Sheikh's Honor
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Alexandra Sellers
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17.3K
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19
One
The green-and-white seaplane skimmed the tops of the trees, the drone of its engine loud as it headed for a landing on the next lake. Clio Blake, guiding the powerboat in hard jolts across the wake of a cruiser that had just emerged from the channel ahead of her, heard the sound first. As the plane roared over her head, she flicked a glance skyward and wished that her gaze held some magic that could make it disappear.
She did not want him here. He should not be coming. It wasn’t right.
She cut her speed sharply and guided the boat into the narrow channel that led between two lakes, where signs posting the speed limit warned boaters of the danger of their wake eroding the shoreline. Some of the cottages were still boarded up, but most showed signs of having been opened for the season. At one cottage two men were working to take down the shutters, and Clio exchanged a wave with them as she passed.
Once through the channel and emerging into the larger lake, she reluctantly booted up her speed again and headed across the water towards the airline dock. The Twin Otter was already skimming along the surface, preparing to take off again.
So he was here. No hope left that something would prevent his arrival…. Seeing where her thoughts led, Cliogrimaced self-consciously. Had she been unconsciously hoping for the plane to crash, then? Well, it only went to show how deep her opposition went.
But her parents had simply refused to listen. Her sister Zara had asked, and what Zara asked for, she still got. So Prince Jalal ibn Aziz ibn Daud ibn Hassan al Quraishi, the newly found nephew of the rulers of the Barakat Emirates, was here. For the entire summer.
She wondered if Prince Jalal was remembering their last meeting right now. It is dangerous to call a man your enemy when you do not know his strength, he had said then.
She had disdained to notice the threat, opening her eyes wide as if to say, You and whose army? But that had been a lie. She felt threatened in his presence, and who would not? He was the man who had taken her sister hostage to force his point on the princes of the Barakat Emirates.
Anything could have happened. They were all incredibly lucky that it had been resolved without bloodshed. It was enough to make him her enemy forever. That was what she had told him, that day at the fabulous, fairy-tale weddings, including Zara and Prince Rafi’s. For her the celebrations had been deeply marred by the presence of such a man…even if, in the most outrageous turnaround of all time, he did have the title prince instead of bandit now.
It is dangerous to call a man your enemy when you do not know his strength.
Clio shivered. No doubt she would get to know his strengths—and weaknesses—over this coming, terrible summer. But one thing was certain—she would never forgive him for what he had done to them, the hell he had put them through, the risk he had run.
Whatever Jalal the bandit’s strength was, he would never be anything to her but enemy.
Clio had always half-worshipped her older sister, though there were scarcely three years separating them. Zary was what Clio called her, right from her earliest speech. It was her own special nickname, and as a child she got ferociously jealous when anyone else tried to use the name.
Both girls took after their mother. Both had the black hair, the dark brown eyes, the beautiful bones…but Clio knew full well that she had always been a poor man’s version of her perfect sister. Zara’s hair fell in massed perfect curls, Clio’s own hair was thick but dead straight. Zara was a fairy princess, with her exotically slanted eyes, delicate features, and her porcelain doll body. Clio’s eyes were set straight under dark eyebrows that were wide, strong and level, giving her face a serious cast. Her eyelashes were not long, though lushly thick, and she had inherited their father’s wide, full mouth rather than the cupid’s bow that Zara had from their mother.
By the age of eleven Clio was already taller and bigger than her older sister. And in spite of being younger, she had begun to feel protective of Zara. She had always felt the urge to fight Zara’s battles for her, even though Zara was perfectly capable of fighting her own. Half the time they weren’t even battles Zara thought worth fighting.
Like now. Zara had forgiven and forgotten what Jalal had done to her. Clio knew she never could. It was Zara who had asked her family to have him for the summer, so that he could practise his spoken English before going on to a postgrad course somewhere…Clio, meanwhile, had been aghast. She had fought the idea with everything she had.
But she had lost the argument. And now here she was, picking up Jalal the bandit from his flight to the Ontario heartland, deep in the most beautiful part of cottage country, where the family lived and worked on the shore of Love Lake.
He was standing on the dock by two canvas holdalls. He had shaved off his neat beard since she last saw him. Perhaps he thought it would help him blend in, but if so, he hoped in vain. The set of his shoulders, the tilt of his chin as he took in his surroundings were indefinably different, set him apart from the men she knew.
He came out of his reverie when she hailed him, the boat sidling up to the concrete dock. The water level on the lakes was low this year, and he was above her.
“Clio!” he cried, ready to be friendly. So he was going to pretend to forget. Her jaw tightened. Well, she was not.
“Prince Jalal,” she acknowledged with a brief, cool nod. “Can you jump in? Toss your bags down first.”
He threw her one assessing look and then nodded, as if marking something to himself. She knew that the offer of friendship had been withdrawn, and was glad of it. It was good that he was so quick on the uptake. It would be best if they understood each other from the beginning.
“Thank you,” he said, and picked up his bags to toss them, one after the other, into the well of the boat.
Then he stood for a moment, frowning down at the boat riding the swell of its own wake, as if trying to work out some obscure alien art. Clio realized with a jolt that he had probably never before performed the, to her, simple action of jumping into an unmoored boat.
And this was the man who was going to be so useful to her father at the marina! That was the argument her parents had made when she protested: with Jude gone off to the city, they needed someone…
“Take my hand,” she said coolly, and, as she would with any green tourist, straightened and turned, keeping one hand steady on the wheel, while she reached her other up for his. “Step down onto the seat first.”
She half expected him to refuse the help of a mere woman, but he bent over and reached for her hand. As his fingers brushed hers, Clio gasped, feeling as if his touch delivered an electric shock, and snatched her hand away.
Jalal tried to regain his balance on the dock and failed, but now he had lost his timing. The boat sank away from him just as his weight came down. He landed awkwardly on the seat with one foot, crashed down onto the floor of the boat with the other, skidded and involuntarily reached for Clio.
Her hands automatically clasped him, too, and then there they were—Jalal down on one knee before her, with his arms around her, his cheek pressed against the rich swell of her breasts, Clio with her arms wrapped around his sun-heated back and shoulders.
It was as if they were lovers. The heat of him burned her palms. She felt the brush of his breath at her throat. For a moment the sun sparkled on the water with a brightness that hurt her eyes.
Clio stiffened. She was suddenly flooded with electric rage, her nerves buzzing and spitting like an overloaded circuit.
“Take your hands off me,” she said.
Jalal straightened, glaring at her. He was seething with anger. She could feel the wave of it hit her.
“What is it you hope to prove?” he asked through his teeth.
Flushing under the impact of his gaze, Clio cried, “It wasn’t deliberate! What do you think I am?”
He stood gazing at her. “I think you are a woman who sees things her own way. You choose to be my enemy, but you do not know what that means. If you try to make a fool of me again, you will learn what it means.”
Nervous fear zinged through her at his words, at the look in his eyes. But she was damned if she would let him see it.
“I think I know, thank you.” She had learned what it meant to be his enemy the day he had kidnapped Zara.
He shook his head once, in almost contemptuous denial, still eyeing her levelly. “If you knew, you would not play the games of a child.”
“And what does that mean?”
“You are a woman, Clio. I am a man. When a woman sets herself to be the enemy of a man, there is always another reason than she imagines.”
She opened her mouth, gasping at the implication. “Well, first prize for patriarchal, chauvinistic arrogance! And you from the modern, secular Barakat Emirates, too! You don’t seem to have—”
He smiled and lifted his palm, and she broke off. “I am of the desert,” he reminded her through his teeth.
“So I gathered!”
Three fingers gracefully folded down to his thumb, leaving the forefinger to admonish her. “In the desert a man will let a woman do much, because he is strong, and she is weak. He makes allowances.”
Her blood seemed to be rushing through her brain and body at speeds never previously attained. “Of all the—!”
“In return, Clio, a woman never speaks to a man in such a tone of voice as this that you use to me. Women have sharp tongues, men have strong bodies. We respect each other by not using our strengths against the other.”
“Are you threatening me?” she demanded.
“I only explain to you how men and women get along in a civilized country,” he told her, and though now she was sure he was laughing at her, she couldn’t stop the fury that buzzed in her.
“Well, that isn’t how it is here!” she exploded. “And maybe you haven’t noticed that, civilized or not, you aren’t in the desert now!”
His lips were twitching. “I do know. We are going to hit the boat behind us, and this is a thing that would never happen in the desert.”
