Rumours: The Billion-Dollar Brides: The Desert King's Blackmailed Bride (Brides for the Taking) / The Italian's One-Night Baby (Brides for the Taking) / Sold for the Greek's Heir (Brides for the Takin

‘Perhaps we will discuss that tomorrow,’ Rashad fielded without batting a single lush black eyelash.

‘You do realise,’ Polly whispered, because that hard-eyed brunette she couldn’t quite warm to was seated only ten feet away, ‘that you are making me want to thump you again? I thought it might be my high temperature that caused my loss of temper yesterday but I can now see that it was merely you being you—’

A brilliant smile unexpectedly stole the grim aspect from his lean, dark, brooding features. ‘Me being me?’ he queried with perceptible amusement in a clear encouragement for her to expand on her feelings.

‘Horribly bossy. And I can see you’re used to people doing exactly as you say—’

‘Because I am the King,’ Rashad filled in helpfully.

‘But you’re not my King.’ Polly made that distinction with a slow sweet smile of mingled exasperation and reluctant amusement.

When he saw that smile, Rashad froze and leant back into his chair, squaring his shoulders while he wondered if she was flirting with him. Probably not, his brain told him. The British women he had been intimate with a few years earlier had used methods that were considerably more direct to attract and hold his attention.

‘But you are still my guest,’ Rashad retorted with lashings of cool. ‘And the Dharian rules of hospitality are strict. One should never make a guest uncomfortable—’

‘But you’re doing exactly that right now!’ Polly hissed at him in frustration.

His long brown fingers clenched taut round the cutlery. He tore his gaze from her lovely face, painfully aware that she made him very uncomfortable. With the discipline of years strengthening him, he studied his plate and he ate in complete silence.

‘In fact, you’re only making me want to stick a fork in you,’ Polly whispered across the table.

And that was it—Rashad lost that minor battle. A wholly inappropriate laugh broke from his lips when he failed to stifle his enjoyment. Polly studied him in surprise and then encountered the brunette’s chilling appraisal, which suggested that amusing the King could well be a capital offence.

‘We will talk again tomorrow,’ Rashad informed her quietly as they vacated the table they had shared.

Polly had to forcibly put a lid on her growing frustration with him. She was being too polite, she told herself. He had blocked her questions and refused to discuss the matter of the ring or tell her when she could leave. But did that really matter? After all, she was being treated like an honoured guest. Staying in the lap of luxury in a truly magical royal palace, another little inner voice chipped in gently, was scarcely a penance. It was a gift to be housed in such a gorgeous building, to be waited on hand and foot and to be wonderfully well fed. How could she possibly form a bad opinion of her host? It wasn’t as though she had been stashed in some primitive prison cell. Moreover she was being granted an intriguing glimpse of a very different and far more colourful lifestyle.

Satisfied by that more positive take on her unexpected stopover in a royal dwelling, Polly wandered off to enjoy all that the exotic palace had to offer. She ignored the troop of men, armed to the teeth, and the maid following close behind her, and roamed from the magnificent desert views available from the recently built rooftop terrace down through the state rooms, with their superb intricate brass-covered arched doors and elaborate interiors, right down to the kitchen, with its army of busy staff, who fell silent and froze in shock when she first appeared.

With the maid acting as an interpreter, Polly ended up seated in yet another shaded courtyard, being plied with chilled strawberry and honey tea and an array of fantastic little pastries. Somewhere about then she decided that she was having a truly wonderful holiday even if it was not advancing her an inch in her unlikely search to find out more about her father.

Possibly that had always been an unrealistic goal, she thought in disappointment. Too much time had passed. How did she even risk voicing the name she had been given when the poor man might not be her father at all and was probably long since married? She didn’t want to upset anyone and the mother she barely remembered had been sufficiently dysfunctional in her relationships even with her own family that she did not feel she could place much faith in Annabel Dixon’s judgement.

* * *

Later that afternoon a dialogue that would have very much shocked Polly was about to take place. Hakim had collected the DNA results and had received such a shock that he had passed much of the afternoon at prayer, wrestling with his guilt and with sentiments it was too late to express. Having unburdened himself, he had then received a shock almost as great when events that had taken place a quarter of a century earlier were clarified for him by an unexpected source. Sharing that information with his King was almost more than Hakim could bear but he did not have a choice.

‘Our guest is your granddaughter?’ Rashad repeated with incredulity. ‘How is that even possible, Hakim?’

The older man sighed heavily. ‘At the time my son Zahir died we were estranged. That has been a lifelong source of regret to me. I was aware that he was involved with the nanny but I also suspected her of having other male interests on the staff at the time. I knew that my son wished to marry her and he refused to listen to my objections. I urged him not to marry her—citing the example of my own parents, who married across the cultural divide—and my son took offence.’

Rashad was silent while his trusted adviser unburdened his troubled conscience. Zahir had been Hakim’s only child and that much more precious for that reason, and the day after the death of Rashad’s family Zahir had died heroically trying to defend the palace and its inhabitants from Arak’s squad of hired mercenaries.

‘And now you see the consequences of my miscalculation. I spoke to my son from my head instead of from my heart. He loved this woman and she was already pregnant. He would not have told me that,’ Hakim acknowledged hoarsely, his emotions roughening his usually steady voice. ‘When the nanny vanished after his death I never thought about her again...why would I have? But I have only now learnt that Zahir married her privately and secretly only the day before he died. May I humbly request some time off to go home and discuss this astounding discovery with my wife—?’

‘Of course,’ Rashad breathed tautly, struggling to absorb the apparent truth that Polly, in spite of her misleading colouring, actually carried Dharian blood in her veins. ‘But who does she resemble?’

‘My mother,’ Hakim confided tremulously. ‘That hair. I should have suspected it the instant I laid eyes on her. I must also ask you to put all matters pertaining to my grandchild and the current unrest in the streets in the hands of my two deputies, because I am no longer a suitably independent and disinterested third party—’

‘That I refuse to do,’ Rashad responded instantaneously. ‘I trust you as I trust no other man close to me.’

‘You do me great honour in saying so but I—’

‘Go home to your wife, Hakim,’ Rashad urged gently. ‘For today at least put family first and official duty second.’

Freed from the risk that Polly could be a half-sibling, Rashad smiled thoughtfully. Well, surprisingly, he was her King because although she did not know it her paternity granted her dual citizenship. He wished he could tell her that but it was her grandfather’s right to break such news, not his.

* * *

The following morning other concerns swiftly consumed him when one of Hakim’s aides brought the most popular newspaper in Dharia to him. The secret of Polly’s true name on her passport was a secret no longer and it was just the kind of nonsense liable to inflame the superstitious with fanciful ideas. A single king, a single woman named Zariyah after his great-grandmother, the return of the Hope of Dharia... Such coincidences were being interpreted as supernatural signposts of heavenly endorsement in the home of his birth.

Rashad heaved a sigh. It was little wonder that Polly’s birth name was now being chanted in the streets. He could not possibly let her leave the palace, for there was no chance of her enjoying an anonymous holiday after her passport photograph had been printed in the newspaper. Proving that the hysteria was generalised throughout every strata of Dharian society, the usually sensible editor had totally ignored all safety concerns when he put such information into the public domain.

And Rashad’s day only darkened in tenor when he was informed that an official from the British Embassy was currently waiting to be seen. The diplomatic incident that Hakim had feared was beginning to happen...

Polly was watching the local television station as she ate her breakfast and wishing she could speak the language. She had tried and failed to access a European television channel. But she did not need Arabic to recognise that the massed crowds in the streets of the capital city were on the edge of overexcited. She wished she could read the placards some of them carried and waved along with the Dharian national flag.

Having promised to phone Ellie again, she did so. Her sibling startled her by admitting that she had spoken to a man from the Foreign Office and that official enquiries were being made about her so-called arrest and imprisonment at the royal palace.

‘Oh, my goodness, Ellie!’ Polly fielded in consternation. ‘How could you do that? I’m having a really interesting time here—’

‘This ring business you’re involved in stinks to high heaven of some sort of a cover-up. I don’t think you have a clue what’s happening out there. As usual you’re just sailing along and letting people push you around—’

Polly let her sister state her case and finally agreed that it was time she returned to the holiday she had booked and that she would demand the right to leave the palace and return to Kashan. Before she could lose her nerve she used the palace switchboard and asked to be put through to the King, wryly amused by her own daring.

‘I have to speak to you,’ Polly declared boldly as soon as she heard his dark deep drawl. ‘And as I may shout, it would be better if we didn’t have an audience.’

At his end of the phone, Rashad almost groaned out loud for palace protocol stated that he should never ever be left alone with a member of the female sex. He knew it was to protect him from the slurs and scandals caused by his father’s debauchery but it was not easy to escape the tightly linked net of strict procedure.

‘Meet me on the roof terrace,’ he urged abruptly. ‘I hear you were there yesterday and it is shaded. I’ll join you as soon as I can.’

The strangest shred of compassion infiltrated Polly. It was clearly a no-no for him to meet up with her alone. When did the Dharian King ever get to be alone? She had seen the security team that followed him everywhere he went and she wondered what it was like to live in such a goldfish bowl where every word and every action was monitored.

Polly left her room and told the maid she wanted to walk alone. The three men guarding her room studied her in wonderment but when she moved off, she was not followed and relief spread through her because she felt really free for the first time within the royal walls with no one watching over her.

The shade on the roof terrace took what she believed to be a rather odd form. A giant tent had been set up at one corner. Within it opulent floor cushions surrounded a fire pit and there was an array of the implements she assumed were required to brew the traditional tea. Walking out of the bright sunshine, Polly sank down with relief on a cushion to enjoy the view. It was fifteen minutes before Rashad appeared through another entrance onto the terrace.

‘We are breaking rules,’ he told her with a sudden flashing smile of such charisma that her heart jumped inside her. ‘This is not allowed.’

‘Sometimes it’s fun to break rules,’ sensible Polly heard herself say dry-mouthed because for the first time Rashad was wearing traditional clothing, a muslin cloth bound by a gold rope hiding his black hair, a pristine white long buttoned robe replacing Western clothing. And that cloth merely accentuated his stunning dark eyes and arresting bone structure, so that breathing was barely an option for her as he sank with fluid animal grace down opposite her.

‘And sometimes there is a price to pay for breaking those rules,’ Rashad murmured with wry amusement. ‘Why did you want to speak to me?’

‘I want to leave the palace and start my holiday,’ Polly told him simply, even though she knew that somewhere down deep inside her she really didn’t want that at all. It was the rational thing to do, she reminded herself doggedly. She did not belong in a royal palace.

Rashad linked long brown fingers and flexed them. ‘I’m afraid I can’t agree to that.’

He even had beautiful hands, Polly was thinking abstractedly before she engaged with what he had actually said and it galvanised her into leaping upright in disbelief. ‘So, I am a prisoner here?’ She gasped in horror that her sister could have been correct in her far-fetched suspicions.