The Sheikh's Impetuous Love-Slave

French! Watching the head tribesman rubbing his hands together, Khalid wondered if the fool had any idea of the predicament this unwanted gift of theirs had placed him in. He bowed. ‘Prince Khalid al-Raqam of Lash’aal.’

A prince! She should have guessed from that haughty stance. Well, prince or no, he had not the right to hold her against her will. Juliette tilted her chin. ‘These men have kidnapped me. I demand that you set me free.’

Definitely French, and judging by the sound of her voice, and that superior air of hers, a well-born mademoiselle to boot. The diplomatic implications could be severe. ‘Where did you find her? How long ago?’ Khalid demanded curtly.

‘By the sea, Highness,’ the head tribesman replied, keeping his eyes cast firmly at his prince’s feet. ‘A month ago, thrown ashore by a storm.’

A whole month! Could it get any worse? Khalid swore silently. ‘What happened to the others?’ he asked, addressing Juliette in her own language.

His French was flawless, softly accented. The question brought a brief, horrible memory of the storm, the screeching of the wind as it ripped through the sail of the dhow, the screams of the crew, her own urgent entreaties to Papa to leave his precious artefacts, to save himself. He hadn’t of course. The rogue wave which had tossed her to shore had also sent Papa and the trunk full of carefully garnered relics to the bottom of the Red Sea. In death, as in life, Papa had put his lost civilizations first. ‘Lost, all of them, including my father,’ Juliette said, biting her cheek.

‘I am sorry,’ Khalid said, touched by the effort she was making not to cry. ‘What of the rest of your family, where are they?’

‘Family?’ Juliette shook her head, swallowing the lump in her throat caused by his too-obvious sympathy. Though Papa had been well-born, when he made archaeology his career rather than a mere gentlemanly interest, his family had disowned him. Juliette had never met any of her relatives, nor had Papa encouraged her to show any interest in them. So used was she to considering herself alone in the world—for Papa, by his own admission, was more her mentor than her parent—that she had come to think it quite normal, unless it was brought to her attention. She did not like to have it brought to her attention, and so she shrugged. ‘I have no other family. My mother died when I was a baby. It has always been just Papa and me.’

Though much of the time, Juliette admitted sadly to herself, especially when she was little, Papa had barely noticed her. It was only as she grew old enough to be of use that he took control of her education, though his purposes were self-serving rather than altruistic, his teaching confined to his own field. In his daughter’s views on anything outside the world of archaeology, he had no interest. Juliette doubted he even knew whether she preferred tea or coffee, Rousseau or Voltaire. Certainly, he would have considered both questions irrelevant.

Prince Khalid was looking at her strangely. ‘No husband?’ he asked with a raised brow. ‘That is surely rather…unusual?’

Juliette bristled. She was aware that her life had been unconventional, but it was all she knew. Though she herself had begun to question it, she did not relish a complete stranger doing so. ‘All my life, I have helped Papa with his work. Important work, far more important than a mere husband. I have no time for such things. I earned the right to be treated as an equal by Papa and his assistants.’

Eyeing the extremely shapely female body beneath the tattered remnants of her clothing, Khalid found this rather difficult to believe. Catching the lascivious look of the tribesmen as they ogled her, he felt a stab of anger at his subjects’ lack of manners, but also at this odd female’s naïveté.

‘She is very pretty, no?’ the tribesman said with a wink in Juliette’s direction.

‘Son of a camel,’ Juliette spat at him, ‘how dare you look at me like that!’

The tribesman moved quickly to the side as Juliette aimed a kick at him, hampered by her bonds. ‘As you can see, Majesty, she has a fine, fiery spirit.’

‘I hope,’ Khalid said coldly, ‘that you have treated her with the respect due to a foreign visitor to my kingdom.’

The tribesman gave a nervous laugh. ‘Such a temper she has, my men would not dare go near her. Truth be told, Majesty, we are glad to be rid of the little wildcat. Only a prince such as you, Mighty One, can tame her, bring her to heel,’ he said with an unconvincing smile and a sideways glance at Juliette.

‘Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?’ Juliette demanded of Khalid. ‘What is he saying about me, that man who has a goat for a father?’ Though her hands were still bound, she looked so fierce that the tribesman shrank away. ‘For a month, they have kept me tied up like an animal. I demand that you tell me….’

‘Enough!’ Khalid clapped his hands together so loudly that Juliette fell abruptly silent. ‘You are in no position to make demands, mademoiselle. I did not ask for you, and by the gods, I wish you had not been given to me, but you are now, by the laws of Lash’aal, my property. Payment for a debt of honour, ‘ he explained grimly. ‘Despite their ramshackle appearances, these men represent a powerful tribe. It would be unwise of me to offend them by refusing their gift.’

It would indeed be most unwise. In fact, the situation was extremely tricky, and Khalid could not help blaming the female gazing belligerently up at him for causing it. Why did she have to wash up on his coastline? By accepting her, there was a risk her government might think him complicit in her imprisonment. He would have to think very carefully indeed about the best way to return her to the French Consulate in Cairo.

Turning back to the tribesmen, Khalid decided to dispense with at least one part of the problem. ‘I consider the debt now paid in full. You may go with my thanks. Take my honoured guests away, Farid, and see that they are well fed and watered before their return journey.’

‘Yes, Highness. And the—the female?’ Farid replied, casting Juliette a pointed glance.

‘I will deal with Mademoiselle Montignac,’ Khalid replied grimly. ‘Just get them out of here.’

The room emptied quickly. Alone with Prince Khalid in the vast, strange space, the light refracting and reflecting off the multitude of mirrors, Juliette tried desperately to think of her next move. Her insides might well be churning with dread, her knees unaccountably like jelly and worryingly unwilling to support her, but support her they must. All she had were her wits, and she must at all costs keep them about her. A frisson of awareness, like the wind rippling over the soft sand of a dune, made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up as Prince Khalid turned the full blaze of his piercing blue eyes on her.

At four and twenty, Juliette’s experience of men other than those involved in her father’s excavations was extremely limited. It occurred to her now as she tried to rally her flagging spirits, that the man eyeing her with what looked horribly like contempt might not share her enthusiasm for Papa’s profession. The unofficial war being waged between the British Consul General Henry Salt and the one-time French Consul General Bernardino Drovetti had forced Papa to break all his own rules, excavating and smuggling artefacts without permission. It was extremely likely that this Prince Khalid would see this as nothing more than looting. Papa, who was usually so adamant about things remaining in the place where they had been found, had compromised almost every principle of his in the past year or so. When he had drowned, he had been a bitter, disillusioned man.

‘Montignac,’ Khalid said musingly. ‘That is what you said your name was?’

Juliette nodded warily.

Khalid frowned. ‘What were you doing in my country?’

Juliette hesitated. They had not had official permission for their latest foray, had been coerced by the French Consulate into taking advantage of the confusion caused by the sudden death of the kingdom’s prince, Asad al-Muhanna, and the unexpected succession of his brother Ramiz. ‘We were in A’Qadiz, not Lash’aal, which I think is the kingdom adjoining yours. Papa is…was—he worked for the French government,’ she said cautiously.

‘A diplomat? Sent to pay his respects to the new ruler, perhaps? I believe Prince Ramiz has spent much time in the West as his brother’s emissary.’

The words formed, but Juliette hesitated to speak them. She was a very poor liar. ‘Not exactly,’ she said uncomfortably.

‘You said you helped him, your father? In what role, precisely?’ Khalid tapped one long finger on the hilt of his scimitar. ‘Montignac. Montignac. Montignac! Of course. Jean-Louis Montignac. The archaeologist. That was your father?’

‘Oui.’

‘Your father was one of those tomb raiders who rape our country of its history, and you, by your own admission, his companion in crime. Does Prince Ramiz of A’Qadiz even know you were within his kingdom’s boundaries?’

Though her inclination was to leap to Papa’s defence, the knowledge that he had, in fact, been operating illegally made Juliette hesitate. This prince did not look like a man to tolerate lies, and she knew, in any case, how transparent she was when she told them. She bit her lip.

‘I assume from your silence that the answer to that is no,’ Khalid snapped, appalled at this further complication. ‘I presume also, that you thought to take advantage of the fact that Prince Ramiz is too distracted by the conflicts which have arisen as a result of his brother’s death, to worry about being invaded by looters. What is it about you Westerners that you think you have the right to pillage any part of the world in which you set foot? You may rest assured, mademoiselle, that I will inform Prince Ramiz myself of your intrusion. He will want to know what was illegally and forcibly taken.’

‘What my father took from A’Qadiz is at the bottom of the sea along with my Papa.’ Tears started in her eyes, but Juliette brushed them away angrily with the back of her bound hands. ‘It’s true. He did take things without asking permission, but only because he was forced to, and he only selected the least valuable,’ she said fiercely. ‘What he cared about more than anything—what he taught me to care about—was knowledge. Who were these people, he asked. How did they live, what gods did they worship, what did they believe in, how were these things passed from one civilization to another? Whether an amulet was bone or gold, whether an idol was studded with jewels or formed from clay, it was what it represented, not what it would fetch in a market which mattered. I don’t care if you believe me or not, but it is the truth. Now he is dead, and there will be others with far fewer principles sent to replace him.’

Her passionate plea surprised him, for she articulated exactly what he felt himself about Persimmanion and all the other sites here in Lash’aal, but the fact remained, she and her father had been stealing. ‘I can guarantee that our borders will not be so easily breached as those of A’Qadiz,’ Khalid replied. ‘We are quite capable of looking after our own treasures without the help of your Western experts.’

‘Sans doute you will treat them all as well as me,’ Juliette threw at him. ‘Perhaps when they hear that their fate is to be held prisoner by savages and given away like a slave they will not come.’

Her refusal to back down infuriated him. There was something about this feisty, altogether wholly unusual female, with the mind of a man, the manners of an infidel and the body of an odalisque, that set his blood aflame. He was wholly unused to being challenged, and entirely unprepared for the source of the challenge to be a mere woman. ‘Perhaps,’ Khalid retorted furiously, driven beyond logical thought in his sudden burning need to bring her to heel, ‘we would treat them more hospitably if they waited upon an invitation.’

Without really thinking what he was doing, wanting only to cow her, Khalid pulled the little dagger, which nestled in the hilt behind his scimitar, from his belt.

Chapter 2

He intended only to free her, and was irked with himself for not having done so immediately, but as he advanced on her, Khalid found he was even more annoyed with Juliette than he’d realized. The defiance in those clear grey eyes of hers could not be ignored. Her face was gamine rather than beautiful, but the way she held herself, just exactly as he would himself under such circumstances, bold and proud, and the surprisingly lush curves of that taut body, roused in him more than just admiration. Desire, like a sharp flash of desert lightning, jolted through him. It didn’t occur to him that he might frighten her. He would have been appalled if it had, would have ceased immediately, but it simply did not. It was the sheer challenge of her, crying out to the innate conqueror in him, which made him raise the dagger higher.