“Jinns?”
David grinned, a sharp twinkle lighting his eyes. “The evil spirits of the desert.” He tapped his finger against his temple. “The heat, the thirst, endlessness of the Sahara, it can drive a man crazy. The locals say that’s when the jinns come and get you.”
“So the general went a little loopy?”
“That’s the story. He took early retirement and moved out here onto Shendi. He bought the island because of the unusual springs of fresh water. He dug the wells that feed these gardens, and in designing the palace, he copied the Moorish architecture from the areas he’d come to love, combining it with whatever other North African influence inspired him.”
“It’s absolutely stunning…eclectic,” she said, studying the mosaic work in one of the recessed alcoves.
“Eclectic is the word. In some ways Shendi Palace is symbolic of North Africa itself. So much of this part of the world is a fascinating and often uneasy blend of past cultures, Arabian, African, colonial, each one trying to erase traces of the previous one, going all the way back to the Kingdom of Sheba and beyond.”
The sudden deepening of his voice, the guttural catch in the honeyed gravel tones, forced her to look up.
He was staring at her. His face had changed. A sharp and fervent energy had shifted into the granite of his dark features. His eyes flashed dangerously.
Sahar swallowed. A tingle of foreboding trickled down her spine at the mood in his eyes. North Africa and the Sahara was something David Rashid obviously cared passionately about. The palace, the Africa he described, they were like the man himself, she thought. He too exuded a timelessness, as if the spirit of ancient warrior tribes, the wild and exotic spice of desert leaders, still shaped his thoughts. Yet his barely leashed and feral energy was veneered with the fine cultural sensibilities of British aristocracy.
David Rashid was a mystery in more ways than one. It made her curious about his personal history…and more than curious about why she was feeling this shiver of portent down the back of her neck.
She cleared her throat, trying hard not to shy away from the hooded intensity of his indigo eyes. “Kamilah said your father was a sheik.”
“Kamilah said that?”
“Yes.”
His jaw hardened. He turned away from her, grabbed a brass ring and flung open a heavy wooden door to another room. He strode ahead of her into the vast chamber.
She caught up with him. “Does that make you a sheik then?”
He stopped, swung around to face her, the lines bracketing his mouth hard. “I am Sheik David bin Omar bin Zafir Rashid. I am the oldest son of my father. According the customs of my father’s people, I now bear his title.”
He paused, his eyes boring into hers. “But it means nothing.” He swept his arm out in an expansive movement, dismissing the subject. “This is the hall where the French general used to host his famous balls.”
Sahar was more interested in studying the face and architecture of David Rashid than the room. “Why do you say it means nothing?” she pressed.
His eyes probed hers, as if he were weighing her up, deciding her worthy of the information. “It would take time to explain. Come.” He took her arm, urged her through enormous double doors to another enclosed courtyard, this one with a long, black marble pool sunk into the center. The pool was flanked by columns and surrounded by arched walkways fragrant with exotic blooms. Elaborately carved fountains splashed water into the pool causing ripples along the shimmering black surface. The pool looked darkly cool under the white-hot sky. Sahar could not see below the surface. She looked from the pool up into David’s eyes. The reflection of the water rippled like wet ink through them. She couldn’t see below the dark surface of this man either. But she wanted to. She needed to.
“I have plenty of time,” she said, forcing a soft laugh. “More time than I know what to do with right now.”
He stilled. “You really are interested?”
She looked up into his smouldering eyes. She was interested all right. She was drawn to him by every cell in her body. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”
He pursed his exquisite lips in thought, his eyes never leaving hers. “All right.” He took her hand, drew her to a bench in the shade of the arches facing the pool. He seated himself beside her, eyes focused on the dark water.
“My father, Sheik Omar bin Zafir Rashid, was descended from a tribe of desert warriors that migrated from Arabia and down through Egypt into the Sahara hundreds of years ago,” he explained. “The Bedu of Azar. A fiercely proud people. They lived as nomads and hunters, and their lives were ruled by the stars and the seasons. They killed oryx for meat and they traveled from oasis to oasis with their camels and goats. They lived by an ancient code of ethics and were both revered and feared.”
He stopped talking, his eyes distant, staring into the waters of the swimming pool as if he could see through them to a distant desert oasis. “They were a noble people, Sahar. But they are no more. I am the lineal leader of a tribe that no longer exists.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “The world changed. My people and their ways didn’t. The desert is dying, and with it an ancient way of life. After years of relentless drought, traditional watering holes have dried up. The oryx are gone. Famine has taken its toll. Camels and goats died. And the Bedu were forced to abandon their way of life, the very existence that made them proud and free. In desperation they were forced toward towns and settlements, and they began to eke out an existence living in shacks on the outskirts of civilization.”
David turned to look at her, his eyes glittering. “A once-noble people have lost their culture, the bonds that held their tribes together. They are now scattered, directionless and impoverished, subsisting mainly on supplies of American grain and other foreign aid.”
The ferocity in his voice caught her by the throat.
“That is why I say the title means nothing.” His jaw steeled, flint sharpened his gaze. “But I will give pride back to my people, Sahar. I will make them whole again. It was my father’s dream. And it is now mine.”
Sahar stared at him. So this is what drove the man. His raw passion for his people, for the desert, moved her profoundly. “How would you do that?” she asked. “How would give pride back to the Bedu?”
He smiled in a way she had not seen him smile. A smile so powerful it reached right to her heart, took hold of it and squeezed so that she could barely breathe.
“I told you, it is a long story.”
“I want to hear it, David.” She needed to. It gave her unique insight into the man, to what fired his soul. He possessed a depth, an integrity she had only guessed at.
He took her hand, and his thumb absently stroked the inside of her palm as he stared into the black water. Her insides went shivery, but she could not bring herself to pull her hand away. This man held an enigmatic power over her, something that defied her control. Did he even realize what he was doing to her?
“I spent half my life in the Sahara,” he said, speaking into the distance, to a place way beyond the pool, a place that lived in his mind. “My father wanted me to see it, to experience the old ways firsthand. He wanted me to taste the ancient lifestyle of a desert warrior before it disappeared from the face of this earth forever.” His fingers laced through hers, tightened. Her heart beat faster.
“My father realized when he was still young that the old ways were going. And he knew the only way to save his people would be to bring the ancient ways of the desert in line with the new world, to give the nomads economic control over their destiny.” He paused. “My father made it his goal to be accepted at Oxford. He’d heard the Bedu legends about the black gold, the oil, that lay beneath the sands of northern Azar. And he wanted to learn how to find it. He came back a geologist, armed with both science and knowledge of the ancient ways of the desert.” David drew in a deep breath. “He found that black gold, Sahar. After many years, he found it.”
For a while they sat
silent, her hand still held in his. Sahar looked up into his face. “And?” she prompted softly.
He turned to look down at her, his gaze meshing intimately with hers. “He brought something else back from England,” he said. “A British wife…and a son.”
“You? And your mother?”
“Some saw it as a sign of my father’s betrayal.”
“Because she was British?”
“Yes.” A bitterness clipped his word. “A foreigner.”
“What happened…to your mother?”
“She didn’t take easily to the ways of the desert. She was the daughter of British privilege, and to her the desert was simply an adventure that grew tiresome. To my father it was life. My mother began to pine for her home, and my father loved her too much to trap her in a place she couldn’t live. He in turn could not leave his beloved desert for a full-time life in England. Their relationship was doomed from the start.”
“How awfully tragic.”
He drew breath sharply in through his nose. “In the end my mother got ill. She decided to return to her homeland, her people. But she wouldn’t leave me behind. I was four. I had been born for the ways of the desert but she took me to England.”
Sahar looked up into his eyes. Below the surface of those dark-blue irises, somewhere deep inside this man, lurked a boy, a boy who had been torn between two parents. Two countries. Two cultures. A boy who had shaped this potent man of the present.
He squeezed her hand, gave her a wry smile. “Ever since, I’ve been divided. For six months of each year I lived in the desert. For the other half of the year I studied in England.”
“What happened to your father after your mother left?” she asked.
“He eventually remarried…took an Azarian bride. He had another son eight years after my birth, my half brother, Tariq. Some felt Tariq should have inherited my father’s title because he was the pure one.” David dismissed it with a shrug. “Either way, like I said, it is a title that means nothing.”
“Do you get on with your brother?”
His eyes flashed to hers and pierced her with a sudden laser sharpness, with suspicion. He withdrew his hand. “Why are you interested in this? It’s Rashid business.”
She stumbled mentally at the turnabout. This man had low flashpoints. “Because…” She felt warmth infuse her cheeks. “Because…I…care. About you. About Kamilah.”
A muscle pulsed along his jawline. But he said nothing. He waited, watching her face, his eyes unreadable.
“I have nothing else to care about, David. I’m…I’m all alone. Until I find out where I belong.”
His eyes softened slightly. He lifted his hand and briefly caressed the side of her cheek. “My brother and I did not get on until about two years ago.”
“Why?”
“Tariq felt I was not one of them. Not pure.” An anger glittered briefly in his eyes, then was gone.
“He thought he should have been sheik?”
“He thought I should have been dead.”
“What?”
David snorted. “Tariq grew up resenting everything about me, Sahar, including my father’s affection. You see, my half brother didn’t agree with our vision for bringing Azar into the global economy. And because of his radical views, he was cut from my father’s will. But that was then. Tariq is older now. Wiser. He is beginning to see beyond his narrow idealist window. He has finally come to accept my views. We share the same goal now, to build the wealth of our people, to marry the ancient ways with the new, using the resources of Rashid International, the company started by our father, the company designed to feed our father’s dream.”
“What finally turned Tariq around?” she asked.
“A promise.” David absently fingered the hilt of the dagger at his waist. “I vowed on my father’s deathbed to do everything within my power to heal the rift between myself and Tariq. And I vowed to continue his work to heal his people, the Bedu of Azar. He died with those dreams on his lips.”
Sahar noted he said “his” people. Not “my” people. Even in his own mind, he wasn’t wholly one of them. David’s dichotomy was cleft deep into his soul. And she had a sense that healing Azar, bridging the divide between the ancient ways and the new, would in a sense make this man whole himself. It would make him feel worthy of his title. It would heal the scars of the four-year-old buried deep within the man.
“How did you manage to sway Tariq, David? I mean, a fundamentalist ideology is not something one gives up easily.”
His eyes shot to hers. “You’re right. But blood can be stronger than ideology. And I never gave up.” His exquisite fingers moved absently over the ornate handle of his jambiya as he spoke.
He caught her looking. “My father’s,” he explained, curling his fingers tight around the hilt. “A gift from his deathbed. The symbol of my promise. I wear it always.”
She swallowed at the sudden dark and possessive edge in his voice, the way he held his weapon as if he were about to yank it from its sheath. His eyes glittered sharply. She’d hit another of his flashpoints. It made her jittery. Anxiety began to swamp her again for some reason she couldn’t identify. She had no doubt that the raw passion housed within the powerful man that was Sheik David bin Omar bin Zafir Rashid gave him the capacity to kill.
What would he do to her if he found her to be disloyal? What would she do if he turned out to be her enemy? She swallowed, tried to keep her voice light. “So…is…is Azar prospering now?”
“Not quite.” He stood up, his one hand still resting on the hilt of his jambiya. “There is still much work to do. Come.” He held out his other hand. She took it. He led her under the arches and escorted her back into the palace.
“Africa is complicated,” he explained. “And in the tradition of Africa nothing goes smoothly.” The mellifluous smoothness was back in his voice, the sharp twinkle back in his eyes. “Once all the oilfields were in full production, after my father died, I discovered a source of very unique uranium, something far more coveted than the oil.”
David Rashid is smuggling weapons-grade uranium.
The thought speared into her brain. Sahar’s chest cramped tight. She tried to breathe. But this time she couldn’t shake the thought. It began to diffuse through her brain like an explosion of ink in water, tainting, suffocating everything.
“And…and what is so special about this uranium?” She heard the catch in her voice.
So did he. He paused, arched his dark brow slightly. “It has a unique molecular structure which makes it very easy to enrich beyond power-station grade.”
To nuclear-weapons grade.
Every muscle in her body froze. She stopped in her tracks.
He halted beside her. “What is it, Sahar?”
“Ah…nothing. It’s nothing.” She forced her muscles to move, forced herself to walk. “Go on.”
A frown creased his brow. He held her back. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
She nodded quickly. “Yes, of course. What happened then?”
“The uranium discovery sparked a coup attempt in Azar,” David explained, his eyes searching hers, his frown deepening. “A dissident Azarian faction attempted to overthrow the government. The rebels gained control of the north and my oil fields, stopping a flow of cash into the country. Then they started moving south in an effort to seize Tabara, the capital.”
Her mouth went dry. “Wh…what happened then?”
“I fought back,” he said, watching her intently. “I hired a private army. I came to an agreement with the Azarian president that I would fund a private military presence on the condition that we would first fight to reclaim and protect my oil fields.”
I know this. I know all of this. Every bit of it. She placed her hand to her temple. Maybe she’d read about it in a newspaper, seen it on the news.
The line of stitches under her hairline began to throb with each beat of her heart.
David misread her reaction. “Mercenaries are not all ba
d, Sahar. There are teams out there who do good. This is one of them. They have pushed the rebels back up toward the Libyan border. In addition, the mercenaries are stiffening and training Azar’s own army. They will be able to stand on their own in a way never seen before. I am making my country strong.”
She was at a loss for words. All she could do was nod.
“Come,” he said, taking her arm. “I’ll show you.” He led her into another wing and along yet another arched corridor.
Her head pounded wildly. She was dizzy. She could feel the prickle of perspiration along her upper lip. “I…I’m just wondering why you are here, then, on Shendi, if your heart…your business is in Azar?”
“It’s a safe home for Kamilah,” he said. “England was not good for her, and Azar is still technically at war with the rebels. And while Azar is my dream, Kamilah is still my priority. Shendi is close enough for me to fly into Azar when needed.” David opened another door and allowed Sahar to enter ahead of him. “This is my study,” he said.
She stepped into a room that was masculine in decor with lots of dark wood and leather and an unmistakable North African stamp in design. The ceiling fan moved slowly up above, stirring soft currents in the warm air.
Sahar caught sight of the huge ochre-toned map on the far wall. A bolt of recognition stalled her heart. She knew instantly exactly who David Rashid was. A thousand little loose shards suddenly slammed together into a cohesive picture as sharp as glass. Pain pierced her head. She gasped at the sensation of it.
She knew the map depicted Azar, a country nestled like an inverted wedge of pizza between Chad to the west, Sudan to the east with Libya and Egypt to the north.
She even knew what the different-colored pins stuck into the map denoted. The big blue pins marked the two Rashid uranium mines. The yellow pins were his oil fields. And the clusters of red pins in the north marked the positions of rebel armies that had been pushed back by Rashid money, cash paid to a controversial new mercenary group grabbing international headlines, the Force du Sable, headed by none other than the legendary Jacques Sauvage and the formidable Hunter McBride and Rafiq Zayed.
The Sheik Who Loved Me Page 11
