Rumours: The Billion-Dollar Brides

‘Why am I being kept here?’ she dared to ask then.

‘We are waiting for instructions,’ she was told.

‘And the ring?’

Both women exchanged looks and neither made an answer. Polly was angry that her ring had been taken from her because she treasured it as her sole remaining link with the mother she had never known. When would her ring be returned to her? At the same time she was trying to take encouragement from the fact that she had not been strip-searched and that tea had been brought. It was a misunderstanding. What else could it be? She had done nothing wrong. But had her mother done something wrong years back in the past?

How was she supposed to answer that question? In many ways, her mother remained a complete mystery to her eldest daughter. Annabel had travelled the world in luxury to look after other people’s children while abandoning her own to the tender mercies of her own mother, who had been a most reluctant guardian. She had, however, dutifully provided financial support for Polly’s grandmother and her daughters for many years. When that support came to a sudden unannounced halt, Polly had learned a lot about how to live on a very tight budget.

The sisters had inherited nothing from their grandmother. She had left the contents of her house, all that she possessed, to her son, Polly’s uncle, complaining bitterly that her daughter had ruined her retirement by forcing her to raise her illegitimate children. It was a label Polly had always hated, a word the younger generation rarely used because it wasn’t fair to tag a child with something that they had played no active part in creating. But it was a word that had meant a great deal to her staunchly conservative and judgemental grandmother, who had been ashamed that her only grandchildren had been born out of wedlock.

* * *

While Polly agonised on the other side of Kashan, Hakim, who rarely moved fast, was positively racing down the main corridor of the palace in his haste to reach his King. His rounded face was beaming and flushed, his little goatee beard quivering. Rashad was in his office, working diligently as usual.

‘The ring!’ Hakim carolled out of breath, holding it high in the air like a trophy before hurrying over to lay it down reverently on the top of the desk. ‘It is found.’

Rashad frowned and sprang upright, carrying the ring in one lean brown hand to scrutinise it in the sunlight pouring through the window. ‘How was it found? Where was it?’

Hakim explained about the British woman being held at the airport.

Rashad’s dark as jet eyes hardened. ‘Why is she not in prison?’

‘This must be carefully handled,’ Hakim urged. ‘We would not want to cause a diplomatic incident—’

‘A thief is a thief and must be held accountable,’ his King assured him without hesitation.

‘The woman is young. She could not have been the thief. She has not been questioned yet. The airport police wished to first ascertain with the palace that the ring was the genuine article. There is great excitement in Kashan. Crowds are already forming at the airport.’

Rashad frowned. ‘Why? How could word of this discovery already have spread?’

‘The airport grapevine was most thoroughly aired on social media,’ his adviser told him wryly. ‘There will be no keeping a lid on this story—’

‘Crowds?’ Rashad prompted in bewilderment.

‘The woman concerned is not being viewed as a thief but as the woman who has brought the Hope of Dharia home to our King. When I add that she is young and apparently beautiful...well, if you think about how your great-grandmother came to your great-grandfather and brought the Hope with her, you can see why our people are thrilled.’

But Rashad was still frowning. A large gathering of thrilled people could translate all too easily into civil unrest. He could barely comprehend his aide’s fervent attitude to what was, after all, only a legend, polished up by the next generation to enhance and romanticise the monarchy and their alliances. ‘But that was a century ago in another age and it was a set-up to achieve exactly what it did achieve...a marriage that suited both countries at the time.’

‘It is dangerous to have crowds congregating at the airport. I would humbly suggest that you have the woman brought here to be questioned. It will keep the whole matter under wraps without causing undue comment.’

Rashad was thinking with regret of the old dungeons in the palace basement. He didn’t think Hakim wanted the British woman put in the basement. He reminded himself that the ring had come home and that the woman was apparently too young to have been responsible for its disappearance. ‘Very well. I suppose it will be interesting to hear her story.’

‘It is a complete miracle that the Hope of Dharia has been returned to us,’ Hakim declared fervently. ‘And a wonderful portent of good events yet to come.’

* * *

Sadly, there was nothing miraculous about Polly’s feelings as she was herded out of the airport by what looked suspiciously like a rear entrance as they emerged into a loading bay surrounded by crates. She was clammy with fright in spite of the presence of the female security guard but her rarely roused temper was also beginning to rise. She was a law-abiding, well-behaved traveller. How dared they force her to endure such treatment?

‘You are going to the palace!’ the woman told her in a voice that suggested that she expected Polly to turn cartwheels of joy at the news. ‘It is a great honour. They have even sent a car and a military escort for you.’

Polly climbed into the rear passenger seat of a shiny white four-wheel drive. She linked her hands tightly together on her lap. Over twenty years ago her mother had been employed at the palace and now she was receiving an unexpected opportunity to see the place, she told herself, striving to take a more positive view of her circumstances. If she got the chance to ask questions she might even meet someone who remembered her mother working at the palace. Of course, that could only lead to a very awkward exchange, she acknowledged reluctantly. Had her mother slept around? Had she been involved with more than one man? And how on earth was she supposed to find that out without seriously embarrassing herself and other people? For the first time, Ellie’s forecast that seeking out her father would be like looking for a needle in a haystack returned to haunt Polly and she resolved to keep her personal business strictly private until she was confident of her reception.

A military truck crammed with armed soldiers led the way out of the airport and Polly’s nervous tension increased as a big crowd of people surrounded the convoy when it slowed down to leave the complex. Faces pressed against the blacked-out windows, hands thumped noisily on the outside of the car and there was a great deal of shouting. Something akin to panic briefly gripped Polly’s slender frame and perspiration beaded her brow. She shut her eyes tightly and prayed while the car pulled away slowly and then mercifully speeded up.

The car drove down a modern thoroughfare lined with tall buildings and lots of people standing around, apparently there to stare at the car she was travelling in. There were masses of people everywhere and a surprising suggestion of a general holiday mood, she thought in surprise as people waved in a seemingly friendly and enthusiastic fashion as the convoy passed by.

They left the city of Kashan and the crowds behind to travel into a desert landscape empty of human habitation. Flat plains of sand ornamented with rocky outcrops stretched in every direction and in the distance she could see giant dunes. There was something about that view stretched taut below a bright blue sky and the burning sun that made her want to paint in a medium different from her usual dreamy pastels. Distracted, Polly blinked as the car purred through giant gates into a startlingly green and lush spread of gardens dotted with trees and shrubs and colourful flowers.

Ahead loomed a very old building that was topped by a variety of large and small domes and which spread in all directions in a haphazard design.

The door beside her opened and Polly eased back out into the simmering heat, her lightweight trousers and tee shirt instantly sticking to her dampening skin. It was incredibly hot. A single female figure stood beneath the huge entrance portico and as Polly approached she bowed very low and motioned a hand in silent request that she follow her.

Clearly, she wasn’t under arrest, Polly reflected with intense relief, her curiosity flying as high as her imagination as she entered the palace, but her anger at the fearful uncertainty she had endured remained. They padded down a very long and very broad hallway lined with ornately carved stone columns. Her sandals squeaked as she trekked after the woman into the depths of the great sprawling building. They traversed a shallow staircase and crossed a scantily furnished large room towards French windows that stood wide open.

Oh, dear, Polly thought in dismay, back to the horribly hot outdoors and the unforgiving burn of the midday sun.

She walked hesitantly out into a walled courtyard and her companion departed. Water gushed down into a fountain overhung by palm trees. The tiles on the ground formed an elaborate pattern faded by time. Polly moved straight into the shade by the fountain, desperate for the cooler air.

A young woman in a long fashionable dress appeared and dealt her a small tight smile, sweeping a hand helpfully at the table and two chairs sited in full sun. Suppressing a groan, Polly moved closer just as quick steps sounded from behind her. The young woman immediately dropped down onto her knees and bowed her head. Polly blinked in astonishment and slowly turned round.

A very tall man with blue-black hair and eyes as keen as a hawk’s surveyed her. The hunting analogy was apt, she conceded, because she felt cornered and intimidated. He emanated authority and danger like a force field. He was also, very probably, the best-looking man she had ever seen outside a modelling advert and she knew who he was, thanks to her Internet research on the country of Dharia. He was the recently crowned ruler of Dharia, King Rashad. She swallowed hard, thoroughly disconcerted and shaken that she was being granted a personal meeting with such an important individual.

Her mouth had run dry and she parted her lips, struggling to think of something to say but he got there before her.

‘I am Rashad, Miss Dixon. I would like to hear how the ring came into your possession.’

I am Rashad, she thought, as if there were only one Rashad in the whole world. And looking at him, she thought there might well only be one man quite like him in the Arab world, a remarkable man who had single-handedly united his country’s different factions to bring about peace and who was universally and quite slavishly adored for that commendable achievement.

‘The truth is...there’s not much I can explain,’ Polly admitted shakily, for the instant she connected with those striking dark brown eyes as luminescent as liquid gold in the sunlight she could barely breathe, never mind think and vocalise.

CHAPTER TWO

‘PLEASE SIT DOWN,’ Rashad urged in a harshened undertone because he was finding it a challenge to maintain his normal self-discipline.

An instantaneous lust to possess was flaming through his lean, powerful frame and the uniqueness of that experience in a woman’s radius thoroughly unsettled him. But then the woman in front of him was, admittedly, quite exceptional. Polly Dixon was blindingly beautiful with hair of that silvery white-blonde shade that so rarely survived childhood. Her wealth of hair fell in a loose tangle of waves halfway to her waist. Her skin was equally fair, moulded over a heart-shaped face brought alive by delft blue eyes and a sultry full pink mouth. She wasn’t very tall. In fact she was rather tiny in stature, Rashad acknowledged abstractedly, doubting that she would reach any higher than his chest, but the ripe curves of her figure at breast and hip were defiantly female and mature.

Polly gazed back at him, dry-mouthed with nervous tension. He had amazing cheekbones, a perfect narrow-bridged nose and a full wide sensual mouth enhanced by the dark shadow of stubble already visible on his bronzed skin. With difficulty she recollected her thoughts and spoke up. ‘I gather all this fuss is about the ring that I had in my bag,’ she assumed. ‘I’m afraid I know very little about it. It only recently came into my possession after my mother died and I think that she had had it for a long time—’

Rashad’s sister-in-law, Hayat, brought tea to the table, acting as a discreet chaperone and stepping back out of view.

‘What was your mother’s name?’ Rashad enquired, watching Polly lick a drop of mint tea off her lower lip and imagining that tiny pink tongue flicking against his own flesh with such driving and colourful immediacy that he was glad of the table that concealed the all too masculine swelling at his groin.

Polly was starting to feel incredibly tired as well as desperately thirsty and she sipped constantly at the tea, wishing that it were cold enough to gulp down. ‘Annabel Dixon,’ she admitted heavily. ‘But I don’t see what that—’

Rashad had frozen into position. Lush black lashes swooped down to hide his eyes and then skimmed upward again to frame startled gold chips of enquiry, his surprise unconcealed. ‘When I was a child I had a nanny called Annabel Dixon,’ he revealed flatly. ‘Are you saying that that woman was your mother?’

‘Yes...but I know very little about her and nothing at all about her time here in Dharia because I was brought up by my grandmother, not by my mother,’ Polly told him grudgingly while marvelling at the idea that her mother had looked after Rashad as a little boy. ‘Why is the ring so important?’

‘It is the ceremonial ring of the Kings of Dharia, a symbol of their right to rule,’ Rashad explained. ‘It has great emotional significance for my people. The ring went missing over twenty-five years ago when my family died and the dictator Arak staged a coup to take power here. Who is your father?’

Polly stiffened at his question. A headache was forming behind her brow and she was wishing she had access to the medication in her case while also dimly wondering when she could hope to be reunited with her luggage. ‘I don’t know but if all this happened twenty-five years ago it must’ve happened around the time I was conceived, so you see I have no further information to offer. I had no idea the ring was a lost treasure, nor do I know how my mother got hold of it or why she kept it. Surely she would’ve known how important it was?’

‘I would’ve assumed so,’ Rashad conceded. ‘I was in her care with my brothers from birth to the age of six and during that period your mother must have learned a great deal about my family.’

‘What was she like?’ Polly was betrayed into asking.

He looked at her in surprise.

‘I don’t really remember her...at least I have only the vaguest of recollections. Perhaps you don’t remember anything about her,’ Polly added hastily, her very pale face flushing as she gave him that escape clause.

‘She was always smiling, laughing,’ Rashad recounted quietly. ‘I was fond of her...as were my brothers. She was not blonde, like you...she had red hair—’

Polly nodded stiffly, thinking about her sister’s red hair, which Ellie hated. ‘Is there anyone else here who would still remember her?’ she asked daringly. ‘Naturally I’m very curious about her.’

‘Few of the staff from that era remain in the household,’ Rashad responded with regret, his lean dark face shadowing because so many of the palace staff had died in the coup.

‘So what happens to the ring now?’ Polly pressed tautly.

‘It must remain here in Dharia,’ Rashad pointed out in some surprise, as if she should have grasped that reality immediately. ‘This is where it belongs.’

Polly lifted her chin, her blue eyes darkening with annoyance even as a mortifying trickle of sweat ran down between her breasts below her loose tee shirt. She might be feeling hot and bothered and impossibly tired but there was nothing wrong with her wits. ‘But it is my ring and it’s the only token I will ever have from my mother.’

Rashad was taken aback by her statement. ‘That is most unfortunate but—’

‘For me, not for you!’ Polly interrupted fierily, her anger sparking at his immense assurance and his assumption that she would simply accept the situation.

Rashad was unaccustomed to being interrupted and even less familiar with the challenge of dealing with an angry woman. An ebony brow lifted at a derisive slant. ‘You are more fortunate than you appreciate,’ he told her levelly. ‘You could have been accused of theft simply for having the ring in your possession—’

Polly rammed back her chair and stood up, bracing her hands down on the table to steady herself because that quick impulsive movement had left her a little dizzy. ‘Well, go ahead and have me charged with theft!’ she urged furiously. ‘How dare you treat me like a criminal? My journey has been interrupted. I was marched off by security staff in front of an audience at the airport, held against my will in a nasty little room for hours and had the life threatened out of me when a crowd mobbed the car on the way here—’

‘You were selected at random at the airport to be searched in a drug-screening scheme we have recently established,’ Rashad interposed smooth as glass. ‘I regret that you have been inconvenienced and embarrassed and will ensure that what remains of your holiday compensates you for the experience.’

Backing further away from the table and its support, Polly valiantly straightened her back and squared her shoulders to lift her head high. ‘I want my mother’s ring back!’ she declared stridently.

Rashad rose fluidly upright, shamefully entertained by the sheer fury that had erupted in her face, flushing the skin to a delicious shade of pink, darkening her bright blue eyes to violet and compressing her lips into a surprisingly tough line. ‘You must know that that is not true. The ring did not belong either to your mother or your family—’

‘It was left to me. Therefore it belongs to me.’

Rashad raised a black brow as he strode towards her and she warily backed away, her legs feeling oddly weak and unusually clumsy.

‘The most basic law is that a stolen item may not be considered the legal possession of the person it is given or sold to because the individual who gave or sold it did not have the right of ownership to do so.’

Polly wasn’t listening to him. After all, now he was talking like a lawyer and, even in his light grey designer suit, he looked like a fantasy against the colourful backdrop of the courtyard. He didn’t look real, indeed none of what had happened to her since she first set foot on the soil of Dharia felt remotely real, so far did those events lie outside her experience. And all of it, him, her surroundings and the whole complex problem of the wretched ring, not to mention the heat, which she was finding unbearable, was becoming too much for her.

‘I’m not going to discuss it with you because it’s my ring, not yours!’ Polly flung back at him dizzily while she wondered why her fantasy image of him was turning a little fuzzy round the edges and putting him into a soft focus that did very little to blur the hard cast of his lean, darkly handsome features.

‘You are being most unreasonable,’ Rashad told her without skipping a beat while he stared at her, fascinated by the firebrand personality hidden beneath that beautiful fragile outer shell. ‘You are even being—forgive me for saying it—a little childish.’

Perspiration trickling down her forehead, Polly’s small hands balled into fists. ‘If you weren’t who you are I’d thump you for saying that!’

A harried knock sounded on the French windows that led back into the palace and Hayat rose to answer it, bowing backwards out of his presence in the same way the staff had behaved over a century ago. The old ways were not always the right ways, Rashad reflected with a sigh. Polly shouting at him and threatening him with a ludicrous assault had had a wonderfully refreshing effect on his mood. Had she any idea how many Dharian laws she had just broken? No, nor would she care were she to be informed because she was angry with him and felt free to express her anger openly and honestly. Rashad had never enjoyed such freedom of expression or action. All he had learned about from the age of six was duty and the always dire consequences of not doing one’s duty.

Hakim was framed breathless in the doorway, frantically indicating a need to speak to him.

Rashad suppressed his irritation at the interruption. After all, whatever good or bad thing had happened, it was his job to deal with it, regardless of mood and timing. For one final self-indulgent moment, he focused on Polly, marvelling at her pale perfection in the sunlight. ‘I don’t think you could hit me even if you tried to do so,’ he responded silkily. ‘I am highly skilled in almost every form of combat.’

‘But you talk like a textbook,’ Polly mumbled shakily, moving jerkily forward as if she was struggling to walk back to the table.

But she didn’t make it. Her small frame crumpled down on the tiles in a heap. Hayat released a small startled scream but Rashad was a lot more practical. He bent down and scooped Polly up off the ground, astonished by how little her slight body weighed. Hayat went from screaming to wailing an urgent cry for help indoors so that a squad of guards came running in an unnecessary panic that their King was in danger.

Rashad refused to put Polly down when others offered to release him from his burden. Hakim was already calling the palace doctor. ‘I will speak to you when we are alone,’ he murmured guardedly.

‘What is the matter with her? Bad temper!’ Hayat remarked to no one in particular in the lift, which was uncomfortably full of people. ‘She shouted at the King. I could not believe my eyes or ears.’

Rashad wondered idly whether Hayat had been a playground sneak, who told tales on her peers. She was very snide about other women and always in his vicinity as if she feared he might not notice female flaws without her drawing them to his attention. He knew that as the sister of his late wife she regarded herself as a superior being. She belonged to a leading Dharian family. And every prominent Dharian family had put forward their daughters as potential brides for the King, a dangerous state of affairs that had convinced Rashad that he had to choose a bride from another country to maintain the peace between the various clans all jockeying for social position.

Rashad laid Polly down on a silk-clad bed. She was starting to recover consciousness, her eyelids flickering, little formless sounds emerging from her full pink lips. But even in that condition she contrived to look remarkably like an idealised image of an angel he had once seen in a book.

‘Dr Wasem is here,’ Hakim said at his elbow, and Rashad stepped back from the bed, suffering one of those weird ‘moment out of time’ sensations and momentarily spooked by it.

Being men, they retreated to the corridor while the female contingent of the household took charge.

‘I wonder what is wrong with her,’ Rashad said tautly.

‘I wonder what our excitable crowds will make of this latest development. One of your guards used his phone in the lift. I frowned at him. He should have desisted immediately. What kind of discipline have we here when even the men dedicated to protecting you are taking a part in this media gossip nonsense?’ Hakim was steadily working himself up into a rant.

‘She was so pale. I should have realised it wasn’t natural for her to be that pale,’ Rashad breathed as if his adviser hadn’t spoken.

Minutes later, Dr Wasem joined them. ‘Heatstroke,’ he pronounced with a hint of satisfaction at the speed of his diagnosis. ‘Normally I would suggest our guest be taken to hospital but I am aware of the current mood in our city. The women will ensure that she is rapidly cooled down and rehydrated. I wonder whose idea it was to take a woman who had already endured a long flight outside during the hottest part of the day? Even our constitutions are taxed in such temperatures as we have in summer.’

A slight flare of colour outlined Rashad’s stunning cheekbones. Sunstroke.

‘That is serious—’

‘Not as serious as what I have to tell you,’ Hakim whispered once the doctor turned away to reel off further instructions to the cluster of women at the bedroom door.

With difficulty, Rashad rose above the guilt he was experiencing because sunstroke could be very serious and his guest could have had a fit, convulsions or even a heart attack if her temperature were not speedily reduced. He was appalled by his own thoughtlessness. ‘And what is that?’

‘Our guest may say she is called Polly but the name on her passport is Zariyah,’ Hakim divulged in an even lower-pitched whisper.

‘But that is...that is my great-grandmother’s name. It is rarely used,’ Rashad framed in shock, for the name was not used in Dharia out of respect for his ancestor’s memory. ‘How can her birth name be Zariyah?’

‘My suspicions have taken me in a direction I really do not wish to go,’ Hakim admitted heavily. ‘But her mother’s possession of that ring and her use of that name for her child, added to her unexplained disappearance all those years ago, deeply concerns me...’

‘It is not possible that she could be a relative!’ Rashad protested with rare vehemence.

‘With the timing, added to your father’s predilection for dallying with pretty women on the staff, it is sadly...possible,’ Hakim spelt out grimly. ‘A DNA test must be taken. Our guest could be your half-sister.’

‘My...’ Half-sister? Reeling with shock, Rashad had frozen into position by the wall as he struggled mightily to handle that shattering possibility while instinctively swallowing back any repetition of that familial designation.

That was not a result he wanted. No, he didn’t want that, he definitely didn’t want to discover that he had been sexually attracted to a long-lost family member. The very idea made him feel sick. But hadn’t he once read somewhere about such unnatural attachments forming between adults who had not been raised together as children?

‘It must be confirmed one way or another. We must know,’ Hakim repeated doggedly. ‘Annabel Dixon was a flirtatious woman and your father was—’

The strong bones of Rashad’s bronzed face set hard as granite as he spoke. ‘I know what he was.’