Sheikh's Honor

Clio said, finding her voice.

Jalal’s hands stilled their motion. The heat was too much. She felt burned.

“Do you challenge me, Clio? When a woman challenges a man, she must beware. He may accept her challenge.”

She had no idea why Jalal’s words created such sudden torment in her, or what that torment was. Her whole body churned with feeling. She wished he would get away from her so she could breathe.

“Why doesn’t it surprise me that you hear the word no as a challenge?” she asked defiantly.

His thumb tilted her chin, bringing her face closer to his full mouth, and her heart responded with nervous, quickened pulse. He smiled quizzically at her.

“But I have not heard the word no, Clio. Did you say it?”

Dear Reader,

Twenty years ago in May, the first Silhouette romance was published, and in 2000 we’re celebrating our 20th anniversary all year long! Celebrate with us—and start with six powerful, passionate, provocative love stories from Silhouette Desire.

Elizabeth Bevarly offers a MAN OF THE MONTH so tempting that we decided to call it Dr. Irresistible! Enjoy this sexy tale about a single-mom nurse who enlists a handsome doctor to pose as her husband at her tenth high school reunion. The wonderful miniseries LONE STAR FAMILIES: THE LOGANS, by bestselling author Leanne Banks, continues with Expecting His Child, a sensual romance about a woman carrying the child of her family’s nemesis after a stolen night of passion.

Ever-talented Cindy Gerard returns to Desire with In His Loving Arms, in which a pregnant widow is reunited with the man who’s haunted her dreams for seven years. Sheikhs abound in Alexandra Sellers’ Sheikh’s Honor, a new addition to her dramatic miniseries SONS OF THE DESERT. The Desire theme promotion, THE BABY BANK, about women who find love unexpectedly when seeking sperm donors, continues with Metsy Hingle’s The Baby Bonus. And newcomer Kathie DeNosky makes her Desire debut with Did You Say Married?!, in which the heroine wakes up in Vegas next to a sexy cowboy who turns out to be her newly wed husband.

What a lineup! So this May, for Mother’s Day, why not treat your mom—and yourself—to all six of these highly sensual and emotional love stories from Silhouette Desire!

Enjoy!

Joan Marlow Golan

Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

Sheikh’s Honor

Alexandra Sellers

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For my sister

Donna.

She knows why.

ALEXANDRA SELLERS

is the author of over twenty-five novels and a feline language text published in 1997 and still selling.

Born and raised in Canada, Alexandra first came to London as a drama student. Now she lives near Hampstead Heath with her husband, Nick. They share housekeeping with Monsieur, who jumped through the window one day and announced, as cats do, that he was moving in.

What she would miss most on a desert island is shared laughter.

Readers can write to Alexandra at P.O. Box 9449, London NW3 2WH, U.K., England.

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 Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

One

The green-and-white seaplane skimmed the tops of the trees, the drone of its engine loud as it headed for a landing on the next lake. Clio Blake, guiding the powerboat in hard jolts across the wake of a cruiser that had just emerged from the channel ahead of her, heard the sound first. As the plane roared over her head, she flicked a glance skyward and wished that her gaze held some magic that could make it disappear.

She did not want him here. He should not be coming. It wasn’t right.

She cut her speed sharply and guided the boat into the narrow channel that led between two lakes, where signs posting the speed limit warned boaters of the danger of their wake eroding the shoreline. Some of the cottages were still boarded up, but most showed signs of having been opened for the season. At one cottage two men were working to take down the shutters, and Clio exchanged a wave with them as she passed.

Once through the channel and emerging into the larger lake, she reluctantly booted up her speed again and headed across the water towards the airline dock. The Twin Otter was already skimming along the surface, preparing to take off again.

So he was here. No hope left that something would prevent his arrival…. Seeing where her thoughts led, Cliogrimaced self-consciously. Had she been unconsciously hoping for the plane to crash, then? Well, it only went to show how deep her opposition went.

But her parents had simply refused to listen. Her sister Zara had asked, and what Zara asked for, she still got. So Prince Jalal ibn Aziz ibn Daud ibn Hassan al Quraishi, the newly found nephew of the rulers of the Barakat Emirates, was here. For the entire summer.

She wondered if Prince Jalal was remembering their last meeting right now. It is dangerous to call a man your enemy when you do not know his strength, he had said then.

She had disdained to notice the threat, opening her eyes wide as if to say, You and whose army? But that had been a lie. She felt threatened in his presence, and who would not? He was the man who had taken her sister hostage to force his point on the princes of the Barakat Emirates.

Anything could have happened. They were all incredibly lucky that it had been resolved without bloodshed. It was enough to make him her enemy forever. That was what she had told him, that day at the fabulous, fairy-tale weddings, including Zara and Prince Rafi’s. For her the celebrations had been deeply marred by the presence of such a man…even if, in the most outrageous turnaround of all time, he did have the title prince instead of bandit now.

It is dangerous to call a man your enemy when you do not know his strength.

Clio shivered. No doubt she would get to know his strengths—and weaknesses—over this coming, terrible summer. But one thing was certain—she would never forgive him for what he had done to them, the hell he had put them through, the risk he had run.

Whatever Jalal the bandit’s strength was, he would never be anything to her but enemy.

Clio had always half-worshipped her older sister, though there were scarcely three years separating them. Zary was what Clio called her, right from her earliest speech. It was her own special nickname, and as a child she got ferociously jealous when anyone else tried to use the name.

Both girls took after their mother. Both had the black hair, the dark brown eyes, the beautiful bones…but Clio knew full well that she had always been a poor man’s version of her perfect sister. Zara’s hair fell in massed perfect curls, Clio’s own hair was thick but dead straight. Zara was a fairy princess, with her exotically slanted eyes, delicate features, and her porcelain doll body. Clio’s eyes were set straight under dark eyebrows that were wide, strong and level, giving her face a serious cast. Her eyelashes were not long, though lushly thick, and she had inherited their father’s wide, full mouth rather than the cupid’s bow that Zara had from their mother.

By the age of eleven Clio was already taller and bigger than her older sister. And in spite of being younger, she had begun to feel protective of Zara. She had always felt the urge to fight Zara’s battles for her, even though Zara was perfectly capable of fighting her own. Half the time they weren’t even battles Zara thought worth fighting.

Like now. Zara had forgiven and forgotten what Jalal had done to her. Clio knew she never could. It was Zara who had asked her family to have him for the summer, so that he could practise his spoken English before going on to a postgrad course somewhere…Clio, meanwhile, had been aghast. She had fought the idea with everything she had.

But she had lost the argument. And now here she was, picking up Jalal the bandit from his flight to the Ontario heartland, deep in the most beautiful part of cottage country, where the family lived and worked on the shore of Love Lake.

He was standing on the dock by two canvas holdalls. He had shaved off his neat beard since she last saw him. Perhaps he thought it would help him blend in, but if so, he hoped in vain. The set of his shoulders, the tilt of his chin as he took in his surroundings were indefinably different, set him apart from the men she knew.

He came out of his reverie when she hailed him, the boat sidling up to the concrete dock. The water level on the lakes was low this year, and he was above her.

“Clio!” he cried, ready to be friendly. So he was going to pretend to forget. Her jaw tightened. Well, she was not.

“Prince Jalal,” she acknowledged with a brief, cool nod. “Can you jump in? Toss your bags down first.”

He threw her one assessing look and then nodded, as if marking something to himself. She knew that the offer of friendship had been withdrawn, and was glad of it. It was good that he was so quick on the uptake. It would be best if they understood each other from the beginning.

“Thank you,” he said, and picked up his bags to toss them, one after the other, into the well of the boat.

Then he stood for a moment, frowning down at the boat riding the swell of its own wake, as if trying to work out some obscure alien art. Clio realized with a jolt that he had probably never before performed the, to her, simple action of jumping into an unmoored boat.

And this was the man who was going to be so useful to her father at the marina! That was the argument her parents had made when she protested: with Jude gone off to the city, they needed someone…

“Take my hand,” she said coolly, and, as she would with any green tourist, straightened and turned, keeping one hand steady on the wheel, while she reached her other up for his. “Step down onto the seat first.”

She half expected him to refuse the help of a mere woman, but he bent over and reached for her hand. As his fingers brushed hers, Clio gasped, feeling as if his touch delivered an electric shock, and snatched her hand away.

Jalal tried to regain his balance on the dock and failed, but now he had lost his timing. The boat sank away from him just as his weight came down. He landed awkwardly on the seat with one foot, crashed down onto the floor of the boat with the other, skidded and involuntarily reached for Clio.

Her hands automatically clasped him, too, and then there they were—Jalal down on one knee before her, with his arms around her, his cheek pressed against the rich swell of her breasts, Clio with her arms wrapped around his sun-heated back and shoulders.

It was as if they were lovers. The heat of him burned her palms. She felt the brush of his breath at her throat. For a moment the sun sparkled on the water with a brightness that hurt her eyes.

Clio stiffened. She was suddenly flooded with electric rage, her nerves buzzing and spitting like an overloaded circuit.

“Take your hands off me,” she said.

Jalal straightened, glaring at her. He was seething with anger. She could feel the wave of it hit her.

“What is it you hope to prove?” he asked through his teeth.

Flushing under the impact of his gaze, Clio cried, “It wasn’t deliberate! What do you think I am?”

He stood gazing at her. “I think you are a woman who sees things her own way. You choose to be my enemy, but you do not know what that means. If you try to make a fool of me again, you will learn what it means.”

Nervous fear zinged through her at his words, at the look in his eyes. But she was damned if she would let him see it.

“I think I know, thank you.” She had learned what it meant to be his enemy the day he had kidnapped Zara.

He shook his head once, in almost contemptuous denial, still eyeing her levelly. “If you knew, you would not play the games of a child.”

“And what does that mean?”

“You are a woman, Clio. I am a man. When a woman sets herself to be the enemy of a man, there is always another reason than she imagines.”

She opened her mouth, gasping at the implication. “Well, first prize for patriarchal, chauvinistic arrogance! And you from the modern, secular Barakat Emirates, too! You don’t seem to have—”

He smiled and lifted his palm, and she broke off. “I am of the desert,” he reminded her through his teeth.

“So I gathered!”

Three fingers gracefully folded down to his thumb, leaving the forefinger to admonish her. “In the desert a man will let a woman do much, because he is strong, and she is weak. He makes allowances.”

Her blood seemed to be rushing through her brain and body at speeds never previously attained. “Of all the—!”

“In return, Clio, a woman never speaks to a man in such a tone of voice as this that you use to me. Women have sharp tongues, men have strong bodies. We respect each other by not using our strengths against the other.”

“Are you threatening me?” she demanded.

“I only explain to you how men and women get along in a civilized country,” he told her, and though now she was sure he was laughing at her, she couldn’t stop the fury that buzzed in her.

“Well, that isn’t how it is here!” she exploded. “And maybe you haven’t noticed that, civilized or not, you aren’t in the desert now!”

His lips were twitching. “I do know. We are going to hit the boat behind us, and this is a thing that would never happen in the desert.”

Two

Clio whirled, diving instinctively for the wheel. She put the engine in gear, barely in time, and drew away from the small yacht moored at the next dock. What a racket there would have been from the anguished owner if she had collided with that expanse of perfectly polished whiteness!

It wasn’t like her to forget herself like that when she was in charge of a boat. Clio had had water safety drummed into her with her earliest memories. It just showed what a negative effect he had on her.

But the sudden change of focus had the effect of calming her wild emotions. As she guided the boat over the sparkling lake, she understood that he had been deliberately baiting her, and was annoyed with herself for reacting so violently. She needed better control than that if she was going to get through the summer in one piece.

Jalal gazed at the scene around him. “This is the first time I have seen such a landscape.” He had an expression of such deep appreciation on his face that Clio had to resist softening. She loved this land. “It is beautiful.”

She certainly would always think so. “But I guess you feel more at home in the desert,” she suggested. She had not liked what she saw of the desert when she was in the Emirates. No wonder if an environment like that produced violent men.

“I am at home nowhere.”

She stared at him. “Really? Why?”

He shook his head. “My grandfather Selim never meant me to follow in his own footsteps. When I was a little boy he told me always that something great was in store for me. I learned to feel that where I was born was not my true home. I belonged somewhere else, but I did not know where. Then my mother took me to the capital….”

“Zara told me that the palace organized your education from an early age,” she said, interested in his story in spite of herself. He had a deep, pleasant voice. He engaged her interest against her will.

“Yes, but I did not know it then. Curious things happened, but I was too young to demand an explanation. Only when I approached university, and my mother gave me a list of courses to follow in my studies. Then some suspicion I had felt became clearer. I demanded to know who controlled my life, and why. But she would tell me nothing.”

“And did you take the recommended degree?”

He laughed lightly at himself. He never told his story to strangers, and he did not understand why he was telling Clio. She had made it clear she was no friend.

“I never knew! I tore up the list, like a hothead. I said, now I am a man, I choose for myself!”

“And then?”

He shook his head, shrugging. “I graduated, I enlisted in the armed forces—and then again I felt the invisible hand of my protector. They put me into officer training. I rose more quickly than individual merit could deserve…still my mother was mute.”

She could hear the memory of frustration in his voice.

“But you did eventually find out.” Clio wondered if this story was designed to disarm her hostility by justifying his treatment of her sister. Well, let him hope. He would find out soon enough that what she said, she meant.

“Yes, I found out. It was on the day the princes came of age according to their father’s will. The Kingdom of Barakat would be no more, and in its place there would be three Emirates. There was a great coronation ceremony, televised for all the country to see. Television sets were put in the squares of the villages—a spectacle for the people, to reassure them of the power, the mystery, the majesty of their new princes.”

She was half-smiling without being aware of it, falling under his spell.

“I watched in my mother’s house. Never will I forget the moment when the camera rested on the faces of the princes, one after the other, coming last to Prince Rafi.

“Of course I knew we were alike—whenever his picture was in the paper everyone who knew me commented. But what is a photograph? True resemblance requires more than the face. That day…that day I saw Prince Rafi move, and speak, and smile, as if…as if I looked in a mirror instead of a television set.”

She murmured something.

“And then it fell into place. The mystery of my life— I knew it had some connection with my resemblance to Prince Rafi. I knew that the old man I had called my father was not my father.

“‘Who am I?’ I cried to my mother, trembling, jumping to my feet. ‘Who is Prince Rafi to me?”’

“Did she tell you?”

He nodded. “My mother could no longer refuse, in spite of the shame of what she confessed. She was disappointed that the great future that they had promised for me for so many years had not arrived on this momentous day. ‘He is your uncle,’ she told me. ‘The half brother of your father, the great Prince Aziz. You could be standing there today instead of them.”’

Jalal paused, a man hovering between present and past. “Of course I knew—every citizen knew—who Prince Aziz was, although it was over twenty-five years since he and his brother had so tragically died. Singers sang the song of King Daud’s great heartbreak.”

His eyes rested on her, but he hardly saw her. He was looking at the past.

“And this noble prince, this hero dead so young…was my father.”

Clio breathed deeply. She had been holding her breath without knowing it. “What a terrible shock it must have been.”

It would be something, a discovery like that. In a young man it might motivate…seeing where her thoughts were leading her, Clio mentally braked.

He nodded. “I was a lost man. As if I stood alone in a desert after a sandstorm. Every familiar landmark obliterated. All that I had known and believed about myself was false. I was someone else—the illegitimate son of a dead prince, grandson of the old king…how could this be? Why had I not been told?”

“What a terrible shock it must have been.”

“A shock, yes. But very soon I felt a great rage. If they did not wish to recognize me because of the illegitimacy of my birth, why had they taken me from my ordinary life, for what had they educated me…? Why had I never met my grandfather, the king, and my grandmother, his most beloved wife, in all those years when my future was being directed—and to what purpose was it all? My grandfather was dead, and I was left with no explanation of anything.”

He paused. The boat sped over the lake, and he blinked at the sun dancing off the water.

“What did you do?”

He glanced towards her, then back to the past again. “I made approaches to these new princes, my uncles. I demanded to know what my grandfather’s plans for me had been.”

“And they didn’t tell you?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. They would not speak to their own nephew. I had been taken from my mother’s home, but those who had done this thing would not let me enter my father’s.”

He turned to gaze intently at her. “Was this not injustice? Was I not right to be angered?”

“Zara told me they never knew. Your uncles, Rafi and Omar and Karim—they didn’t know who you were. Isn’t that right?”

“It is true that they themselves had never been told. They said afterwards that my letters, even, did not make the point clear. They thought me only a bandit. But someone had known, from the beginning. My grandfather himself…but he had made no provision for me in his will. No mention.”

“Isn’t that kind of weird?” It struck her as the least credible part of the whole equation.

His eyes searched her face with uncomfortable intensity.

“You would say that my uncles knew the truth, and only pretended ignorance until they were forced to admit it? Do you know this? Has your sister said something?”

She shook her head, not trusting the feelings of empathy that his story was—probably deliberately—stirring in her.

“No, I don’t know any more than you’ve told me. It’s just very hard for me to accept that a woman wouldn’t insist on meeting her only grandchild, the son of her own dead son.”

His face grew shadowed. “Perhaps—perhaps my illegitimate birth was too great a stain.”

“And so they never even met you?” Clio tried to put herself in such a position, and failed. She herself would move heaven and earth to have her grandchild near her, part of the family, whatever sin of love his parents had committed.

“Nothing. Not even a letter to be given to me after their death.”

No wonder he felt at home nowhere.

He was silent as they skimmed across the endless stretch of water, that seemed as vast as any desert.

“What did you do when your uncles refused your requests?”

He had made his way back to his “home,” the desert of his childhood. But the bonds had been severed.

“The desert could never be home to me. The tribe—so ignorant, living in another century, afraid of everything new—could not be my family.” So his determination to force his real family to recognize him grew. He had collected followers to his standard—and eventually…he had taken a hostage.

“And the rest you know,” he said, in an ironic tone.

“The rest I know,” she agreed. “And now your life has changed all over again. Thanks to Zara, you’ve proven your bloodline, you have your father’s titles and property…and you’re so trusted by your uncles they’ve made you Grand Vizier and now you’re on a mission to—”

His head snapped around, and if his dark eyes had searched her before, they now raked her ruthlessly.

“Mission? Who has told you I had a mission?”

She returned his look with surprise. “I thought the reason you were coming here was to get a better command of English so you could study political science or whatever at Harvard in the autumn. I thought a summer with the rowdy Blake family was supposed to be the perfect way to do it.”