Alexandra Sellers - The Ice Maiden's Sheikh

Jalia sat up with a jerk. A chasm seemed to be opening up before her, and without having any idea what it represented, she knew it was dangerous.

“What are you talking about?” she said mockingly.

The car stopped at a traffic light on the outskirts of Medinat al Bostan. Below them, in the magnificent tapestry that was the city, sunlight gleamed from the golden dome and minarets of the great Shah Jawad mosque and glittered on the sea. It was a heart-stopping sight, she couldn’t deny that. Talk about your dreaming spires!

Latif turned and gazed at her for an unnerving few seconds.

“You know what I am talking about,” he accused through his teeth.

She didn’t, if he meant from personal experience. No man had ever reduced her to adoration on sheer sexual expertise alone, and what he said was just so much masculine arrogance!

“So sex is a crucible in which to melt your wife’s independence?”

“Her independence? No. Her dissatisfaction.”

“And how many wives are you keeping happy?” she asked sweetly.

“You know that I am not married.”

“But when you are, your wife will love you? Oooh, I almost envy her!” she twittered, while a kind of nervous fear zinged up and down her back and she knew that the last woman in the world she’d envy would be Latif Abd al Razzaq’s wife. “I don’t think!”

His eyes burned her.

“So what is the secret of eternal wedded bliss?” Jalia pressed, against the small, wise voice that was advising her to back off.

His jaw tightened at her tone, and he turned with such a look she suddenly found herself breathing through her mouth.

“Do you wish me to show you such secrets in the open road?” he asked, and she was half convinced that if she said yes he would stop the car where it was and reach for her….

“Not me!” she denied hastily, and a smile, or some other emotion, twisted the corner of his mouth. “But if you look around—well, it can’t be well-known, or there’d be more happy marriages, wouldn’t there? I can’t help feeling you could make your fortune marketing this secret.”

She was getting under his skin, she could see that, and she pressed her lips together to keep from grinning her triumph at him.

He looked at her again, a narrow, dangerous look, and Jalia’s eyes seemed to stretch as she watched him. “In the West, perhaps. But I think even a How To book would not help your fiancé.”

“I—what—?” Jalia babbled furiously.

Latif moved his hand from the wheel to where her hand lay on the armrest between them, and with one long, square forefinger fiercely stroked the three opals of her ring.

Jalia snatched her hand away in violent overreaction.

“Do you intend to marry this man?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you would be a fool.”

The light changed and he let out the brake and turned his attention to the road. Fury swept over her like a wave. Though he spoke perfect truth, he could not know it. She laughed false, angry, deliberately mocking laughter.

“How kind of you to have my interests at heart! But you don’t know anything about Michael.”

“Yes.”

“What, exactly, do you profess to know? You’ve never even seen him!”

“I have seen you.”

“And you don’t know anything about me, either!”

“All I need to know for such a judgement.”

“And what have you learned about me that allows you to prescribe for my future?” she couldn’t stop herself asking, though a moment’s thought would have told her she would not come out of the encounter the winner.

He deliberately kept his eyes on the road.

“Your fiancé has never aroused real passion in you,” he said grimly.

Jalia jerked back as if he had slapped her. A rage of unfamiliar feeling burned in her abdomen, almost too deep to reach. She felt a primitive, uncharacteristic urge to leap at him, biting and clawing, and teach him a lesson in the power of woman.

“How dare you!” she snapped instead, her Western upbringing overruling her wild Eastern blood. She was half aware of her dissatisfaction that it should be so.

His laughter underlined the feebleness of her reply.

“This is what you say to your English boyfriend, I think! Do you expect it to affect such as me?”

“And what would it take to stop you? A juggernaut?”

“Ah, if I taught you about love, you would not want me to stop,” he declared, a mocking smile lifting one corner of his mouth, and outrage thrilled through her. She knew the last thing on his mind was making love to her. He didn’t even like her!

“It’ll be a cold day in hell before you teach me about love!” Jalia snapped, as something like panic suddenly choked her. “Suppose we agree that you’ll mind your own business when it comes to the intimate details of my love life?”

He was silent. She looked up at his profile and saw that his face was closed, his jaw clamped tight. Disdain was in the very tilt of his jaw as he nodded formally.

“Tell me instead where your cousin will have gone.”

She didn’t know how she knew, but she did: the words were a struggle. They were not what he wanted to say.

“I have told you I don’t know.”

Although she had demanded it, Jalia was disconcerted by the abrupt change of subject. She had more to say, plenty more, but to go back now and start ranting would look childish.

They were approaching the city centre now: the golden dome appeared only in the gaps between other buildings as they passed.

“You must have some idea.”

“If you’re thinking I’m a mind reader, you overestimate me. If you imagine I had prior knowledge, go to hell.”

His eyelids drooped to veil his response to that.

“I am thinking that if your cousin had made friends in al Bostan you would know who they are. Or if she had found a favourite place—a garden or a restaurant—she might have shown it to you.”

My manner is biting off heads. The line of poetry sounded in her head, and he really did look like a roosting hawk now, with his cold green eyes, his beaked nose, his hands on the wheel like talons on a branch. A brilliantly feathered, glittering hawk, owner of his world.

And exerting, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, every atom of his self-control.

“She is wearing a white wedding dress and veil, you know. She’s not going to be able to just disappear. In a restaurant or any public place she’d attract comment.”

“Where would she go, then?”

Her imagination failed. Where could you hide wearing a staggeringly beautiful pearl-embroidered silk wedding dress with a skirt big enough to cover a football field and a tulle veil five yards long?

Latif put his foot on the brake and drew in to the side of the road, where, under a ragged striped umbrella, a child was selling pomegranates from a battered crate. At the Cup Companion’s summons the boy jumped up to thrust a half dozen pomegranates into a much-used plastic bag, and carried it to the car.

As Latif passed over the money he asked a question, which Jalia could just about follow. The urchin’s response she couldn’t understand at all, but from his excited hand signals she guessed that he had seen Noor pass.

Latif set the bag of fruit into the back seat beside his sword and put the car in motion.

“What did he say?”

“He saw a big white car go past with a woman at the wheel and a white flag streaming from the roof,” he reported with a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “About half an hour ago. Another man in a car asked him the same question soon after. The white car hasn’t come back. He’s not sure about the other.”

“A white flag!” Jalia exclaimed. “Why would she be flying a white flag?”