ALEXANDRA SELLERS – Sleeping with the Sultan (страница 3)

Her father was still looking at her. She wondered if he had seen her dress. She hoped so. She was suddenly filled with a dry, dead fury, as if her father had somehow manipulated her presence here. Logic told her that was impossible.

“Hellooo,” Jenny carolled.

Dana surfaced, nodded a cool acknowledgement to her father and turned away. “Sorry, what did you say?”

“Sir John Cross,” Jenny repeated, pointing to the card at the place setting to one side of Dana’s. “Who’s he?”

“A diplomat, I think. Or, he was.” She had a vague memory of her father’s voice. “Wasn’t he the British Ambassador to Bagestan at the time of the coup?”

“Search me!” Jenny shrugged. “Poor Dana! And Sheikh Ashraf Durran,” she read from the card on her other side. “One of those boring old farts in white skirts, I bet. My poor darling, it’s going to be a long night for you.”

“It is going to be a very successful fund-raising night,” Dana told her with dry sarcasm, unable to hold down her irritation.

“Is it? How do you know?” Jenny asked with a smile. She wasn’t big on world affairs, Dana reminded herself. And her interest in such things as mind manipulation techniques began and ended with using her disarming, housewifely smile in fabric softener commercials.

“Because it may say Drought Relief on the banners, but the real story behind this little event is Line Our Pockets with Gold and One Day We’ll Restore the Monarchy in Bagestan!” she told Jenny through her teeth. “God, these people make me sick!”

Jenny blinked. “What do—”

“Listen to that music! They’re deliberately playing on everyone’s insane hopes for Ghasib to be overthrown and a new sultan to come riding in on his white horse and turn back the clock to the Golden Age! It’s not going to happen, but they will get a fortune from the deluded tonight! It’s unspeakable!”

Jenny was looking at her in surprise. Dana wasn’t often like this, except when she was on the set playing the overexcitable Reena.

“But, Dana, wouldn’t you rather see Ghasib kicked out? Wouldn’t it be a good thing if one of the al Whatsit princes could be found and restored to the throne?”

“You’ve been reading the Sunday papers, Jenny. It’s nothing but ink and hot air. There are no al Jawadi princes! Ghasib had them all assassinated years ago. If anybody kicks Ghasib out, it is going to be the Islamic militants, and that’s just going to be a case of out of the frying pan, isn’t it?”

“But what about that one in Hello! magazine a couple of weeks back, who had amnesia? He was so gorgeous, too. He’s a grandson of the old sultan, and it said—”

“Najib al Makhtoum is not a viable candidate for the throne, even if he is who they say he is, which I doubt. They are all completely deluded, these people, and somebody is making sure they stay deluded.” She belatedly noticed the alarm in Jenny’s eyes, heaved a sigh and smiled.

“Sorry, Jen, but I got this stuff all my life from my father, and I hate it. You’re right, they are a bunch of boring old farts who want their palaces and oil rigs back and can’t accept that it isn’t going to happen. God, I wish I hadn’t come! It might be tolerable if I were sitting with you and the others. This way—” she gestured at the label that read Sheikh Ashraf Durran “—in addition to everything else, I’ll have to listen to a whole lot of demented ravings about 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.