ALEXANDRA SELLERS - The Solitary Sheikh

“How much would you personally expect to dictate terms in my teaching?”

“Terms?” he repeated, frowning slightly. “We do not have school terms. The princesses are taught entirely by tutors within the palace. Most of them are now absent for the summer. I prefer that you start now because the princesses have been without English lessons for some months.”

She laughed lightly at the misunderstanding. “No, no, I meant...” She flailed for another way of explaining, and then gasped as his face hardened and his eyes glinted with cold rage.

“My English is very far from perfect, Miss Stewart. I hope you will not be moved to laugh at every error I will make.”

Jana sat up straight. “I was not laughing at any error!” she said indignantly.

Prince Omar raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “No? What caused your amusement?”

She gritted her teeth. “The mutual misunderstanding!”

“I see.”

“Do you forbid laughter in the palace?”

He sat for a moment watching her. She didn’t think she had ever seen such resignation in a human face.

“No, I do not forbid it,” he answered, but she could see that laughter rarely happened, even if it was not actively forbidden. She was starting to feel seriously sorry for his daughters, raised with such a curb as this cold-hearted father must place on their spirits.

“What are your daughters’ names?” she asked involuntarily.

His dark green gaze flicked briefly towards Hadi al Hatim and then back to her. “Masha and Kamala are their usual names.”

“Kaw-meh-leh,” she repeated carefully. “Masha. They’re both very pretty names.” She smiled. “Masha. Isn’t that Russian?”

“Masha is short for Mashouka, which means beloved in Parvani, my mother’s tongue. It is true that I spent many years in Russia. There it is short for Maria. But I did not intentionally give my daughter a Russian name.”

He sounded as though it would be the last thing he’d do. “If you hated it so much, why were you there?” she asked impulsively. Speaking without thinking was one of Jana’s most determined faults. By the time she reminded herself to think before she spoke, Jana had usually already spoken.

“I did not say I hated it.” Another glance at the silent vizier. “I attended univ—”

“But you did hate it.”

His eyelids drooped, as if to hide his reaction from her, and, released from his gaze, she suddenly was free to notice how physically attractive he was. His face and head were beautifully shaped, and both the curving eyelids and the full lower lip held a sensual promise. His beard gave him the look of a Hollywood pirate. But the coldness in his eyes seemed to undo all that.

He heaved an impatient sigh.

“Yes, I did hate it. Why do you insist on this, Miss Stewart? Is it important to you?”

Jana’s cheeks were suddenly warm. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He was watching her curiously. “Do you yourself have some connection with Russia?”

“None at all,” she replied hastily, hoping he would not press the point. She could hardly confess that she had felt an impulse to make him admit to some feeling! So the Prince of Central Barakat was withdrawn! It was not her business.

“Do you have a picture of them?” she asked.

“Of the princesses?” He frowned, as though the request was unusual. “I don’t know—” He turned in his chair and called to his vizier, “Do we have such a photograph, Khwaja?”

Hadi al Hatim smiled and crossed to the table in front of the sofa where they were sitting. He pulled a file out of a briefcase and extracted a colour ten-by-eight photograph, handing it to the prince. At that moment the Cup Companion who had searched her appeared at the door, and the vizier crossed the room and went out with him, closing the door behind him.

“Baleh,” Omar replied to something the vizier said as he left. He hardly glanced at the photo before passing it to Jana.

With a little shiver of response at his clinical coldness in looking at a photograph of his daughters, Jana leaned forward to take the picture. In one of those slightly awkward moments of misjudgement, both she and Prince Omar moved a few inches more than either expected the other to do, and their hands brushed. She drew in her breath with a little shock.

Two young girls half smiled at the camera, their arms around each other. They were very pretty, and would probably be beautiful when they got older. Wide dark eyes, delicately shaped eyebrows, their father’s curving eyelids and full mouth. Beautiful, but lacking confidence, their gaze at the camera shy, their smiles tentative. Jana found herself feeling as protective towards them as she had for any of her schoolchildren from troubled homes. Wealth and position had never protected children against misery, she reminded herself, and these two had lost their mother, and, if His Serene Highness’s attitude was anything to go by, had never had a real father.

And yet, one was called Beloved. She wondered who had chosen that name.

“They are very lovely. You must be proud of them.”

“They are like their mother. She was considered a great beauty,” he said, as if he were discussing a database or import duty.

“What does Kamala mean?” she asked, looking up from the photograph to discover that he was watching her.

“It means perfect, Miss Stewart.” He paused, and they looked at each other. In the silence, they were abruptly aware that they were alone together in the room. Prince Omar lifted a long slender hand to his dark beard and stroked it, and she watched the motion of his fingers without being aware that she did so.

She could not think of anything to say. There were words, but they seemed caught in her throat. She stared at his mouth, full but held so firmly in check. His lips moved, and she caught her breath on a silent gasp.

“Your own name has a meaning in our language,” he said. “Jana.”

He lengthened the first a. Jahn-eh.

Jana swallowed. “What does it mean?”

“Soul,” he said. “Really, ‘the soul of’—it is incomplete. Jan-am means my soul, for example. What is your middle name?”

Jana shivered. His deep voice had softened on the words, and he was watching her as he said them, and her skin responded as if to a touch.

“Roxane.”

“This also is a Parvani word. Roshan means ‘light.’ Therefore your names together mean ‘light’s soul,’ or ‘a soul of light.”’

Jana swallowed and nodded. “I see,” she said. “Thank you.”

There was a pause while the prince considered the sheaf of papers in his hand. She recognized her resume and application, but the rest was written in the Arabic alphabet.

“You are descended from the royal family of Scotland.”

“We lost that battle many generations ago, Your Highness.”

“But you will have an understanding of royal life that the others did not have. This is always the problem, that the foreign teachers cannot understand the restrictions. You, I think, would understand.”

She thought, Oh, yes, I would understand. It’s just what I’ve always fought against, the restrictions. She looked down at the photo of those two questioning, uncertain little faces, and a well of pity washed up in her.

“Yes,” she said.

“And your work in the poorest schools tells me that you understand the nature of duty. The princesses must also understand their duty.”

Poor, poor little princesses. She looked again at the photo still in her hand. He was going to offer her the job. And in spite of everything, she realized, she still wanted it. Not entirely for the sake of the little lost-looking princesses. But for her own sake, too. However cold the sheikh was, however restricted the environment, it would only be for a year. If she ended up married to Peter...that sentence would last much longer.