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MILLS & BOON
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
Copyright
PROLOGUE
‘SO THE negotiations went well, then?’
Drax frowned, his dark, arrogantly slanted eyebrows snapping together over an equally arrogant aquiline nose. Although his brother had welcomed him back to the small Arab emirate they ruled together with his usual warmth, Drax sensed that there was something on his elder twin’s mind that Vere had not yet revealed to him.
‘The talks in London went very well,’ he confirmed. He and Vere had ruled Dhurahn together now for almost a full decade, having come to power just after their twenty-fifth birthday, following the death of their parents in a car accident during a state visit.
Despite their closeness, they had never talked about the horror of that time—or the loss of their strong, energetic and forward-thinking father and their beautiful Irish mother. There had been no need. As twins they in stinctively understood each other’s feelings. Physically they were identical, but when it came to their personalities sometimes it seemed to Drax that they were two halves of one whole—sharing the same basic mind-set and understanding, and yet manifesting a desire to follow their shared life path in different ways.
Drax had come straight to his brother’s private audience room from the airport without bothering to go to his own quarters first to change. So, while Vere was dressed traditionally in a robe of dark blue embroidered with gold, worn over his white dishdasha, his head covered, Drax was wearing a formal dark blue business suit, the jacket open over a crisp white shirt worn with a discreetly striped dark red silk tie.
However, although their mode of dress could not have been more different, that faded into insignificance against the impact of their identical and magnificent physical appearance.
They were both tall and broad-shouldered, with the same slightly hooded ice-green eyes which could glitter with fierce heat, and the same distinctive predatory profiles. Their Berber blood, mixed with French and then Irish, had ensured they possessed an aura of power and sexuality that went beyond easy good looks to something that would have been dark and dangerous enough in one man, but when doubled possessed a force that was unnerving and compelling.
‘We both know that we aren’t the only Middle Eastern country wanting to establish ourselves as not just the Arab world’s recognised premier financial centre but the one with the strongest links to the recognised financial centres throughout the world. However, from the talks I had in London I gained the impression that we are the favoured choice. As we agreed, I made it clear that Dhurahn is prepared to put aside an enclave of one hundred acres of land to house the buildings needed to develop and grow a “knowledge economy”, and that we favour the use of English mercantile law because of its principles of equity and fairness. I also told them we envisage developing a financial exchange that will equal anything that New York, Hong Kong or London has to offer, with a regulatory system that investors and the business community can rely on and trust. But that’s enough about what I’ve been doing in London, Vere. Something’s on your mind.’
Vere raised one eyebrow in silent recognition of his twin’s astuteness.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘We have a problem.’
Drax looked searchingly at his twin. ‘And that problem is?’
‘While you were in London we were contacted by both the Ruler of Zuran and the Emir of Khulua.’
Drax waited. There was nothing particularly unusual in them being contacted by their closest neighbours; they were on good terms. Dhurahn did not have the large oil reserves and revenues enjoyed by its neighbours, but its long river made the land rich and fertile, and Dhurahn had become the ‘greenhouse’ that supplied Zuran, in particular, with fresh produce for its expanding tourist industry. The days when the fiercely warring tribes had fought bitterly over the hot desert sands were long gone, and the people of Dhurahn lived in peace with their neighbours, enjoying a mutual and shared prosperity.
But certain tribal methods of ensuring peace still endured.
‘Both the Ruler and the Emir have, in the mysterious ways of such things—the desert wind is, as ever, capricious in where it blows—heard rumours of our plans,’ Vere told his brother dryly. ‘Not that they said as much, but of course it is obvious why they are both now so eager to cement the existing good relationship we share with them.’
‘You are telling me this—but what is it that you are not telling me?’ Drax demanded, easily recognising that his brother was withholding something. ‘To keep on good terms with our neighbours makes sound business sense…’
‘What the Ruler and the Emir are so keen to discuss with us is the matter of our marriages.’
‘Our marriages?’ Drax frowned again. They were thirty-four. One day, of course, they would both marry, choosing their wives carefully and with due consideration for the future of their country, but that time was not here yet. Right now they had far more important things to do—like establishing Dhurahn as the strongest financial powerhouse in the region.
‘Our marriages,’ Vere repeated grimly. ‘Yours to the Emir’s eldest daughter and mine to the Ruler’s youngest sister.’
The two brothers looked at one another.
‘Such marriages would strengthen our ties with both countries, but it would also strengthen their potential involvement with Dhurahn,’ Drax pointed out. ‘While we stand between them, and get on well with both the Ruler and the Emir, there are issues on which they do not agree. The Emir has never approved of the Ruler’s decision to expand Zuran’s involvement with the tourist industry. Currently we hold the balance of power between them, and ours is in many ways the stronger position.’
‘And, while he is loath to admit it, the Emir is jealous of the growing financial status and success of Zuran, and eager to match it. If we agree to their suggestion and take as wives members of their families both of them will try to use the link marriage creates to demand greater allegiance and support from us: in effect to control the power we hold. We can’t let that happen. Apart from anything else it could, theoretically, mean that there might come a time when our loyalty to one another and Dhurahn could be in conflict with the loyalty demanded of us by our wives and their families.’
‘And if we don’t agree we’ll risk offending both the Ruler and the Emir, causing them to lose face, and we can’t afford to be on bad terms. It could harm our plans to establish Dhurahn as the financial and business capital of the region.’
‘Yes.’
Angrily Drax paced the floor. ‘We cannot allow ourselves to be manipulated like this.’
‘Neither of us wants to be tied via marriage to either of our neighbours,’ Vere agreed grimly. ‘Dhurahn must always govern its own future, and it is our duty to ensure that it does.’
‘But, as you said, if we refuse then we risk offending two very powerful men.’ Drax thought quickly. ‘Unless, of course, we tell them that we are refusing because we are committed to marriage elsewhere. That way they’d stop pressuring us and they wouldn’t lose face.’
‘And when they discover that we are not getting married?’
‘Do they need to discover that?’ Drax asked. Vere was frowning but Drax persevered coolly. ‘Both the Ruler and the Emir know that it is the tradition for our family and our people to take only one wife. It is not, surely, an insurmountable task to find women—the right kind of women—we could marry, and then—’
‘The right kind?’
‘You know what I mean.’ Drax shrugged dismissively. ‘The dispensable, disposable type—morally decent enough to be acceptable and naïve enough to agree to be divorced with the minimum of fuss and pay-off.’
‘Oh, that kind,’ Vere said cynically. ‘A naïve virgin ready to fall in love with a sheikh and be so grateful to him for marrying her that she willingly accepts being divorced and put aside without wanting a penny. Do they still exist? Somehow I don’t think so,’ he told Drax dryly. ‘Certainly if you could find us such a bride apiece then I would gladly marry mine. But we both know that the kind of woman who would agree to the sort temporary marriage we would want is hardly likely to be the sweet virgin our people would expect. The reality is that she is more likely to be an adventuress, who would demand an extortionate amount of money to go through with a temporary marriage in the first place and who would then probably attempt to sell her story to the press. That kind of media attention would be bound to have a damaging effect on how we are perceived by the rest of the world as men of integrity.’ Vere shook his head. ‘No, Drax. It sounds like the perfect way out of our current dilemma, but my view is that it would be impossible to find even one woman let alone two of the right type—and fast enough to bring an end to the Ruler’s and the Emir’s determination to have us marry into their families.’
Drax’s eyes gleamed like those of a predatory black panther. ‘Is that a challenge, brother?’
Vere laughed. ‘I know better than to issue you with any challenges, Drax. But if you can find a woman—’
‘Two women,’ Drax corrected him. ‘I promise you I shall find them, Vere. And you shall have the first of them.’
‘Mmm…’ Vere looked unconvinced. ‘Very well. But in the meantime the only way to keep our neighbours at bay is to continue negotiations with the Ruler and the Emir while avoiding making any kind of commitment. The Ruler has invited us to make an unofficial visit to Zuran,’ Vere continued. ‘And I rather thought you ought to be the one to go, Drax.’
‘You mean that the Ruler wants you for his sister, since you are the elder,’ Drax guessed shrewdly, ‘and you want me to put up some delaying tactics. Why not? They want to talk to you in London, by the way,’ he told Vere. ‘I said that you would be free to fly there for more negotiations once I was back in Dhurahn.’
‘One of the benefits of dual rulership—one pair of hands always available to hold onto the helm of leadership here in Dhurahn, no matter what matters of state require our presence elsewhere.’
‘But you are the one who prefers to remain here in the desert,’ Drax pointed out. ‘I am the one who welcomes the cut and thrust of pursuing our business activities elsewhere.’
‘A perfect partnership—built on a trust nothing can destroy and absolute loyalty.’
Silently they clasped hands, and then, in the manner of their Arabic ancestors, they exchanged a fierce, brotherly embrace.
CHAPTER ONE
‘YOU are useless—totally and completely useless. I cannot imagine why I ever thought you were up to the demands of this job. You claim to have a degree, and an MBA, and yet you cannot do the simplest thing you are told.’
On and on went the harsh, critical voice of her Lebanese employer, while Sadie dutifully bowed her head beneath the weight of the venom being directed towards her, all too aware that if she looked directly at Madame al Sawar now the other woman would see all too clearly the angry hostility in her own eyes. And Sadie could not afford to give madame the opportunity to threaten, as she had done many times already in the two months that Sadie had worked there, to withhold the wages still owing to her.
To be accused so unfairly and so vindictively was bad enough, but to have to stand here and be berated in a voice loud enough to carry to the rest of the al Sawar household—a traditional Arab household, where loss of face was something to be dreaded and avoided at all costs—made it even worse. It was typical of her employer, Sadie recognised, that she should choose to accost and accuse her while she was enjoying her legitimate lunch-break in the peace of the pretty courtyard garden of the al Sawars’ traditional Moorish-style Zuran home. Sadie knew perfectly well that, although she could not see them, most of household staff would belingering in the shadows of the building, listening to their employer hectoring her assistant.
Not that they could avoid hearing what was going on, with madame screaming and shouting so loudly. The whole street could probably hear, Sadie reflected miserably. She wasn’t the only recipient of her employer’s vile temper. Scarcely a day went by without madame losing her temper with someone.
Sadie could have defended herself against her employer’s unfair accusations, of course, and told her that she did indeed possess both a First Class Honours degree and an MBA. And she could have told her, too, that as much as Madame al Sawar regretted employing her it couldn’t come close to her own regret at having taken the job. But the truth was that she simply couldn’t afford to lose this job—not with madame having consistently refused to pay her since she came here.
‘I have no use for such a deadweight as you in my business. You are dismissed.’
‘You can’t do that!’ Sadie burst out, panicked out of her determination not to be forced into a verbal battle.
‘You think not? I assure you that I can. And don’t think that you can walk out of here and get another job,’ madame screeched. ‘Because you can’t. The Zurani authorities impose very harsh measures on illegals who try to take work from the locals.’
Illegals! Now Sadie had to stand up for herself. ‘I am not an illegal,’ she protested. ‘You know that. You assured me yourself when I took this job that all the necessary formalities would be completed on my behalf. I remember signing the necessary forms…’ Sadie was beginning to feel slightly sick with panic now, as well as from the heat burning down on her exposed head. She was being made to wait and listen to madame ranting in the full burn of the sunlight, whereas madame herself remained in the shade.
Sadie could see a smug look of satisfaction in the older woman’s eyes as she affected nonchalance with a dismissive shrug.
‘I do not remember saying any such thing. And if you try to claim as much now, it will be the worse for you.’
Sadie could hardly believe what she was hearing. She had thought her situation bad enough, but that was nothing to what she was facing now.
With no job, no money, and no legal status here in Zuran her situation was dire indeed. And it had all seemed so promising at the time…
Six months into her first job as an MBA graduate with one of London’s premier hedge funds, she had been made redundant to make way for the son of a very senior member of the bank’s latest lover. Or that was what she had been told via the office grapevine. It had certainly been easier to swallow that explanation than it had been to accept the jeering comment from one particularly unpleasant male colleague that she was being dumped because she couldn’t hack the testosterone-loaded male environment in which she worked.
A top-flight, good, money-earning job in the financial sector—one which would make her completely financially independent—had been her goal all the way through university, and she had initially been devastated by this unwelcome setback to her career plans.
Her parents had divorced when she was in her early teens. Her mother had then married again—a very wealthy man, with children of his own from his first marriage, and with whom she now had a second and younger family. When her mother had first become involved with the man who would become Sadie’s stepfather he had lavished time and attention on Sadie, forever telling her now much he wanted her as a daughter. But as soon as her mother had married him he had changed completely towards Sadie, instilling in her the belief that male love, both sexual and paternal, was something that some men could assume to suit themselves.
After her mother’s marriage to him Sadie had grown up enduring her stepfather’s unkind comments about her father’s inability to provide for her as well as he provided for his new children. She had been torn between anger against her parents for divorcing and a protective love for her father, who had remarried as well, and had a young wife and a very young family, and had looked far older and more careworn than his age the last time she had seen him. Unlike her stepfather, her father was not a wealthy man.
It had been pride that had made her refuse to ask for financial help from her stepfather to get through university, and that pride had left her weighed down with a very large student loan. The loss of her first job had meant that she would have to crawl back to her stepfather and ask for his help—help which he had given willingly to his own sons, both of whom had been given a car and an apartment apiece when they had started work—and that was the last thing she had wanted to do.
She could still remember how he had sneered at her when she had announced that she was going to study for her MBA, suggesting that she’d be better off looking for a rich husband to support her instead.
‘After all,’ had been his comment, ‘it isn’t as though you haven’t got the looks—and the body.’
Yes, she had those. But Sadie had sworn when she had seen the way her obviously highly-sexed stepfather behaved towards her mother, making it plain that he expected her to repay his financial support in bed, that she would never, ever let any man think he had the power to demand her sexual compliance just because he paid the bills. Either inside marriage or outside it. And she had stuck to that vow—even though its by-product had been an unexpected and unlooked-for celibacy that had left her partnerless. For Sadie, her financial and sexual independence were strongly interlinked. Thirteen was a very vulnerable age for a girl to witness the kind of relationship Sadie had witnessed between her mother and her stepfather.
When she had seen her current job advertised, in the columns of a national broadsheet newspaper, she had been so excited that she had had to warn herself that there would be hundreds of applicants and that she probably wouldn’t stand a chance.
But then, when Monika al Sawar had interviewed her and told her that she specifically wanted to employ a female MBA—‘Because my husband is very much the Arab male, and will not tolerate me working one to one with another man’—her hopes had started to rise.
The job Monika had described to her had sounded perfect—challenging and exciting, with plenty of room to grow. Monika’s business, she had told Sadie, involved advising new residents to Zuran in the wake of the tourist boom on investment, the buying of Zurani property, and arranging finances for property purchases. Monika had further told Sadie that she wanted a keen young assistant she could train up to work as a financial adviser in her own right.
Sadie had been in seventh heaven when she had got the job—even when the promised business-class flight to Zuran had somehow turned out to be an economy-class flight, and the promised advance of funds to pay a lump sum off her student loan had not materialised.
But then had come the discovery that the accommodation she had been promised was the not the apartment in a modern executive block she had somehow imagined, but instead a very small and basic room in the al Sawar house—and, more disturbingly, that Monika was deducting what seemed to be an overly large sum of money from Sadie’s wages to cover her ‘bed and board’. Sadie’s awkward attempt to discuss her dissatisfaction with this situation had led to the first of the now regular and familiar outbursts of Monika’s temper, and with it the withholding of Sadie’s wages.
Now, with only a very small sum of money left from the funds she had brought with her, Sadie was getting desperate. Very desperate. But she was not going to let Monika see that.
‘Very well, then. I’ll go,’ Sadie said quietly. ‘But not until you have paid me the wages owing to me.’
The scream of fury that erupted from the other woman made Sadie wince, and it could be heard all over the house.
And also outside in the street, where Drax, having parked the hire car he preferred to the Ruler’s offer of a chauffeur-driven limousine—mainly because of the privacy it afforded him—was walking towards the house. He slowed his pace to match that of Amar al Sawar. The kindly older man had been a close friend of the twins’ father, and neither of them ever visited Zuran without calling to see him. Drax had found him on this occasion at the Royal Palace, and had reluctantly accepted his invitation to return to his home with him. Neither Drax nor Vere liked their father’s elderly friend’s younger second wife.
‘Oh, dear me. I’m afraid it sounds as though Monika is a little upset,’ Amar apologised. ‘And I had so hoped that this time she would take to the new assistant she hired. Such a delightful young woman. English, and well-educated—a good, kind girl too, modest and sweet-natured.’
If she was all of those things then she was certainly no match for Monika, Drax reflected.
‘I cannot understand why it is that such an attractive young woman should choose to work instead of marry. If I had a son she is just exactly the kind of girl I would want for him as a wife.’
Now Amar had surprised Drax. The older man was very much of the generation and outlook that followed the old ways and looked for the kind of virtues in a young woman that very few now possessed. Drax suspected that the older man, who was no match for his aggressive wife, deeply regretted having allowed Monika to bully him into marrying her.
From inside the courtyard, the piercing sound of her wrath could still be heard quite plainly by the two men as she berated her young assistant.
‘Wages? You expect me to pay you for practically ruining my business? Hah!’ Monika screeched at Sadie. ‘You are the one who should be paying me. Be glad that I am letting you go without demanding any recompense from you. If you are wise you will leave now, this minute, before I change my mind and set my lawyers to work on you.’
Before Sadie could object Monika had turned round and begun walking away from her, leaving her standing in the courtyard.
‘My clothes…’ she began, too stunned and battered by Monika’s loud ranting and merciless tactics for logic or argument. ‘My passport…’
‘Zuwaina has packed them for you. Take them and go,’ Monika said triumphantly, as a young maid appeared in the courtyard, pulling Sadie’s case on wheels with one hand and holding her handbag and passport in the other.
It gave Sadie a sharp sense of revulsion to know that Monika had been through her personal belongings, but the real cause of the sickness making her feel so clammy and light-headed was the reality of what she was now facing. No job, no money, no plane ticket home. All she could think of to do was throw herself on the mercy of the British Consulate—although it would mean a long walk in to town to get there.