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He sounded so certain that she stared up at him in bewilderment. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because I have bought up all the rights to those photos—they are now exclusively mine. No newspaper will ever publish them, the calendar shall never be reprinted, and the negatives have been destroyed. I have even made sure that they will never appear on the infernal internet,’ he finished grimly.
She opened her mouth to ask how, but then changed her mind. When you were as rich and as powerful and as determined as Hashim, then Sienna supposed anything was possible. Instead, she gave a rather wobbly smile, needing something more than words or reassurance now. Something which she had missed so unbearably. She was aching to have him touch her again. ‘Won’t you please kiss me?’ she whispered.
He felt a strange kick to his heart as he bent his face to hers. Was it a kind of weakness for a man to be so in thrall to one woman? ‘You wish your Sheikh to go before the cameras in a state of arousal?’ he murmured.
‘Oh, Hashim—I never thought of that! I’ve got so much to learn. Maybe we’d better not…’
He gave a low, rumbling laugh. ‘And you think that I have not been aroused since the moment you first walked in, my love? That I can look at you without wanting you? Then, yes, you still have much to learn! Now, come here.’
It was a brief kiss, fuelled by a sense of coming home rather than passion—though that was bubbling away beneath the surface as his lips brushed over hers.
‘Now,’ he said firmly, and, bending down, rang a small golden bell.
A stream of people began to appear. Men in flowing robes who bowed briefly to her and then deeper still to Hashim. And then they were walking along cool marble corridors towards the ‘small’ Throne Room—which seemed pretty vast to Sienna, but there again she hadn’t had much experience of them.
She had been in TV studios before, but never when everyone had been behaving with such genuine deference towards the interviewee.
Hashim settled her in a chair at the back of the room and she watched while the camera lights lit up his face like the brightest sunshine. And then the red light flashed and the cameras began to roll, and suddenly he was speaking live to the nation.
She watched on the screen, so that she could read the English subtitles, and much of it she missed, because her heart was beating so fast with nerves and excitement and protectiveness.
But key phrases would stay in her mind and her heart for ever.
‘I have been charged with the running of our country.’ His face grew very serious at this point. ‘An awesome responsibility which I have always embraced and cherished. But your Ruler must be allowed to fulfil his own personal destiny in order to best discharge his duties to his homeland.’
He sent her the briefest of looks before continuing. ‘In Qudamah, your Sheikh is permitted by law to have a harem of up to sixty women.’
Sienna sat bolt upright. She hadn’t known that!
‘But I do not wish to have sixty women. I wish for only one, for I believe in monogamy.’
There was an unmistakable ripple in the room—as if he had just come out and declared that he had converted to cannibalism!
Now his eyes were on her, and they were very steady.
‘For I have found my very own houri, and I intend to make her my wife.’
Later, Sienna would discover the significance of that particular word. A houri was a beautiful young woman but—far more crucially—she was a virgin. He was telling his people that he had found a bride who, although she might not at first appear so, was actually a suitable bride for their Sheikh.
She would also learn that Abdul-Aziz had travelled to England with the intention of attempting to bribe her with unimaginable riches to stay away from the Sheikh. But then he had seen her playing with Cara in the homespun tranquillity of her mother’s house.
‘I realised that I had never allowed myself to think beyond the stereotype of what I believed you to be,’ he told her. ‘And of course by then I realised that my Sheikh had grown to love you—and suddenly I could see why.’
And it didn’t take long to realise that Hashim’s mother wanted only her son’s happiness.
For when it all came down to it palaces and different cultures counted for very little. In the end, the human spirit was the same the world over.
EPILOGUE
A DOLLOP of mashed banana landed in a slimy lump on the back of her hand and Sienna giggled as she wiped it away, looking up into the bemused black eyes of her husband as he surveyed the breakfast scene before him.
Hashim smiled. How his life had been transformed! Gone was the starchy formality and the slow glide of numerous servants who catered to his every whim. Instead, there sat his beautiful Sienna, with their gorgeous wriggling son on her lap.
‘What a merry dance he leads you,’ he observed ruefully.
‘Ah, but what wonderful co-ordination he has,’ cooed Sienna. ‘Only eight months old, and he’s practically feeding himself!’
