Nicola Marsh - An Ordinary Girl and a Sheikh - The Sheikh's Unsuitable Bride / Rescued by the Sheikh / The Desert Prince's Proposal

Maybe if she’d been dressed in a glamorous gown she wouldn’t have felt so foolish. But in her uniform …

‘Don’t!’ she begged, but Zahir caught her hand and, humming, began to spin her along the footpath. ‘Zahir …’ Then, ‘For heaven’s sake, that’s not even the right tune!’

‘No? How does it go?’

Maybe his excitement, his joy, were infectious, but somehow, before she knew it, she was singing it to him, filling gaps in the words with ‘da-da-de-dum’s and he was humming and they were dancing around Berkeley Square to a song that was old when her parents had first danced to it. A song in which the magic of falling in love made the impossible happen. Made London a place where angels dined, where nightingales sang and where the streets were paved with stars.

Dancing as if they were alone in the universe and the streets truly were paved with stars.

It was only when she came to the end of the song that she realised they had stopped dancing, that they were standing by the car. That Zahir was simply holding her.

That what she wanted more than anything in the world was for him to kiss her again.

And as if reading her thoughts, he raised her hand to his lips, before tilting his head as if listening to something very faint.

‘Can you hear it?’ he murmured. ‘The nightingale.’

It was a question that asked more than whether she could, impossibly, hear a shy woodland bird singing in a London square.

It took every atom of common sense to ignore the soft touch of his breath against her cheek, his fingers still wrapped about hers, his hand warm against her waist. To ignore the magic of the nightingale’s sweet song filling her heart.

It took Freddy’s voice saying, ‘Will you be home before I go to bed, Mummy?’ The memory of her promise, ‘I’ll be there when you wake up.’

‘No, sir,’ she managed, her voice not quite her own. ‘I think you’ll find that’s a sparrow.’

And with that she shattered the fragile beauty of the moment and the danger passed. He took a step back and said, with the gravest of smiles, ‘I forgot, Metcalfe. You don’t believe in fairy stories.’

For a moment she wanted to deny it. Instead, she said, ‘Neither, sir, do you.’

‘No.’ He repeated the touch of his lips to her finger and, without a word, turned and began to walk away. What?

‘Sir!’ He did not seem to hear her. ‘Where are you going?’ Then, in desperation, ‘Zahir!’

Without stopping, without turning, he said, ‘Go home, Metcalfe. I’ll walk back to the hotel.’

‘But …’

He stopped. Looked up to a sky fogged with neon. But? But what? What was she thinking? As if in answer to her unspoken question, he turned and, as their eyes met, she knew ‘what’. She’d always known.

She’d been here before and the raw power of the heat-charged look that passed between them scared her witless.

She’d had the sense to take a step back and then, as if seized by a determination to destroy herself all over again, she’d undone it all with that ‘but’.

And she had no excuse. She wasn’t an eighteen-year-old with her head in the clouds and her brains in cold storage. At eighteen there was some excuse. At twenty-three, with her reputation rebuilt, responsibilities …

She was fooling herself.

This was desire at its most primitive. The atavistic urge that powered all of creation. Age, experience, counted for nothing. There was no immunity …

‘But?’ Zahir finally prompted, his voice as soft as thistledown.

Without thought she’d reached out to him. Her hand was still extended, as if imploring him to come back. Finish what he’d started.

Slowly, deliberately, she closed her hand, but somehow it stayed there and he took a step towards her.

Maybe the movement broke the spell. Maybe age did help, because she swung her arm wildly towards the far corner of the square. ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ she said. ‘You need Charles Street. Then, um, Queen Street. Then Curzon Street.’

‘That’s out of the taxi drivers’ handbook, is it?’

‘Yes. No …’ Her eyes were still locked on to his. She could scarcely breathe. ‘Queen Street is one-way. I’d … a taxi … would have to cut along Erfield Street.’

Zahir gently took her arm, opened the driver’s door of the car and said, ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Diana. Ten o’clock.’

Zahir stood back as she climbed into the limo, fumbled to get the key in the ignition and, after what seemed like an age, drove away. Only then did he let loose the breath he seemed to have been holding for ever.

He’d only met the woman a few hours ago and yet it was as if he’d been waiting for her all his life. She was the one who made him laugh, made him dance. Made him want to sing.

Walking through the quiet streets, he should have been concentrating on the future, plans that had been a year in the making. Instead it was Diana Metcalfe who filled his head, heated him to the heart, made nightingales sing in the heart of London.

Her father was dozing in front of the television, not conspicuously waiting for his little girl to come home, but he never went to bed until he knew she was safely in. As a teenager it had driven her mad. It still did but, a mother herself, these days Diana understood the need to know that your family was safe before you could rest. ‘Busy day?’ he asked.

‘Above average,’ she said, managing a grin as she peeled off her jacket. ‘An outbreak of food poisoning meant that I had the number one car and a sheikh.’ About whom the least said the better. Her father could read her like a book. ‘Did you manage okay?’ she asked, by way of diversion. ‘Freddy wasn’t too much for you?’

‘He was as good as gold. He’s spark out, bless him.’ He eased himself to his feet, limped into the kitchen, turning on the tap with his left hand, then holding the kettle beneath it. She wanted to say, Sit down … let me … but understood that his self-esteem was involved. Knew that the more he did, the better it was for his mobility. Her need, his determination, to look after Freddy for her had done more for his recovery from the stroke than all the months of phsyio. Had given him a reason to push himself to be mobile. ‘What’ll you have? Tea, chocolate?’

All she wanted was to get to her room, shut the door, be on her own so that she could unravel the emotional tangle she’d got herself in, get her head around it, but her father looked forward to hearing about her day. ‘Chocolate, if you’ll have some with me. Has Mum gone up?’

‘Hours ago. She was rushed off her feet at the shop today, doing the flowers for some fancy society wedding. She looked whacked out.’

‘She could do with a holiday,’ Diana said, trying not to envy all those journalists and tour operators, being whisked away, first class on Sheikh Zahir’s magic carpet. ‘Maybe we could all go somewhere when school breaks up.’

‘You should be going on holiday with people your own age,’ he said, then looked away.

‘I don’t think Freddy would fit in with an eighteen-thirty package, do you?’ she joked, pretending she hadn’t noticed.

‘We’d look after him. You need to get out more. Get a life.’

‘Freddy is my life,’ she said.

‘Di—’

‘How’s the Test Match going?’ she asked.

Once launched on the safer subject of cricket, her father’s passion, all she had to do was say ‘absolutely’ in all the appropriate places while he gave her chapter and verse on the weaknesses in the England team, the poor eyesight of the umpires, the quality of the wicket, while she drank her chocolate. Then, having rinsed her mug, she dropped a kiss on his balding head.

‘Tell Mum that I’ll see to Freddy in the morning. I don’t have to go in until nine. Don’t stay up too late,’ she chided, playing up to the pretence that he’d stayed up to watch something he wanted to see on the television, rather than because he was waiting for her to come home.