ALEXANDRA SELLERS - The Solitary Sheikh

The minion shrugged. “I am sorry, Madame, I must insist.”

“Nothing was said to me at any time about being searched!”

The elevator arrived at the floor and stopped, but he had turned a key in the panel and the doors did not open.

“I say it, Madame.”

“And who are you?”

“I am Ashraf Durran, cousin and Cup Companion to Omar Durran ibn Daud ibn Hassan al Quraishi,” he said, with a nod of such regal condescension that she blinked. “Please, Miss Stewart, allow me to search you. He is waiting for you.”

Jana hadn’t run away from the restrictions of her own family life all these years to go to work now for someone who had their staff physically searched and who was apparently worried about assassination attempts. Maybe her mother was right.

She asked with angry amusement, “Whose pay, exactly, does he imagine I’m in?”

“There are many fools in the world. Miss Stewart,” the man said simply. “Please,” he said, lifting his hands in a gesture inviting reason.

Her hands tightened on her bag. She was damned if she’d submit to this! “I was invited here for an interview, and no one said anything about being searched. I think there’s been a mistake,” she said firmly.

Ashraf Durran stared at her, shrugged and reached into his pocket. For a chilling moment she thought the narrow black object he pulled out was a gun. She laughed with reflexive relief when he started to speak into it. After a moment he said, “Baleh, baleh,” and put it back in his pocket.

“I must search you and your bag, Madame,” he said.

“Or?”

“Or escort you back downstairs.”

She glared furiously at him. “Well, do tha—” she began, but immediately broke off. She thought of Peter, of the vacation her mother would engineer—for Jana and Peter—if she did not get this job.

She handed her bag to Ashraf Durran, waited as he searched it and handed it back to her. “Excuse me,” he said, and she gasped as he reached for her and then stood in cold, stony fury as he ran his hands lightly, impersonally over her body.

“Thank you,” he said. “I am sorry for the necessity.” Then he turned the key and the elevator doors opened.

She stepped out into a large furnished foyer. A massive mirror directly opposite reflected her image. She was relieved to see that her irritation did not show. In her white dress she was neat and cool looking. There were several men, all in Western suits, but some wearing burnouses in addition, standing and sitting around the room, and they all turned to watch her progress as Ashraf Durran led her across to a door. She had the humiliating conviction that they all knew that she had just been searched.

Ashraf Durran tapped on the door and opened it. As the door opened into the elegantly furnished hotel sitting room, the two occupants turned towards her and got to their feet.

Behind them an expanse of Hyde Park showed green through a wide window. One man, she saw, was the old man with grey hair, tall, thin, and perfectly erect, whom she had met at a previous interview. Hadi al Hatim’s dark eyes sparkled with a smile of welcome.

The other was much younger—in his mid-to-late thirties, she thought—a little taller, lean, a good build. He had sea green eyes, strong cheekbones, a broad forehead, thick black hair and a neat devil’s beard. His expression was hard and closed. He might as well have been carved from stone, for all the feeling she got from him. He did not smile.

“Miss Jana Stewart, Your Highness,” Hadi al Hatim presented her, then put out his hand. Jana shivered as she put out her own hand to take it. “Miss Stewart, it is a pleasure to meet you again. This is His Serene Highness Sheikh Omar ibn Daud, the Prince of Central Barakat.”

“Prince?” she repeated on a wailing note. “My mother was right! Oh, damn it!”

Of course she shouldn’t have said it. His Serene Highness Prince Omar ibn Daud stiffened—Jana didn’t think it was possible to get any stiffer than he already was, but he managed it—and stared at her from eyes as cold as the green, green sea.

“What is the matter, Miss Stewart?” He spoke with an accent, in a deep, hard, unresponsive voice.

“You were described to me as an influential Barakati family with mining interests!” she said.

There was an arrogant tilt to his head. “We own the gold and the emerald mines of the mountains of Noor.”

“Congratulations!” she said dryly. She was irritated by his icily arrogant manner. She realized that she had no idea how to greet a sheikh. Should she curtsey? She was pretty sure that the curtsey was a purely Western tradition, but the Eastern genuflection before princes, if her memory served, was the kind of prostration where you touched your nose to the ground, and that seemed too incongruous, even for the Dorchester.

“But I don’t want to work in a palace. And I do think I might have—”

Been warned, she was going to say, but he cut across her. “Why not?” His voice was flat, emotionless. Not even curiosity showed.

The interruption annoyed her, and she snapped, “Partly for all the reasons that make you think you can interrupt me whenever you like.”

He stared at her. “Miss Stewart, I do not understand your hostility. You seemed to my vizier very eager to take this job.” He glanced at Hadi al Hatim, but the old man, the suspicion of a smile at one corner of his mouth, was saying nothing. “What is the reason for your attitude?”

“I’ve just been body searched in the damned elevator,” Jana said, waving an indignant arm back towards the door. “There’s an army of bodyguards out there, and it turns out to be because you’re a prince, that’s the reason!”

“I have no army of bodyguards,” he informed her flatly. “You are not yet a member of my household staff. When you are, you will not be searched when you approach me.”

Approach me. He sounded like something out of the fifteenth century. “That’s not the point. The point is, I wasn’t told I was applying for a job in a royal family.”

“Now you have been told. You do not want the job?”

Faced with the stark decision, Jana suddenly, belatedly, began to think. To wonder if she was handling this in the best way. Not for nothing did her family and friends accuse her of impulsiveness.

One thing was sure—her mother and Peter would be quick to take advantage of her situation if she agreed with what His Serene Highness had just said and walked out of here.

“Well—I...” She hesitated and bit her lip.

The vizier intervened. “Miss Stewart, before this meeting, His Highness and I had decided that you were very much the best candidate for the job. If you are now determined not to take the job, there is nothing to be said. If you are in doubt, I suggest you sit down and discuss the matter.”

It was a very gracious way out.

“All right,” she said gratefully.

Prince Omar indicated the sofa and they sat down, the prince in a chair set at an angle to her. Hadi al Hatim retired to a window embrasure.

“In your last interview, I think, you were informed that the job requires that you will live with us, teaching two girls,” he said. “You are aware of their ages and their level of proficiency.” Although his use of English seemed very good, she sensed that he did not really feel comfortable with the language, and she wondered why.

“The only thing I wasn’t told about them, I think, was that they are princesses.” Jana looked into his eyes, and was locked by a gaze that seemed to both draw and repel her at the same time. She felt the surge of a mixture of feelings—surprise, confusion, discomfort, nervousness, irritation. “I’m right in that? They are your daughters?”

“Yes, they are,” he said, without any hint of parental feeling. Just stating a cold, hard fact. Jana wondered if there were someone with a little more warmth of feeling closer to the girls. “If you have questions, you may ask them now.”