One Desert Night: Destined for the Desert King / Hidden in the Sheikh's Harem / Claimed by the Sheikh

‘It’s designed so that it won’t move or come loose—until...’

Just for a second the flying fingers slowed, stilled, came to a complete stop with the last couple of pins in their reach as Aziza struggled with the reality of just what was happening. Apprehension fought with anticipation, a wild, fizzing excitement at the thought that this man—her husband—really had wanted her, not her sister.

‘Done!’ she managed on a long exhalation of breath, taking the veil in one hand, lifting it, flinging it in the opposite direction to the pins so that it rose wildly into the air, hovered for a moment then drifted slowly and elegantly down to the floor like some giant gauzy cloud.

Then she turned to see Nabil, to meet his eyes, for once free and unrestricted by the concealing curtains.

And saw his whole face change. Saw every muscle draw tight over his harsh, etched bone structure, pulling the skin white around the nose and mouth. Saw the light fade from his eyes to be replaced by a heavy shadow that spoke of the exact opposite of what she had hoped to see in his reaction.

He even took a single step backwards, away and so much more distant from her than the paces between them. His obvious mental withdrawal was far, far worse than any physical response he had made.

‘Nabil...’

It was just a whisper, dragged from a mouth that was suddenly too dry to speak properly. Even as she said it, she was forced to wonder whether in fact that was the biggest mistake of all.

Had he given her permission to use his name? She’d thought he had, but as she met the polished jet darkness of those deep-set eyes she saw no lessening of the frozen coldness, no warming to soften them.

‘Sire...’ she tried again, anxious to repair the mistake—if a mistake it had been. Desperate to appease him she sank into a deep curtsey too, giving him the respect and deference he was owed as the Sheikh.

Her husband but still the Sheikh.

‘Sire...’ he muttered, echoing her shaken response with dark cynicism.

With a movement like the pounce of a hunting cat, he moved forward, reached for her left hand, grabbing it and lifting it from where it was partially hidden by the sweeping skirt of her wedding gown.

‘Sire,’ he said again and the danger in that dark tone drained all the power from Aziza’s legs so that she could only stay crouched halfway to the floor, staring with unfocused eyes as she watched him lift the hand he’d captured, turn it so that he could see it more clearly. His black frowning gaze fixed on the slightly damaged shape of her littlest finger and too late she realised that he had stared at it in something of the same way before. On the night on the balcony.

The night when she had told him...

‘Zia...’ Nabil said again, his tone turning the sound of her nickname into a fiendish curse. ‘Not Aziza—but Zia.’

He spat the word at her, not troubling to hide the fury he was feeling.

‘Hellfire and damnation—I have married the maid!’

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ud83f3334-bf69-53be-9535-2db87e0008f3)

HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION—I’ve married the maid!

Or have I?

Nabil tried to make his mind focus but nothing registered except the appalling truth of those seven impossible words. Was that his pulse thundering inside his head, beating at his temples, or had a storm really broken on the horizon, threatening to drown any attempt to think straight?

‘Who the hell are you?’

No—stupid question. He knew exactly who she was—or did he? Aziza, his arranged bride—or Zia, ‘just a maid’? Shaking his head violently as his scrambled brain refused to put any words together in a logical sequence, Nabil tried to enforce some control on the thinking processes that had been shattered by shock and savage rage. The fact that his body was still rock hard with desire only made matters even worse.

Just moments before he had been burning up with sexual hunger; turned on as he had never been before in his life. Now it felt as if someone had punched him right in the gut and the throbbing ache of frustration only soured his temper even more than the mental bruising.

‘Who?’

He got a grim sort of satisfaction from the way she started in nervous reaction as he flung the word into her white face. A face he’d been so impatient to see, never realising until too late that he’d seen it already, and so much more recently than the child Aziza he had been trying to remember.

Against the pallor of her skin, her golden eyes looked huge and dark, the lush fringes of her black lashes making them look even wider than before. He had been enchanted by those eyes that night on the balcony, he remembered. They had drawn him in like some witch’s spell woven deliberately around him. Was it then that the plan to deceive him had come to her mind—or was there some other way that this scheme had been created? A maid couldn’t have arranged all this by herself, could she? There had to be someone else behind all this. The answer seemed obvious.

How much had Farouk been planning all this time?

‘Who put you up to this?’

‘No one... I mean...’

For a moment it looked like she was about to get to her feet, then obviously thought the better of it. But the slight movement was enough to remind Nabil of the implications of the situation and to have him checking in the belt under his robe. Feeling the cool slide of metal there under his fingertips, he relaxed again and flung a repeat of the question at her with cold virulence.

‘I asked you—who?’

‘No one put me up to it.’

She’d regained some sort of strength in her voice and was able to make it sound as if she was actually defying him. He was glad to see that. He didn’t want to see her go down without a real contest. He wanted a worthy opponent to give him a chance to release some of the tumult of emotions he was feeling inside.

All he should be feeling was anger and betrayal. He’d been deceived again, trapped—this wasn’t Aziza, was it? But it was intensely disturbing to realise that there was so much more. The desire was only part of it.

‘It was you.’

‘Me! Are you mad, woman? Are you actually claiming that I...?’

Aziza—or Zia—or whatever her name was—had obviously had enough of being down on the floor. She put her hands to the floor and pushed herself upwards, scrambling to her feet as she faced him boldly, her neat little chin set into a firm declaration of defiance. Strangely, she looked even more defenceless standing before him like this when she had clearly tried to draw herself up to her full height.

‘You are the one who asked me—who picked me out as his prospective bride.’

‘Not you...’

He was remembering the moment when he had seen her and her mistress—Jamalia—through the two-way mirror, recalling the hot wave of physical hunger that had swept through him just from touching her, kissing her, on the balcony. The same hunger that had alerted him to the fact that something was not as he had anticipated when he had fed her the sugared grape at the banquet table.

When he had caught the scent of her perfume.

‘I never chose you.’

Aziza winced under the sting of that lashing dismissal. She had been so overjoyed to think that Nabil had chosen her. That he wanted her above all the other candidates. The beautiful women he could have chosen. Even her sister. But he had picked her. The one her father had always believed was second best.

But now Nabil was saying that he hadn’t chosen her—he didn’t even want her! Her mind flashed back to the scene in the crowded, brilliantly lit banqueting hall. The knowing looks of the guests who had watched as Nabil had stood up and grabbed hold of her hand.

She had thought she knew what that meant. She’d believed that very soon she would be a proper wife, sharing her husband’s bed. But now what would happen?

I never chose you.

How would she ever face everyone all over again and let them know that Sheikh Nabil—the man she had thought was to be her husband—had taken one look at her face and rejected her out of hand?

How could she go from being Queen one moment to a nobody—a rejected, spurned nobody—in less than a couple of hours? And how could she ever cope with knowing that Nabil had decided she was not the person he wanted? The thought of confronting her father’s rage at her failure was as nothing when compared with the prospect of having to leave now, when it had seemed that so much—her dreams and fantasies—had been within her grasp.