The Sheikh’s Forced Bride(4)

“What? I’m a prisoner of love instead?” His mouth quirked. Casey’s face heated. She waved a hand at him. “Sorry to bust in on your wedding. I just wanted a quote.”

One of his dark eyebrow lifted. She noticed they were arched high in the middle and black as sin. “Your little outburst, Casey Connolly, left me in more than my usual amount of trouble.” He leaned against the wall in front of her cell, his casual posture at odds with a situation that was, Casey had to admit, headed to dire. Reporters had been known to disappear into Middle Eastern prisons for a very long time.

She tilted her head and studied his face, trying to figure out just what he wanted from her. Because he must want something—even if it was only to gloat that she was behind bars. However, he didn’t seem the gloating type.

He did look like trouble on two legs. Those dark eyes—bedroom eyes, she’d call them—raked a stare over her body, his gaze moving slowly as if he was enjoying the view.

She thought about stepping closer to let him enjoy the smell—eau de prison cell and two days of sweat, but she wanted out and this guy might be her key to that.

He swept a courtly bow that might have been ridiculous if anyone else had done that. “I’m Sheikh Khalid Al-Qasimi.” “As if I didn’t know. What, you think I’d crash just anyone’s wedding.” She crossed her arms. “Now can I call the American Embassy so we can clear up this misunderstanding?”

He shook his head and the ends of his headscarf swayed. “It is not a misunderstanding when you violate a private ceremony against the expressed wishes of the Sultan of Sharjah. And this is not America—our laws our quite different.”

Dropping her arms to her sides, she chewed on her lower lip. Was it better to go damsel in distress or stay a reporter who knew her stuff. Sharjah might not be the most forward-looking of countries, but it also wasn’t backwater—they had a lot of ties to American businesses, which was why she’d targeted them for a quote from one of the CEOs. She lifted her head and told him, “Do you really want to escalate this into an international incident? And that’s after the bad press you already earned? What did they call you? The sulky Sheikh? The sultan’s sorry son?”

He winced, but waved aside her remarks. “As you note, honor does matter in Sharjah. Your actions interrupted my wedding and humiliated the bride.”

Casey bit down on her lower lip again. She let out a breath. “About that…I am sorry if your bride’s angry. But, honestly, she seemed a nice girl, and too nice to be pushed into something without her express consent.”

“Oh, she won’t be. The wedding is, as you Americans might say, off.”

Casey blinked—and held still, cutting off the urge to pump a fist into the air and shout, “Yes!” That would be rude. Something, however, must have showed up in her eyes, for Khalid shook his head. “My father is undecided what to do about you. He may simply forget about you. If that happens, there’s no telling how long you’ll stay in here.” He waved a hand at the iron bars, the concrete walls and floor. Sharjah was certainly modern with its ideas of prisons being a lot of hard surfaces.

“You’re bluffing,” Casey said. “Your father has far too many connections to American businesses to risk sanctions or worse.”

Khalid shrugged. It seemed an elegant gesture, smooth and practiced, but Casey couldn’t help noticing his eyes had darkened. It was possible he was as upset with her as his father must be—from what she’d seen, the bride had been a lovely girl.

Staring at him, she lifted her chin and cut to the chase. “You’re not here to tell me all this, so just what do you want?” She could have sworn she saw a shift in his expression, a quirk of his lips and those arched eyebrows that betrayed what seemed irritation. Over what?

Before she could figure it out, he asked, “I wish to know why did you crash my wedding?”

Turning her head to one side, she chewed on her lower lip. Did she go for honesty? Or something that might get her out of here? Giving up—she was a damn poor liar—she waved a hand at him. “Look, yours wasn’t the first arranged wedding I’ve been to. I’ve seen girls shoved into matches with rich old men, and women obviously terrified to say no or so unhappy that you could feel it in the room. But yours is…was…high profile. A story about a dozen women sold by their family into virtual slavery gets a few lines of page five and people going tsk-tsk. But—”

“The Sultan’s Sulky Son—is that what you said I was named—I will get front page. Yes?”