Crowned at the Desert King's Command

by Jackie Ashenden

  From desert captive to convenient queen!

  The borders of Sheikh Tariq’s kingdom are permanently closed—just like his ironclad heart. After rescuing lost archaeologist Charlotte from the desert, he can’t let her go. And when he requires a bride, their mutual desire compels Tariq to crown Charlotte as his queen!

  Innocent dreamer Charlotte thought passion was for other people—until Tariq proves how deliciously wrong she is! The pleasure of their marriage bed makes her feel alive. But the intensity of her connection with Tariq makes Charlotte feel something infinitely more dangerous...

  Charlotte frowned. “Then how are you supposed to find a wife?”

  Tariq searched her face, seeing only puzzlement. “I have already found one.”

  Only then did something flicker in her eyes, a flash of apprehension. “Oh.”

  And that strange feeling in his chest, the sympathy that wouldn’t go away, deepened. He fought it, because it couldn’t gain ground in him. He wouldn’t let anything like it take root inside him again.

  “You can’t,” she murmured, not looking up, “mean...me.”

  “Can I not?”

  Her lashes quivered against the smooth, pale skin of her cheeks, and she went very still, tension radiating from her. “I don’t understand,” she said eventually.

  “What is there to understand? I need a wife, Miss Devereaux. I need the succession secured and I need my council happy, and I need to put the aristocratic families seeking to use their position to their advantage back in their place.” He paused, making sure that soft, weak feeling inside him was gone. “I had no suitable candidates and no prospect of any, and then you turned up. And you are perfect for the role.”

  Jackie Ashenden writes dark, emotional stories with alpha heroes who’ve just gotten the world to their liking only to have it blown apart by their kick-ass heroines. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with her husband, the inimitable Dr. Jax, two kids and two rats. When she’s not torturing alpha males and their gutsy heroines she can be found drinking chocolate martinis, reading anything she can lay her hands on, wasting time on social media or being forced to go mountain biking with her husband. To keep up-to-date with Jackie’s new releases and other news, sign up to her newsletter at jackieashenden.com.

  Books by Jackie Ashenden

  Harlequin Presents

  Shocking Italian Heirs

  Demanding His Hidden Heir

  Claiming His One-Night Child

  Harlequin DARE

  The Knights of Ruin

  Ruined

  Destroyed

  Kings of Sydney

  King’s Price

  King’s Rule

  King’s Ransom

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Jackie Ashenden

  Crowned at the Desert King’s Command

  To Dr. A. R. Coates.

  So long, and thanks for all the fish.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM CRAVING HIS FORBIDDEN INNOCENT BY LOUISE FULLER

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHARLOTTE DEVEREAUX DIDN’T often think about her death. But when she did, she’d hoped it would be when she was very old and tucked into bed. Or maybe in a comfortable armchair, quietly slipping away over a very good book.

  She hadn’t imagined it would be of heatstroke and dehydration after getting lost in the desert trying to find her father.

  He’d told her he was going to the top of the dune to get a better view of the dig site—nothing major. But then someone had mentioned that they hadn’t seen Professor Devereaux for a while, so Charlotte had decided to go and see if she could find him.

  She’d gone to the top dune where he had last been seen, only to find it empty. As all the dunes around her had been.

  She hadn’t been worried initially. Her father did go off on his own so he could think, and he was a very experienced and eminent archaeologist who’d been on many digs in his time. The desert was nothing out of the ordinary for him and the idea of him getting lost was unthinkable.

  As her father’s assistant, she wasn’t entirely inexperienced herself when it came to a dig and finding her way around it, and yet somehow, when she’d turned around to go back to the site, it had vanished. Along with her sense of direction.

  Again, she hadn’t been worried—her father had talked a lot about how the desert could play tricks on a person’s perception—so she’d strode off confidently the same way she’d come, retracing her steps, expecting to come across the site pretty much straight away.

  Except she hadn’t. And after about ten minutes of striding she’d realised that she’d made a mistake. A very grave one.

  Of course she hadn’t panicked. Panicking wouldn’t help. It never did. The trick, when you got lost, was to stay calm and stay where you were.

  So she had. But then the sun had got so hot—as if it were a hammer and she was the anvil. And she’d known that she was going to have to do something other than stand there otherwise she was going to die. So she’d started moving, going in the direction she’d thought the dig site would be, yet still it hadn’t materialised, and now she was slowly coming to the conclusion that she was lost.

  It was a bad thing to be lost in the desert.

  A very bad thing.

  Charlotte paused and adjusted the black and white scarf she wore wrapped around her head. She hated the thing. It was too heavy and too hot, and gritty due to the sand. It was also usually damp, because she was constantly bathed in sweat, but she wasn’t sweating now and that was also a bad thing. Not sweating was a sign of heatstroke, wasn’t it?

  She squinted into the distance, trying to see where she was going. The sun was beating her to a pulp. A number of black dots danced in her vision. That was probably another sign of heatstroke too, because she was now starting to feel dizzy.

  This was the end, wasn’t it?

  The rolling golden sands were endless, the violent blue of the sky a furnace she couldn’t seem to climb out of. The harsh, gritty sand under her feet was starting to move around like the deck of a ship and there was a roaring in her ears.

  The black dots were getting bigger and bigger, looming large, until she realised that, actually, they weren’t dots in her vision. They were people, a whole group of them, dressed in black and riding...horses?

  How odd. Shouldn’t they be riding camels?

  She took a shaky step towards them, hope flooding through her. Were they some of the assistants from the dig? Had they come to find her? Rescue her?

  ‘Hey,’ she yelled. Or at least tried to. But the sound escaped as more of a harsh whisper.

  The people on horses stopped, and she must be in a bad way because it wasn’t until that moment that she remembered that the assistants didn’t ride horses and they certainly weren’t swathed in black robes, the way these people seemed to be. Neither did they wear... Oh, goodness, they were swords, weren’t they?

  Her heartbeat began to speed up, and a chill was sweeping through her despite the intense heat.

  Her father, who’d been managing the dig, had warned everyone about how close the site w
as to the borders of Ashkaraz, and how they had to be careful not to stray too far. Ashkaraz had closed its borders nearly two decades ago and the current regime did not take kindly to intruders.

  There were stories of men draped in black, who didn’t carry guns but swords, and of people who’d accidentally strayed over the border and never been seen again.

  Rumours about Ashkaraz abounded—about how it was ruled by a tyrant who kept his people living in fear, banning all international travel both out of and into the country. All aid was refused. All diplomats and journalists turned away.

  There had been one journalist reputed to have smuggled himself into Ashkaraz a couple of years back, escaping to publish a hysterical article full of terrible stories of a crushed people living under a dictator’s rule. But that was it.

  Basically, no one knew what went on inside the country because no one—bar that journalist, and plenty doubted that he’d even been there anyway—had ever been there and come back.

  Charlotte hadn’t listened much to the stories, or worried about how close to the borders they were. Mainly because she had been enjoying spending time with her father and was more interested in the archaeology they were doing than in rumours about a closed country.

  Now, though, she wished she’d paid more attention. Because if the people approaching her weren’t assistants from the dig, then they were people from somewhere else.

  Somewhere frightening.

  She squinted harder at the group on horseback. Oh, goodness, was that a...a person, slung over the back of one of their horses? It seemed to be. A person with distinctive pale hair...

  Her heart constricted, recognition slamming into her. She’d recognise that hair anywhere, because her hair was exactly the same colour. It was a family trait. Which meant that the person currently slung over the back of that horse was her father.

  Fear wound around her, as cold as the sun was hot. He must have got lost, like she had, and they’d picked him up. And now they’d found her too...

  A tall figure in the middle of the group swung down off his horse—and it had to be a he, given that women weren’t generally built like Roman gladiators—the sunlight catching the naked blade thrust through the belt that wound around his hips, and the chill that gripped Charlotte intensified.

  He came towards her, moving with the fluid, athletic grace of a hunter despite his height and build and the shifting sand under his feet. She couldn’t see his face, he was covered from head to foot, but as he came closer she saw his eyes.

  They weren’t so much brown as a dense, smoky gold. Like a tiger.

  And all at once she knew that her doubts had been correct. That this was definitely not a search party come to rescue her. A group of men draped in black with swords at their hips could only mean one thing: they were Ashkaraz border guards and they were not here to rescue her. They were here to take her prisoner because she had almost certainly strayed into the wrong country.

  The man came closer, looming over her, his broad figure blocking out the hammer-blow of the sun.

  But even the sun wasn’t as hot or as brilliant as the gold of his eyes. And they were just as relentless, just as harsh. There was no mercy in those eyes. There was no help at all.

  You fool. You should have told someone where you were going. But you didn’t, did you?

  No, she hadn’t. She’d just gone to find her father, thinking she’d only be a couple of minutes. It was true that she hadn’t been paying attention to where she’d been going, as she’d so often done as a child, lost in whatever daydream had grabbed her at the time, since that had been better than listening to the screaming arguments of her parents as they’d battled each other over her head.

  Even now, as an adult, she found it difficult to concentrate sometimes, when she was stressed or things were chaotic, her mind spinning off into its own fantasies, escaping reality. Though those moments of inattention didn’t usually have such terrible repercussions as now, when she was left with the choice of either turning and running away from the terrible man striding towards her across the hot sand, or falling to her knees and begging for her life.

  What did these guards do to people who strayed over the borders? No one knew. No one had ever escaped. She and her father were going to be taken prisoner and no one would ever hear from them again.

  Running was out of the question. Not only was there nowhere to run, she couldn’t leave her father. Wouldn’t leave him. He’d had no one else but her since her mother had moved to the States nearly fifteen years ago—and, though he wouldn’t exactly win any father-of-the-year awards, his career and all the digs he’d taken her on had instilled in her a love of history and ancient peoples that the dreamer inside her found fascinating.

  She had a lot to thank him for, so she’d follow him the way she’d always followed him.

  Which meant that she was going to have to throw herself on this man’s mercy—if, indeed, he had any.

  Fear gripped her tight, and darkness crawled at the edge of her vision. Her lips were cracked, dry as the desert sand drifting around her feet, but she fought to remain upright. She was an idiot for wandering away from the site, it was true, but she wasn’t going to compound her mistake by collapsing ignominiously at this man’s feet.

  She would be polite and reasonable, apologise calmly, and tell him that she hadn’t meant to wander into his country by mistake. That her father was a professor and she only a lowly assistant, and they hadn’t meant any harm. Also, could he please not kill them, or throw them into a dungeon, or any of the rest of the things her over-active imagination kept providing for her?

  A hot wind kicked at the black hem of the man’s robes, making them flow around his powerful thighs as he came to a stop in front of her. He stood there so still, as if he was a mountain that had stood for millennia, as enduring and unchanging as the desert itself.

  Charlotte held tight to consciousness and something about his merciless golden gaze hardened her spine, making her square her shoulders and straighten up.

  She tried to get some moisture into her mouth and failed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she forced out. ‘Do you speak English? Are you able to help me?’

  The man was silent a long moment, and then he said something, his voice deep enough that she felt it in her chest, a subtle, sub-sonic vibration. But she didn’t understand him. Her Arabic was rough, and the liquid sounds bore no resemblance to the minimal words she knew.

  She felt very weak all of a sudden, and quite sick.

  The man’s golden eyes seemed to fill her entire vision, his stare hard, brutal, crushing utterly her hope of rescue and of mercy.

  She would get neither from him and that was obvious.

  ‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ Charlotte whispered as the darkness gathered around her. ‘But I think the man you have on that horse is my father. We’re quite lost. Do you think you could possibly help us?’

  Then she fainted dead away at his feet.

  * * *

  Tariq ibn Ishak Al Naziri, Sheikh of Ashkaraz, stared impassively at the small body of the Englishwoman collapsed on the sand in front of him.

  Her father, she’d said. Well, that cleared up the question of who the man was.

  They’d found him unconscious on one of the dunes. After finding him, Tariq and his border guards had then spotted the woman, and had been tracking her for a good twenty minutes. Her zigzag path and the way she’d blundered across the border straight into Ashkaraz made it clear she had no idea where she was going, though what she’d murmured just now clarified things somewhat. She’d obviously been looking for the man currently slung over Jaziri’s horse.

  Tariq had been hoping she’d turn around and make her way back over the border again, ensuring that she wasn’t his problem any more, but she hadn’t. She’d spotted them instead and had just stood there, watching him approach her as if he was her own personal saviour.

/>   Given that she was clearly suffering from heatstroke and advanced dehydration, she wasn’t far wrong.

  He didn’t touch her just yet, though, because you could never be too suspicious of lost foreigners wandering over his borders—as the incident with the man who’d been armed and hoping to ‘free the people of Ashkaraz from tyranny’ had proved only the week before. One of his border guards had been severely injured and Tariq didn’t want that to happen again.

  It was probably why Faisal—his father’s old advisor, who’d now become his—had been unhappy about Tariq approaching this woman himself rather than letting one of his guards do it. But protecting his subjects was his purpose, and he didn’t want another injury simply because one guard had been a little careless when dealing with an outsider.

  Tariq knew how to deal with them; his guards generally did not.

  Especially a woman. They could be the most dangerous of all.

  Except this woman didn’t look very dangerous right now, crumpled as she was on the sand. She was dressed in a pair of stained, loose blue trousers and a long-sleeved white shirt, with a black and white scarf wrapped around her head, which was paltry protection from the desert sun.

  She did actually seem to be unconscious, but since it could be difficult to tell, and Tariq was naturally suspicious, he nudged her experimentally with the toe of his boot. Her head rolled to the side, her scarf coming loose and revealing a lock of hair pale as moonlight.

  Yes, very definitely unconscious.

  He frowned, studying her face. Her features were fine and regular and, though he preferred women with stronger looks, she could be said to be pretty. Currently the fine grain of her skin was flushed bright red from the heat and burned from the sun, making the pale arches of her eyebrows stand out.

  English, no doubt, given the sunburn. Certainly when she’d spoken he recognised that cut-glass accent, which meant the man they’d picked up was likely English too.

  He gave her another assessing look. Neither she nor the man were carrying anything, which meant their camp, or wherever they’d come from, couldn’t be far away. Were they part of a tour party, perhaps? Although tour parties generally didn’t come this far into the desert—they stuck to the edges, where it was cooler, safer. From where they could easily get back to the air-conditioned luxury of their hotels and away from the sun and the heat and the rumours of a closed country where men patrolled the borders wearing swords.

 
-->