The Sheikh's Son Read Free Page A

him.” Ali shoved his head under his pillow.
    “Maybe we should leave him for a bit,” Sarah suggested.
    Akbar ignored her and sat on Ali’s bed. “I see you’re a Manchester United fan. When I was your age, I was a great footballer. I was one of the best in the whole country.”
    “I never knew that,” Sarah said.
    Akbar winked at her and then carried on talking to Ali. “Your mother tells me that you like to play football.”
    Sarah raised her eyebrows in surprise. She hadn’t told Akbar that, though looking at Ali’s room, it wasn’t hard to guess that he was a big football fan. The walls were covered in football posters and on the floor there was a small heap of football clothes that hadn’t found their way to the laundry basket yet.
    “How often do you go training?” Akbar asked. Ali poked his head out from under the pillow, but didn’t reply.
    “Maybe I could take you training sometime. Where’s the nearest football field?”
    “There’s the park,” Ali mumbled.
    “A park would be the perfect place to show me what a good footballer you are.”
    “I’m not that good. I wasn’t even picked for the school team.”
    “That’s all the more reason why we need to go training. I’ll teach you some tricks. How about we go straight after school? I could meet you there.”
    Ali looked at his mum. Sarah nodded. “We could all go together,” she said. She was glad that Akbar had dropped the subject of fighting.
    Ali explained where his school was and what time he finished.
    “Excellent. I’ll see you tomorrow, Ali. Get some rest.” Akbar patted the boy on the shoulder, got up and left the room. He motioned for Sarah to follow him downstairs. Once they were standing by the front door, he whispered into Sarah’s ear, “Until tomorrow, my desert rose.” He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand and left the house.
    Sarah touched her face where his hand had been and looked in the mirror that hung in the hallway. Only then did she realise what a mess she looked. Her make-up had run from when she’d been caught in the rain earlier and across the front of her blonde hair was a long streak of mozzarella and tomato sauce. She couldn’t believe that Akbar had seen her like this, but then what did it matter what he thought?
    Sarah went through all the reasons why she left him. First, he stopped her from working at the Women’s Hospital in Yazan because he refused to write a letter giving his consent, a necessary procedure for all married women who wanted to work. However, she could live with that. Instead of working at the hospital, which was a long and difficult drive away, she acted as a doctor to the local Bedouin who she lived with. But then Akbar told her that he wanted to take Rasha as a second wife. He said it was to look after her, as she was unmarried and pregnant with a dead man’s son. However, it was possible that Rasha was pregnant with Akbar’s child. Sarah once saw her coming out of his tent late at night and when she accused Akbar of sleeping with Rasha, he didn’t deny it.
    Sarah looked at her reflection in the mirror and promised herself that there was no way that she was going to fall back into Akbar’s arms and return to the desert with him. Her place was in London with her son, not in a Bedouin camp, living as part of the sheikh’s harem.
     

Chapter 4
     
    Sarah left the clinic late the next day. Even though she managed to cancel her last few appointments, the ones that she did have took longer than expected. She worked in an area where there were a high number of Arabic-speaking women and her language skills were certainly an asset. However, there were many different forms of Arabic and Sarah didn’t know all of them. The last patient she saw that day spoke a regional dialect from East Africa and it took Sarah a long time to understand what the woman was telling her. Eventually she worked out that the woman was suffering from migraines and, after prescribing some medicine