‘Ready to go?’ he said from behind her.
Liyah steeled herself and turned around. ‘Yes.’
She had a sudden vision of how this marriage would play out—days spent on her own interspersed with sterile social events. Playing dress-up in haute couture. She clenched her hands into fists. Why did that suddenly bother her? When the thought of her imminent freedom and independence should be enough to see her through this short period?
She moved forward, very aware of Sharif’s eyes on her, coolly appraising. He held out a long camel coat and helped her into it. A classic design, it belted around her waist. She picked up her clutch bag.
In the back of the car a few minutes later, cocooned from the bitterly cold air outside, Liyah said, ‘I looked you up today.’
He turned, arched a brow.
Her face grew hot. ‘I mean I looked up your company. So, you basically own all the biggest luxury designer brands and labels in the world?’
Sharif inclined his head. ‘Along with the oldest and most exclusive champagne and Irish whiskey brands.’
‘You have a distillery in Ireland?’
He nodded.
‘Is that something you always wanted to do? Follow in your father’s footsteps?’
Sharif tensed visibly, his eyes widening, and then he made a sound that was half-laugh, half-growl. ‘Follow? I had no choice but to take over—or everything he’d built up would have been destroyed and all for nothing.’
Feeling her way, she said, ‘You weren’t close?’
She thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, ‘Do you know when I saw snow for the first time?’
She shook her head.
‘In Scotland, at a boarding school so remote you needed a boat to get to the mainland. That’s where my beloved father put me after he’d had me kidnapped from my mother’s home in Al-Murja.’
‘Kidnapped?’ Liyah was shocked. She hadn’t seen anything about that in the stories she’d found online. ‘Why would he kidnap you?’
‘Because my mother wasn’t going to just hand me over. She knew what he was like. He’d seduced her and married her just to get her dowry and set himself up. He’d humiliated her and broken her heart. She knew he only wanted me as a pawn to use in the future. Someone he could mould into doing his bidding.’
His voice was hard. Cold. Liyah couldn’t push away the image of a young boy with dark hair, shivering against the forbidding backdrop of an icy country. The culture shock would have been traumatic. Especially coming from the desert. The very thought of it made her own heart ache.
‘How did your mother die?’
‘He killed her.’ Before Liyah could respond to that, Sharif added, ‘Or as good as. She got sick. She needed urgent expensive medical treatment in Europe. Her family didn’t have the necessary cash—it took years for them to recover financially from the loss of her dowry, and from the humiliation of her not fulfilling the agreement to marry your uncle—and my father refused to help. When he eventually did agree to fly her to Paris for an operation it was too late. She’d died.’
‘How old were you?’
‘I’d just turned nine. I hadn’t seen her in a year.’
A lump formed in Liyah’s throat. She forced it down, sensing that Sharif was not looking for sympathy or comfort. She just said, ‘That’s rough.’
Sharif shrugged. ‘It was what it was. It’s in the past now.’
But she sensed it was not forgotten. Not by a long shot.
They were coming to a smooth stop outside a restaurant now, and Liyah could see officious-looking people springing forward with clipboards, and umbrellas to ward off the snow.
Sharif got out and opened Liyah’s door. She steeled herself against the inevitable reaction when she put her hand into his, but it was no use. By the time she got into the warm space of the restaurant her skin was hot, and she pulled away from Sharif in case he saw how weak she was.
Someone discreetly took her coat and she followed Sharif into the restaurant, gasping a little when she saw the elaborate setting. There was a long table laid with gold cutlery. An arrangement of winter flowers ran down the centre of the table in green, gold and decadent red. There were hundreds of flickering candles.
Everything became a bit of a blur as she and Sharif were swept into a round of meeting people and air-kissing before they were seated for dinner. Liyah had to stop her jaw dropping to the floor more than once when she recognised several movie stars. One of whom had won multiple awards the previous year.
To her relief, she wasn’t seated beside Sharif, who was at the top of the table. The new designer and his assistant were next to him. It gave her a chance to regain her breath after the revelations he’d shared on their journey here. A chance to observe him for once. She saw how he interacted with the designer, giving him the totality of his attention, but every now and then his gaze would slide to Liyah and she’d immediately feel flustered and look away.
In a bid to avoid Sharif’s eye, she got into a conversation with the woman beside her who turned out to be very pleasant. She was a stylist who regularly worked with the designer, and Liyah was able to ask her lots of questions about the fashion industry that Sharif would never have had the time to indulge.
After Sharif had given a speech, and the dinner party had started to break up, people moved into another room, from where Liyah could hear the infectious beat of disco music. Clearly the party was continuing. But when she looked around, Sharif was approaching with her coat.
‘You really
