The Ice Maiden's Sheikh

“Can’t?”

“You said it yourself,” she accused. “I don’t belong here, Latif. It’s not my home.”

“A woman belongs with her husband. His home is her home. You belong with me. You are Bagestani. Your blood is here. Your heart is here. Your people call to you. I call to you.”

His hands tightened on her, as if he knew that he had lost. He bent and kissed her again.

“Answer me,” he commanded.

“Please take me as a lover,” she sobbed, “and don’t ask me for more.”

“If I love you, I make you mine!”

Her heart twisting with hurt, she drew back from him. But fear was more powerful than the pain. She knew this was not a question of heart, or even of love. This was powerful sexual passion, masquerading as love, and she would be ten times worse than a fool to be swayed by it….

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another stellar month of smart, sensual reads. Our bestselling series DYNASTIES: THE DANFORTHS comes to a compelling conclusion with Leanne Banks’s Shocking the Senator as honest Abe Danforth finally gets his story. Be sure to look for the start of our next family dynasty story when Eileen Wilks launches DYNASTIES: THE ASHTONS next month and brings you all the romance and intrigue you could ever desire…all set in the fabulous Napa Valley.

Award-winning author Jennifer Greene is back this month to conclude THE SCENT OF LAVENDER series with the astounding Wild in the Moment. And just as the year brings some things to a close, new excitement blossoms as Alexandra Sellers gives us the next installment of her SONS OF THE DESERT series with The Ice Maiden’s Sheikh. The always-enjoyable Emilie Rose will wow you with her tale of Forbidden Passion—let’s just say the book starts with a sexy tryst on a staircase. We’ll let you imagine the rest. Brenda Jackson is also back this month with her unforgettable hero Storm Westmoreland, in Riding the Storm. (A title that should make you go hmmm.) And rounding things out is up-and-coming author Michelle Celmer’s second book, The Seduction Request.

I would love to hear what you think about Silhouette Desire, so please feel free to drop me a line c/o Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10279. Let me know what miniseries you are enjoying, your favorite authors and things you would like to see in the future.

With thanks,

Melissa Jeglinski

Senior Editor

Silhouette Desire

The Ice Maiden’s Sheikh

Alexandra Sellers

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, UK, 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

Epilogue

One

The bride was missing.

Jalia ran along the balcony, anxiety beating in her temples. The soft green silk of the bridesmaid’s veil fell forward yet again to cover her face, half blinding her, adding to the helpless confusion she felt. But she had no time now to struggle with it.

What was wrong? Where had Noor gone, and why?

Oh, please let it be just one of her games. Let her not have changed her mind like this, in the most embarrassing possible way….

“Noor!” she called softly. “Noor, where are you?”

A confused, murmuring silence was replacing the earlier sounds of celebration coming from the large central courtyard of the palatial house, and Jalia’s heart sank. Hopeless now to think she might find Noor quickly so that the wedding could proceed without an obvious delay.

This balcony overlooked a smaller courtyard. If Noor had come out here, surely she would have realized at once that she had gone the wrong way?

“Noor?” She leaned over the railing. Below, the courtyard was empty. A fountain played with the sunlight, creating an endless spray of diamonds; flowers danced in the breeze; but no human shadow moved across the beautiful tiles.

Ahead of her, in a breathtaking series of arches and columns, stretched the shadowed balcony, leading to an ancient arched door like the secret door of childhood dreams. No one.

“Noor?” A bead of sweat dropped from under the veil onto her hand. Half heat, half nerves. Was the bride’s flight her—Jalia’s—fault? People would think so. Jalia would be blamed, by some more fiercely than by others.

Latif Abd al Razzaq Shahin, for one, would condemn Jalia’s interference in her cousin’s sudden engagement to his friend Bari. He already had, and Jalia was still smarting from the contact.

“Noor!” she cried more loudly, because secrecy was impossible now. Oh, how like Noor to create a melodramatic, self-centred, eleventh-hour panic, instead of taking the calm, rational course Jalia had advised. All the princess bride had had to do was insist on taking a little more time before committing herself irrevocably to a stranger in a strange land!

And how like Noor, too, to leave her cousin to pick up the pieces. Thanks to Noor’s open-mouth policy, Jalia’s opposition to the hasty wedding was well-known in the family. People would blame her for this outcome.

He would blame her. Not that she cared a damn for Latif Abd al Razzaq’s opinion, but his criticism could be biting and cruel, and he disliked Jalia almost as much as she disliked him. He would probably relish this opportunity to put her so drastically in the wrong.

As if the thought had given rise to the devil—or the devil to the thought?—the man himself appeared before her on the balcony a few yards away. He was wearing the magnificent ceremonial costume of a Cup Companion, but she shivered as if at the approach of menace and dodged behind one of the columns of worn, sand-coloured brick.

But she had been mesmerized a second too long, and he struck fast, like the falcon he was named for. The next moment he was before her, blocking her path.

“Where has your cousin gone?” demanded Latif Abd al Razzaq Shahin, Cup Companion to the new Sultan, in a commanding voice.

Jalia’s skin twitched all the way to her scalp. She shrank against the pillar in instinctive animal alarm, then forced herself to stand straight. Her face was totally covered. How could he know who she was, behind the veil? He was only guessing.

“I dant now vot you are tawkeen abowt,” she said in a deep, breathy voice. “You are made a meestek.”

He shook his head with the unconscious, bone-deep arrogance she so hated. Whatever Latif Abd al Razzaq decided to own was his, whatever he decided to do was right, and everyone else—life itself—had to submit. That was the message.

Anger sang through her blood and nerves. How she detested the man! He was everything she most disliked about the East.

“The game is over, Jalia,” he said through his teeth. “Where did she go?”

She wanted to walk away, but her path was blocked by his body. She would have to push past him, and she discovered that she was deeply reluctant to do so.

“I am not who you sink. Lit me pess,” she commanded, with icy disdain.

He raised a hand, his teeth flashing as she instinctively flinched. Slowly and deliberately he caught a corner of the scarf that covered her to draw it back over her head.

Her thick, ash-coloured hair lay over one side of her face, a heavy wave curving in against the high, delicate cheek, half masking one slate-green eye as she lifted her chin with a cool, haughty look.

His hand remained tangled in the scarf, the pale hair brushing his knuckles as Latif and the Princess gazed at each other. Deep mutual hostility seemed to warp the air between them.

After a curious, frozen moment, his fingers released the supple silk and his hand withdrew. With the breaking of the connection the air could move again.

“Where has your cousin gone?” he asked in a harsh, low voice.

Her chin went up another notch, and her jade eyes flashed cool fire. She showed no embarrassment at having been caught in a lie.

“Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice, Excellency.”

“Where?”

“I have no idea where Noor is. Perhaps in a bathroom somewhere, being sick. I am looking for her. You waste time by keeping me here. Let me pass, please.”

“If you are looking for her in the house, it is you who waste time. She has fled.”

Jalia’s heart dropped like a diving seabird. “Fled? I don’t believe you! Fled where?”

“That is the question Bari sent me to ask you. Where has the Princess gone?”

“Are you telling me she’s left the house?”

“Don’t you know it?”

Involuntarily she glanced down at her own closed fist. “No! How would I know? I was waiting with the other bridesmaids….”

His eyes followed hers. Her fist was clenched tight on something. In a move that was almost possessive, his hand closed on her wrist. Calmly he forced her hand over, so that the fingertips were uppermost.

“What is it?” His eyes flicked from her hand to her face and rested there, with a grimly determined look.

“None of your bloody business! Let go of me!”

“Open your hand, Princess Jalia.”

She struggled, but his strength was firmly turned against her now, and she could not get free. After a moment in which they stared at each other, she had the humiliation of feeling the pressure of his finger between her knuckles, forcing her hand open.

On her open palm a diamond solitaire glittered with painful brilliance.

Again his green eyes moved to her face, and the expression she saw in them made her stiffen.

“What is this?” he demanded as, with long, strong fingers, he ignored her struggles and plucked the ring from her palm. He let her wrist go so suddenly she staggered.

He held it up in a shaft of sunlight that found its way into the shadows of the balcony through some chink in the ancient arched roof. It glowed and flashed, but even the fabulous al Khalid Diamond couldn’t match Latif Abd al Razzaq’s eyes for glitter.

“What is this?” he repeated accusingly.

“A cheap imitation?” Jalia drawled with exaggerated irony, because Noor’s engagement diamond was unmistakable. The al Khalid Diamond was probably worth about a thousand times what had been paid for the modest engagement band of opals encircling Jalia’s own finger.

The ring’s value, as much as its stark, flashing beauty, had delighted Noor, but it didn’t tempt Jalia one bit. She knew too well what came with a ring like that—a man like Bari al Khalid…or Latif Abd al Razzaq.

“Tell me where your cousin has gone.”

“What makes you so damned sure I know? Back to the palace, I suppose! Where else would she go?”

Her scarf was slipping forward over her face again. Jalia began irritably tearing at the pins that held it. What a stupid bloody custom it was, the bride having to be chosen from among a group of bridesmaids, all with scarves draped over their heads, to test the groom’s perspicacity! Everyone knew the groom was always tipped off as to exactly what his bride would be wearing, and today anyway Noor had infuriated all the diehards by wearing Western white. Bari would have had to be blind and ignorant to miss her, even under the yards of enveloping tulle.

But everyone had insisted on playing the ancient ritual out, nevertheless. It was just one of many reasons why Jalia was grateful that her parents had fled Bagestan years before she was born, and why she was not happy about their plans for coming back.

Latif Abd al Razzaq was another.

He gazed at her, incredulous. Jalia knew he would never believe that, as opposed as she had been to Noor’s hasty, ill-conceived wedding, Jalia had had absolutely nothing to do with this last-minute sabotage.

But what did she care? What Latif Abd al Razzaq thought of her mattered precisely nothing to her.

She flung the beautifully embroidered scarf away from her, not caring that it caught on a rosebush bristling with thorns.

“You have her ring.”

“Yes,” Jalia admitted coolly.

“How did you get it?”

“What makes it your business to ask me that question, Excellency? And in that particular tone of voice?”

His voice shifted to a deep growl. “What tone of voice do you want from me, Princess?” he asked abruptly.

Jalia’s skin twitched, but she brushed aside her nervous discomfort.

“I would be quite happy never to hear your voice at all.”

Jalia was glad of Latif Abd al Razzaq’s dislike, of the fierce disapproval that he didn’t bother to hide. A man like him could only be an enemy—she knew that much—and it was safer to have the enmity in the open. Then no one was fooled.

Looking up at him now, in the deep green silk jacket that intensified the dangerous depths of his emerald eyes, a thickly ornamented ceremonial sword slung from one hip, she felt the antipathy like a powerful current between them.

She didn’t know why he should dislike her, though she understood her own deep dislike of him clearly enough: he embodied everything she least liked in a man. Autocratic, overbearing, sure of himself, super-masculine, proud of it.

“Did Noor speak to you before she fled?”

She sighed her outrage. “What do you hope to gain by this?”

“Did she drop any hint? Did she say she was heading to the palace?”

“Will you stop imagining I stage-managed this? Whatever Noor is doing, and whoever is helping her, I had nothing to do with it! Has it occurred to you at all that this may not be what it looks like? For all you or I know, Noor was enticed out of the house by some threat—”

“Ah! She did not leave of her own accord?” The emerald eyes glinted with mocking admiration.

“I don’t know! Can’t you get it past your rigid mind-set that I have no idea why Noor has left—if she has?”

“If?”

“Well, I only have your word for it, Excellency, and you have now and then shown a predisposition to wanting to see me put in the wrong!”

His Excellency gazed at her without speaking for a moment.

“We must talk to the others. Come.”

He turned on his heel and started along the wide, roofed terrace, then entered the arched passageway that led into the main courtyard of the house.

Jalia’s jaw clenched, but she had to talk to Noor’s parents, and that meant apparently obeying Latif’s command. Besides, she reminded herself, he had the ring, and if she wasn’t present he would be sure to put some damning interpretation on the fact that he had found it in Jalia’s own hand.

Two

They descended the magnificent worn marble staircase to the main courtyard, where an air of subdued confusion hung over the wedding party. People were milling around, wondering and speculating, or simply looking bewildered.

Only the Sultan and Sultana looked unruffled, serenely chatting to whoever approached them, so that a tiny island of calm was created in the sea of unhappy excitement.

“What happened?”

“Where is the Princess?”

“Has someone been taken ill?”

“Is the wedding called off?”

The cloud of questions billowed her way, but Jalia didn’t stop; Latif was striding along as though the people were so many trees, and she was grateful to have the excuse to keep going. She had nothing to tell.

In the spacious, pillared reception hall, the families were grouped together on the low platform at one end of the room, talking in quiet, distressed voices. Everywhere the rich carpets were spread with tablecloths laid with china, crystal and silver, as if a thousand people had decided to picnic at once.

“Jalia!” Her mother and aunt, both looking tearful and confused, ran to her. “Did she say anything to you before she went? Where is she going? What happened?”

“H-has she really left the house?” Jalia stammered. She had never seen the two princesses so deeply distressed. Oh, how she wished she had been a little more reasoned in her opposition to Noor’s wedding! If her interference had contributed to this unhappiness…

“Didn’t you know? She has gone! She took the limousine! Still wearing her dress and veil!”

“She didn’t even change?” Jalia gasped. “But where could she go in her dress and veil, except back to the palace? Did she take any luggage?”

“The servants say it is all still stacked in the forecourt, nothing taken. There’s no sign of her at the palace. They will phone if she turns up, but if she had been heading there, surely she would have arrived by now! Tell us what happened!” her aunt begged.

“Aunt, I have no idea what happened! I wasn’t with her.”

But any information, she knew, was better than nothing at a time like this. “I went up with the other bridesmaids to collect her at the right time. The hairdresser said she’d gone into the bathroom. We waited. After about five minutes, I followed her in. She wasn’t there.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Zaynab, I should have raised the alarm right away, but I thought it was just nerves or she’d gone out to the wrong balcony or—” She bit her lip. “So I went to look for her. I suppose that wasted time, but I thought…”

Her aunt patted her hand. “Yes, you thought it was just one of Noor’s little games, Jalia. Anyone would have. But it’s more serious than that. It must be, for her to leave the house. Did she say anything to anyone? When I was with her she was fine, laughing, so happy and excited….”

“Aunt, she—I found her ring. It was on the floor in the room I am using. She must have gone out that way to avoid being seen.”

Latif produced the al Khalid Diamond. Her aunt all but snatched it from him, moaning with horror.

“She must have panicked,” someone offered. “Bridal jitters.”

All around the room, eyes dark with blame rested on Jalia. She was saved from whatever might have been said next when Bari al Khalid’s uncle came into the room, looking harassed and bewildered.

“Bari has gone, too! The guards say he drove out a few minutes after Noor!”

“Barakullah!” Princess Zaynab wailed. “What is going on?”

Latif Abd al Razzaq spoke, his calm voice stilling the rustle of horrified panic. “One of the guards saw her drive away and came to tell Bari. He went after her to bring her back.”

Where Latif stood was suddenly the centre of the room. Everyone turned to gaze at him.

“He asked me to find Jalia and ask her what she knew.”

Again, as one, they all turned more or less accusing eyes on Jalia.

“I don’t know anything about it!” she wailed. “She didn’t say a word to me.” She flicked a glance at Latif. She was sure he had deliberately dropped her in it. “Is it possible she got a phone call—?”

“The maids say not.” Princess Muna answered her daughter.

“Where’s her mobile? Did she phone someone?”

“In her handbag, in the bedroom. She didn’t even take money, Jalia!”

“Oh, my daughter! What is to be done now?” Princess Zaynab cried. “If Bari finds her, so angry as he must be…”

“I will go after them,” Latif announced.

“Ah, Your Excellency, thank you! But if you find Noor—”

“Jalia will come with me.”

Jalia looked up in startled indignation. “Me? What good can—”

Her mother hurried into the breach. “Yes, go with His Excellency, Jalia. You might be able to help.”

Go with Latif Abd al Razzaq? The words had a kind of premonitory electricity that made her skin shiver into gooseflesh. Why was he asking for her company, when he clearly thought her poison?

“Help how? I don’t know where she’s gone!” she protested, but not one face relaxed. She glared at Latif. “I have absolutely no idea what she’s…”

He only lifted an eyebrow, but it was a comment that she was protesting too much. She could see in their faces that most people saw his point. Damn the man!

“Of course you don’t, Jalia,” Princess Zaynab murmured, patting her hand again, her soft dark eyes liquid with worry. “But Bari will be so angry. Please go with Latif. She may be…calm her down and bring her back. Tell her it’s not too late. We will wait here.”

Outside, a hot, dry wind smacked her, blowing her wedding finery against her body and dust into her eyes.

The hem of her flowing skirt and the bodice of her tunic were encrusted with gold embroidery, sequins and gold coins. How stupid to go searching for Noor dressed like this! As if she were one of the mountain tribeswomen she had seen in the bazaar, who even seemed to go shopping dressed in magnificently decorated clothes. Some of them were blond, with green eyes, like Jalia, though she had always believed that her own colouring came from her French grandmother.

By the time Latif’s car arrived from the parking area, her skin was glowing with sweat and she realized she had taken nothing to protect herself from the sun.

The Cup Companion’s ceremonial sword in its jewelled scabbard had been tossed into the back seat. He watched her silently as she slipped into the seat beside him.

“I can’t imagine why you feel you need me!” she remarked.

Sheikh Latif Abd al Razzaq gave her a long unreadable look.

“Need you?” he repeated with arrogant disdain, and she felt a strange, dry heat from him, like invisible fire deep under dry grass that hadn’t yet burst into open flame. “I was getting you out of the way before they all turned on you. Not that you don’t richly deserve it.”

As the big gates opened the car crept forward, and two men and a woman flung themselves towards it. One man had a camera on his shoulder, and the woman was thrusting a tape recorder towards Latif’s face as she banged on the window.

“Excellency, may we have a word, please?”

“Can you tell us what happened? Did the wedding take place?”

“Why did Princess Noor drive off?”

More reporters were now surging around the car, forcing Latif to drive very slowly to avoid running them down. The questions continued nonstop, shouted through the windows at them, while rapid-fire flashes burst against the glass. Several little red eyes gazed hotly into the car, as if the cameras themselves took a fevered interest in the occupants.

“Damn, oh damn!” Jalia cried.

“Don’t give them an opening,” he advised flatly.

Jalia had to admire Latif’s cool. Although forced to drive at a speed of inches per hour, he gave no sign that he heard or saw the media people. She, meanwhile, found her temper rising as the reporters deliberately blocked their path, banging on the car as if somehow they might not have been noticed.

The fact that the air-conditioning hadn’t kicked in and the car was like an oven didn’t help her mood.

“Princess! Your Highness!” someone called, and she turned in dismay as another flash went off right in her face. How did they know? She had been so careful!

“Can you tell us why Noor ran?”