The Ice Maiden's Sheikh

“And what were you saying to me not twenty minutes ago?” she shrieked. “Were you advising me not to marry Michael, or was I hallucinating? You would be a fool to marry this man!” she cited sharply. “Was that what you said, or do I misquote you?”

His eyes met hers, and she sensed a kind of shock in his gaze. A muscle in his cheek twitched, but whether with annoyance or an impulse to laugh she couldn’t tell. It was funny, but she was too annoyed to find it so.

“You blame your cousin for not giving serious consideration to your doubts about her engagement, but you do not listen to my doubts about yours. Who has the double standard now?” he said, with the air of a man pulling a brand from the burning.

Laughter trembled in her throat, but she was afraid of letting her guard down with him. Jalia bit her lip.

“Great! We’re both hypocrites,” she said, shaking her head.

Instead of making a reply to that, Latif jerked forward to stare out the window.

“Barakullah!” he breathed.

He had turned into the wide boulevard that led down to the seafront. At the bottom was the broad, sparkling expanse of the Gulf of Barakat, and miles of bright sky.

Jalia narrowed her eyes against the glitter. Off to the right a forest of silver masts marked the yacht basin.

“A yacht!” she cried. “Of course! I’ll bet she knows someone on a boat—maybe some friend even sailed over for the wedding. The perfect hide—”

“Look up,” Latif interrupted. He stretched an arm past her head, pointing into the sky, where a little plane glinted in the sun as it headed up the coast towards the mountains.

“That plane? What, do you think—?”

“It is Bari’s plane.”

Jalia gasped hoarsely. “Are you sure?”

“We can confirm it soon enough.”

“But what—?” Jalia fell silent; there was no point babbling questions to which neither of them had answers.

Latif turned the car along the shore highway. After a few minutes he turned in under an arched gateway in a high wall, and she saw a small brick-and-glass building and a sign announcing the Island Air Taxi service to the Gulf Eden Resort.

Out on the water several small planes were moored, bouncing gently in the swell. Latif stepped on the brakes and pointed again. Ahead of them on the tarmac, carelessly taking up three parking spaces, as if the driver had been in too much of a hurry to care, sat a large white limousine, parked and empty.

They slipped out of the car.

“Is that it? Is that the al Khalids’ limousine?” she asked.

He nodded thoughtfully.

“My God,” Jalia breathed. She felt completely stunned. She stared up at the glinting silver bird in the distance. “Is Noor at the controls, do you think? Why? Where can she be going? And where’s Bari?”

Latif turned his head to run his eyes over the half dozen other cars in the lot, then shook his head.

“His car is not here.”

She stared up at the plane as if the sight of it would tell her something. A gust of wind struck her, blowing the green silk tunic wildly against her body. She felt a blast of fine sand against her cheek.

Latif stiffened to attention beside her. He was still looking into the sky, but not at the plane. Frowning, Jalia turned her head to follow his gaze.

In the past few minutes a mass of cloud had boiled up from behind the mountains, and even as she watched it was growing, rushing to shroud the sky over the city.

Over the water the sky was still a clear, hot blue, but that couldn’t last. Jalia turned her head again to stare at the plane, watching anxiously for some sign that it was banking, turning, that the pilot had seen the clouds building and made the decision to put down again.

But the little plane, the sun glinting from its fat wings, sailed serenely on.

Five

There was little sleep for anyone in the palace that night. The phones rang constantly, with family and friends in the country and abroad calling for news, calls from officials organizing the search team, and journalists around the world clogging up the line asking for details of Princess Noor’s Fatal Peril.

Everybody felt worse when the couple’s disappearance began to be announced on repeated television news bulletins in the early evening and the announcer’s voice resonated with the kind of gravity that meant he thought Princess Noor was probably dead.

But they couldn’t just turn it off. It was entirely possible that some reporter would get wind of a search team discovery and broadcast the news before the family was notified. The regular announcements became a horrible kind of compulsive listening for them all as more and more journalists joined the fray.

On the breakfast terrace early the next morning, bleary-eyed but unable to sleep, and fed up with the constant insensitive badgering, Jalia delivered herself of a few blistering comments to one journalist and hung up the phone to find Latif watching her.

He was silhouetted against the morning sun, and she couldn’t see his expression. She dropped her eyes and picked up her coffee.

“Is there any news?” she asked. The question had taken on the impact of ritual. They were all constantly asking it of each other.

“Have you heard that the Barakat Emirates have sent a couple of planes to join the search this morning?”

Jalia nodded.

Latif set something on the ground, then moved over to pour himself a cup of coffee. “Then there’s no news.”

“God, how I hate sitting here doing nothing more productive than fielding calls from the media. If only there was something to do!” she exploded. Part of the emptiness she felt was the letdown after the blizzard of wedding preparations, of course. But Jalia was also missing the hard, rewarding work of her university life.

Latif remained standing, resting his hips back against the table, gazing out over the courtyard. He swirled the coffee in his cup.

“Well, why not?”

Jalia looked up, and his eyes turned to her with a hooded expression she couldn’t fathom. “What do you mean, why not?” Suddenly her eye fell on the case he had set down by a column. She frowned in sudden dismay.

“Are you leaving?” How could he go when they were in such trouble? Bari was one of his closest friends!

He took another sip of coffee. “I’m going to drive up into the mountains to ask in the villages whether anyone saw or heard a plane coming down in the storm.”

She stared at him, the fog of a sleepless night abruptly clearing from her brain. “What a brilliant idea!” she breathed. “I wish I could do something useful like that!”

Latif shrugged as if she impressed him not at all. “Why don’t you?”

“It would take me a week to decipher the answers.” The mountain dialects of both Bagestani Arabic and Parvani, Bagestan’s two languages, were very different from what was spoken in the cities, and Jalia had trouble enough even in the city.

Latif said nothing, merely turned, set down his cup, and rang the bell. A servant came out and asked what he would eat. Latif shook his head.

“I don’t want food, thanks, Mansour,” he began in Arabic. “You have a son named Shafi.”