The Sheik and the Runaway Princess (3 page)

But there was no point in explaining all that to Kardal. He wouldn’t believe her and even if he did, he wouldn’t care.

“I will consider what you have told me,” he said at last.

“What does that mean? You believe that I’m really the princess? Are you going to take me back to the palace in Bahania?” Compared to her recent desert experience, the troll prince might not be such a bad choice after all.

“No,” Kardal told her. “I think I will keep you for now. It would be most entertaining to have a princess as a slave.”

She tried to speak but could only splutter. He couldn’t mean it, she told herself, hoping she wasn’t lying.

“No,” she finally said. “You couldn’t do that.”

“It appears that I could.” Kardal chuckled to himself as he walked away, leaving her openmouthed and frothing.

“You’ll regret this,” she yelled after him, fighting the fury growing within her. If she hadn’t treasured her coffee so much, she would have tossed the steaming liquid at his retreating back. “I’ll make you sorry.”

He turned and looked at her. “I know, Sabrina.
Most likely all the days of my life.”

Forty minutes later, she knew a flogging was too good for him. She was back to wanting him both hanged and shot.
Maybe even beheaded.
It wasn’t enough that he threatened her and insulted her. No. Not only had he tied her up, but he’d blindfolded her as well.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” she announced, practically vibrating with rage. The sensation of being blind while on a moving horse was completely disconcerting. With each step, she expected to tumble under the horse’s hooves.

“First,” Kardal said, his voice barely a whisper in her ear. “You don’t have to shout. I’m right behind you.”

“Like I don’t know that.”

She sat in front of him, on his saddle. As much as she tried to keep from touching him, there wasn’t enough room. Holding
herself
stiffly away from him only made her muscles ache. Despite her best effort to prevent contact, her back kept brushing against his front.

“What’s the second thing?” she asked grudgingly.

“You’re about to get your wish. Our destination is the City of
Thieves
.”

Sabrina didn’t respond. She couldn’t. Her mind filled with a thousand questions, not to mention disbelief, hope and excitement.

“It’s real?”

Behind her, Kardal chuckled.
“Very real.
I’ve lived there all my life.”

“But you can’t—It isn’t—” What he was saying didn’t make sense. “If it truly exists, how come I’ve never heard about it except in old books or diaries?”

“It’s how we prefer it. We are not interested in the outside world. We live in the old tradition.”

Which meant life for women was less than agreeable.

“I don’t believe you,” she told him. “You’re just saying this to get my hopes up.”

“Why else would I blindfold you? It is important that you not be able to find your way back to our city.”

Sabrina bit her lower lip. Could Kardal be telling the truth? Could the city exist and did people really live there? It would almost be worth being captured just to see inside the ancient walls. And his statement about finding her way back implied that he would—despite his posturing to the contrary—eventually let her go.

“Are there treasures?” she asked.

“You seek material wealth?”

There was something in his tone.
Contempt, maybe?
What was it about this man and his assumptions?

“Stop talking to me like I’m some gold digger,” she said heatedly. “I have a bachelor’s degree in archeology and a master’s in Bahanian history. My
interest in the contents of the city are
intellectual and scientific, not personal.”

She adjusted her weight, trying to escape the feeling that she was going to fall from the horse at any moment. “I don’t know why I’m bothering,” she grumbled into the darkness. “You’re hardly a sympathetic audience. Just believe what you want. I don’t care.”

But she did care, Kardal thought with some surprise when she was finally quiet. He had heard about her going to school in
America
. It had never occurred to him that she would actually complete her studies, nor had he thought she would study something relevant to her heritage. He wasn’t sure she didn’t want the treasures of his homeland for herself, but he was willing to wait and let her show her true self on that matter.

She leaned forward, as if holding herself away from him. He felt the tremor in her muscles, the result of her tension.

“Relax,” he told her, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her against him. “We have a long day’s ride. If you continue to sit so stiffly, you’ll spend much of the time in pain. I promise not to ravish you while we’re upon my horse.”

“Remind me to never dismount then,” she muttered, half under her breath, but she did let herself sag against him.

Sabrina was more trouble than any other three women Kardal had ever known, but he found he didn’t dislike her as much as he would have thought. Unfortunately he also found her body appealing as it pressed against his own. During the night he’d managed to ignore the sweet scent of her, but not while they rode pressed so closely together. When he’d first placed her in the saddle, he’d only thought to keep her from running off. By tying her hands, he’d attempted to both restrain and punish her willfulness. Now he was the one being punished.

With each step of the horse, her body swayed against his. Her rear nestled against his groin, arousing him so that he could think of little else. It was a kind of trouble he did not need.

She was not the traditional desert woman he would have chosen. She was neither deferential nor accommodating. Her quick mind allowed her to use wit and words as a weapon and there was no telling how her time in the west had corrupted her. She was disrespectful, opinionated and spoiled. And even if he found her slightly intriguing, she was not whom he would have chosen. But then the choice hadn’t been his at all. It had all been proclaimed at the time of his birth.

He wondered why she didn’t know who he was. Had her father not told her the specifics or had she simply not listened? He would guess the latter. Kardal smiled. He doubted Sabrina listened to anything she didn’t want to hear. It was a habit he would break her of.

He could almost anticipate the challenge she would be to him. In the end he would be the victor, of course. He was the man—strength to her yielding softness. Eventually she would learn to appreciate that. In the meantime, what would the ill-tempered beauty say if she knew he was the man to whom she had been betrothed?

Eventually Sabrina found the rhythm of the horse hypnotic, even with the chronic sensation of falling. Despite her desire to, if not prove
herself
then at least be somewhat independent, she found herself relaxing into Kardal’s arms. He was strong enough to support her and if she continued to hold herself stiffly, she would be aching by the end of the day.

So instead she allowed herself to lean into him, feeling the muscled hardness of his chest pressing against her. He shifted his arms so that he held the reins in front of her instead of behind her. Her forearms rested on his.

The sensation of touching him was oddly intimate. Perhaps it was their close proximity, or perhaps it was the darkness caused by her blindfold. She’d never been in a situation like this, but that shouldn’t be a surprise. Not much of her life had been spent with her being kidnapped.

“Do you do this often?” she asked. “Kidnap innocent women?”

Instead of being insulted by the question, he chuckled. “You are many things, princess, but you are not innocent.”

Actually he was wrong about that, but this was hardly the time or the place to have that conversation. She could—

The horse stumbled on a loose rock. There was no warning. For Sabrina, the blackness of her world shifted and the sensation of falling nearly became a reality. She gasped and tried to grab on to something, but there was only openness in front of her.

“It’s all right,” Kardal soothed from behind her. He moved his arm so that it clasped her around the waist, pulling her more tightly against him. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She wanted to take comfort in his words, but she knew the real purpose behind them. “Your concern isn’t about me,” she grumbled. “You don’t want anything to happen to your prize.”

He laughed softly.
“Exactly, my desert bird.
I refuse
to let you fly away, nor will I allow you to be injured. You are to stay just as you are until I can claim my rightful reward.”

She didn’t like the sound of that. No doubt he believed everything he read in the papers about her, so he thought he knew her.

“You’re wrong about me,” she said a few minutes later, when the horse was once again steady and her heartbeat had returned to normal.

“I am rarely wrong.”

That comment made her roll her eyes, although with her wearing a blindfold he couldn’t tell.

“I know you are not a dutiful daughter,” he murmured in her ear. “You live a wild life in the west. But that is no surprise. You are your mother’s daughter, not a woman of Bahania.”

She told herself that he was a barbarian and his opinion didn’t matter. Unfortunately those words didn’t stop the sting of tears or the lump in her throat. She hated that people judged her based on a few reports in newspapers or magazines. It had happened to her all her life. Very few people took the time to find out the truth.

“Did it ever occur to you that sometimes the media gets it wrong?” she asked.

“Sometimes, but not in your case.
You have lived most of your years in
Los Angeles
. Picking up that lifestyle was inevitable. Had your father kept you here, you might have learned our ways, but that was not to be.”

She didn’t know which charge to answer first. “You’re making it sound as if my father letting me go was my fault,” she told him. “I was four years old. I didn’t have any say in the decision. And just in case you forgot, Bahanian law forbids a royal child being raised in another country, yet my father let my mother take me away. He didn’t even try to stop her.”

She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. All her life she’d had to live with the knowledge that her father hadn’t cared enough about her to keep her around. She didn’t doubt that if she’d been a son, he would have refused to let her go. But she was merely a daughter. His only daughter, but that was obviously not significant to him.

She felt her frustration growing. It wasn’t fair. It had never been fair and it was never going to be fair in the future. One day she would figure that out. Maybe on the same day she would cease caring what people thought about her. Maybe then she would be mature enough not to worry when they formed opinions and judged her before even meeting her. Unfortunately that day wasn’t today and she hated that Kardal’s low opinion stung more so than usual.

“You can say what you want,” she told Kardal. “You can have your opinions and your theories, but no one knows the truth except me.”

“I will admit that much is true,” he said, his deep voice drifting around her and making her wonder what he was thinking.

“Relax now,” he continued. “We will travel for much of the day. Try to rest. You didn’t sleep much last night.”

She started to ask how he knew,
then
remembered they had been tied together. Although she’d fallen asleep right away, she’d awakened several times, tossing and turning until she could doze off again. No doubt she’d kept him awake as well. What with being kidnapped, blindfolded and left with her wrists tied, Sabrina wasn’t sure she was even sorry.

She drew in a deep breath and tried to relax. When the tension in her body began to ease, she allowed her mind to drift. What would it be like to be someone as in charge of his world as Kardal? He was a man of the desert. He would answer to no one. She’d always been at the beck and call of her parents. They were forever sending her back and forth, as if neither really wanted her around.

“Do you really live in the City of
Thieves
?” she asked sleepily.

“Yes, Sabrina.”

She liked the sound of her name on his lips. Despite her predicament, she smiled. “All your life?” she asked.

“Yes.
All my life.
I went away to school for a few years, but I have always returned to the desert. This is where I belong.”

He spoke with a confidence she envied. “I’ve never belonged anywhere. When I’m in
California
, my mother acts like I’m in the way all the time. It’s better now that I’m older, but when I was young, she would complain about how she wasn’t free to come and go as she wanted.
Which wasn’t true because she just left me with her maid.
And in Bahania…” She sighed. “Well, my father doesn’t like me very much. He thinks I’m like her, which I’m not.”

She shifted to get more comfortable. “People don’t appreciate the little things in their lives that show they belong. If I had them, I would appreciate them.”

“Perhaps for ten minutes,” Kardal said. “Then you would grow weary of the constraints. You are spoiled, my desert bird. Admit it.”

Her sleepiness vanished and she sat up straight. “I am not. You don’t know me well enough to be making that kind of judgment. Sure, it’s easy to read a few things and listen to rumors and decide, but it’s very different to have lived my life.”

“I think you would argue with me about the color of the sky.”

“Not if I could see it.”

“However you talk around me,” he said, “I’m not removing the blindfold.”

“Your attitude needs adjusting.”

He laughed.
“Perhaps, but not by you.
As my slave, you will be busy with other things.”

She shivered. Did the man really intend to keep her as his personal slave? Was that possible? “You’re kidding, right? This is all a joke. You think I need a lesson and you’re going to be the one to teach it to me.”

“You’ll have to wait and see. However, don’t be too surprised when you find out I have no intention of letting you go.”

She couldn’t get her mind around the idea. It was crazy. This wasn’t fourteenth-century Bahania. They were living in the modern world. Men didn’t keep slaves. Or maybe in the wilds of the desert, they did.

She swallowed hard. “What, ah, exactly would you want me to do?”

He was silent for several heartbeats,
then
she felt him lean toward her. His breath tickled her ear as he whispered, “It’s a surprise.”

“I doubt it will be a very good one,” she murmured dryly.

Sounds awakened her. Sabrina jerked into consciousness, not aware that she’d been asleep. For a second she panicked because she couldn’t see, but then she remembered she was both bound and blindfolded.

“Where are we?” she asked, feeling more afraid than she had before. There were too many noises. Bits of conversation, yells, grunts, bleats.
Bleats?

She listened more closely and realized she heard the sounds of goats bleating and the bells worn by cattle. There were rooster calls, clinks of money, not to mention dozens of conversations occurring at the same time. The fragrance of cooking meat competed with the desert animals and the perfumed oils for sale.

“A marketplace?” she asked. Her stomach lurched. “Are you going to sell me?”

A coldness
swept over her. Until this moment, she hadn’t really thought through her situation. Yes, she’d been Kardal’s prisoner, but he’d treated her well and she hadn’t felt more than inconvenienced. Suddenly things were different. She was truly his captive and at his mercy. If he decided to sell her, she couldn’t do anything to stop him. No one would listen to the protests of a mere woman.

“Don’t think you have to throw yourself in front of the next moving cart,” Kardal said calmly. “Despite the appeal of the idea, I’m not going to sell you. We have arrived. Welcome to the City of
Thieves
.”

Sabrina absorbed the words without understanding them. He wasn’t going to sell her to some horrid man? Her life wasn’t in danger?

She felt his fingers against the back of her head,
then
her blindfold fell away. It took several seconds for her eyes to adjust to the late-afternoon light. When they did, she could only gasp in wonder.

There were dozens of people everywhere she looked. Hundreds, actually, dressed in traditional desert garb. She saw women carrying baskets and men leading donkeys.
Children running between the crowds.
Stalls had been set up along a main stone street and vendors called out enticements to come view their wares.

It was a village, she thought in amazement.
Or a town.
The City of
Thieves
really existed? Did she dare believe it?

She half turned in her saddle to glance at Kardal. “Is it real?”

“Of course.
Ah, they’ve noticed us.”

She returned her attention to the people and saw they were pointing and staring. Instantly Sabrina was aware of feeling dirty and mussed. Her cloak lay across her lap, hiding her bound hands, and a thin cloth covered her hair so no one could see the bright red color. Still, she was a woman sharing a saddle with a man. Worse, she had western features. Her skin wasn’t as dark as a native’s and the shape of her eyes was all wrong. There was also something about her mouth. She’d never quite figured out exactly what bow or curve set her apart, she only knew that she was rarely mistaken for a true Bahanian.

“Lady, lady!”

She glanced toward the high-pitched voice and saw a small girl waving at her. Sabrina started to wave back only to remember at the last second that her hands were bound. She had to settle for nodding pleasantly.

“Where is the treasure kept?” she asked. “Can I see it? Do you have it inventoried?”

Before he could answer, she heard a most peculiar sound. Something familiar, yet so out of place that she—

She turned toward the noise and gasped. There, on the edge of the marketplace, was a low stone wall. On the other side, a lazy river flowed around a bend and disappeared from view.

“Water?” she breathed, barely able to believe what she saw.

“We have an underground spring that supplies all our needs,” he told her, urging his horse through the crowd. “On the east side of the city, it returns underground, here it provides irrigation for our crops.”

Sabrina was stunned. In the desert, water was more valuable than
gold,
or even oil. With water, a civilization could survive. Without the precious commodity, life would end very quickly.

“I read several references to a spring in some of the diaries,” she said, “but no one mentioned a river.”

“Perhaps they weren’t allowed to see it, or chose not to write about it.”

“Maybe.
How long has it existed?”

“Since the first nomads founded the city.”

She jerked her attention away from the flowing river and focused again on the marketplace. “These people can’t all be nomads. By definition, they would want to spend some portion of the year in the desert.”

“True enough. There are those who live permanently within the city walls. Others stay for a time and move on.”

Walls?
Sabrina searched the far edges of the marketplace for the beginnings of walls. It was only then that she noticed they appeared to be riding through a giant courtyard. She turned in the saddle to glance behind them. Nearly a quarter mile away
were
massive stone walls.

“It’s not possible,” she breathed, amazed by the sheer size of the city.