The Sheikh's Chosen Wife

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER ONE

DRESSED to go riding, in knee-length black leather boots, buff pants, a white shirt and a white gutrah held to his dark head by a plain black agal, Sheikh Hassan ben Khalifa Al-Qadim stepped into his private office and closed the door behind him. In his hand he held a newly delivered letter from England. On his desk lay three more. Walking across the room, he tossed the new letter onto the top of the other three then went to stand by the grilled window, fixing his eyes on a spot beyond the Al-Qadim Oasis, where reclaimed dry scrubland had been turned into miles of lush green fig groves.

Beyond the figs rose the sand-dunes. Majestic and proud, they claimed the horizon with a warning statement. Come any closer with your irrigation and expect retaliation, they said. One serious sandstorm, and years of hard labour could be turned back into arid wasteland.

A sigh eased itself from his body. Hassan knew all about the laws of the desert. He respected its power and its driving passion, its right to be master of its own destiny. And what he would really have liked to do at this very moment was to saddle up his horse, Zandor, then take off for those sand-dunes and allow them to dictate his future for him.

But he knew the idea was pure fantasy. For behind him lay four letters, all of which demanded he make those decisions for himself. And beyond the relative sanctuary of the four walls surrounding him lay a palace in waiting; his father, his half-brother, plus a thousand and one other people, all of whom believed they owned a piece of his so-called destiny.

So Zandor would have to stay in his stable. His beloved sand-dunes would have to wait a while to swallow him up. Making a half-turn, he stared grimly at the letters. Only one had been opened: the first one, which he had tossed aside with the contempt it had deserved. Since then he had left the others sealed on his desk and had tried very hard to ignore them.

But the time for burying his head in the sand was over.

A knock on the door diverted his attention. It would be his most trusted aide, Faysal. Hassan recognised the lightness of the knock. Sure enough the door opened and a short, fine-boned man wearing the traditional white and pale blue robes of their Arabian birthright appeared in its arched aperture, where he paused and bowed his head, waiting to be invited in or told to go.

‘Come in, Faysal,’ Hassan instructed a trifle impatiently. Sometimes Faysal’s rigid adherence to so-called protocol set his teeth on edge.

With another deferential bow, Faysal moved to his master’s bidding. Stepping into the room, he closed the door behind him then used some rarely utilised initiative by walking across the room to come to a halt several feet from the desk on the priceless carpet that covered, in part, the expanse of polished blue marble between the desk and the door.

Hassan found himself staring at the carpet. His wife had ordered it to be placed there, claiming the room’s spartan appearance invited no one to cross its austere threshold. The fact that this was supposed to be the whole point had made absolutely no difference to Leona. She had simply carried on regardless, bringing many items into the room besides the carpet. Such as the pictures now adorning the walls and the beautiful ceramics and sculptures scattered around, all of which had been produced by gifted artists native to the small Gulf state of Rahman. Hassan had soon found he could no longer lift his eyes without having them settle on an example of local enterprise.

Yet it was towards the only western pieces Leona had brought into the room that his eyes now drifted. The low table and two overstuffed easy chairs had been placed by the other window, where she would insist on making him sit with her several times a day to enjoy the view while they drank tea and talked and touched occasionally as lovers do…

Dragging the gutrah from his head with almost angry fingers, Hassan tossed it aside then went to sit down in the chair behind his desk. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What have you to tell me?’

‘It is not good news, sir.’ Faysal began with a warning. ‘Sheikh Abdul is entertaining certain…factions at his summer palace. Our man on the inside confirms that the tone of their conversation warrants your most urgent attention.’

Hassan made no comment, but his expression hardened fractionally. ‘And my wife?’ he asked next.

‘The Sheikha still resides in Spain, sir,’ Faysal informed him, ‘working with her father at the new resort of San Estéban, overseeing the furnishing of several villas about to be released for sale.’

Doing what she did best, Hassan thought grimly—and did not need to glance back at the two stuffed chairs to conjure up a vision of long silken hair the colour of a desert sunset, framing a porcelain smooth face with laughing green eyes and a smile that dared him to complain about her invasion of his private space. ‘Trust me,’ he could hear her say. ‘It is my job to give great empty spaces a little soul and their own heartbeat.’

Well, the heartbeat had gone out of this room when she’d left it, and as for the soul…

Another sigh escaped him. ‘How long do you think we have before they make their move?’

The slight tensing in Faysal’s stance warned Hassan that he was not going to like what was coming. ‘If you will forgive me for saying so, sir,’ his aide apologised, ‘with Mr Ethan Hayes also residing at her father’s property, I would say that the matter has become most seriously urgent indeed.’

Since this was complete news to Hassan it took a moment for the full impact of this information to really sink in. Then he was suddenly on his feet and was swinging tensely away to glare at the sand-dunes again. Was she mad? he was thinking angrily. Did she have a death wish? Was she so indifferent to his feelings that she could behave like this?

Ethan Hayes. His teeth gritted together as an old familiar jealousy began mixing with his anger to form a much more volatile substance. He swung back to face Faysal. ‘How long has Mr Hayes been in residence in San Estéban?’

Faysal made a nervous clearing of his throat. ‘These seven days past,’ he replied.

‘And who else knows about this…? Sheikh Abdul?’

‘It was discussed,’ Faysal confirmed.

With a tight shifting of his long lean body, Hassan returned to his seat. ‘Cancel all my appointments for the rest of the month,’ he instructed, drawing his appointments diary towards him to begin scoring hard lines through the same busy pages. ‘My yacht is berthed at Cadiz. Have it moved to San Estéban. Check that my plane is ready for an immediate take-off and ask Rafiq to come to me.’

The cold quality of the commands did nothing to dilute their grim purpose. ‘If asked,’ Faysal prompted, ‘what reason do I give for your sudden decision to cancel your appointments?’

‘I am about to indulge in a much needed holiday cruising the Mediterranean with my nice new toy,’ Sheikh Hassan replied, and the bite in his tone made a complete mockery of the words spoken, for they both knew that the next few weeks promised to be no holiday. ‘And Faysal…’ Hassan stalled his aide as he was about to take his leave ‘…if anyone so much as whispers the word adultery in the same breath as my wife’s name, they will not breathe again—you understand me?’

The other man went perfectly still, recognising the responsibility that was being laid squarely upon him. ‘Yes, sir.’ He bowed.

Hassan’s grim nod was a dismissal. Left alone again, he leaned back in his chair and began frowning while he tried to decide how best to tackle this. His gaze fell on the small stack of letters. Reaching out with long fingers, he drew them towards him, picked out the only envelope with a broken seal and removed the single sheet of paper from inside. The content of the letter he ignored with the same dismissive contempt he had always applied to it. His interest lay only in the telephone number printed beneath the business logo. With an expression that said he resented having his hand forced like this, he took a brief glance at his watch, then was lifting up the telephone, fairly sure that his wife’s lawyer would be in his London office at this time of the day.

The ensuing conversation was not a pleasant one, and the following conversation with his father-in-law even less so. He had just replaced the receiver and was frowning darkly over what Victor Frayne had said to him, when another knock sounded at the door. Hard eyes lanced towards it as the door swung open and Rafiq stepped into the room.

Though he was dressed in much the same clothes as Faysal was wearing, there the similarity between the two men ended. For where Faysal was short and thin and annoyingly effacing, Rafiq was a giant of a man who rarely kowtowed to anyone. Hassan warranted only a polite nod of the head, yet he knew Rafiq would willingly die for him if he was called upon to do so.

‘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.’

Leandros Petronades was the main investor in San Estéban. He was hosting the party tonight for very exclusive guests whom he had seduced into taking a tour of the new resort, with an invitation to arrive in style on his yacht and enjoy its many luxurious facilities.

‘At a guess, I would say it has to be the biggest in the harbour, considering its capacity to sleep so many people,’ Leona smiled.

‘Actually no, it wasn’t,’ Ethan replied with a frown. ‘There’s another yacht tied up that has to be twice the size.’

‘The commercial kind?’ Leona suggested, aware that the resort was fast becoming the fashionable place to visit.

‘Not big enough.’ Ethan shook his head. ‘It’s more likely to belong to one of Petronades’ rich cronies. Another heavy investor in the resort, maybe.’

There were enough of them, Leona acknowledged. From being a sleepy little fishing port a few years ago, with the help of some really heavyweight investors San Estéban had grown into a large, custom-built holiday resort, which now sprawled in low-rise, Moorish elegance over the hills surrounding the bay.

So why Hassan’s name slid back into her head Leona had no idea. Because Hassan didn’t even own a yacht, nor had he ever invested in any of her father’s projects, as far as she knew.

Irritated with herself, she turned her attention to what was happening outside the car. On the beach waterfront people strolled, enjoying the light breeze coming off the water.

It was a long time since she could remember strolling anywhere herself with such freedom. Marrying an Arab had brought with it certain restrictions on her freedom, which were not all due to the necessity of conforming to expectations regarding women. Hassan occupied the august position of being the eldest son and heir to the small but oil-rich Gulf state of Rahman. As his wife, Leona had become a member of Rahman’s exclusive hierarchy, which in turn made everything she said or did someone else’s property. So she’d learned very quickly to temper her words, to think twice before she went anywhere, especially alone. Strolling just for the sake of just doing it would have been picked upon and dissected for no other reason than interest’s sake, so she had learned not to do it.

This last year she hadn’t gone out much because to be seen out had drawn too much speculation as to why she was in London and alone. In Rahman she was known as Sheikh Hassan’s pretty English Sheikha. In London she was known as the woman who gave up every freedom to marry her Arabian prince.

A curiosity in other words. Curiosities were blatantly stared at, and she didn’t want to offend Arab sensibilities by having her failed marriage speculated upon in the British press, so she’d lived a quiet life.

It was a thought that made Leona smile now, because her life in Rahman had been far less quiet than it had become once she’d returned to London.

The car had almost reached the end of the street where the new harbour was situated. There were several large yachts moored up—and Leandros Petronades’ elegant white-hulled boat was easy to recognise because it was lit up like a showboat for the party. Yet it was the yacht moored next to it that caught her attention. It was huge, as Ethan had said—twice the length and twice the height of its neighbour. It was also shrouded in complete darkness. With its dark-painted hull, it looked as if it was crouching there like a large sleek cat, waiting to leap on its next victim.