CAROL MARINELLI - Sheikh's Forbidden Queen - Zarif's Convenient Queen / Gambling with the Crown

On their first date he had kissed her and a whole other level of attraction had surged through her in response. She had felt things she had never felt before; she had felt her whole body light up like a blazing torch in his arms and afterwards that had become the bar other men had had to reach to impress her. Only none of them ever had, she conceded reluctantly. And that last kiss, the one in his hotel suite, had proved that Zarif still had the power to make her want to rip his clothes off. Uneasy with that reality, Ella paced the floor.

She had only spoken to Zarif a handful of times on the phone since she had agreed to marry him. He had returned to Vashir while she had been busy running after her parents, dealing with the wedding planner and persuading Cathy to hire someone to take her place rather than asking Ella to sell her share of the business to her. At least she would still have the shop to come home to in a year’s time, she reflected ruefully.

Would it even take a year for Zarif to decide that he had had his revenge and was now bored with it and her? What else could possibly be motivating him? She was the woman who had said no and evidently her value in his estimation had leapt sky-high at the same moment. She was convinced that had he slept with her three years earlier, he would no longer have wanted her. But what drove him hardest? Sexual hunger or a need for revenge?

Three years earlier he had been icily outraged by her gauche foot-in-the-mouth refusal of his proposal. He hadn’t been prepared for it, hadn’t foreseen that even though she was in love with him she had had doubts about whether she could successfully live in his world. So, although she had worded her misgivings clumsily and insulted him, her concerns had been genuine, and layered over the disappointment of learning that he had buried any ability to become emotionally attached to a woman in the grave with his first wife and child.

It totally amazed her that Zarif’s desire for her body could act as such a powerful incentive on him. How would he react when she proved inexperienced in his precious bed? Was sex really that important to him? And to offer her marriage on such a score? That was crazy, she thought ruefully, particularly as he presumably had no intention of working to establish a normal marital relationship with her. After all, in a year at most it would be over and she would be a divorcee back at home with her disappointed parents, probably using the excuse that her marriage had broken down because it had just been too difficult to surmount the differences between them in background and culture.

A year was such a short time, she told herself, surely it would pass quickly. Though a split second later she conceded that time never passed quickly though when you were unhappy. She would just have to hope that Zarif was prepared to put more effort into being married to her than his approach had so far suggested...

* * *

‘You need to get up,’ Cathy urged Ella, shaking her awake from a deep dreamless sleep.

Ella looked up drowsily at her best friend, a blonde with a spiky short haircut and bright brown eyes that were currently frowning. She was bemused by her tone of urgency. Cathy had stayed over and they had sat up late relaxing and talking. ‘What time is it?’

‘Only seven,’ Cathy confided ruefully. ‘My father came over with the morning papers and then the phone started ringing and that four-letter word has really hit the fan.’

Ella sat up and grabbed her dressing gown. ‘What are you talking about? It is my wedding day...isn’t it?’ she queried in a daze.

‘You should go downstairs. I’ll be tactful and stay up here,’ her friend told her uncomfortably. ‘My dad’s already gone home. There’s an utterly preposterous story about you in the newspaper and your parents are upset. There’s also a pack of photographers standing out on the drive and I think one of them has his finger stuck in the doorbell. I don’t know how you’ve slept through it all.’

‘Blame the large glasses of wine we shared. A story about me? Photographers? What on earth?’ Ella exclaimed, blundering into the bathroom to steal a moment in which to freshen up before starting down the stairs, noting that the curtains were still pulled in the lounge and also over the glass-panelled front door, cocooning the house in dimness. The phone was off the hook and the doorbell was ringing but seemingly being ignored.

There was a deathly hush inside the kitchen where a newspaper was spread open on the table. Her mother was mopping tears from her reddened eyes and her father was tense and flushed with annoyance.

‘What on earth has happened?’ Ella whispered.

‘Read that,’ her father told her, directing a look of angry revulsion at the newspaper.

It was a double-page spread in the Daily Shout, the most downmarket tabloid sold in the UK, and generally full of celebrity exposés of cheating married men and women. Scandals sold newspapers but Ella could think of absolutely nothing in her own life, aside of her upwardly mobile wedding plans, which could possibly have attracted such salacious media attention. She froze by the table, recognising the photos scattered at random across the article.

‘Where did they get those photos?’ she demanded in consternation, because they were family photos. There was one of her aged eighteen wearing a bikini on a Spanish beach holiday, another of her as a fair-haired toddler in her mother’s arms, yet another of her aged about ten in school uniform.

‘Jason must’ve taken them from the albums in the trunk in our bedroom,’ Jennifer Gilchrist opined heavily, ignoring her husband’s instant vocal denial of such a possibility. ‘It’s the only possible explanation for this. Nobody else would have known where to find those photos or had access to them.’

‘Why the devil would Jason launch a vicious character assassination on his sister on the very day of her wedding?’ Gerald Gilchrist demanded.

‘Because he’s very bitter and selling a sleazy story like that would have got him a lot of money,’ Ella’s mother breathed in a pained undertone. ‘Of course, he told a lot of lies to spice it up—it probably got him a bigger pay-out.’

‘Let’s not judge without proof,’ her father urged uneasily.

‘How much proof do you need, Gerald? He’s moved out into a flat we didn’t know he owned and he texted you to tell you he’d gone skiing yesterday.’ Jennifer Gilchrist sighed. ‘Where did he get the money to pay for an expensive holiday when he told us he was broke?’

In growing dismay, Ella was studying a more colourful image of herself, racily dressed in a short black leather skirt and a low-necked lace top with fake black wings attached. It had been taken at a Halloween fancy-dress party the previous year. Cathy by her side, the two girls were giggling and slightly the worse for wear. As well as a large photo of Zarif looking very forbidding there was one of a man she didn’t recognise and that snapshot was labelled ‘Ex-boyfriend, Matt Barton’. Who on earth was Matt Barton? Ella finally took in the headline: THE SEX EXPLOITS OF A FUTURE QUEEN.

Exploits? What exploits? Her tummy executing a sick somersault, Ella thrust back a chair and began to read. The salacious content of the article sent shock reeling through her in waves. This Matt Barton claimed she had attended sex parties with him and he called her ‘an adventurous woman with a voracious appetite for sex and new experiences.’ She was gobsmacked.

‘Is it all lies?’ her father queried darkly. ‘I mean, who’s this Matt Barton chap? Why have we never heard of him before?’

‘Probably because I’ve never heard of him either...in fact I’ve never seen him before and I’ve certainly never gone out with him,’ Ella declared between compressed lips as she read. ‘Apparently he owns some London nightclub that’s just closed down... I do hope Zarif doesn’t take this newspaper,’ she concluded weakly.