Never Resist a Sheikh (International Bad Boys) Page 7

  Instinctively she’d met his gaze, shocked by the dark glitter of hunger in his eyes. As if she were food. No one had ever looked at her like that, not one single man. At college, she’d been far too young, the schoolgirl genius playing with the grown-ups. And afterwards, after she’d gotten her company up and running, there had been the odd guy who’d expressed an interest. Yet it had been obvious even then that it wasn’t her they wanted, only a ticket into the industry…

  You liked it. You liked the way Zakir looked at you.

  No. Stupid. She didn’t like it. And her body was an idiot.

  Her palm stung, but this time it wasn’t because of the remembered heat of the sheikh’s hand in hers, it was her own nails digging in. Trying to drown out that heat and the memory. An impossible task.

  He kidnapped you. Remember that instead.

  Felicity bit her lip. Hard.

  The woman behind her tutted, pulling out the lipstick and touching it up before Felicity could protest. Then she was gently urged to her feet and ushered to the door, the gilded flat slippers she wore scuffing on the stone floor, the white silk of the robes billowing out behind her.

  She felt like a walking sail or some kind of ambulatory cloud.

  Outside the door, there were the usual guards, plus the bearded, hard-faced man who had introduced himself as Jamal, one of the sheikh’s head guards and advisor, or something.

  He never looked very pleased to see her, which was fair enough since she wasn’t very pleased to see him either.

  His hard, dark eyes swept over her and he said something to the women, who nodded their heads and glided away down the corridor without a backward glance. Oddly bereft, Felicity only just stopped herself from nibbling on her perfectly painted mouth again. “So it’s party time, I guess?” she said inanely.

  Jamal said nothing, but then he didn’t need to. His scornful gaze was enough.

  Wonderful. This was like her disastrous debutant ball all over again, where she’d been presented to New York society with all the other girls her age. Another pointless social engagement, another occasion where everything she did would be picked at and pulled apart by her mother. Where her father wouldn’t even notice she was there.

  It’s not the same.

  No, of course it wasn’t. Anyway, she was over that. She didn’t bow to anyone else’s expectations these days. She’d embraced who she was. Hell, she was proud of it.

  Tonight would be an exception. She’d be who the sheikh wanted her to be for the sake of a phone call. And with any luck her company wouldn’t have collapsed while she’d been away. Hell, maybe he even had some cell phone reception in that office of his. All she needed was a whiff of a signal for her phone to connect and then someone would be able to trace her.

  Who? Your parents? You haven’t spoken to them for years.

  Felicity clasped her hands together as she followed Jamal down the dim, narrow corridors of the palace.

  Not them. She had friends and she had her company. They would be frantic if they knew she was missing. Which they didn’t because according to his majesty everyone thought she was having a lovely sightseeing jaunt out into the desert. Though maybe they’d find that odd? Especially considering they’d know she wouldn’t pass up an important meeting for a bit of sightseeing.

  Whatever. Damn him.

  Perhaps waiting it out was the best thing. Wait for a signal or wait for enough time to pass before someone realized she hadn’t gone sightseeing at all.

  Someone? Your employees, maybe? Because even your friends aren’t that close.

  Something painful twisted inside her, but she didn’t want to examine it too deeply so she forced it away. Better to think about this upcoming feast or party or whatever it was that Zakir was presenting her at.

  “You will not protest or insult our customs. You will comport yourself with grace and dignity.”

  Well, she was wearing the clothes he’d had sent to her rooms that afternoon. And there was no way she was going to insult his customs or his people. She wasn’t stupid, after all.

  Yet as Jamal led her down a massive flight of stone stairs to a pair of huge wooden double doors, she couldn’t stop the fear that clenched tightly around her heart. God, she hated social stuff like this. She never knew what to say to people.

  But perhaps she’d be lucky. Perhaps there’d be hardly anyone there.

  A figure waited beside the doors, tall and broad-shouldered, swathed in black robes and a head covering of midnight blue. The circlet holding the head covering in place looked like it had been made out of twisted gold thread and it glittered in the light.

  A crown for a desert king.

  And this time the twist inside her had nothing to do with fear.

  The sheikh was unsmiling as his black eyes swept over her and she could feel the heat begin to rise to her cheeks. Because for some reason she couldn’t seem to look away from him. There was something savage about him, something dark and wild and ancient as time itself. As if he’d been carved from the same stone as the palace around him and had reigned here for a thousand years. Dark and silent and indestructible. Strong.

  It made her shiver in her white silk robes. Sent a pulse of heat ricocheting around in her bloodstream.

  You’re mad. He’s a violent stranger who kidnapped you and who is currently holding you prisoner.

  Yes, quite clearly she was mad. And she must have Stockholm syndrome or something if she was starting to think he was… No, attractive was too mundane a word for what he was. Attractive was for the rich, Ivy League young men her mother had once shoved in front of her and told her to make nice to.

  The sheikh of Al-Shakhra was not one of those young men. At all.

  And, God help her, she found him fascinating. The danger of him. The challenge of him. The sheer intricate mystery of him. He hadn’t seemed to want to talk about himself that morning at breakfast when she’d asked him about being a soldier, but she suddenly wanted to know all about him.

  He said something to Jamal in that deep, rough voice of his, but his black gaze never left her.

  And in English he said, “You will do.”

  And though the words sounded halfhearted, she knew they weren’t. Because in his eyes was the dark thing she’d seen that morning at breakfast, the starved thing that glittered like shattered obsidian. The hunger that made her heart race and shortened her breath. There was nothing halfhearted about that.

  Suddenly out of her depth, Felicity looked away.

  He scared her, no question, and for some reason she didn’t understand, she liked that.

  “Jamal,” he ordered. “It is time.”

  His guard went to the double doors and pushed them open.

  Felicity tried to slow her breathing, tried to relax. Tried not to be aware of how every muscle was tensing up. She didn’t know where this pressure was coming from, especially since she’d long since stopped feeling like she had to prove herself to anyone, yet there it was. It annoyed her.

  Pasting a grin on her face, her heartbeat like thunder, she noticed Zakir extending a hand to her. Oh hell, she was supposed to take it, wasn’t she?

  She didn’t want to, not after what had happened last time. But she couldn’t refuse. She’d promised she’d give him this in order to get that phone call. So she reached out and took his hand, feeling the intense jolt of electricity as he closed his fingers around hers.

  It shook her, set her off balance, made her unsure. And if there was anything she hated, it was feeling unsure. She was used to being smart, to knowing things, so this was weird. Especially when intellectually she knew about sex and all it involved.

  But you’ve never felt it before.

  Felicity gritted her teeth and forced the thoughts away. No, she felt nothing. Nothing.

  And then there was no more time to think because he was drawing her through the doors, a massive, vaulted room ahead of her. After the narrow, medieval corridors of the rest of the palace, it was almost a shock.

&n
bsp; The ceiling was so high it was almost dizzying and inlaid with all kinds of beautiful mosaics. Even the walls glittered, bright with colored tiles and shards of mirrored glass. It was like being in a room covered in jewels.

  She stared at the walls because it was easier to look at them than it was to look at the rest of the room. Especially when it was absolutely jam packed full of people.

  And they were all staring directly at her.

  Her heartbeat thudded in her head, the warmth of Zakir’s skin on hers making her dizzy. There were calluses on his fingers; she could feel the slight roughness of them against her. Was that from sword fighting? Or something else?

  More puzzles. More mysteries.

  Jamal was talking, his voice carrying over the crowd gathered to watch them, but she didn’t understand what he was saying. It was easier to concentrate on the feel of Zakir’s hand or the mosaics on the walls. Anything so she didn’t have to look at all the faces turned toward her.

  The crowd began to part, opening up a clear path through to a massive, gilded throne. In front of the throne was a large cushion covered in white silk.

  Zakir strode forward and she had no choice but to go with him. People murmured as they went past, whispers like wind in the trees. She didn’t understand what was being said, but she’d seen the expression on the faces of the people watching her before.

  Her father had looked at her the same way when she’d tried to tell him why she wanted to study computer science at college instead of law. Her mother fluttered around, placating. But nothing had been able to mask his scorn or disapproval.

  And nothing had kept her mother from complaining to her in private, guilting her, and making her feel as if she was being heartless for making her own choices and not doing what her father wanted her to.

  Anger roiled inside her, an instinctive response. But she kept her eyes on the floor. These people weren’t her parents and this had nothing to do with her past. And anyway, she couldn’t afford an emotional outburst, not now.

  As they approached the throne, Zakir guided her to the cushion at the foot of it. Then he leaned in, his mouth near her ear. “This is your place,” he murmured. “You are my bride prize and as such will be on display to my court. People will come to pay their respects and leave you gifts as is the custom, but you will not be required to speak. You only need to nod your head.”

  His breath was warm against her neck, she could feel it even through the silk of her robes. She shivered helplessly and that really didn’t help. “O-Okay. What about you?”

  “I will need to mingle with my court.”

  She blinked. “You mean, all I do is sit here?”

  His fingers firmed around hers, directing her to the cushion. “Yes. Remember what you promised me, Felicity.”

  The use of her first name jolted her enough that she forgot to protest as she sank down onto the white silk cushion, folding her legs beneath her.

  Felicity. Why had he called her that?

  He also called you “little one”.

  So he had. But she’d kind of blanked that one out because it had felt…intimate in some way that she wasn’t ready to acknowledge. It was also bossy and possessive and all sorts of wrong.

  You liked that, too.

  No way. Of course she hadn’t.

  She scowled after him as he strode into the crowds of people. He was nearly half a head taller than most of them, standing out in his black and midnight blue robes, with his circlet of gold. Most of the rest of the people of his court wore robes of white, like her own. But there were numerous different colors of head covering, though none of them wore the deep, intense blue of the sheikh. Was that a royal color here?

  And then, as she watched his dark, massive figure surrounded by crowds, she realized something.

  There were hardly any women present.

  She frowned, scanning around the rest of the huge room. There were long tables set up at either end, all heaped with food. And in one corner a group of people played instruments, though the music was pretty much drowned out by the roar of conversation that had started up.

  But she only spotted around twenty women in the room, out of a crowd of a couple of hundred at least.

  How weird was that?

  She could understand the sexes being segregated at an occasion like this, since that’s what she’d heard happened in the stricter countries of the Middle East. But that obviously wasn’t the case here since there were some women present.

  They wore brightly colored robes and they were, without exception, mostly in their fifties or sixties. The fact that they were dripping with heavy, gold jewelry, not to mention numerous gems, seemed to indicate that they were aristocracy of some kind.

  Too busy staring and puzzling out the reasons for the lack of women, she didn’t notice a group of men approach her cushion until they were almost standing over her.

  Startled, she looked up at them, trying a nervous smile.

  But they didn’t smile back. In fact, there was no expression at all on their faces. One of them, an older man with a graying beard, bent and put something down on the silk carpet that her cushion sat on. A coin. The rest of them followed suit until she had a little pile of copper-colored coins in front of her. Then, without a word, they turned their backs and disappeared back into the crowd.

  Felicity frowned after them then glanced down at the coins. These were gifts? They were rather pretty. She wondered if she should touch them, then thought better of it, folding her hands in her robes.

  It wasn’t the most interesting evening she’d ever had, but sitting on a cushion and not interacting with anyone was a lot better than many other parties she’d been forced to attend, so she didn’t mind too much.

  Another group of men stopped in front of her and this time the looks on their faces were easy enough to read. Disapproval. Contempt.

  One of them put something down in front of her, but it wasn’t a coin this time. It was a stone, rough cut and gray and clearly just picked up from the roadside.

  Felicity swallowed, a wave of hot anger washing over her skin as she began to realize what was happening. More stones joined the coins in front of her, and she knew they weren’t gifts. They were insults.

  She bit her lip and looked away as another stone hit the ground in front of her, fighting to keep still and not leap to her feet and demand to know why she was being insulted.

  Okay, so they didn’t like her. What did she care? She wasn’t going to marry Zakir anyway; in fact, she’d been forced into it. She should be pleased they weren’t happy with their sheikh’s choice. She should be ecstatic. Because if they didn’t like her, then perhaps he’d set her free.

  Yet she found herself burning with humiliation all the same.

  She tried to ignore it, tried to see where Zakir was, but for some reason she couldn’t find him anywhere in the room. It was like he’d gone, leaving her here, sitting like an idiot on her cushion while the people of his court showered her with rocks.

  More people approached her, some of them saying things to her that she didn’t understand and didn’t want to, because whatever it was they were saying would be insulting.

  The pile in front of her began to grow, full of rocks and copper coins, and lumps of dirt.

  People were staring now.

  She compressed her lips together, refusing to let them see her anger or show any hint of vulnerability. So this is what Zakir had brought her to. Drugged, kidnapped, and now ritually humiliated. And she couldn’t even defend herself because she’d promised him she’d sit here and behave. Was a lousy phone call really worth this?

  Yes, it was. Because then someway, somehow she’d alert every damn authority there was to get her out of here.

  Her throat felt dry, a vague nausea sitting in her stomach. She wished she had something to drink, but she didn’t dare move in case moving was somehow insulting.

  And then she spotted a familiar figure moving toward her. Jamal. She forced herself to give him a tentat
ive smile as he approached, his brows drawing down as he noticed the pile of rocks and dirt in front of her.

  “I’m not sure those are gifts,” she murmured, her voice thickened with anger. She had to get up, get out of here. At least for a moment. “Do you think I could stretch my legs? Get a drink of water? I think my feet have gone to sleep.”

  The look on Jamal’s face was thunderous, his head turning as if scanning the immediate vicinity for enemies. There were none, except the last group of men who’d given her the so-called “gifts”, another generous helping of rocks with an added lump of dirt. They were standing near the cushion, talking amongst themselves.

  Jamal’s dark eyes narrowed as he stared at them. Without taking his eyes off them, he reached a hand down to her and she gratefully took it, getting painfully up off the cushion.

  But she’d been sitting too long and as she tried to stand on her numb feet, someone jogged her elbow, making her stumble. There was an exclamation and from out of nowhere a shower of something wet and cold splashed in her face and soaked the pristine white silk of her robes, the sound of smashing glass following it.

  For a second she could only stand there blinking as the attention of over two hundred people descended on her.

  And she realized what had happened. Someone had thrown red wine all over her and now it was all down the front of her robes, staining them and the cushion behind her red. Staining the carpet she stood on and the floor.

  Felicity looked up at the man who’d done it. There was a scornful smile on his face, obviously pleased with his handiwork.

  Humiliated, a red rage descended over her vision.

  And she took a step toward him.

  * * *

  Zakir was listening to the concerns of yet another of his ministers, another litany of complaints about salaries that he was tired of hearing. They wanted more money because he’d come down hard on the corruption, a leftover from his father’s reign that Farid had been trying to stamp out. He’d made it plain on a number of occasions that they wouldn’t be getting any and yet still they complained.