Sleeping with the Sultan. ALEXANDRA SELLERS

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СКАЧАТЬ how we’ve got Ghasib on the ropes at last.”

      “Never mind,” Jenny murmured mock-placatingly, “you can always marry him. He’s probably got lots of money, and that’s what really matters.”

      “Not if he were the last sheikh on the planet!” Dana vowed.

      Jenny laughed, leaned to kiss Dana’s cheek again and moved off. Dana turned her head—and found herself looking at the harsh-faced stranger from a distance of a few feet. By the look on his face, not only was he an al Jawadi supporter, he had overheard every word of their conversation.

      Two

      For a moment she thought he was going to pass on by, but he stopped and faced her. His eyes bored into hers, but against a little shiver of feeling she couldn’t define, she managed to hold her gaze steady.

      “Are you an optimist, Miss Golbahn, or a pessimist?” he asked in conversational tones.

      Typical of a man like him to call her by her father’s, not her professional name. She was quite sure it was deliberately calculated.

      “Don’t you mean, am I a dreamer or a realist?”

      “No, I don’t mean that,” he replied, in a careful tone that infuriated her. His eyebrows moved expressively. “I mean, when you say that the restoration of the monarchy is impossible, do you speak from your wishes, or your fears?”

      He had absolutely no right to challenge her about a conversation he had eavesdropped on in the first place. His arrogance made her grit her teeth—and tell a lie.

      “I have no wishes one way or the other. I am simply calling it as I see it.”

      “You have no wish to see a vicious dictator who destroys his country and his people swept from power,” he repeated, his face hardening.

      She was damned if she would retract now.

      “What good would my hopes do anyone?”

      His burning gaze flicked down over her body, then back up to her face again. She suddenly felt what a disadvantage it was not to know whether she was naked or not. Had he just looked at her breasts?

      “Do you feel you owe nothing to your father, Miss Golbahn?” he asked.

      She stared at him in open-mouthed, indignant astonishment. Typical of a man like him to imagine a twenty-six-year-old woman should govern her actions according to her father’s pride!

      “Who do you think you’re talking to?” she demanded, dimly realizing that heads were now turning in their direction.

      “I—”

      “My name is Morningstar,” she overrode him in her coldest voice. “And how accounts stand between me and my father is absolutely none of your business.”

      His eyes narrowed at her, but if he expected her to be cowed, he could think again. She tilted her chin and gave him stare for stare. Her tone was no more insulting than his own had been, and she would be quite happy to point that out to him. But the man bowed his head a fraction.

      “I apologize. I was given to understand that you were Colonel Golbahn’s daughter.”

      “My father is Khaldun Golbahn. He is no longer a colonel, and the regiment he was colonel of hasn’t existed for over thirty years,” she returned through her teeth.

      Before he could respond to this, a waiter appeared to pull out her chair, and Dana gratefully turned away and sank down to accept a napkin on her lap. Only a few people were still milling around, tying up their conversations before heading to separate tables. People were watching her more or less covertly, and she realized that her argument with the stranger had given them another reason to stare and whisper.

      She could sense that he was still hovering behind her. She hoped he wasn’t intending to get in the last word. Dana picked up the printed menu card propped in front of her wineglass and wished he would disappear.

      “Sheikh Durran!” a crusty old voice exclaimed with satisfaction.

      “Sir John,” his voice replied, and she almost fainted with horror. Her eyes flew to the place card at the setting next to her. Sheikh Ashraf Durran.

      Ya Allah, she would be sitting beside him for the next two hours!

      The two men were shaking hands behind her, and she heard the clap of hand against shoulder. “I was hoping to see you.” The old man dropped his voice. “How did your brother manage? Can I assume your presence tonight means I am to congratulate you?”

      Dana found she was holding her breath. There was an air of mystery over the conversation, suddenly, and it gripped her. She bent further over the menu card, but she wasn’t taking in one word of what was printed.

      “He was successful, Sir John, in a manner of speaking—and flying by the seat of his pants, as usual.”

      He spoke quietly. His voice now held a hint of humour that she hadn’t been privileged to hear when he spoke to her. It was deep and strong, as compelling as the man. A voice an actor would kill for.

      “You have it safe, then?” The old man was whispering now.

      “I do.”

      “Tremendous! Well done, all of you! One might almost say, an omen.”

      “Mash’Allah.”

      The two men sat, one on either side of her. Dana stared fixedly at the menu. She had never felt so unnerved by a situation. She reminded herself how many times in the past she had made conversation with awkward, difficult strangers, more or less successfully. There was no reason to feel as though there was a chasm in front of her.

      Waiters were already circulating with trays of starters and pouring wine. Onstage the tar was being played with a heartrending virtuosity that no other instrument, she thought, ever achieved.

      “Asparagus or tabbouleh?” the waiter asked her.

      Dana loved the food of Bagestan; she had been raised on it. At sixteen she had stopped eating it, as a rejection of her father and all he stood for. That time of rebellion was long past; she was twenty-six now. But she found herself thrown back into that old, combative mind-set now.

      She wanted to let Sheikh Ashraf Durran know that 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. СКАЧАТЬ