Crowned At The Desert King's Command

‘You crawled out of the window?’ he repeated, his voice flat, the lines of his brutally handsome face set and hard. ‘And what made you think that was a good idea?’

‘I’ve heard the rumours,’ she said defensively. ‘About how people who stray over your borders disappear for ever, never to be seen again. How they’re beaten and terrorised. And I didn’t know what had happened to my father.’ She steeled herself. ‘I saw an opportunity to escape, to see if I could find him, and so I took it.’

The man said nothing, but that stare of his felt like a weight pressing her down and crushing her into dust.

You’re really for it now.

Charlotte gripped her hands together, lifted her chin another inch and stared back. ‘We’re British citizens, you know. You can’t just make us disappear like all the rest. My dad is a very well-respected academic. Once people realise we’re missing they’ll send others to find us. So you’d better tell whoever is in charge here that—’

‘No need. All the interested parties already know.’

‘Which interested parties?’

His face was impassive. ‘Me.’

‘You?’ Charlotte tried to look sceptical and failed. ‘And who exactly are you?’

‘I am the one in charge,’ he said, without any emphasis at all.

‘Oh? Are you the head of the police or something?’

It would explain his aura of command, after all.

‘No. I am not the head of the police.’

His eyes gleamed with something that made her breath catch.

‘I am the head of the country. I am the Sheikh of Ashkaraz.’

Charlotte Devereaux, all five foot nothing of her, blinked her large silver-blue eyes. Shock was written across her pretty, pink features.

She should be shocked.

She should be quaking in those little boots of hers.

He’d only just been notified of her escape and her jaunt down Kharan’s main street, and to say that he was angry was massively to understate the case.

He was furious. Absolutely, volcanically furious.

The fury boiled away inside him like lava, and only long years of iron control kept it locked down and not spilling everywhere, destroying everything in its path.

Because he had no one to blame for this incident but himself. He was the one who’d elected to bring her back to Kharan and not to follow Faisal’s advice to return her and her father to the dig site from which they’d come.

No, he’d decided to handle her himself, to make sure she was taken back to Kharan and had the medical treatment she required. Her father had needed more, and was still unconscious in a secure hospital ward. She had been transferred to the facility where they kept all illegal visitors to Ashkaraz.

Normally those visitors tended to be men. They were not usually little women who could wriggle through small windows. He hadn’t even known the cell she’d been put in had a window.

Not that it mattered now. What mattered was that this woman had escaped and had somehow stumbled unchecked into Kharan, and she had seen through the lies he and his people told the world.

Far from being a nation stuck in time, mired in poverty and war, it was prosperous and healthy, its population well-cared-for and happy.

And it was a wealthy nation. A very wealthy nation.

A nation that had to hide its wealth from the rest of the world or else be torn apart by those desperate to get their hands on it—as had occurred nearly twenty years earlier.

He couldn’t allow that to happen again.

He wouldn’t.

Catherine had been at the centre of it twenty years ago and now here was Charlotte Devereaux, another foreign woman causing another diplomatic incident.

This time, though, he would not be a party to it, the way he had been with Catherine. He’d learned his lesson and he’d learned it well, and he would not be giving this woman the benefit of the doubt.

‘Oh,’ she said faintly. ‘Oh. I... I see.’

Her voice had a pleasant husk to it. Somewhere along the line she’d lost her scarf, so her silvery blonde hair hung in a loose ponytail down her back, wisps of it stuck to her forehead. The angry red of the sunburn she’d got out in the desert had faded slightly, leaving her pale skin pink. It made the colour of her eyes stand out, glittering like stars. She wore the same pair of loose blue trousers she’d had on in the desert, though the white shirt had gone, leaving in its place a tight-fitting white tank top.

It did not escape his notice that, though she was small, she had a surprisingly lush figure.

‘I am sure that you do not see,’ he said, forcing those particular observations to one side. ‘Because your little excursion has put me in a very difficult position.’

She gave him a cool look that pricked against something inside him like a thorn, needling him. ‘Indeed? How so?’

It was not the response he’d hoped for. In fact, nothing of her behaviour was the response he’d hoped for. She should be afraid. As any woman—or any person, for that matter—who’d woken up to find herself in a jail cell would be. Especially given the rumours she must have heard about Ashkaraz.

She should be terrified for her life, not standing there giving him cool looks as if he was nothing more than a mere functionary and not the king of his own country.

‘Miss Devereaux,’ he said, his anger still raw. ‘You are not at all showing proper deference.’

She blinked those glittering silvery eyes again. ‘Oh, I’m not? I’m sorry. I don’t know the customs—’

‘You would curtsey before your queen, would you not?’ He cut her off coldly. ‘I am king here. My word is law.’

‘Oh,’ she repeated, lowering her gaze. ‘I didn’t mean to offend.’ Then she made an awkward curtsey, her hands fluttering at her sides.

He narrowed his gaze at her. Was she making fun of him? He didn’t think so, but you could never tell with foreigners.

It didn’t improve his temper.

Then again, he shouldn’t be taking his temper out on her, full stop. A king should be above such things, as his father had always told him. A ruler needed to be hard, cold. Detached from his emotions.

Except he could feel his anger straining at the leash he’d put on it. He wanted her on her knees, begging his forgiveness.

Are you sure that’s the only reason you want her on her knees?

Something shifted inside him—a strange pull.

She was...pretty. And, yes, there was a physical attraction there. Perhaps that accounted for the reason this particular woman tried his temper so badly. Not that an attraction would make the slightest difference. As he’d told Faisal out in the desert, he’d treat her exactly the same way he treated every other intruder.

‘It is too late for that,’ he said implacably. ‘You have offended already. You escaped your cell and found your way into the city.’

She was standing with her small hands clasped, but this time the expression on her face wasn’t so much cool as uncertain.

‘Yes, well...as I was going to explain, I didn’t mean to. I just wasn’t sure what you were going to do with me or my father.’

‘We would have done what we do with all illegal visitors to Ashkaraz. You would have both been sent back to your home country.’ He paused. ‘But we cannot do that now.’

Her pale brows drew together. ‘Why not?’

‘Because you have walked down the main street of Kharan and seen the truth.’

‘What? You mean all the nice buildings? The new cars and smartphones and things?’ Her mouth, full and prettily pink, curved. ‘It’s such a beautiful city. How is me seeing that a problem?’

‘Because you will tell other people, Miss Devereaux.’

What he had to tell her now wouldn’t be welcome, yet she had to understand the gravity of the situation.

‘And they will tell others, and so it will go on until the whole world learns the truth. And I cannot let that happen.’

She was still frowning. ‘I don’t understand...’

‘Of course you do not. But you will have plenty of time to work it out.’

Another ripple of uncertainty crossed her face. ‘That sounds ominous. What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean that we cannot send you back to England. We cannot send either of you back to England. You will have to remain in Ashkaraz.’ He paused again, for emphasis. ‘Indefinitely.’

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