The Solitary Sheikh

Of course she shouldn’t have said it. His Serene Highness Prince Omar ibn Daud stiffened—Jana didn’t think it was possible to get any stiffer than he already was, but he managed it—and stared at her from eyes as cold as the green, green sea.

“What is the matter, Miss Stewart?” He spoke with an accent, in a deep, hard, unresponsive voice.

“You were described to me as an influential Barakati family with mining interests!” she said.

There was an arrogant tilt to his head. “We own the gold and the emerald mines of the mountains of Noor.”

“Congratulations!” she said dryly. She was irritated by his icily arrogant manner. She realized that she had no idea how to greet a sheikh. Should she curtsey? She was pretty sure that the curtsey was a purely Western tradition, but the Eastern genuflection before princes, if her memory served, was the kind of prostration where you touched your nose to the ground, and that seemed too incongruous, even for the Dorchester.

“But I don’t want to work in a palace. And I do think I might have—”

Been warned, she was going to say, but he cut across her. “Why not?” His voice was flat, emotionless. Not even curiosity showed.

The interruption annoyed her, and she snapped, “Partly for all the reasons that make you think you can interrupt me whenever you like.”

He stared at her. “Miss Stewart, I do not understand your hostility. You seemed to my vizier very eager to take this job.” He glanced at Hadi al Hatim, but the old man, the suspicion of a smile at one corner of his mouth, was saying nothing. “What is the reason for your attitude?”

“I’ve just been body searched in the damned elevator,” Jana said, waving an indignant arm back towards the door. “There’s an army of bodyguards out there, and it turns out to be because you’re a prince, that’s the reason!”

“I have no army of bodyguards,” he informed her flatly. “You are not yet a member of my household staff. When you are, you will not be searched when you approach me.”

Approach me. He sounded like something out of the fifteenth century. “That’s not the point. The point is, I wasn’t told I was applying for a job in a royal family.”

“Now you have been told. You do not want the job?”

Faced with the stark decision, Jana suddenly, belatedly, began to think. To wonder if she was handling this in the best way. Not for nothing did her family and friends accuse her of impulsiveness.

One thing was sure—her mother and Peter would be quick to take advantage of her situation if she agreed with what His Serene Highness had just said and walked out of here.

“Well—I...” She hesitated and bit her lip.

The vizier intervened. “Miss Stewart, before this meeting, His Highness and I had decided that you were very much the best candidate for the job. If you are now determined not to take the job, there is nothing to be said. If you are in doubt, I suggest you sit down and discuss the matter.”

It was a very gracious way out.

“All right,” she said gratefully.

Prince Omar indicated the sofa and they sat down, the prince in a chair set at an angle to her. Hadi al Hatim retired to a window embrasure.

“In your last interview, I think, you were informed that the job requires that you will live with us, teaching two girls,” he said. “You are aware of their ages and their level of proficiency.” Although his use of English seemed very good, she sensed that he did not really feel comfortable with the language, and she wondered why.

“The only thing I wasn’t told about them, I think, was that they are princesses.” Jana looked into his eyes, and was locked by a gaze that seemed to both draw and repel her at the same time. She felt the surge of a mixture of feelings—surprise, confusion, discomfort, nervousness, irritation. “I’m right in that? They are your daughters?”

“Yes, they are,” he said, without any hint of parental feeling. Just stating a cold, hard fact. Jana wondered if there were someone with a little more warmth of feeling closer to the girls. “If you have questions, you may ask them now.”

“How much would you personally expect to dictate terms in my teaching?”

“Terms?” he repeated, frowning slightly. “We do not have school terms. The princesses are taught entirely by tutors within the palace. Most of them are now absent for the summer. I prefer that you start now because the princesses have been without English lessons for some months.”

She laughed lightly at the misunderstanding. “No, no, I meant...” She flailed for another way of explaining, and then gasped as his face hardened and his eyes glinted with cold rage.

“My English is very far from perfect, Miss Stewart. I hope you will not be moved to laugh at every error I will make.”

Jana sat up straight. “I was not laughing at any error!” she said indignantly.

Prince Omar raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “No? What caused your amusement?”

She gritted her teeth. “The mutual misunderstanding!”

“I see.”

“Do you forbid laughter in the palace?”

He sat for a moment watching her. She didn’t think she had ever seen such resignation in a human face.

“No, I do not forbid it,” he answered, but she could see that laughter rarely happened, even if it was not actively forbidden. She was starting to feel seriously sorry for his daughters, raised with such a curb as this cold-hearted father must place on their spirits.

“What are your daughters’ names?” she asked involuntarily.

His dark green gaze flicked briefly towards Hadi al Hatim and then back to her. “Masha and Kamala are their usual names.”

“Kaw-meh-leh,” she repeated carefully. “Masha. They’re both very pretty names.” She smiled. “Masha. Isn’t that Russian?”

“Masha is short for Mashouka, which means beloved in Parvani, my mother’s tongue. It is true that I spent many years in Russia. There it is short for Maria. But I did not intentionally give my daughter a Russian name.”

He sounded as though it would be the last thing he’d do. “If you hated it so much, why were you there?” she asked impulsively. Speaking without thinking was one of Jana’s most determined faults. By the time she reminded herself to think before she spoke, Jana had usually already spoken.

“I did not say I hated it.” Another glance at the silent vizier. “I attended univ—”

“But you did hate it.”

His eyelids drooped, as if to hide his reaction from her, and, released from his gaze, she suddenly was free to notice how physically attractive he was. His face and head were beautifully shaped, and both the curving eyelids and the full lower lip held a sensual promise. His beard gave him the look of a Hollywood pirate. But the coldness in his eyes seemed to undo all that.

He heaved an impatient sigh.

“Yes, I did hate it. Why do you insist on this, Miss Stewart? Is it important to you?”

Jana’s cheeks were suddenly warm. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He was watching her curiously. “Do you yourself have some connection with Russia?”

“None at all,” she replied hastily, hoping he would not press the point. She could hardly confess that she had felt an impulse to make him admit to some feeling! So the Prince of Central Barakat was withdrawn! It was not her business.

“Do you have a picture of them?” she asked.

“Of the princesses?” He frowned, as though the request was unusual. “I don’t know—” He turned in his chair and called to his vizier, “Do we have such a photograph, Khwaja?”

Hadi al Hatim smiled and crossed to the table in front of the sofa where they were sitting. He pulled a file out of a briefcase and extracted a colour ten-by-eight photograph, handing it to the prince. At that moment the Cup Companion who had searched her appeared at the door, and the vizier crossed the room and went out with him, closing the door behind him.