The Sultan's Choice

It was a beautiful room, with blue and green wallpaper and sumptuous divans piled high with cushions. A window opened out onto a small private terrace and B’harani glittered in the distance. But the thing that Samia noticed most was in the centre of the room, in pride of place.

She let go of Sadiq’s hand. She could feel his tension as she walked towards the piano, running her hand reverently over the bittersweetly familiar lines. With silent tears running down her face she turned back to Sadiq. ‘My mother’s piano. You brought it here.’

He nodded. ‘I arranged with your brother to have it sent here the night after you told me what had happened to you.’ He looked disarmingly unsure of himself. ‘I wanted to do something … But if you don’t want it …’

Samia shook her head, and the last piece of the wall fell apart. She walked back to Sadiq and stretched up to take his face in her hands to kiss him. She felt his relief, and exulted in the brief moment of insecurity he’d shown.

When she could stop kissing him she pulled back and said, ‘How long has it been here?’

Sadiq smiled ruefully. ‘About two weeks. But every time I thought I’d tell you I came up with an excuse, because I knew damn well that the minute you saw it you’d know exactly how I felt …’

Samia kissed him again, her heart singing. ‘You’re an idiot, but I love you.’

Sadiq started to pull her from the room and Samia looked back at the piano wistfully. Sadiq said fondly, ‘You can come back. But I want to take you to one more place.’

Samia was floating on a cloud of bliss. She would have gone anywhere on the earth with Sadiq, and she followed him obediently to his Jeep, then a helicopter. Her heart started to pound when she saw the familiar lines of the castle at Nazirat. But they were flying over the castle, and when Samia saw where they were landing something dark pierced her haze of happiness.

If there was one place on the earth she could have avoided, it would have been the bedouin tent.

Sadiq picked up on her tension and took her hand as they got out of the helicopter. He took her face in his hands once it had lifted away into the skies again, leaving them utterly alone.

‘Just trust me, okay?’

Samia nodded and bit her lip. It was almost excruciating to remember that night, and the thought that he’d been here with all those other women.

The sun was setting and painting everything a gorgeous burnished gold as she followed Sadiq into the tent again. She gasped with shock when she saw that it had been completely redecorated. Nothing remained from that night.

He pulled her around in front of him and said carefully, ‘Samia, I’ve never brought any other woman here. Only you. This tent didn’t exist until I had it built for us when we were in the castle. But that night.’ He shook his head in disgust at himself. ‘I think that was the start of it. I’d brought you here and suddenly you were questioning me. I couldn’t believe how transparent I’d been.’

Joy was infusing every cell of Samia’s body. She smiled. ‘I thought I had to let you know straight away that I wasn’t seeing it as a romantic gesture, but all I wanted was to believe that you’d done this for me.’

Sadiq pulled her close, where she could feel how badly he wanted her, and the last few nights of sleeplessness and aching and wanting rose up within Samia like a forest fire. Much like the last time, but in completely different circumstances, they were on the bed, making love with an intensity that made Samia cry out over and over again.

Much later, when their bodies were just a tangle of limbs, dark against pale, Sadiq was trailing Samia’s hair through his hand and he said quietly, ‘Now I know why I was so freaked out when I saw Nadim and Salman get married.’

Samia lifted her heavy head and came up on one elbow to look at her husband. ‘What do you mean?’

Sadiq brushed her hair back over her shoulder, and the tender look on his face and in his eyes made Samia feel extraordinarily blessed. She caught his injured hand and kissed it.

‘Because I knew that I was terrified of being as emotionally exposed as they were in those moments. And then you came along, and any hope of protecting myself from a similar fate flew out the window.’

Samia grumbled good-naturedly, ‘You took long enough to come around to the idea …’

Sadiq flipped up to hover over her, covering her sensitised breasts with his chest, making her squirm against him deliciously. He smiled. ‘And I’m going to spend our lifetimes paying you back for taking so long to recognise what was in my own heart. It’ll be a long and slow and infinite process …’

Samia wound her arms around his neck and arched even closer, exulting in his rapidly recovering arousal. ‘I like the sound of long and slow, Sultan … so what are you waiting for?’