came to what should and shouldn’t have been possible, she had no clue. “I don’t really have a comparison,” she said quietly. “If you’re looking for praise on your virility…”

  “No.” He slashed his hand through the air. “Somewh
ere in the month I would have expected you to be unavailable to me. You are a woman. The only explanation for how frequently we have slept together is that you are pregnant.”

  The world was dropping. Falling completely out of the atmosphere; losing its galactic integrity. She stared at him, but her feet were carrying her backwards, seeking reassurance. She halted at a chair and sank into it, then lifted her gaze to his face.

  “I’m not pregnant.”

  Only, how could she not be?

  She’d been so busy since they’d arrived in Kalastan that she hadn’t paid any attention to her diary. The meticulous note she kept of her cycle had been completely ignored.

  “Then is this normal for you?” He prompted, staring at her as though she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Worse, strangling a five year old.

  Numb, she shook her head. “I guess not.”

  “Jesus, Violet. You seem to be an intelligent woman. How the hell has this passed you by?”

  The vehemence of his anger made her shake. She hadn’t thought him capable of such rage!

  She snapped her eyes away from his and stood, pacing towards the bathroom, then back to one of the windows. “I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t think of it.” She turned to face him. “I went on birth control the day after we were married, and we’ve been so careful. You’ve used protection almost every time.”

  “Not the first time,” he muttered grimly, reaching into the folds of his robe. He pulled out a paper bag and handed it to her. “Take this.”

  “What is it?” She opened it slowly, removing the generic boxing of a pregnancy test.

  “The royal physician will have to see you to confirm, of course, but let’s just get an idea of what we’re dealing with.”

  “I’m not pregnant,” she said, with absolutely no sense of relief. After all, did she really believe that?