Sleeping with the Sultan. Alexandra Sellers

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СКАЧАТЬ she was not to be judged by any of his rules. As she had her father.

      “Asparagus, thank you,” she said, and a plate of butter-soaked green spears was set before her. She took a sip of wine.

      “Tabbouleh,” Sheikh Durran firmly requested a moment later. She noticed that there was no wine in his wineglass. Well, she could have guessed that.

      In the loud buzz of conversation that was going up all around the ballroom, it seemed to her that the silence between the two of them must be as obvious to everyone as their earlier disagreement. She wondered if gossip about them would find its way into the tabloids. Journalists often needed no more. Find a button and sew a coat onto it was their motto.

      Dana glanced around the table in the hopes of finding a conversation to join. Somehow she had got put in with the political crowd. She recognized an academic who was often called in to discuss Bagestani affairs on a BBC current events program, and a television journalist who had made her name covering the Parvan-Kaljuk War and whose career was now devoted to reporting from one Middle East hot spot or another. Dana thought she would have enjoyed talking to them. But they were directly across the table from her, chatting quietly together.

      Sir John Cross, too, was engaged with the person on his other side.

      “You have no desire to see your father restored to his command, Miss Morningstar?” Sheikh Durran clearly had no reservations about picking up where they had left off.

      Dana picked up a stalk of asparagus and turned her head. Up close she recognized the Parvan flag on one of his medals. He was a veteran of the Parvan-Kaljuk War, then, but she was no closer to knowing who he was.

      “I have no expectation of seeing it,” she returned, before biting into the tender, delicious tip.

      “Why not?”

      “My father is, after all, nearly sixty. Not very much younger than President Ghasib.” She said the name deliberately, for in expat circles it wasn’t the thing to give the dictator his title. Saying it on an occasion like this was tantamount to declaring herself on the Ghasib side.

      She wasn’t on the Ghasib side and never had been, not even in her days of wildest rebellion. But no way was she going to fall meekly in line with the sheikh’s expectations.

      She pushed the buttery stalk into her mouth. There was no change in the sheikh’s expression, but suddenly she felt the phallic symbolism of it, almost as if he had pointed it out to her. Dream on! she wanted to snap. She chewed, then licked the butter from her fingertips before deliberately reaching for her wine again.

      Sheikh Durran seemed to take no notice. He picked up a small lettuce leaf and used it to pinch up some of his tabbouleh salad.

      “Do you think the only thing that will remove Ghasib from power is death from old age?”

      She chose another stalk. She opened her mouth, wondering if she could unnerve him by sucking the butter from the tip. Her eyes flicked to his. His look was dry and challenging, and without any warning, heat flamed in her cheeks.

      “Even granting the unlikely proposition that there was an al Jawadi heir,” she said defiantly, “even granting that this mysterious person should at last reveal himself and, even more amazingly, make the risky attempt to take power, and then granting that he should be successful in restoring the monarchy in Bagestan—what are the odds that my father would be given his old job back by someone who wasn’t even born at the time he held it?”

      His eyebrows went up, but he made no answer.

      “But the truth, if people would stop being excited by newspaper reports as reliable as sightings of the Abominable Snowman, is that it’s a mirage. No prince is going to come riding in on his white horse and wave his magic wand to make Ghasib disappear.”

      “You know this?”

      “Look—I got that nostalgia stuff at my daddy’s knee. He talked of nothing else all through my childhood. When I was a kid, I believed it. I had a huge crush on the mysterious Crown Prince who was going to make it all happen. I wrote letters to him. I even had a dream that I was going to marry him when I grew up. But he never came, did he? Thirty years now.

      “I paid my dues, Sheikh Durran. I believed the myth as firmly as I believed in Santa Claus. After my mother and father split Santa Claus never visited our house again, but I went on believing in him. And I went on believing in the al Jawadi restoration, too. But a dream like that only lasts so long. And then one day you wake up and realize—it’s a fairy tale.”

      “And at what age did you wake up?”

      Dana tensed and wished she hadn’t spoken so openly. She wasn’t sure why she had. “From the Santa Claus myth, eight. From the prince on a white horse fiction, sixteen,” she said shortly, and applied herself to her meal.

      “Sixteen,” Sheikh Ashraf repeated consideringly. “That’s young to stop believing in justice.”

      She supposed he was right. But she had had a very rude and sudden awakening.

      Dana shrugged, demolished another spear of asparagus, and wiped her fingers on her napkin. He waited, and she felt forced to answer. She waved a hand at the room.

      “What amazes me is the number of people who never wake up—who refuse to wake up.”

      “What happened at sixteen that took the stars from your eyes?”

      I discovered that the father I adored was a monster and nothing he said was to be believed.

      She shrugged and lied again. “Nothing in particular.”

      His gaze probed her for an uncomfortable moment, but to her relief he let it pass.

      “And what happened to your letters?” he asked.

      “What?” she asked blankly. She automatically leaned towards him as the waiter cleared her plate.

      “The letters you wrote to the Crown Prince. What became of them?”

      She really wished she hadn’t told him about that. It wasn’t a part of her past she confided very often. Something had knocked her off her centre tonight.

      “I really don’t know.” Her tone said, don’t care.

      “They were never sent?”

      “Where to? My father told me Crown Prince Kamil had escaped from the palace as a baby, with his mother carrying him in a load of Ghasib’s dirty laundry. He said they got to Parvan, but no one knew any more than that, did they?”

      He hesitated. “Some knew more.”

      She wasn’t sure what made her ask, “Did you ever meet him?”

      Again he hesitated. “Yes, I met him.”

      “He died fighting in the Kaljuk War, didn’t he? Is that where you knew him?”

      Sheikh Ashraf turned his head and lifted a hand as the waiter started to fill his glass with wine. “No, thank you.”

      When he turned back he seemed to have forgotten her question. After a moment Dana nodded towards the СКАЧАТЬ