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‘I’d prefer to know what’s happening, so if you could just fill me in...? Tell me where the plane is headed and then I’ll let you sleep in peace.’
‘Surana.’
The mention of the oil-rich desert state fired a memory. That was where she’d seen the crest on the plane before, and it fitted: her father had called in some favours. She knew he counted the King of Surana as a personal friend; the two men had met forty years earlier at the public school they had attended as boys. The friendship had survived the years—apparently the King had once dandled her on his knee but Hannah had no recollection of the event.
‘So Dad will be there to meet us?’
‘No, he’ll be waiting at the chapel.’
Hannah fought for composure. Was this man on something? ‘Hilarious.’ She tried to laugh but laughing in the face of the ruthless resolve stamped on his hard-boned face was difficult. She hefted a weary sigh and reminded herself she was free. It was all up from here, once she got a straight answer from this man. ‘This is not a joke that has the legs to run and run.’
His broad shoulders lifted in a shrug that suggested he didn’t care. ‘Look, I wish it were a joke. I have no more wish to marry you than you have me, but before you start bleating for Daddy ask yourself what you would have preferred if I’d offered you the option back there: marrying me, or spending twenty years in a boiling-hot jail where luxury is considered a tap shared by several hundred. Or even worse—’
‘How does it get worse?’
‘How about the death penalty?’
‘That was never a possibility.’ Her scorn faltered and her stomach clenched with terror. Had she really been that close? ‘Was it?’
He arched a sardonic brow.
‘So if I’d signed the confession...?’ Her voice trailed away as she spoke until ‘confession’ emerged from her white lips as a husky whisper.
‘You didn’t.’ Kamel fought the irrational feeling of guilt. He was only spelling out the ugly facts; he was not responsible. Still, it gave him no pleasure to see the shadow of terror in her wide eyes. ‘So don’t think about it.’
The advice brought her chin up with a snap. ‘I wouldn’t be thinking about it at all if you hadn’t told me.’
‘Maybe it’s about time you faced unpleasant facts and accepted that there are some things we cannot run away from.’
Not several thousand feet off the ground, but once they landed Hannah intended to run very fast indeed from this man. ‘I’m grateful to be free, obviously, but I didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘You entered a sovereign state illegally, carrying drugs.’
Hannah’s clenched teeth ached. His righteous attitude was really getting under her skin.
‘I got lost and I was carrying medicine. Vaccines and antibiotics.’
‘Morphine?’
Feeling defensive, Hannah rubbed her damp palms against her thighs. With his steely eyes and relentless delivery he was a much more effective interrogator than her captors had been. ‘Yes.’
‘And a camera.’
‘No!’
‘Isn’t there a camera on your phone?’
He would have thought better of her if she had the guts to hold up her hands and take responsibility for her own actions, but that obviously wasn’t her style.
‘Weren’t you told to stay with the vehicle if it broke down?’
How did he know? ‘It was an emergency.’ And that was the only reason she had been entrusted the responsibility. There simply had been no one else available.
‘And you were the one on the ground and you made a tough call...fine. But now you have to take the consequences for that decision.’
Struggling to keep pace with the relentless pace of his reasoning, she shook her head. ‘So I have to marry you because you rescued me? Sure, obvious. I should have realised.’
The bored façade and the last shades of cynical amusement in his manner fell away as he vaulted to his feet.
He towered over her, eyes blazing with contempt. She could feel the anger spilling out of him and presumably so could the bird sitting on its perch—it began to squawk and Hannah lifted her hands to her head to protect herself.
The act of soothing the spooked creature seemed to help Kamel regain some semblance of control. ‘She won’t hurt you.’
Hannah dropped her hands, cast a quick sideways glance at the fascinating wild creature, and then returned her attention to the man. ‘I wasn’t worried about the bird.’
His jaw tightened in response to the pointed comment, and he stared at the mouth that delivered it...her wide, full, sexy lower lip. Hers was a mouth actually made for kissing.
‘I wouldn’t marry you even if you were sane!’
She might have a point. Wasn’t it insane to be checking out her impossibly long legs? Wasn’t it even more insane to actually like the fact she didn’t back away from him, that her pride made her give as good as she got?
‘And came gift-wrapped!’ Hannah caught herself wondering how many women would have liked to unwrap him, and felt a lick of fear before she told herself that she was not one of them.
‘You want facts? Fine. When we land in Surana in—’ He turned his wrist and glanced at the watch that glinted against his dark skin.
‘Thirty minutes. There will be a red carpet and reception committee for Your Royal Highness,’ she finished his sentence for him, and, keeping her eyes on his face, she performed a graceful bow.
He took her sarcasm at face value.
‘There will be no official reception under the circumstances. Things will be low-key. We will go straight to the palace where my uncle, the King—’
Her eyes flew wide. ‘King? You’re asking me to believe you’re really a prince?’
He stared at her hard. ‘Who did you think I was?’
‘Someone my father paid to get me out of jail. I thought you were pretending to—’
‘I can’t decide if you’re just plain stupid or incredibly naïve.’ He shook his head from side to side in an attitude of weary incredulity. ‘You thought all I had to do was walk in, claim to be of royal blood and all the doors would open to release you?’ What alternative universe did this woman live in?
Her eyes narrowed with dislike as he threw back his head and laughed.
‘What was I meant to think?’
‘That you were extremely lucky you have a father who cares so much about you, a father who is waiting with my uncle and Sheikh Sa’idi of Quagani. The only reason you are not now facing the consequences of your actions is because the Sheikh has been told that you are my fiancée.’
‘And he believed that?’
‘I think the wedding invite swung it.’
‘Well, I’m out, so job done. You can tell him the wedding’s off.’
‘I can see that that is the way things work in your world.’ A world with no honour.
‘What is that meant to mean?’
The plane hit a pocket and he braced himself as it sank and rose while she staggered and grabbed the back of a chair. ‘That you step away from commitment when it suits you.’
Hannah was waiting for her stomach to find its level but this not so veiled reference to her engagements brought an angry flush to her cheeks. ‘I’m fine, thanks for asking,’ she murmured, rubbing the area where her wrist had banged against the chair.
He continued as though she had not spoken. ‘But that is not the way it works here. My uncle feels indebted to your father and he has given his word.’
‘I didn’t give my word.’
‘Your word!’ he echoed with acid scorn.
She felt the burn of tears in her eyes and furiously blinked to clear them. ‘I won’t be lectured by you!’
‘Your word means...’ he clicked his fingers ‘...nothing. It is otherwise with my uncle. He is a man of integrity, honour. I suppose I’m speaking a foreign language to you?’
‘So your uncle would be embarrassed. I’m sorry about that—’
‘But not sorry enough to accept the consequences of your actions?’
Consequences...consequences... Hannah fought the urge to cover her ears. ‘This is stupid. What terrible thing is going to happen if we don’t get married?’ Hannah hoped the question didn’t give him the false impression that she would even consider this.
‘I’m glad you asked that.’
He opened the laptop that lay on a table and spun it around, stabbing it with his finger. ‘We are a small country but oil rich, and we have enjoyed relative political stability. Since the discovery last year of these new reserves, we are set to be even more rich.’
She pursed her lips at his lecturing tone and stuck out her chin. ‘I do read an occasional newspaper.’
‘Don’t boast about your IQ, angel, because,’ he drawled, ‘stupidity is the only possible excuse for your little escapade.’
An angry hissing sound escaped her clenched teeth. ‘I know the country is a shining light of political stability and religious tolerance. What I didn’t know was that the ruling family had a history of insanity—but that’s what happens when you marry cousins.’
‘Well, you will be a new injection of blood, won’t you, angel? This will happen, you know. The sooner you accept it, the easier it will be.’
Hannah bit her lip. Even her interrogators had never looked at her with such open contempt and, though she refused to admit it even to herself, it hurt. As had the headlines and the inches of gossip all vilifying her.
‘Shall I tell you why?’
He waited a moment, then tipped his head, acknowledging her silence.
‘We have a problem. We are landlocked and the oil needs to get to the sea.’ He flicked his finger across the screen and traced a line. ‘Which means we rely on the cooperation of others. The new pipeline is at present being constructed in Quagani, and it crosses three separate countries. Did you know your father is building the pipeline?’
Hannah didn’t but she would have died before admitting it. ‘I’m surprised they haven’t already married you off to some Quagani princess to seal the deal.’
‘They were going to, but she met my cousin.’ Kamel had fallen in love with Amira slowly. It had been a gradual process and he’d thought it had been the same for her. Had he not seen it with his own eyes, Kamel would have laughed at the idea of love at first sight. He had tried very hard not to see it. ‘When she found him...preferable, her family were fine with it because he was the heir and I was, as they say, the spare.’
‘Then where is the problem? If your families are linked they’re not going to fall out.’
‘He died...she died...their baby died.’ The only thing that linked the rulers now was shared grief and a need to blame someone.
Like a sandcastle hit by a wave, Hannah’s snooty attitude dissolved. Despite some throat-clearing her voice was husky as she said softly, ‘I’m so sorry. But my father wouldn’t force me to marry for any amount of money.’
He looked at the woman who sat there with spoilt brat written all over her pretty face.
‘Has it occurred to you that your father, being human, might jump at the chance to get you off his hands? And if he did I don’t think there are many who would blame him.’
‘My father doesn’t think of me as a piece of property.’
He might, however, think of her as a lead weight around his neck.
‘Do you care for your father as much as he does you?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means if Quagani closes the new pipeline it won’t just be the school programme in our country that suffers. Your father has a stake in the new refinery too.’
It was the mention of a school programme that brought a worried furrow to her brow. In her job she knew what a difference education could make. ‘My father has a stake in many things.’
‘My uncle let your father in on this deal as a favour. He knew of his situation.’
She tensed and then relaxed.
‘What situation? Are you trying to tell me my father has lost all of his money again?’
Over the years her father’s reckless, impulsive approach to business had led to dramatic fluctuations in fortune, but that was in the past. After the heart attack he had actually listened to the doctors’ warnings about the danger of stress. He had promised her faithfully that the risky deals were a thing of the past.
‘Not all of it.’
Hannah met his dark, implacable stare and felt the walls of the cabin close in. Even as she was shaking her head in denial she knew deep down that he was telling her the truth.
Kamel watched, arms folded across his chest, as the comment sank in. The prospect of being the daughter of a poor man seemed to affect her more than anything he had said so far. The idea of slumming it or being forced to make her own way in the world without the cushion of Daddy’s money had driven what little colour she had out of her face.
‘He has made a number of unfortunate ventures, and if the pipeline deal fails your father faces bankruptcy.’
Hannah’s heart started to thud faster and her heart was healthy. Stress...what could be more stressful than bankruptcy? Unless it was the humiliation of telling a cathedral full of people that your daughter’s wedding was off.
She had accepted her share of responsibility for the heart attack that very few people knew about. At the time her father had sworn Hannah to secrecy, saying the markets would react badly to the news. Hannah didn’t give a damn about the markets, but she cared a lot about her father. He was not as young as he liked to think. With his medical history, having to rebuild his company from scratch—what would that do to a man with a cardiac problem?
Struggling desperately to hide her concern behind a composed mask, she turned her clear, critical stare on her prospective husband and discovered as she stared at his lean, bronzed, beautiful face that she hadn’t, as she had thought, relinquished all her childish romantic fantasies, even after her two engagements had ended so disastrously.
‘So you have made a case for me doing this,’ she admitted, trying to sound calm. ‘But why would you? Why would you marry someone you can’t stand the sight of? Are you really willing to marry a total stranger just because your uncle tells you to?’
‘I could talk about duty and service,’ he flung back, ‘but I would be wasting my breath. They are concepts that you have no grasp of. And my motivation is not the issue here. I had a choice and I made it. Now it is your turn.’
She sank onto a day bed, her head bent forward and her hands clenched in her lap. After a few moments she lifted her head. She’d made her decision, but she wasn’t ready to admit it.
‘What will happen? If we get married...after...?’ She lifted a hank of heavy hair from her eyes and caught sight of her reflection in the shiny surface of a metallic lamp on the wall beside her. There had been no mirrors in her cell and her appearance had not occupied her thoughts so it took her a few seconds before she realised the wild hair attached to a haggard face was her own. With a grimace she looked away.
‘You would have a title, so not only could you act like a little princess, you could actually be one, which has some limited value when it comes to getting a dinner table or theatre ticket.’
‘Princess...?’ Could this get any more surreal?
The ingenuous, wide-eyed act irritated Kamel. ‘Oh, don’t get too excited. In our family,’ he drawled, ‘a title is almost obligatory. It means little.’
As his had, but all that had changed the day that his cousin’s plane had gone down and he had become the Crown prince.
That was two years ago now, and there remained those conspiracy theorists who still insisted there had been a cover-up—that the royal heir and his family had been the victims of a terrorist bomb, rather than a mechanical malfunction.
There was a more sinister school of thought that had gone farther, so at a time when Kamel had been struggling with the intense grief and anger he felt for the senseless deaths—his cousin was a man he had admired and loved—Kamel had also had to deal with the fact that some believed he had orchestrated the tragedy that wiped out the heirs standing between him and the crown.
He had inherited a position he’d never wanted, and a future that, when he allowed himself to think about it, filled him with dread. He’d also inherited a reputation for bumping off anyone who got in his way.
And now he had a lovely bride—what more could a man want?
‘My official residence is inside the palace. I have an apartment in Paris, and also a place outside London, and a villa in Antibes.’ Would the lovely Charlotte still be there waiting? No, not likely. Charlotte was not the waiting kind. ‘I imagine, should we wish it, we could go a whole year without bumping into one another.’
‘So I could carry on with my life—nothing would change?’
‘You like the life you have so much?’
His voice held zero inflection but she could feel his contempt. She struggled to read the expression in his eyes, but the dark silver-flecked depths were like the mirrored surface of a lake, deep and inscrutable yet strangely hypnotic.
She pushed away a mental image of sinking into a lake, feeling the cool water embrace her, close over her head. She lowered her gaze, running her tongue across her lips to moisten them.
When she lifted her head she’d fixed a cool smile in place...though it was hard to channel cool when you knew you looked like a victim of a natural disaster. But her disaster was of her own making.
Her delicate jaw clenched at the insight that had only made her imprisonment worse. The knowledge that she was the author of her own disaster movie, that she had ignored the advice to wait until a driver was available, and then she had chosen not to stay with the vehicle as had been drilled into them.
‘I like my freedom.’ It had not escaped his notice that she had sidestepped his question.
‘At last we have something in common.’
‘So you...we...?’ This was the world’s craziest conversation. ‘Is there any chance of a drink?’ With a heavy sigh she let her head fall back, her eyes closed.
Exhausted but not relaxed, he decided. His glance moved from her lashes—fanning out across the marble-pale curve of her smooth cheeks and hiding the dark shadows beneath her eyes—to her slim, shapely hands with the bitten untidy nails. Presumably her manicure had been a victim of her incarceration.
She had some way to go before she could collapse. Would she make it? It appeared to him that she was running on a combination of adrenalin and sheer bloody-minded obstinacy. His expression clinical, he scrutinised the visible, blue-veined pulse hammering away in the hollow at the base of her throat. There was something vulnerable about it... His mouth twisted as he reminded himself that the last two dumb guys she’d left high and dry at the altar had probably thought the same thing.
‘I’m not sure alcohol would be a good idea.’
Her blue eyes flew open. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of tea.’
‘I can do that.’ He spoke to Rafiq, who had a habit of silently materialising, before turning his attention back to Hannah. ‘Well, at least our marriage will put an end to your heartbreaking activities.’
‘I didn’t break anyone’s—’ She stopped, biting back the retort. She’d promised Craig—who had loved her but, it turned out, not in ‘that’ way—that she’d take responsibility.
‘You’re more like a sister to me,’ Craig had told her. ‘Well, actually, not like a sister because you know Sal and she’s a total...no, more like a best friend.’
‘Sal is my best friend,’ Hannah had replied. And Sal had been, before she’d slept with treacherous Rob.
‘That’s why I’m asking you not to tell her I called it off. When we got engaged she got really weird, and told me she’d never ever forgive me if I hurt you. But I haven’t hurt you, have I...? We were both on the rebound—me after Natalie and you after Rob.’ He had patted her shoulder. ‘I think you still love him.’
Somehow Hannah had loved the man who had slept his way through her friends while they were together. She had only known about Sal when she had given him back his ring after he stopped denying it.
She hated Rob now but he had taught her about trust. Mainly that it wasn’t possible. Craig, who she had known all her life, was different. He was totally predictable; he would never hurt her. But she had forgotten one thing—Craig was a man.
‘You know me so well, Craig.’
‘So, are you all right with this?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘So what happens now?’
People who had never met you felt qualified to spend time and a lot of effort ripping you to shreds. ‘I don’t know,’ she lied.
Her lips twitched as she recalled her ex-fiancé’s response. Craig never had been known for his tact.
‘Well, what happened last time?’
Hannah had shrugged guiltily. The last time her dad had done everything. Even though pride had stopped her revealing that her fiancé had slept with all her friends—pride and the fact that her father would have blamed himself, as Charles Latimer had introduced her to Rob and had encouraged the relationship.
The second time he’d run out of understanding. He’d been furious and dumped the whole nightmare mess in her lap. Her glance flickered to the tall, imposing figure of her future husband and she struggled to see a way through the nightmare he represented.
CHAPTER FOUR
THIS TIME HANNAH was aware of the man mountain before he appeared—just as they hit another air pocket, he entered apologising for the tea he had slopped over the tray he was carrying.
‘I will get a fresh tray.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ Kamel responded impatiently. ‘We need not stand on ceremony with Miss Latimer. She is one of the family now. Considering the nature of my trip I kept staffing down to a minimum.’ He murmured something in what she assumed was Arabic to the other man, who left the compartment. ‘Rafiq can turn his hand to most things but his culinary skills are limited.’ He lifted the domed lid on the plate to reveal a pile of thickly cut sandwiches. ‘I hope you like chicken.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ she said dully.
‘I don’t recall asking you if you were hungry, Hannah,’ he returned in a bored drawl as he piled an extra sandwich onto a plate and pushed it her way.
She slung him an angry look. ‘How am I meant to think about food when I’m being asked to sacrifice my freedom?’ That had been her comfort after the battering her self-esteem had taken after being basically told she was not physically attractive by two men who had claimed to love her. At the very least she still had her freedom.
He smiled, with contempt glittering in his deep-set eyes.
‘You will eat because you have a long day ahead of you.’
The thought of the long day ahead and what it involved drew a weak whimper from Hannah’s throat. Ashamed of the weakness, she shook her head. ‘This can’t have been Dad’s idea.’
She looked and sounded so distraught, so young and bewildered that Kamel struggled not to react to the wave of protective tenderness that rose up in him, defying logic and good sense.
‘It was something of a committee decision and if there is an innocent victim in this it is me.’
This analysis made her jaw drop. Innocent and victim were two terms she could not imagine anyone using about this man.
‘However, if I am prepared to put a brave face on it I don’t see what your problem is.’
‘My problem is I don’t love you. I don’t even know you.’
I am Kamel Al Safar, and now you have all the time in the world to get to know me.’
Her eyes narrowed. He had a smart answer for everything. ‘I can hardly wait.’
‘I think you’re being unnecessarily dramatic. It’s not as if we’d be the first two people to marry for reasons other than love.’
‘So you’re all right with someone telling you who to marry.’ Sure that his ego would not be able to take such a suggestion, she was disappointed when he gave a negligent shrug.
‘If I weren’t, you’d still be languishing in a jail cell.’
She opened her mouth, heard the tap, tap of the uniformed officer’s stick on the floor and closed it again. ‘Don’t think I’m not grateful.’