Bound to the Sheikh: An ancient debt. A deathbed promise. A marriage of duty and obligation. Desire too strong to control.

by Clare Connelly

  Laurie was weary. She stared up at his face, unable to fight him. She pressed her lips together, and then sighed softly. “Where then?”

  Her resignation was worst of all! Where had his wife gone? The woman who burned in his arms? He didn’t recognise this silent, deferent creature. He kept a grip on her arm as he walked through the plane, to one of the elegant bedrooms at the back. It was more luxuriously appointed than a room in a five-star hotel, with a king size bed in the centre, gold side-tables and a warm glow.

  But Laurie was instantly ill-at-ease. She wrenched free of his hand, and moved shakily to the other side of the bedroom. She stopped just before the side of the plane curved down, and turned to stare out one of the windows.

  “Why did you leave the palace?”

  Her breathing was ragged. This was it. The moment of truth. Hadn’t she known, from the moment of accepting his proposal, that this wasn’t a marriage for keeps? It had always been destined to end.

  And now it would.

  But how could she leave him? How would she cope?

  How could she stay?

  A lovely little baby would be at the palace in a matter of months.

  Laurie’s heart ached.

  “I have to leave,” she said firmly, her tone only slightly uneven.

  “Leave to go where?” He was careful. Cautious. He didn’t want to misunderstand her. Nor did he want to increase her angst.

  “Good evening, your royal highnesses. We are now prepared for lift off.” The short disembodied announcement reached them through the cabin’s PA system.

  “Sit,” Afida murmured, pointing to the bed.

  Laurie glared at him as if he’d gone temporarily insane. What choice did he have? Afida crossed the room swiftly and lifted his wife, placing her gently on the end of the bed.

  “It is for your comfort and safety.”

  She ran her hands over her arms, erasing his touch. It didn’t work. Her skin still tingled.

  “Why did you leave?” He murmured, sitting beside her, so close she could feel his breath fanning against her forehead. He smelled so good. Her heart clenched.

  Laurie’s head was swimming. The jet began to accelerate, crossing the runway with power and speed. “I was running this morning,” she said, back in the memory of the moment.

  “Yes, as you do most mornings.”

  She was surprised by this – his knowledge of her movements – but she didn’t wish to be derailed.

  “I ran further than I have before.”

  Afida was watching her. Something deeply disturbing was troubling his wife. “It was very hot this morning.” He had been almost unbearably warm in May’s apartment.

  “Yes.” She swallowed. The plane lifted into the air with a slight judder. They were going to Aktaria. She had left, and yet she had been too weak to stay away.

  “What is it, zivzel?”

  “Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “I hate it.”

  “Why?” He was dismayed by the strength of her outburst.

  “Because! It is rude! I know I’m a disturbance in your life. I don’t need you to keep telling me that.”

  He was very still but his mind was turning. “You were speaking of your run.”

  She stared straight ahead, her face pale beneath his gaze. “I ran to the borders of the back garden.”

  A trickle of suspicion surged through him. Fear, like a shard of broken glass from a mirror, punctured his mind. “Go on.”

  “Those houses have always fascinated me. They’re very beautiful. I didn’t set out to go to them. Not consciously.” Her eyes were swarming with grief. “Or maybe I was meant to go there today. To hear what I did.”

  His gut was squeezing painfully. “What exactly did you hear?”

  She fidgeted her fingers in her lap. “I know about the baby. May’s baby. I heard you.”

  He swore softly under his breath and stood, pacing across the room in deep thought. “I came to find you tonight, to tell you myself. I did not want you to learn of it this way.”

  “It? That’s a child you’re referring to.”

  He winced. “It is an inconvenience.”

  “Afida!” Laurie was shocked by his callousness. “How can you speak like that?”

  “It is true. It is something that will forever bind us to May. I do not wish it.”

  Laurie swallowed and said the words she’d been thinking all day. “There is no us. Not now. Surely you see I can’t stay married to you with this baby in the picture?”

  He was very, very still. The closest thing to panic he’d ever felt was icing his veins. “I do not see that at all.”

  Laurie’s laugh was a harsh sound of sadness. “May is your lover. Your mistress. Your consort. I told you once before, I won’t share you.”

  “It is over between us.”

  “But this baby will keep her in your life. She will always be there. Don’t you see that? She will always be a part of your life – our lives, if I were to stay. I couldn’t bear it.”

  “The baby is nothing to me. Nor is May. I will gladly vow to see neither of them again, if this is what you want.”

  “No! How can you speak like that? This woman loves you! And this baby will be your heir. I know you could never disavow the child. And I wouldn’t ask you to. But please don’t ask me to stay.”

  The confusion was followed swiftly by relief. Afida’s smile was discordantly bright given the fog of grief Laurie was trapped in. “Laurie,” he came to crouch before her, his body powerful and broad, effectively blocking anything else from her line of sight. “May’s baby is not mine.”

  Laurie couldn’t be sure she’d heard him properly. She opened her mouth to speak but no words came out.

  “I can assure you Laurie, the child is not mine. May and I have not been together for a very long time. Certainly not since you and I have been married.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said finally. She didn’t. Did she?

  “I ended it with her the same day I first kissed you. The day we were at the pool and I saw your beautiful breasts and touched your body.” His eyes had a faraway look in them. “I was so angry with you then. I despised what I believed you had done to your father – how you had ignored him so spectacularly.” His derision was completely self-focussed. “And yet I came to your room after dinner, and you were asleep. You had a book beside you, an Aktarian history book, and I knew then that I couldn’t marry you if I was still involved with May. I ended it that night.” His smile was shaped by memory. “I cannot say what it is about you, only I have felt for a very long time that you are someone infinitely more special and unique than I could ever have deserved.”

  The words were filling in some gaps in her heart, but they were not enough. She shook her head sadly. She wouldn’t be derailed. His mistress was pregnant. That was all that Laurie wanted to speak about. “But still she lives on the grounds of the palace. She is pregnant.”

  He ran a hand across his jaw, his expression grim. “I was careless with May. I did not protect her as I ought to have done. I allowed our relationship to become public knowledge, and then discarded her swiftly, when she no longer suited me.” His eyes linked with Laurie’s; he was pained by the admittance, she could tell. “May was convenient, but she was not special to me. I did not feel for her anything other than desire.”

  Laurie’s stomach lurched painfully. Jealousy was sharp in her gut.

  “When it was no longer convenient for me, I found it surprisingly easy to sever ties with her. I ended it without a backwards glance.”

  “You had me, then, to fulfil the role she had,” Laurie surmised tartly.

  He put a hand on her knee but she flinched her legs away. It was too raw. Everything was too raw.

  His sigh was thick with impatience. “I ended it with her, but I knew I could not ask her to leave the palace immediately. She would have become a figure of derision, scorned for her lack of morality and for the way I’d passed her over. She has no family. No fortune.
I did not wish her to be more hurt than she needed to be by our marriage.”

  Laurie was jealous as hell of the other woman, and yet his words – strangely – made her love him all the more.

  “I had planned to leave her living in the palace grounds, until a suitable time had passed and I could then remove her to a different home. A home of her own, far away from us. By then, I reasoned, our affair would have been long forgotten.”

  “You speak as though she had no say in the matter.”

  “Her say was only a firm wish for me to take her back,” he said sharply, and then softened his statement with an apologetic grimace. “She did not see why our marriage meant my relationship with her had to end. Especially given my new wife’s apparent approval of my mistress’s place in my life.”

  Laurie closed her eyes on a wave of pain. “She was very upset at our wedding.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did she come?”

  “Perhaps to speak to you. Certainly to see you. She was very curious about the woman I had married.”

  “As I was about the woman you had loved for so long.”

  “I did not love May, I have told you this. I used her. Badly, as it turns out.”

  Laurie refused to be pleased by his admission. This other woman had deserved better and it was right that her husband should feel that.

  “And yet, she’s pregnant.”

  “Yes. It turns out, May did not love me either.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Laurie said again, her eyes enormous in her face. “I saw her. She was heart-broken.”

  “Perhaps. But it did not take her long to fall in love with another, more available man.”

  “And you expect me to believe the baby’s his, and not yours?”

  Her scepticism was understandable, but Afida knew how to dispel it. “Believe me, zivzel, there are many things I would prefer to tell you than this. All day I have agonised over how to break this unpalatable news to you.”

  “What unpalatable news?” She demanded impatiently. “Just tell me, for goodness sake.”

  His smile was lopsided. He laced his fingers through hers and now she took solace from the gesture. He was warm. She was cold. “Apparently May and your father have decided they are in love and cannot live without one another.”

  “What?” She stared at him in abject confusion.

  “David and May. They’re in a relationship.”

  “Are you trying to tell me the baby is my father’s?”

  “Yes.” His lips were a slash in his face. “I am as furious as you might imagine. How they could be so inconsiderate of you is impossible to comprehend.”

  “My father and your mistress are having a baby together.” She said, her mind reeling. “Your lover is going to raise my half-brother or sister.” She sucked in a juddering breath. “Our child’s cousin will be its uncle or aunt as well.” She squeezed her eyes shut and so didn’t see the look of wonder on Afida’s face.

  “You just said ‘our child’. Do you mean … are you?”

  “No!” She denied hotly, her cheeks flushing at the very idea. “I meant hypothetically.”

  “May is not my mistress or lover. You must see her as an irrelevant piece of my history. Someone who I spent time with, who meant nothing to me.”

  “Someone I heard you swear you would not give up for me,” she reminded him swiftly.

  “I was angry. I wanted to hate you. I believed you had been cold and cruel to your father. I didn’t know you then. And I certainly wasn’t prepared to change my life for you.”

  Her heart was heavy.

  “You say you hate that I refer to you as zivzel?” He murmured, running his hands through her hair.

  “Yes.”

  “But you misunderstand it’s meaning.” He promised throatily. “It does mean disturbance, that’s true. But it also means earthquake.”

  “Earthquake? Gee, thanks.”

  He laughed again, a soft husk. “It’s hard to translate, but you are good with languages; you will know many words like this. I thought I knew what I was getting when I suggested this arrangement. I presumed we would marry and that a debt my father had felt towards yours for decades would finally be redressed. But you arrived and everything I took for granted began to tremble beneath my feet.” He pressed a finger to her chin, lifting her face to his. “You changed the parameters of my being. You redefined my existence just with your presence. Everything I had thought sufficient before you was now inadequate. Most of all, me.”

  Laurie’s heart was thumping hard in her chest. She stared at him in confusion. “But you don’t … I don’t … what are you saying?”

  His smile was slightly self-mocking. “How do you not see it, Laurie? I am in love with you.”

  His words shook around the cabin, flying from him to her, wrapping her in warmth and marvellous, giddy happiness. Only maybe she’d misheard? Perhaps she’d dreamed the words from out of nowhere?

  “You’re … you aren’t. You can’t be.”

  His expression was serious. “It took me a long time to fully understand how I felt, Laurie. Only this morning, when May told me of her duplicity, did I finally understand. My desire to protect you terrified me. My need to comfort you and fix this. There is only one explanation. I have done something stupid and fallen in love with my wife.”

  Laurie stood, her legs restless, her stomach in knots. Could she believe him? This was everything she had, for a long time, wanted to hear. And yet it was too good to be true.

  “I have no reason to hope you will ever forgive me, Laurie. I thought the worst of you, only to repeatedly have my opinions blown far out of the water. But still I thought them. Still I accused you of acts I am ashamed to have put at your feet now. How could I believe someone like you would not care for her father? That you would work as an escort?”

  “I did work as an escort,” she pointed out quietly.

  “You were a translator to foreign businessmen, and if I’d done any kind of due diligence instead of simply accepting the worst then I would have known this.”

  “Yes,” she said with a small nod. She focussed her gaze on a vase of spiky orange flowers.

  “I am not asking you to forgive me.” He was right behind her. “Only to be patient. To give our marriage more time.”

  Laurie spun around, her eyes scanning his face. “Our marriage has served its purpose.”

  “It’s original purpose, perhaps. But now? I care only for you. What do you need from me, Laurie? What can I give you to make you happier?”

  Laurie shook her head. “It’s not like that.” She lifted the sheer scarf from her hair and placed it carefully on the table.

  “I love you.” He lifted his hands and cupped her cheeks, holding her face level. “I love you. I have never said these words to another person. No one. Not my parents, not anyone. And yet I would shout them to the world for you. I love you. I think of you all day. When we are not together it is as if I am starving. When I see you, I want to smile the whole time, like some kind of crazed idiot. I dream of you and I hold you tight all night because I love you.” He kissed her lips gently. “I care not for your father. His life is his business. Your life is mine. You are my wife. You are what I care about.”

  Laurie had tears in her eyes. She stared at him with confusion. “It’s too much.” She blinked away the moisture. “I can’t think straight.”

  “I am torn, sweet Laurie, between asking you why you need to think, and giving you the time to do just that. Tell me what I should do. Tell me how I can stop you from running away again? How can I stop you from going to Elon when you are upset? How can I make sure you always come to me with any troubles in your life? How can I earn your love?”

  Her smile was loaded with happiness but still she hesitated. “Love isn’t like that. There’s no recipe for it.”

  The unpalatable thought that had been fraying at his mind since before the wedding finally found voice. “Do you love Elon?”

  “Elon?” Sh
e burst out laughing. “No.”

  “This is not amusing to me.”

  “I’m sorry.” She sobered. “Elon is your friend. He has been very helpful to me, and I have come to value his counsel, but no. I do not love him. And he doesn’t love me.”

  The rejoinder Afida was tempted to make seemed petty. For he would have bet his right to rule on Elon’s devotion to Laurena. He, Elon, had been far smarter than Afida, and had seen her worth from the beginning.

  “I am glad of this.”

  “I thought you and May were going to have a baby together, and that you would expect me to stay married to you, while she raised your child in the palace grounds.”

  A muscle jerked in his cheek. “The only woman I want to see grow round with my child is you.”

  Her heart thumped in her chest. “But what I heard …”

  “Was naturally confusing. But without foundation, Laurie.”

  She nodded. “I can’t believe my father and May are going to have a baby together. It’s like a parallel universe.” She blinked up at him thoughtfully. “I guess I’ll have to congratulate them when we get back.”

  “No.” He stroked her cheek. “They are gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “As in, banished?”

  “Nothing so melodramatic.” His smile was teasing. “But I would do so if it pleased you.”

  “No, that won’t be necessary,” she promised hurriedly. “Where did they go?”

  He shrugged as if it was of little importance. “To England. Given the timing of matters, I felt it would relieve us all of unwelcome gossip if they were not present when her pregnancy became noticeable.”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “I think you’re right. Did my father seem … happy?”

  “Yes.” He dropped his arms and linked them behind her back. “I acted as I felt was in our best interests. We can go and see him whenever you wish.”

  “No.” She blinked up at him, her face carefully neutral. “I want to stay here. For now. With you.”

  Hope flared in Afida’s broad chest. “I am pleased.” He tried not to focus on her use of the words ‘for now’.