The Sheikh's Virgin Bride

Ten thousand pounds. Petra felt sick. Her parents had left her a very generous trust fund, but until she turned twenty-five, there was no way she could raise such a large sum without the approval of her trustees—one of whom was her godfather, who was after all part of the reason why she needed to do this in the first place.

Her body slumped in defeat.

He was still walking away from her, and had almost reached the end of the beach. In another few seconds he would be gone.

Swallowing against the bitter taste of her own failure, she turned away herself.

CHAPTER TWO

REFUSING to give in to the temptation of watching him disappear, Petra fixed her gaze on the sea.

Most people, on first seeing her, assumed that Petra carried either Spanish or Italian blood in her veins. Her skin had a soft creamy warmth and her dark brown hair was thick and lustrous, her bone structure elegant and delicately patrician. Only her brilliant green eyes and the narrow straightness of her small nose, combined with her passionate nature, gave away the fact that she possessed Celtic genes, inherited through her American father’s Irish ancestry. Very few people guessed that her colouring came from an exotic blending of those genes with her mother’s Bedouin blood.

She could feel the evening breeze lifting her hair, its coolness raising tiny goosebumps on her skin, but they were nothing to the rash of sensation that flooded atavistically through her body as she suddenly felt the pressure of a male hand on the nape of her neck.

‘Five thousand, then—and the reason,’ a now familiar silken voice whispered in her ear.

He had come back! Petra didn’t know whether to be elated or horrified!

‘No haggling!’ the silken voice warned her. ‘Five thousand and the reason, or no deal.’

Petra’s throat had gone dry. She didn’t want to tell him, but what option did she have? And besides, what harm could it really do?

‘Very well.’

What was it that was making her voice sound so tremulous? Surely not the fact that his hand was still on her nape?

‘You’re trembling,’ he told her, so accurately tracking and trapping her own thoughts that his intuitiveness shocked her. ‘Why? Are you afraid? Excited?’

As he drawled the soft words with deliberate slowness, almost whispering into her ear, his thumb stroked against the side of her throat, trapping the pulse fluttering there.

Stalwartly Petra wrenched herself free and told him resolutely. ‘Neither! I’m just cold.’

She could see the taunting cruelty in the mocking curve of his smile.

‘Of course,’ he agreed. ‘So, you want me to publicly pursue and seduce you?’

He questioned her as though he had suddenly grown bored with tormenting her, like a domestic cat suddenly tiring of the prey it had caught as a plaything rather than for food. But this man was no domesticated fireside pet! No, everything he did had a raw, untamed danger about it, a warning of power mockingly leashed.

‘Why? Tell me!’

Petra took a deep breath.

‘It’s a long and complicated story,’ she warned him.

‘Tell me!’ he repeated.

Briefly Petra closed her eyes, trying to marshal her thoughts into logical order, and then opened them again, beginning quietly, ‘My father was an American diplomat. He met my mother here in Zuran when he was posted here. They fell in love but her father did not approve. He had other plans for her. He believes that it is a daughter’s duty to allow herself to be used as a pawn in her family’s empirebuilding.’ As she spoke Petra could hear the anger and the bitterness in her own voice, just as she could feel it surging inside her—a mixture of a long-standing old pain on behalf of her mother and a much newer, bitter anger for herself.

‘My grandfather refused to have anything to do with my mother after she ran away with my father. And he forbade his family—my mother’s brothers and their wives—from having anything to do with her either. But she told me all about him. How cruel he had been!’ Petra’s eyes flashed.

‘My parents were wonderfully, blissfully happy, but they were killed in an accident when I was seventeen. I went to live in England with my godfather who, like my father, is a diplomat. That’s how they met—when my godfather was with the British Embassy in Zuran. Everything was fine. I finished university and then I travelled with my godfather, I worked for an aid agency in the field, and I was…am planning to take my Master’s. But then…

‘A short time ago, my uncle came to London and made contact with my godfather. He told him that my grandfather wanted to see me. That he wanted me to come to Zuran. I didn’t want to have anything to do with him. I knew how much he had hurt my mother. She never stopped hoping that he would forgive her, that he would answer her letters, accept an olive branch, but he never did. Not even when she and my father were killed. He never even acknowledged her death. No one from my family here came to the funeral. He would not allow them to do so!’

Tears of rage and pain momentarily filled Petra’s eyes, but determinedly she blinked them away.

‘My godfather begged me to reconsider. He said it was what my parents would have wanted—for the family to be reconciled. He told me that my grandfather was one of the major shareholders in this holiday complex and he had suggested that both I and my godfather come and stay here, get to know one another. I wanted to refuse, but…’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘I felt for my mother’s sake that I had to come. But if I’d known then the real reason why I was being brought out here—!’

‘The real reason?’ There was a brusqueness in the male voice that rasped roughly against her sensitive emotions.

‘Yes, the real reason,’ she reiterated bitterly.

‘The day we arrived my uncle came here to the hotel with his wife, and his son—my cousin Saud. He’s only fifteen, and…They said that my grandfather wasn’t well enough to come, that he had a serious heart condition, and that his doctor had said that he needed bed rest and no excitement. I believed them. But then, when we were on our own together, Saud accidentally let the cat out of the bag. He had no idea, you see, that I didn’t know what was really going on!’

Petra shook her head as she heard her voice starting to tremble. ‘Far from merely wanting to meet me, to put right the wrong he had done to my parents, what my grandfather actually wants is to marry me off to one of his business partners! And, unbelievably, my godfather actually thinks it’s a good idea.

‘Although at first he tried to pretend that I had got it wrong and misunderstood Saud, in fact my godfather thinks it’s so much of a good idea that right now he’s incommunicado in the far east—on official diplomatic business, of course—and he’s taken my passport with him! “Just meet the chap, Petra, old thing.”’ She mimicked her godfather’s cut-glass upper class British voice savagely. ‘“No harm in doing that, eh? Who knows? You might find you actually rather like him. Look at British nobility. All from arranged marriages, and with pretty good results generally speaking. All that love tosh. Doesn’t always work y’know. Like to like, that’s what I always say—and from what your uncle has to say—it seems like this Sheikh Rashid and you have lots in common. Similar cultural heritage. Bound to go down well with the Foreign Office. And the Prime Minister…awfully keen on that sort of thing, y’know. I’ve heard it on the grapevine that the White House is one hundred per cent behind the idea.”’

‘Your grandfather wants you to marry a man who is a fellow countryman of his, and a business colleague, as a PR exercise for diplomatic purposes? Is that what you’re telling me?’ He cut across Petra’s angry outburst incisively.

Petra could hear the cynical disbelief in his voice and didn’t really blame him for his reaction.

‘Well, my godfather would like me to think that’s the only motivation for my grandfather’s behaviour, but of course he isn’t anything like so high-minded or altruistic,’ she told him scathingly.

‘From what I’ve managed to find out from Saud, my grandfather wants me to marry this man because as well as being a fellow shareholder in this complex he is also very well connected—is in fact related to the Zuran Royal Family, no less! My mother was originally supposed to marry a second cousin of the Family before she met and fell in love with my father. Her father—my grandfather—considered it to be a very prestigious match, and one that would bring him a lot of benefits. I suppose in his eyes it is only fitting that since he couldn’t marry my mother off to suit his own ends I should now take her place as a…a victim to his greed and ambition!’

‘Does your mixed heritage disturb you?’ His unexpected question threw Petra a little.

‘Disturb me?’ She tensed, anger and pride ignited inside her. ‘No! Why should it?’ she challenged him. ‘I am proud to be the product of my parents’ love for one another, and proud to be myself as well.’

‘You misunderstand me. The disturbance I refer to is that caused by the volatile mixing of the coldness of the north with the heat of the desert; Anglo Saxon blood mixed with Bedouin, the hunger for roots and the compulsion that drives the nomad and everything that those two polar opposites encompass. Do you never feel torn, pulled in two different ways by two different cultures? A part of both of them and at the same time alien to them?’

His words so accurately summed up the feelings that had bedevilled Petra for as long as she had been able to recognise them that they stunned her into silence. How could he possibly know that she felt like that? The tiny hairs on her skin lifted as though she were in the presence of a force she could not fully understand—a strength and insight so much more developed than her own that she felt in awe of it.

‘I am what I am,’ she told him firmly as she fought to ignore the way he was making her feel.

‘And what is that?’

Anger darkened her eyes.

‘I am a modern, independent woman who will not be manipulated or used to serve the ends of a machiavellian old man.’

She could see the shrug he gave.

‘If you do not want to marry the husband your grandfather has chosen for you then why do you simply not tell him so?’

‘It isn’t that easy,’ Petra was forced to admit. ‘Of course I told my godfather that there was totally and absolutely no way I was going to agree to even meet this man. Never mind marry him. That was when he announced that he had to leave for the far east and that he was taking my passport with him. To give me time to get to know my grandfather and to rediscover my cultural heritage, was how he put it, but of course I know what he’s really hoping for. He’s hoping that by leaving me here, at my grandfather’s mercy, he will be able to pressure me into doing what he wants. My godfather retires next year, and no doubt he’s hoping that the government will reward him for his work—including arranging a high-profile marriage to Sheikh Rashid—with a Peerage in the New Year’s honours list. And what makes it even worse is that, from what my cousin Saud has told me, it seems the whole family believe I should be thrilled to think that this…this…man is prepared to consider marrying me,’ Petra concluded bitterly.