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CHAPTER ONE
‘I’M nother for the ood Queen of Al-O but looks I could haveI need is the distraction of a beautiful woman’
Princess Said with shock outside the Sultan of Al-Omar’s private office in his London home He hadn’t been informed that she was there yet as he’d been on this call His secretary, who had left htly ajar—subjecting Samia to the deep rumble of the Sultan’s voice and his even more cataclysmic words
The drawling voice ca deeply cynical ‘That she may well appear, but certain people have always speculated that when the time came to take my bride I’d choose conservatively, and I’d hate to let the bookies down’
Saine what the voice on the other end of the phone had said, so
Even if she hadn’t heard this explicit conversation Samia already knehat the Sultan of Al-Oe She hadn’t slept a wink and had co that it would all be a terrible mistake To hear him lay out in such bald ter And not only that but he evidently considered it to be a done deal!
She’d only ht years previously, when she’d gone to one of his legendary annual birthday parties in B’harani, the capital of Al-Oone on to England to finish her studies, in a bid to try and help her overcome her chronic shyness Sae where her limbs had had a mind of their own, her hair had been a ball of frizz and she’d still been wearing the thick bifocals that had plagued her life since she was small
After an excruciatingly e moment in which she’d knocked over a slittering and beautiful people had turned to look at her, she’d fled for sanctuary, finding it in a dimly lit room which had turned out to be a library
Sa ain
‘Adil, I appreciate that as ht choice, but I can assure you that she ticks all the boxes—I’e like this work The stability and reputation of my country comes first, and I need a ill enhance that’
Mortification twisted Sa to the fact that she was a world apart from his usual women She didn’t need to overhear this conversation to know that Saoing to sit there and wait for humiliation to walk up and slap her in the face
Sultan Sadiq Ibn Kamal Hussein put down the phone, every muscle tensed Claustrophobia and an unwelcome sense of powerlessness drove him up out of his leather chair and to the here he looked out onto a busy square right in the exclusive heart of London
Delaying theback to his desk where a sheaf of photos was laid out Princess Samia of Burquat She was from a small independent emirate which lay on his northern borders, on the Persian Gulf She had three younger half-sisters, and her older brother had beco Emir on the death of their father some twelve years before
Sadiq frowned , so he knehat the yoke of responsibility was like How heavy it could be Even so, he wasn’t such a fool to consider that he and the Ereed to this e—and ouldn’t she?—then they would be brothers—in-law
He sighed The photos showed indistinct i wouely remembered from when he’d met her at one of his parties None of the pictures had captured her fully The best ones were fro trip with two friends But even in the press photos she was sandwiched between two other irls, and a baseball cap was all but hiding her from view
The most important consideration here was that none of the photos came from the tabloids Princess Samia was not part of the Royal Arabian party set She was discreet, and had carved out a quiet, respectable career as an archivist in London’s National Library after coree For that reason, and many others, she was perfect He didn’t want a ould bring with her a dubious past life, or any whiff of scandal He’d courted enough press attention hi And to that end he’d had Sa sure there were no skeletons lurking in any closet
His e would not be like his parents’ It would not be driven by e and resemble a battlefield He would not sink the country into a vortex of chaos as his father had done, because he’d been too distracted by a ho’d resented everymarried to a man she didn’t want to be married to His father had fae that in his obsession to have the renowned beauty reputed to be in love with another he’d paid her family a phenomenal dowry for her His mother’s constant sadness had driven Sadiq far away for most of his life
He needed a quiet, stable ould coive hi his country And, above all, a ouldn’t engage his emotions And from what he’d seen of Princess Samia she would be absolutely perfect
With a sense of fatalism in his bones he swept all the photos into a pile and put theo forward His best friends—the ruling Sheikh and his brother from a small independent sheikhdom within his borders—had recently settled down, and if he rele
for in to look directionless and unstable
He couldn’t avoid his destiny It was time to meet his future wife He buzzed his secretary ‘Noor, you can send Princess Samia in’