Sheikh's Temptation
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Alexandra Sellers
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Harlequin😌 Second Chances
HarlequinOne
Winter was taking a last swipe at the mountains. A strong wind had started to blow soon after lunch, and within an hour the beautiful spring weather had developed claws. Now, wearing the anorak and jeans that had been perfectly comfortable this morning, Lana Holding was shivering, and probably it would get worse.
Static screeched in her ear again. “Nothing,” she reported briefly, turning down the volume on the CB mike and tossing it through the truck window onto the passenger seat. She leaned against the truck and looked down at where Arash was tightening the wheelnuts, his left leg bent, his right leg extended awkwardly away from his body.
She could have helped with the job, but when, in his usual autocratic way, he had told her not to bother, she hadn’t forced the issue. She was determined to enjoy this trip through the breathtaking Koh-i Shir mountains in spite of his presence and the jinx that seemed to be dogging them. Getting into a heated argument with Arash over changing a wheel wasn’t her idea of a good time.
She sighed with ill-suppressed anxiety. “They must still be miles behind us.”
Arash pulled the wrench off the last nut and straightened. “They probably have not left Seebi-Kuchek.”
Seebi-Kuchek was the village where they had spent the night. Their little convoy had consisted of two trucks when they set off from the palace yesterday, one carrying Arash and Lana, the other two of Arash’s staff, who had come along as bodyguards or advance men or something. Or for all she knew, their role might be just to make sure she and Arash wouldn’t have to be alone.
If so, that was fine with her. Lana didn’t want to be alone with Arash, either—she didn’t want to be with him at all—but she had been impatient to get into the mountains. This morning, when the other truck had developed minor engine trouble, it was she who had suggested setting off without them.
“They can catch up with us at lunch time,” she had urged. “The weather is so beautiful. I want to get up into the mountains while the sky is clear, and what if it doesn’t last?”
She regretted it now, even more so because her instincts had been right. Clouds were building around the magnificent peak of Mount Shir, and soon this road would be just any old desolate stretch of road with no mountain views to entrance the eye.
Arash had agreed without a word, though she knew he hadn’t liked it. They had dawdled at their lunch break, waiting for the others to catch up, but it didn’t happen, and so they had gone on again. An hour later one front wheel had hit a pothole hard. Replacing the broken wheel, which had unbelievably stubborn bolts, had cost them too much time. She knew they would have to hurry if they were going to reach the village they were aiming for on the other side of the pass today.
She eyed him now. “Should we go back?”
“Your choice,” Arash said, moving to set his tools into the back of the truck. He slammed the double doors. “We can go forward or back. The distance is about the same, and each way it is unlikely we will get down out of the pass before nightfall.”
She eyed him in alarm. “What does that mean?”
“It means spending the night in the mountains.”
Lana closed her eyes and heaved a sigh. “Why is this trip so jinxed?”
“I know no better than you,” Arash said, in a calm voice which had the effect of irrationally irritating her.
“I know you don’t know, Arash,” she told him levelly. “Haven’t you ever heard a rhetorical question before?”
His response was to eye her steadily for a moment and then say, as if she hadn’t spoken, “Which shall it be, Lana? Forward or back?”
She could hear the suppressed impatience that was almost always in his voice when he spoke to her, and of course this stupid situation was no easier for him than for her. However much she disliked Arash Durrani ibn Zahir al Khosravi, cousin and Cup Companion to Prince Kavian, she knew he returned the compliment with at least equal force.
She couldn’t imagine how he had been talked into being her escort to Central Barakat, any more than she could understand—now—why she had accepted the situation.
She had wanted, unofficially, to be the first to travel through these fabulous, awe-inspiring mountains on the newly-built Emerald Highway which her father’s money had made possible. And when Alinor—her best friend from university, now Princess of Parvan—had said that Kavian had a particular reason for wanting Arash to be her escort, had hinted that she would in this way be providing cover for a secret diplomatic mission, Lana just hadn’t known how to tell her friend that the thought of making the journey in Arash’s company would leach all the joy out of the adventure for her…
So now here she was, stuck in practically the most desolate mountains on the face of the earth with Arash al Khosravi, a man who got on her nerves at the best of times.
Who was still waiting for her to decide. “You’re here, too,” she told him. “What do you want to do?”
“Let us go on,” Arash said.
Arash shifted gears for another climb on the tortuous road that, with a small chunk of Jonathan Holding’s vast wealth, was being built through the mountain ranges of Shir and Noor to link Parvan with the Barakat Emirates.
He thought back to that moment when Kavi had asked him to accompany Lana Holding on her misguided pilgrimage on the still-unfinished road. Arash had never before pleaded with his prince for any favour, but he had been horrified by the request.
He had resisted in the strongest terms.
Kavi, I ask you not to ask this of me. I cannot be the one to take her through the mountains. Surely any of the others…
“As the most trusted of my Companions, Arash, you are the only one I can ask this favour,” Kavi had replied uncomfortably, and Arash had realized there was more to this request than he himself had been told. “We owe her everything. How can I entrust her safety to any other?”
He gazed at his prince for a long moment as certainty crept over him. “Who has requested this, Kavi?”
“I myself make the request,” Kavi said, but with a tone in his voice that belied the words. Arash opened his mouth to say that it would be worse than useless for him to make this trip, and then subsided into silence.
It was true. Kavi and the country owed Lana Holding everything. Kavi had two reasons now to bless the luck that had put him and Arash at university at the same time as Alinor, now his wife, and her friend Lana. Lana, who had turned out to be the daughter of the American billionaire Jonathan Holding, had fallen in love with Parvan, and had persuaded her father to aid the tiny kingdom in the aftermath of its savage and destructive war against the Kaljuk invaders. So this was a small sacrifice for Kavi to ask of his closest and most trusted Companion.
Between Kavi and Arash there could be no such thing as a command. Arash had not sworn to obey the Durrani, for such an oath could not be asked from one of his ancient line. But he had sworn his loyalty, and such a wish, expressed in such a way, was more powerful than a command.
On my head and eyes, Lord, he had said then, bowing formally in the most ancient of exchanges.
But he wished Kavi had laid any other mission on him.
The way Arash was pushing the truck, Lana wondered if he had changed his mind after all, and intended to get down out of the pass before they had to stop for the night.
“Mash’Allah,” she reminded herself, in the way that she had learned during her time in Parvan. Whatever God wills. In terrain like this it was easy to remember the maxim that, whatever man proposes, it is God who disposes.
He heard the murmur and glanced over.
“Pardon?”
“I was just thinking that we might still make it down out of the pass to where we originally planned to stop if you keep it up like this.”
Arash shook his head. He wished it were true. “It will be dangerous to drive after sunset.”
He meant that they could not afford to risk hitting another pothole in the darkness.
Lana glanced nervously at the sky. She had been trying for the past hour to tell herself that the thick heavy clouds were moving east and the area of clear sky was no smaller than before. But they were not moving east, and the amount of blue was definitely shrinking.
He followed her gaze, but said nothing.
They rounded a curve, and he braked sharply. A spread of stones and rocks and snow had come down off the side of the mountain to spew across the road. He bumped slowly over it.
At night, without benefit of a moon, they would almost certainly have hit it before he saw it. Suddenly Lana accepted that they really would have to spend the night up here.
“What if there’s a storm?” She tried to sound matter-of-fact, but she couldn’t hide the note of dismay in her voice.
Arash flicked her a glance.
“Is there any protection up here?” she pursued.
He shrugged. “It is as you see.”
She knew in a storm they should find cover. But here, in the remotest region of Parvan, landmine warnings were still posted prominently on both sides of the road. The snow-covered, uninhabited mountains, almost as much as the valleys, had been liberally strewn with butterfly mines by the Kaljuks in the last days of the war, before their retreat.
Anything might be a landmine in disguise—a comb, a toy, a leaf….
There were teams all over the country working hard on mine clearance: Lana knew all about it, since it was her own favourite project in Parvan.
She also knew that, except for the routes that were the nomads’ regular pathways between their summer and winter grounds, including this one where the road had been built, these bleak, difficult mountains were scheduled to be the last area cleared.
It made sense to clear the valleys, the towns, the farmlands and nomad trade routes first. But it meant that even if they saw a cave or overhang, she and Arash could not just climb up to take shelter. They were safe from mines only for a few yards either side of the road, and all that had been mostly levelled to make way for the road.
A gust of wind roared down the mountainside, shaking the truck as it bumped along, spattering sand and gravel against the windshield, making her shiver.
Storm and mountain—you couldn’t beat them for making a human being feel frail and insignificant.
“We can’t pitch the tent if there’s going to be a storm. We’ll have to sit it out in the truck,” she observed in a level voice.
There was silence. He did not deny it.
Lana felt the first real thrill of alarm. Sitting in a truck overnight while a storm raged with only Arash and a survival candle for company! It defied imagination. The man could barely bring himself to be civil to her at the easiest of times.
She eyed the clouds again.
“Is there going to be a lot of snow?”
It was a stupid question, which she knew as soon as she asked it. When the weather was unseasonable in the first place, who could guess? But it was just ordinary human nature to ask, Lana figured. It didn’t really mark her as ignorant, but by the glance Arash threw her, you’d think she was a specimen of a species that lacked basic reasoning capabilities.
Arash shrugged. “Two inches? Two feet?”
“Two feet?”
“It is impossible to guess.”
His voice was rough and flat, not sharing anything with her, and she had to breathe deeply to calm her irritation. She had only been making conversation to ease her nerves, and besides, he must know the ropes a lot better than she did. She’d never been up here before, but his family estates were in the Koh-i Shir mountains somewhere, so why shouldn’t she ask an expert?
But what was the point in defending herself?
They always did rub each other the wrong way. It was one of those inexplicable, unfounded antipathies. Each would have been happy never to see the other again, she thought, if only one of them would leave town.
But Parvan was Arash’s home, and he wasn’t going to emigrate. And, apart from this short break which Alinor had insisted on, Lana wasn’t going anywhere, at least until after Alinor’s baby was born. And then—well, she wasn’t ready yet to name a day when she would leave Parvan.
She had never met such brave, strong, true people as the citizens of Kavi’s little country of mountain and desert, and here—helping, with her father’s money, to put the war-torn country back together—she felt that she had found her reason for being.
“What is this, Lana, adopt-a-country?” her father had demanded in amused exasperation at yet another request for a contribution. In one of his weak moments she had convinced him to match, dollar for dollar, all the funds she raised elsewhere. “Don’t I already support most of the villages and roads and wells and schools? And that mountain highway—what are you calling it, the Emerald Road?—is sucking up cash like a vacuum cleaner! What else can there be?”
“Dad, face it—if you don’t spend your money on something like Parvan, what’ll you spend it on? Trying to buy power, that’s what. And then you won’t be a great guy anymore, you’ll be a monster, and everyone will hate you,” she had explained ruthlessly. “And I don’t want everyone in the world hating my dad.”
“I’m not trying to buy power at the moment, Lana,” he had told her. “I’m trying to endow a museum.”
The new museum was his baby, and it needed lots of funds, too. But he almost always came through for her. And sometimes their interests coincided, for many wealthy Parvani families were forced into selling their ancient treasures to finance the rebuilding of their lives.
At least Lana could always make sure the Holding Museum paid well.
Kavi and Alinor and all the people whose lives she touched—whose villages and homes and farms were rebuilt, much sooner than could otherwise have been possible, with her father’s generous donations and the money she raised with her fund-raising events—of course were grateful.
Only Arash stood outside the circle of her admirers. As a sheikh and tribal leader with a valley full of farms and villages to care for, he had not interfered when his people had received their share of the generosity. But as the man whose own estates and family home had suffered, he would accept nothing from her.
And although she was certain that his painful limp could be helped with surgery, he had virtually pretended not to hear her offer to finance a trip for surgery abroad.
She had never understood his reasons, and she no longer bothered to try.
She turned her head to run a look over his strong, uncompromising profile as he drove, his own attention firmly on the road. He was wearing a leather jacket and denim jeans and boots, but he looked no less a sheikh than when he was in full traditional dress.
“Will this thing drive if there’s that much snow?” she couldn’t help asking.
“There are too many unknowns to predict anything with certainty,” he said.
“So we might end up waiting for a helicopter rescue?” Her heart sank. And how long would that take? she wanted to ask, but she suppressed the desire. His answer would only be another irritating refusal to guess, and she was already gritting her teeth.
“I knew I should fly,” she muttered.
Arash lifted a disbelieving eyebrow. “And why didn’t you?”
“Well, you know the answer to that better than I do, Arash!”
“I know only that Kavi asked me to see you safely to Central Barakat and that you insisted on coming by road.”
She threw him a look. “I do know, Arash, that I’m providing cover for some secret mission to Prince Omar.”
Arash frowned at the road. “I am entrusted with no mission other than delivering you safely to my cousin Omar and Princess Jana in Central Barakat.”
Of course he wouldn’t tell her if he was. “So why was it so important that you and no one else accompany me?” she demanded sceptically.
There was a short silence.
“But this was your own choice,” he said in slight surprise.
Lana’s mouth gaped. “My choice? What, to have you along? Why would it be my choice?”
“Naturally I found your motive inexplicable.”
Lana turned to look at him, her eyes narrowed. “Did you really think that I had asked Kavi to force you to come with me? Kavi couldn’t have told you such a thing!”
He threw her a glance, shrugging. “It was one possible explanation for something inexplicable.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence!” she snapped. “What did you think my motive was, Arash, just as a matter of interest?”
The truck slowed as his eyes briefly but electrifyingly met hers.
“I thought your motive would be revealed in time. I didn’t trouble, therefore, to wonder.”
“Don’t hand me that!” she commanded irritably. “If you thought I engineered this, you must have had some ideas about why! What was my reason, Arash?”
She stared at him, her mind whirling, fury already bubbling up inside, and she thought how dangerous it would be to be stranded alone with Arash, of all men. She knew there was a well of resentment in her towards him…. There wasn’t another of Kavi’s Cup Companions she didn’t like, whom she wouldn’t rather have been with now.
“What reason could I possibly have for wanting to be alone with you up here in God’s country?”
He made no reply. After a minute, she opened her mouth on a slow, outraged breath.
“I don’t believe it!” Suddenly she could hardly get the words out for the rage that assailed her. When she spoke, her voice shook.
“What did you think, Arash? Did you think I maybe wanted to get you alone to make you an offer?”
She saw a muscle leap in his jaw and was sure she had hit home.
“What kind of an offer, exactly, were you envisaging? Just a brief affair, or was I going to go so far as to propose a mutually convenient marriage of wealth with an ancient title? Was that it?”
“It was not that I believed it. It was merely one possible explanation that crossed my mind.”
“You really have to be seen to be believed!”
He slowed the truck with a quick jab at the brakes and turned to her, a blaze of fury on his face.
“You deny that such a possibility has occurred to you?”
She stared at him, the words tumbling from her lips. “Yes, I deny that such a possibility has occurred to me! What gives you the right to speak to me like this?”
His eyes were dark with feeling, and a shiver ran all over her. What on earth could be coming now?
He lifted a hand from the steering wheel and his finger pointed at the end of her nose. His eyes flashed violet, and the fury in his voice now astonished her.
“What gives me the right? You give me the right, Lana. You with your quiet suggestion that I am for sale at public tender!”
