The Sultan's Choice

ight.

Overcome with an emotion she didn’t want to analyse, and feeling terribly vulnerable, Samia scrambled inelegantly out of her seat. She felt permanently inelegant next to this man. Muttering something about being tired, she escaped to the back of the cabin, where she’d been shown a bedroom earlier, and firmly closed the door behind her. They’d be landing soon, but Samia curled up on the bed anyway and tried to block out the taunting and gorgeous face of Sadiq in her mind’s eye. She wondered how on earth she’d ever been deluded enough to think he might be vulnerable.

Sadiq flung down his phone and glared out of the small oval window of the plane. All he could see were clouds upon clouds—and Samia’s face, with those big wounded aquamarine eyes shimmering more blue than green against the pale skin of her face. He had already come to notice how her eyes went dark blue when she was emotional.

She’d looked close to tears just then, but he couldn’t fathom what he’d said to upset her. His mouth twisted wryly. Apart from asking her to marry him. He hadn’t had such a comprehensive attack on his ego ever … and he had to acknowledge at the same time that it wasn’t altogether unwelcome. Being surrounded by yes people and sycophants became wearing after a while.

He thought back to what he’d said, and still couldn’t see that he’d said anything untoward. Of course he hadn’t expected her to be pure and untainted. He was a modern man and a modern ruler. Why would he behave one way himself and expect his wife to have lived like a nun? The important thing was that, whatever Samia had been doing, he’d seen no evidence of it.

He gritted his jaw against the pervasive memory that threatened to burst free when he thought of the words pure and untainted. A woman had said those words to him with a scathing voice a long time ago.

Analia Medena-Gonzalez. A stunningly beautiful socialite from Europe who had come to visit Al-Omar with her ambassador father when Sadiq had been eighteen. He’d been no innocent youth then, but he hadn’t exactly been experienced either.

Analia, who was ten years his senior, had seduced him and reduced him to putty in her hands, enslaving him with the power of her sensuality and sexuality. And Sadiq, like the young fool he’d been, had believed himself in love with her.

She’d stood in front of him the day she was leaving and looked at him as if he’d just crawled out from under a rock. ‘You love me? Sadiq, darling, you don’t love me. You are in lust with me, that’s all.’

Sadiq could remember biting back the words trembling on his lips to contradict her. Even then some self-preserving instinct had kicked in—much to his everlasting gratitude.

She’d looked him up and down with those exotic green eyes and sighed. ‘Darling, I’m twenty-eight and looking for my second husband. You’re still a boy. The sooner you learn to harden your heart and not fall for every woman you sleep with, the better it will be for you. I know the kind of women you’ll meet. They will all want your body, yes, but they will also want you because you’re powerful and rich. Two of the greatest aphrodisiacs.’

She’d come close then, and all but whispered into his ear, ‘Believe me, Sadiq, they won’t care about the man you really are—just as I don’t really care. That’s why you have a mother. One day you’ll choose some pure and untainted local girl to be your wife, and you’ll live happily ever after.’

The banal cruelty of those words hadn’t had the power to shock or hurt Sadiq for a long, long time. He’d learnt a valuable lesson, and her prophecy had turned out to be largely true.

Once he’d become Sultan on his father’s death, at the age of nineteen, he’d been catapulted to another stratosphere. For almost a year Sadiq hadn’t even taken a lover, too intent on taking control of a wildly corrupted and chaotic country. But once he’d re-emerged into society women had surrounded him in droves.

He’d quickly become an expert at picking the ones who knew how he wanted to play the game. No emotional entanglement, no strings. He’d become used to seeing the glazed, avaricious glitter in their eyes when they saw the extent of his inestimable wealth and on some perverse level it had comforted him—because he never again wanted to be standing in front of a woman laying himself bare to her pity and ridicule.

He’d actually met Analia once or twice over the years, and once had even seduced her again, as if to purge the effect of that day from his mind and heart for ever. He’d looked at her as she’d dressed the next morning and hadn’t felt a thing. Not a twinge of emotion. It had been a small moment of personal triumph.

Seeing the way his father had been so pathologically enraged because his wife didn’t love him should have been enough of a lesson to Sadiq, but it hadn’t. He wasn’t about to forget either of those valuable lessons now, just because the woman he’d chosen to marry was singularly unimpressed with everything he put before her, wore her vulnerability on her sleeve and made him feel unaccountably protective.

Samia was facing another velvet drape in another exclusive shop about three hours later—albeit this time in a secluded side street in Paris, the centre of world fashion. She’d woken just before the air stewardess had come to tell her they were about to land, and Sadiq had largely ignored her on the journey into Paris. She fiddled for a moment with the chiffon overlay of the dress, and then the much friendlier French stylist appeared at her side and tugged her through the drape. ‘Come on, chérie. We have a lot of outfits to get through.’

Samia closed her eyes for a split second and held her breath, the bright light blinding her for a moment so she couldn’t see the initial expression on Sadiq’s face. He was standing near the window and he lowered the ever-present smart phone from his ear.

Samia desperately felt like fidgeting in the long dress, but the stylist was already fussing around her, tweaking and pulling. Resolutely refusing to be intimidated this time, she hitched up her chin and looked straight at Sadiq—but his gaze was somewhere around her breasts. Samia’s jaw clenched; he was looking for them, no doubt. Although she had to admit that even she’d been surprised at how voluptuous the dress made them look.

The sylist had chided her that she’d been wearing the wrong size bra for years and had quoted a size of 32C, which had had Samia protesting vociferously that she must be wrong. Until she’d given her a bra to try and it had fitted like a second skin.

Sadiq’s gaze finally ascended and his face was completely expressionless. Samia thought she saw a flare of something in those blue depths, but put it down to the light and cursed the traitorous jump in her pulse.

‘Much better.’ His voice was cool. ‘This is more like it. Well done, Simone. Keep going.’

And then Samia was whisked away, back into the dressing room, and pushed and pulled and contorted into a dizzying array of outfits. Evening wear, daywear, casual wear, beachwear. She soon affected her own uninterest as she was paraded in front of Sadiq for the umpteenth time. And then they were finished. When she went back outside Sadiq was gone, and she felt an ominous lurch where her heart was.

She whirled around when the petite Frenchwoman appeared holding out her coat. ‘Um … do you know where …?’

Simone smiled and said cheerily, in her gorgeous accent, ‘Your fiancé is trusting my judgement for the rest of the day. You don’t really want him to see your wedding outfits before the wedding, do you? And also …’ She linked her arm with Samia who felt extremely uncomfortable—never having been a girly girl. ‘I think when he sees you in your new underwear it should be a nice surprise, non?’

For the next few hours, until dusk fell over Paris, Samia endured the humiliation of having an army of women parade around her, poking and prodding, and of climbing in and out of underwear so indecently flimsy that she had no earthly intention of ever wearing it for herself, never mind for someone else!

She’d been measured for her main wedding dress, which she would wear on the final day of the celebrations—the most westernised part of the wedding. The rest of the fitting for that would take place the next day, as well as her spending a few hours in a beauty salon. In a couple of weeks the dress would be brought to London for a final fitting and last adjustments before they left for Al-Omar.

So apparently they were staying in Paris for the night. An ominous fluttering started up in Samia’s belly.

Simone escorted her out to the car that had been ferrying them around all afternoon and bade her goodnight, telling her that all of the clothes would be delivered to London and then on to Al-Omar. She pressed a small luxury holdall into Samia’s hands and winked. ‘You might need this tonight.’