Pulling himself up short, Zayed took a sharp breath and turned to stride from the room. Why was he wasting his time trying to figure that out? Didn’t he have bigger things to worry about?
* * *
Nadia felt the cold night air brush over her heated skin and shivered violently. What now? That gorilla of a guard had escorted her to the palace gates without a word, locking them firmly behind her, and now she watched his retreating figure through the bars as he ascended the long flight of steps back up to the entrance, where he would no doubt take up his position to make sure she didn’t slip past him again.
Well, she would just have to come up with another plan. One thing was for sure, she wasn’t going to give up now. Not now she had been inside the palace and met Sheikh Zayed Al Afzal face-to-face. Although met was hardly the right word. The look of disgust on his face as he had turned her from the room after her little performance still produced a cringe that would buckle her body if she let it. Which she wouldn’t.
But along with the humiliation, there was no doubt that this formidable sheikh had made another, more unexpected, impression on Nadia. Tall, broad shouldered and commanding—all these things she had taken in in an instant. But there was more: a quiet intelligence, an urbane sophistication that, coupled with his extreme good looks, was a heart-stopping combination. Certainly he was like no man Nadia had ever come across before. And certainly he had made her feel something she had never felt before. Something she had no intention of thinking about now.
Crossing her arms over her chest, Nadia rubbed at the chilly exposed flesh of her shoulders while she studied the vast palace that was now tantalisingly out of her reach. The epitome of extravagant opulence, it glowed against the night sky, each of its numerous arched windows, porticos and colonnades floodlit a fiery amber, the enormous blue dome in the centre of the roof pierced by the illuminated crescent moons. It looked unreal in this light, like a shining UFO that had landed in the desert.
Nadia was no stranger to palace life; in fact it was the only life she had ever known. Born Princess Nadia Amani of Harith, she had spent her entire twenty-eight years a virtual prisoner in the palace of Harith, confined by the archaic rules of protocol and the equally archaic rules of her father and brother. But the palace that she had grown up in, that she knew so well, seemed very humble in comparison to the magnificent edifice before her now. The palace of Gazbiyaa left no one in any doubt of the mighty wealth and power of this kingdom.
But if growing up in a palace had taught Nadia one thing, it was that there was always a way in. She just had to find it. She was about to move away to start her search when movement at one of the windows on the fourth floor caught her eye. Retreating into the shadows, even though there was no way she could be seen down here, she watched as the French windows were pushed open wide and she could just make out the silhouette of Zayed himself, framed against the light. Were these the sheikh’s private quarters? Silently, Nadia counted one, two, three, four windows from the central portico. Committing the image to memory, she felt her heart start to thud in her chest again. This was where she had to head to commit the bravest, most dangerous and possibly the stupidest act of her life. But first she had to find her way in.
* * *
Leaning on the balcony railings outside his bedroom window, Zayed breathed in the sweetly scented night air. Before him stretched the kingdom, his kingdom, spread out like a twinkling tapestry. The recently erected skyscrapers soared into the sky, the daring glass and steel monuments that pushed the boundaries of architects’ dreams and construction workers’ abilities to the limit and beyond, each one taller, more daring, more dazzling than the last. This had been his brother’s dream, to make the kingdom of Gazbiyaa a major player, not just in the Middle East, but on the world stage. But at what cost? Azeed was ruthless and determined, and Zayed suspected that had Azeed been crowned sheikh he would have stopped at nothing in his quest to make Gazbiyaa the ultimate superpower.
And that was why Zayed’s mother had broken her vow of silence on her deathbed, putting an end to Azeed’s increasingly extreme plans and precipitating the chain of events that had led to Zayed standing here now.
Through the buzz of the city traffic Zayed could hear the call to prayer, floating from the dozens of minarets that were dotted about the city landscape, dwarfed in size by their towering neighbours but still more than making their presence felt.
Turning back from the window, Zayed headed for the bathroom to take a shower. It had been a long day.
* * *
It was the azan, the call to prayer, that gave Nadia her chance. She had followed the wall round to the back of the palace, where to her dismay she saw that the gates were just as high, just as impenetrable, when a small group of young men appeared, hurrying towards her, their robes glowing white in the dusky light. Shrinking into the shadows, Nadia watched as one of them touched a keypad and the gates opened, allowing them to pass through. She had just enough time to slip in behind them before they silently slid closed again.
With her heart in her throat she kept to the shadows as she hurried towards the brightly lit palace, past the manicured lawns and rows of swaying palm trees, the vast courtyard dotted with fountains, until she was within a few hundred yards of the kitchens. Here she stopped, squatting down behind a pomegranate tree to catch her breath and try to figure out what to do next.
A solitary male voice alerted her to a palace guard talking into his mobile phone in front of the kitchen doors. The open kitchen doors. She just needed to distract him. A plan started to form in her head; she hadn’t idled away her years watching adventure movies on the television for nothing. Feeling around her feet, she found what she was looking for and, picking up the smooth pomegranate, she felt its weight in her hand. If she could just throw it somewhere away to the side of that guard, it might distract him long enough for her to slip in.
Slipping the bracelets off her wrist and discarding them, she stood up and took aim, flinging the pomegranate wildly and with all her might as hard as she could. The result was better than she could ever have imagined. By some luck the weighty fruit landed square on the bonnet of a sleek black limousine she hadn’t even noticed, and as its alarm shrieked into life the guard immediately hurried over to investigate. This was her chance. Nadia sprinted towards the open door and she was in!
Casting around her in exhilarated panic, she saw that luck was with her again and the kitchens appeared to be completely empty. Tiptoeing through one room after another, she eventually found the servants’ staircase and started to climb it with the feverish speed and blind panic born of doing something very, very dangerous.
By the time she reached the fourth floor she was almost doubled over with the exertion, but she couldn’t allow herself more than a couple of gasping breaths. She peeped out into the long corridor. All seemed quiet, though it wasn’t easy to tell over the banging of her own heartbeat and the roaring in her ears. Raising shaky hands to her temples, she tried to get her bearings, turning this way and that in an attempt to figure out where she was. Four windows from the central portico at the front. If she followed this passageway to the end, turned left and then counted the doors...
Her hand was on the doorknob now. If her calculations were right she was about to enter the bedchamber of Sheikh Zayed Al Afzal. Slowly, slowly she turned the heavy brass knob. It moved silently, readily beneath her grasp. There was no going back now. Whatever fate awaited her on the other side of this door, she knew her life would never be the same again.
* * *
Zayed was towelling himself dry when he heard a noise coming from his bedchamber next door. He froze, the towel in his hand. Someone was in there, he was sure of it. He strained his ears to listen but there was no sound now.
But a sixth sense told him that he was no longer alone. Had he locked his bedroom door? No, of course he hadn’t. Despite warnings that security was of paramount importance here, he couldn’t break the habit