Sheikh's Castaway

She stared at him. What arrogance! Noor’s doubts about her behaviour were conveniently swamped in outrage. “Maybe you didn’t notice that the bride changed her mind, Bari! I’m not going to marry you!”

“You did not change your mind,” he informed her contemptuously. “You would not be acting like this if you had ever intended to marry me, of course. But you chose the wrong man. I do not play these Western games, Noor. You said you would marry me. You will do so.”

“It’s no game! Turn this plane around!” she screeched. How dare he brush her off when he must know her reasons for what she did? At the very least, he suspected! Who did he think he was?

“Who do you think—”

“It will not take long. You may pass the time by telling me what it is, if not a game. And I will have the truth.”

“The truth! Oh, that’s good, that is! I’m not the one who’s been lying from beginning to end of this whole affair! I’m not the one with zero conscience! Suppose you begin by telling—”

“Do you talk to me about conscience?” he shouted, as if suddenly losing his grip on a fierce control. Her heart gave a nervous kick; his temper was at white heat. “What has been your motive in pretending to agree to marry me and then playing such a terrible trick? Hundreds of people have come—”

“You must have a very good guess as to what motivated me! Your lies! You must have known I’d find out the truth soon—”

“—from all over the world to celebrate not just our wedding but their hopes for the rebirth of our country!”

“—er or later! I guess you were counting on later! Too bad!”

“Do you know you nearly ran into the Sultan’s motorcade as you drove out the gates? He and the Sultana—”

“The Bagestani flags on the fenders gave me a hint,” Noor admitted. “He hires good outriders, your boss. They nearly drove me off the road.”

He turned on her a gaze so black with threat she cowered. “Do not speak slightingly to me of a man of whose courage and strength you are ignorant.”

The plane had turned 130 degrees, and the expanse of cloud covering the mainland suddenly came into view again out the window behind her head.

Bari’s eyes widened, and then narrowed. How had he let his anger suck him into argument when he should have been watching the sky?

Noor turned to follow the direction of his gaze and let out a breath of stunned surprise. Bari had made his appearance not a minute too soon. The cloud had built fast and was rushing towards them.

If I were alone now, I’d be saying my last prayers.

“Cumulonimbus,” the dark-eyed Sheikh murmured softly. “I am a thousand fools.”

She gasped hoarsely, her hand lifting to press against the window in protest as she stared out at the sinister mass that approached.

But Bari was right.

“The airport said nimbostratus!” she cried.

He made no reply, except to the threat they faced. He was throttling back.

Cumulonimbus clouds were dangerous even to the most experienced instrument-trained pilot. They could carry severe turbulence. Turbulence might easily cause the plane to break up.

The plane began to lose height, and she felt it alter course again, away from the coastline. Of course he would try to get under the cloud, Noor realized. If only he could…

“Not even the sense to remove your lace finery before taking off into cloud!” he said harshly, his eyes on the instrument panel. The acres of silk and tulle surrounding his ex-bride didn’t make his task any easier. “In the water, it would drag you down to certain death. Get rid of it.”

His air of cold command was completely new. Noor gnawed her lip at that in the water, for it seemed to make the danger real. While he tried fruitlessly to raise air traffic control, she lifted her hands and frantically began to pull out the first of dozens of pins fixing the wreath of white roses in her hair, though if the plane broke up in the air it wouldn’t be her bride’s finery that killed her.

Abruptly, sea and sky and sun disappeared, and the little plane entered a world all grey. Noor heard a strange, quiet shushing. Droplets of water appeared on the glass.

Her fingers trembled and hesitated, then went on with their task. What else was there to do? Bari was in command of the situation as far as that was possible, and to offer resistance—or even help—now would be ridiculous.

Bari leaned over to peer at an instrument, and she distantly noted how a dark curl gleamed in the reflected glow from the panel. What a powerfully handsome man he was! Noor thought involuntarily. Not conventional, Hollywood handsome—he wasn’t even at handshaking distance with the bland, polished looks that passed for masculinity on a movie screen. No, Bari was one of Saladin’s warriors. Fierce nobility was what shaped his jaw, not pineapple facials and a perfectly judged beard shadow. If only…

But now was not the moment for such thoughts.

At last the flowers and tulle began to come loose, and Noor ignored the remaining pins and dragged at the headdress, wincing at the pain as hair came away with it. She tossed it over her shoulder onto the floor behind, where it sank into the nest of itself.

A faint, delicate perfume floated to her nostrils from the bruised roses. Her senses, it seemed, were heightened. Her fingers unconsciously massaging her protesting scalp, Noor picked out the pins that were still caught, combing through her hair, trying not to remember the excited, happy moment when the hairdresser had set the wreath on her head.

Without warning, a fierce gust of wind smacked them. The plane rocked, and so did her heart.

“Ya Allah!” Bari exclaimed, and the grey all around them abruptly turned dark. Another sharp slap of wind.

Then, much more ominously, a low rumble.

Horror shivered down her spine. Noor’s heart lurched in frantic denial and her mouth was suddenly dry as the desert. It wasn’t possible! Please, God, let it not…

Another crack of thunder cut her off. A thunderstorm. And they were in it.

Three

There are few things more dangerous than a thunderstorm embedded in cloud, and Noor knew it. It is the pilot’s nightmare.

She might have chosen death not only for herself, but for Bari. Her heart thudded with useless regret.

“Are you strapped in tight?”

His voice was so calm it shocked her, an incongruity her mind couldn’t cope with. It had the effect of setting her building panic at bay.

“No. My dress—”

“Damn your dress.” She could feel that the plane was still descending, but there seemed no bottom to the cloud. “Get your harness on. Fast.”

Though a stubborn part of her resented his autocratic tone, she knew it would be insane to resist. Noor twisted in her seat, groping underneath the swathes of silk for the webbing of her harness.

The plane was still losing altitude.

“Are we landing?”

“We’ll see,” Bari said dryly as another crack of noise drowned him out. She thought she sensed him adjust his heading again, but how he had any idea where they were, she couldn’t imagine.

She had never seen Bari operating under pressure before. It surprised her that such a passionate, hot-tempered man could be so cool under fire. For a brief moment the thought of her only experience of his—of any man’s—passion flicked across her mind. He hadn’t been cool then…or had he? That must have been faked, too.

Her fingers quickly found one buckle, but the other eluded her. Noor half stood in the confined space and groped the seat behind her.

Bari reached across and fielded the buckle of her harness, holding it for her in one strong, well-formed hand. Well, at least I won’t die a virgin! The thought rose unbidden, and a breath of laughter—and something else—escaped her. Her eyes brushed up to his as she took the harness from him with a murmur of thanks, but the look she met was hard and ungiving, and the only passion was rejection.

“Even in the lion’s mouth,” he mocked her.

A jolt of turbulence wiped any retort from her mind. She tumbled back into her seat to the sound of tearing. Her arm hit painfully on something, but Noor suppressed the automatic grunt that rose in her throat and buckled herself in. The webbing abraded the delicate white silk across her breast, tearing the clustered pearl embroidery.

She was sorry about that—it was a beautiful creation.

A pearl fell like a teardrop. A second followed, landing in her palm. Noor’s fingers involuntarily caught it, massaged the cool little sphere between finger and thumb. How completely her dreams were being destroyed. And yet…

If they had gone through with the wedding, there would have come a point when they sat side by side in the plane like this. The thought gave her a curious sensation of being in two lives at once. Was there a parallel universe in which they had been married? That other life seemed so close. She could almost feel it, as if she might blink and find everything the same, but different.

Would she have gone on believing Bari loved her, living her fool’s dream? Would he have kept up the pretence once he had what he wanted, or would she have learned immediately that he had made a fool of her? Would she ever have guessed if she hadn’t overheard the truth…

“She’s so spoiled! All she cares about is clothes and jewellery and having a good time. She’s just totally frivolous!”

Noor had been standing at the mirror, layers of silk and lace surrounding her, her tanned skin and auburn hair gleaming like the rich heart of a white rose, when the bitchy malice filtered through from the room beyond.

“And I don’t believe she’s in love with anyone but herself!”

And just like a droplet of dew on the rose’s heart was the fabulous al Khalid diamond. Bari’s grandfather’s wedding gift to her had simply taken her breath away. Noor was used to wealth and all its pleasures, but Bari’s family fortune went beyond wealth. The diamond was the biggest single stone Noor had ever seen, and it lay against her hand with a dark fire that almost burned her—like Bari’s eyes, she thought with a delicious flutter.

“She is young yet.”

“She’s twenty-four. Why are you making excuses for her?”

Noor let it wash over her. She had heard it before, directly or implied. The women in Bari’s family were not uniformly delighted with his choice of bride, but what should she care about that?

“She has been raised by overfond parents, it’s true,” said the more placid voice of Bari’s aunt. “But she is an al Jawadi by blood. She has more depth than she knows yet.”

Of course they didn’t know she could hear. She was in the large, luxurious bathroom set between her bedroom and another. A moment ago Noor had been at the centre of buzzing activity, the hair stylist and the makeup artist competing with the dressmaker and her personal maid for her attention, but now, with the excuse of one last nervous visit to the toilet, she had stepped in here to be alone for a moment and catch her breath.

And she had heard voices murmuring together in bitchy comfort in the other bedroom.

“He’s only known her a few weeks,” the younger one was still protesting, and Noor wondered if this particular cousin, whoever it was, was in love with Bari herself.

“You are talking like a true Westerner. Why should a man know his bride? It is enough that his family knows her family.”

In a moment she would go back into her bedroom to face the renewed onslaught of perfectionism from her dressers and wait for Jalia and her bridesmaids to tap on the door to tell her it was time. Time to be escorted to meet the richest, the handsomest, the sexiest man ever to have deserved the title “Cup Companion,” the man who had known he wanted to marry Noor Ashkani—Princess Noor Yasmin al Jawadi Durrani—practically from the first glance.

“It’s different when the marriage is arranged, though, isn’t it?” The murmurs in the next room grew louder as the two women moved past the slightly open door, in complete ignorance of the fact that the subject under discussion was on the other side of it. “Then the families at least have—”

“How is it different? This marriage might not have been arranged in the traditional way, but it was your grandfather who chose the bride.”

“Really?” The younger voice sounded both shocked and deliciously intrigued, and Noor’s eyes widened with startled dismay. “You mean Bari isn’t in love with her?”

She sounded thrilled, Noor noted. Cow.

“He was very bitter when his grandfather told him what was necessary.” The voices faded again and she heard the opening of the door that led onto the broad, shady balcony.

“How—but why would Bari agree to something like that? He’s so independent!”

“Bari has no choice.” The other voice was matter-of-fact. “If he wants the right to the property in Bagestan and the money to restore it, he has to marry as he is instructed. Your grandfather wants an alliance with the Durranis. He will leave the property away from Bari if—”

The door shut, cutting the voices off, and leaving Noor stunned and as white as her veil among the broken pieces of her stupid, childish dreams….

A loud rumble brought her back into the here and now, with all its dangers. Oh, if only her father had never told them their history! If only she could return to her ordinary life, and never learn whose blood ran in her veins. Princess! They had been happy as they were! And now…her life had so changed that it might end here, miles from her home, in the next few minutes.

Another, louder crack of thunder, and she bit back a cry. She had seen flickering light within the roiling darkness. If lightning struck…

They hit turbulence and dropped for a few metres before landing with a sickening thud on a boiling air mass. Her stomach churned. Oh, let me not throw up! she begged feverishly.

Lightning danced perilously in the black cloud again, and the noise was deafening. They were at the heart of the storm.

Bari struggled against turbulence, hoping he had a heading towards the Gulf Islands as he came down, but he was far from certain. The instruments were jumping so much they were all but useless. And as a mere human he was in the maelstrom, archetypal Chaos, the place where the ordinary senses were powerless as guides.

Flying by the seat of your pants, they called it. On a wing and a prayer. The clichés recited themselves in his head, describing truths no one with sense wanted to discover for himself.

He had been acting like a fool for too long. His judgement had been faulty ever since hearing his grandfather’s ultimatum, and what a pity he could only recognize that now!

But this wasn’t the moment to fan the flames of his legitimate anger, either with his grandfather or with Noor. His mind needed to be clear of everything except the job at hand.

He could keep dropping lower to try to get below the cloud, but that was risky: some of the islands were high and rugged. And even at the coast the foothills were over a thousand feet high in places. So whether he was badly off course or right where he hoped he was, there was terrible risk involved in flying low.

But to continue to fly inside the storm invited even more certain disaster. He had to take the risk and try to put down, trusting that he would break out of cloud in time to see where he was and take evasive action if it wasn’t where he hoped.

Noor’s mouth was dry. Her heart beat with terror; the metallic taste of panic was on her tongue. She had never been afraid for her life before. They could be struck by lightning. Turbulence could break the plane apart. They could fall from the sky like a stone.

Or the earth could leap up in their path and smash them to atoms.

She wanted to lash out and hit something; her legs were tense with the need to run screaming from the scene. She wanted her heart to stop thundering in her chest and cheeks and temples. She wanted to wake up from this nightmare and find herself safe.

“Oh God!” she whimpered as a fist of sound punched the little plane and set it juddering. How was it possible one tiny act had set such a chain of events in motion? If she could have it to do over again…

“Pray for some common sense while you’re at it,” Bari advised with grim humour. He was fighting to hold the plane against the turbulence, and he seemed to have as good a grip on himself as on the controls.

The injustice of the comment infuriated her—or was it the justice of it?—and as if that fury somehow served as an antidote to the emotion that engulfed her, Noor gritted her teeth in sudden revulsion for her own fear. If this was death, she wasn’t meeting it as a coward! She wasn’t going to spend her last few minutes in a panic, pleading with fate or regretting her own stupidity or anything else.

The noise was deafening now—the shriek of wind, the rain and thunder and the protesting engine all conspiring together to produce cacophony. Noor ran her eyes over the instrument panel. Even if they hadn’t been leaping around like drops of water on a summer pavement, the instruments would have told her exactly nothing.

“There must be something I can do!” she cried over the noise.

Bari’s eyes were steady on her for a moment, clocking the shift in her state of mind. He indicated the radio with his chin.

“Try and raise air traffic control again,” he shouted, less because he thought it likely than to give her something to do. “Give them our stats. Height eleven hundred and descending. Bearing two two five. See if they have us on radar and can confirm our position.”

But the radio responded with static. They were out of range, but that told them nothing with regard to their own position—except that a mountain might be between them and the airport. In the distance she heard the pilot of another plane saying he could hear her, but the signal faded and he didn’t respond to her call.

“Go to the distress channel,” Bari ordered, and a thrill of renewed fear zinged through her. Every pilot knew the channel number, but not in the expectation of ever needing it. Her mouth dry, Noor turned the dial to read 121.5. She coughed.

“Mayday, May—” she began hoarsely.

Suddenly there was a flash of light all around them, as though they had touched an electric grid. Then a curious silence, as if the rain were taking a breath, or her heart had stopped beating. Then rippling, cracking, booming thunder.

“Did that hit us?” Noor barely breathed the question.

Bari shrugged. “The electrics are still working.” He pulled back on the throttle, slowing the engine further.

“I’m going to put down. The sea will be choppy, but better to break up on the surface than up here.”

If the sea was beneath them.

Noor felt a sudden calm. Mash’allah. “All right. What should I do?”

“There’s a life raft in the rear.” He sounded doubtful. “Can you get it out?”

She set down the mike and unbuckled herself. “Right.”

“Be prepared for more turbulence.”

She hastily kicked off her shoes and got up, scrabbling her way between the two passenger seats behind and into the back of the aircraft as fast as she could, yanking at the voluminous skirt of her dress, clutching tightly to anything within reach. Meanwhile the plane leaped and bounced as the storm did its unholy best to knock her off balance.

Strange, she thought distantly, all this bucking wasn’t making her queasy now. Maybe having nerves at a fever pitch had something to do with that.

Still the wind howled and shrieked around the little plane. Lightning crackled within the clouds, and the answering thunder pounded and banged them almost physically.

In the luggage space behind the passenger seats, she saw a suitcase-sized container fitted to the bulkhead on a mounting. There were very similar items on the yachts of friends, and in her carefree life Noor had been miles from imagining she would ever actually need one.

She knelt into the cloud of her dress and wrestled with the clasps holding the case in the cradle. She noted only distantly that the tip of one perfect peach-coloured fingernail snapped off in the process.

“LIFE RAFT, 4 PERSON. DO NOT INFLATE IN AN ENCLOSED SPACE.”

Bari swore as the plane bucked again, and Noor fell against the seat and then the bulkhead as she dragged the case awkwardly off its mounting. It was heavy and hard and had a mind of its own, but with curses and tears she at last manoeuvred it to a position behind Bari’s seat. Two more fingernails tore in the process.

The sweat of struggle was on Bari’s forehead, and his face was white with strain. A black curl fell over one eye. “Sit down,” he called. “We’ll break out of cloud soon and I may have to take it back up fast.”

Fear rushed through her again at this stark statement of what she already knew—that they might be blindly flying towards a mountainside. Biting her lip, Noor struggled back into her seat and shoved her arms through the safety harness, clicking it home.

Rain pounded the metal body of the plane, and the wind screamed around them, in an intensity of sound she’d never heard before. Thunder rolled all around. She felt the noise in her skin, in her body, as if sound itself embraced her, a physical thing.

She picked up the mike again. “Mayday, Mayday, this is India Sierra—”

Suddenly they were out of cloud, driving through rain so heavy there was scarcely any improvement in visibility. But below she could see water, and she let her breath out on a long silent sigh. Thank God, thank God. Alhamdolillah. She glanced at Bari, but she saw no emotion other than fierce concentration on his face.

“Brace yourself,” he said briefly. The water looked choppy and unforgiving. Noor pushed her free hand against the control panel, pressed her stockinged feet against the floor.

“This is India Sierra Quebec two six, we are—”

He slowed the engine, dropping lower, trying to gauge the height of the chop by what he knew of the sea as a sailor. It was rougher than he had hoped.

The belly of the plane touched down with a hollow thump, and then another and another as they hit the waves. Bari wrestled to keep the plane from nose-diving, the muscles of his arms bulging with the effort. As he slowed to a standstill, a bigger swell grabbed the starboard wing. With a sharp, terrifying scream of metal the plane slewed around, bounced up, smacked down, pitched forward and then dropped back.

Four

The high scream stopped. The propellers stopped. The pounding rain increased in ferocity, but still it sounded like silence to the two in the cockpit. Bari slapped his harness open.

“Are you hurt?” His voice was harsh.

“No,” Noor said faintly. The truth was she was so shocked that if she did have broken bones she wouldn’t have known.

“The hull is damaged,” Bari said, flinging open his door onto driving rain and waves that slapped against the belly of the plane, stretching greedy fingers into the cockpit. “We’ve got a couple of minutes before it goes under.”

Noor, dizzy and shaken, struggled out of the harness and her seat again.

Bari was in the open doorway, the rain slashing at him, staining his jacket dark, plastering it to his skin. He tied the cord from the life raft to a metal brace with quick expertise. Somehow he did not look incongruous in his wedding finery. The purple silk jacket that was dress uniform to a Cup Companion only emphasized his physical power and masculinity. Around his hips the jewelled belt of his sword glowed dully. He looked like an ancient painting of a noble warrior, ready for anything.

Lightning crackled behind his head, and thunder exploded around them like a small bomb.

“Take your dress off,” he shouted.

Her hand went unconsciously to her throat. “But I’m—”

“Now!” His voice was harsh. “Do you want to drown?”

She was too stunned by events to argue. He was right. If she fell into the water, the dress would drag her down. Anyway, what did she have to hide from Bari? He had been so intimate with her body he practically owned it.