The Desert Lord's Baby by Olivia Gates Page A

inexorable.” This man was all-seeing. And they sure saw eye to eye in evaluating Farooq. “But he is also magnanimous and just. You have no reason to feel apprehensive, ya Ameerati. Everything will be fine.”
    Okay, here was where their concord ended. Even if she agreed the qualities mitigating Farooq’s ruthlessness existed, Hashem didn’t know that Farooq no longer considered her entitled to his magnanimity, was dealing out his brand of justice by using Mennah to pressure her into giving up her freedom and choices. She was also not buying Hashem’s prognosis for a second.
    How could everything be fine? Ever again?
    She could only pray it would one day grow tolerable.
    To have Hashem’s allegiance as an extension of his to Farooq, mixed in with his pity for her as a casualty of his master’s inescapability, a man of such insight and importance in Farooq’s life, might grow comforting. Right now she had to make him leave her to her turmoil.
    She answered his original question. “Thank you, Hashem. I promise to avail myself of your services if I think of anything.”
    With a last probing look, he bowed and walked away, obviously loath to leave her in her state without offering service or solace.
    Instead of relief, the moment he disappeared from her field of vision, chaos rushed in to fill the vacuum he’d left behind. Everything her eyes fell on contributed to her imbalance.
    In both her personal and professional lives, she’d lived and worked where power brokers weaved their pacts, where billionaires flaunted their assets in an addiction to competition and for leverage in business. She’d been in the bowels of private citadels, of diplomatic and hospitality fortresses. She’d studied beauty and luxury, learned their secrets and power and how to utilize their nuances to enthrall the most jaded senses, smoothing her clients’ path to winning their objectives through the goodwill engendered by perfectly designed and realized events.
    This jet surpassed anything she’d ever experienced in taste and sheer, mind-numbing opulence. She’d had an idea it would be something unprecedented when she’d laid eyes on it. It was surely the first bronze-finished Boeing 737 she’d ever seen. Then she’d set foot on its plush carpeting and had plunged deeper into the surrealism of being with Farooq, being introduced as his wife and deluged in the veneration of a culture that revered its royals. All her knowledge of the best that money could buy had only sent her mind boggling in appreciation of every detail around her.
    She gaped again at every article of genuine art, every flawless reproduction in design, everything spanning centuries and cultures, the classical meshing with the modern, the Western with the Middle Eastern, disparate forms of beauty melding with luxury and futuristic technology in a symphony of unlikely harmony.
    She fingered her seat’s armrest. A panel slid open, exposing a set of buttons. Hashem had said they gave her control over all amenities, from service to entertainment to climate control. She pushed one with a screen icon. Her head snapped to the left as an eighteenth-century mural disappeared with a smooth whir to reveal a screen of a size she hadn’t known had been manufactured yet.
    No need to experiment further. There’d only be more wonders, a refresher course as well as a first-time close-up of Farooq’s affluence and power. And this was only his transportation…
    She was staring down at her sweaty palms, fighting another wave of dizziness when her senses overloaded. She almost moaned at the force of the breach. Farooq.
    She didn’t want to raise her eyes. Didn’t want to watch him approaching, obliterating her autonomy, shrinking the world into the parameters of his presence, his desires, his decrees.
    She did, saw his eyes firing with satisfaction at her slumped pose. He closed in on her like a force of nature, two men from his extensive entourage trying to keep up with him,