The Sheikh's Chosen Wife

‘Come in, shut the door, then tell me how you would feel about committing a minor piece of treason?’ Hassan smoothly intoned.

Below the white gutrah a pair of dark eyes glinted. ‘Sheikh Abdul?’ Rafiq questioned hopefully.

‘Unfortunately, no.’ Hassan gave a half smile. ‘I was in fact referring to my lovely wife, Leona…’

Dressed for the evening in a beaded slip-dress made of gold silk chiffon, Leona stepped into a pair of matching beaded mules then turned to look at herself in the mirror.

Her smooth russet hair had been caught up in a twist, and diamonds sparkled at her ears and throat. Overall, she supposed she looked okay, she decided, giving the thin straps at her shoulders a gentle tug so the dress settled comfortably over her slender frame. But the weight she had lost during the last year was most definitely showing, and she could have chosen a better colour to offset the unnatural paleness of her skin.

Too late to change, though, she thought with a dismissive shrug as she turned away from her reflection. Ethan was already waiting for her outside on the terrace. And, anyway, she wasn’t out to impress anyone. She was merely playing stand-in for her father who had been delayed in London due to some urgent business with the family lawyer, which had left her and her father’s business partner, Ethan, the only ones here to represent Hayes-Frayne at tonight’s promotional dinner.

She grimaced as she caught up a matching black silk shawl and made for her bedroom door. In truth, she would rather not be going out at all tonight having only arrived back from San Estéban an hour ago. It had been a long day, and she had spent most of it melting in a Spanish heatwave because the air-conditioning system had not been working in the villa she had been attempting to make ready for viewing. So a long soak in a warm bath and an early night would have been her idea of heaven tonight, she thought wryly, as she went down the stairs to join Ethan.

He was half sitting on the terrace rail with a glass in his hand, watching the sun go down, but his head turned at her first step, and his mouth broke into an appreciative smile.

‘Ravishing,’ he murmured, sliding his lean frame upright.

‘Thank you,’ she replied. ‘You don’t look so bad yourself.’

His wry nod accepted the compliment and his grey eyes sparkled with lazy humour. Dressed in a black dinner suit and bow tie, he was a tall, dark, very attractive man with an easy smile and a famous eye for the ladies. Women adored him and he adored them but, thankfully, that mutual adoration had never raised its ugly head between the two of them.

Leona liked Ethan. She felt comfortable being with him. He was the Hayes in Hayes-Frayne, architects. Give Ethan a blank piece of paper and he would create a fifty-storey skyscraper or a whole resort complete with sports clubs, shopping malls and, of course, holiday villas to die for, as with this new resort in San Estéban.

‘Drink?’ he suggested, already stepping towards the well stocked drinks trolley.

But Leona gave a shake of her head. ‘Better not, if you want me to stay awake beyond ten o’clock,’ she refused.

‘That late? Next you’ll be begging me to take you on to an all-night disco after the party.’ He was mocking the fact that she was usually safely tucked up in bed by nine o’clock.

‘Do you disco?’ she asked him curiously.

‘Not if I can help it,’ he replied, discarding his own glass to come and take the shawl from her hand so he could drape it across her shoulders. ‘The best I can offer in the name of dance is a soft shoe shuffle to something very slow, preferably in a darkened room, so that I don’t damage my ego by revealing just how bad a shuffler I am.’

‘You’re such a liar.’ Leona smiled. ‘I’ve seen you dance a mean jive, once or twice.’

Ethan pulled a face at the reminder. ‘Now you’ve really made me feel my age,’ he complained. ‘Next you’ll be asking me what it was like to rock in the sixties.’

‘You’re not that old.’ She was still smiling.

‘Born in the mid-sixties,’ he announced. ‘To a free-loving mother who bopped with the best of them.’

‘That makes you about the same age as Hass…’

And that was the point where everything died: the light banter, the laughter, the tail end of Hassan’s name. Silence fell. Ethan’s teasing grey eyes turned very sombre. He knew, of course, how painful this last year had been for her. No one mentioned Hassan’s name in her presence, so to hear herself almost say it out loud caused tension to erupt between the both of them.

‘It isn’t too late to stop this craziness, you know,’ Ethan murmured gently.

Her response was to drag in a deep breath and step right away from him. ‘I don’t want to stop it,’ she quietly replied.

‘Your heart does.’

‘My heart is not making the decisions here.’

‘Maybe you should let it.’

‘Maybe you should mind your own business!’

Spinning on her slender heels Leona walked away from him to go and stand at the terrace rail, leaving Ethan behind wearing a rueful expression at the severity with which she had just slapped him down.

Out there at sea, the dying sun was throwing up slender fingers of fire into a spectacular vermilion sky. Down the hill below the villa, San Estéban was beginning to twinkle as it came into its own at the exit of the sun. And in between the town and the sun the ocean spread like satin with its brand-new purpose-built harbour already packed with smart sailing crafts of all shapes and sizes.

Up here on the hillside everything was so quiet and still even the cicadas had stopped calling. Leona wished that she could have some of that stillness, put her trembling emotions back where they belonged, under wraps, out of reach from pain and heartache.

Would these vulnerable feelings ever be that far out of reach? she then asked herself, and wasn’t surprised to have a heavy sigh whisper from her. The beaded chiffon shawl slipped from her shoulders, prompting Ethan to come and gently lift it back in place again.

‘Sorry,’ he murmured. ‘It wasn’t my intention to upset you.’

I do it to myself, Leona thought bleakly. ‘I just can’t bear to talk about it,’ she replied in what was a very rare glimpse at how badly she was hurting.

‘Maybe you need to talk,’ Ethan suggested.

But she just shook her head, as she consistently had done since she had arrived at her father’s London house a year ago, looking emotionally shattered and announcing that her five-year marriage to Sheikh Hassan ben Khalifa Al-Qadim was over. Victor Frayne had tried every which way he could think of to find out what had happened. He’d even travelled out to Rahman to demand answers from Hassan, only to meet the same solid wall of silence he’d come up against with his daughter. The one thing Victor could say with any certainty was that Hassan was faring no better than Leona, though his dauntingly aloof son-in-law was more adept at hiding his emotions than Leona was. ‘She sits here in London, he sits in Rahman. They don’t talk to each other, never mind to anyone else! Yet you can feel the vibrations bouncing from one to the other across the thousands of miles separating them as if they are communicating by some unique telepathy that runs on pure pain! It’s dreadful,’ Victor had confided to Ethan. ‘Something has to give some time.’

Eventually, it had done. Two months ago Leona had walked unannounced into the office of her family lawyer and had instructed him to begin divorce proceedings, on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. What had prompted her to pick that particular day in that particular month of a very long year no one understood, and Leona herself wasn’t prepared to enlighten anyone. But there wasn’t a person who knew her who didn’t believe it was an action that had caused a trigger reaction, when a week later she had fallen foul of a virulent flu bug that had kept her housebound and bedridden for weeks afterwards.

But when she had recovered, at least she’d come back ready to face the world again. She had agreed to come here to San Estéban, for instance, and utilise her design skills on the completed villas.

She looked better for it too. Still too pale, maybe, but overall she’d begun to live a more normal day to day existence.

Ethan had no wish to send her back into hiding now she had come out of it, so he turned her to face him and pressed a light kiss to her brow. ‘Come on,’ he said briskly. ‘Let’s go and party!’

Finding her smile again, Leona nodded her agreement and tried to appear as though she was looking forward to the evening. As they began to walk back across the terrace she felt a fine tingling at the back of her neck which instinctively warned her that someone was observing them.

The suspicion made her pause and turn to cast a frowning glance over their surroundings. She could see nothing untoward, but wasn’t surprised by that. During the years she had lived in an Arab sheikhdom, married to a powerful and very wealthy man, she had grown used to being kept under constant, if very discreet, surveillance.

But that surveillance had been put in place for her own protection. This felt different—sinister. She even shivered.

‘Something wrong?’ Ethan questioned.

Leona shook her head and began walking again, but her frown stayed in place, because it wasn’t the first time she’d experienced the sensation today. The same thing had happened as she’d left the resort site this afternoon, only she’d dismissed it then as her just being silly. She had always suspected that Hassan still kept an eye on her from a distance.

A car and driver had been hired for the evening, and both were waiting in the courtyard for them as they left the house. Having made sure she was comfortably settled, Ethan closed the side door and strode around the car to climb in beside her. As a man she had known for most of her adult life, Ethan was like a very fond cousin whose lean dark sophistication and reputed rakish life made her smile, rather than her heart flutter as other women would do in his company.

He’d never married. ‘Never wanted to,’ he’d told her once. ‘Marriage diverts your energy away from your ambition, and I haven’t met the woman for whom I’m prepared to let that happen.’

When she’d told Hassan what Ethan had said, she’d expected him to say something teasing like, May Allah help him when he does, for I know the feeling! But instead he’d looked quite sombre and had said nothing at all. At the time, she’d thought he’d been like that because he’d still been harbouring jealous suspicions about Ethan’s feelings for her. It had been a long time before she’d come to understand that the look had had nothing at all to do with Ethan.

‘The Petronades yacht looks pretty impressive.’ Ethan’s smooth deep voice broke into her thoughts. ‘I watched it sail into the harbour tonight while I was waiting for you on the terrace.’