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“I knew what I was doing.” He pushed back a tendril of her damp hair. “And if I could so lightly break my promise to Kalila, how could anyone ever trust my word again?” Looking down at her, he said softly, “How could you?”
“I could,” Irene insisted, even if part of her wondered. She gripped the towel wrapped tightly over her breasts, over her breaking heart. “I know you, Sharif,” she said, her voice cracking. “Honor, caring for your family, for your country—that’s everything to you. You can’t—”
A heavy door banged against the wall. Cold air rushed into the hammam, causing the steam to melt away. Irene jumped when she saw the bath attendant rush in. The woman didn’t even look at her, just went straight to Sharif and spoke in rapid Arabic. The words were too quick for Irene to understand, but she saw the instant tension of Sharif’s body, like a man who’d just been cut with steel.
“What is it?” she asked as the attendant bowed and hurried away. “What’s happened?”
Sharif walked to a wall. He flicked on an electric switch, and the bath was suddenly filled with harsh light, causing all the shadows and mysteries to disappear, leaving only cold reality.
“You need to get dressed.” His voice had no expression.
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Longing to put her arms around his naked chest, to offer him comfort, she went close to him, trying to see his face. He looked at her. He was once again the powerful emir in control. The vulnerable man she’d so briefly seen beneath the mask had disappeared as if he’d never been.
Emotionlessly Sharif said, “My future bride has seen fit to honor us with a visit.”
Irene’s lips parted. “You can’t mean—”
“Kalila has just arrived unexpectedly at the palace.” He turned empty eyes to hers. “Come, Miss Taylor,” he said. “Come meet my beautiful bride.”
CHAPTER NINE
“YOU CAN’T TRUST servants. Any of them.” Kalila Al-Bahar’s red-nailed hand waved airily over the dining room table. “Thieves and liars, most of them. And the precious few who aren’t, well, they’re generally stupid and lazy.”
Irene blushed, exchanging glances with Aziza, who sat wide-eyed beside her. Kalila seemed completely unaware that the long dinner table was, in fact, surrounded by twelve palace servants, all of them within earshot, all of them stone-faced.
“Oh,” Kalila turned to Irene with a saccharine-sweet smile on her sharp red lips, “I do beg your pardon. Of course I didn’t mean you, Miss Taylor. I’m sure you’re...none of these things.”
“Of course,” Irene said through gritted teeth. Her eyes met Sharif’s. He was at the head of the table, in his traditional white robes, as was right and proper for the Emir of Makhtar entertaining the daughter of the former vizier, now wealthy governor of Makhtar’s eastern region.
Sharif’s handsome face was as expressionless as a statue, but oh, she knew what he was feeling. Her heart twisted painfully.
This horrible woman was to be his wife—the partner of his life—the mother of his children?
Irene had been so nervous to meet the beautiful Kalila. After leaving Sharif at the hammam, she’d rushed to her room, tidied up, showered and dressed. She’d been relieved to see a new box of contact lenses from the local optometrist waiting on her writing desk. Her hands had trembled as she put on red lipstick and a simple black sheath dress, adding a rope of fake pearls around her neck, like armor.
As if any lipstick or fake pearls could make Irene compete with Kalila Al-Bahar. When Irene had first met her at the start of dinner, she’d been overwhelmed with misery. The Makhtari heiress was even more beautiful and thin and impossibly glamorous in person. She had dark eyes lined with kohl, dark hair streaked blond, red lips, long red fingernails, tight red dress. The February weather in Makhtar was pleasantly warm, but she’d still draped herself in a mink coat. She looked like a gorgeous 1950s film star, Irene had thought, crossed with a dash of anorexic porn actress.
Then Kalila had started to speak, and she hadn’t stopped since. She had a beautiful, husky, magical voice. But she dominated every conversation with selfish, ugly words.
“If I had my way,” she continued now, “I’d bury every servant in the desert, and replace them with—I don’t know, anything. Trained dogs. Robots.” She sighed. “But robot technology is just so damn slow.”
The silence that greeted this bombshell was immediate. Even Kalila sensed something in the air.
