GALILA’S GETAWAY WAS an exhilarating race down a straight stretch of paved road through the desert. If the sun seemed to dim, she blamed the tinted windows, not her mood. She didn’t have any gloomy feelings about leaving Karim. Zero. She couldn’t do it fast enough.
Then the light pouring through the sunroof really did change. It became a strobing flash as a helicopter hovered over the car, casting its shadow on the hood. The rat-a-tat chop of the blades cut into the otherwise luxuriously silent interior.
“So what?” she shouted. “I have a full tank and an open road.”
She would get herself to the border into Khalia and once there, she would be her own person again. She would fly to Europe and stay there. Pull a Malak and quit the family. Do whatever the hell she wanted.
She jammed her foot even harder onto the accelerator. The road was straight and clear, not another car in sight.
He raced ahead, staying low, then stopped and landed in the middle of the road.
“Bastard!”
She had half a mind to ram the car straight into him. With a muted scream of frustration through gritted teeth, she lifted her foot from the accelerator.
As her speed dropped off, she searched for a way around the helicopter, but it blocked both lanes. This car wouldn’t get very far off-road, unfortunately. The soil might look hard-packed, but pockets of loose sand could swallow a tire in a heartbeat. This was the sort of sedan built for a paved highway, not scrubby desert. It would spin in the dirt until it ran out of fuel.
Turn around? The only place to go was back to his mother’s palace.
Oh, she was frustrated as she braked! She came to a reluctant stop as she reached the helicopter while its blades were still rotating.
She flung herself from the car. The wash off the rotors caught at her hair. She used a finger to drag it out of her eyes.
“I will not marry you,” she shouted in single-syllable blurts when Karim came out of the helicopter, expression thunderous.
“Look,” he said with a stabbing point to her left.
That was when she realized why the sky had been growing darker. A red-brown cloud rose like a tsunami against the sky. Haboob.
She didn’t normally swear out loud, so she swallowed the words threatening to fall from her lips.
“We’ll outrun it. I want to be in Nabata when it hits.” Karim threw his arm around her, using his body to shield her as best he could while he more or less dragged her toward the helicopter.
Much as she wanted to fight him, windstorms could be deadly.
“What about the car?” she shouted.
His pilot was already leaping out of his seat. Galila presumed he would take the vehicle back to the palace and allowed Karim to push her into the copilot’s seat.
“This isn’t an agreement to marry you,” she told him as she buckled in and accepted the headphones he handed her.
He ignored her statement as he quickly buckled in himself and put on his own headset. Maybe he didn’t hear her. He lifted off in seconds, perfectly adept as a pilot, which was kind of sexy, not that she wanted to notice.
Within moments, they were racing toward the rocky hills in the distance.
She eyed him, trying to gauge how angry he was. It was difficult to tell when his body seemed to move with natural precision and that stern mouth of his had probably never smiled. She hadn’t expected to get caught so she hadn’t worried too much about his reaction to her escape, but he wasn’t her father and her brothers.
Until this morning, she had been confident she could cajole nearly anything out of anyone—schooling in Europe, Thoroughbred horses, designer clothing. When it came to her charity work, she was a money-raising machine, squeezing record donations out of men and women alike. With very few exceptions, she always got what she wanted.
Things had changed, however. Her stupid brother had put her at the mercy of this wretched man and Karim didn’t strike her as the indulgent sort, his mother’s remarks notwithstanding. In fact, the longer she watched him, the more her uneasiness grew.
He swore, sudden and sharp as a gunshot, loud enough to make her jump because it came into her head through the earmuffs, crystal clear. For one second, she thought the curse had been aimed at her, then he made a sudden veering motion that tilted them as he avoided something.
She looked forward where visibility had become severely reduced. Despite his efforts, the storm was wrapping around them, buffeting the helicopter. They were running out of time. And options.
He went lower, searching for a safe place to land, but the rotor wash kicked up more dust, making it nearly impossible to see what was on the ground.
“There!” she said as she saw a flash of blue and green, black and yellow—colors and symmetries that didn’t belong in the rust-red of the desert. It was a Bedouin camp, men running around securing tents and corralling the camels.
Karim set down on the nearest flat piece of land and turned off the engine, but the rotors continued to turn and whine.
“I have to tie down. Wait here.” He leaped from the helicopter.
One of the Bedouins clutched his head-covering and ran to greet him. She saw the shock and flash of a wide smile of recognition before the man hurried to help, shouting at one of his fellow tribesmen that their sheikh was among them.
“Tell the women,” she heard him shout. To prepare food and suitable lodging, Galila surmised.
She pulled off her headphones and drew the scarf from around her neck to drape it over her head and prepare to wrap it across her face. Zyria wasn’t a country where face covering was demanded, but she would have to protect herself from the blast of dust.
That was when she realized her purse was in the car and she didn’t have her sunglasses. Her toothbrush was with her luggage, though.
She went through to the passenger cabin, having to catch her balance twice because the wind was trying so hard to knock the helicopter off its footings. The luggage compartment was easily accessed and she quickly retrieved her necessities along with stealing the shaving kit out of Karim’s case. Such things were always the last into the luggage so it was right on top.
Then she shamelessly dumped his laptop bag onto an empty seat. She began filling it with the contents of the onboard pantry—coffee and tea, fresh oranges and bananas, nuts and dried figs, cheese and crackers, chocolates and Turkish delight. Caviar? Sure. Why not?
“What the hell are you doing?” he bit out as he came through from the cockpit.
“Food.” She showed him the bag, swollen with his travel larder. “Our toothbrushes are in here, too. Time to run?” She buttoned her jacket and drew her scarf across her face.
He clearly hadn’t expected this. He glanced at her heeled shoes. Yes, well, she hadn’t made a priority of digging out her pool sandals. She’d been too busy making herself useful.
The helicopter jerked again. They couldn’t stay here. The very thing that kept this bird aloft was liable to topple it in the wind. The Bedouins had spent centuries learning how to wait out these types of storms, however. She and Karim would be safer in one of their tents.
Karim leaped out the side door, not bothering with the steps. He reached back to take her by the hips and lift her to the ground while one of the Bedouins stood by and slammed the door behind her.
She dragged her scarf up to peer through the layer of silk, relying more on Karim’s hard arms around her to guide her than the ability to actually see. She had only ever watched a storm through a window. It was terrifying to be in it, making her anxious when Karim pressed her into a tent and left her there.
A handful of women were moving around inside it, efficiently smoothing bright blue sheets and plumping cushions on a low bed, setting out a battery-operated lantern on a small dining rug and urging her to sit at a washing basin.
The walls and roof of the tent fluttered while the wind howled and sand peppered the exterior. She removed her scarf and jacket, grateful to wipe away the worst of the dust with a damp cloth. She wound up changing into the silk nightgown she had thrown into the bag since all of her clothes felt so gritty. It wasn’t cold in here, not with the sunbaked earth still radiating heat and so many warm bodies in here, but she accepted the delicate shawl one woman handed her.
The entire camp had been informed that the sheikh’s intended bride, the Princess of Khalia, was among them. They were pulling out all the stops, eager to praise her choice of husband.
Choice? Ha!
But they wanted to make her comfortable so Galila bit her tongue. She had done enough work with the underprivileged to understand that her problems were not the sort that most people identified with. These women had chapped hands and tired smiles. Everything they owned, they carried.
She let them fuss over her, rather appreciating the motherly kindness of the old woman who wanted to brush her hair. After she had washed her face and hands, she gave her moisturizer to the old woman. The woman laughed and said nothing could erase her wrinkles, but she was pleased all the same.
The other women were excited by the fresh fruit and other treats, insisting on adding a selection from the bag to Galila’s meal of stew and lentils.
That was when Galila realized the dining mat was set for two.
What had Karim told them? They couldn’t share this tent! They weren’t married.
Karim was their sheikh, however. When he entered the tent, the women scattered with gasps and giggles, not a single protest for Galila’s honor.
It was fully dark outside by then, despite the still early hour. The tent was lit only by the small lantern over the meal they would share. The wind howled so loudly, she couldn’t hear any voices in the neighboring tents.
Now she realized why the women had been so admiring of this silly nightgown, intent on ensuring her hair was shiny and tangle-free as it flowed around her bare shoulders and fell just so across the lace on her back. That was why they had praised him and called him lucky and said she would make him a good and dutiful wife.
They thought she was consummating her wedding night!
She hugged the delicate shawl more closely around her. Her pulse throbbed in the pit of her belly. She curled her toes into the silk nap of the rug beneath her feet, clammy and hot at the same time. Her mind trailed to the way he’d made her feel last night, kissing her so passionately, while the rest of her fluttered with nerves.
He took a long, leisurely perusal from her loose hair to the hem of her ivory nightgown.
Without a word, he removed his robe and scraped his headwear off, tossing the dust-covered garments aside without regard. He wore a white tunic beneath that he also peeled off, leaving him bare-chested in loose white pants that hung low across his hips. He stepped out of his sandals.
She swallowed.
His mouth might have twitched, but he only turned and knelt with splayed thighs on the bathing mat, using the same cloth she had run down her throat and under her breasts to wash his face and behind his neck.
She shouldn’t be watching him. Her pulse raced with a taboo excitement as she gazed on the burnished skin that flexed across his shoulders. Her ears picked up the sound of water being wrung from the cloth, and his quiet sigh of relief. Those sounds did things to her. Her skin tightened and her intimate regions throbbed.
She imagined replacing that cloth with her hands, smoothing soap along the strong arm he raised, running slippery palms up his biceps, over his broad shoulders, down to his chest and rib cage. If she snaked her touch beneath his arm to his navel, would she be able to trace the narrow line of hair she had glimpsed, the one that disappeared into the waistband of his trousers?
What would he look like completely naked? What would he feel like?
As wildness threatened to take her over completely, she tried to forestall it by blurting, “You shouldn’t be in here.”
“Worried about your reputation? We’re married.” He stayed on the mat with his back to her, continuing to stroke the cloth along his upraised arms and across his chest.
“I don’t know how to say this more clearly, but—”
“They have already given up one much-needed tent for me,” he interjected, pausing in his bath to speak over her. “I won’t ask them to prepare one for you as well. We share this one. Therefore, we must be married. We are.”
“Just like that?” she choked. “The sheikh has spoken and thus it is so?”
“Exactly.”
She didn’t even have words for the weakness that went through her. She told herself it was the deflation of watching her childhood dreams of a royal wedding disappear in a poof, but it was the way her life had changed in the time it took for him to make a declaration.
“You can’t.” She spoke so faintly she was surprised he heard her.
“It is done, Galila. Accept it.” He rinsed the cloth and gave it a hard wring.
“I can’t.”
She had avoided marriage for many reasons, one of the biggest ones being that she wanted a choice in how she lived her life. At no time had she been satisfied with the idea of putting her fate into the hands of any man—particularly one who didn’t love her and didn’t seem to even like her. She barely knew him!
What she did know was that he was strong and powerful in every way. No one would come to her aid here even if they heard her scream over the wailing wind. In a matter of a few words, he had stripped away all the shields she possessed—her family name, her station as Khalia’s only princess, even the composure she had taken years to construct. There was no affection or admiration or infatuation to leverage here. This was all about expediency. About what he wanted.
She tightened her fists at her sides, throat aching while the backs of her eyes grew hot, but she refused to let him see she was terrified.
“You are an educated man with intelligence and—I would hope—a shred of honor.” Perhaps that wasn’t true, considering he’d used her at the wedding and seemed to have no conscience about behaving like a barbarian from centuries ago. Realizing that made her tremble even harder. “You can’t just declare us married and force yourself on me.”
“I’m not going to attack you,” he said sardonically. “Quit sounding like a terrified virgin.”
“I am a virgin.” She spat it out with as much angst as anger.
He froze, then dropped the cloth and rose, pivoting so neatly on the ball of his foot, the rug gathered beneath him into a knot.
“How?” he asked, sounding very casual with his inquiry, but the intensity that seemed to grip him caused the hot coil in her belly to tighten and glow while her heart teetered and shifted. It thumped in wavering beats, unsure whether to feel threatened or excited under his laser-sharp regard.
“What do you mean, ‘how’?” She grew prickly with self-consciousness, face scorched even though virginity was nothing to be ashamed of. “The usual way. By not having sex.”
“You’re twenty-five.”
“Six.”
He gave his head a small shake, as if he didn’t understand the words passing between them.
“How have you not been with a man?”
“I’ve dated. Had boyfriends. I’m not...completely inexperienced.” None of her relationships had lasted, though, because she didn’t put out. Not much, anyway. She confined things to kissing and a bit of petting. She knew what happened between the sheets. Girlfriends had described the process in profound detail over the years, which truth be told, hadn’t always been a selling feature. The process sounded both incredibly intimate and kind of ridiculous.
“Weren’t you curious?”
“Sure.” She shrugged, trying to appear offhand when this conversation was equally intimate and awkward. “But not enough to sleep with a man just to know what happens. It’s not a book where you can skip to the end and make sure it will satisfy before you wade through all the exposition.”
He made a noise that might have been a choke of amusement, but his face remained a mask of astonishment.
“What?” she demanded. She had wanted more. So much more than the tepid feelings that most men inspired in her. Even when her suitors had been adoring and dazzled by her, it hadn’t been enough. She hadn’t trusted their infatuation to last. She needed more.
Karim hung his hands off his hips. “You were going to take me to your room last night,” he reminded.
“I was drunk,” she claimed, even though with him, it had been different. She had felt the “more” that she’d been craving. At least, she’d thought she had. Now she was so confused, she didn’t know what she felt.
He barked out a single harsh, “Ha!” and came toward her.
She stumbled backward in alarm only to have him catch at her arms and steady her.
“You’re about to step into our dinner.”
She shrugged off his touch, disturbed by the way her whole body was now tingling, and lowered to the rug with him, the food between them.
He stretched out on his side, propped on an elbow. His stern face relaxed a smidge. Maybe. She watched him closely, but wasn’t sure.
“Are you laughing at me?”
“No.” He reached for an olive in a dish. “Us, maybe. I don’t care for lies,” he stated. “Tell me now if it’s not true. You’re really a virgin?”
In the low light, his eyes were more black pupil than brown iris as his gaze came up to take hold of her own, refusing to let it go.
“I am,” she said, wondering why her voice had retreated behind a veil and came out shy and wispy. She cleared her throat, searching for the confident woman who usually occupied her skin. “Are you?”
“No.” Flat and unapologetic.
She managed to break their stare by rolling her eyes. She had fully expected that answer, but a pang struck in her chest all the same. Jealous? That would be a ridiculous response when she kind of hated him.
Didn’t she?
He ate another olive, still watching her. “Be thankful I’m familiar with writing compelling exposition.”
“Don’t be smug.” The pang went through her again. She wanted to splay her hand over his face and give him a firm shove.
His mouth twitched. “You’ve been living in Europe for years. I would have thought you would have been drunk before last night.”
She had, but she ignored the dig inside his comment and asked, “How do you know where I’ve been living?”
He shrugged. His gaze lowered to scan the food, but it seemed like a subterfuge.
“Big fan of gossip sites, are you?” she prompted.
“My advisors have kept you on my list of prospects for years. Ours has always been seen as an advantageous match. I would have thought it had been viewed that way in Khalia as well. Your father never suggested me when discussing your own marriage plans? Frankly, I’m surprised you’re still single, never mind a virgin.”
“Names came up, yours among them,” she admitted. “I wasn’t interested in marrying so I never bothered to look at photos or read any of the advisements I was sent. Being in Europe, I didn’t attend many events to meet any bachelors, either. My mother always sided with me that I didn’t have to hurry into marriage.”
“That seems odd. Why not?”
Galila shrugged, curling her knees under her, trying to get comfortable but feeling as though she sat on sharp stones. It wasn’t the ground beneath the floor of the tent, however. It was the rocky relationship with her mother that was poking at her.
Karim reached a long arm to the bed and handed her a cushion.
“Thank you,” she murmured and shoved it under her hip.
“Your mother didn’t encourage any match? Or just not ours?” He seemed to watch her with hawk-like attention.
“It wasn’t personal.” She told herself she was reading more intense interest from him than the topic warranted because she was feeling so sensitive. She took her time arranging her nightgown so it covered her feet, not wanting him to read the layers of mixed feelings she carried when it came to her mother. They were far too close to the bone to share with a stranger. She wasn’t drunk tonight, and she had learned the hard way that he used every weakness for his own gain. “She was sensitive to the signs of age. Preferred to put off being called Grandmother as long as possible.”
It hadn’t been about her daughter’s well-being, but it had suited Galila to avoid the shackles so she had been grateful.
He made a noncommittal noise and accepted the bowl of stew she served him.
“Karim,” she said, boldly using his name and finding it a caress in her throat. “I am a modern woman with a liberal education. You cannot expect me to give you my virginity simply because you declare us married.”
“Galila.” Somehow, he sounded as if he mocked her solemnity, yet turned her own name into an endearment. “You caught fire in my arms when your senses were dulled by alcohol. Your sober brain is now regretting your impulsiveness, but I expect we’ll be even more combustible when we lie together. You will give me your virginity because you want to.”
She couldn’t move, felt caught in amber, her whole being suffused with thick honey that suffocated with the aim of creating something eternal.
“I had hoped that would be tonight,” he added in a voice that seemed to roll into her ears from far away, barely discernible over the noise outside the swaying walls of this tent. “But your inexperience changes things. We’ll wait for your trust in me to grow. I’ve given my staff two weeks to arrange a wedding ceremony and reception at the palace. We can wait until then.”
She choked. A whole two weeks? Wow.
“How am I ever supposed to trust you when you tricked me into this?” she asked, voice cracking with emotion. “How am I supposed to feel confident—proud—to be your queen when I’m only a strategic political move?”
* * *
That was his cue to profess a deeper interest in her as a woman. It wouldn’t be a lie to say he was intrigued by the facets she kept revealing. He had thought her impulsive and spoiled, not given to thinking of others. That was certainly the impression she had left last night. Her brother’s disparagement of her actions this morning had more or less confirmed it.
But she had put his mother at ease and it didn’t escape him that she had ensured the family ring stayed in his possession while she plotted her foiled escape.
He had been prepared to let loose with his riled temper when he confronted her on the highway, but she hadn’t kicked up a fuss at their emergency takeoff. She had evacuated with as much awareness of their danger as required. She wasn’t balking at camping with the Bedouins, either. Instead of acting like she was above these rough conditions, she had ensured they contributed to the community food supply, guaranteeing she reflected well on him and the union he had made and knowing full well it would affect his country in subtle, unalterable ways.
The worst complaint he had so far was that she had cost him a favored laptop bag, since he wouldn’t dream of asking for its return. Even her escape had worked to his advantage, providing him a reason to shift their marriage from intended to a fait accompli. He had been on fire since he had spoken the words.
Now he had discovered she was a virgin? He had neither expected nor particularly wanted an untouched bride, but having one was an inordinate thrill. A primal possessiveness gripped him, chest and belly and groin. He would be the only man to stroke and taste and mate with her. She was his.
His inner barbarian howled with triumph, recalling the way she had ignited in his arms, demanding to stoke that blaze into an all-consuming inferno now.
The very fact he hovered so close to losing his rational brain to the primal one, however, told him he had to slow things down. For her sake and his own.
So he was careful to keep his tone even, not betraying how craven desire licked like flames inside him. “You’re very beautiful, Galila. Of course I desire you.”
Every man she had ever come into contact with must have desired her. It defied comprehension that she had never physically shared herself with one of them. He wasn’t in the habit of disbelieving people, but he genuinely couldn’t understand how a woman of her naturally sensual nature hadn’t indulged her passion to its fullest extent. He had.
Or rather, he had always believed he had. She might have already reset the bar—which was yet another disturbing layer to this thing between them.
All of these thoughts he held to himself behind an impervious mask.
She studied him, picking apart his words and seeming to grow more and more skeptical of them as the seconds passed.
“My beauty has nothing to do with this. You don’t care if I’m beautiful. You’re beautiful. Do you want me to believe you chose me so we can make beautiful babies?”
He felt his eyebrows jump. The topic of an heir hadn’t entered his mind beyond the abstract, but now she had brought it up...
“We should talk about that.”
“How beautiful you are?”
“Children.”
She scowled and shifted to hug her knees. “Politically expedient broodmare. Is that what I am? How romantic. A thousand times yes, I wish to be your wife, Karim.”
He ought to curtail that sarcasm. No one else in their right mind would speak with such casual disrespect toward him, but he found her temper revealing. She probably didn’t realize how much of her genuine thoughts and emotions she betrayed with that barbed tongue of hers.
“You had other plans for your life? Tell me how I’ve derailed them. Perhaps there’s a compromise.”
“Yes, you strike me as a man who compromises all the time.”
Ah. That was what she was afraid of.
“I rarely have to,” he admitted. “From the time I was old enough to grasp an adult conversation, I sat with my father in his meetings. He died when I was six and my uncle continued to include me in every decision he made on my behalf, explaining his reasoning. By the time I was fourteen, I was effectively running the country with his guidance and support. He carried out my wishes until I was officially crowned.”
She blinked wide eyes at him. “Zufar is barely ready for that level of responsibility at thirty-three.”
“He has the luxury of a father who still lives.”
She cocked her head with curiosity. “What happened to your father? It was an accident, wasn’t it? I don’t recall exactly.”
“He fell from a balcony at the palace.” He repeated the lie by rote, even though it grated on him to this day that he was forced to carry such a dark secret. He hated lies, probably because his father had burdened him with such earth-shattering ones. “He’d been drinking.”
“Ah,” she said with soft compassion. “That’s why you were so disparaging. I see now why you resent anyone who fails to appreciate the destructive power of alcohol.”
He resented a lot of things—his father’s affair with her mother, her mother for leaving his father and causing his father to pursue a desperate act. Now Karim learned there had been a child? It wasn’t as though he hadn’t considered that possibility over the years—and again in the last twenty-four hours specifically where Galila was concerned. She had been born long after his father had died, however. There was no chance they were related, which was quite possibly the only bright spot in this otherwise three-act tragedy.
“Do you want to tell me about him?” she invited gently.
“No.” He didn’t regret his abrupt response. He rarely spoke about his father, but the way she closed up like a flower, showing him her stony profile, caused him to sigh internally.
Women. They were as delicate as thin-skinned fruit, bruising at the least thing.
“Your father left you without a choice,” she summed up, still not looking at him. “So you’re comfortable imposing a lack of choice on others.”
He wasn’t so soft he felt stung by that remark, but he did feel it, maybe because the fact she was striking out that hard told him how deeply her own resentment ran at what he was demanding of her.
“You weren’t planning to avoid marriage forever, were you?” People in their position couldn’t.
“I was waiting to fall in love.”
Ah. Something like regret moved in him, but he wanted there to be no false hopes between them.
“It’s true that I will never expect or offer you love,” he agreed. “That particular emotion is as treacherous and devastating as alcohol.”
“You’ve been in love?” Her pupils exploded as though she’d taken a punch.
“No. Like alcohol, I don’t need to imbibe to see the inherent risks and have the sense to avoid it.”
A small flinch and her lashes swept down, mouth pouted.
“It doesn’t mean we can’t have a successful marriage. In fact, going into this union with realistic expectations ensures we won’t be disappointed in the long run.”
“Is that what you think?” She took a cube of cheese. “Because the problem isn’t whether you can grow to love me. It’s that I expected to choose my own husband, not have one forced upon me. I expected to make a family when it felt right, because I wanted to see something of my husband in the children I made. If you give me sons and daughters, I’m sure I’ll love them, but I don’t desire your children.”
That one did land in a previously unknown vulnerability. Why?
“Meanwhile, you expect me to give up my freedom so you won’t have to go through the inconvenience of renegotiating a few trade agreements with the new Sheikh of Khalia. The two most important decisions any woman will make are whom she will marry and whether she will have children. You expect to make both of those decisions for me. That’s not fair.”
“As I said, we can talk about children.” He wasn’t a monster. He had already said they could curtail the sex, hadn’t he?
“You still expect me to breed with you eventually,” she said with a sharp angst. “You gain on every level with this marriage and I gain nothing. In fact, I lose everything. And I’m not even allowed to feel disappointed? Your expectations are the ones that are too high, Karim.”