Jane Porter - The Desert Sheikh's Innocent Queen - King of the Desert, Captive Bride

“Is there anything else you’d like better?” he asked.

“No,” she answered breathlessly, curling her fingers, feeling the weight of the stone against the back of her finger and the smooth warm fit of the platinum band on her skin. “But it’s too much, far too much—”

“That is the ring,” Khalid said, turning to Mr. Murai. “Can we have it sized this morning and returned to us before our noon flight?”

Mr. Murai nodded. “Not a problem.”

“We’ll leave for the airport at eleven-thirty,” Khalid added.

Liv looked at him, and then back at the ring, which was still enormous at two and a half carats, and yet it was also beautiful, beyond beautiful, and she couldn’t believe it was going to be hers.

It shouldn’t be hers. She wasn’t really going to marry Khalid. She was going to go home and get back to her job and become just Liv Morse again, but until then, would it be so awful to actually wear something this lovely? God knows, she’d never have anything like this again.

Girls like her didn’t own jewels. Girls like her just admired them in magazines.

“I’ll have the ring sized immediately,” the jeweler answered, “and will personally bring it back to you.”

After Mr. Murai left with his briefcase of rings, Liv stood at the window with the view of the Great Pyramid, feeling increasingly pensive.

She shouldn’t have said yes to the ring. It wasn’t proper. Nice girls— good girls —didn’t accept expensive gifts from men, much less from men like sheikhs and desert princes.

Her mother would have another heart attack if she knew Liv was even wearing a ring like that.

“It’s just a ring,” Khalid said flatly, standing not far behind her. “You haven’t damned your soul yet.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Yet.”

His generous mouth with that slightly bowed upper lip curved in amusement. “Most women love trinkets.”

“Sheikh Fehr, yellow diamonds aren’t trinkets.”

“I don’t think you can continue with the Sheikh Fehr title now that we’re engaged.”

“But we’re not really engaged.”

His faint smile disappeared, and his chiseled features grew harder, fiercer. “On the contrary, we really are, and in just a few hours you’ll have the ring to prove it.”

MR. MURAI returned to the hotel by eleven with the sized ring and by eleven-thirty she and Khalid were in the car, heading for the airport.

At Cairo’s executive airport they boarded the royal jet for Aswan, the southernmost outpost of ancient Egypt, a city five hundred and fifty miles south of Cairo.

During the first half hour of the flight, Khalid stared out the window, reflecting on the early morning phone call from his brother.

Sharif had been wrong about several things, but he had been right when he said that Khalid had pushed people away and severed relationships. Khalid didn’t want anyone dependent on him, much less emotionally dependent. He needed space—freedom—and he wasn’t ready to give it up.

He’d do what he had to do to get Olivia home, but this wasn’t about love. It wasn’t about emotion. It was duty. Pure and simple.

The flight attendant appeared to tell them she would soon be serving lunch, and proceeded to set up a table that locked into the floor in between their club chairs, turning the sitting area into a cozy dining room.

Liv glanced at Khalid as the flight attendant spread a pale gold linen cloth over the table. She didn’t want to be intimidated by him but there was something overwhelming about him. She didn’t know if it was his silence, or the stillness in his powerful frame, but he reminded her of the desert he lived in. Remote, detached, aloof. A desert—and a man—she wanted nothing to do with.

Horrifying tears suddenly started to her eyes. She reached up and knocked them away with a knuckle. She hadn’t cried in Ozr. She certainly wasn’t going to cry now, but she’d gotten her hopes up. She’d thought—imagined—she was free. She’d thought that once she left Jabal with Khalid she was just one step away from home. But instead of home, they were setting off on a different journey. A new journey. A journey she wasn’t ready, or willing, to take.

The flight attendant served their first course, sizzling prawns, on the Fehr royal china, with its distinctive geometric gold-and-black pattern that struck Liv as exceptionally Egyptian.

Baked red snapper in a lightly spiced tomato sauce followed the sizzling prawns, with a minted pomegranate yogurt on sliced grapefruit presented for dessert.

They ate with almost no conversation or discussion, which did little to ease Liv’s nerves. “We don’t eat like this on commercial air flights,” she said awkwardly as the last of the dishes were cleared away. “Especially not in economy.” She took a quick breath, adding in a rush, “Not that you’d ever fly economy.”

His brow lowered. “I’m sure I have once.”

She waited a good minute, and Khalid was still thinking. “You haven’t,” she answered for him, “or you’d remember. It’s horrendous, especially on international flights when you have to sleep sitting up and you can’t because you’ve been cramped for so long.

“There’s no room for your tray table,” she added, “no room to lean back, no place for your legs or feet, and the people sitting on either side of your seat hog the armrests, which squishes you even more.”

He grimaced. “I’d never fly if I had to fly like that.”

“I actually didn’t think it was going to be so bad. I sell coach tickets all the time but it was miserable. I just kept thinking once I arrived in Morocco the trip would get better….” Her voice faded and she stared out the window at the impossibly blue sky.

After a moment she drew a deep breath and looked back at Khalid. “I honestly don’t know how everything went so wrong. I thought I was being careful. Cautious. I avoided going out on my own, didn’t dress provocatively, never allowed myself to be alone with men …” Her voice drifted off as she shook her head. “I’m just so disappointed. Not just with the world, but with me.”

“Why are you disappointed with yourself?”

“I thought I was smarter. Better prepared. I thought I could take care of myself and instead I end up arrested and in prison.” She clasped her hands in her lap. “But it’s my fault I ended up there. I have no one else to blame but me.”

“And how is it your fault?”

Liv struggled to explain it, but the words didn’t come. How could she make him understand exactly what had happened that day? It was already such a blur. Just remembering the day she was arrested filled her with cold, icy despair. She bit into her lower lip as she searched for the right words.

“I offered to hold Elsie’s bag,” she said at last, her voice unsteady. “I had a backpack and she had that awkward purse. I told her to slip her purse in my backpack so she wouldn’t lose it.”

Khalid listened intently. “Did you know Elsie well?”

Liv shook her head. “No, we’d only met a couple days earlier. She was part of this big group of people in their twenties from Europe, the U.S. and Australia. There were guys, girls, a very friendly international crowd. A lot of them had met while traveling through Spain, and then they crossed from the tip of Spain into Morocco, and that’s where I met them. We traveled around Morocco for a week before deciding we’d go to Jabal.”

“Why Jabal?”

“We missed the bus to Cairo and it seemed like an adventure. No one really goes to Jabal anymore, and yet everyone heard it was cheap and we could catch a bus to Cairo from Jabal’s capital.”

“That was the destination—Egypt?”