Sheikh's Captured Bride: The Sheikh's Prize / The Sheikh's Son / Captured by the Sheikh

She had also ploughed through a half-dozen frustrating meetings with her agent and various clients as the reality of her condition forced the need for urgent rethinks on previously planned shoots. A couple of clients had taken the opportunity to drop her because her pregnancy meant that she was in breach of contract. Desert Ice, however, had retained her services because they were more than halfway through their campaign. She was grateful for that because it was mainly her earnings from the cosmetics company that funded the orphanage she supported.

Zahir’s stunning black-fringed golden eyes met hers as she drew level with him and she felt painfully vulnerable, which she didn’t like at all. Unfortunately wounding memories of their first wedding were assailing her, reminding her of a day when she had not had a doubt in the world about becoming a wife, had indeed innocently overflowed with feelings of love and happiness. The wedding ring slid onto her finger and she breathed in deep, conscious that Zahir retained a hold on her hand. It was done, the die was cast, she told herself soothingly. What was she afraid of happening? What was there to fear now? That he didn’t love her—well, she knew he didn’t love her, didn’t she? Unfortunately the awareness that he was marrying her to give their baby a name and a home was no more welcome to her heart or her pride.

On their passage back down the aisle, Zahir pressed a supportive hand to her spine. ‘You feel very shaky,’ he admitted when she cast him an enquiring glance.

And it was true, she did feel shaky, had ridden roughshod over her misgivings to marry him, trying at every step to put her child’s needs ahead of her own.

Zahir participated in the photographs in silence. Sapphire was pale as death and silent and her family, aside of the little bouncy one in green, who had smiled brightly at him, were clearly hostile and suspicious. No doubt her family had taken their cues from Sapphire. She didn’t want to be married to him again; he could feel it in the tension that gripped her every time he touched her. That made him angry and bitter, roused memories better left buried. But he had royally screwed up by allowing his primal instincts to triumph and there was always a price to be paid for recklessness, he reminded himself darkly. He had got her back. That was, at least, a beginning, and only time would tell whether or not she would continue to hold the threat of a divorce like a gun to his head.

‘You look stunning,’ Zahir told her belatedly as she scrambled into the limo that would whisk them from the church to the embassy to undergo a Muslim marriage ceremony. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m not ill, only pregnant,’ Saffy countered defensively, wishing he hadn’t reminded her of her condition, reluctant to be viewed as in any way in need of special treatment.

The second ceremony was brief, witnessed by embassy officials and a posed photograph was taken afterwards. They returned to Mikhail and Kat’s house where a reception was being held in the ballroom. After the wedding breakfast, they circulated. Surrounded by the familiar faces of the models she often worked with, Saffy began to relax a little, bearing up well to comments about how quiet she had been about her supposed long-term relationship with Zahir and striving to behave more like a normal bride.

‘Of course, I shouldn’t mention it,’ trilled Natasha, a six-foot-tall Ukrainian blonde, well on her way to supermodel status. ‘But Zahir was mine first.’

It was said so quietly and with such a sunny smile that it took several seconds for that spiteful confession to sink in on Saffy. She stared back into Natasha’s very pale blue eyes and murmured, ‘Really?’ as politely as if the other woman had commented on the weather.

‘Yes, a couple of years ago now. A fling at a film festival,’ Natasha confided with a little shrug of a designer-clad shoulder. ‘But he was hard to forget.’

‘Yes,’ Saffy acknowledged, passing on as soon as she could into less aggressive company, anger licking like fire at her composure. Mine first? No, he had been hers, her husband and then her ex-husband before he became anyone else’s. But the truth that he had sought amusement in other beds could still slash like a knife turning in her breast. She glanced back at Natasha, beautiful and reputedly sexually voracious, struggling not to picture Zahir entwined in her arms, and the nausea she had never experienced until that moment turned her stomach into a washing machine and sent sickness hurtling up her throat. Her skin clammy with perspiration, she rushed off to the cloakroom and made it just in time. She was horribly sick and it took a few minutes for her to freshen up and lose the unsteadiness that afflicted her in the aftermath.

When she emerged, Topsy was waiting for her. ‘Are you OK? Zahir saw you leaving and asked me to check.’

Zahir didn’t miss much, Saffy reflected wretchedly. ‘I think I just got bitten by morning sickness.’ And a very tall shrewish blonde.

But Saffy was no fan of ducking reality and she knew she had to deal with life as it was. Zahir had been with other women when he was no longer married to her and that was his business, not hers. His past was his own, just as hers would have been had she lived a little more dangerously since their first marriage. But unfortunately there had not been a cure for the fact that she had still found Zahir and her memory of him far more attractive than other men. What did that say about her? He was like a habit she had never managed to shake, her one and only fantasy, and the men who had pursued her over the years had never managed to cause her a single sleepless night. With the exception of Zahir, she had never pined for a phone call or a smile from a man, had truly never contrived to rouse that much interest, and perhaps that was why she had fallen so easily back into bed with him. Was it a kind of persistent physical infatuation? Had he somehow spoiled her for other men? She stared at him as she crossed the floor of the ballroom.

He was lithe, powerfully built and supremely sophisticated in his light grey morning suit with his luxuriant ebony hair fanning back from his brow; his dark deep-set eyes were riveting in his lean, bronzed face. He was drop-dead gorgeous and always had been a very hard act to follow. But as her body stirred with responses far removed from nausea, her breasts swelling and peaking beneath her bodice and a dull ache expanding in her pelvis, she was furious with herself for being so susceptible to a male who neither loved nor even truly wanted her.

‘What’s wrong?’ Zahir asked softly.

‘Why would anything be wrong?’ she traded tartly, ice in her cool scrutiny and edging her voice. ‘You tell me…film festival two years ago, Ukrainian blonde by the name of Natasha, ring any bells?’ That scornful and provocative question just leapt off Saffy’s tongue before she was even aware she was going to voice it.

The faintest hint of colour edged Zahir’s chiselled cheekbones but his dark golden gaze did not waver from hers. Indeed if anything he stood a little straighter. ‘I will never lie to you.’

Even when you should, she almost screamed at him, wanting, needing to know and yet fearing what knowing more would do to her.

‘There weren’t many and there was nothing serious,’ Zahir breathed in a harsh undertone. ‘This is not a conversation I want to have on our wedding day.’

‘It’s not something I want to talk about either!’ Saffy launched back at him, her eyes a very bright blue lit with anger.

His stubborn jaw line squared. ‘Before you judge me, ask yourself if you have any idea of what state I was in after our divorce.’

Saffy came over all defensive. ‘How would I know?’

‘When you’re ready to tell me what changed you out of all recognition in the bedroom, I’ll tell you why I did what I did.’ His brilliant dark eyes glittered. It was a challenge, blunt and simple, and it only made Saffy angrier than ever.

He had divorced her. He had made that choice. He could not expect her to accept the consequences or feel responsible for a situation that had not been of her making. As for what had changed her into a normal sexually able woman, that was not something she was willing to share with him. It was too private, too personal, might well affect the way he looked at her and that very possible outcome made her cringe.

‘Are you two actually arguing?’ Kat came up to demand in dismay.

‘We always did have a fiery relationship,’ Zahir admitted.

‘Not so different from our own,’ Kat’s husband, Mikhail, teased his wife. ‘It takes time to adjust to living with another person.’

‘Time and buckets of patience,’ Zahir added, an authoritative look stamped on his lean dark face that only made Saffy want to slap him hard.

‘Your guests are waiting for the bride and groom to start the dancing,’ Kat informed them more cheerfully.

Saffy wasn’t in the mood to dance, especially not with Natasha smirking at the side of the floor, but she owed her sister too much to risk upsetting her and she gave way with good grace.

Zahir was a great dancer with a natural sense of rhythm but Saffy felt as if someone had welded an iron bar to her spine and she was stiff in the circle of his arms, holding herself at a distance. Glimpses of Natasha watching them did not improve her mood. Yes, she had known he had made love to other women, but actually having a face to pin to one of those anonymous women was another turn of the torture screw. She had never thought of herself as the jealous type and now she was finding out different. Once Zahir had been hers, entirely hers, and even though things had gone wrong in the bedroom she had rather naively trusted him not to stray. Now she was wondering crazy things, such as how she compared to his other lovers, and she was regretting her lack of experience and her honesty on that score. Yet how could she have lied when her child’s paternity hinged on telling the complete truth? That reminder cooled the fizz in her blood, settled her down and made her seek another topic of conversation.

‘I thought you might have invited your brother and sister and possibly even Azel to the wedding,’ she remarked gingerly.

‘One of Hayat’s children is in hospital with complications following on from a bout of measles. Akram is standing in for me at an OPEC meeting and my sister-in-law, Azel, no longer lives with us. She remarried last year and now lives in Dubai,’ Zahir explained. ‘You will meet what remains of my family tomorrow.’

‘I’ll look forward to it,’ Saffy said politely. ‘Do they know about the baby?’

‘Only my siblings. When we chose to marry in such haste, it made sense to be honest,’ Zahir said wryly.

Hot pink burned like a banner across her cheeks at the thought that his strictly raised siblings might assume that she was a total slut for succumbing so quickly and easily to their brother’s attractions.

‘You know, when you blush, the tip of your nose turns pink as well,’ Zahir husked. ‘It’s cute as hell.’

‘You know what happened in the desert…the baby,’ Saffy said sharply. ‘It’s all your fault.’

A sizzling, utterly unexpected smile played across Zahir’s wide sensual mouth and startled her. ‘I know. But out of it I gained a very beautiful wife and we have a baby in our future and I can’t find it within my heart to regret anything we did.’

Her eyes prickled and she blinked rapidly, knowing that her acid and pointless comment had not deserved so generous a response. Suddenly her tension gave and she rested her head down on his broad shoulder, drinking in and loving the familiar scent of him—warm clean male laced with an evocative hint of sandalwood. She was momentarily weak with the sheer amount of emotion pumping through her and so confused, still so desperately confused about what she felt, what she truly thought. With every passing moment, her feelings seemed to swing to one side and then violently to the other. So much had happened between them in such a short time frame that she was mentally all over the place.

Saffy was half asleep by the time they left for the airport. She had changed into a very elegant shift dress and jacket almost the same colour as her eyes and let her hair down to flow round her shoulders in a golden mane. Relaxation was infiltrating her for the first time that day. Drowsily she studied the platinum ring on her finger. They were married again: she couldn’t quite believe it.

‘I think I’ll sleep all the way to Maraban,’ Saffy told him apologetically as they boarded the private jet.

‘It’s been a long day and it is after midnight,’ Zahir conceded wryly. ‘But first there’s something I’d like to tell you.’

Alert to the guarded note in his dark deep drawl, Saffy felt her adrenalin start to pump. The jet took off and drinks were served. She undid her belt, let the stewardess show her into the sleeping compartment where she freshened up, and then she rejoined Zahir, made herself comfortable and sipped her fresh orange juice. ‘So?’ she prompted quietly, proud of her patience and self-discipline while she wondered what he had to unveil. ‘What is it?’

Zahir straightened his broad shoulders and settled hard dark eyes on her without flinching. ‘I’ve bought the Desert Ice cosmetics company.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

SAFFY BLINKED IN astonishment, for of all the many surprises she had thought Zahir might want to disclose that one staggering confession had not figured. She set down her glass and stood up, her mind in a bemused fog. ‘You bought the company? But why? Why the heck would you do that?’

‘It was a good investment.’ Zahir loosed a sardonic laugh that bluntly dismissed that explanation. ‘But I bought it only for your benefit. I knew the company had a cast-iron contract with you and I didn’t want anyone putting pressure on you while you were pregnant.’

Eyes slowly widening, Saffy stared back at him in rampant disbelief, while she wondered what strings he had pulled to learn the contract terms she had been on with the company. ‘I can’t believe that you would interfere in my career to that extent!’ she admitted in stunned disbelief, anger steadily gathering below the surface of that initial reaction. ‘Nobody was putting pressure on me at the meeting I attended with their campaign manager this week.’

Cynicism hardened Zahir’s expressive mouth, making him look inexpressibly tough in a way far different from the younger man she remembered. It was a look that was hard, weathered and unapologetic and she refused to be intimidated by it. ‘Naturally not. By that time, I was the new owner, so of course there was no pressure. They can film your face as much as they like while you’re pregnant but they’ll be doing it in Maraban.’

‘In… Maraban?’ Saffy parroted as though he had suggested somewhere as remote as the moon.

‘I don’t want you forced to travel thousands of miles round the globe now that you’re pregnant. It would be too stressful for you.’

‘And what would you know about that?’ Saffy demanded hotly. ‘What do you know about what a pregnant woman needs?’

‘I don’t want you exhausted,’ Zahir asserted grimly. ‘I appreciate that the baby is a development that wasn’t planned or, indeed, expected, but adjustments have to be made to your working schedule.’

‘You’re not the boss of me!’ Saffy hissed back at him in helpless outrage. ‘You know, the one phrase I heard you speak most clearly was, “I don’t want…” This is about you, your need to clip my wings and control me. Isn’t it enough that I married you? What about what I want? What about what I need? This isn’t all about you!’

‘I’m not trying to control you.’ Eyes now smouldering with anger, Zahir gazed back at her, his hard jaw line set at an unyielding angle. ‘But the security needs alone that are now required to ensure your safety would be impossible to maintain in some of the exotic locations where you have recently travelled.’

‘I don’t have security needs!’ Saffy flung at him in a bitterly aggrieved tone of fury. ‘It’s taken me five years to build my career and I didn’t get where I am by being difficult!’

Zahir didn’t bat a single absurdly long eyelash. He stared steadily back at her, those twin black fringes round his remarkable eyes merely adding to the intensity of his scrutiny. ‘As my wife, you have security needs. Just as I could be a target, you could be as well. I will not allow your headstrong spirit to tempt you into taking unnecessary risks. This is not about your career. This is about you accepting that your new status will demand lifestyle changes. You are no longer Sapphire Marshall, you are a queen.’

‘I don’t want to be a queen!’ Saffy sobbed in a passionate rage at the logic he was firing at her. Memories were flooding back to her of long-buried quarrels during which she had raged while Zahir shot down her every argument with murderous logic and practicality. ‘You never told me that. I just thought I’d be your wife, your consort, your plus one or whatever you want to call it!’

‘The last queen was my mother, who died when my younger brother was born,’ Zahir commented grimly. ‘It is time you saw sense. You can’t have thought you could marry me and ignore who and what I am.’

Saffy was so worked up she wanted to scream. Over the past week she had thought of many, many things, like dresses and wedding breakfasts and guest lists and babies, but not once had she pondered her future status in Maraban. In fact she hadn’t wanted to think about Maraban at all because once she had been very unhappy there.

‘I didn’t think about it,’ Saffy muttered in indignation, furious with him, wondering in a rage how on earth he had broken the news about the Desert Ice company and then contrived to roll over his indefensible interference in her career to put her on the defensive with the news that she was apparently a queen. ‘I don’t want to be a queen. I’m sure I’m not cut out for it. In fact I bet I’m totally unsuitable to be royal.’

‘With that attitude you probably will be,’ Zahir shot back at her with derision. ‘I think you tried harder at eighteen to fit in than you are willing to try now as an adult.’

Saffy’s lush mouth dropped open as temper exploded in her like a grenade. ‘I was a doormat at eighteen, a total stupid doormat! I wanted to please you. I wanted to please your family. I was so busy trying to be something I’m not—and getting no thanks for it! I had no space to be me!’

‘Times have changed. Maraban has been transformed and brought into the twenty-first century. But I have changed as well,’ Zahir breathed on a taut warning note, his gaze burning gold in its force. ‘I will tell you now how things are and I won’t keep secrets from you again.’

‘Secrets?’ Saffy shot back at him jaggedly, entrapped by that one word of admission, her nervous tension seizing on it. ‘What secrets?’

‘Five years ago, I kept a lot from you in an attempt to protect you. I didn’t want to hurt you but this time I will employ no lies and no half-truths. I will tell it like it is…’

Other women, Saffy was thinking in despair, a sharp wounding pain piercing her somewhere in the chest region. What else could he be talking about? When he had found no satisfaction in the marital bedroom he had gone elsewhere. Maybe out to that remote desert palace where his late father had kept his personal harem, very discreet. Hey, Saffy, you dummy, a little voice piped up at the back of her mind…maybe he wasn’t on army manoeuvres all those times he was gone. Maybe he was off the leash having fun, the kind of fun you couldn’t give him then. And what shook Saffy most at that moment was that instead of confronting him on that score and demanding an explanation, she instead wanted to stay silent and withdraw, conserve some dignity, protect herself from painful revelations that she did not at that moment feel strong enough to bear. Every atom of ESP she possessed urged her to leave the past where it belonged.

Saffy lifted her golden head. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed but thanks for making our wedding night almost as dreadful as the first we had,’ she murmured with stinging scorn.

And she saw right then in his lean darkly handsome face that he had forgotten it was their wedding night. And really that said it all, didn’t it? She had already travelled from being the object of intense desire to being the pregnant wife, apparently shorn of attraction.

Zahir gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to talk back to her in a similar vein. Had she really thought he would stage their wedding night on a plane when she was exhausted and already under strain from all the challenges of the past weeks? He suffered a hollow sensation of horror even recalling that first catastrophic wedding night, her sickness, fear and distress, his own incomprehension and sense of defeat. She had been too young, far too young and naïve at eighteen, he knew that now. Guilt assailed him as Saffy ducked into the cabin, her lovely face taut and pale awakening memories he would have done anything to avoid. So much for honesty, so much for trying to clear the air, he reflected bitterly.

That last comment of hers had been a low blow, Saffy conceded in shame. It wasn’t either of their faults that their first wedding night had been catastrophic and he had been incredibly kind and patient and understanding even though she knew he didn’t understand any more than she did then what was wrong with her. Hitting out at him like that had been unjust, a mean retaliation to the reality that Zahir had made her feel small and stupid with his talk of security concerns and queens. She didn’t look much like a queen, she thought wretchedly, studying herself with wet pink eyes in the mirror, noting the mascara and eyeliner smudged from tears. She had panicked when he mentioned that because she was so terrified of not meeting his expectations again. Hadn’t she already done that to him once? She didn’t want to let him down or embarrass him but what did she know about being royal? Certainly she had learned absolutely nothing during their last marriage when only the servants knew she existed and she was virtually the invisible woman.

He didn’t love her, didn’t want her, probably had no faith in her ability to act like a royal wife either, Saffy thought painfully, tears streaming down her cheeks as she forced her convulsed face into a pillow. Why did she care so much about what he thought of her? Why did it hurt so much that she felt she couldn’t stand it? And why more than anything in the world did she now want him to come in and put his arms round her to comfort her the way he had once done without even thinking about it? She had married him to give their baby a better start in life. That was the only reason and she didn’t know why she was getting so worked up, sobs shuddering through her body like a storm unleashed on her without warning.

I am not in love with him. I am so not in love with him, she told herself urgently. That is not why I’m suddenly looking for more from him than he ever promised to deliver. And in that guarded state of mind she finally fell asleep.

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