Sheikh's Forbidden Queen: Zarif's Convenient Queen / Gambling with the Crown

Zarif stretched out a slim tanned hand and closed it round hers to tug her closer. ‘So, you will marry me?’

‘But it won’t work...even for only a year,’ Ella protested weakly. ‘I won’t fit in.’

Eyes golden as the heart of a fire flamed over her troubled face. ‘You will fit in my bed to perfection,’ Zarif assured her and as panic and sexual awareness clenched her every muscle with raw tension Ella registered that that was really the only thought in his mind.

She stared up at him, almost mesmerised by his stunning gaze, and he lowered his head. His wide sensual mouth nuzzled against the corner of hers and she shivered, suddenly hot and cold inside her skin while little tingles of sexual awareness snaked through the lower part of her body. The scent of him was in her nostrils, a hint of some exotic spice overlaid with clean, husky male that was both familiar and dangerously welcome. His wide mobile mouth drifted across hers, his tongue breaking the seal of her lips and darting within, plunging deep in a single measured stab of eroticism before he pressed his hard mouth urgently to hers. That kiss was like being hit with white lightning, desire exploding within her like a fire ball, fiery tendrils of heat reaching low in her belly, and her knees trembled, her breasts swelling and nipples pinching tight.

Zarif lifted his handsome dark head and slowly drew in a deep breath to look down at her with hot possessive appreciation blazing in his golden eyes. ‘Yes, you will fit into my bed as though you were born to be there.’

In the aftermath, rage gripped Ella and she wanted to smack him across the face. For a split second she had lost control, indeed lost sight of everything because he had thrown her straight into that disturbing world of exciting sensation that she had almost forgotten. And she could have wept at that knowledge for she had diligently dated more than one attractive man over the past three years and not one of them had made her heart leap and her body tremble with a single kiss. At the same time she had no doubt that that brief embrace had affected Zarif on a much less high-flown level.

‘No, I wasn’t born to be in your bed... Azel was,’ Ella murmured flatly.

Disconcerted by the mere mention of Azel’s name, Zarif froze and shot an icy look of censure down at her. ‘You will not mention the name of my late wife or that of our child ever again,’ he warned her forbiddingly.

Well, at least she didn’t need to have any doubts about exactly where she stood in her future husband’s affections, Ella reflected grimly. But then that had been exactly why she didn’t marry the man she had once loved. Even seven years after her passing, Azel still ruled Zarif’s heart.

CHAPTER THREE (#u2a42d7ea-ba46-5596-b6c3-fb54d8fdfc89)

‘NO,’ ELLA TOLD her brother with quiet determination. ‘If you want to ask Zarif anything, you go and see him.’

‘And what use is that going to be? For goodness’ sake, you’re marrying the guy!’ Jason reminded her angrily. ‘Obviously you’ve got more sway with him than anyone else. Mum and Dad are over the moon and everything in everybody’s garden but mine is coming up roses. What about me?’

Ella studiously averted her gaze from her sibling’s furious face. Over the past three weeks everything had changed within the family circle. Once her father had heard his daughter’s news, he had made a steady recovery and had gratefully accepted Zarif’s contention that he could hardly let his future wife’s family either go bankrupt or lose their home. Zarif’s business manager, Yaman, had booked into a local hotel and the two men had worked out a viable rescue plan for the ailing firm. But right from that first day, all financial assistance on offer had been subject to the assurance that Jason would resign from the partnership and that her father would promise not to hire him again in any capacity. Gerald Gilchrist had duly given those guarantees and Jason had now officially left the firm. Her father had also insisted that Zarif’s aid be given in the form of a loan, which he intended to start repaying as soon as he could.

‘I’m sorry, Jason,’ Ella breathed uncomfortably. ‘Zarif isn’t a forgiving person.’

‘I’m out of a job and Dad thinks it would be easier all round if I move out of this house before your bloody ridiculous wedding!’ Jason snapped out resentfully. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

‘Look for a career that suits you. Something that isn’t financially orientated,’ Ella suggested ruefully.

Her brother stomped off. Ella’s mother, Jennifer, emerged from the kitchen and winced at the slam of a door overhead. ‘Thank you for taking the heat off me and your father. I don’t have the patience to listen to Jason’s bitter rants right now and I don’t want him making your father feel guilty again,’ she confided.

The older woman had lost weight since her heart attack, which was hardly surprising if one considered her mother’s new walking regime and healthier diet, Ella acknowledged fondly, relieved and proud of the way her mother had adapted to the challenge of changing her lifestyle.

‘I’m so looking forward to the wedding,’ Jennifer admitted happily. ‘It’s wonderful to have something to smile about again.’

And that was her parents’ attitude to her nuptials in a nutshell, Ella conceded wryly. They thought it was wonderful news that she was marrying Zarif. She had lied to them and they hadn’t suspected a thing was amiss. She had told them that she had turned down Zarif’s first proposal because she didn’t feel up to the challenge of the public role he was offering her and they had completely understood and accepted that explanation. In the same way it had been quite easy to persuade the older couple that once Zarif and their daughter had met again, they had recognised that their feelings were unchanged and had reconciled while deciding to waste no further time in getting married.

Ella’s personal feelings were exactly that: strictly personal. Jason, of course, who thought everybody thought the way he did, assumed she was marrying Zarif for his money. And, of course, in a twisted way, she was marrying him for his money, Ella acknowledged shamefacedly. Marriage was the price of protecting her parents from a nasty wake-up call at an age when they no longer had the time and strength to deal with such a colossal challenge. Ella was, however, willing and able to pay that price for the mother and father who had surrounded her with love from the day of her birth. As a boy, Jason might have been the favourite but Ella had never been short-changed when it came to parental care and attention.

The phone rang and her mother, still mistily smiling at the prospect of her daughter’s wedding, which was only three days away, answered it. ‘The wedding planner,’ she said, passing the receiver straight over to Ella.

Ella breathed in deep. Zarif had instructed his aide, Hamid, to put all the wedding arrangements in the hands of a top-flight professional, able to work to a very tight schedule and stage the wedding within weeks. A fixed smile tightening her tense lips, Ella listened to the planner’s dilemma on whether the napkins should be purple or plum in colour before admitting that she didn’t care which colour was chosen.

‘You’re the most easy-going bride I’ve ever worked for,’ the planner told her and not for the first time.

No, Ella was simply an unwilling bride, who, while prepared to play along with appearances for the sake of her parents, refused to pretend otherwise when it came to all the bridal decisions. A woman in love would want everything perfect and would have her own ideas. But Ella was not in love and no longer the dreaming romantic girl she had been at the age of twenty-one when she had fantasised about walking down the aisle clad in blinding white to greet Zarif.

She had taken the phone into the drawing room, which her parents only used when they entertained. As she hovered there she remembered her twenty-first birthday and the night when Zarif had first deigned to notice that she was alive and female. To her surprise, he had come to her party and he had given her a very pretty contemporary silver necklace and matching bracelet. Her heart had been hammering fit to burst while he stood there chatting to her and when he had invited her out for a meal the following evening, virtually announcing his new interest in her, it had been like her every dream coming true at once.

It was ironic, she had often thought, that Azel had been Zarif’s first love and that Zarif had then become Ella’s. Nobody knew better than Ella how desperately hard it was to shake free of the trappings of adolescent fantasy. Zarif had first come into her life when she was only seventeen and she had taken one dazed look at him and fallen like a ton of bricks. At that time, he had given her not the smallest encouragement. His eyes hadn’t lingered on her, he hadn’t flirted with her and he had never been alone with her but Ella had still lived for the weekends that Jason brought Zarif home with him. The boys her own age who paid attention to her had seemed like immature kids in comparison to Zarif, who had spent five years in his country’s army as a soldier before he came to the UK to study for a physics degree. His spectacular good looks, wonderful manners and exotic background had enthralled her.

On their first date he had kissed her and a whole other level of attraction had surged through her in response. She had felt things she had never felt before; she had felt her whole body light up like a blazing torch in his arms and afterwards that had become the bar other men had had to reach to impress her. Only none of them ever had, she conceded reluctantly. And that last kiss, the one in his hotel suite, had proved that Zarif still had the power to make her want to rip his clothes off. Uneasy with that reality, Ella paced the floor.

She had only spoken to Zarif a handful of times on the phone since she had agreed to marry him. He had returned to Vashir while she had been busy running after her parents, dealing with the wedding planner and persuading Cathy to hire someone to take her place rather than asking Ella to sell her share of the business to her. At least she would still have the shop to come home to in a year’s time, she reflected ruefully.

Would it even take a year for Zarif to decide that he had had his revenge and was now bored with it and her? What else could possibly be motivating him? She was the woman who had said no and evidently her value in his estimation had leapt sky-high at the same moment. She was convinced that had he slept with her three years earlier, he would no longer have wanted her. But what drove him hardest? Sexual hunger or a need for revenge?

Three years earlier he had been icily outraged by her gauche foot-in-the-mouth refusal of his proposal. He hadn’t been prepared for it, hadn’t foreseen that even though she was in love with him she had had doubts about whether she could successfully live in his world. So, although she had worded her misgivings clumsily and insulted him, her concerns had been genuine, and layered over the disappointment of learning that he had buried any ability to become emotionally attached to a woman in the grave with his first wife and child.

It totally amazed her that Zarif’s desire for her body could act as such a powerful incentive on him. How would he react when she proved inexperienced in his precious bed? Was sex really that important to him? And to offer her marriage on such a score? That was crazy, she thought ruefully, particularly as he presumably had no intention of working to establish a normal marital relationship with her. After all, in a year at most it would be over and she would be a divorcee back at home with her disappointed parents, probably using the excuse that her marriage had broken down because it had just been too difficult to surmount the differences between them in background and culture.

A year was such a short time, she told herself, surely it would pass quickly. Though a split second later she conceded that time never passed quickly though when you were unhappy. She would just have to hope that Zarif was prepared to put more effort into being married to her than his approach had so far suggested...

* * *

‘You need to get up,’ Cathy urged Ella, shaking her awake from a deep dreamless sleep.

Ella looked up drowsily at her best friend, a blonde with a spiky short haircut and bright brown eyes that were currently frowning. She was bemused by her tone of urgency. Cathy had stayed over and they had sat up late relaxing and talking. ‘What time is it?’

‘Only seven,’ Cathy confided ruefully. ‘My father came over with the morning papers and then the phone started ringing and that four-letter word has really hit the fan.’

Ella sat up and grabbed her dressing gown. ‘What are you talking about? It is my wedding day...isn’t it?’ she queried in a daze.

‘You should go downstairs. I’ll be tactful and stay up here,’ her friend told her uncomfortably. ‘My dad’s already gone home. There’s an utterly preposterous story about you in the newspaper and your parents are upset. There’s also a pack of photographers standing out on the drive and I think one of them has his finger stuck in the doorbell. I don’t know how you’ve slept through it all.’

‘Blame the large glasses of wine we shared. A story about me? Photographers? What on earth?’ Ella exclaimed, blundering into the bathroom to steal a moment in which to freshen up before starting down the stairs, noting that the curtains were still pulled in the lounge and also over the glass-panelled front door, cocooning the house in dimness. The phone was off the hook and the doorbell was ringing but seemingly being ignored.

There was a deathly hush inside the kitchen where a newspaper was spread open on the table. Her mother was mopping tears from her reddened eyes and her father was tense and flushed with annoyance.

‘What on earth has happened?’ Ella whispered.

‘Read that,’ her father told her, directing a look of angry revulsion at the newspaper.

It was a double-page spread in the Daily Shout, the most downmarket tabloid sold in the UK, and generally full of celebrity exposés of cheating married men and women. Scandals sold newspapers but Ella could think of absolutely nothing in her own life, aside of her upwardly mobile wedding plans, which could possibly have attracted such salacious media attention. She froze by the table, recognising the photos scattered at random across the article.

‘Where did they get those photos?’ she demanded in consternation, because they were family photos. There was one of her aged eighteen wearing a bikini on a Spanish beach holiday, another of her as a fair-haired toddler in her mother’s arms, yet another of her aged about ten in school uniform.

‘Jason must’ve taken them from the albums in the trunk in our bedroom,’ Jennifer Gilchrist opined heavily, ignoring her husband’s instant vocal denial of such a possibility. ‘It’s the only possible explanation for this. Nobody else would have known where to find those photos or had access to them.’

‘Why the devil would Jason launch a vicious character assassination on his sister on the very day of her wedding?’ Gerald Gilchrist demanded.

‘Because he’s very bitter and selling a sleazy story like that would have got him a lot of money,’ Ella’s mother breathed in a pained undertone. ‘Of course, he told a lot of lies to spice it up—it probably got him a bigger pay-out.’

‘Let’s not judge without proof,’ her father urged uneasily.

‘How much proof do you need, Gerald? He’s moved out into a flat we didn’t know he owned and he texted you to tell you he’d gone skiing yesterday.’ Jennifer Gilchrist sighed. ‘Where did he get the money to pay for an expensive holiday when he told us he was broke?’