Free Married to the Sheikh by Katheryn Lane

Chapter 1
     
    Like many brides, Dr. Sarah Greenwich thought that her wedding day was the happiest day of her life, except for the fact that none of her family and friends were there to witness it.
    Most of her friends said that they couldn’t afford the trip from England to Yazan, a remote country in the south of the Arabian Peninsula. Her friends who worked with her at the Women’s Hospital, in the country’s capital, all said that they were busy that weekend and gave mumbled apologies. Sarah’s parents had been more honest. They said that they couldn’t possibly condone the event by attending. When Sarah asked them why, her mother simply replied that if Sarah didn’t see what the problem was, she was more of a fool than her mother thought. However, Sarah did know what the issue was. She didn’t have to press the point to know that her friends and family in England thought she was crazy to marry a Bedouin sheikh, a man that lived in a tented encampment in the middle of the desert.
    “Sheikh Akbar isn’t even rich,” Sarah’s mother had yelled at her. “Only you could find a poor Arab and then be stupid enough to marry one.” Luckily, Sarah’s mother didn’t know how Sarah had “found” Sheikh Akbar, though her friends in Yazan did and this was the reason that many of them didn’t come to her wedding.
    During the long wedding service, Sarah stopped listening to the imam, the local religious man, reciting prayers and reading holy passages that were meant to enlighten the bride and groom, and she began thinking about how she’d first met SheikhAkbar. He had kidnapped her several months ago in the mistaken belief that she was the British ambassador’s wife. However, once he found out that she was just a foreign doctor, he helped her to escape, though by then they had both fallen madly in love with each other.
    Unfortunately, most of her friends didn’t understand how Sarah could fall for her abductor. One of her colleagues, Dr. Ralph Warren, even offered to give her psychiatric help, saying that she was suffering Stockholm syndrome, a condition whereby a hostage believes that they are attracted to their abductor. Sarah refused the doctor’s help. She knew that what she felt was genuine and not the result of some mental disorder. After Sheikh Akbar had helped her to escape, they met frequently and she had returned to his encampment many times over the last six months, not as a hostage, but as a lover and as a friend.
    Some of her local friends did understand her feelings for the sheikh, but even they were unwilling to come to her wedding as they were scared of leaving the capital and travelling out to the wild empty lands of Sakara where Sheikh Akbar and his people, the Al-Zafir tribe, lived. Sarah tried to reassure them that Akbar ruled peacefully over this territory and no one would dare to attack the friends of his bride-to-be, but it wasn’t enough. Several of her friends, especially her local friends, hinted that they were scared of Akbar and his men and wanted nothing to do with them.
    Sarah peered through the heavy veil of linked gold coins that covered her face. It had been a present from the sheikh and through it, she could just see her groom. He sat so close to her that she could feel his knees touching hers and she could see his warm brown eyes gazing back at her, full of love and tenderness. He was wearing traditional white robes embroidered with gold and round his waist was a wide silk sash into which he had struck a jewelled dagger that he said had belonged to the rulers of his tribe for centuries.
    Sarah stifled a giggle as she realised that the groom was wearing white while she was wearing black, in a strange inverse of a Western wedding. However, it was hard to see the black cloth of her dress through all the embroidery. Her new mother-in-law, Fatima, had spent untold hours sewing her wedding gown and decorating it lavishly with coloured silks and dozens of gold and silver coins, so that