Alexandra Sellers - The Ice Maiden's Sheikh

More reporters were now surging around the car, forcing Latif to drive very slowly to avoid running them down. The questions continued nonstop, shouted through the windows at them, while rapid-fire flashes burst against the glass. Several little red eyes gazed hotly into the car, as if the cameras themselves took a fevered interest in the occupants.

“Damn, oh damn!” Jalia cried.

“Don’t give them an opening,” he advised flatly.

Jalia had to admire Latif’s cool. Although forced to drive at a speed of inches per hour, he gave no sign that he heard or saw the media people. She, meanwhile, found her temper rising as the reporters deliberately blocked their path, banging on the car as if somehow they might not have been noticed.

The fact that the air-conditioning hadn’t kicked in and the car was like an oven didn’t help her mood.

“Princess! Your Highness!” someone called, and she turned in dismay as another flash went off right in her face. How did they know? She had been so careful!

“Can you tell us why Noor ran?”

“Where did she go?”

“Was she escaping a forced marriage, Princess?”

Forced? Noor had been laughing all the way to the altar. Jalia couldn’t prevent a slight outraged shake of her head. Instantly someone leaped on this sign.

“The marriage was her own free choice? Are you surprised by the turn of events?”

But she had learned her lesson, and stared straight ahead. “Damn, damn, damn!” she muttered.

Latif put his foot down on both brake and gas, spinning the tires on the unpaved road. Immediately the car was enveloped in a cloud of dust that blinded the cameras.

Coughing, frantically waving their hands in front of their noses, the journalists backed away. Latif lifted his foot off the brake and, belching dust, the car spurted away.

For a moment they laughed together, like children who have escaped tyranny. Jalia flicked Latif a look of half-grudging admiration. She would have congratulated anyone else, but with Latif there was an ever-present constraint.

“I’ve been so careful to avoid being identified!” she wailed. “How did they know who I was?”

Unlike Noor, who had reacted with delight, Jalia had greeted the news that she was a princess of Bagestan with reticence, and was determined to avoid any public discovery of the fact. She hadn’t told even her close friends back home.

Who could have given her away, and why?

Latif’s dark gaze flicked her and she twitched in a kind of animal alarm. It was just the effect he had on her; there was no reason for it. But it annoyed her, every time.

“They just took an educated guess, probably. Your reaction gave you away.”

The truth of that was instantly obvious.

“Oh, damn it!” cried Jalia. “Why did I ever take off my veil?”

Laughter burst from his throat, a roar of amusement that made the windows ring. But it wasn’t friendly amusement, she knew. He was laughing at her.

“Does it matter so much—a photo in a few papers?”

Jalia shrugged irritably. “You’re a Cup Companion—the press attention is part of your job. And anyway, you’re one of twelve. I’m a university lecturer in a small city in Scotland, where princesses are not numbered in the dozens. I don’t want anyone at home to know.”

He slowed at the approach to the paved road and turned the car towards the city. Two journalists’ cars were now following them.

“Aren’t you exaggerating? You aren’t a member of the British royal family, after all. Just a small Middle Eastern state.”

“I hope you’re right.” She chewed her lip. “But the media in Europe have had an ongoing obsession with the royal family of the Barakat Emirates for the past five years—and it jumped to Bagestan like wildfire over a ditch the moment Ghasib’s dictatorship fell and Ashraf al Jawadi was crowned. If I’m outed as a princess of Bagestan, my privacy is—” Blowing a small raspberry she made a sign of cutting her throat.

“Only if you continue to live abroad,” he pointed out. “Why not come home?”

Jalia stiffened. “Because Bagestan is not ‘home’ to me,” she said coldly. “I am English, as you well know.”

The black gaze flicked her again, unreadable. “That can be overcome,” he offered, as if her Englishness were some kind of disability, and Jalia clenched her teeth. “You would soon fit in. There are many posts available in the universities here. Ash is working hard to—”

“I teach classical Arabic to English speakers, Latif,” Jalia reminded him dryly. “I don’t even speak Bagestani Arabic.”

She felt a sudden longing for the cool of an English autumn, rain against the windows, the smell of books and cheap carpet and coffee in her tiny university office, the easy, unemotional chatter of her colleagues.

“I am sure you know that educated Bagestani Arabic is close to the classical Quranic language. You would soon pick it up.” He showed his white teeth in a smile, and her stomach tightened. “The bazaar might take you a little longer.”

The big souk in Medinat al Bostan was a clamour on a busy day, and the clash between country and city dialects had over the years spontaneously produced the bazaar’s very own dialect, called by everyone shaerashouk—“bazaar poetry.”

Jalia looked at him steadily, refusing to share the joke. She had heard the argument from her mother too often to laugh now. And his motives were certainly suspect.

“And I’d be even more in the public eye, wouldn’t I?” she observed with a wide-eyed, you-don’t-fool-me-for-a-minute look.

“Here you would be one of many, and your activities would rarely come under the spotlight unless you wished it. The palace machine would protect you.”

“It would also dictate to me,” she said coolly. “No, thank you! I prefer independence and anonymity.”

He didn’t answer, but she saw his jaw clench with suppressed annoyance. For a moment she was on the brink of asking him why it should mean anything to him, but Jalia, too, suppressed the instinct. With Latif Abd al Razzaq, it was better to avoid the personal.

Silence fell between them. Latif concentrated on his driving. One of the press cars passed, a camera trained on them, and then roared off in a cloud of exhaust.

She couldn’t stop irritably turning the conversation over in her head. Why was he pushing her? What business was it of Latif Abd al Razzaq’s where she lived?

“Why are you carrying my mother’s banner?” she demanded after a short struggle. “From her it’s just about understandable. What’s your angle? Why do you care what I do with my life?”

In the silence that fell, Jalia watched a muscle leap in his jaw. She had the impression that he was struggling for words.

“Do you not care about this country?” he demanded at last, his voice harsh and grating on her. “Bagestan has suffered serious loss to its professional and academic class over the past thirty years—too many educated people fled abroad. If its citizens who were born abroad do not return… You are an al Jawadi by birth, granddaughter of the deposed Sultan. Do you not feel that the al Jawadi should show the way?”

Jalia felt a curious, indefinable sense of letdown.

“You’ve already convinced my parents to return,” she said coolly, for Latif’s efforts on their behalf, tracking down titles to her family’s expropriated property and tracing lost art treasures grabbed by Ghasib’s favourites, had been largely successful, paving the way for them to make the shift.

“And my younger sister is considering it. Why can’t you be satisfied with that?”

“Your parents are retirement age. Your sister is a schoolgirl.”

Jalia was now feeling the pressure. “Nice to have a captive audience!” she snapped. “Is this why you decided I should come with you on this wild-goose chase? You wanted to deliver a lecture? Do you enjoy preaching duty to people? You should have been a mullah, Latif! Maybe it’s not too late even now!”