She resisted the urge to take a step back, hating how small and insignificant his sheer size made her feel. It was exactly the same feeling that had filled her when her parents had argued and she’d hidden under the dining room table. They’d never noticed that she’d left her seat—which was ironic, since more often than not they had been shouting about her.
Clasping her hands in front of her to prevent them from shaking, Charlotte took a small, silent breath. ‘Um...do you speak English?’ Her voice sounded thin and reedy in the silence of the room.
The man said nothing, continuing to stare at her.
It was extremely unnerving.
Her mouth had dried and she wished her Arabic was better. Because maybe he didn’t understand English. She wanted to ask him where her father was and also to thank him for saving her.
He put you in a cell, remember?
Sure, but maybe that hadn’t been him. He might look like a medieval warrior, but the suit he was wearing was thoroughly modern. Perhaps he was an accountant? Or the chief of the jail she’d been put in? Or a government functionary?
Yet none of those things seemed to fit. He was too magnetic, too charismatic to be anyone’s mere functionary. No, this man had an aura about him that spoke of command, as if he expected everyone to fall to their knees around him.
Sadly for him, she wouldn’t be falling anywhere in front of him.
Except you already have. In the desert.
That, alas, was true.
‘I’m s-sorry,’ she stuttered, casting around for something to say. ‘I should have thanked you for saving my life. But can you tell me where my father is? We got lost, you see. And I... I...’ She faltered, all her words crushed by the weight of his stare.
This was silly. Her father could be dead or in a jail cell and she was letting this man get to her. She couldn’t get pathetic now.
Perhaps introducing herself would help. After all, she’d had no identification on her when she’d collapsed, so maybe they had no idea who she or her father were. Maybe that was why she had been put in the cell? Maybe they thought she was some kind of insurgent, hoping to...?
But, no. Best not get carried away. Keep thinking in the here and now.
‘So,’ Charlotte said, pulling herself together. ‘My name is—’
‘Charlotte Devereaux,’ the man interrupted in a deep, slightly rough voice. ‘You are an assistant attached to an archaeological dig that your father, Professor Martin Devereaux is managing in conjunction with the University of Siddq.’
His English was perfect, his accent almost imperceptible.
‘You both come from Cornwall, but you live in London and at present are employed by your father’s university as his assistant. You are twenty-three years old, have no dependents, and live in a flat with a couple of friends in Clapham.’
Charlotte could feel her mouth hanging open in shock. How did he know all this stuff? How had he found out?
‘I...’ she began.
But he hadn’t finished, because he was going on, ignoring her entirely, ‘Can you tell me, please, what you were doing out there in the desert? Neither you nor your father were anywhere near your dig site. In fact, that is the whole reason you are here. You crossed the border into Ashkaraz—you do understand that, do you not?’
She flushed at the note of condescension in his voice, but took heart from the fact that he was talking of her father in the present tense.
‘Are you saying that my father is alive?’ she asked, needing to be sure.
‘Yes,’ the man said flatly. ‘He is alive.’
Relief filled her, making her breath catch. ‘Oh, I’m so glad. He wandered away from the site, the way he sometimes does, and I went to try and find him. I walked up a dune and somehow—’
‘I am not interested in how you got lost, Miss Devereaux,’ the man interrupted, his voice like iron, his golden stare pitiless. ‘What I am interested in is how you somehow got out of a secure facility.’
Charlotte swallowed. Briefly she debated lying, but since she was in a lot of trouble already there was no point in making it any worse.
‘I...smashed the glass and crawled out of the window.’ She lifted her chin a little to show him that she wouldn’t be cowed. ‘It really wasn’t that difficult.’
‘You crawled out of the window?’ he repeated, his voice flat, the lines of his brutally handsome face set and hard. ‘And what made you think that was a good idea?’
‘I’ve heard the rumours,’ she said defensively. ‘About how people who stray over your borders disappear for ever, never to be seen again. How they’re beaten and terrorised. And I didn’t know what had happened to my father.’ She steeled herself. ‘I saw an opportunity to escape, to see if I could find him, and so I took it.’
The man said nothing, but that stare of his felt like a weight pressing her down and crushing her into dust.
You’re really for it now.
Charlotte gripped her hands together, lifted her chin another inch and stared back. ‘We’re British citizens, you know. You can’t just make us disappear like all the rest. My dad is a very well-respected academic. Once people realise we’re missing they’ll send others to find us. So you’d better tell whoever is in charge here that—’
‘No need. All the interested parties already know.’
‘Which interested parties?’
His face was impassive. ‘Me.’
‘You?’ Charlotte tried to look sceptical and failed. ‘And who exactly are you?’
‘I am the one in charge,’ he said, without any emphasis at all.
‘Oh? Are you the head of the police or something?’
It would explain his aura of command, after all.
‘No. I am not the head of the police.’
His eyes gleamed with something that made her breath catch.
‘I am the head of the country. I am the Sheikh of Ashkaraz.’
Charlotte Devereaux, all five foot nothing of her, blinked her large silver-blue eyes. Shock was written across her pretty, pink features.
She should be shocked.
She should be quaking in those little boots of hers.
He’d only just been notified of her escape and her jaunt down Kharan’s main street, and to say that he was angry was massively to understate the case.
He was furious. Absolutely, volcanically furious.
The fury boiled away inside him like lava, and only long years of iron control kept it locked down and not spilling everywhere, destroying everything in its path.
Because he had no one to blame for this incident but himself. He was the one who’d elected to bring her back to Kharan and not to follow Faisal’s advice to return her and her father to the dig site from which they’d come.
No, he’d decided to handle her himself, to make sure she was taken back to Kharan and had the medical treatment she required. Her father had needed more, and was still unconscious in a secure hospital ward. She had been transferred to the facility where they kept all illegal visitors to Ashkaraz.
Normally those visitors tended to be men. They were not usually little women who could wriggle through small