The Sultan's Choice

24 hours later

‘I’M not going to marry you.’

Sadiq’s mouth was open and he was already smiling urbanely in anticipation of the Princess’s acquiescence—already thinking ahead to buying her a trousseau and getting her out of those unflattering suits. Her bottom had barely touched the seat of the chair opposite him. He frowned. Surely she couldn’t have just said—

‘I said I don’t want to marry you.’

Her voice was low and husky, but firm, and it tugged somewhere deep inside him again. Sadiq’s mouth closed. She sat before him like a prim nun, hair pulled back and dressed in a similarly boxy suit to the one she’d worn yesterday. This one was just a slightly darker hue of blue. Not a scrap of make-up enhanced those pale features or those aquamarine eyes. Disconcertingly, at that moment he noticed a splash of freckles across her delicately patrician nose.

Freckles. Since when had he noticed freckles on anyone? Any woman of his acquaintance would view freckles with the same distaste as acne. Something nebulous unfurled within Sadiq, and he sat back and realised that it was a surprise—because it was so long since anyone had said no to him. Or been so reluctant to impress him. Princess Samia’s chin lifted minutely, and for a second Sadiq could see her innately regal hauteur. She might be the most unprepossessing princess he’d ever met, but she was still royalty and she couldn’t hide it.

The thin line of her mouth drew his focus then, and bizarrely he found himself wondering how full and soft those lips would be when relaxed … or kissed. Would they be pink and pouting, begging for another kiss?

Samia could see the conflict on the Sultan’s face, the clear disbelief. That was why she’d repeated herself. It had been as much to check she hadn’t been dreaming. She was trembling all over like a leaf. She’d tossed and turned all night and had kept coming back to the stark realisation that she really did not have a choice.

But when faced with Sadiq again, and the clear expectation on his face that she was there to say yes, she had felt some rebellious part of her rise up. This was her only chance of escaping this union. She crushed the lancing feeling of guilt. She couldn’t worry now about the fallout or she’d never go through with it. The thought of marrying this man was just so downright threatening that she had to do something—no matter how selfish it felt.

Sadiq’s voice rumbled over her, causing her pulse to jump. ‘There’s a difference between not marrying me, and not wanting to marry me. One implies that there is no room for discussion, and the other implies that there is. So which is it, Samia?’

Samia tried to avoid that searing gaze. He was sitting forward, elbows on his desk, fingers steepled together. The way he said her name made her feel hot. She was already unravelling at the seams because she was facing this man again, even though the heavy oak desk separated them. Even the threat to her sister wasn’t enough right now to make her reconsider. She’d cross that bridge if it came to it.

He hadn’t kept her waiting today. He’d been waiting for her. Standing at his window like a tall, dark and gorgeous spectre. And now he was utterly indolent—as if they might be discussing the weather. He wore a shirt and no tie. The top button was undone, revealing the bronzed column of his throat. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, showing off muscled forearms more suited to an athlete than a head of state. Samia felt unbearably restless all of a sudden.

Abruptly she stood up, wanting to put space between them. She couldn’t seem to sit still around this man, and she couldn’t concentrate while he was looking at her like that—as if she were under a microscope. So clinically.

She went and stood behind the chair, breathing erratically. ‘Discussion …’ she finally got out. ‘Defintely the discussion one.’

Great. Now she couldn’t string a sentence together—and what was she doing, encouraging a discussion with one of the world’s greatest debaters? She paced away from the chair, feeling constricted in her suit. She’d never been as self-conscious about what she wore as she had been in the last thirty-six hours. Samia had always been supremely aware of her own allure, or more accurately the lack of it, and was very comfortable with a uniform of plain clothes to help her fade into the background. Or at least she had been till now.

She avoided his eye. ‘Look, I know you need a wife, and on paper I might look like the perfect candidate—’

Sadiq cut in with a low voice. ‘You are the perfect candidate.’ He stifled intense irritation. She was the only candidate. After carefully vetting potentially suitable brides from his world and dismissing them, she was the only one he’d kept coming back to. And once he’d set his mind on something he would not rest until he had full compliance. Failure was not an option.

Samia turned back to face him, and quailed slightly under the glowering look he was sending her. ‘But I’m not! You’ll see.’ She searched frantically for something to say. ‘I don’t go out!’

‘A perfectly commendable quality. Despite what you’ve been led to believe, I’m not actually the most social of animals.’

Samia forced her mind away from that nugget of information. This man and a quiet evening in by the fire just did not compute. ‘You find it commendable that I don’t have a life? That’s not something to applaud—it’s something to avoid. How can I be your queen when the last party I was at was probably yours? You must have parties every week—you move in those circles. I wouldn’t know what to do … or say.’

Samia’s tirade faltered, because the Sultan had moved and was now sitting on the edge of the desk, one hip hitched up. She swallowed and wished he hadn’t moved. Heat was rising, and dimly she wondered if he had any heating on.

‘Of course you’d know what to do and say. You’ve been brought up to know exactly what to do and say. And if you’re out of practice you’ll learn again quickly enough.’

Samia choked back her furious denial. She ran a hand through her hair impatiently, which was something she did when she was agitated. She forgot that it was tied back and felt it come loose but had to ignore it.

She faced him fully. ‘You really don’t want me for your wife. I don’t like parties. I get tongue-tied when I’m faced with more than three people, I’m not sophisticated and polished.’ Like all your other women. Samia just about managed not to let those words slip out.

Sadiq was watching the woman in front of him with growing fascination. She wasn’t sophisticated and polished—and he suddenly relished that fact for its sheer uniqueness. She was literally coming apart in front of him, revealing someone very different from the woman she was describing. He agreed with absolutely everything she was saying—apart from the bit about her not being a suitable wife.

‘And yet,’ he drawled, ‘you’ve been educated most of your life in a royal court, and your whole existence has held within it the potential for this moment. How can you say you’re not ready for this?’

Samia could feel the unfashionably heavy length of her hair starting to unravel down her back. Her inner thermostat was about to explode. With the utmost reluctance she opened her jacket, afraid that if she didn’t she’d melt in a puddle or faint.

Before she could stop him Sadiq was reaching out and plucking the coat from her body as easily as if she were a child, placing it on the chair she’d vacated. Too stunned to be chagrined, Samia continued, ‘You need someone who is used to sophisticated social gatherings. I’ve been in libraries for as long as I can remember.’

The ancient library in the royal Burquat castle had always been her refuge from the constant taunting of her stepmother, Alesha. She started to pace again, disturbed by Sadiq’s innate cool.

‘You need someone who can stand up to you.’ She stopped and stood a few feet away, facing him. She had to make him see. ‘I had a chronic stutter until I was twelve. I’m pathologically shy. I’m so shy that I went to cognitive behavioural therapy when I was a teenager to try and counteract it.’ Which had precipitated another steady stream of taunts and insults from her stepmother, telling her that she would amount to nothing and never become a queen when she couldn’t even manage to hold a conversation without blushing or stuttering.

Sadiq had stood up and come closer to Samia while she’d been talking. He was frowning down at her now, arms folded across that impressive chest. ‘You don’t have a stutter any more, and I’d wager that your therapist, if he or she was any good, said that you were just going through a phase that any teenager might go through. And plenty of children suffer from stuttering. It’s usually related back to some minor incident in their childhood.’

Samia blinked. She felt as if he could see inside her head to one of her first memories, when she had been trying to get her new stepmother’s attention and was stuttering in her anxiety to be heard. She would bet that he’d never gone through anything like that. But he’d repeated more or less exactly what her therapist had said. It was so unexpected to hear this from him of all people that any more words dried in her throat as he started to move around her.

Sadiq was growing more intrigued by the second. Her hair had come completely undone by now, and it lay in a wavy coil down her back. His fingers itched to reach out and loosen it. It looked silky and fragrant … a little wild. It was at such odds with that uptight exterior.

So close to her like this, for the first time he noticed the disparity in their heights. She was a lot smaller than the women he was used to, and he felt a surprising surge of something almost protective within him. With the jacket gone he could see that she was slight and delicate, yet he sensed a strength about her—an innate athleticism. He could see the whiteness of her bra strap through her shirt, and how her shirt was tucked into the trousers, drawing his eye to a slim waist and the gentle flare of her hips. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a prospective lover so demurely dressed, and that thought caught him up short. She was to be his wife. Lovemaking would be purely functional. If he got any enjoyment out of it, it would be a bonus.

He came to stand in front of her and could see where she’d opened the top button of her shirt, revealing the slender length of her neck right down to the hollow at the base of her throat. It looked pink and slightly dewed with moisture. She must be hot. He had the most bizarre urge to push her shirt aside and press a finger there. His eyes dropped again, and he could see very plainly the twin thrusts of her breasts, rising and falling with her breath and fuller than he had first imagined.

To his utter shock, the unmistakable and familiar spark of desire lit within him. With more difficulty than he would have liked, he brought his gaze back up to hers and felt a punch to his gut at the way those aquamarine depths suddenly looked as dark blue as the Arabian sea on a stormy day. Tendrils of hair were curling softly around her face, and she looked softer, infinitely more feminine. In fact in that moment she looked almost … beautiful. Sadiq reeled at this completely unexpected development.

Samia was helpless under Sadiq’s assessing gaze. No man had ever looked at her so explicitly, his gaze lingering on her breasts like that. And yet she wasn’t insulted or shocked. A languorous heat was snaking through her veins. She was caught in a bubble. A bubble of heat and sensation. As soon as he had walked behind her she’d had to undo her top button because she couldn’t breathe—she’d felt so constricted. And now he was looking at her as though … as though—

‘You say I need someone to stand up to me and that’s what you’ve been doing since yesterday.’ His beautifully sculpted mouth firmed. ‘It’s a long time since anyone has refused my wishes. I encounter people every day who are overawed and inhibited by what they perceive me to be and yet I don’t get that from you.’ Before Samia could articulate anything, he continued. ‘Very few people would feel they had the authority to do that, but we’re the same, Princess Samia, you and I.’

Samia nearly blanched at that. If there was one thing she was sure of, it was that she and this man were not the same. Not in a million years. Polar opposites. ‘We’re not the same,’ she got out painfully. ‘Really, we’re not.’

He ignored her. ‘I know you’ve got a closely knit and loyal group of friends.’

Without a hint of self-pity and vaguely surprised that he knew this, she said, ‘That says more about who I am and the background I come from than anything else.’ Remembering one painful episode in college, she went on, ‘I could never fully trust that people weren’t making friends just because they thought they could get something out of me.’ When he still looked unmoved she said desperately, ‘I’m boring!’

He arched an incredulous brow. ‘Someone who is boring doesn’t embark on a three-woman trip across the Atlantic in a catamaran made out of recycled materials in a bid to raise awareness about the environment.’

Samia was immediately disconcerted. ‘You know about that?’

He nodded and looked a little stern. ‘I think it was either one of the most foolhardy or one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen.’

She flushed deeper and couldn’t stop a dart of pleasure rushing through her at the thought she’d earned this man’s admiration. ‘I care about the environment … The other two were old friends from college, and they couldn’t raise the funding required on their own … But once I got involved …’ Her voice trailed off, her modesty not wanting to make it sound as if she’d been instrumental in the project.

Sadiq rocked back on his heels. ‘I have a well-established environmental team in Al-Omar that could do with your support. I often find I’m too tied up with other concerns to give it my full attention. We’ve both grown up in rarefied environments, Samia, both grown up being aware of public duty. If anything, your teenage and childhood experiences will make you more empathetic with people—an essential quality in any queen.’

Samia objected to his constant avowal of partnership, and the tantalising carrot of being able to work constructively for the environment, but her attempt to halt him in his tracks with a weak-sounding ‘Sadiq …’ made no impact.

‘You might find social situations intimidating, but with time they’ll become second nature. Also, you can’t deny that having grown up as a princess in a royal court you are aware of castle politics and protocol. You would have learnt that by osmosis. These are all invaluable assets to me in any marriage I undertake. I don’t have the time or the inclincation to train someone.’

Samia blinked up at him again. She couldn’t deny it. As much as she might want to. Even though she’d spent her formative years avoiding her stepmother, she knew castle politics like the back of her hand—she’d had to learn to survive. Her knowledge of the things he spoke had been engraved invisibly on her psyche like a tattoo from birth.

‘I want to create a solid alliance between Al-Omar, Merkazad and Burquat. We live in unstable times and need to be able to depend on each other. Marrying you will ensure a strong alliance with your brother. I already have it with Merkazad. Your father’s rule put Burquat firmly in an isolated position, which did your country no favours. Thankfully your brother is reversing that stance. I don’t see how you have any grounds at all—apart from your own personal concerns—to believe that you are not fit to become my queen, and in so doing ensure the future stability of your country.’