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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SIENNA’S first sight of Hashim’s palace was against a backdrop of stars—like a distant castle in a fairy tale—and she touched her fingers to her lips in disbelief and a growing sense of wonder. As if this could not be happening. Not now, and not to her.
But it was.
She was summoned to a room all golden and sapphire-blue, but she was scarcely aware of the lavish and opulent décor for only one figure dominated her line of vision. As he always did. Tall and lean and proud—the beautiful-ugly face tense. His flowing white robes made him look like a stranger, but his eyes were oh-so-familiar. Burning into her like smouldering coals that heated her skin and warmed her heart.
He nodded when he saw her, as if she had just confirmed something in his mind, but Sienna was terribly aware of protocol and of the presence of his servants—even though they had their eyes averted. And so she simply nodded back—as if they were two commuters who passed each other on the train platform every morning.
With a curt, clipped statement in his native tongue he dismissed the servants, and after the room was emptied he stood staring at her for long, countless seconds.
‘Now come to me,’ he commanded.
She went like a woman willingly sleepwalking. Towards him. Summoned by her Sheikh. Into his arms. The place where she most wanted to be.
There was no kiss, just a fierce embrace which seemed to force all the breath out of her lungs. He clasped her against him and pressed his face to her scented hair. His words were muffled.
‘You know that I love you, don’t you, Sienna?’
Sienna pulled away and stared up at him, her eyes blinking rapidly, certain that she must have misheard him. ‘Hashim?’
‘Can’t you feel it in the beating of my heart?’ He placed her palm over his chest, where the rapid thundering of his life-blood made her eyes widen in dawning realisation. ‘It is no good, Sienna—for I have tried. By the mountains and the rivers, I have tried! I have attempted the impossible and have failed. To forget you. To imagine life without you. And I cannot. I will not.’
‘But love?’ she whispered.
‘Yes, love.’ He smiled. ‘More powerful than the eagle—a force as powerful as life itself—can you not feel it gathering strength, Sienna—as the bird itself does just before flight?’
He waited.
But Sienna felt tongue-tied and strangely humble—and scared too, in these imposing surroundings. A declaration she had longed for and never thought to hear—and now that it had been made she was shaken. It was as if dust had turned to gold before her eyes, and she was terrified that it would change back to dust again.
Yet he was right. She could feel the strength emanating from him—waves of it washing over her barely believing self. She touched her fingertips to the charm at her neck, as if it could give her the courage to say the words to him. Words she had once had tossed back in her face. Words she had grown inside her for so long, all the while trying to deny them.
‘I love you too,’ Hashim,’ she said brokenly. ‘I have done right from the very start, and it never changed—never dimmed—even when I prayed that it would.’ She stared into the black eyes which had softened now. ‘But you knew that, didn’t you? You could read it in my eyes.’
‘Yes.’
‘And it doesn’t actually change anything, does it? Not practically. You’re still a sheikh and I’m still a—’
‘No!’ He cut her words off with brutal force. ‘Do not say it! You are more and then much more—but you are not that! A youthful folly does not define a person for the rest of their lives!’
‘But that is how I will be perceived.’
‘And that,’ he said grimly, ‘that is why I am making the broadcast. They are setting up cameras in the small Throne Room.’ He tilted his head—handsome and irresistible. ‘Will you come in with me?’
‘What are you going to say?’
‘Will you come in with me?’ he repeated inexorably.
‘Yes.’
‘And I must ask you something else, Sienna—and this is important. The life you live in England is incompatible with mine. My home is here. My place is here—increasingly more so. Could you renounce much of the freedom you enjoy in England? Is your love for me strong enough to embrace my life here? For if you decide to, you must do so without reservation. There can be no trial period, no waiting to see whether or not you can adapt. It must be a leap of faith and nothing less. You must decide whether your love for me is strong enough to commit to me, and to commit for the rest of your life. When you marry me,’ he finished deliberately, his gaze fixed firmly on her face.
