The Sheikh's Captive Mistress (4 page)

She grimaced at the thought. “Excuse me? I don’t want to go to dinner with that arrogant prick. I want to go home.”

“You are home, miss. That’s the point,” Basheera replied, steering her toward the dressing tables. The other girls glared at her and whispered and laughed to one another in what she assumed was Arabic. Basheera shouted something terse at them in that same guttural language and they scattered, still glaring at her as if they were cats with claws about to be unsheathed. Turning back to her, Basheera smiled broadly. “You get used to it.”

“Get used to what?”

“Get used to the jealousy of others. These girls served the king before, Munir’s brother, as well. They all have vied and tried to woo Munir, too, but he has always resisted.”

“You’re not seriously going to tell me that he was waiting for me. That he’s never…”

“Oh a lady never kisses and tells, but he’s not like his family, not one to have a collection of wives and harem women in addition to his beloved. He’s loyal like that. Alas, in his prime, his father, Shadid, was not.” Basheera said this even as she prepared the kohl for Emma’s eyes, but the sweet velvety tone in her voice took on a hardness. Her eyes would not meet Emma’s own.

There was a story there.

“Were you once the one for Shadid?”

“We had a good relationship and now, in his old age I am still his favorite. I only know that the others can be catty and you must learn to bear the brunt of their harsh tongues.”

“Believe me,” she replied, thinking of Allison. “I know exactly what it’s like to be made fun of.” She sighed and pinched her hip. “I’m used to it.”

“You know,” Basheera replied, starting to line her eyes. Emma blinked at the pencil on her lower eyelid and tried to blink back the watering of her eyes. “Curves help win men over. There’s no belly dancing, as you Americans call our rituals, without actual bellies.”

She grimaced and tried not to cry as the liner was applied to her other eyes. Emma had never been the best at makeup, after all. “I don’t want to impress anyone. I want to go home.”

“You’re home now, dear, and I think that you do. I was there when he took you from the transport, and I saw the way you melted into his embrace. You only have to let yourself love him.”

“I’d rather die.”

“Never speak like that – it can be arranged by his father or brother.”

“What?” she asked, her heart hammering in her chest.

Surely she’d misheard. Either she’d be used as a pawn and traded home or made to warm Sheikh Munir’s bed. There was no way she was in complete danger. Only a mad man would abduct a senator’s daughter and then kill her. That would bring total annihilation on Yoman; surely the old sheikh and his other son could do the math.

Emma struggled to swallow, but her throat was too dry. If they weren’t reasonable men, she could be dead very soon.

“Don’t give them a reason to try a treaty with another daughter or child as bait. Kashif…he is not to be trusted.”

She snorted and rubbed her still sore chin. “You don’t have to tell me that twice. He’s an animal.”

“Then believe me that Munir is his opposite,” the older woman said, now adding the reddest of lipsticks to Emma’s lips. “Work hard to make a good impression, and you may find everything you’ve been seeking.”

“What would you know about it?”

She leaned over and pushed long blonde strands of hair back from Emma’s face. “I know everything about it.”

Emma couldn’t believe the girl before her in the mirror. Basheera must have been holding out on her with the truth; surely the woman was a wizard of some kind and she truly had fallen into a fairy story. Her hair was piled high on her head in an ornate bun with tendrils falling from the updo. The bright blonde locks highlighted even moreso by the rich red and blue jewels studded through her braids. Her blue eyes were prominent and glittered like sapphires because of the kohl, and her lips looked fuller, cherry red from the tint Basheera had used. Somehow, the older woman had even known how to dress her to emphasize her curves properly, something she’d never thought possible. The pink silk of the genie pants clung to the roundness of her hips and the matching top revealed the soft stretch of flesh of her stomach while dipping low over her breasts.

She looked beautiful, unlike anything she’d been ever before.

It was a look that Alexis or Parker could have carried off, but always felt so unattainable for her. After all, the studious one was never also the attractive one. She’d just never felt it, especially after she’d found Kevin cheating on her.

But bedecked like this?

She almost felt like the queen Munir claimed he was trying to make her.

Basheera smiled up at her work and clapped her hands. “I’m good. I should have charged you for the service.”

“It’s like you have a wand hidden back there. You don’t, do you?”

Basheera laughed, her voice tinkling like bells. “No,” she said finishing by adding one last adornment, a silver pin, to Emma’s hair. “It was mine when I first came to the palace. I promise it will bring you luck.”

“I don’t want this kind.”

“Make an aging woman happy and get to dinner and try to be nice.”

“Be nice to my captor.”

“To your future husband,” Basheera corrected, walking her to the door and shoving her out into the hallway.

Emma paced the labyrinthine hallways of the palace, finding her way to the dining hall by the amazing scent wafting down the way. There were heavenly spices, the smell of perfectly roasted lamb, and the mouth-watering smell of dried and seasoned figs and apricots. When she opened the door, the dining hall’s sheer size amazed her. If the harem room was large, this room was gigantic.

Easily three of the harem’s quarters could fit into this room and the table before her sat at least fifty. She wondered if there were leaves there, as well, in order to stretch the table out even further. Set out in large silver serving dishes were all the things she smelled and then some: chick peas, lentils, rice seasoned with turmeric and various bottles of wine. It was an amazing spread.

All of that paled in comparison to the sight of Munir waiting for her.

He stood when she entered the room and his eyes were wide. From her vantage point, Emma even noticed him licking his lips. Despite everything, maybe especially logic, she grinned at that. No one had ever eyed her like that before, like she was the main course, the best filet mignon in the city.

Steadying herself, forcing her passion away, Emma sat down beside him at the table. He tried to pull out her chair for her first, but she refused, not wanting to give him the pleasure.

“I can do it myself.”

He laughed, rich and throaty, and she felt herself began to grow wet with need – traitorous instincts. “You’re always fighting everything,
habbibi
. All I was trying to do was be polite for my future wife.”

“You say that like it’s the most normal sentence in the world,” she countered, at least allowing him to spoon out the lentils and lamb onto her plate. She hadn’t eaten anything in over a day, and her stomach was growling. The white wine was dry down her throat and helped calm her, oddly ground her in a way she had only hoped it might. “I have to go home. You do understand that, don’t you? I thought this was a ransom. Can’t it just be that?”

The ridiculousness of begging her captor for any concessions did occur to her. Maybe Stockholm Syndrome was starting to eat into her brain, trying to remind her of the passion of their first kiss. Still, she had to try. She wasn’t made to be a sheikha and the fact he even imagined her as something so regal was insane.

It was oddly flattering, but nevertheless insane.

He reached up and stroked her cheek, and she felt herself relax into his touch. His scent was becoming familiar – that hint of jasmine mixed with his own musk, pure masculinity presented before her. It would be so easy to lean forward and kiss him, so easy to forget all of the rules and her duties as a good daughter.

But it would be wrong.

“Do you doubt that I love you?”

“You stole me from thousands of miles away. You’re holding me in a fortress without any hope of escape. Gee, I wonder how I can possibly think that you don’t actually love me.”

He dropped his hand back and sighed, regret creeping into those golden-flecked eyes. “I could have chosen so many girls. We had more than a few of the senators on your father’s committee and their families were under consideration. But I chose you.”

“Because my dad’s the chairman,” she challenged, taking a sip of her wine.

“It was because I started to see the recon and saw the determination of your spirit and the fire behind your eyes. I saw you day after day trying to live up to your father’s ideas and still having the dignity to have your own path underneath. I want to offer you more.”

She snorted and rolled her eyes a bit, ignoring the spicy tang of the lamb as she bit into it. “Your minions were taping me and tapping my phones. That doesn’t mean that you know anything about me.”

“Tell me I’m wrong then,
habbibi
,” he said, his hazel eyes regarding her solemnly. “Tell me you never wanted more from your life than an offer at your father’s former firm, that part of you isn’t excited to be here.”

“It’s different,” she said, her voice quiet. “I can want adventure, but not want to be trapped here.”

“You aren’t, not forever. One day, after the wedding, we’ll see the entire world together, anywhere you want and anything you want. You merely have to ask.”

“Except home.”

He stood then and leaned down, kissing her with a passion that matched what she’d felt earlier in his room. Instantly, her nipples hardened at the embrace and heat flared in her stomach. Emma moaned and, reaching up, ran her hands over Munir’s hair, feeling her wetness grow when her hands ran over the rough patches of his sideburns.

Munir responded to that, as well, his kiss deepening, and his tongue tangling with her own. They were locked like that, a dance for dominance with their lips, and she wanted him to win, badly, in the deepest part of her soul. He dropped his hands lower and let one cup her left breast, his fingers playing with the hardened nipple underneath the thin gauze of her shirt. His other hand dipped lower, teasing over her stomach and she squirmed, ticklish from his touch.

She broke away from the kiss, long enough to grin back at him. “You can’t do that. That’s too sensitive.”

He chuckled and traced his fingertips over the nub of her nipple, and she shuddered beneath him, her nerves already on fire. His fingers lowered even further, slipping under the waistband of her pants, trailing over the thatch of soft hair at the apex of her thighs.

She leaned up and kissed him again, but pulled back as if she’d been burned when she heard another voice call out from the doorway.

“Well, brother, I should have known that you couldn’t be trusted,” Kashif said, strolling into the dining room.

It was like having a bucket of ice water poured over her. She pulled away instantly from him and stood up, trying to pull her cropped top down over her pale stomach. Emma wished then that Basheera had chosen a kaftan for her. It was too raw, too exposed to be before a cruel animal like Kashif.

“It wasn’t anything. Nothing was going on.”

“Oh, I think I saw plenty,” Kashif purred, circling his older brother. “It makes so much more sense now. All that anxiety until she was here. I thought that was about the treaty and forcing the American dogs to play nice. It never occurred to me that it could be anything else, but now I know why you were also so ready to defend the fat cow.”

Munir stepped forward and reached back to slug his brother, but she grabbed his arm, stilling it. “He insulted you.”

“He abducted me on your orders,” she countered, reaching up and rubbing his arm in an effort to calm him further. She marveled at the rock hard steadiness of his biceps underneath her grasp. “Please, just let it all drop. Dinner was a mistake.”

He reached out for her, but she stepped back and started running for the harem room, unwilling to let her passion drive her any longer. A few minutes in Munir’s arms were one thing, but allowing herself to really become comfortable here, to stop struggling to find her way home, was unthinkable.

No matter what he managed to do to her or how he made her feel.

Pleasure wasn’t worth never going home, was it?

***

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said, throwing her hands up and wishing the other girls in the harem weren’t eyeing her suspiciously from their corner.

Let them. She might not be a ravishing exotic beauty like all of them with their long legs and lean figures, but she was somehow – impossibly – the one Sheikh Munir wanted. She gulped, thinking about the way his hand had caressed her breast. She wasn’t just the one that could afford to fall for him. Her home was thousands of miles away, and she had to remember that, even when he made her quiver with just a stroke of his fingers.

Basheera smiled up at her and handed her a cup of tea. “Do you think you’re the only one who has struggled with their attraction? The Sheikha, rest her soul, was a bride brokered by her father from Omai and had to learn to love Sheikh Shadid through an arranged marriage. I was brought here at eighteen from my village, stolen away in the night.”

“And you still care for Shadid?”

“The circumstances do not dictate the match. You’re reeling because how you feel doesn’t match what your preconceptions are.”

She nodded and pulled one of the myriad of broaches from her hair. It was more than that, even from her position as being used as a pawn in negotiations. He had spied on her, but he’d actually seen her. She’d spent years lying to herself, as well as her family and friends, trying to convince herself she was happy, never truly succeeding. Munir had seen that easily in her.

Already it scared her – that connection.

What else about her did he see that she didn’t even know about herself?

“Your brother told me everything he saw, Munir,” his father said, wheezing a bit around the oxygen tank seated by his wheelchair.