The Sheikh's Virgin

If she’d never disobeyed her father…

If she’d never snuck out to attend something forbidden…

If she’d never gone where good Barakan girls shouldn’t go…

But that was all years ago and this was now and Keira Gordon’s fingers felt nerveless as they wrapped tightly around the telephone. “I’m not marrying him. I can’t marry him, Father. It’s impossible.”

Omar al-Issidri drew a short, impatient breath. “The only thing impossible is that you’re twenty-three and still single! You’re shaming our family, you’re shaming our name.”

Keira knew in Baraka young women married early to protect their reputations, but Keira wasn’t Barakan. She’d never been Barakan. But she wasn’t English, either, despite having spent the majority of her life in Manchester with her liberal, intellectual mother.

“He’s a prominent man, Keira. Connected, powerful, influential—”

“I don’t care.”

Silence stretched across the phone line. “You must understand, Keira, that this is important. It’s important for all of us. You need to marry. Sidi Abizhaid has chosen you. You should be flattered by his interest.”

Her father wasn’t listening to a thing she said. But according to her mother, her father never did listen to anyone, at least not to any woman, which was only one of the reasons her mother had left him all those years ago.

Keira rubbed her forehead. She cared about her father, she did, but her father had no idea how Western she was, how removed she’d become from the veiled life of Baraka, a North African kingdom filled with rose tinted mountains, golden sand dunes and beautiful port cities more European than Middle Eastern. “I live in Dallas, Father. I have a job here. I have wonderful friends here, people who really care about me—”

“But no husband.”

“I don’t want a husband.” Exasperation sharpened her voice. “I’ve barely finished school, haven’t even begun to establish myself in my career.”

“Career?”

“Yes. I want a career. I’ve a good brain—”

“This is your mother’s doing. I should have never allowed her to take you out of the country. I should have kept you here, with me. She wasn’t fit to be a parent.”

Overwhelmed by a rush of anger, Keira bit her tongue. Both of her parents had played games, both had used her in a vicious tug-of-war between them.

“Marriage is an honor,” her father added now. “And a good marriage would bring honor to all of us.”

Not to me, she answered silently, savagely, feeling a rise of fierce emotion, the emotion tied to memories so old it was as if they’d been with her always. “I’ve no desire to marry,” she repeated, voice strangled. “It’s not something I’ve ever wished for myself.”

“But it’s something I’ve wished for you. You are my only child. You are my future.”

“No.”

He made a rough sound, part irritation part anger. “Don’t shame me, Keira al-Issidri. Do not shame the family.” The warning was clear and while she felt her father’s frustration, there was nothing she could do about it. She could never be what he wanted her to be.

She could only be herself. And what she was, who she’d become, was unacceptable in Baraka.

But her father didn’t know… Her father would never know.

With a glance at her wristwatch, she noted the late hour, felt a twinge of panic at the thought of the traffic if she didn’t leave immediately. “I have to go. I can’t be late for work.”

“Work? What work do you do on a Sunday morning?”

One more thing her father didn’t know about her. It seemed her father knew nothing about who she really was. “I dance.”

Critical silence stretched across the phone line. Her father had never approved of her ballet training but his opposition had grown worse as she hit adolescence. When she turned twelve he wanted the classes to stop but she wouldn’t. And then a year later when he discovered she didn’t just take lessons with boys at the Royal Ballet School, but performed on stage as Clara in a Christmas production of the Nutcracker, he’d threatened to return her to Baraka. Immediately. Permanently.

No daughter of his would wear a leotard and tights in public.

No daughter of his would be touched—even if partnered in a pas de deux—by a member of the opposite sex.

And her mother, always defiant, never intimidated, had crumbled.

It was her mother, her fierce rebel radical mother, who made Keira stop dancing. You don’t want to antagonize your father. He isn’t like us. He could do anything if provoked…

After eight years of daily lessons at the school, after years of loving, living, breathing ballet, after eight years where the smooth hardwood floors, the smell of rosin, the slippery satin of her pale pink pointe shoe ribbons, the intense discipline of barre work before floor work were more familiar than her own home, she’d dropped her lessons. Like that.

“I thought you gave up your dancing,” her father said now.

“I did,” Keira answered softly. And it had killed her. Broken her heart. But her mother wouldn’t relent and her father had been pleased and it was just another example of the way her parents had warred. What she wanted, needed, hadn’t ever figured in the equation. Her parents’ fights and decisions were based on their personal agendas. Their own ambition. And both had been hugely, voraciously ambitious.

“I do have to go,” she added, knowing that nothing her father could say would change her mind. In America she’d finally found peace—acceptance—and there was no way in hell she’d ever return to Baraka.

It wasn’t that Baraka wasn’t beautiful, or the mix of cultures—Berber, Bedouin, Arab and European—hadn’t created a fascinating landscape of language and customs. But in Baraka, women were still protected, sheltered, segregated, and she’d spent too many years in England and America to ever live that way again.

“Keira, you cannot ignore your responsibility.”

She felt a weight settle on her, felt the cultural differences between them stretch, vast, unapproachable, endless. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in arranged marriages. I don’t find it acceptable, even if most Barakan girls do.”

Heavy silence stretched between them. At last Omar al-Issidri spoke. “Twenty-four hours, Keira. That’s all I give you.”

“No.”

“I’m not asking. I’m telling you. You will return within twenty-four hours or I will have you returned to me.” And he hung up.

For a moment Keira could only stare at the phone before slowly hanging up. Her father couldn’t be serious. He couldn’t intend to drag her forcibly home…

Numbly she gathered her duffel bag and purse and headed for her car. Her hands shook on the steering wheel as she drove to the football stadium in thick game day traffic. Marry someone she didn’t know? Marry a Barakan leader just because her father said so?

With one eye on traffic and the other on her mobile phone’s keypad, she punched in her father’s phone number.

“I can’t believe you’re serious,” she said as soon as her father answered. “I can’t believe you’d threaten me with such a thing. I’ve never lived in Baraka. I haven’t visited in seven years—”

“Yet you are Barakan whether you admit it or not. And I’ve been patient with you. I’ve allowed you to conclude your studies in the States, but you’ve finished your coursework, it’s time you came home.”

“Baraka isn’t my home!” She quickly shifted down the gears, coming to a stop as the heavy traffic ground to a standstill turning the four-lane highway into a sea of red brake lights.

“You were born in Atiq. You spent your childhood here.”

“Until I was four.” And yes, she might have been born in the coastal city of Atiq, the sprawling capital of Baraka, where the buildings were all whitewashed, and the streets narrow and winding, but she was English, not Barakan. And her memories of Baraka were the memories of a visitor, a guest, memories generated from her annual visit to her father’s home.