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Three powerful, passionate princes of the desert, about to choose brides…

Summer Sheikhs

Three exotic, exciting and intense novels by three super writers: Alexandra Sellers, Abby Green and Marguerite Kaye

Summer Sheikhs
Alexandra Sellers
Abby Green
Marguerite Kaye

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Sheikh’s Betrayal

About the Author

ALEXANDRA SELLERS is the author of over twenty-five novels and a feline language text published in 1997 and still selling.

Born and raised in Canada, Alexandra first came to London as a drama student. Now she lives near Hampstead Heath with her husband, Nick. They share housekeeping with Monsieur, who jumped through the window one day and announced, as cats do, that he was moving in.

What she would miss most on a desert island is shared laughter.

Readers can write to Alexandra at PO Box 9449, London NW3 2WH.

Dear Reader,

I wonder how many men and women hold in their hearts the image of their first love while they carry on lives that bear no relation to that dream? For every story that we hear of true love reunited – after years, even decades, of separation – there must be many, many more who remember, but never take that risky first step towards rediscovery. If the chance was offered, though, would we be able to resist?

My heroine, Desi, hasn’t kept the dream alive, at least not consciously. A painful betrayal changed her passionate young love, first to its opposite and then to indifference – or so she imagines. It would take wild horses for her to seek out her old love, Salah…wild horses or a best friend’s desperate need.

Salah, now a powerful Cup Companion who has the confidence of a prince, also thinks himself immune to the siren call of rediscovered love. But still he is driven to meet Desi, the first love whose memory has haunted him all these years. And once met, he’s driven to taste the bittersweetness again…

There’s another kind of reunion for me in this book – it’s my first SONS OF THE DESERT story in nearly five years. I am very glad to be back writing for you again and I hope you’ll find the rediscovery as thrilling as I do!

Love,

Alexandra Sellers

For you

Again

Prologue

THERE were two immigration officers at passport control, and a short line of travellers in front of each. A man stood behind one of the desks, scanning the faces of the disembarking passengers. His watchful stillness was a hub for the busy flow, as if the scene somehow revolved around him.

He looked straight at Desi, and a buzz of warning sounded in her bones. She was wearing sunglasses, but even so, she turned her head to avoid meeting his eyes. Passport and landing card in her hand, clutching her elegantly travel-worn leather bag, she joined the other line, and resolutely did not look his way again.

But it had taken only one glance for his image to get stuck in her memory, as irritating as a fishbone: desert dark and harsh-faced, wearing an immaculate white cotton kaftan under a flowing burnous and the traditional headscarf she knew was called a keffiyeh. A chiselled mouth. Cheeks carved out of the rock she’d flown over in the desert, a scar across one cheekbone.

‘Passport, please,’ a voice said, and Desi came to. It was her turn. She stepped forward and handed up her passport. She was tight with nerves.

Desirée Drummond. He read the name without a flicker of recognition, and she breathed a little easier.

‘Take off sunglasses, please.’

She had to comply. She held her breath while the agent’s eyes roved over her face with sudden eagerness. She let it out slowly when it was clear he didn’t recognize her face, either. He didn’t ask her to take off her hat. He picked up his official stamp and flipped through the heavily stamped passport for an empty page.

‘What is porpoise of visit?’

‘Pleasure.’ And that’s the first lie done and dusted, she told herself. Pleasure is the last thing I expect from this little outing. Then, an inexpert liar, she rushed to add detail. ‘I’m a student of archaeology. I’m going to visit a dig.’

‘Deeg?’ he was clearly pleased to have an excuse to prolong the encounter. He might not have recognized her, but he clearly liked what he saw. ‘What is deeg?’

‘Oh…it’s a—a place where they find an ancient city or something and…archaeologists, you know, they dig to find out about history.’

His eyes widened with sudden alertness, and Desi cursed herself. Why hadn’t she just left well enough alone?

‘Where is the dig?’ he asked, in the voice of a man determined not to let beauty distract him from duty.

‘Oh!’ Desi laughed awkwardly. ‘I don’t actually know. Someone is meeting me…’

‘Stamp the passport,’ a deep voice commanded in Arabic, and both heads snapped up in surprise.

Him. The man who had been watching her. Standing by the immigration officer now and looking at Desi with a black gaze that sent nervous ripples down her spine.

Then she gasped, her head snapping back in sudden shock. The face of the stranger in front of her dissolved and reassembled. Her heart kicked like a million volts.

‘I don’t believe it!’ she croaked.

‘Hello, Desi,’ he said, in the same second.

‘Salah?’

He was nothing like the boy she remembered, nor the man she might have imagined that boy becoming. He looked closer to forty than thirty. There were deep lines on his forehead, a scar high on one cheek, and the oncegenerous mouth was tight and disciplined. The thin boy’s chest and shoulders had filled out with mature muscle.

And those were only the superficial changes. He had an aura of unquestioned authority, a man used to commanding and being obeyed. Power came off him like heat, distorting the air around him.

But it was the harshness, the cold disillusion behind the eyes that shocked her most.

Salah, but not Salah. She could not imagine how he’d got here from who he had been. She was looking at a stranger.

A stranger whose name, she knew, was His Excellency Salahuddin Nadim ibn Khaled ibn Shukri al Khouri, Cup Companion to Prince Omar of the Barakat Emirates, one of the dozen most influential men in his government.

The childhood sweetheart she had come here to seduce, and betray.

Chapter One

‘BABA’S a gineer.’

That mystical communication, imparted to Desirée by Samiha on their first day at school, had entranced Desi with its exotic otherness and bound her instantly to her pretty, dark-eyed new friend. Soon she learned that Baba meant Daddy, and that gineer meant he had come to the west coast to build something big. But the magic never quite faded.

It was the first day of what grew into a lifelong friendship. Desi and Sami were inseparable all through school. They spent their summers together, too, on a small island off the B.C. coast, where the Drummond family’s lakefront ‘cottage’ was a century-old black clapboard farmhouse with outbuildings.

Her ex-hippie parents were hoping to turn the place into a year-round home, growing their own food, and hosting retreats, healing courses and dream workshops in the summer to see them through the winter. But the project never generated enough income for her father to give up his university post and permanently move the family from Vancouver.

Every summer Desi and her brother and sister were each allowed to invite a friend to stay. Every year from first grade on, Desi took Sami.

The summer Desi turned nine, Samiha’s cousin Salah came from Central Barakat to stay with Sami’s family and improve his English. Salah was twelve, the same age as her brother Harry, and for some reason no one could afterwards remember, he was invited to the cottage.

Salah and Harry became friends, and after that every year it was somehow taken for granted that Salah would be a part of their summer adventure.

Salah was deeply attractive, a fascinating boy. Those first few summers, Desi hovered between hero worship and competitiveness in her feelings for him, half determined to prove she was braver and brighter than any boy, half wishing Salah were her friend instead of her brother’s.

Such feelings were a perfect primer for something deeper, and it wasn’t long in coming. At the end of the summer she turned fourteen, Desi was just entering on puberty, and a new awareness between herself and Salah beckoned. The next summer, Salah didn’t make his annual visit to Canada.

During those two years, Desi grew up. Her breasts formed, her waist appeared, and her height shot up six inches that was almost all leg. Her face shifted from sweet roundness to a haunting elegance.

The just-sixteen-year-old who greeted her old sparring partner the following summer was tall, very slender and quirkily beautiful—so ‘unusual’ that she had been spotted in the street by a scout and signed with a modelling agency.

As for Salah, at nineteen he showed more clearly the man he would be: slim but powerful, with broad, thin shoulders, a dark, intense gaze and a voice that came from his toes. He was also broody, inscrutable and very sure of his opinions.

Of course she fell in love with him. Of course she did. The friend of childhood whom she already adored, transformed into a romantic hero? Salah was now intensely good-looking, darkly masculine—and so much more adult than the boys at school. And his innocent integrity was a complete contrast to the predatory male sleaze her father and minders kept at a distance in the modelling world.

He was clearly sunk by the new Desi, whose flowing hair moved even when she didn’t, whose creamy skin glowed with sensual promise, whose bikinis showed off the curve of full small breasts, fabulous legs, smooth abdomen and firm rump, and who could scarcely eat for fear of gaining an ounce.

That was the year, by an unlucky coincidence—though they thought it perfect enough then—that both her brother Harry and her friend Sami missed the usual holiday on the island. Samiha had gone back to the Barakat Emirates for a visit, and at the last minute Harry had got a summer job to earn money for university. He came to the island only on odd weekends.

It was only natural that Desi and Salah should spend their time with each other.

That summer, too, there was a heat wave, and maybe it was the exhaustion factor that meant her parents didn’t notice the building chemical reaction between them, or maybe it was just their hippy laissez-faire attitude; Desi never knew.

On the mainland there were forest fires, but the islands, although oven-hot during the day, mercifully got rain at night. Mornings began cool and fresh, with mist lifting off the lake, but by ten the temperature was soaring, and by eleven most of the paying guests were prostrated by the heat.

Everybody hated the intense heat—everybody except Desi and Salah. Salah was used to such temperatures, and as for Desi—she felt she was waking from a lifelong sleep. The heat energized her, made her blood sing, her muscles flex, as if she were a runner waiting to begin a race she knew she’d win.

Not just the heat, of course, contributed to the feeling.

They became inseparable. Looking back on that summer, Desi remembered bright hot days lasting forever, and an all-encompassing joy in sheer being. They ran together, swam together, talked, explored.

They didn’t stop competing with each other, of course. But that only added to the intensity, spiced their meetings, kept them on their toes.

‘Salah?’

They gazed at each other for a frozen moment, and suddenly, treacherously, against all the odds, the warm, sweet, sensual memories of a decade ago stirred to melting in her. The sun-burnt warmth of his naked chest against her trembling hand. Black eyes filled with love and need. The intoxication of desire that he had tried so nobly to resist…

Kiss him hello. You need to knock him off balance right at the start, before he gets his lines of control in place.

Desi couldn’t have moved to save her life. She couldn’t have kissed Salah to save the world. All she could do was stand there, her gaze locked with his, and wonder how she would ever manage to do what she had come here to do, while yesterday’s vision of a full, young, passionate mouth and eyes intense with longing arose to confuse the impression of tight control and harsh judgement she saw in his face now.

Then his mouth moved.

‘Who were you expecting?’

‘Not you.’

If he had expected anything, it was not that his heart would leap so painfully at his first glimpse of her. This fact annoyed him almost as much as her daring to come here. It argued a weakness in him, and he would not be weak where she was concerned. He was no longer a boy, to be at the mercy of his own needs, and hers. He would not be manipulated by her sexuality, practised as it was. He was a man, as she would discover.

Her right eyebrow flared up in the nervous way he remembered. Her eyes seemed slate grey now, as if her anxiety had drained them of colour. She had chameleon eyes, a fact he remembered well. He had never met a woman whose eyes changed colour in such a way. In his memory they were mostly turquoise, deep and rich, like the jewel. Green sometimes when they made love in daylight…and sometimes this green-tinged, slate grey…

‘I was not expecting you, either,’ he said grimly.

‘Then I wonder who you’re here to meet.’

‘I hoped that you would change your mind. You should have.’

‘Excellency,’ the passport officer murmured, and His Excellency Salahuddin Nadim al Khouri surfaced to take her passport from the outstretched hand. A muscle in his jaw moved.

‘Come, Desi,’ he said, turning to lead the way. He pronounced it, as he always had, Deezee. The memories it summoned up skated on her nerves. Desi, I love you. I will love you longer than the stars burn.

Now that the gaze was broken, she could move. She fell into step beside but a little behind him. Like a good Muslim wife, she told herself, and with an irritated little skip that was totally unlike her, she caught up with him.

Her heart was in turmoil, not least because of the way he had changed. Was this what the desert did? Was this the kind of man it grew? Fierce, hard…dangerous to cross?

But she had to cross him. She had come here to cross him.

I’m sure he never got over you. He’d probably give his right arm for the chance to kiss you.

She had even believed that she would enjoy settling scores with him. What a fool she was. If anyone was going to suffer from their encounter, it would not be this closed, proud man.

He led her through a door marked with an elegant sweep of Arabic letters above Private in English. They passed along an empty corridor in charged silence. She tried to think of something ordinary to say. If only he would ask her about the flight! Couldn’t he feel how the silence built tension? Or didn’t he care?

‘We flew in over the Barakati desert,’ she offered, stupidly, because how else would a plane get to the capital of Central Barakat? ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen desert like that! It’s so…well, beautiful is the wrong word. It has a haunting…’

He turned his head and her little speech died as the black gaze collided with her own.

‘People have strong reactions to the desert,’ he said. ‘But whatever your feelings for it, the desert does not change. It is dangerous whether you love it or hate it.’

The clear attempt at intimidation irritated her. He might as well have said, I am dangerous whether you love me or hate me.

And I’ve done both, Desi told him silently. But no more. I got through having any feeling for you a long time ago.

‘Funny, so is the Arctic,’ she said aloud, because two could play at the innuendo game. ‘Would it be better to freeze to death, or fry, do you think?’

His mouth tightened. ‘It is better to survive.’

For a moment the scar showed white against the skin drawn tight over his cheekbone. It traced a path to above his ear and was lost in the thick black hair under his keffiyeh.

‘And I guess you’d know,’ she said.

Salah’s been wounded. For one unguarded moment she relived the overwhelming anguish that had hit her with those words. She was astonished to discover how shaken she was by the evidence of how close he had come to death. Her hand ached suddenly, as if with the need to touch. But she wasn’t here to soothe any hurt of Salah’s.

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

As they reached the end of the corridor a uniformed guard, clasping a fist to his chest in salute, opened the door for them. Salah paused to issue instructions to him as Desi passed through into blinding sunlight.

She stopped. ‘My bags!’

Salah continued without pausing. ‘Come,’ was all he said, and his burnous streamed out behind him like a king’s cloak as he stepped out into the hot desert wind.

The heat smacked her, a living thing. Desi stopped to take her first breath of the dry, orange-scented air with its tang of plane diesel.

And suddenly here she was. The place he had promised to bring her, ten long years ago. The place she had dreamt of, yearned for—believed would be her home. The desert, he had assured her, where men were men, where life was lived and love was loved with the deepest intensity. Where passion was a part of nature and human nature.

Where his passion for her would never die.

How many times, under his urgent, loving guidance, had she visualized herself in the desert, and how often, long after it was hopeless, had she wished and pleaded for life to have worked out differently! Begged fate to allow her to retrace the steps that had taken her away from that life with him. Ten long years on, she was here.

And she would give a year of her life to be anywhere else.

‘So hot!’ she cried, trying to shake the feeling. ‘It’s only ten o’clock!’

‘This is not a good time for foreigners in Central Barakat,’ Salah said.

‘By foreigners do you mean any foreigner? Or just me?’

‘Are you so different from ordinary people, Desi? Has fame made you weak?’ he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Not many foreigners come at this time of year, unless to work in the oil fields. Next month will be cooler.’

Next month would be too late. It’ll be hell on earth, Desi, but if you don’t go now, I’m lost. She would never forget the mixture of rage, grief and exhaustion in Sami’s voice, the voice of a woman driven to the edge, fighting not to go over.

She glanced at Salah, wondering again how a boy of such passion as she remembered in him could have turned into a man ready to contemplate what he was now contemplating. But his face was closed, impossible to read.

Ten years ago she had understood every expression as it crossed his face. Now he was unreadable. As well read stone. What had done this to him? His injury? War itself?

A white limousine hummed in quiet readiness at the bottom of the steps. A chauffeur in black trousers, white polo shirt and a headscarf like Salah’s leapt out to open the passenger door. As she slipped inside with Salah, an airport official arrived, carrying the two battered leather satchels that had accompanied her around the world over the past ten years. They were stowed in the trunk, doors banged, and the limo moved off.

And suddenly she was the last place in the world she would ever have chosen to be again: alone in a small space with Salah.

Chapter Two

AT THE height of the heat wave, Desi’s father had accompanied her to Vancouver on a two-day modelling gig. Hating to miss one moment of time shared with Salah, she would have cancelled the engagement if she’d dared, and in the stifling heat of the city, she had wondered, not for the first time, why her friends envied her. She missed Salah with a desperate intensity, and could not wait to get back to the island. When they returned, it was Salah who met them at the ferry dock.

‘Your mother is a little sick with the heat,’ Salah explained, but when he looked at her, Desi knew. The knowledge was like chain lightning in her blood, striking out from her heart again and again, every time she thought of it: he had to come. He couldn’t wait even the extra half hour to see her.

‘It has not rained since you left,’ he told her, and Desi’s heart kicked with what he meant.

‘You’ll want to tell Salah all about your trip,’ her father said, with masterly tact, or, more likely, masterly insensitivity. So she got in the front with Salah while her father sat in the back reading the local paper. But they did not talk much. There was a killing awareness between them, so powerful she felt she might explode with it.

The tarmac was practically steaming in the heat, as if it would melt the tires, and when they turned onto the unpaved road that led to the cottage dust billowed up around them in an impenetrable cloud.

‘Like my country,’ Salah said. ‘Like the desert.’ And Desi half closed her eyes and dreamed that they were there, that he was driving her across the desert to his home.

‘I wish I could see it,’ she whispered. ‘It must be so beautiful, the desert.’

‘Yes, beautiful. Like you.’

He might as well have punched her in the stomach. She had never dreamed love would be like this, gasping for air, every cell of her body ready to burst.

‘Am I?’

‘I will take you to see it one day,’ he promised. ‘Then you will know how beautiful you are.’

‘Yes,’ she said softly, and they looked into each other’s eyes and it was as if the promise were sealed with a kiss.

The kiss came later, as they sat on the dock, wet from swimming, watching as the sunset behind the trees painted the lake a rich gold.

‘In my country I will show you an ocean of sand,’ he said. ‘The shadows at sunset are purple and blue. And every day it is different, because the wind—what do you say?—makes it into shapes.’

‘Sculpts,’ she offered.

‘Sculpts, yes. In the desert the wind is a sculptor. I wish I were a sculptor, Desi,’ he breathed, and his hand moved up to explore the line of her temple, cheek, chin, and then slipped behind her neck under the wet hair.

It was her first kiss, and it was unbelievably, piercingly sweet. It assailed her body as though a thousand tender mouths touched her everywhere at once. With Salah bending over her, their mouths fused, she melted down onto the dock, and the sun-warmed weathered wood against her back added its mite to the overwhelming sensation that poured through her.

Her hand lifted of its own volition to the warm skin of his chest, his shoulder, and a moment later Salah lifted his mouth to look at her. His face was gold and shadow, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. They gazed into each other’s eyes.

‘Desi, I love you,’ he said; she breathed, ‘I love you, Salah,’ and all around them was perfection.

She had never seen real desert so close before. Mountains and sea were her natural background; from her childhood she had never questioned the rightness of that.

Until now. Now, as she watched an eternity of dusky sand pass, smoky tendrils of longing and belonging reached out from the stark landscape into the vehicle, into her being, her self, and clasped her heart.

‘So,’ Salah said, in a harsh voice that immediately brought her back to the now. ‘So, Desi, you come to my country at last.’

She could feel her emotions rising to the bait, and fought down the impulse to rake over their ten-year-old history.

‘Well, I guess you could…’

‘After ten years, what have you to say to me?’

‘I didn’t ask you to meet me, and I’ve nothing to say to you,’ she said, forgetting Sami, forgetting everything except basic life-saving procedures.

‘You lie. What do you come for, if not this?’

This?

‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded.

He looked at her for an electric moment, his eyes blazing as if he were struggling against some powerful impulse, and she held her breath and awaited the outcome.

‘You know what I mean.’

She licked her lips. ‘Didn’t your father tell you why I’m here?’

Salah snorted. ‘My father’s work! Even the immigration official knew better than to believe it. Why do you come to me now? What do you want? What do you hope I can give you? You are too late.’

She couldn’t believe this. What was time, then? Ten years since they had spoken, but here they were, picking up the argument as if scarcely an hour had passed.

‘I don’t want anything from you! Who told you I wanted—?’

He pulled her sunglasses off, flinging them down on the seat between them.

‘Do not hide behind darkness and tell me lies.’

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ She grabbed the glasses up again, fumbling to unfold them.

‘When women veil their hair it is to protect their modesty. When they veil their eyes it is to conceal deceit.’

It was impossible to put the glasses back on, after that, impossible to leave them off. She glared at him, anger rising in her.

‘And when men accuse women it’s to avoid facing their own guilt. What do you want?’

‘We will discover. But I did not go to you, Desi. You came to me.’

‘That’s a Napoleonic ego you’re nursing there, Salah. I came to your country.’

The flesh on his face tightened. ‘To visit my father,’ he said, measuring every word.

‘Exactly!’ she said. ‘I think we’re back where you started, aren’t we?’

He was not fazed.

‘Why do you deny it? There is no shame in returning to your first love when other men are unsatisfactory. If your first love has waited for you, all is well.’

‘Do you have any idea how pompous you sound?’

‘Do you regret our unmatched passion, Desi?’ His black eyes burned into hers. ‘That day in the cabin—do you remember it? What could ever reach it, if we lived a thousand years? Is that why you are here?’

The memory of that summer welled up in her at his words. Heat burned her blood. That incredible, bone-deep, never-to-be-repeated yearning for the touch of another human being—it was as if she had sat by a fire she thought was ashes and dust, and with one measured kick he had set it roaring into an inferno again.

‘I regretted it for a while,’ she said. ‘And then not. What about you?’

‘Your hair,’ he said. ‘I want to see your hair.’

Her head twitched back. ‘Don’t touch me!’

‘Ten years.’

She could not prevent him. He reached out to grasp the brim of her hat and slowly pulled it off. At his bidding, the ash-blond hair came tumbling down around her shoulders. It was like being undressed by any other man.

‘Still the colour of the desert at the edge of the mountains.’

One strong finger reached for a lock, curled around it. He had said it ten years ago. Not the golden sand you see on postcards, Desi, he had whispered as they lay in each other’s arms, and he kissed a lock of her hair, more beautiful than that. The colour before sunset, just where it flows into purple foothills. I will show you.

Her skin shivered with unbearable sensation. He was watching her with half-lidded hawk eyes, the better to see her with. She lifted her chin to draw back, and could not.

Time, the great trickster, stopped altogether then, and they stared at each other, unmoving, his hand locked in her hair, her eyes wide, hypnotized. Outside the car, blinding sun and a harsh, unforgiving landscape. Inside, the unforgiving landscape of the heart.

The car went over a bump, kicking time into motion again. Desi lifted her hand and pulled her hair from his grasp.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she began, but even as she spoke the command his control snapped. One strong dark hand clamped her wrist and his other arm went around her waist to pull her into his embrace, thigh to thigh, breast to chest, her hands helpless, her body arcing against him as if in erotic submission.

For a moment they were frozen there, eyes fixed on each other’s face, but if it was the past she was yearning for, there was nothing of the tender boy she remembered in the angry blackness of a gaze that seemed to swallow her every attempt at conscious thought, fatally weakening her resistance.

At last she found the use of her hands and lifted to push them against his shoulders. Still he held her, resisting the pressure with frightening ease. His keffiyeh fell forward over one shoulder, cocooning them in their own little world.

Their own world. It had always been their own world.

‘Salah!’ she protested, but the name was lost in a gasp as his lips took possession of hers.

His mouth was strong and hungry, and her body heat went instantly to melting point as the kiss devoured her. Need like a starving child rose up in her then, an ancient, unfamiliar yearning—hunger, and thirst, and the bone-deep ache of a decade bursting a heart that had been locked tight against feeling for too long.

Terrified by the force of her anguished need, gasping at her overwhelming response, she resisted the powerful urge to wrap her arms around his neck and drink deep of what she had been deprived of so long, and instead struggled and pushed against him, dragging her parched mouth away from water in the desert, fighting against instinct and compulsion like one who knows the source of all they need is poisoned.

He lifted his mouth at last. Again they were still, staring into each other’s eyes at point-blank range, her hair flowing over his arm, his black gaze over her face.

‘I always liked to taste my name on your lips,’ he said, remembering.

Something like panic gripped her. ‘Let me go.’

Salah breathed as if for ammunition in the battle for self-control, and opened his arms. She flung herself back indignantly, flicking her hair, tweaking her clothes straight, avoiding looking at him for fear of what he could read in her eyes.

With all her heart she wanted to avoid confrontation, pretend this had never happened. But it would be fatal to let it pass. At last she could raise her eyes and stare at him.

‘If you kiss me again I will hit you,’ she said between her teeth.

‘Beware of chain reactions, then.’

His voice was like iced gravel. A thrill of something that was not quite fear went through her.

‘Can we leave it out?’ she cried. ‘I’ve been flying for most of a day and I’m tired!’

He nodded, lifted up and opened a briefcase, pulled out some papers, and began to study them. Suddenly he was the stranger again, in the unfamiliar keffiyeh and desert robes. He looked like an oil sheikh.

Just like that, it seemed, he could dismiss her from his consciousness. Desi resisted the sudden, mad urge to go for him and tear off the intimidating headgear, as if that would restore him to the boy she had known.

But there was more than a keffiyeh between this chiselled, haughty face and the Salah she’d once overwhelmingly loved.

Chapter Three

PERHAPS if her parents had been more awake to what was going on, Desi’s personal disaster might have been averted. But the house was at peak capacity, with every bed full, and in the heat there seemed to be twice as much work, with guests demanding fresh towels, cold drinks and extra service.

They had a retreat, a place that the children had used as a hideaway for years: under the old wooden pier that lay on one side of the lake a few hundred yards from the house. Every summer Desi and her brother dragged an air mattress underwater and up onto the rocks beneath, and then inflated it so that it lay half floating, half moored.

They called it their clubhouse. Sometimes, when avoiding household chores or ignoring mealtimes, the children had hidden there, giggling and listening to their mother call.

In sunlit hours, the spot was pleasantly shady. In rain, they could pretend it was dry. And in the evening it was perfection to sit there with a small smudge coil keeping the mosquitoes at bay, talking about life, death and destiny, and what they would do when they grew up.

Salah and Desi spent many hours there that summer, away from the paying guests who wandered up and down at the lake’s edge. In the searing heat, it was pleasant to lie there, while shafts of burning light pierced the gloom, the air mattress bumping lightly against the sides of the pier or the rocks as the water lapped. In the evenings they lay in each other’s embrace, watching as stars and moon appeared.

With her head resting on his shoulder, his fingers threading her hair, they dreamed together about the future. They would get married as soon as she finished high school. She would move to the Barakat Emirates to be with him, and make her life there. They would have four children, two boys and two girls.

Neither Salah nor Desi meant for it to happen, though it was always Salah who drew back, when Desi was too much in love, and too drowned in sensation, to know where the point of no return was.

‘We have time, Desi,’ Salah would say gently. ‘All our lives. We can wait.’ And of course she agreed.

But everything seemed to conspire against this determined nobility: the heat, their innocence and the fact that they were always together, so often alone.

It was there under the dock, when he told her about the war in Parvan, that their control finally broke.

Brave little Parvan, which had been invaded by the Kaljuks, and had long been fighting an unequal war with little help from its friends. Prince Omar of Central Barakat had formed a company of Cup Companions and joined the war on the side of Prince Kavian of Parvan.

‘The Kaljuks are monsters,’ Salah told her. ‘Prince Omar is right—we can’t let them do what they are doing to Parvan. He is right to join the fight.’

Desi’s heart choked with a sudden presentiment of doom.

‘You—you wouldn’t go, would you?’

‘My father has forbidden me, he says I must finish one year of university first. He thinks the war will be over this winter. The Kaljuks are tired and Parvan will never give up. But if it is not—what else can I do, Desi? I must join the Prince. I must help them.’

Tears starting in her eyes, she begged him not to go to war. She pleaded her love and their future. The life together they would never have if he were killed. Those four children who would never be born.

‘Marry me now, Desi,’ he said roughly, drawing her in against his chest and holding her tight. ‘Then, if I die, I will leave you with a son to take care of you when he grows up. Come home with me! Marry me now!’

He kissed her then, when all their barriers were down. And amid the perfect silence of nature, that silence that is wind and birdsong and still water, they could no longer say no to the wild desire in their blood.

She always marvelled, afterwards, at the coincidence. After two weeks of utter joy, of living in their own secret, magic world, on the night before Salah’s departure, her brother Harry arrived for the weekend bringing a magazine.

‘Baby, it’s you!’ he said proudly, opening it to show them all something that the family was still a long way from being used to: a full-page ad with Desi’s photo.

It had been her first high-fashion assignment, shot in Toronto months before, and it had been a very different world from any she had experienced up till then. Desi had been awed by the arrogance of the makeup artist, never mind the photographer, who everyone said was the absolute best…

The results, too, were different: the peak of professional skill evident in the ad, which was all in shades of bronze. Desi sat on a director’s chair with her feet sprawled wide, her knees angled in, in a trench coat, buttoned and belted, but exposing a V of sensual dark lace at both breast and hip. With her elbow resting on the arm of the chair, propping up her chin, Desi gazed at the viewer with limpid beauty. Between her feet was a fabulous leather handbag. Glossy shoes matched the bag.

The family and guests crowded round. ‘You look absolutely stunning!’

‘Oooh, very sexy!’

‘I’ll buy one! Just show me the money!’

Everybody was delighted, thrilled for her. Only one voice was silent. Desi looked shyly up at Salah, expecting his proud approval.

His face was dark with shock.

‘They exploit you,’ he said quietly, and it was a terrible slap, all the worse because it was public. The babble in the room damped down as Desi gasped and blushed bright red.

‘Exploit me? Do you know how much I was paid for that shoot?’ she cried indignantly. ‘And the hotel where they put us up…’

‘They put you up in a fine hotel and pay you to expose yourself,’ Salah said.

‘Expose? My legs!’ she cried. ‘Everybody does it! I’m not nude, you know!’

‘Yes,’ he said. And it was true that the positioning of the bag between her feet, with the innocent vulnerability in her eyes, was disturbingly erotic.

For once her mother rose to the occasion.

‘Isn’t it wonderful the differences you still find in cultural perceptions, when we’re all so worried about American monoculture sweeping the world?’ she said, picking up the magazine and flipping it shut. ‘Congratulations, darling, we’ll look at it again later. It’s a cold supper tonight, everyone, shall we eat now?’

Tears blinding her, Desi got up and banged out through the screen door into the star-filled night. The door banged a second time behind her, but she did not stop running.

He caught up with her down by the water’s edge.

‘Desi!’

‘Why did you do that? Why did you humiliate me in front of everyone?’ she demanded.

‘If you are humiliated, it is not me. That picture, Desi—’

‘Oh, shut up! Shut up! There is nothing wrong with that picture! It’s a fashion shoot! I was so lucky to get that job, girls wait years for something like that! It’ll open so many doors for me!’

That was her agent talking. The truth was that modelling, the teenage girl’s fantasy, had never really been Desi’s dream. Perhaps it was the impact of her parents’ ideals on her, her island upbringing, for what she had seen of the life so far she did not like. But, perversely human, when pressed, she defended what she did not believe in.

‘Desi, we are going to be married. You will be my wife. You can’t pose like this for other men.’

‘Men?’ she cried. ‘That’s not a men’s magazine! It’s fashion! It’s for women! I’m advertising a handbag!’

‘No,’ he said levelly. ‘You advertise sex.’

He had the outsider’s clarity, but it was too much to expect that she could see what he saw, or that he would understand the intimate connection between sex and sales.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘Desi, one picture is not important. But this work you do—will it all be like that? Is this what a modelling career means?’

‘All like what, for heaven’s sake? I was fully dressed! Wait for it, Salah, next month I’ll be in an underwear catalogue! What is your problem?’

‘Desi, a Muslim woman cannot do such things. It is impossible.’

She was silent, listening to the crickets. Then, ‘I’m not a Muslim woman,’ she said slowly.

‘Desi!’ he pleaded.

She burst into tears. ‘And if that’s what it means—that my photograph is seen as disgusting, then…and if that’s what you think—if that’s what you see when you look at that picture of me…oh, God, you make me feel like a…like a…’

They were too young to see that what had motivated his outburst was not religion, but jealousy. Sexual possessiveness.

‘And if you’re so high and holy, Salah, what about what we’ve been doing? How does that stack up with your principles?’

‘We love each other. We are going to be married!’ he said, but she thought she could see doubt in his eyes.

She said accusingly, ‘You think what we’re doing is wrong, don’t you?’

‘No, Desi!’

She cringed down to the bottom of her soul.

‘Oh, God! That is so sick!’

If he felt guilty about their lovemaking, what did that mean about how he saw her? Shame swept through her. And the stupid fragile dream she’d been dreaming cracked and split open, and the real world was there, beyond the jagged edges, telling her she’d been a fool.

Suddenly she was saying terrible things to him, accusing him of tricking her into sex, and then judging her for giving in. Horrible things that she did not believe, but was somehow driven to say.

His face grew white as he listened, and then Salah erupted with things about the corrupt West which he did not believe and always argued against with friends at home.

Corrupt. The word hung in the air between them as they stared at each other, bewildered, their hearts raw with hurt, and far too young to make sense of what was happening.

‘You mean me!’ she cried then. ‘Well, if I’m corrupt, you’re the corrupter! I hate you!’ She whirled and ran back into the house and up to her room.

She locked her bedroom door, and buried her head under the duvet, trying to drown out the sound of pebbles hitting her window during the night, the whispered pleadings at her door.

She did not come down again until after breakfast the next morning, just in time to say a cool goodbye to Salah, with all the others, before her father took him to the ferry. As he got into the car he looked at her with the reproach of a dying stag who cannot understand what has motivated his killer.

Salah never came to the island again.

Chapter Four

THE palace clung to a rocky slope above the winding river and the city between, brooding over the scene like a dream of white, terra cotta and blue. From the plane, in all the glory of its dome and its arched terraces, the palace had looked like something out of a fairy tale, but approached from below it had the air of a fortress.

It was some time before she understood that they were approaching it. They drove through the centre of the city, past the bustle of a market, through a small herd of reluctant goats driven by a grinning urchin, then along wide streets bordered on two sides with high white walls topped with greenery. So entranced was she with the unfamiliar sights that it was only after they left these walls behind that she realized there was only the palace ahead.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked, when the answer was already obvious.

The car stopped at a gate and the chauffeur exchanged words through the window with an armed guard.

Salah put the papers away, snapped the briefcase shut and set it aside. After a moment, as if at a thought, he reached out and spun the locks. She felt it like a slap.

‘You can never be too sure,’ she said sarcastically. ‘But really, the state secrets of little Barakat are safe from me.’

He looked at her with a black gaze that revealed nothing.

‘What is this place, Salah?’

‘It is Prince Omar’s palace.’

‘Am I staying here?’

‘What else? Should I put you up in a hotel? Do you think I forget what I owe your family?’

‘Won’t I be meeting your family?’

They moved up the incline, past an unmanned sentry post, then under a broad archway and into a courtyard where there were several parked vehicles.

‘Except for my father, who is at the dig, my family go to the mountains in summer. The heat is bad for my mother’s health. Only the poor remain in the city in summer, and they move down by the river.’

His eyes were hard. She remembered the very different look in his eyes the last time they had met, on the morning that he left the island for the last time.

Never got over her? On the contrary, the boy who had loved her had disappeared. He was changed out of all recognition. You had a lucky escape! she told herself.

Her heart, contrarily, mourned a loss.

‘So why are you still in the city?’

He lifted one corner of his mouth and looked at her as if she were being naive.

‘You stayed in the city to meet me? Why? What do you want?’

‘Not what I want, Desi. What you want.’

He opened his door as two servants appeared through a doorway. The men seized her bags from the trunk and disappeared. The chauffeur opened her door. The heat slapped her again as she got out.

‘What has it got to do with me?’

‘I will be your guide to my father’s dig. Did you not expect it?’

Of course Salah will be your guide. The entire plan depended on this, and yet, somehow…not until this moment had Desi really believed that it was going to happen. That she’d be travelling across the desert for hours with only Salah for company…

Her eyes hurt as she gazed at him, as if they were letting in too much sun.

‘Well, I’m sorry. Your father said a guide. I didn’t expect…’

‘No?’ His manifest disbelief infuriated her, even though he was right.

‘I’m sorry, but this is the only time I’ve got. It’s when I normally go to the island.’

The word was electric between them.

‘And the case is so urgent,’ he said.

There was no answer she could make to that, without looking even more of a selfish idiot. She turned her head to escape his cynic’s gaze, and a panel of exquisite, ancient tilework met her eyes.

She had stayed in some pretty fabulous places in her time: a hot modelling career opened a lot of doors. But not so far an active royal palace. Never a place with such an aura of power, past and present.

‘Will I get to meet them?’ she asked. She knew that Prince Omar and Princess Jana had children of their own, as well as two daughters from Omar’s first marriage.

Salah led her under a worn, intricately arabesqued stone archway onto a tiled path.

‘They go to Lake Parvaneh in summer. Princess Jana asked me to assure you of your welcome here, and apologizes for her absence.’

He opened a door and ushered her along a path bordering a formal garden and thence into an internal courtyard so entrancing Desi stopped short and gasped.

Columns, floor, stairs and walls were covered with beautiful, intricately patterned mosaic tiling. A perfectly still reflecting pool in the centre reflected greenery and sunlight and the balcony above, with a mirror’s clarity and water’s depth. Cloisters ran around the walls on all sides; an ancient tree rose up in one corner, its gnarled branches and thick leaves shading the space from the morning sun. More tumbled greenery cascaded down from the balcony, or entwined the tall columns and latticework.

It was compellingly beautiful, deeply restful. The temperature seemed to have dropped by at least ten degrees. Desi heaved a sigh of sheer wonder.

‘Isn’t it spectacular!’

‘It is more beautiful in spring, with the flowers,’ said Salah and, pausing under the archway, he threw a switch.

She heard a rumble, a groan, as if some great underground creature had been disturbed in its rest, and then the perfect reflection in the water shimmered and was lost as fountains leapt up into the air from the centre of the pool.

The fine spray damped her face as she stood smiling up at the vision.

‘Now, that’s what I call air conditioning!’ Her spirits lifted and she laughed for sheer pleasure.

Watching as the fine mist damped her lips, as if a kiss had moistened them, his face closed. He turned away to lead her through the spray up a flight of stairs and along the balcony.

A sudden gust caught his cloak and it billowed around him, the image of the hero in an ancient tale. Desi was struck by the same promise of timelessness and belonging that the sands had whispered to her, as if they had met here a thousand years ago…

He opened a door.

She stopped to catch her breath again at the doorway. It was a magnificent room, huge, but divided into comfortable niches by the artistic use of rugs, furniture clusters, and intricately carved antique room dividers in cedar, ebony and sandalwood.

Above the doorway and windows, panels of stained glass threw patterns of coloured sunlight onto the white-painted walls. Fat brocade cushions forming sofas and armchairs were interspersed with low tables; on the walls above hung fabulous paintings and patterned mirrors, with niches holding burnished bronze plates and pitchers that glowed like gold. Covering the dark polished wood floor was the biggest silk carpet she had seen outside a museum. A Chinese cabinet looked as if it had been painted for an emperor.

The plates and jars that glowed like gold, she realized with a jolt, were gold.

A sweeping arch gave onto a farther room, and against the opposite wall a soft breeze coming through the jalousies of an open window disturbed the silk canopy of a low bed whose pillows and spread were patterned in turquoises and purples.

The luxury was suddenly and profoundly erotic. So different from the bed under the old dock ten years ago, but pulsating with sensual and sexual promise. As if that other bed, those places they had made their bed, had been a foreshadowing, a dream of which this, now, was the living, breathing, full-colour reality.

They stood gazing at each other, locked in the moment, as the tentacles of memory reached out from the thing called bed and began to entwine them.

She had thought herself immune. She had imagined that hatred had blanked out the love that had once consumed her, and that in the intervening years indifference had wiped out hatred.

Desire, it seemed, was independent of such considerations. It operated outside them, it must, because right now his eyes were as hot on her skin as the desert sun.

Desi thought wildly, with a kind of panic, If he kissed me now…

A woman appeared silently, suddenly, as if from nowhere, and murmured a greeting. Salah drew in a controlled breath, spoke a few words to her, and when he turned back to Desi all sign that he had been affected by the moment was blanked out behind obsidian shutters.

‘I have a meeting now. Fatima speaks a little English. She will look after you and bring you lunch later. It will be best if you remain in the palace today. We will have dinner about sunset. Do you wish something to eat or drink now? Fatima will bring it.’

‘Nothing, thanks. Do you live in the palace?’ she asked, not sure which answer she was hoping for.

‘I have rooms here, yes,’ he said. ‘We all do.’

‘“We”?’

‘Prince Omar’s Cup Companions have offices and apartments in the palace.’

Desi remembered all about the Cup Companions. In ancient times holders of the title had had duties no more onerous than to carouse with the monarch and take his mind off affairs of state.

‘Now they work very hard,’ Salah had told her, that day he confided his dreams of one day serving with Prince Omar. ‘They are the Prince’s working cabinet. One day, inshallah, I will achieve this—to work with Prince Omar.’

I don’t know what Salah’s exact mandate is, but my brothers have heard he’s in Prince Omar’s confidence, Sami had explained more recently. They’re convinced he’s very, very VIP.

‘We heard about your appointment, of course. Congratulations, Salah, I know it was always your dream,’ she said now. ‘Your parents must be proud.’

‘Mash’allah,’ he said dismissively. It was God’s will.

In another life, he would have come to her first with the news.

Looking up at the shuttered face, the arrogant tilt of his chin, the hanging judge’s eyes, Desi could well believe that Salah had a Prince’s ear. But she herself wouldn’t marry him now for all the power and influence in six continents. She was suddenly violently, intensely glad she’d agreed to help Samiha. Marriage to Salah would be a hell of a life.

Chapter Five

‘THEY want me to marry Salah,’ Samiha had said.

The harassment had begun during the last year of her undergraduate degree, after Sami’s father had been killed in a work accident. With his death, her eldest brother, Walid, became ‘head of the family’. The trouble started almost immediately, and because her mother caved in under the pressure, Sami had had to give in. First she had been forced to wear the head covering called hejab whenever she was out of the house. Other restrictions followed, in a steady erosion of her freedom.

But when Walid, supported by their brother Arif, started to suggest that the headscarf was not sufficient to protect her from men’s lusts or show her devotion to their religion, and that Sami really ought to wear niqab, the full face veil, Sami had finally found the courage to introduce him to Farid, her fiancé. The couple hoped that Walid would be happy to pass his troublesome ownership of his sister to a husband.

This had been a tactical error. The secrecy of it, her brazen determination to make her own choice, outraged Walid. It violated his right as her protector and guide to choose a good husband for her. Farid al Muntazer, though a Muslim, did not meet with his approval.

Samiha should marry someone from back home. Someone connected to them. Family.

‘But Salah’s your cousin!’ Desi had protested, scandalized.

In her distress, Sami had turned to Desi as naturally as breathing. They no longer lived on the same street, but there were ways of keeping in touch that were almost as good as walking home from school together. Wherever Desi was in the world, the two friends always spent a couple of hours a week on the phone.

‘All the better!’ Sami informed her bitterly. ‘The old ways are best, you see!’

‘They’re crazy! Sami, you can’t give in to this!’ The idea filled her with primitive horror. Sami and Salah, married? It couldn’t be allowed! ‘You’re twenty-seven! It’s none of their business who you marry. You’ve got to refuse!’

‘I am refusing. But my mother is being very weak. My brothers keep telling me how lucky I am, can you believe it? Salah’s got everything—he’s rich, handsome, Prince Omar’s right-hand man.’

‘I don’t care if he’s Prince Omar himself. He’s your cousin!’

‘If he were Prince Omar himself, Des, he wouldn’t be my cousin.’

‘That’s what they call gallows humour, is it?’

‘I knew there was a word for it.’

‘What can you do to make your refusal stick?’

‘I know what I can’t do. I can’t marry anyone but Farid. I’ll drink bleach first. But Walid is pretty crazy right now, and Arif is right behind him. Full-frontal confrontation is probably not a good idea.’

‘Can you just tell Salah himself? He must think you want this. Surely if he knew—’

‘Maybe, but, Des, I’m actually scared to risk it. I don’t know what his reasons are. Maybe he needs a Canadian passport or something.’

‘What? He’s a Cup Companion! Why would he need—’

‘Des, I can’t risk telling Salah!’ Sami protested in a tight voice. ‘I don’t know what’s in it for him! If he told Walid…’

‘Do you really think Salah would—’

‘I don’t know who to trust!’ Sam cried, and Desi suddenly realized how close her friend was to outright panic. When your own brothers could turn rabid, what was safe?

‘Oh, I feel so useless! I wish I could help!’

‘Des, you’re the only one who can.’

Her heart had started to pound right there. ‘Me? What—’

‘It’s no good challenging the noble protectors of Islamic purity head-on. I figure I have to start from the other end.’

‘I’d be very happy to kneecap them both for you, Sam, but I think it’s actually illegal.’

‘Not that end.’

Desi’s heart seemed to feel she was trying for the thousand-metre world record.

‘You want me to kneecap…Salah?’

‘That’s the one! Do you think Salah ever got over you, Desi?’

‘Yes,’ she said crisply. ‘Without a doubt. In ten years he hasn’t lifted a finger in my direction.’

‘He hasn’t married, either.’

‘Clearly the women of Central Barakat are not stupid.’

‘I don’t think he ever really got over you. And that was then. Look at you now. Did you see what Every-woman called you this week? Hang on a sec, I’ve actually got it here.’ There was the sound of rustling paper, then Sami started reading.

‘“Perhaps the most iconically beautiful of all the supermodels on the world scene today, Desirée Drummond—Desi to everyone caught in the intimacy of that smile—projects the haunting vulnerability of a woman who has never learned to hide her heart.”’

‘How wrong can one sentence be?’ said Desi.

‘Whatever reasons Salah’s got for wanting the marriage, I bet if he thought he stood any chance with you…’

‘Along the lines of an icicle’s chance in hell…’

‘…he’d walk away from this deal so fast we’d see smoke at his heels.’

The bottom fell out of Desi’s stomach. She tried to laugh.

‘Sami, I haven’t seen Salah in ten years!’

‘Yeah, but he’s seen you! Your face is everywhere, isn’t it? You can bet he hasn’t forgotten.’

Her face on a magazine cover would only serve to remind him of why he’d rejected her, but Desi couldn’t embark on that now.

‘You aren’t dating anyone, are you? I wouldn’t ask if you were involved with someone. At least—I hope I wouldn’t,’ Sami admitted with disarming honesty.

‘Are you joking me, Sam?’

‘Des, all you’d have to do is—let him think there’s a chance. Talk about those carefree summers on the island. Remind him how you used to hero-worship him. You know you can do it.’

Desi took a deep breath, and reminded herself that Sami hadn’t been there. And afterwards she’d told no one, not even Sami, all of it.

‘Oh, Sam…’ she began pleadingly.

‘Des, I know it’s a terrible thing to ask. But this is the rest of my life, and you’re my only hope. Just think if your father wanted to force you to marry—Allan, say.’

Her cousin Allan was a blameless stockbroker in Toronto, but Desi shuddered.

‘I understand. You know I understand. But honestly, Sam—’

‘All we need is some excuse for you to visit Central Barakat. Could you be looking for locations or something?’

‘Models don’t scout locations. Anyway, even if I did visit, why should I run into Salah? The country’s not that small.’

‘After all your family did for him all those years! Of course you’d get in touch and ask for his help! Wouldn’t you?’

‘When pigs fly,’ Desirée said grimly.

‘But why? Of course you’d call him! Harry did, when he was over there. Salah treated him like royalty, he told me.’

‘Sam, if I did go, if I did see him, it wouldn’t do any good. Ashes are ashes. They don’t stay warm for ten years.’

‘They do. Salah used to act as if…’

She would not ask. She didn’t care how he used to act.

‘As if what?’ Desi blurted.

‘As if his heart was broken, I guess. For years when I mentioned your name he’d stiffen, the way people do when they’re protecting a sore spot.’

‘I’d be happy to think Salah suffered, but I think it was probably gas.’

‘Hey—that’s it!’ Sami said. ‘Two birds with one stone! Think of how sweet revenge would taste.’

‘It’s tempting to consider myself a worthy successor to Sharon Stone, but come on, Sam!’

The wind went out of Sami’s sails abruptly.

‘You’re right. It’s crazy of me to ask. Sorry, sorry. But, Desi, what can I do? Tell me what to do!’ And again, the flame of desperation was there, licking around the edges of her voice. Desi’s heart contracted.

‘God, Sam—can’t you and Farid just elope?’

‘Walid is not above making threats. Maybe—probably he’d do nothing, but you know I can’t count on that.’

‘Making threats? That’s disgusting!’ Desi exclaimed. ‘Is Walid completely insane?’

‘Don’t get me started.’

‘What about talking to your Uncle Khaled?’ Uncle Khaled was her father’s younger brother, and since her father’s death, Sami had explained, was the head of the extended family. Uncle Khaled was also Salah’s father.

‘I’ve thought of that. But Uncle Khaled and Aunt Arwa are really keen on me and Salah. They’ve told my mother they’re thrilled. So I can’t just ask Uncle Khaled straight out, either, because if that went wrong…But, Des, if you were there you could sound him out for me—’

Sami broke off with a gasp. ‘Oh, Allah, I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ she cried. ‘Uncle Khaled’s dig!’

Chapter Six

THE servant led her through the palace to the foot of an external staircase running up to a large terrace backed by the dome, and left her. Desi went slowly up, gazing entranced as the vista was slowly revealed.

The sun was just disappearing behind the horizon of deep-purple desert on the right, pulling a cloak of fiery, furnace-red sky after it; to the left the last of its rays caught the mountain tops with liquid gold. Below and beyond the palace the city was lighting up, a swathe of glittering jewels cut in two by the darkness of the great river that carved its way from the mountains to the sea. As the sun’s last light faded, the tree-lined river began to reflect the myriad lights from its banks.

Desi drew a long breath as she arrived at the top and sighed it out. Magic.

Salah was standing halfway along the terrace, looking out over the city. He turned, and at once she was locked by his gaze. Desi put one foot in front of the other and, as helpless as if a magnet were drawing her, slowly moved towards where he waited.

Her hair was loose, he saw, caressing shoulders and neck; her skin was without a flaw. She was wearing seablue silk that turned her chameleon eyes to turquoise: a clingy slip top bared the smooth skin of her throat and the shadow between her breasts; flowing trousers caressed the tantalizing shape of hip, thigh and leg when she moved; a matching jacket, the collar standing up under her chin, showed purple and gold embroidery. Gold and amethyst glinted against her neck and ears. Her sandals were delicate straps of gold across her insteps.

But it was her eyes where the true beauty resided—that wide level gaze that once had shown him all the truth of her soul, the gentle sweep of mobile eyebrows under a broad, pale forehead. The curve of her cheeks like wind-sculpted sand, and the mouth—wide, full, sensuous. Her face had always held this contradiction, as if her eyes held no awareness of the sensuality promised by her mouth and body.

Long ago, he had awakened something else in that gaze. Joy, sensual gratitude and love had mixed in a gaze for him and him alone. He had believed he was the only one to see it.

Falsely, as it happened, for it was exploited by every advertiser she posed for. But men had been fools before him, and would be fools when he was dust.

And still in ten long years he had not seen beauty to match it. But he would not fall victim to that beauty again. He had been weak earlier, but he would be that much more on his guard now.

Her gaze was guarded, her beauty remote. But something more: in her eyes was more than a simple veiling of the inner. She was lying to him.

What lie? Well, he would find out.

‘Good evening, Desi,’ he said.

He had dispensed with the keffiyeh and the oil sheikh’s robes. Now he was wearing flowing cream cotton trousers and a knee-length shirt, the outfit called shalwar kamees. The shirt was open at the neck and rolled up at the wrists, leaving his dark throat and his forearms bare. His head, too, was bare, black curls kissed into gold by the setting sun.

Without the keffiyeh, he was less a stranger. She looked up into the harsh face, searching for traces of the fresh-faced boy she had loved, and wondered if he, too, was looking for the awkward, naive girl of ten years ago.

The boy was gone forever. The eyes she remembered could never have looked at her as these eyes did: hard and suspicious, even as they raked her face with a hunger so blatant she shivered.

‘It’s a fabulous view,’ she said, to defuse the sudden tension. But his jaw only tightened. She felt a sudden jolt of heat against her back—his hand, guiding her.

They moved silently along the terrace and into a roof garden. In the centre of the space was a small fountain, its splashing sounds a caress to the ears in the twilight.

He led her to an alcove surrounded by trellis, enclosed in greenery, where a low platform was luxuriantly spread with carpets and pillows. He kicked off his sandals, stepped up onto the platform and sank down on the lush carpet amongst silken pillows.

Lying back against the cushions, dark and arrogant, he suddenly looked like a sultan in a storybook.

She hesitated, without knowing why. With a regal gesture he indicated the cushions opposite him in the little enclosure. Desi slipped off her own sandals, stepped up along the soft carpet and melted down into the luxuriously comfortable cushions opposite him.

‘You are beautiful tonight.’ The words seemed choked, as if they came out in spite of his intentions.

He had said it before. Tonight—and always, he had said then.

‘Mash’allah,’ she said, with a wry half smile. He had taught her the traditional Barakati response to a compliment. Like crossing your fingers, he’d said, you have to avert the evil eye.

His eyes darkened, suddenly, like a cat’s, but his lips tightened, as if the fact that she used the expression gave him pleasure but he would not allow himself to feel it.

Beyond the trellis and greenery, sky and sunset created a backdrop of magnificence. Intimacy closed around them like a velvet paw, trapping them for the gods’ amusement.

The desert was deep purple now in the darkness. A soft breeze lifted her hair as she gazed at the scene, tossed it lightly across her face. Shaking it back, Desi sighed in pure delight. A feeling of peace invaded her bones, and she searched for something innocuous to say. She did not want to fight with him.

‘This must be the most unusual dining room in the world.’

‘Princess Jana designed it for private use. It is Omar’s favourite retreat. No state business is ever conducted here.’

‘I hope food is coming soon! I haven’t eaten since London, and I’m ravenous.’

‘I apologize. Fatima should have offered you lunch.’

‘She did. I wasn’t hungry. Then.’

‘And you didn’t eat on the plane?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t usually.’

There was a curious amplified clicking noise, and then down in the city the haunting voice of the muezzin began to recite the call to prayer. The reciter’s deep tones, half singing, half chanting, poured out over the city, echoing in the distance. They sat in silence, listening, trying not to remember how, long ago, he had lovingly described this sound to her…

A waiter came, spread a tablecloth on the platform between them and set down a couple of jugs and four goblets. He half filled the goblets and disappeared again.

Allahu akhbar. Allahu akhbar. Hayya alas salaat.

‘What is he saying?’

‘God is great. Come to prayer,’ Salah translated softly.

‘Curious to hear so many echoes! Does the desert do that?’

‘Echoes?’ A smile twitched one corner of his mouth and he shook his head. ‘Each mosque has its own muezzin, so that no one lives beyond reach of the call. Up here we hear them all.’

The last note sounded as darkness covered the sky. Desi leaned back and looked up through the tracery of trellis and leaves at the stars just beginning to appear.

‘This is magic,’ she breathed again, and then, with a little frown, ‘It reminds me of somewhere! What is it? That sky is pure velvet. I can’t think when I last saw such a—Oh!’

Heat burned up her chest and into her face like a flash fire, and she instinctively jerked upright.

‘What is it?’ Salah said.

‘Nothing.’ She coughed unconvincingly. ‘Something in my throat.’

‘You are reminded of something? A place? A time?’

‘No, not really.’ She coughed again and reached for a glass.

‘Yes,’ he said harshly, as all his intentions for the evening went up in smoke. ‘The island. I, too, Desi. The first time I sat here under the trellis at night I remembered those nights under the dock. We looked up at stars glowing with endless beauty, telling us it was the right time, the right place, the right one.’

Desi gazed at him, frozen, the glass halfway to her mouth.

‘You remember, Desi?’

‘Do I?’ she asked bitterly. Tears were ripping at the back of her throat, but she was damned if she would give him that victory.

‘Yes!’ he said fiercely. His face was shadowed in the candlelight, his eyes hidden, his mouth hard. ‘Yes, you know how our love was! Tell me! I want to know that you remember.’

‘Why, since you forgot?’

‘I thought the stars would die before my love for you. I told you that, didn’t I? When each of those stars is a blackened lump, my love will still be burning for you. Isn’t that what I told you?’

Her throat closed tight. She set the glass down again without drinking. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said, her eyes shadowed and grey.

‘Ah, that is well. Because I was wrong. My love did not last.’

‘No kidding. And are you proud of that fact? I’ve always wondered.’

‘Proud?’ His eyes flashed. ‘Why should I be proud? I was shamed, for you and for me. My love did not die honourably, like a star, consuming itself in its own burning. You know how it died.’

‘Your love died because it was fantasy from day one. The stars going out? It wouldn’t have withstood a hiccup.’

The waiter appeared out of the night, shocking them both into silence, and set down a basket of bread and another filled with sprigs of greenery before disappearing again.

‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘they will bring us the foods I told you of, in those starry nights when we lived a dream.’

She closed her eyes and breathed for calm as memory smote her. ‘Why?’

‘Because it was a promise. A man keeps his promises,’ he said. ‘Even ten years too late.’

A kiss with every mouthful.

She had not expected this. Of all the reactions she might have imagined in Salah, the last would have been that he would actually want to bed her. Flames burst into life in her stomach. No. No.

‘Just so long as you don’t expect me to keep mine,’ she said grimly.

He smiled. ‘But I know well that you do not keep your promises, Desi. Who knows better than I? That other one you promised to marry and then did not?’

The bitter memory was bile in her throat. ‘I changed my mind there.’

‘Yes,’ he said with emphasis. ‘You changed your mind.’

Why was he doing this? What did he want? She was miles from understanding him. For years she had waited for his call, hoping against hope. Until her love died and nothing was left but dust and ashes. He must know that. The choice had been his.

‘And you didn’t, I suppose?’

He stared at her for a long, electric moment during which his eyes seemed to pierce her soul. A hard, angry gaze that was nothing like the boy she had loved. Then he tore off a bit of bread, plucked up a sprig of the greenery, wrapped it expertly in the bread, and held it out to her.

‘This I told you of. Sabzi-o-naan. This is traditional in the mountains.’

Desi took it and put it into her mouth. The pungent taste of a herb she didn’t recognize exploded in her mouth and nostrils, sweet and fresh, and she made an involuntary noise of surprise.

His eyelids dropped to hide his eyes for a moment, then his dark gaze burned her. ‘I taught you to make that sound,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I thought it would be the music of all the rest of my life.’

Heat rushed through her at his words, tearing at defences she now saw were pitifully weak. ‘Stop this,’ she said.

He reached for the herbs again, pulling off a sprig that he put into his own mouth.