Wifed By The Sheikh Read online

  small train. It was going to be utterly beautiful, Zelda knew.

  “I’ll get a chance to see it on the day, at least,” Tahirah said with an unconcerned shrug.

  Of course, with such a short time between design and debut, the designer and her staff were almost certainly going to be putting the final touches on the gown the day of. Zelda glanced down at her hand; the plan was for Zayed to ceremoniously put the engagement ring on her finger at the party that evening, as part of the festivities, but she had tried it on before coming to Tahirah’s studio. Like everything else in her new life, it seemed, the ring was absolutely breathtaking: rose gold and platinum, wrapped around diamonds and rubies.

  “Should I be able to breathe in this?” Zelda glanced at Tahirah as one of her team tightened fabric at her waist.

  The designer murmured something and the pressure on Zelda’s ribs slacked slightly. “You’re going to look stunning,” Tahirah said, stepping back to admire her. “Look at yourself.”

  Zelda turned slightly and looked in the full-length mirror. Even with her hair simply pulled back into a bun, she looked gorgeous; more beautiful than she had ever looked in her life.

  “Your mother must be so proud of you, catching a guy like Zayed,” Tahirah said.

  The words hit Zelda like a lead weight. Almost involuntarily, everything her mother had ever told her on the subject of weddings and marriage flooded her mind. “Just remember: the money you don’t spend on your wedding can go to your honeymoon.” “All I care about for you is that you are happy with the man you marry—and that he’s not a deadbeat.” “I’d rather you be the wife of a man working two jobs who loved you deeply than married to a rich man who gives you everything you want except his love.”

  Zelda’s stomach churned inside of her as her thoughts turned to the wedding that was only a week away. She knew, like waking up from a dream, that the marriage she’d agreed to forge with Zayed was wrong. It wasn’t what she wanted. Even if it was a sham marriage—maybe especially because it was a sham—she didn’t want to get married without her parents even knowing. She didn’t want to have a sham marriage, even if she had agreed to it, and even if it was in her best interest.

  Zelda got through the rest of the fitting on automatic, smiling and replying to comments from Tahirah, accepting tea from the designer’s assistant, and gossiping about the preparations, about her ring, and about the party that evening. Afterwards, she numbly got into the limousine that Zayed had put aside for her use, and all the way back to the palace, she thought about the party to come and the wedding she would have in a week’s time. She thought about the ring that Zayed had had made for her, and the advice her mother had given her, and the priceless dress. The thoughts swirled around in her head, and she had barely realized that she’d arrived at the mansion when the driver coughed.

  Zelda climbed out of the limo, making sure to remember the bags from the last-minute purchases she’d made on Zayed’s credit card for accessories to her gown for the engagement party. Murmuring a hasty “thank you” to her driver, she stepped into the house, walking towards her quarters. She stowed her purchases next to the couture gown and sat down in the bathroom, staring at the floor. In theory, she had just enough time to take a bath and scrub herself head to toe before the stylists arrived to do her hair and makeup for the party.

  She licked her lips and tapped her foot idly on the floor. “The real question,” she said to herself, listening to her voice echoing off of the walls, “is whether I can bring myself to go through with this.” The engagement party wasn’t the wedding; she could go to it, and then…

  “And then what? It’s not going to get any better if I ditch him after he’s publicly declared us engaged,” Zelda said, thinking out loud. “No. No, it would be better…”

  She shook her head again. There wasn’t a good option in front of her. If she ran away now, Zayed would have to explain why the bride-to-be was absent from her own engagement party. If she tried to get away afterwards, he would have to explain why the engagement had fallen apart so quickly. No matter when she left, it would humiliate him. But she knew that she couldn’t stay; her cold feet and the memory of her mother’s warm advice had already overcome her cool, self-serving logic.

  Zelda stood and began moving around the room, finding her backpack buried deep in the huge closet and scanning the room for everything she’d had in it when she arrived. She told herself that it was at least slightly less terrible for her to only take what was hers; that there was some kind of moral high ground in not taking anything Zayed had bought her in the time she’d been in his home.

  As she gathered up her few meager possession, she heard the muted noises of the preparations going on outside; they would be putting up decorations, setting up the food and beverage tables, finishing everything off right up until the party started. She sighed quietly, thinking of Tarek, Zayed’s overworked personal assistant; the man was determined to move heaven and earth to make his boss’s idea a reality.

  She went through her mental checklist of what she should have, and changed out of the outfit she’d worn to visit the designers and jewelers in the city that day. She pulled on one of the outfits she’d had with her when she stowed away, and looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t look like the future wife of a billionaire sheikh anymore. She looked like Zelda Barnes-Scott, the young woman who’d sneaked onto a yacht on little more than a whim.

  Zelda took a deep breath, hefted her backpack onto her shoulders, and made for the door. She pressed her lips together, trying to decide how to go about her escape, and looked around as she followed the corridor, listening for the different activities going on around her.

  From the sound of the voices she heard downstairs, Zelda thought that some of the guests had started to arrive. She carefully continued through the palace, avoiding the paths to the garden where the engagement party was supposed to take place. It would have been a lot easier if you’d come to this epiphany a few hours ago. Or yesterday, she chided herself.

  Zelda narrowly avoided one of the servants rushing to put something in place out in the east garden and waited a few moments, thinking. If she didn’t get out right now, the stylists would arrive to finish her preparations, and they’d discover her gone.

  She found a door leading out to an abandoned area on the property, and slipped through it. She knew she couldn’t leave through the gate, not with the security guards who knew her already standing there, with people coming and going. It would be immediately obvious that she was trying to flee.

  Well, I’ve climbed trees before, Zelda thought, looking up into the branches of one of the trees that hugged the wall wrapped around the property. She smiled wryly to herself, briefly remembering summers spent tucked away in old banyan trees, reading books. If she could climb the slippery-barked banyans in her neighborhood and manage to avoid the ants, Zelda reasoned, she could just as well climb the cedar tree in front of her.

  Zelda looked around once again to make sure no one had wandered into the part of the property she’d come to; finding no one, she shifted the backpack on her shoulders and surveyed the tree. She picked out likely hand-holds and took a quick breath before reaching for her first branch.

  The spicy-smelling bark crackled under her hands, but Zelda had climbed slippier trees in her childhood; she got a good grip and hauled herself up, trying not to groan as she swung her feet around to get fully into the branch. She climbed and climbed, looking around and pausing if she thought she heard someone, finally reaching the point where the tree became taller than the wall it stood against.

  Carefully, Zelda shimmied around to the other side of the trunk. Sweat had already begun to accumulate on her brow, on the small of her back, under her breasts; but the day was beginning to cool off, and Zelda told herself that it would be easy once she got to the other side of the wall. She told herself that it couldn’t be that difficult to get back into the city—even if she’d never taken the trip by foot, there had to be a way to ge
t there.

  She stepped along gingerly, holding herself balanced with her hands on the branch directly above her. It was a long drop, but she had no other way down.

  Taking a deep breath, Zelda let her hands fall, and then carefully crouched down, her heart in her throat. She grabbed and carefully dropped her legs over the branch until she hung from the shaking, groaning wood.

  “One, two, three!” Zelda murmured, her voice just above a breath. And then she let go.

  ELEVEN

  Zelda hit the ground unsteadily, and for a moment she was certain that she had sprained her ankle—far from an auspicious start to her getaway—but as she put a little weight on it, the joint held.

  She stood slowly, taking stock of herself: she thought she might have a bruise or two, and her hands were sticky from cedar resin, but she would live. She settled her backpack on her shoulders and began walking, trying to remember which way the car had come from when it brought her back to the house from the city.

  Zelda walked the perimeter of the compound before heading in what she thought was the direction of the city. Outside of the sprawling property, the landscape was much drier. Her feet crunched and whispered through the sand, and the wind picked up, rifling at her hair and clothes. Zelda could feel grit in the air as it hit her face, and suddenly realized that she hadn’t thought of one very important thing that she would need in making her journey through the semi-desert territory between Zayed’s home and the city: water.

  “It’ll be okay,” she told herself. “I’ll be a little dusty and parched when I get to the city, but I have some cash. I can get something to drink once I get there.”

  She was grateful that Zayed had allowed her to cash her paycheck in the local currency; he’d been amused at her interest in it, pointing out that she could have however much money she wanted at any given time as his wife. Zelda counted her lucky stars that she’d thought to cash the check now that her ability to get away from Murindhi counted on having money—she would have felt badly about taking the Sheikh’s money to make her escape.

  Zelda had struck off for what she hoped was the city, but from her vantage point, she couldn’t see any sign of it. Oh God. What if I was totally wrong about the direction to go in?

  She shook the question out of her mind; if she was wrong, she would just have to keep going until she got somewhere. Murindhi wasn’t a big country; it was, she recalled, about the size of Singapore. It wasn’t possible for her to keep walking and not eventually find some kind of town or village, was it? If nothing else, she had to at least hit a border if she walked for long enough, and then she could get her bearings, and pay for a ticket somewhere.

  Except, Zelda remembered, the reason she’d entered into her agreement with Zayed was that she didn’t have the proper documentation.

  “Cross that bridge when you come to it,” she told herself, taking a moment to pause and stretch a little before she continued walking. Her mouth was starting to feel dry; her sweat was evaporating, and that only reminded Zelda of the fact that she had nothing to replace it with. She told herself again and again that she’d get through it, that she would find the main city, or at least a place with people, and figure out what to do with herself from there.

  A few minutes later, Zelda paused again to look around her, and realized that she could no longer see even the vaguest shape of the Sheikh’s palace behind her, nor could she discern any sign of the city she’d spend so much of the past week visiting. This is bad, she thought, her heart beating a little faster in her chest, but she had lost so much moisture already that it couldn’t manage more than a trembling quaver.

  Zelda swallowed against the dry, gritty feeling in her throat, mentally kicking herself for not thinking of some way to get water to bring with her. “Keep walking,” she croaked to herself, before deciding that talking out loud was a bad idea—she’d just irritate her throat even more. She coughed and pulled the collar of her shirt up over her mouth, half-remembering some advice she’d read once about conserving moisture that way.

  It helped that the heat of the day was dying rapidly as the sun finished setting in the west. The arid land between Zayed’s home and her destination was not just cooling, it was almost cold as darkness enveloped it.

  She mentally chastised herself again, this time for not thinking to find some kind of light source before she fled the palace. Water, flashlight, some kind of jacket… Zelda discarded the idea no sooner had she thought of it—she had deliberately not taken anything that Zayed had paid for, telling herself that at least she would have some kind of moral or ethical standing that way. Water, she could have justified, but stealing a flashlight, or a jacket, or anything else would have just put her further in the wrong.

  As she trudged forward, Zelda wondered how Zayed was handling the engagement party, in light of her absence. Her feet felt so heavy; her face felt as if someone had taken a scouring pad to it, the skin across her cheeks and nose uncomfortably tight from the dry air. Her temples throbbed with a sensation she hadn’t felt since the last time she’d gotten a hangover: a dehydration headache.

  She crouched on the ground, closing her eyes for a moment in the darkness. The only reason she hadn’t stopped altogether was that the moon provided just enough light for her to see the ground at her feet; she knew she should have made it to some kind of city by now, and her feet attested to the fact that she’d walked for miles. She tried to cry, but she was so parched, so dehydrated, that all she could manage were a few dry, almost coughing sobs.

  “This is what I get for trying to do the right thing,” she croaked to the darkness around her, forgetting her resolution not to speak out loud. She wrapped her arms around her knees, wondering how it was possible for someone to simultaneously be freezing cold and so dehydrated that she couldn’t cry. She buried her face against her legs, feeling hopeless. Even if she could somehow figure out where the city was, she was so dizzy, so exhausted, that it would be impossible for her to finish the trek.

  With a burst of clarity, Zelda realized that there was a very real chance that she would die right where she had stopped; that she would become more and more dehydrated until— She wasn’t exactly sure how death by thirst happened, but she was certain that it was unpleasant.

  Zelda groaned, coughed and decided once more to be quiet; she shivered and at the same time felt too warm. She wanted desperately to cry but her eyes felt as dry as the sand dusting her arms. The worst part of it is that I’m going to die without my parents having even a single clue of where I am or what happened to me, she thought miserably. I just wish I could tell them I’m sorry.

  Her head was pounding; it got worse by the moment, until she could feel her pulse at her temples, throbbing in a steady lub-lub-lub that brought nothing but pain with it. Through the veil of her eyelids, the moon’s light had gotten brighter and brighter. A low, droning sound filled her ears and Zelda thought irritably that if she was going to die, she would vastly prefer it to be somewhere quiet. What had happened to the desert stillness?

  “Zelda! Zelda!”

  Zelda moaned and pulled her face away from her knees, opening her eyes a crack only to wince away from the bright light that filled them. A dark figure advanced towards her and for a terrified instant, she thought that it might be the specter of death itself—only it had a familiar shape.

  “Zelda. Zelda, are you awake?”