Читать книгу The Desert Lord's Love-Child - Кейт Хьюит, Оливия Гейтс - Страница 13

“Will you need anything else, ya Somow’el Ameerah?”

Carmen squinted up at the thin, dark, bird-of-prey-like man who stood above her, body language loud with deference.

He’d called her Somow’el Ameerah. Again. She couldn’t get her head around it. Wondered if she ever would.

It had been Somow’el Ameer Farooq this and Somow’el Ameer Farooq that since they’d set foot outside her building. All the way out of the country. It had taken his word—well, under a dozen words—to get her out of there. It had taken even less to make her Somow’el Ameerah. Highness of the princess. Her royal highness in Arabic. He’d waved his magic wand and made her a princess….

It had really happened. He’d stormed into her life, had uprooted her existence all over again.

He’d literally uprooted it this time. He’d snatched her from her home, from her country, from everything she knew, had soared with her to the unknown. And she had a feeling she’d never be back. Not for more than visits anyway. And since she had no one to visit anymore, she doubted she’d even be back at all …

Her lungs emptied as another breaker of anxiety slammed into her, pushing her under, the foreboding of stepping into the quicksand of Farooq’s existence pulling at her, the forces synergizing, paralyzing her under their onslaught.

Oh God, what had she let herself in for?

She was on board his jet, on her way to Judar. There was no going back, no way out, now or ever …

“Ameerati?”

The concern in that word slowed down the spiral of agitation. The man with the hawk’s face and eyes was doing it again. Probing her with solicitude, scanning her with an insight she’d bet could read her thoughts. She’d also bet he’d seen through Farooq’s declaration that he’d reclaimed his wife and child, ending the misunderstanding that had led to their separation.

She remembered him well. He’d been there from the first time she’d seen Farooq, his shadow. Hashem. Farooq had told her to ask Hashem for anything in his absence. He was the only one Farooq trusted implicitly, in allegiance and ability, discretion and judgment.

Had he trusted him with the truth? Or had the shrewd man worked it out for himself? Or was everything obvious to everyone?

What did any of that matter? Hashem would take what he thought to his grave, would reinforce his prince’s version of the truth with his last breath. No one else would dare even think but what Farooq had declared to be the truth.

“Ameerati—are you maybe suffering from air-sickness?”

Carmen winced at his gentleness. It made her realize how raw she was, how vulnerable she must seem to him. She shook her head.

His gaze was eloquent with his belief that she needed many things but couldn’t bring herself to ask for any.

“Please, don’t hesitate to ask me anything at all. Maolai Walai’el Ahd wants you to have all you need till he rejoins you.”

Smart man. Being the über P.A. that he was, he knew the best way to make her succumb to his coddling was invoking his master’s wishes, the master he’d called …

Maolai Walai’el Ahd.

Carmen started, the three words that had flowed on his tongue with such reverence erasing all she’d heard before and after them, blasting away what remained of her fugue, blaring in her mind.

Had she misheard? Was her Arabic translation center offline …?

She’d heard just fine. All her senses had been functioning to capacity since she’d set eyes on Farooq. In fact, she felt she was developing hypersensory powers. Everything was amplified, sharpened, heightening the impact of every stimulus, yanking responses from her that ranged from agitation to anguish.

Her translation center was fine, too. That was the sturdiest part in her brain. She understood what Maolai Walai’el Ahd meant all right. It was literally my lord successor of the Era. Aka, crown prince.

Farooq was the crown prince now?

But how? A year and a half ago, he’d been only second-in-line to the throne of Judar. What had happened to the first-in-line?

This information jogged another in her mind, igniting it with new relevance. The king of Judar was ill. From all reports there wasn’t much optimism regarding his return to health. And if he died …

Farooq would soon become king of Judar.

And she’d graduate from plain Ms. Carmen McArthur to somow’el Ameerah to Maolati’l Malekah in no time flat.

Malekah. Queen. Yeah, sure.

The preposterousness of the whole thing burst out of her.

Hashem’s dark eyes rounded at her outburst. Self-possessed as he was, she’d managed to shock him.

Yeah, him and her both. In fact, the cackles tearing out of her shocked her more than they could him.

“Ameerati?”

His bewilderment, the way he kept calling her “my princess,” spiked the absurdity of it all. She spluttered under an attack of hysteria, felt her sides about to burst with its merciless pressure. “I’m s-sorry, Hashem, I’m j-just—just …”

It was no use. She was unable to stem the racking laughter, to muster breath enough to form a coherent sentence.

The man stood before her, watching her with heavy eyes that seemed to fathom her to her psyche’s last spark, until she lay back in her seat, trembling with the passing of the fit as if in the aftermath of a seizure.

“God, you must think me a total flake,” she wheezed.

“I think no such thing,” he countered at once, his voice a soothing flow of empathy that jarred her.

God, she would have preferred anything to bristle at, to brace against. His kindness only knocked her support from beneath her, left her sinking. She hated it. She’d survived by counting on no one’s goodwill, by doing without support of any kind. She had to keep it that way, now more than ever. Or she’d be destroyed.

“I apologize if my surprise gave you the impression that such an unfavorable opinion crossed my mind for a second, when the exact opposite is true. I fully realize how overwhelmed you must be. Everything has happened so fast, and Maolai Walai’el Ahd is formidable—and, when he has his sights on a goal, inexorable.” This man was all-seeing. And they sure saw eye to eye in evaluating Farooq. “But he is also magnanimous and just. You have no reason to feel apprehensive, ya Ameerati. Everything will be fine.”

Okay, here was where their concord ended. Even if she agreed the qualities mitigating Farooq’s ruthlessness existed, Hashem didn’t know that Farooq no longer considered her entitled to his magnanimity, was dealing out his brand of justice by using Mennah to pressure her into giving up her freedom and choices. She was also not buying Hashem’s prognosis for a second.

How could everything be fine? Ever again?

She could only pray it would one day grow tolerable.

To have Hashem’s allegiance as an extension of his to Farooq, mixed in with his pity for her as a casualty of his master’s inescapability, a man of such insight and importance in Farooq’s life, might grow comforting. Right now she had to make him leave her to her turmoil.

She answered his original question. “Thank you, Hashem. I promise to avail myself of your services if I think of anything.”

With a last probing look, he bowed and walked away, obviously loath to leave her in her state without offering service or solace.

Instead of relief, the moment he disappeared from her field of vision, chaos rushed in to fill the vacuum he’d left behind. Everything her eyes fell on contributed to her imbalance.

In both her personal and professional lives, she’d lived and worked where power brokers weaved their pacts, where billionaires flaunted their assets in an addiction to competition and for leverage in business. She’d been in the bowels of private citadels, of diplomatic and hospitality fortresses. She’d studied beauty and luxury, learned their secrets and power and how to utilize their nuances to enthrall the most jaded senses, smoothing her clients’ path to winning their objectives through the goodwill engendered by perfectly designed and realized events.

This jet surpassed anything she’d ever experienced in taste and sheer, mind-numbing opulence. She’d had an idea it would be something unprecedented when she’d laid eyes on it. It was surely the first bronze-finished Boeing 737 she’d ever seen. Then she’d set foot on its plush carpeting and had plunged deeper into the surrealism of being with Farooq, being introduced as his wife and deluged in the veneration of a culture that revered its royals. All her knowledge of the best that money could buy had only sent her mind boggling in appreciation of every detail around her.

She gaped again at every article of genuine art, every flawless reproduction in design, everything spanning centuries and cultures, the classical meshing with the modern, the Western with the Middle Eastern, disparate forms of beauty melding with luxury and futuristic technology in a symphony of unlikely harmony.

She fingered her seat’s armrest. A panel slid open, exposing a set of buttons. Hashem had said they gave her control over all amenities, from service to entertainment to climate control. She pushed one with a screen icon. Her head snapped to the left as an eighteenth-century mural disappeared with a smooth whir to reveal a screen of a size she hadn’t known had been manufactured yet.

No need to experiment further. There’d only be more wonders, a refresher course as well as a first-time close-up of Farooq’s affluence and power. And this was only his transportation …

She was staring down at her sweaty palms, fighting another wave of dizziness when her senses overloaded. She almost moaned at the force of the breach. Farooq.

She didn’t want to raise her eyes. Didn’t want to watch him approaching, obliterating her autonomy, shrinking the world into the parameters of his presence, his desires, his decrees.

She did, saw his eyes firing with satisfaction at her slumped pose. He closed in on her like a force of nature, two men from his extensive entourage trying to keep up with him, documenting his muttered orders. They’d disappeared by the time he reached her, a partition sliding behind them to isolate the dining area where he’d seated her before going to “arrange matters” from the rest of the jet.

He looked down at her with the same intensity as he had when he’d been on top of her, demanding she repeat his land’s ancient marriage rite.

Her heart lurched like a captured bird in her chest.

Oh God, she’d really done it.

She’d really married him.

She’d lain beneath him, feeling him imprinting her, hard with an indiscriminate reaction to feeling a female body beneath him, had repeated the words that had bound her to him in a marriage without love or respect—or anything, really. A sham. A cold-blooded ruling on his part, a capitulation on hers.

It’s all for Mennah. It’s all for Mennah.

Maybe if she repeated the mantra enough she could endure this. The feeling of forever plummeting into an abyss.

She snatched her gaze away from his, fingered Mennah’s baby monitor receiver, praying for her daughter to wake up so she could run to her and be spared another exposure to Farooq.

All she heard over the amazingly low drone of the jet’s engines was the soothing Middle Eastern music through the surround sound system, and Mennah’s soft breathing.

Mennah had awakened during their departure, had bubbled with excitement in response to Farooq’s delight in her all through the trip in his limousine right up to the jet and through takeoff. She’d executed her sudden sleeping maneuver an hour ago, and he’d secured her car seat in one of the jet’s bedroom suites.

“You haven’t eaten.”

At his rebuke, her eyes fell on the masculine, square-cut silver service set and cutlery, laid out before her on midnight-blue silk tablecloth, nestling among sparkling crystal and crisp white napkins. She’d picked something from the extensive menu Hashem had provided. It had been served with great fanfare under polished brass domes, placed to simmer over gentle flames. Hashem had raised the covers to show her the cookbook perfection below and the aromas of the haute cuisine creations had hit her salivary glands. Her stomach had fed on its emptiness, churned with revulsion against being catered to as if she was a beloved mistress when she was just a necessary evil, an abhorred hostage.

Corrosion surged again in her throat. “I’m not hungry.”

His jaw hardened. “You haven’t eaten in the last seven hours. Your stomach must be feeding on itself by now.”

Gee. What was it with men suddenly being able to read her mind? Or was she just too predictable to live?

“You’ll have to excuse my stomach if it isn’t functioning to your calculated expectations. After all that’s happened in said seven hours, all it feels now is the urge to heave out its nonexistent contents. Just imagine what it would do to existent ones.”

“You’re trying to tell me I make you nauseous?” Exasperation flashed across his face before morphing into derision. “Still playing games? Still challenging me to expose your proclamations for the feminine taunts that they are?”

She pressed a fist to her head in an attempt to mitigate the pressure building inside. “Just why do you want me to eat? I wouldn’t miss a few pounds. If I ever manage to part with them.”

His eyes changed hue, melted down her enervated body like his fingers once had, following a path of seduction, of destruction over her. “You have gained some weight.”

She snorted. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

“I will. In detail. When I’m in … possession of the full range of … particulars.”

“Gee, thanks. Just what every woman wants to hear. An inventory of her expanding assets.”

He leaned, ran a light touch down her left forearm to her ring finger, circled a nonexistent ring before sawing his finger between hers. “Expanding is an inaccurate word. Your assets have … appreciated.” He pushed a button on her seat’s armrest, swiveling it around, picked up her hand, tugged her out of her slouch, bringing her face level with his groin. “See for yourself how appreciated they are by inspecting my expanding assets.”

A second before he had her performing a hands-on assessment, she snatched her hand from his as if he’d been forcing it into an open fire, darting a look around.

He encroached closer, coming between her legs, making her feel dwarfed, dominated. “Don’t worry about accidental audience. We won’t be disturbed for anything less than an impending crash. Do get on with your reconnaissance, put your mind to rest about the efficacy of your weapons.”

She rolled her eyes, tried to resume breathing. “One more transparent double entendre and you win a food processor.”

His lips spread on a grudging smile as his legs did the same to her knees. He leaned down, his arms braced on both sides of her head, one hand weaving into her hair, pinning her head to the seat, tilting her face upward as his descended. “Don’t start a game you don’t intend to play to the end.”

She lurched as his breath lashed her lips, fresh and male and all him, the movement wrenching at her anchored hair, bringing tears stinging her eyes. His pupils flared, almost obliterating the irises, her name rumbling low in his chest. “Carmen …”

He was going to kiss her.

Every sensation of every time his heat and hunger had devoured her, deluged her with pleasure, drained her of will blossomed, a surround-memory replaying the glide of his flesh on hers, the taste of his tongue, of his vigor inciting her greed for more. Her heart stampeded, her lips, her nipples stung, every nerve discharged …

She couldn’t sit there and pant for him to kiss her.

Her fingers landed on her armrest. The seat swiveled away, taking her out of his reach.

She felt him brooding down on her bent head for a breath-depleting moments, before he exhaled, moved away.

He lowered himself in the seat beside her, swiveling it to face hers. “More games, I see.”

She huffed. “I didn’t comment before because your accusation left me speechless. What games, for God’s sake? The only act I ever pulled in my life was when I was out of my mind needing to get away before you found out I was pregnant. It was so transparent you must have laughed your head off every time you remembered it. I wouldn’t know how to play games if I wanted to. If I did, don’t you think I’d be in a better situation now?”

His eyebrows shot up. “What better situation is there? Every woman alive would kill to be in your place.”

This time the laugh that tore from her hurt. “Every woman alive would kill to have her motives, her anguish ridiculed, her character reviled, her life railroaded?”

His gaze hardened, flared before something like amusement flooded its depths, softening the edges, putting out the fire. “Any more R words? Recounting how I routed you out, ran roughshod over you then through a bit of rough-and-tumble got you to reiterate the vows that have roped you to me, ya rohi?”

The endearment, my soul, speared her with its sarcasm. Its impossibility. The rest of his wickedness had a counteractive effect, tickling her. And she couldn’t help it.

She made a face at him, stuck out her tongue. “Show off.”

He threw his head back on a surprised guffaw, his face blazing with enjoyment, turning his beauty from breathtaking to heartbreaking. She found herself smiling back at him in yet another demonstration of unabashed idiocy.

And it was as if they were back to those magical times a year and a half ago, when everything between them had been rich in rapport—to use two more R words—when they just had to say anything and the other would understand, appreciate, the desire to please as strong as the desire to pleasure or be pleasured, the smiles flowing uncensored, unfettered.

But like any illusion, the moment of communion passed. The warmth kindling his face evaporated, the mirth drained to be replaced by the coldness that had turned him into the stranger she’d left a lifetime ago.

He finally drawled, “So you claim you’re not playing games. What’s this about being nauseous then? Are you going to go on a hunger strike in protest of my alleged crimes against you?”

“I am nauseous. If you were flying into the unknown to a strange land where you knew no one, wouldn’t you be?”

His chin rose. “You know me. That’s all you’ll need.”

She shook her head at the irony. “Do I know you, Farooq? In the biblical sense, you mean? Oops, wrong faith here.”

He leveled his gaze on her, his eyes glinting with danger and a resurgence of reluctant humor. “You’d be surprised how alike all faiths are. And besides knowing me, thoroughly, in that sense, you know every other thing that counts.”

“Really? So being the crown prince of Judar now is one of the things that don’t count? I just discovered that—by accident.”

His eyes narrowed. “And the discovery disappoints you?”

She sagged further in her seat. “It staggers me. Staggers me more, to be accurate. You’re not just a prince, you’re the prince. And to think I was going to pieces contemplating what being the wife of a Middle Eastern prince entailed. Now I’m scared witless at what is expected of the crown prince’s wife. If I’m woefully unsuited for the first position, I’m disastrous for the second.”

He looked away, presenting her with the magnificence of his slashed profile. He was silent for a long moment, looking lost in thought.

Then without looking back at her, he drawled in a distant, distracted tone, “You speak Arabic. It was why you were chosen. I never thought to ask if you did. You never spoke it, but when I thought of it later, I realized you understood when my men did, when I reverted to using it in extremes of passion.”

She blinked. What was this jump in logic? And she was “chosen"? For what? But what had her heart shriveling was his indifference as he mentioned his reversion to Arabic during their intimacies. That had always sent her spiraling into mindlessness, knowing it was what had heralded his loss of control, his plunge with her into the depths of ecstasy.

When he didn’t add anything more, continued staring at nothing, she had to say something. “I do speak Arabic. If you mean that’s why I was chosen to organize your conference, it was what made me stand out, made me land such a huge opportunity. Though I’m better in the formal dialect than your colloquial Judarian—”

He cut across her aimless rambling. “You read and write it?”

Her heart dropped a beat at the sub-zero inflection in his voice. “Y-yes. Better than I speak it, actually. Pronunciation has always been a bit tricky. I’m okay I guess, but I could be better—”

He again cut her off. “Besides Arabic, you speak, read and write French, Italian, Spanish, German and Chinese?”

He’d finally read the file his security/intelligence machine must have compiled on her, had he?

She exhaled. “Yes, if not all with the same proficiency …”

“And apart from being an events planner, of which conferences of international scale were but one type of event you handle, you’ve worked as an interpreter, a hostess and a facilitator in the range of diplomatic functions and every other sort of multinational event. You’ve set up a cyberconsultancy service organizing such events, networking providers, coordinating themes, putting every detail together from the ground up from the comfort of your home.”

Still unable to understand where this was leading she answered, “Yes, but how is that—”

He again aborted her query, still staring into space. “The wife of the crown prince of Judar has to be beside him in formal and informal meetings with dignitaries from around the globe. She must be acutely aware of the cultural protocols of every nation and faith, be versed in the art of etiquette and dialogue with everyone from servants to magnates, from emissaries to heads of states. She has to have an appreciation for all forms of art, an understanding of global historical landmarks, be up-to-date about contemporary world state and technologies. Mastery of seven languages which include Arabic would turn such a wife into an unprecedented find.”

He looked at her then, held her stunned gaze, his giving nothing of his thoughts away. Then he drawled, “If I’d tailored a woman for the position of my wife, I wouldn’t have come up with one more suited for it than you.”