TO DEFY A SHEIKH Page 7

  He rapped on Samarah’s door and it opened slowly. Lydia, the maid, peered out. “Sheikh,” she said, inclining her head.

  “Is the lady ready?” he asked.

  “Yes, Sheikh.”

  “I can speak for myself.” Samarah’s voice came from beyond the door.

  “Leave us please, Lydia,” he said.

  The other woman nodded and scurried out of Samarah’s chamber and down the hall. He walked in, and she looked at him with an expression reminiscent of someone who’d been stunned.

  “What?”

  “You’re in a suit.”

  “So I am,” he said, looking down at his black tie and jacket. “This shocks you?”

  “I didn’t expect Western attire.”

  She was elegant, in a long-sleeved black dress with a swath of white silk draped across the skirt and a gold belt around her waist. Matching gold decorated the cuffs of her sleeves, and there was gold chain woven through her hair. Which was still back in a braid.

  He felt like making it a personal mission to see her hair loose.

  Though, he shouldn’t care about her hair. It had nothing at all to do with honor.

  “You look perfect in Eastern attire,” he said.

  She pursed her lips. “I would think you might have liked us to look united.”

  “Perhaps you wanted it to look as though we got dressed together?”

  Her cheeks turned a burnished rose. “That is not what I meant.”

  “Perhaps one day we will dress together.” Though there would be no purpose behind that in their marriage, either. He would go to her at night when it was necessary. They wouldn’t share a life. Not in those ways.

  “This is not…an appropriate…I don’t…”

  “Do I fluster you, Samarah?” He did, he could see it. And he had no idea why he enjoyed it. Only that he did. And he enjoyed so few things, he felt driven to chase it. If only for the moment.

  “No,” she said, dark eyes locking with his, her expression fierce. “It would take much more than you to fluster me, Ferran Bashar. I remember you as a naughty boy, not simply the man you are now.”

  “And I remember you as a girl, but I think we’re both rather far removed from those days, are we not?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I think we’re a whole regime change, an execution and a revenge plot away from who we were.”

  “And a marriage proposal,” she said.

  “Yes, there is that. Though you seem to object to all mentions of marital related activities.”

  “I’m not ready to think about it,” she said.

  “I see.” Heat burned through him, reckless and strange. Nothing like he’d experienced in his memory. Arousal was familiar. But there was a way he handled it now. And that was: alone.

  He didn’t act on reckless impulse. He didn’t try to make the heat burn brighter. He extinguished it as quickly as possible. By working out until he dropped from exhaustion. By submerging himself in cold water.

  He’d managed to diminish the desire for release until it was simply a physical need. Like hunger for food, thirst for water. There was no need for fanfare or flirtation. He had successfully managed without another person for years.

  But there was a reality before him now. A woman he would marry. A woman who he would share his body with. And he was fascinated by her, by the thought. Now that sex was on the horizon he was finding it a difficult desire to ignore.

  Especially with all the questions he had about her hair. How long it was. How it would feel sifting through his fingers.

  Yes, he was curious about many things. He looked at her, at the exquisite line of her neck, the curve of her lips. His heart rate sped up. His fingers itching with the need to touch her.

  “Tell me, Samarah,” he said, ignoring his reservations and chasing the fire, “in all of your time spent on vengeance training and nurturing your rage, did you make time for men?”

  She blinked. “No.”

  “Women?”

  She blinked again. “No.”

  “Have you ever been kissed, Samarah?”

  She stepped back as if she’d been shocked, her eyes wide. And he should be thankful she had. Or years of restraint would have been undone. “We’re going to be late.”

  “The press will wait. We’re what they’re there for.”

  “I don’t like to be late.” She strode past him and out the door. “Are you coming?” she asked, out of view.

  “Yes,” he said, trying to calm the heat that was rioting through him.

  They had to present a united front for the nation. He only hoped she didn’t decide to attempt to give him a public execution.

  * * *

  Samarah looked out at the sea of reporters and felt the strong desire to scurry off the podium and escape so she could indeed do what Ferran had already accused her of doing. Nesting in the palace. Hiding away from everyone and everything.

  She wasn’t used to being visible like this. It felt wrong. It felt like an affront to survival.

  But then, this pounding, wild fear she was experiencing was much better than the strange, heated fear she’d felt in her bedroom.

  Have you ever been kissed, Samarah?

  What kind of question was that? And why did it make her feel like this? Edgy and restless, a bit tingly. If this was rage, it was a new kind. One she was unfamiliar with. And she didn’t like it one bit.

  “It is with great happiness,” Ferran said, his tone serious and grave and not reflecting happiness in the least, “that I announce my upcoming marriage. It is happy, not only because marriage is a blessed union—” Samarah nearly choked “—but because I am to marry my childhood friend—” she mentally rolled her eyes at his exaggeration “—who was long thought dead. Sheikha Samarah Al-Azen.”

  The room erupted into a frenzy, a volley of questions hitting like arrows. Samarah hadn’t been the focus of so much attention in her memory. As a child, she’d been shielded from the press, and as an adult, she’d spent her life in hiding.

  This wasn’t anything she was prepared for. Fear had a limited place in her life. It acted only as a survival aid. To be heeded when she needed to heed it, and ignored when something larger than survival commanded she ignore it.

  She never felt as if she was a slave to it.

  Until now. Until she found herself doing something that went beyond explanation.

  She put her hand on Ferran’s arm, her fingers curling into his firm, warm flesh, and she drew nearer to him, concealing part of herself behind his body.

  She felt him tense beneath her touch, saw a near-imperceptible shift in the muscles on his face. “I will take no questions now,” he said. “I will add only this. I am regretful of the history that has passed between Khadra and Jahar. As are we all. I hope that this ushers in a new time. A new era. We are neighbors. And when children come from this union, blood. And while things will never be as they were, perhaps we can at least forge a truce, if not an alliance.”

  He put his hand on her back, the touch firm, burning her through her dress. He propelled her from the podium and away from the crowd, who were being managed now by his staff. “I have briefed them on what to say,” he said when they were back in the corridor. “They have a nice story about how we reconnected at a small event we both attended in Morocco six months ago.”

  “That’s quite the tale,” she said, feeling shivery now, though she wasn’t sure why.

  “You have not been in front of people in that way before, have you?”

  “I’m used to being anonymous,” she said. “Actually, I’m used to needing anonymity for survival. This runs…counter to everything that I’ve learned.”

  That was a truer statement than she’d realized it was going to be. A far deeper-reaching statement
.

  Everything she’d been experiencing here this past week countered everything she knew about life. Everything she’d known about Ferran.

  And about herself.

  It was a lot to take in.

  “This is my world,” he said. “Everything I do needs a press conference.”

  “I’m not sure how I feel about that. Well, no, that’s not true. I’m certain I don’t like it.” Because if she was really doing this sheikha thing, she wasn’t sure how she would survive something like that all the time. “I feel too exposed.”

  “You’re perfectly safe,” he said.

  “I’m standing there being useless in formal attire and I’m not at all ready to defend myself if something should happen.”

  He frowned and took a step toward her, and she took a step back, her bottom hitting the wall behind her. “It’s something you’ll have to get used to. This is only the beginning. We’ll be planning a formal ball after this, to celebrate our upcoming marriage. And then the wedding. I am not going to hurt you,” he said. “Stop preparing to collapse my windpipe.”

  “Should the need arise, I must be prepared.”

  One dark brow shot up. “The need will not arise.”

  “Says you.”

  He planted a hand by her head, leaning in. “I am here to protect you. I swear upon my life. In that room, where the conference is being held, there are always guards. They are ready to defend us should anything happen. And if they should fail, I am there. And I will guard you. I failed you once, Samarah. I let you die, and now that you’ve come back from the grave I will not allow you to return to it.”

  She felt the vow coming from his soul, from that place of honor he prized so dearly, and she knew he spoke the truth. So strange to hear this vow when part of her had still been ready to exact the revenge she’d come to deliver from the first.

  She looked up and met his gaze. It was granite. And she felt caught there, between the marble wall and the hardness in his eyes. Between the honor he had shown since her return, and the growing respect she felt for that honor, and the years-long desire for a way to repay the devastation he’d been part of wreaking on her life. She couldn’t look away, and she didn’t know why. She was sent right back to the moment in his room, when she’d been poised, ready to take his life, and she’d seen his eyes.

  There was just something about his eyes.

  “I have never been able to trust my safety to another person,” she said. Even when she’d had her mother with her, she’d often felt like the one doing the protecting. The parenting.

  “Entrust it to me,” he said. “I’ve already entrusted mine to you.”

  She turned that over for a moment. “I suppose that’s true. But then, I am a prisoner of sorts.”

  “Instead of a leg shackle you’ll have a ring.”

  “Sparklier anyway,” she said, flexing her fingers, trying hard not to picture what it might feel like to wear a man’s ring.

  “You don’t sound thrilled.”

  “Jewelry was never an aspiration of mine.”

  “I dare say it wasn’t.”

  “So you can hardly expect for me to get all girlish over it, now can you?”

  “Oh, Samarah, I don’t expect that. No matter how much you make yourself glitter, I’m not fooled.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “You are a feral creature,” he said, leaning in slightly, the motion pulling the breath from her lungs.

  “And you think you’ll tame me?”

  He put his hand on her cheek, his thumb tracing the line of her lower lip. She could do nothing. Nothing but simply let him touch her. Nothing but see what he might do. She was fascinated, in the way one might be of something utterly terrifying. Something hideous and dark that all decent people would turn away from. Her stomach twisted tight, her lungs crushed, unable to expand.

  “Have you ever seen exotic animals that were caged?” he asked. She shook her head. “The way they pace back and forth against the bars. It’s disturbing. To see all that power, all that wildness, locked away. To see every instinct stolen from them. I do not seek to tame you. For those very reasons. But I do hope we might at least come to exist beside one another.”

  “We might,” she said, the words strangled.

  “I will take that as an enthusiastic agreement coming from you. I know this is not ideal but can’t you simply…”

  “Endure for the greater good?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what you will be doing?”

  “It’s what I’ve always done,” he said. “It’s what I must do. This is the burden of a crown, Samarah. If you do it right, you’re under the power of the people, not the other way around.”

  “Let me ask you this, Ferran,” she said. And she didn’t know why she was keeping the conversation going. Didn’t know why she was standing in the hall with him, backed against a wall, allowing him to keep his hand on her cheek. But she was.

  She knew she was extending the moment, extending the contact, but as confused as she was by her motivations, she didn’t feel ashamed.

  “Ask away,” he said.

  “You consider me feral.”

  “I do.”

  “Does this mean you’re domesticated? As you’ve been brought up in captivity?”

  “Of course I am,” he said. “I’m the ruler of this country, and I have to be a diplomat. A leader. I have to be a man who acts rationally. With his mind, with his knowledge of right and wrong.”

  She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head, the motion causing his fingers to drift downward to her jawline. He traced the bone there. Slowly. It felt like the long slow draw of a match. Burning. Sparking.

  “That’s not what I see,” she said.

  “Oh no?” he asked. “What is it you see?”

  “A tiger pacing the bars.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SAMARAH WAS IN the garden doing martial arts forms when Ferran found her.

  “I’m pleased to see you’re out enjoying the scorching heat,” he said.

  She wiped the sweat from her forehead. “It’s the desert. There is no other sort of weather to enjoy. It’s this or monsoons.”

  “You don’t get so much of the torrential rains here. But if you go west, toward the bedouin camps…there you find your monsoons.”

  “Then I suppose here at the palace, heat is my only option.”

  “Mostly.”

  He watched her for a moment longer. Every graceful movement. Precise and deadly. She was a thing of beauty. A thing of poisoned beauty.

  He was much more attracted to her than he’d anticipated. Because he hadn’t anticipated it at all. This strange, slow burn that hit him in the gut whenever she was near. He’d never experienced anything like it. He wasn’t the kind of man who burned for one woman. For any woman.

  He scarcely remembered his past lovers. He’d had one year of his life devoted to the discovery of women. At fifteen, he hadn’t been able to get enough. Such a spoiled, stupid boy he’d been. He’d been granted almost his full height then, and he’d had more money and power than a boy his age knew how to wield. That had meant he’d discovered sex earlier than he might have otherwise.

  But women had only been a means to him finding release, and nothing more. He’d never wanted one much more than any other.

  But here and now, he burned.

  It was not at all what he wanted.

  Then there was her bit of insight.

  A tiger pacing the bars.

  When she’d said that, he’d wanted to show her—while he kept himself leashed, he was not in a cage. He could slip it at will, and he’d had the strong desire to make sure she realized that.

  To press her head against the wall and let her feel ju
st what he was feeling. To tilt her head back and take her lips with his.

  To show her just what manner of man he was.

  But that was passion driving that desire. And he didn’t bow down to passion. It was too exposing. And he would not open himself up in that way again.

  This deadly, encroaching feeling had fueled his plan for the day, too. It was time for both of them to get out of this palace, this mausoleum that held so many of their dead.

  He would get them both out into an open space for a while.

  “I had thought you might like a chance to go out in it for a while.”

  “Out in it?”

  “The heat,” he said.

  “Oh.” She stopped her exercise. “For what purpose?”

  “There is a large bedouin tribe that camps a few hours east of the palace at this time of year, and I always like to pay them a visit. See that their needs are being met, what has changed. They have an ambassador, but I like to keep personal touch, as well.”

  “Oh. And you would…bring me?”

  “You’re to be my wife. This will be a part of your duties. You will be part of this country.”

  “It’s hard to imagine being a part of Khadra,” she said. “Being somehow a part of you.”

  “And yet, that is to be our future,” he said.

  “So it appears.”

  “So it is.”

  “So let it be written, et cetera.”

  He smiled. “Yes. I think you just bantered with me.”

  She frowned in return, the golden skin on her forehead creasing. “I did not banter with you.”

  “You did. For a moment there, you thought of me as a human being and not a target you’d like to put an arrow through.”

  “Lies. I am imagining breaking your nose as we speak.”

  “I don’t think you are, princess.”

  “Don’t let my naturally sweet demeanor fool you.”

  “There is no chance of that,” he said.

  He didn’t know why, but he wanted to tease her. He wanted to make her smile. Because she never did. It was less perturbing than wanting to feel how soft her skin was beneath his fingers, anyway. So perhaps for now he would just focus on the smile.