The Sheikh's Prize

by Lynne Graham

  Zahir wasn’t giving her a choice and he wasn’t about to conveniently drop the subject for the sake of peace either, she recognised wretchedly. He wanted to know; he was determined to know and he had a will of iron that would chip away at her obstinacy day after day. He wouldn’t let it go and the distance that would create between them would provide fertile ground in which suspicion might well fester. Would he then start to doubt that he was truly her baby’s father? Would he wonder if he had really been her only lover?

  Stinging tears stung Saffy’s eyes and trickled down her cheeks in the darkness. He was always so honest; he never seemed afraid of anything, never seemed to worry about how other people saw him. Why couldn’t she be the same? Why couldn’t she just spill it all out and stop worrying about how it might damage his view of her? But Saffy couldn’t find an answer to the never-tell-anyone barrier that existed inside her mind. The therapist had had a lot of trouble getting her to talk and finally she had had hypnotherapy to overcome what she was too afraid and ashamed to remember, and only then, in possession of full knowledge, had she found it possible to move forward…

  CHAPTER TEN

  BREAKFAST FOR SAFFY and Zahir the following morning was an almost silent affair. Zahir, being Zahir of course, was scrupulously polite and yet in every glance, every intonation Saffy imagined she heard condemnation, suspicion, doubt that she could be trusted as he believed he should be able to trust his wife. Nausea stirred in her stomach as she contemplated the piece of toast clasped between her fingers and with a stifled apology she fled for the nearest bathroom to lose what little she had eaten.

  Afterwards, weak and with hot, perspiring skin she lay down on the bed, relishing the restorative coolness of the air conditioning wafting over her.

  Zahir strode through the bedroom door, stunning dark golden eyes intent on the picture she presented. ‘With all the flowers surrounding you here you look like the Sleeping Beauty…’

  Saffy parted pink lips. ‘But this doesn’t feel like a fairy tale,’ she whispered apologetically because if there had ever been a romantic male, it was Zahir. And how on earth could a romantic male ever come to terms with something as ugly as her biggest secret?

  ‘I’ve phoned Hayat’s obstetrician.’

  ‘Why the heck did you do that?’

  ‘You’re sick. You need medical attention,’ Zahir informed her with a stubborn angle to his jaw line.

  ‘Being sick in early pregnancy is very common and not something to make a fuss about,’ Saffy countered steadily.

  ‘I shouldn’t have tired you out last night,’ Zahir responded tight-mouthed, his beautiful eyes shaded by his outrageously lush black lashes.

  Saffy thrust her hands down onto the mattress to lift herself up into sitting position. ‘That’s got nothing to do with this—this is only my body struggling to adapt to being newly pregnant and it’s normal.’

  ‘I will stop worrying only when the doctor tells me to do so. I’m responsible for looking after you,’ Zahir asserted, unimpressed by her argument. ‘And while I realise that you’re not feeling like it, you must make an effort to eat some breakfast to keep your strength up.’

  And the boss has spoken, Saffy tagged on in silence to that speech as Zahir stalked out of the door again. He did care that she wasn’t feeling well, she assured herself ruefully. It wasn’t love but it was concern, but for how long would she even retain that hold on him if she continued to keep her secrets? Naturally he was curious, naturally sooner or later he would need to know the truth about her past. For the first time she accepted that telling Zahir the truth was unavoidable and a bridge she would eventually have to cross.

  Zahir’s sister, Hayat, accompanied the consultant, who had tended her through her pregnancies. A well-built older man with a studious manner, he was calm and practical and exactly what Saffy needed to reinforce her belief that a little nausea was not serious cause for concern.

  ‘The baby’s father is very worried about your health,’ the doctor declared. ‘It is a challenge of civility to tell a king he must not worry unduly.’

  Hayat was waiting outside to ask Saffy to join her for tea. Dressed in a light summer dress in shades of blue, Saffy accompanied her sister-in-law to the rear of the palace complex where she and her husband and children lived. Her husband, Rahim, was a senior doctor at the city hospital and their three little girls occupied much of Hayat and Saffy’s conversation until a maid arrived to take the children out to the gardens to play.

  Tea with tiny sweet cakes was served on a shaded balcony.

  ‘My brother needs to learn to say no,’ Hayat told Saffy firmly. ‘The same day he brings you home a bride he was immediately dragged into some government squabble about security concerns and forced to abandon you. You will quickly discover that Zahir doesn’t know how to say no to the demands made on his time.’

  Saffy simply smiled, warmed by the frank tongue that Hayat appeared to share with her brother. ‘Zahir was always very conscientious. Thank you for being so welcoming, Hayat. I appreciate it.’

  ‘I know how much you and Zahir went through when you were married five years ago and our people now have a very good idea as well,’ Hayat commented, her brown eyes level and serious. ‘Zahir was wise when he chose to issue a public statement, admitting that he was remarrying the woman whom his father once forced him to divorce.’

  Saffy stiffened in surprise at that revelation. ‘I had no idea there had been any statement made about our marriage!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Or that now my brother, the king, is forced to tell lies in public to protect you?’ another louder voice interposed from the doorway behind them and both women’s heads whipped around in astonishment at the interruption.

  ‘Akram!’ Hayat snapped in a warning tone at her youngest brother before turning back to Saffy with her face flushed and her expression uneasy to say, ‘Please excuse me for a moment.’

  But Zahir’s volatile kid brother had worked up too much of a head of steam to be denied the confrontation with his brother’s wife that his temper clearly craved. He concentrated his attention on Saffy, who was already starting to rise from her chair in dismay. ‘You walked out on my brother—you deserted him after all he had endured to keep you as a wife against our father’s wishes!’ he accused with loathing. ‘Zahir was imprisoned, tortured and beaten for your benefit and then you threw your marriage away by divorcing him when he needed your loyalty most!’

  Her expression distraught, Hayat was pleading with her angry brother to keep quiet while simultaneously yanking on his arm in an unsuccessful effort to physically drag him away.

  Saffy could barely part her numb lips. She was in serious shock from Akram’s ringing condemnation of her behaviour. And what on earth was he talking about? Imprisoned, tortured, beaten? Zahir?

  ‘I will deal with this…’ and another more familiar voice intervened, cutting across the row going on between Hayat and Akram with commanding force.

  Trembling, Saffy focused on Zahir where he stood like a bronzed statue in the centre of the light, airy reception room, coldly surveying his squabbling siblings. He spoke in his own language at length to Akram and Hayat backed off, dropping her head apologetically. Whatever Zahir told his brother, Akram turned his head in consternation to stare back at Saffy with frowning disbelief. He took a half-step towards her and muttered uncomfortably, ‘I am very sorry. It seems I got everything wrong.’

  ‘Yes, Zahir divorced me,’ Saffy pointed out ruefully.

  ‘Even so, I should never have spoken to you in that way or approached you in a temper. It was not my business,’ Akram mumbled, his face very flushed, his discomfiture in Zahir’s thunderous presence pronounced. ‘Over the years it seems I reached the wrong conclusions and, as my brother has reminded me, I was never party to the true facts of what happened between you.’

  An uneasy silence fell. Zahir was still glaring angrily at his kid brother.

  ‘No harm done,’ Saffy said awkwardly, keen to dispel the tens
ion. ‘I assume that Zahir has told you what really happened and that you no longer think so badly of me. Now, if you would all excuse me…’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Zahir demanded.

  ‘Only for a walk. I’d like to be alone for a while,’ she muttered tightly.

  ‘I will accompany you,’ Zahir pronounced.

  ‘No…I only want a minute alone,’ Saffy whispered pleadingly, because she was thinking about what Akram had hurled at her and reaching the worst possible conclusions. Zahir had been punished by his father for defying him by marrying her? Why had that possibility never occurred to her before? Why had she been so wrapped up in her own misery that it had never occurred to her that Zahir might be dealing with bad things too? But, imprisoned, tortured, beaten…surely not? Was that possible? Would his father have subjected his son to such brutal intimidation? According to his reputation, King Fareed had been responsible for many atrocities. She thought of Zahir’s appallingly scarred back and a sense of cold fear of the unknown and of such cruelty infiltrated her. But if Zahir had suffered like that, why hadn’t he told her?

  When Saffy actually focused enough to recognise where her wandering feet had carried her, she realised that she was back in the old part of the palace where she had once lived. She walked down a dim corridor and cast open the door of the room that had once been theirs. It shook her that it was still furnished the same, untouched by time or alteration, and she walked in with a compulsive shiver of remembrance of the past.

  A thousand images engulfed her all at once and she reeled from memories of Zahir watching her with wary eyes, his silences, sudden absences and his refusal to answer questions. Had he been hiding stuff from her that she should have guessed? Was Akram telling the truth? She couldn’t bear that suspicion, wasn’t sure she could ever live with any discovery that painful…

  ‘I should have had this place cleared…’ Zahir murmured from behind her. ‘But I used to come here to think about you.’

  Saffy turned round, her face pale as milk, her eyes nakedly vulnerable. ‘When? After the divorce? I think you need to start talking, Zahir…and maybe I do too,’ she acknowledged unevenly.

  ‘After I married you, my brother Omar asked me if I was insane to challenge our father to that extent,’ Zahir admitted with curt reluctance. ‘But at first I genuinely had no idea what I was dealing with: Omar had protected me too much. He kept a lot of secrets. I was the younger son, the junior army officer, and I wasn’t part of the inner circle of people who knew what a monster my father had become on a diet of unfettered power.’

  ‘So, you must have regretted marrying me rather quickly,’ Saffy assumed, searching the lean strong features she loved for every passing nuance of expression and sinking down on the edge of the bed where she had often cried her heart out with loneliness.

  His handsome mouth hardened. ‘I only ever regretted the unnatural lifestyle which our marriage inflicted on you. I had no regrets on my own behalf.’

  ‘That’s a kind thing to say but it can’t be the way you really felt.’

  ‘I loved you more than life,’ Zahir breathed starkly. ‘My mistake was in rebelling against my father and bringing you back here to become the equivalent of a hostage. I should have married you and left you in London where you would be safe, but I was too selfish to do that.’

  Loved you more than life. The declaration rippled through her like an unexpected benediction, steadying her nerves. ‘I loved you too. You weren’t selfish. I wouldn’t have agreed to being left behind in London.’

  ‘But you didn’t know what you were getting into here any more than I did.’ Face grave, Zahir compressed his lips. ‘Omar had been married five years and he still had no child. Our father was impatient to see the next generation in the family born.’

  ‘That must have put a lot of pressure on Omar and Azel.’

  ‘More on Omar for the lack of fertility was his, not hers but I didn’t learn that until shortly before Omar…died.’ He spoke that last word with curious emphasis. ‘My older brother’s secret was that he had discovered he was unable to father a child and he was afraid to tell our father lest he was passed over in the succession stakes in favour of me. Omar was always the ambitious one,’ Zahir told her heavily. ‘Unfortunately for him, our father had run out of patience. He demanded that Omar either set Azel aside or take a second wife.’

  Saffy was shocked. ‘And that was the background to our marriage?’

  ‘Our father was doubly enraged when I married you without permission because my marriage to a suitable woman would have been the next step on his agenda.’

  ‘And of course I got in the way of his plans,’ Saffy completed. ‘Yet you thought he would eventually accept me.’

  ‘I was wrong,’ Zahir admitted grittily. ‘I was much more naïve than I thought I was about what our father was really like. I never dreamt he would be as vicious with his sons as he was to some of our people. How adolescent was such innocence in a grown man?’

  ‘Everybody wants to think the best of their parents,’ Saffy told him with rueful understanding. ‘I don’t blame you for getting it wrong.’

  ‘The year we were married was the year my father went over the edge. Although I was unaware of it, he had become a regular drug user and suffered from violent rages. From the first day you arrived he wanted me to divorce you…and the sensible act would have been to surrender to greater force, but I was never sensible about you.’

  Her heart was beating in what felt uncomfortably like the foot of her throat. ‘Greater force?’ she queried suspiciously. ‘If even half of what Akram suggested happened to you, I have the right to know about it. Were you imprisoned? Tortured? Beaten?’

  Zahir stared levelly back at her, not a muscle moving on his bronzed handsome face, his mouth an unsmiling line. ‘I could curse Akram, though he spoke out of ignorance. This is a conversation I never wanted to have with you…’

  Saffy was trembling. ‘You’re telling me that your father—your own father—did do that stuff to you?’ she prompted sickly. ‘That you weren’t away on army manoeuvres when you disappeared for weeks on end?’

  Zahir gave confirmation with a grudging jerk of his chin.

  And Saffy just closed her eyes, because all of a sudden she couldn’t bear to look at him when she had excelled at being such a blind, childish fool all the months they had been man and wife the first time around. He had reappeared after those apparent military trips, filthy, often visibly bruised and cut, always having lost weight…and not once had she questioned the condition he was in, not once had she suspected that he had been brutally ill-treated while he was away from her and prevented from returning from her. In her little cocoon the very fact he was a prince had made entertaining such a suspicion too incredible to even consider. She had assumed that soldiers led a rough and ready life and that such trips were organised to be as realistic and tough as real warfare. And he had never told her, never once breathed a word of what was being done to him, never once sought her sympathy or support…

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked thickly, tears thickening her throat and creating a huge lump there.

  ‘I didn’t want to upset you. There was nothing you could have done to stop it. Omar was correct. I should never have brought you to Maraban. Our father was a madman and he was out of control, incapable of accepting any form of opposition. It was all or nothing and once I defied him he was determined to break me.’

  ‘And all over me…all because you married me,’ Saffy muttered, her distress growing by the second as she looked back on her colossally ignorant and oblivious self at the age of eighteen. Little wonder he had ducked her questions, embraced silence, never knowing when he would be with her or torn from her side again.

  ‘That whole year you were the only thing that kept me going,’ Zahir informed her harshly. ‘Look at me.’

  ‘No!’ Saffy unfroze finally and flew upright. ‘I have to think about this on my own!’

  As she tried to brus
h past him he closed a hand round a slim forearm. ‘I told you I would tell no more lies or half-truths but I never wanted you to know about that period of my life!’

  ‘Oh, I know that…Mr Macho-I-suffer-in-silence!’ Saffy condemned chokily, her increasing distress clawing at her control. ‘So when you came back here to me after suffering gross mistreatment and allowed me to shout at you and complain that I was bored and lonely? Just what I need to know to feel like the biggest bitch ever created!’

  And, tears streaming down her distraught face, Saffy fled, in need of privacy. How could he do that to her? How could he not have told her? How could he have allowed her to find out all that from his resentful brother? She had known King Fareed wasn’t a pleasant or popular man, but she had had no idea that he was a drug-abusing tyrant capable of torturing his own son if he was disobedient! What an idiot she must have been not to have guessed that something so dreadful was going on! How could she ever forgive herself for that? You were the only thing that kept me going. Why was he still trying to make her feel better by saying that sort of rubbish? He’d been stuck in a virtually sexless marriage while being regularly punished for rebelling against his father’s dictates. And not once had she suspected anything. Was she stupid, utterly stupid, to have been so unseeing?

  Saffy took refuge in their new bedroom, which was comfortably removed from the suffocating memories of the older accommodation they had once occasionally shared. She was remembering the condition of Zahir’s back, thinking, although she didn’t want to, of him being whipped, beaten up, hurt and all on her behalf. Zahir with his pride and his intrinsic sense of decency! She ran to the bathroom and heaved but nothing came up and she hugged the vanity unit to stay upright, surveying her tousled reflection with stricken accusing eyes. How could you not know? How could you not see what he was going through?