Susan Mallery: The Sheik and the Runaway Princess

The horse stumbled on a loose rock. There was no warning. For Sabrina, the blackness of her world shifted and the sensation of falling nearly became a reality. She gasped and tried to grab on to something, but there was only openness in front of her.

“It’s all right,” Kardal soothed from behind her. He moved his arm so that it clasped her around the waist, pulling her more tightly against him. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She wanted to take comfort in his words, but she knew the real purpose behind them. “Your concern isn’t about me,” she grumbled. “You don’t want anything to happen to your prize.”

He laughed softly. “Exactly, my desert bird. I refuse to let you fly away, nor will I allow you to be injured. You are to stay just as you are until I can claim my rightful reward.”

She didn’t like the sound of that. No doubt he believed everything he read in the papers about her, so he thought he knew her.

“You’re wrong about me,” she said a few minutes later, when the horse was once again steady and her heartbeat had returned to normal.

“I am rarely wrong.”

That comment made her roll her eyes, although with her wearing a blindfold he couldn’t tell.

“I know you are not a dutiful daughter,” he murmured in her ear. “You live a wild life in the west. But that is no surprise. You are your mother’s daughter, not a woman of Bahania.”

She told herself that he was a barbarian and his opinion didn’t matter. Unfortunately those words didn’t stop the sting of tears or the lump in her throat. She hated that people judged her based on a few reports in newspapers or magazines. It had happened to her all her life. Very few people took the time to find out the truth.

“Did it ever occur to you that sometimes the media gets it wrong?” she asked.

“Sometimes, but not in your case. You have lived most of your years in Los Angeles. Picking up that lifestyle was inevitable. Had your father kept you here, you might have learned our ways, but that was not to be.”

She didn’t know which charge to answer first. “You’re making it sound as if my father letting me go was my fault,” she told him. “I was four years old. I didn’t have any say in the decision. And just in case you forgot, Bahanian law forbids a royal child being raised in another country, yet my father let my mother take me away. He didn’t even try to stop her.”

She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. All her life she’d had to live with the knowledge that her father hadn’t cared enough about her to keep her around. She didn’t doubt that if she’d been a son, he would have refused to let her go. But she was merely a daughter. His only daughter, but that was obviously not significant to him.

She felt her frustration growing. It wasn’t fair. It had never been fair and it was never going to be fair in the future. One day she would figure that out. Maybe on the same day she would cease caring what people thought about her. Maybe then she would be mature enough not to worry when they formed opinions and judged her before even meeting her. Unfortunately that day wasn’t today and she hated that Kardal’s low opinion stung more so than usual.

“You can say what you want,” she told Kardal. “You can have your opinions and your theories, but no one knows the truth except me.”

“I will admit that much is true,” he said, his deep voice drifting around her and making her wonder what he was thinking.

“Relax now,” he continued. “We will travel for much of the day. Try to rest. You didn’t sleep much last night.”

She started to ask how he knew, then remembered they had been tied together. Although she’d fallen asleep right away, she’d awakened several times, tossing and turning until she could doze off again. No doubt she’d kept him awake as well. What with being kidnapped, blindfolded and left with her wrists tied, Sabrina wasn’t sure she was even sorry.

She drew in a deep breath and tried to relax. When the tension in her body began to ease, she allowed her mind to drift. What would it be like to be someone as in charge of his world as Kardal? He was a man of the desert. He would answer to no one. She’d always been at the beck and call of her parents. They were forever sending her back and forth, as if neither really wanted her around.

“Do you really live in the City of Thieves?” she asked sleepily.

“Yes, Sabrina.”

She liked the sound of her name on his lips. Despite her predicament, she smiled. “All your life?” she asked.

“Yes. All my life. I went away to school for a few years, but I have always returned to the desert. This is where I belong.”

He spoke with a confidence she envied. “I’ve never belonged anywhere. When I’m in California, my mother acts like I’m in the way all the time. It’s better now that I’m older, but when I was young, she would complain about how she wasn’t free to come and go as she wanted. Which wasn’t true because she just left me with her maid. And in Bahania…” She sighed. “Well, my father doesn’t like me very much. He thinks I’m like her, which I’m not.”

She shifted to get more comfortable. “People don’t appreciate the little things in their lives that show they belong. If I had them, I would appreciate them.”

“Perhaps for ten minutes,” Kardal said. “Then you would grow weary of the constraints. You are spoiled, my desert bird. Admit it.”

Her sleepiness vanished and she sat up straight. “I am not. You don’t know me well enough to be making that kind of judgment. Sure, it’s easy to read a few things and listen to rumors and decide, but it’s very different to have lived my life.”

“I think you would argue with me about the color of the sky.”

“Not if I could see it.”

“However you talk around me,” he said, “I’m not removing the blindfold.”

“Your attitude needs adjusting.”

He laughed. “Perhaps, but not by you. As my slave, you will be busy with other things.”

She shivered. Did the man really intend to keep her as his personal slave? Was that possible? “You’re kidding, right? This is all a joke. You think I need a lesson and you’re going to be the one to teach it to me.”

“You’ll have to wait and see. However, don’t be too surprised when you find out I have no intention of letting you go.”

She couldn’t get her mind around the idea. It was crazy. This wasn’t fourteenth-century Bahania. They were living in the modern world. Men didn’t keep slaves. Or maybe in the wilds of the desert, they did.

She swallowed hard. “What, ah, exactly would you want me to do?”

He was silent for several heartbeats, then she felt him lean toward her. His breath tickled her ear as he whispered, “It’s a surprise.”

“I doubt it will be a very good one,” she murmured dryly.

Sounds awakened her. Sabrina jerked into consciousness, not aware that she’d been asleep. For a second she panicked because she couldn’t see, but then she remembered she was both bound and blindfolded.

“Where are we?” she asked, feeling more afraid than she had before. There were too many noises. Bits of conversation, yells, grunts, bleats. Bleats?

She listened more closely and realized she heard the sounds of goats bleating and the bells worn by cattle. There were rooster calls, clinks of money, not to mention dozens of conversations occurring at the same time. The fragrance of cooking meat competed with the desert animals and the perfumed oils for sale.

“A marketplace?” she asked. Her stomach lurched. “Are you going to sell me?”

A coldness swept over her. Until this moment, she hadn’t really thought through her situation. Yes, she’d been Kardal’s prisoner, but he’d treated her well and she hadn’t felt more than inconvenienced. Suddenly things were different. She was truly his captive and at his mercy. If he decided to sell her, she couldn’t do anything to stop him. No one would listen to the protests of a mere woman.