Under Command Read online

  Heat rippled through Nikki, pooling low in her belly.

  Then he was gone, striding away, his long gait eating up the distance to the main huts of the clan council.

  She swallowed, composing herself before ducking back into the dark cool of the hut.

  “Was that really the king?” Samira whispered in French.

  “Yes, it was.” Nikki placed the damp cloth on Samira’s forehead, her heart squeezing at the smile crossing the child’s thin face, the sudden glimmer of light in her huge dark eyes.

  “We will be all right, then, Miss Nikki, with a king’s help.”

  I hope so.

  “Yes, we will—I know it in my heart, Samira,” she lied. “And you must believe it, too. You and your baby will be just fine.” As she spoke, memories of her own toddlers sifted into her mind. Pain stabbed through Nikki, her eyes growing moist again.

  She clenched her teeth. Nikki needed to do this—she had to save Samira and her unborn baby. It might give some reason to why her own two precious little souls were stolen from her.

  “He’s very handsome,” whispered Samira.

  A breath of laughter burst through Nikki’s tears, and she wiped her eyes. “You think so? How could you even see his face in this light?”

  “I saw. I saw that he likes you.”

  Nikki stilled.

  Her pulse quickened, along with something else, a little trill through her stomach. But she said nothing. Because she knew Samira was right—and it frightened her.

  Later that night Nikki crept quietly up to a hut and pressed herself against the clay wall still warm from the sun. From this vantage point she could remain hidden while she tried to catch snatches of the tribal council debate around a fire that had been lit at the center of the village. The flames crackled, shooting hot orange sparks into the cool, dark sky.

  Headmen from neighboring clans had traveled to join the Rahm sheik’s council, and he and his men were passing a hookah around the fire as they listened to Zakir. The rich scent of tobacco reached Nikki as a young male attendant placed fresh charcoal in the clay water pipe.

  The discourse was growing animated. Suddenly, Zakir leaned forward, his eyes locking with those of the clan sheik.

  The men fell silent. Nikki tensed.

  Even sitting on the ground, Zakir exuded a larger-than-life commanding presence. Tonight he wore his flowing black cloak against the mountain chill, and his hair fell loose and shiny to his shoulders. The flames caught the angles of his regal features, and his black eyes flashed as they reflected firelight—eyes that were failing him. Nikki’s heart compressed involuntarily at the thought.

  Blindness was going to be a real challenge for a man who liked to control everything.

  Zakir broke the tension around the fire with an abrupt movement of his arm as he uttered something to the sheik, his voice resonating with the bass and guttural tones of the rough Rahm dialect. The sound rippled over Nikki’s skin, warming her stomach. She could not take her eyes off him. She was mesmerized by this fireside vignette of what was possibly a historic political discussion.

  The Berber sheik replied, his tone low, earnest, and the rest of the men leaned forward in interest. Zakir spoke again, saying something about representation at key government levels, and heads nodded in agreement. Nikki noticed that every now and then, almost as if subconsciously, Zakir’s hand went to rest on the head of Ghorab who was lying with the two female salukis—Khaya and Tala—in the sand at his side. She leaned against the wall and just watched him for a while, enjoying the residual warmth from the clay spreading through her body.

  Enjoying the look of him.

  It was a guilty pleasure she hadn’t allowed herself in years, just appraising a good-looking male. It also made her uncomfortable, reminding Nikki of who she used to be and of all the things she used to want—family, children of her own. The love of a good man.

  But even as she was being inexorably pulled toward the king, attracted by his shimmering power and charisma, she feared his control over her emotions, her body. Because deep down, these were the same reasons she’d fallen for Sam.

  Nikki had been a powerful and influential professional in her own right—an accomplished and feted surgeon who’d been drawn toward the intoxicating sensuality of a powerful, good-looking and sharply intelligent man. Sam had represented a challenge to her, and a promise of something incredible—in bed and in life. And look what had happened.

  Sam had tired of her, started having affairs…

  Against her will, memories whispered again, the desert night enveloping her with cold images of that tragic, snowy Christmas Eve. Nikki glanced up at the cliff silhouetted against the light of a pale moon. And she told herself she really had nothing to fear. Her children were healing, and Zakir had infused her with hope that they’d all make it to the Canary Islands soon.

  Once she was away from him she could forget her past self again. She could stop the ugly memories of Sam again, stop worrying about her fraudulent identity being exposed.

  Nikki started as she felt a warm little hand slipping into hers. She glanced down and smiled as Solomon’s eager eyes peered up at hers, glistening pools in the darkness. “Can you please sing us the bedtime story, Miss Nikki?”

  She crouched down. “Of course, Solomon, I’ll be right there. You go on ahead.” She ruffled his head of tight dark curls. “Make sure the others are all lying down on their sleeping mats, okay?”

  He ran off into the darkness. An owl hooted softly, and Nikki glanced once more at Zakir holding court. The king barked something angrily in Arabic, stabbing his jambiya forcibly into sand as he launched to his feet. She strained to hear, but the rough dialect eluded her. He stood, looming above the men, arms akimbo, his dark cloak lifting in the breeze, the bejeweled hilt of the scimitar at his hips catching firelight.

  Dead silence descended over the men.

  And then they suddenly broke out into knee-slapping laughter. Ghorab got up and yipped, followed by the excited barking of the two female salukis.

  Relief rippled through Nikki.

  For a moment she’d thought negotiations had turned sour. She had no idea what Zakir’s joke was, but she found herself smiling as she turned and made her way to the orphan’s hut. After all that the children had endured she was pleased to have been able to expose them to a community where jokes and laughter were a part of life, where the notions of family, respect and honor were sacrosanct.

  Whatever diplomatic wizardry Sheik Zakir Al Arif was busy weaving around those orange flames in the velvet desert night, Nikki knew instinctively it would be for the better—for both the Berber clans and Al Na’Jar.

  Darkness was complete, the fire dying to red embers in the diplomatic circle. Above, in the inky vault of sky, stars were flung as if by supernatural hand. The wind had died, and all was still.

  But tonight Zakir’s sight was not good, and he could not visually appreciate the beauty of a Sahara night sky.

  Anger stung him. He hated from the depths of his heart that he could not win the war against this one physical weakness in himself.

  A soft and magical sound rose into the air, distracting Zakir from his emotions. Singing—a woman’s voice, gentle, lyrical—came from the orphans’ adobe hut, where a candle glowed through a narrow window. Zakir reached for Ghorab’s collar and coaxed his dogs toward the blurry gold flickering in the dark.

  As he neared, he realized with a surprising surge of pleasure that the voice was Nikki’s and that she was singing a story in French.

  Zakir walked quietly toward the hut, not wanting to make any sound that might telegraph his presence, simply hungry to listen to her voice. A jackal yipped somewhere in the hills as it hunted, and Zakir abruptly silenced his dogs, signaling them to lie at his boots. He leaned his shoulder against the mud wall and listened for a while, his pleasure deepening as he realized that he recognized the words of her story.

  It was an ancient desert fable from his own youth, one his mother, Nah
la, used to sing to Zakir and his siblings. His mother had told them the story had been passed down from nomadic Bedouins who used to sing it to their children while they traveled from the Western Sahara all the way to the Caspian Sea.

  Bewitched by the threads of story and song, the king was inexorably pulled back to memories of the boy he once was.

  The exact words of the tale varied across the Sahara, but essentially the story was the same—about a princess stolen by warriors and sold into slavery. She was bought at a North African market by emissaries of a strange and mysterious man who some said was a chimera who shifted between king and animal.

  The princess was taken to this man’s desert castle, and while she never actually got to see him since he moved about his palace only by night, she was taught by staff to fear him. The orphan princess was also taught the dance of the veils.

  “And then—” Nikki’s voice switched from song into a soft whisper “—when she was old enough, one night the princess was summoned to dance before this mysterious king. And she danced and danced, swirling in her veils, and then the king said to the slave girl, ‘Now you must sing for me.’ And the slave girl did.” Nikki’s own voice rose in song, and Zakir felt in himself a rush of anticipation and warmth as he recalled his mother’s voice singing these same words in Arabic while he, Da’ud, Tariq and Omair sat listening rapt at her feet, and tiny Dalilah, who was just an infant at the time, slept in his mother’s arms.

  Transported, Zakir inhaled deeply and closed his eyes, allowing his other senses to absorb this moment. Nikki’s voice wrapped around him like soft velvet, bringing even more memories of family, comfort, a time when everything was right in his young world.

  And in his heart Zakir suddenly yearned to return to that place of family and togetherness. He longed to feel inside himself the pure love that he’d glimpsed in his father’s eyes as the then king had looked upon his mother.

  Nikki reached a verse where the children’s voices joined hers, a little orphan choir rising in song, high in the barren hills of a desert night—children of violence, singing with such innocence and purity and beauty that it could make a man weep.

  This surely was the essence of life, of the future. Especially for a country like his. And Zakir realized suddenly that this childlike purity that could still be coaxed from these abused war orphans was the very thing that Nikki sought so desperately to save.

  Compelled, hungry for something he could not even begin to articulate, Zakir reached forward and carefully edged aside the curtain that hung over the door. He peered inside, eyes trying to adjust to candlelight.

  Nikki’s face was turned away from him. He could see the blur of her profile, skin like porcelain. She wore no scarf, and her golden hair fell across her face in a cascade of loose curls. She looked like an angel.

  Around her feet, on seven reed mats on the dirt floor, were the children. Each pair of dark eyes was turned toward Nikki, their voices earnest as they sang the fairy-tale words of Zakir’s youth.

  The eldest child, Samira, caught his movement at the door. She glanced up and abruptly stopped singing. Like an electric current rippling through the other kids, they all fell instantly silent and spun to face him.

  Zakir sensed their fear.

  He cleared his throat, stepped inside the room. “I apologize,” he said in Arabic, then French. “Je suis desolé. I wanted to listen, but not to disturb.”

  Nikki lurched to her feet, hand shooting to chest in surprise. “Zakir!” She hurriedly groped for her scarf to cover her hair. But he stepped forward and stayed her with his hand on her arm. “Please, don’t.”

  She hesitated.

  “I don’t want you to hide yourself from me anymore,” he whispered against her ear. Then loudly he said, “I just wanted to hear the story.” He smiled and turned to the orphans, holding his hands out at his sides, palms up. “So, you must be the famous children who crossed the burning sands of the Sahara!”

  A little boy bobbed his head and excitedly got up on to spindly brown legs. He bowed deep. “I am Solomon, your Royal Highness.”

  Zakir laughed with deep pleasure, and he crouched down, balancing on the balls of his feet as he peered into the young boy’s dark eyes. “I know. And I am Sheik Zakir Al Arif, the King of Al Na’Jar. Can you introduce me to everyone else, Solomon?”

  Pride swelled the little boy’s chest.

  Nikki’s eyes glistened as she watched him, and for some damned reason Zakir wanted to do her proud, to not disappoint her. He wanted to see that glow of admiration in her eyes again. He wanted to ease the tension that seemed to permanently knot her shoulders.

  “This is Philippe, Mahmoud, Lorita, Koffi and this is Lina—” Dusky faces broke into smiles as the children launched to their feet in turn and bowed in front of Zakir.

  “And this is Samira,” declared Solomon. “She’s going to have a baby!”

  Zakir’s heart torqued with sudden ferocity as Samira, a mere child herself, lowered her dark head in reverence, her silken hair spilling forward. She had Arabic blood, like him, but with much browner skin—a child of mixed race and culture, born of violence, and carrying another conceived in violence. A cycle that never ended.

  A cycle Nikki was fighting to stop.

  Zakir shot a fierce a glance at Nikki, suddenly understanding the steel he’d glimpsed in her eyes. He now knew how she’d managed to walk up that deserted boulevard toward his tanks and guns. He understood the way in which she’d confronted him in his reception room.

  He exhaled slowly, a little overwhelmed with the sudden rawness of affection he felt for her, and he turned to her children. “Did you all have enough dinner tonight?”

  They nodded quietly.

  Nikki picked up the candle, cupping her hand around the flickering light as she moved toward the door. “Time for sleep, mes enfants,” she said fondly. “I will be back soon. I’m just going outside to talk with the king.”

  She carried the candle to the door and blew it out before exiting. In the sudden darkness, Zakir had to reach for the wall. He felt his way to the entrance and held back the reed mat for Nikki.

  He knew she was watching.

  They stepped outside, and Zakir clicked his fingers softly, his hounds surging to his side. He hooked his fingers into Ghorab’s collar as they walked into the night. “How are they doing, Nikki?”

  “Better.”

  “Samira? Have you been able to turn her baby?”

  “No. And she’s still running a fever.”

  He nodded quietly, leading her toward the dying fire with no real purpose other than talking to her out of earshot.

  “Where did you learn that song, Nikki?”

  “Do you know it?”

  “My mother used to sing those words to us in Arabic when I was a child.”

  She stilled, looked up at him and smiled. Moonlight caught the slight gleam on her teeth and the shimmer of her eyes. It was all Zakir could see. But her smile did crazy things to his chest. Giving Nikki pleasure expanded Zakir in a way he could not define.

  “Why are you smiling, Nikki?”

  “Some men,” she said quietly, “you just can’t imagine as having been children.”

  He laughed. “Solomon will be like that someday. Mark my words. Overnight you will suddenly see only a powerful man, and you will no longer see the boy.”

  “And how would you know?” He heard the slight jest in her tone, a playfulness he had not detected before.

  “I just do.”

  “Because you were like him?”

  He shrugged, slipping effortlessly into easy conversation with her as they resumed walking, his dogs moving like shadows at their side. “I think Tariq was more like Solomon. Very earnest, helpful. He wanted to solve the world’s problems. I was perhaps more quiet than Tariq. My mother used to call me broody, but I was not as sullen as Omair.” He laughed again. “These Rahm Berbers might call me the Dark One, but Omair is the true dark horse. He’s the one whose thoughts will never be
read.”

  “Well, unless Solomon gets a break, he’ll become like his father.”

  “And who was Solomon’s father?”

  “A warlord. Very cruel, very powerful. Solomon ran away.”

  “Why?”

  “He was abused.”

  “He was lucky,” said Zakir softly. “How so?”

  “Because he found you.” Zakir paused, turned to glance down at her.

  Moonlight caught the glisten of emotion in her eyes, but she said nothing. And Zakir couldn’t stop himself. He touched her cheek, in the dark, with no one to watch.

  “Nikki,” he whispered, her skin soft under his palm, cool in the night air. He moved his thumb under her chin, his fingers cupping the side of her face. “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever met.” He brought his lips close to hers. “And I speak of much more than physical perfection,” he whispered in Arabic.

  A shiver trilled down Nikki’s spine.

  She swallowed, unable to speak, and she was suddenly, utterly desperate to lean into this man’s hard, warm body, to feel his strength, to absorb more of the calm power he seemed to infuse with his touch.

  It was such a human need—to be touched. Comforted. Loved. A need Nikki had tried to ignore for so long. And Zakir was forcing those long-buried desires to rise to the surface, making her burn with hunger for him.

  He removed his hand abruptly, and she felt as if she’d been dropped from a safety net. Nikki cleared her throat, anxiety tearing through her desire. This man was too strong, too masculine, too sensual, and when she was around him her mind narrowed. It was as if she had no control.

  And with her mounting panic, the stark reality of her situation returned. She’d been told to spy on Zakir—if she didn’t, her children could be hurt. She was going to have to face that Gurkha. She had to give him something, and right now she had nothing.

  “How did the meeting with the elders go?” Her voice came out husky as she changed the topic.