The Fierce and Tender Sheikh (13 page)

He led her out to the dance floor and Shakira, who, it soon became clear, had inherited a certain musical instinct from her grandmother, began her own particular dance.

She was wearing a dress in emerald-green silk organza, another of Kamila's special designs. A wide jewelled band en
circled her throat, the halter-top exposed her shoulders and back. A snug bodice clung to her small breasts and over her stomach to another jewelled band around her hips. The circular skirt was composed of a dozen layers of gauzy silk, the top layer spangled all over with beads and pearls.

Around her ankles her sandals carried matching bands of clustered jewels. The effect, as with most of the wardrobe Kamila had designed for her, was primitive elegance, an effect that was matched now by her part ballet, part belly, part tribal dancing.

Sharif was wearing a tuxedo. “Going native,” Gazi and Sharif had called it, when Shakira had challenged their Western evening gear. “Why do men in the West dress like crows?” she'd asked, but no one had an answer. “I don't like it!”

He looked very dark and handsome in the black suit, but Shakira liked him better in the silk jacket and jewels that comprised the dress uniform of the Cup Companions—what he had been wearing the night of the reception given in her honour, when he had told her she was beautiful.

He watched her dance, graceful and unconsciously sensuous, with a tight jaw. Time, he knew. He had to give her time. And yet—there would be plenty of other men now, men who wouldn't necessarily have the patience, or the sense, to give her time. Men were watching her here with eyes that told their own story. If she succumbed to another man while he, Sharif, waited and watched and was careful…

But he would kill any man who came near her.

The sentiment must have been written large on his face, for a man who'd been watching hungrily, catching his eye, suddenly turned to his companion, put his arm around her and leaned into her ear.

The musicians slipped into something slow, and around them the floor emptied. Half a dozen couples remained, moving into each other's arms to begin the slow sway of public sex.

He had waited too long to hold her.

She put her hand in his because he seemed to expect it, but as he drew her closer, she protested nervously, “I never danced with a man before. I don't know what you do.”

Then she caught her breath, because Sharif drew her close and put his arm around her. He seemed very tall suddenly: her head just reached his heart, and almost of its own accord nestled there. One arm was around her waist; with the other he held her hand firmly against his chest.

“It's like walking. Shift your weight back and forth between your feet, and let me give you your direction.” His voice rumbled in her ear, like a cat's purr, and she felt it all down her spine.

“Oh,” she said, on a note of surprise, but she didn't resist, and he wrapped his arm more securely around her, drawing her firmly into his embrace.

She felt enclosed and safe, and a drowsy happiness seemed to flow through her, making her lazy. She did what he had instructed, lifting one foot and then the other, and the movement of his body told hers where to put it down.

The music seemed to flow through them, wrap around them, binding them together, so that after a time she seemed to herself not to be moving from her own volition. As if something else—the music, perhaps—created the dance, using their bodies.

A singeing heat tingled on her skin when he touched her. His hand moved against her bare back, and she felt a shivering response all down her spine. He bent his head to murmur something, and even his breath against her neck caused a delicious melting in her, and her blood flowed with warm sweetness like the taste of honey.

Then he dropped his hands and stood a little away from her, and she knew she had been wrong about the bonds that linked them. They were not the product of the music, but something else. Because they were still there, strong and vibrant, and binding her to him, when the music stopped.

S
he was a hit, a very palpable hit. A tiny, perfect princess, a survivor from hell who had kept her humour, her truth…and her predilection for straight talk and plain, pungent language, which after months of tutoring no one had quite been able to eradicate in her. The world loved what it saw and wanted more.

After that interview, as Gazi had predicted, the demand for appearances by the Bagestani princess and her rescuer went nuclear, and the Gulf Island campaign was to be stepped up and taken all over the world.

“We'll need some support,” Gazi insisted. “We don't want anyone getting burn-out, and Shakira is new to all this.”

So other members of the royal family were drafted, and Farida, too. “A B-list celebrity,” Noor said with a grin one day, overhearing Gazi on his mobile with a chat show producer who wanted Shakira and Sharif and was being offered Noor and Farida and Jamila instead. “Just what I always dreamed of.”

Gazi hung up and shook his head. “You're not B-list, Princess. It's just that they hadn't realized yet that you're on offer.
What a blessing you were so reclusive when you got back from your adventure with Bari! Believe me, they jumped at the chance to get the heiress who bolted from her wedding and spent her honeymoon with her fiancé on a desert island.”

“I did not bolt from my wedding,” Noor denied primly. “Bari's grandfather withdrew his permission.”

He grinned. “That's the ticket, Princess.”

 

It seemed strange to her that she should have discovered love, real love, not with her family, not for the Sultan or even her grandmother, but for Sharif. She had believed that she loved her family, because she wanted to love them. But when her heart opened for Sharif she learned that love was very different from a feeling of wanting to love. And now she loved not just Sharif, but her family, too.

It was mysterious, inexplicable, but something had happened when he told her her name—earlier, even, for when she stole his wallet, hadn't she been half glad then that he had come after her? But she hadn't begun to understand herself until that night she had danced with him, and felt how her heart cleaved to his.

Her heart had been closed before Sharif. But every moment she was with him, it opened a little more.
Like a dark, locked room,
she told herself.
And he unlocked the door and came in with a light, and looked at things that no one has ever seen.

But he hadn't seen everything, she reminded herself anxiously. Now she knew what love really was—but would Sharif love her, if he knew?

 

What the family called in private
The Al Jawadi Islands-for-the-Islanders Road Show
went from success to raging success. They were capturing the public imagination. Between the Princesses, the Cup Companions, and the islanders themselves, as represented by Farida and her daughter, the campaign caught fire. Someone started selling T-shirts over the Internet, and sent a dozen samples to the palace.

“Why not?” said Gazi, and on the next chat show Noor, Farida and Jamila had
People Need Sanctuary Too
emblazoned on their chests. After that the T-shirts began appearing on the streets.

It had been Gazi's idea that Noor and Farida would make a good team, since Noor had been shipwrecked on the island, Solomon's Foot, where Farida's family had lived for generations. On the practical front, Noor could translate when Farida was interviewed in English. On the bums-on-seats front, as Gazi put it, Farida and Jamila pulled the heartstrings, and Noor added the glitter.

“Shakira, of course, does both,” Gazi confided to Sharif. “Her kind are few and far between, Sharif. She's one of a kind, and they're all after her.”

The two Cup Companions looked at each other.

“Do you think I don't know that?”

“What do they say? ‘You'd better hurry, 'cause it's going fast.'”

“Over my dead body.” Sharif showed his teeth.

Gazi's hands went up. “Okay, okay. So long as you're on the case. A person would have to be blind not to know how you feel, and the way she looks at you, you're miles ahead of the rest of the field. But are you making your advantage good?”

“She's unique, Gazi, as you say. She looks great—sometimes you'd swear she'd recovered as if it all had never happened. But underneath Princess Shakira is still Hani half the time, an urchin fighting the world for the right to live. She needs room to find herself a little more before I start labelling her as mine. She's got a right to discover herself.”

It was killing him to wait, but he knew he was right. And giving Shakira time didn't mean giving anyone else a chance. He could keep the others away.

 

Farida's husband was found, in a prison far from the capital, where the prison superintendent had destroyed the prison
records before fleeing. Hashim Sabzi was thin, weak and ill, but at least he had not been tortured. The prison superintendent, a far-seeing man, had noted the direction of the wind a couple of years before the Return, and tailored his activities accordingly.

Hashim moved to the palace to be with Farida, where he was under medical observation. He wasn't well enough to make the next talk show appearance with his family, as the producer had hoped.

But Farida and Jamila went, as scheduled.

 

What happened was completely unexpected. It was Noor's own idea to take along the doll she had found under the burnt house on Solomon's Foot, the doll she had given the name
Laqiya,
the foundling. Gazi had given the idea the thumbs-up, telling her to bring the doll out if the moment was good. But no one had mentioned it to Farida.

“Tell us what you ate, Princess, because I think that's what most people worry about—did you have to eat grubs while you were shipwrecked?”

Noor laughed. “No, but it was a close-run thing! We survived on turtles' eggs and fish and what we could forage in the forest,” she said. “Then we found the tragic remains of the village. Farida's village, I know now. The houses had all been burnt, but even so there was some useful material for the shelter we were building. And it was great to find some self-seeded vegetables in the abandoned gardens.”

“So you—”

“And there was one more thing I found, and I think this speaks louder than anything for the unspeakable nature of what Ghasib and Mystery Resorts committed on those islands,” Noor went on. “I brought it today and I'd like to show it to you.”

“Of course.”

Noor bent down to the smart carryall she had brought with her, lifted out a plastic bag, and opened it.

“As long as I live, I will never forget the day I found this, in the ruins of a wrecked, half-burnt house. For me, this little doll said it all.”

She drew Laqiya out of the plastic shroud and sat the little rag doll on her knee. “To me this doll is a symbol of—”

A piercing shriek electrified them all.

“Aminaaaaaa!”
screamed Jamila, and then, “Mama, it's my Amina!” and she launched herself off her mother's lap to run to Noor, wrapped her hands around the doll, tore it from Noor's startled grasp, and danced around the studio, the doll hugged to a cheek wet with tears.

Then she turned to her mother with an expression that had the studio audience groping for their own hankies.

“We have Baba and Amina, Mama. Can we go home now?”

 

“Dear Princess Shakira,” read the note.

They walked in the garden at night, his arm around her, her head against his heart. Around them the fountains burbled and sang, and the scent of sleepy roses perfumed the air.

“It couldn't have happened without you,” Sharif said. “Congratulations, Princess. Not everyone can turn life's hard experiences around and make something so positive out of them.”

“Does Ashraf say the islanders will be able to go home now?”

“Yes, this has changed everything. The original contract for the lease of the islands wasn't signed in good faith, which means the company won't be able to ask the courts to enforce it. But in any case the fallout from public opinion if the company now proceeded with a claim is too big to risk.”

Shakira smiled and sighed.

“This also means we'll have an easier time with the tribal council. Now that we're no longer fighting for their agreement to resettle the islanders inland we'll make headway on other issues.”

She lifted her head and looked up into his face. “It's all because of you. So many lives changed so completely, because you found me in that camp. Especially my life.”

He was silent for a long breath. Then he murmured, “My life, too, Princess.”

Nervously she withdrew, but his arm held her firm, and she subsided against his heart again. “I love you, Shakira,” he said softly.

Her blood created a flurry in her breast. “Do you?” she whispered. “Do you
love
me?” Tears spurted over her cheeks, as if being loved by him were too much for her heart to bear. “Oh, Sharif!”

He turned to face her, wrapping his arms around her as the night embraced the moon. “Very, very much. I want you to be my wife. Will you?”

“Oh!” Her breath caught, and she swallowed over the lump that had suddenly leapt into her throat. “Oh, Sharif! I don't think—oh,
Allah,
marry? How could I be married? I'm not like Noor, or even Jalia. I'm not a woman, I'm still half a boy. You know that better than anyone. I'm so ignorant about everything. I need to go to school, and I need—oh, how can I be a wife?”

“Do you love me, Shakira?”

His voice was half rough, half gentle, and her skin shivered with the danger that beckoned. “Yes—oh,
yes,
I do! But—”

He bent his head and his mouth came closer and closer while her heart kicked and struggled. Tenderly, he brushed her lips with his, and a kind of sweetness she had never tasted before flowered in her, as if her heart tasted the scent of roses.

He lifted his mouth a little away, and rested his forehead against hers. “If you love me, the rest can wait, Shakira. We can take it as slowly as you need. But tell me you love me.”

It was the first time in her life that anyone had asked for her love, and her heart cracked with the sweet pain and the newness of it. To be someone whose love was valued—oh, how far she had come from Burry Hill!

“Is it—is it important to you?” she pressed, just to prolong the sweetness.

“Nothing has ever been as important.”

She could not hold out longer against that. “I love you, Sharif. I don't think I knew what love was before I loved you. But it's—it's when your heart opens, isn't it? When someone gets inside your heart and you're glad they're there.”

“Yes,” he said, for he, too, had learned that frightening joy. “Yes, that's what love is.”

“And then you find that there's room for lots more people, too. I—I thought I loved my family, but my heart didn't know how to open right away. And then you went in and now—now I can love everyone I want to love.”

His arms wrapped her so tightly then that she couldn't breathe, but it seemed you didn't need breath when you had love. His mouth sought hers again, but although she lifted her lips he sensed her fear, and again, though he trembled with the effort, his lips only brushed hers.

“Promise to be my wife,” he whispered.

“But I'm so—I told you why.”

“Shakira, you are perfect and true. What is it you fear?”

“I don't know,” she whispered helplessly, for how could she tell him?

He looked at her closely, as if he guessed something, and she dropped her eyes.

“Let's sit down,” Sharif said after a moment. He led her to a bench under a rustling tree, and they sat. Above them the bright moon sailed above a wisp of grey cloud in the lush, purple-black sky. Its light gleamed on the turquoise dome, and on the sparkling fountain.