Buch lesen: «A Cinderella For The Desert King»

CHAPTER ONE

ABBY FOSTER WAS HOT, her feet ached—part of the photo shoot had involved her walking up a sand hill in shorts and four-inch heels—and something had bitten her on the arm. The thick layer of make-up had disguised it but not stopped it throbbing and itching like hell.

All that was bad enough but what was really the icing on the cake was the fact that their transport had broken down. She’d been meant to be in the first four-wheel drive, the one she had travelled out of Aarifa city to their desert location in, but the stylist had pushed past her, bagging a seat next to the photographer’s assistant the girl had a crush on.

So, thanks to young love, Abby was now stranded in the middle of who knew where, trying without success to tune out the raised, angry voices outside. So far she had resisted the urge to add her own voice to the melee, but her clenched teeth were beginning to ache with the effort.

Leave well alone remained the best strategy, though, so along with Rob, who had reacted to being stranded in a desert by promptly taking the opportunity to grab a nap and falling asleep, she’d waited inside the broken-down vehicle.

It was a decision she was starting to rethink as the temperature inside the dark car rose and Rob, the person who had made her climb that damned sand dune ten times before he was satisfied he’d got the shot, began to snore.

Loudly!

Rolling her eyes, she pulled a bottle of water from the capacious tote bag she always carried with her. Despite the frequent-traveller miles she had clocked up since she’d embarked on her modelling career, Abby had never mastered the art of travelling light.

She had half-unscrewed the top before caution kicked in and she realised she may need to ration herself. Before he’d fallen asleep Rob had confidently claimed they would be rescued in a matter of minutes, but what if the photographer was being overly optimistic?

What if they were stuck here longer?

The internal debate didn’t last long. Her grandparents had raised her to always be cautious—pity they hadn’t displayed the same quality when it came to financial advice, considering they’d been swindled out of their life savings by a crooked financial advisor. But caution won out.

Gregory’s good-looking face, complete with that boyishly sincere smile, materialised in her head as she tightened the lid with a vicious turn and put the bottle back into her bag. Her jaw clenched, she fought her way through the familiar toxic mixture of guilt and self-contempt she experienced whenever she considered her own part in her grandparents’ situation. They put a brave face on it but she knew how unhappy they were.

It didn’t matter which way you looked at it, it was her fault Nana and Pops had lost their financial security.

If she hadn’t been fool enough to fall for Gregory’s sincere smile and the blue eyes that went with it, and if she hadn’t imagined herself in love and taken the sweet man of her dreams home to meet her grandparents, then they would still have the comfortable retirement they had worked so hard for to look forward to.

Instead they had nothing.

Her throat thickened with emotion, which she dismissed with a tiny impatient shake of her head. Tears, she reminded herself, weren’t going to fix anything; what she needed was a plan.

And she had one. At last.

A militant gleam lit her green eyes as her rounded chin lifted to a determined angle. By her calculations, if she took every single piece of work that came her way—barring those that wanted her to pose minus clothes, and there were quite a few—in another eighteen months she’d be able to buy back the retirement bungalow her grandparents had lost because of her conman boyfriend. She’d brought him into their lives, he’d got them all to trust him and then he had vanished with her grandparents’ life savings. In a vicious parting shot he’d emailed her a photo of him with another man, the pose they were in making the salt-in-the-wound footnote ‘You’re not really my type’ slightly redundant.

Gregory’s patience with her inexperience and his reassurance that he was prepared to wait because he respected her now made perfect sense.

Shutting out the humiliating memories before they took hold, Abby peeled off a wet wipe from a packet in the inner pocket of her bag. Eyes closed, she wiped her face and neck, removing the last of her make-up along with some of the dust and grime.

She was repeating the action while thinking longingly of a cool shower and a cold beer when one of the two men outside put his head into the cab. He fiddled with something beside the steering wheel before turning reproachfully to Abby.

‘You might have said something, Abby—we’ve been trying to open the damned engine for hours.’ He gave the lever he’d located a sharp tug and yelled to the man outside. ‘Got it, Jez!’

By her count it had actually only been ten minutes. ‘It felt more like days,’ she retorted, more bothered by the swelling bite on her arm than defending herself from this unfair criticism. Teeth gritted, she rolled up the sleeve of her blouse to take the pressure off the area, not that the shirt was actually hers—she was still wearing the outfit selected for today’s shoot, the shorts and shirt apparently meant to convince viewers that if a girl chose the new shampoo the company was unveiling with this campaign, they too could go from a casino table to trekking up sand dunes in the desert all while maintaining perfect, glowing hair. They might, but they’d also have blisters if they wore these wretched heels.

The developments through the fly-speckled window didn’t look good. The men had both stepped back hastily from the scalding steam that billowed out from the engine.

And then they both started shouting again.

She nudged Rob’s foot with her own—luckily for him she had swapped the spiky heels for canvas pumps.

‘We should go out and see if we can help.’

Or at least stop them killing one another, she thought as she grabbed a scarf from her bag and pulled the strands of sweat-damp hair back from her face, securing the flaming waves at her nape in a ponytail that was neither smooth nor elegant.

As she got to her feet, head down to avoid banging it on the door frame, Rob opened one eye, nodded, then closed it again and began to quietly snore.

Cool was the wrong word, but at least the temperature outside was marginally less oppressive than that inside the car.

‘So, what’s the verdict, guys?’ she asked, adopting a cheerful tone.

Her attitude did not rub off on the two men.

On the occasions she had worked with the lighting technician previously, Jez had always had a joke up his sleeve to lighten tense situations, but his sense of humour had clearly deserted him today. Frowning heavily, he stepped away from the inner workings of the steaming engine, his face glistening with sweat as he dropped the bonnet back into place.

‘It won’t go and, before anyone asks, I haven’t got a clue what’s wrong or how to fix it. If anyone else feels the urge...be my guest.’ The thickset technician tossed a challenging look in the direction of the younger man but the intern’s aggression had drained away and he was standing biting his nails, suddenly looking very young and very scared.

‘No need to worry, Jez. I’m sure once they realise they’ve left us behind they’ll come back to look for us,’ Abby said, determined to look on the bright side, despite the fact that the sun was quickly setting and darkness was starting to steal across the desert around them.

‘We shouldn’t have stopped,’ the younger man muttered under his breath as he kicked a tyre.

The older man nodded his agreement. ‘What’s he doing?’ He nodded towards the vehicle where the self-acknowledged photographic genius lay sleeping, exhausted, presumably by the effort of taking several dozen shots of an unusually shaped rock with a lizard sitting on it. By the time he had been satisfied with the result, the two lead vehicles in their small convoy had vanished back towards the city they’d come from earlier in the day.

‘He’s asleep.’

Abby’s announcement was greeted with astonished looks and a cry in unison. ‘Un-bloody-believable!’

The two men looked at one another and laughed, their mutual disgust for Rob draining some of the hostility out of the situation. The smiles didn’t last long though.

‘Anyone got a phone signal?’

Abby shook her head. ‘Well, what’s the worst that could happen?’

‘We die a slow and painful death from thirst?’ Rob’s voice suddenly cut in as he made a graceful and yawn-filled ascent from the vehicle.

Abby threw him a look. ‘Seriously, what is the worst that can happen? At least we’ll have a story to tell over dinner when we get home.’

‘Guys.’

They all turned to look at Jez, who grinned broadly as he stabbed a finger towards plumes of dust in the distance. ‘They’ve come back for us!’

Abby sighed and wiped the moisture from her forehead. ‘Thank God!’ She frowned at the sound coming from the direction of the fast-approaching vehicles. ‘What was that?’

The young man shook his head, looking as puzzled as Abby felt. The two older men exchanged sharp glances, Rob turning to her. ‘Maybe you should get back inside, Abby, love.’

‘But—’ This time the sharp cracking noises were louder and Abby felt her initial relief at being found slip away, replaced by the first flurries of fear as she stared at the approaching dust cloud. ‘Was that gunfire?’ she whispered.

‘We’re fine,’ Jez said, shading his eyes. ‘We’re in Aarifa... It’s safe as houses. Everyone knows that.’ Another volley of gunfire cut across his words. He glanced at Abby. ‘Maybe just to be on the safe side you should go inside and keep your head down...?’

* * *

The pure-bred Arab horse picked his sure-footed way through a darkness that was profound, a thick, velvety blackness against which the flowing white robe of his rider stood out.

Rider and animal, at full gallop, moved in harmony across the sand, slowing only when they reached the first rocky outcrop. At a distance, the column of rock seemed to rise vertically from the ground, but in reality the spiralling path to the summit, though not one recommended to someone without a head for heights, was a series of shorter ascents punctuated by relatively flat sections.

The highly bred horse was panting by the time they crested the summit and paused, the animal drawing air through flared nostrils, the rider waiting for the usual sense of peace this spot gave him.

Not tonight though.

Tonight, even the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama—incredible any time of day but especially magnificent at night, set against the backdrop of a velvet sky sprinkled with stars—failed to penetrate or lift Zain Al Seif’s black mood. The most he could claim was the relaxing of a little of the tension in his muscles as he drank in the view, the illuminated ancient walls of the palace with its towers and spires making it visible for miles around. Tonight, however, there were more lights than usual, lights that spread into the old town, built within the shadow of the citadel walls and extended beyond into a geometric pattern created by the brightly illuminated tree-lined boulevards of the modern city with its tall, glass-fronted buildings.

There were a lot more lights tonight because today the city...the whole country, in fact...was celebrating. There had been a wedding. A royal wedding.

And the world loved a royal wedding, Zain reflected, his sensually sculpted lips twitching into a cynical curve. On this occasion, the world minus one.

He couldn’t escape it even here.

The horse responded to Zain’s tight-lipped curse with a snort that was loud in the stillness. His mount, picking up on his own mood, began to paw the ground and dance around in circles that would have sent a less experienced rider catapulting over his head.

‘Sorry, boy...’ Zain soothed, patting the spooked animal’s neck, an action that sent out a puff of the red dust that clung to everything in this desert. He waited for his horse to calm down before dismounting, an action he performed in one supple, well-practised action, his boots making no sound as he landed lightly on the uneven stone surface.

Releasing the reins, he took two steps forward and stood on the edge, not noticing the dizzying drop into blackness as his deep-set electric-blue eyes were drawn to the city’s lights. As he stared the faint smile that had curved his lips disappeared, those same lips flattening into a grim line. His dark, angled brows drew together in a parallel line above his hawkish, narrow nose as he embraced a fresh surge of self-contempt.

He deserved to feel like a fool, because he had been a fool. A complacent bloody fool.

Yes, he’d had a lucky escape but that was the problem—he’d needed luck. He prided himself on being such a great judge of people but the beautiful bride being toasted by an entire country and assorted foreign dignitaries had totally fooled him with her act. The only positive he could see in the situation was that his heart had not been involved. His pride, however, was another matter and it had taken a serious hit.

Of course, now Zain could see the clues, but during the pleasurable six-month affair he had remained oblivious even when he had crossed his own self-imposed very clear line; the progress towards it had been so insidious he hadn’t heard the alarm bells when he had started thinking of what they shared as a relationship... Who knew where that could have led?

Luckily, he never had to find out, because Kayla had got tired of playing the waiting game and when she received a better offer she took it. Zain, still under the illusion they were playing by his rules, had never for a moment suspected that lovely...lovely, poisonous Kayla had been playing him.

She had turned up at his apartment in Paris earlier than expected after her trip home to Aarifa to see her family. He’d been pleased enough to rearrange his schedule so they could spend the afternoon in bed. Afterwards, as he lay in bed, his attention was divided between the laptop propped on his knees and Kayla, who had dressed before taking a seat in front of the mirror and beginning to repair her make-up.

‘You really don’t need that,’ he’d said offhandedly.

They had been enjoying a discreet affair for six months and he had never seen her without her make-up. On the admittedly few occasions they had spent the night together she always vanished to the bathroom before he woke, emerging looking flawless, a silent signal there would be no repeat performance that morning as she didn’t want her hair mussed or her lipstick smudged.

She had turned to him at his words, lipstick in hand and a hardness in her smile he had not seen before. ‘Sweet of you to say but,’ she paused and applied a second layer of red to her lips before standing up and strolling back to the bed, ‘although I was prepared to pretend to like art and opera and even be interested in supremely boring politics for you, I’ve never been prepared to settle for the fresh-faced look you seem to like in your women.’

The shrillness in her laugh had made him wince, so unlike her usual placating style designed to stroke his ego.

‘No-strings-attached sex...did you really believe that was all I wanted? Do you really think we met by accident, that I took that awful pittance-paying art-gallery job because I want a career? Oh, well, at least it wasn’t a complete loss. I certainly never had to pretend with you when we were in bed...’ The concession emerged on a deep sigh. ‘You know, I’m really going to miss this.’

Zain, still processing the contents of her confession, had not yet reacted as she sat down on the edge of the bed and trailed a red fingernail down his bare, hair-roughened chest, but his lips curled in distaste now at the memory.

‘I thought I owed you...’ she paused ‘...well, nothing actually, but I figured one more time, for old times’ sake, wouldn’t hurt. My family are formally announcing my engagement to your brother next weekend, so I’m afraid, darling, we won’t be able to do this for a while. Don’t look so shocked! It is kind of your fault. All I ask is that you try and look a teeny bit heartbroken at the wedding. It would make your brother’s day.’

Now, alone in the desert, Zain felt his lips curl into a thin-lipped smile. He might not have inherited his father’s physical characteristics but it seemed that he had inherited a genetic predisposition to be blind to women’s faults. Then the smile vanished as he scanned the moon-silvered landscape and pushed away the self-contempt.

Acknowledging a weakness meant you could guard against it.

His father had lived the last fifteen years of his life consumed by a combination of self-pity and pathetic hope, not accepting the reality of a situation. It had been the man’s downfall.

It would not be Zain’s.

He stared out into the darkness as the scene in his head continued to replay with relentless accuracy.

‘Of course, I’d prefer to marry you, darling, but you never did ask, did you?’ Kayla had reproached with a pout, the truth of her anger showing for the first time. ‘And I put so much effort into being perfect for you. Still, once things have settled we can pick up where we left off in bed, at least, so long as we’re discreet. And that’s the beauty of it all—Khalid isn’t...well, let’s just say he’s in no position to object, as I have enough dirt on him to...’

Zain abruptly closed down the conversation playing in his head.

People wrote bucket lists of things they wanted to do before they died. At nine, practical Zain had penned a list of things he would never do while he lived. Over the years, some had fallen by the wayside—he’d actually grown quite fond of green vegetables, and kissing girls had proved less awful than he’d thought—but others he had rigidly stuck to. The primary one being that he would never allow himself to fall in love or get married—he was determined never to repeat the mistakes his father had made.

Marriage and love had not only broken his proud father as a man but also had threatened the stability of the country he ruled and the people he owed a duty to. Watching the process as a youngster, Zain had been helpless to do anything, the love and respect he once felt for his father turning to anger and shame.

The situation could have had more serious consequences—not that his father would have cared—had the sheikh not been surrounded by a circle of courtiers and advisors loyal to him. Somehow, they had shielded him and managed to maintain the illusion of the strong, wise ruler for the people.

Zain had not been shielded.

He shook his head, aware that he was indulging in a pastime that he would have been the first to condemn in others, and he didn’t tolerate those who lived in the past.

A movement in the periphery of his vision interrupted his stream of thought.

Head inclined in a listening attitude, Zain turned his head and stared hard through the dark towards where the invisible border between Aarifa and their neighbour Nezen lay.

He was on the point of turning away, deciding he’d imagined it, when suddenly it was there again...a flash of light that could be a flashlight, or possibly headlights. The light was accompanied this time by a distant sound that drifted across the moonlit emptiness... It sounded like voices shouting.

This time, lights stayed on. Definitely headlights.

He sighed, feeling little enthusiasm for rescuing what would inevitably turn out to be some damn idiot tourist—they averaged about ten a month—with no respect for the elemental environment. Zain loved the desert but he also had a healthy respect for the dangers it presented.

He sometimes wondered if the deep emotional connection he felt with the land of his birth was made stronger by the fact that, growing up an interloper, he’d had to prove his right to belong.

Things had changed, though sometimes an overheard comment or knowing glance would make him wonder just how much.

Admittedly, no one called him names these days, no gangs egged on by his brother threw stones, excluded him or simply beat him up, but scratch the surface and the prejudices were still there. His existence continued to be an insult to many in the country, especially those members of the leading Aarifan families.

He was more of an annoyance than his mother, who at least was living on another continent. It would have been easier in many ways if he had been a bastard, but his parents had married, not letting a little thing like his father’s already having a wife and an heir get in the way of true love.

Love...!

A growing noise of distaste vibrated in his throat as, with a creak of leather, he heaved himself back into the saddle and turned the horse. That word again. In his mind it was hard to be sane and celebrate something that people over the centuries used to justify...well, pretty much anything from bad choices to full-scale war!

Love really was the ultimate in selfishness.

He didn’t have to look much farther than his own parents to see its destructive power—there was no doubt of his father’s enduring love for his mother, but it was as if their love story had been perfectly designed to increase tabloid turnover.

The sheikh of a wealthy middle-eastern state—married to a wife who had already given him an heir—had fallen for the tempestuous Italian superstar of the opera world, a diva in every sense of the word... Zain’s mother.

Despite its progressive reputation, setting aside a wife was not unheard of in Aarifa—in fact, there were circumstances, even in these more enlightened times, when it would be positively encouraged, and even by the discarded bride’s family if brought on by the need for a male heir, especially when that heir would one day be the country’s ruler.

But Zain’s father had already had an heir and the wife whom he dishonoured by setting her aside came from one of the most powerful families in the country. The humiliation of the sheikh’s betrayal of the family with impeccable lineage was compounded by the unsuitability of the bride Sheikh Aban al Seif took in her stead, and the fact that the unsuitable bride had won over all her critics with her charm and smiles.

A nation had loved her and then fell dramatically out of love with her when she had walked away from her husband and eight-year-old son to resume her career.

The irony was that her humiliated, proud husband, the leader who had never dodged making tough decisions, the man known for his strength and determination, had not fallen out of love despite her betrayal. He’d have taken her back in a heartbeat and both his sons knew this, which perhaps accounted for the fact that they had never been what anyone could term close.

And in many ways, just like their father, Khalid was stuck in the past. His eyes still shone with pure malice when he looked at the half-brother whom he still held responsible for every bad thing that had happened to him and his mother. He still wanted whatever Zain had, be it success, accolades or, now, the woman on his arm. Ultimately it was about depriving not possessing and, once he had whatever it was he coveted from Zain, Khalid usually lost interest.

Would he lose interest in Kayla now he had her?

Zain shrugged to himself in the darkness. It was no longer his concern.