“He’s called the Shahin, Jalia. No one’s sure whether the word is an ancient word for king or really does mean falcon, as the myth says, but the holder of that title is traditionally one of the most respected voices on the Tribal Council. Not that Ghasib ever consulted the council, but the Sultan will.”
Although Jalia hadn’t believed for a minute that the fierce-eyed sheikh was attracted to her, the mere thought of what complications would ensue if he or any Bagestani should declare himself had terrified her. She had gone home as soon as politeness allowed.
Of course she couldn’t refuse to return to Bagestan for the wedding, but this time she had come with insurance—Michael’s engagement ring on her finger. Now when she was asked whether she intended to make the Return, Jalia could dutifully murmur that she had her future husband to consider. No one could argue with that.
“Why do you say this is a wild-goose chase?”
The Cup Companion’s voice broke in on her thoughts. Jalia jolted back into the here and now and gazed at him for a moment.
“You think Noor ran of her own accord, do you?” she said at last.
“She was seen driving the car herself.”
“And if that’s so, it means she’s changed her mind about the wedding?”
“Do you doubt it?”
Jalia shrugged. That wasn’t her point. “That being the case, do you honestly imagine that, even assuming we find her, we’re just going to bring her meekly back to marry Bari?”
“Women do not always know their own minds,” Latif said with comfortable masculine arrogance.
It was the kind of thing that made her want to hit him. Jalia sat with her fists clenching in her lap.
“Is that so?”
“Your powers of persuasion may have undermined her. But she will return to her senses when she realizes what she has done. Then she will be glad to know that there is a way back.”
“Or perhaps she’s come to her senses!” Jalia countered sharply. “That’s why she ran. It’s a pity it took her so long, that’s all.”
“But of course—she did not come to her senses until she agreed with you!”
The sarcasm burned like acid.
“She was rushing into marriage with a complete stranger, which would entail a total transformation of her life, and on the basis of what? Nothing more than sex! Would you encourage someone to do what Noor was doing?”
He turned and gave her a look of such black emotion she almost quailed. “Why not?” he demanded grimly.
If Noor had simply bolted, it was going to cause hideous embarrassment all around, but surely anything was better than to marry in haste? Noor had been totally swept away by Bari’s looks and wealth and sex appeal, but that was no foundation for a marriage, still less for uprooting from everything she knew and transplanting to Bagestan.
“For a start, because she’s not in love with him! She’s blinded by—”
“If she does not love him yet, it will not be long coming. Bari will see to that, once they are married.”
Jalia’s mouth fell open, angry irritation skittering along her spine. “Oh, a man can make a woman love him, just like that?”
“What kind of man cannot make his own wife love him?”
Her eyes popped with reaction to the arrogance; her mouth opened.
“And how exactly does a man go about it?”
At the look in his eyes now she gasped as if she’d been punched in the stomach.
“Who is your fiancé, that you do not understand a man’s power over a woman?” asked the Cup Companion.
Four
Jalia sat up with a jerk. A chasm seemed to be opening up before her, and without having any idea what it represented, she knew it was dangerous.
“What are you talking about?” she said mockingly.
The car stopped at a traffic light on the outskirts of Medinat al Bostan. Below them, in the magnificent tapestry that was the city, sunlight gleamed from the golden dome and minarets of the great Shah Jawad mosque and glittered on the sea. It was a heart-stopping sight, she couldn’t deny that. Talk about your dreaming spires!
Latif turned and gazed at her for an unnerving few seconds.
“You know what I am talking about,” he accused through his teeth.
She didn’t, if he meant from personal experience. No man had ever reduced her to adoration on sheer sexual expertise alone, and what he said was just so much masculine arrogance!
“So sex is a crucible in which to melt your wife’s independence?”
“Her independence? No. Her dissatisfaction.”
“And how many wives are you keeping happy?” she asked sweetly.
“You know that I am not married.”
“But when you are, your wife will love you? Oooh, I almost envy her!” she twittered, while a kind of nervous fear zinged up and down her back and she knew that the last woman in the world she’d envy would be Latif Abd al Razzaq’s wife. “I don’t think!”
His eyes burned her.
“So what is the secret of eternal wedded bliss?” Jalia pressed, against the small, wise voice that was advising her to back off.
His jaw tightened at her tone, and he turned with such a look she suddenly found herself breathing through her mouth.
“Do you wish me to show you such secrets in the open road?” he asked, and she was half convinced that if she said yes he would stop the car where it was and reach for her….
“Not me!” she denied hastily, and a smile, or some other emotion, twisted the corner of his mouth. “But if you look around—well, it can’t be well-known, or there’d be more happy marriages, wouldn’t there? I can’t help feeling you could make your fortune marketing this secret.”
She was getting under his skin, she could see that, and she pressed her lips together to keep from grinning her triumph at him.
He looked at her again, a narrow, dangerous look, and Jalia’s eyes seemed to stretch as she watched him. “In the West, perhaps. But I think even a How To book would not help your fiancé.”
“I—what—?” Jalia babbled furiously.
Latif moved his hand from the wheel to where her hand lay on the armrest between them, and with one long, square forefinger fiercely stroked the three opals of her ring.
Jalia snatched her hand away in violent overreaction.
“Do you intend to marry this man?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you would be a fool.”
The light changed and he let out the brake and turned his attention to the road. Fury swept over her like a wave. Though he spoke perfect truth, he could not know it. She laughed false, angry, deliberately mocking laughter.
“How kind of you to have my interests at heart! But you don’t know anything about Michael.”
“Yes.”
“What, exactly, do you profess to know? You’ve never even seen him!”
“I have seen you.”
“And you don’t know anything about me, either!”
“All I need to know for such a judgement.”
“And what have you learned about me that allows you to prescribe for my future?” she couldn’t stop herself asking, though a moment’s thought would have told her she would not come out of the encounter the winner.
He deliberately kept his eyes on the road.
“Your fiancé has never aroused real passion in you,” he said grimly.
Jalia jerked back as if he had slapped her. A rage of unfamiliar feeling burned in her abdomen, almost too deep to reach. She felt a primitive, uncharacteristic urge to leap at him, biting and clawing, and teach him a lesson in the power of woman.
“How dare you!” she snapped instead, her Western upbringing overruling her wild Eastern blood. She was half aware of her dissatisfaction that it should be so.
His laughter underlined the feebleness of her reply.
“This is what you say to your English boyfriend, I think! Do you expect it to affect such as me?”
“And what
would it take to stop you? A juggernaut?”
“Ah, if I taught you about love, you would not want me to stop,” he declared, a mocking smile lifting one corner of his mouth, and outrage thrilled through her. She knew the last thing on his mind was making love to her. He didn’t even like her!
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before you teach me about love!” Jalia snapped, as something like panic suddenly choked her. “Suppose we agree that you’ll mind your own business when it comes to the intimate details of my love life?”
He was silent. She looked up at his profile and saw that his face was closed, his jaw clamped tight. Disdain was in the very tilt of his jaw as he nodded formally.
“Tell me instead where your cousin will have gone.”
She didn’t know how she knew, but she did: the words were a struggle. They were not what he wanted to say.
“I have told you I don’t know.”
Although she had demanded it, Jalia was disconcerted by the abrupt change of subject. She had more to say, plenty more, but to go back now and start ranting would look childish.
They were approaching the city centre now: the golden dome appeared only in the gaps between other buildings as they passed.
“You must have some idea.”
“If you’re thinking I’m a mind reader, you overestimate me. If you imagine I had prior knowledge, go to hell.”
His eyelids drooped to veil his response to that.
“I am thinking that if your cousin had made friends in al Bostan you would know who they are. Or if she had found a favourite place—a garden or a restaurant—she might have shown it to you.”
My manner is biting off heads. The line of poetry sounded in her head, and he really did look like a roosting hawk now, with his cold green eyes, his beaked nose, his hands on the wheel like talons on a branch. A brilliantly feathered, glittering hawk, owner of his world.
And exerting, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, every atom of his self-control.
“She is wearing a white wedding dress and veil, you know. She’s not going to be able to just disappear. In a restaurant or any public place she’d attract comment.”
“Where would she go, then?”
Her imagination failed. Where could you hide wearing a staggeringly beautiful pearl-embroidered silk wedding dress with a skirt big enough to cover a football field and a tulle veil five yards long?
Latif put his foot on the brake and drew in to the side of the road, where, under a ragged striped umbrella, a child was selling pomegranates from a battered crate. At the Cup Companion’s summons the boy jumped up to thrust a half dozen pomegranates into a much-used plastic bag, and carried it to the car.
As Latif passed over the money he asked a question, which Jalia could just about follow. The urchin’s response she couldn’t understand at all, but from his excited hand signals she guessed that he had seen Noor pass.
Latif set the bag of fruit into the back seat beside his sword and put the car in motion.
“What did he say?”
“He saw a big white car go past with a woman at the wheel and a white flag streaming from the roof,” he reported with a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “About half an hour ago. Another man in a car asked him the same question soon after. The white car hasn’t come back. He’s not sure about the other.”
“A white flag!” Jalia exclaimed. “Why would she be flying a white flag?”
“To signal her surrender?”
His dry voice made her want to laugh, but she suppressed the desire. She had no intention of getting pally with the man.
They were in the city centre now. Latif began cruising the streets, turning here and there at random. As best she could, Jalia monitored passing cars as well as those parked at the side of the road. She glanced down each side street as they passed.
Jalia sighed.
“Oh, if this isn’t just Noor all over!” she muttered. “Turn a deaf ear to everything until it suits her! If she’d listened to me when I was talking to her—if she’d actually sat down and considered what I was saying, she would have come to this conclusion long ago. Instead she waits until it’s almost too late and will cause the maximum chaos!”
Latif threw her a look. “Or you might say that if you hadn’t tried to force your views on her so unnecessarily, there would have been no fear suddenly erupting in her and taking over.”
“You say unnecessarily, I say necessarily…” Jalia sang in bright mockery, then glowered at him. “Why are you right and I’m wrong?”
“I?” he demanded sharply. “It is Bari and Noor’s judgement that you challenged, not mine! I have no opinion, except that when two people decide to get married they should be left to make their own fate!”
She whooped with outrage.
“And what were you saying to me not twenty minutes ago?” she shrieked. “Were you advising me not to marry Michael, or was I hallucinating? You would be a fool to marry this man!” she cited sharply. “Was that what you said, or do I misquote you?”
His eyes met hers, and she sensed a kind of shock in his gaze. A muscle in his cheek twitched, but whether with annoyance or an impulse to laugh she couldn’t tell. It was funny, but she was too annoyed to find it so.
“You blame your cousin for not giving serious consideration to your doubts about her engagement, but you do not listen to my doubts about yours. Who has the double standard now?” he said, with the air of a man pulling a brand from the burning.
Laughter trembled in her throat, but she was afraid of letting her guard down with him. Jalia bit her lip.
“Great! We’re both hypocrites,” she said, shaking her head.
Instead of making a reply to that, Latif jerked forward to stare out the window.
“Barakullah!” he breathed.
He had turned into the wide boulevard that led down to the seafront. At the bottom was the broad, sparkling expanse of the Gulf of Barakat, and miles of bright sky.
Jalia narrowed her eyes against the glitter. Off to the right a forest of silver masts marked the yacht basin.
“A yacht!” she cried. “Of course! I’ll bet she knows someone on a boat—maybe some friend even sailed over for the wedding. The perfect hide—”
“Look up,” Latif interrupted. He stretched an arm past her head, pointing into the sky, where a little plane glinted in the sun as it headed up the coast towards the mountains.
“That plane? What, do you think—?”
“It is Bari’s plane.”
Jalia gasped hoarsely. “Are you sure?”
“We can confirm it soon enough.”
“But what—?” Jalia fell silent; there was no point babbling questions to which neither of them had answers.
Latif turned the car along the shore highway. After a few minutes he turned in under an arched gateway in a high wall, and she saw a small brick-and-glass building and a sign announcing the Island Air Taxi service to the Gulf Eden Resort.
Out on the water several small planes were moored, bouncing gently in the swell. Latif stepped on the brakes and pointed again. Ahead of them on the tarmac, carelessly taking up three parking spaces, as if the driver had been in too much of a hurry to care, sat a large white limousine, parked and empty.
They slipped out of the car.
“Is that it? Is that the al Khalids’ limousine?” she asked.
He nodded thoughtfully.
“My God,” Jalia breathed. She felt completely stunned. She stared up at the glinting silver bird in the distance. “Is Noor at the controls, do you think? Why? Where can she be going? And where’s Bari?”
Latif turned his head to run his eyes over the half dozen other cars in the lot, then shook his head.
“His car is not here.”
She stared up at the plane as if the sight of it would tell her something. A gust of wind struck her, blowing the green silk tunic wildly against her body. She felt a blast of fine sand against her cheek.
Latif stiffened to attention besi
de her. He was still looking into the sky, but not at the plane. Frowning, Jalia turned her head to follow his gaze.
In the past few minutes a mass of cloud had boiled up from behind the mountains, and even as she watched it was growing, rushing to shroud the sky over the city.
Over the water the sky was still a clear, hot blue, but that couldn’t last. Jalia turned her head again to stare at the plane, watching anxiously for some sign that it was banking, turning, that the pilot had seen the clouds building and made the decision to put down again.
But the little plane, the sun glinting from its fat wings, sailed serenely on.
Five
There was little sleep for anyone in the palace that night. The phones rang constantly, with family and friends in the country and abroad calling for news, calls from officials organizing the search team, and journalists around the world clogging up the line asking for details of Princess Noor’s Fatal Peril.
Everybody felt worse when the couple’s disappearance began to be announced on repeated television news bulletins in the early evening and the announcer’s voice resonated with the kind of gravity that meant he thought Princess Noor was probably dead.
But they couldn’t just turn it off. It was entirely possible that some reporter would get wind of a search team discovery and broadcast the news before the family was notified. The regular announcements became a horrible kind of compulsive listening for them all as more and more journalists joined the fray.
On the breakfast terrace early the next morning, bleary-eyed but unable to sleep, and fed up with the constant insensitive badgering, Jalia delivered herself of a few blistering comments to one journalist and hung up the phone to find Latif watching her.
He was silhouetted against the morning sun, and she couldn’t see his expression. She dropped her eyes and picked up her coffee.
“Is there any news?” she asked. The question had taken on the impact of ritual. They were all constantly asking it of each other.
“Have you heard that the Barakat Emirates have sent a couple of planes to join the search this morning?”
The Ice Maiden's Sheikh Page 3
