The Desert Bride

She emerged from the bathroom wrapped in towels. ‘Where are my clothes?’

With pride Zulema indicated the fabulous heap of jewel-coloured silks now strewn over the bed.

‘My clothes...my suitcase,’ Bethany extended tautly.

Neither was forthcoming. Ignoring her audience, Bethany flicked open chests and closet doors. Nothing, not a stitch of her own clothing in sight! She wanted to stamp her feet and scream with temper, and it must have showed because Zulema and her helpers looked worried sick, as if any sign of dissatisfaction on her part was likely to bring punishment down on their unprotected heads.

‘OK... I’ll wear this stuff. Choose something for me,’ Bethany invited grudgingly.

Smiles broke out again like magic. Zulema extended an emerald-green silk caftan edged with gold, and a filmy pair of lace briefs and matching bra, the likes of which Bethany had never harboured in her plain white cotton underwear drawer. A flush of increasing rage mantling her cheeks, she dressed and stood at the mirror with a silver-backed brush, yanking it brutally through her long, wild mane of tangled curls.

‘I have displeased you, sitt?’ Zulema pressed in a small, tearful voice. ‘Why you not like my help?’

Bethany felt all mean and small-minded and contemptible and handed over the brush, taking a seat on a divan. How the heck could you force the principle of equality on someone when equality was neither acknowledged nor desired?

‘Such glorious hair. I have never seen such wonderful hair,’ Zulema sighed, delicately teasing out each snarl with reverent fingers. ‘It is the colour of the setting sun, just as was said.’

‘Said by whom?’

Zulema giggled shyly. ‘Prince Razul’s guards, they talk... It is forbidden that they talk, but men, they gossip too. A long time ago we hear about the English lady with the hair of glorious colours...soon all our people know and talk and the King, he got very angry indeed to hear the whispers about his beloved son. Ah...the English breakfast is here!’ Zulema carolled excitedly as the door opened.

What kind of whispers? Bethany wanted to know as she stood up, but Zulema threw wide yet another door, revealing a dining table and chairs. ‘Just like home,’ she told Bethany as a procession of servants bearing trays followed in her wake.

Open-mouthed, Bethany stared as the trays were unloaded and the lids on the metal dishes were lifted one by one. Fruit juices, cereals, toast, croissants, breakfast rolls, wheaten bread and every possible kind of preserve. Fried eggs, boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, even coddled eggs. Kippers, devilled kidneys, beef sausages, fried bread, tomatoes and French toast. It was lunchtime but she was receiving breakfast.

Zulema pulled out a chair and Bethany collapsed down onto it, surveying the banquet before her. She was hungry but never in her life had she seen such a spread for one individual. The entire table was covered.

‘You like?’

‘I’m very impressed.’ Her voice wobbled in the presence of such shamelessly conspicuous consumption.

‘Prince Razul bring in chef from Dubai. If you not like his cooking, he go back,’ Zulema informed her cheerfully.

Razul had hired a chef specifically to cook Western food for her? Heavens, did he actually think that she would be staying long enough for it to matter? Bethany took a deep breath, feeling more and more as though she was existing in some outrageous fantasy world, aeons removed from her own life of quiet, sensible practicality.

She was finishing her tea when Zulema approached her again.

‘The Prince...he say he meet with you now,’ Zulema whispered, as if she were setting up an incredibly exciting romantic assignation.

Bethany stood up and straightened her narrow shoulders with Amazonian spirit. ‘And don’t spare the horses.’

‘The horses?’

‘Never mind.’

The palace was an astonishingly large building. It rambled all over the place in a hotchpotch of corridors, screened galleries and sunlit courtyards.

At the head of a superb marble staircase Zulema abruptly halted and drew back several steps. ‘We must wait, sitt.’

Bethany looked over the wall down into the magnificent courtyard below, but her attention had not been attracted by the lush selection of tropical plants and the beautiful playing fountains. It was Razul she saw, his luxuriantly black, slightly curly hair gleaming like raw silk in the strong sunlight...and then the woman, sobbing and clutching frantically at his ankles.

‘We go for walk, sitt,’ Zulema urged uncomfortably.

‘No, thanks.’ In all her life Bethany had never seen a woman humiliate herself to such an extent. She was appalled. She needed no grasp of Arabic to interpret that distraught voice, that subservient posture and the passionate intensity with which the poor woman was hanging onto him.

Razul hissed something in his own language and literally stepped over her. As she attempted to follow him he snapped his fingers furiously at a cluster of servants cowering in a corner. Within seconds they were rushing to lift the woman from the ground and hurry her away through one of the archways off the courtyard.

‘Who is that woman?’ Bethany whispered.

‘The Princess Fatima,’ Zulema muttered thinly. ‘Prince Razul take only one wife. Always he say that... only the one.’

Bethany’s stomach lurched sickly. Perspiration broke out on her brow. So Razul was married. Dear heaven, that tormented woman was his wife, and it did not take great imagination to comprehend the source of her hysteria, did it? Razul had brought another woman into the palace and the poor creature was quite naturally distraught. The sheer cruelty of his behaviour devastated Bethany. He was every inch the savage, despotic Arab prince, who believed his own desires to be innately superior to any mere female’s wants and needs.

In a tempest of pain she refused to acknowledge Bethany descended the marble stairs. Razul swung round, his starkly handsome features flushed and still set with cold anger and hauteur. And then, as his stunning golden eyes settled on Bethany, the tension went out of him. A dazzling smile completely transformed his strong dark face.

That smile hit her like a shock wave, made her steps falter and her heart give a gigantic lurch behind her breastbone. For a split second she was hurled back two years to the evening they had first met. She had been coming out of the library. He had been leaning against the bonnet of his Ferrari, surrounded by gushing female students, every one of whom had been blonde and not known for her inhibitions with men. And then he had looked up and focused on Bethany and perceptibly stilled, treating her to a narrowed, intent stare before suddenly flashing that spectacularly glorious smile. Riveted to the spot, she had dropped her books.

But not this time, she swore to herself, despising her own shameful susceptibility and the disturbing emotions and responses which could block out every rational thought.

‘I’ve always been told that the Arab male cherishes and protects the women in his family,’ she shot at him in stark challenge, ‘but report really doesn’t match reality, does it? The Princess Fatima does not appear to qualify for even an ounce of your respect.’

His smile vanished as though she had struck him. A dark rise of blood delineated his hard cheek-bones. ‘You saw...?’

‘I saw,’ Bethany confirmed shakily.

‘I am disturbed that you should have witnessed so distressing a scene but, in honour, I may not discuss it with you,’ Razul delivered in a grim undertone.

Bethany turned away. She could not bear to look at him. So he had that much decency—a tiny kernel of loyalty to his wife. And he was profoundly embarrassed that she had seen that distasteful encounter...amazing. It was almost as though he expected her to pretend that these other women did not exist in his life. Concubines and a wife.

Yet she had never been able to hate him properly for his lifestyle. Just as she was a product of her world, he was a product of his. Nor was she foolish enough to imagine that Datar was the only country in the world where concubines were kept. It was not a subject referred to; it was a subject politely ignored lest people in high places be offended. And she had often wondered how many Western males could truthfully say that, given the same opportunity and society’s silent blessing, they too would not indulge in the freedom of such sexual variety.

‘Did you sleep well?’

A laugh that was no laugh at all bubbled in her throat. ‘You should know...you drugged me—’

‘You were in great pain. I could not bear to see you suffer,’ Razul imparted tautly, on the defensive. ‘A sleeping potion allowed you to rest.’

A sudden unbearable sadness swept over her. She found herself sinking down on the stone edge of a fountain, and she let her fingers trail restively in the water. ‘And how do you answer the kidnapping and imprisoning charge?’

‘You gave me no other option.’

Bethany breathed in deeply and looked at him where he stood, brushing aside the disturbing realisation that in the superbly tailored dove-grey suit which outlined his broad shoulders, narrow hips and long, lean legs he looked achingly familiar to her. On the outside touched by Western sophistication, she thought painfully, on the inside not touched at all, and not about to apologise for it either.

‘You know I won’t let you get away with a cop-out like that,’ she whispered.

‘Cop-out?’ Razul queried flatly, standing very tall and taut.

‘An evasion.’ She guessed that the women in his life let him off the hook every time he smiled, and then doubted if he even had a passing acquaintance with being pinned between a rock and a hard place by her sex. Fatima had been crawling round his feet like a whipped dog, not standing up to him like an equal.

Pain trammelled through her afresh. Was that what had attracted Razul to a woman outside his own culture...to her? Her spirit, her independence? In Datar even the male sex walked in awe of Razul al Rashidai Harun. One day he would be their king.

‘You cannot seriously intend to imprison me here—’

‘It does not have to be a prison. Give me your word that you will not attempt to escape and you may roam free.’

‘Something of a contradiction in terms.’ Unwarily she connected with smouldering golden eyes intently pinned to her and her throat closed over. Why am I talking to him so calmly instead of screaming at him? she wondered. Her own pain had risen uppermost, swallowing up the anger. Worse still, there was a treacherous part of her that greedily cherished every stolen moment in his company. The knowledge filled her with a deep, abiding shame.

‘Je te veux...’ he had said two years ago. ‘I want you.’

‘Tu es à moi,’ he had purred like a sleek jungle cat. ‘You are mine.’

Temptation—sinful, sweet, soul-destroying...

‘You are an educated man,’ Bethany muttered not quite steadily.

‘On the surface. Don’t flatter me,’ Razul said with sudden harshness. ‘I know your opinion of me. My father allowed thousands of Datari men to attend British and American universities over the last two decades. He did this only because it became clear to him that our country would become totally dependent on foreign workers if he did not encourage our young men to seek education and technological training in the West. But he would not permit me to enjoy a similar experience.

‘I am well aware that reading many books and spending a short spell at university does not make me an educated man...especially not in the eyes of a woman who has a string of letters after her name and many academic accomplishments.’

In the hot, still air the tension pulsed and throbbed, beating down on her from the electric force of his challenging gaze. He possessed one very powerful personality, one very volatile temperament which was also unashamedly emotional, but you were never in any doubt of the ferociously strong will that lay behind it all. But only now did she register the innate humility with which he viewed himself on an intellectual level, and that discovery pained her and made her want to put her hands round the throat of his obstinate old father, who had denied his own son what he freely gave to his subjects.

Her throat thickened. ‘Razul, nobody who has seen what you have managed to achieve here in Datar over the past five years could possibly think you anything other than an educated man.’

‘I make use of many advisors from all levels of our society. I will not tolerate nepotism, for placing the unfit in authority is the curse of the Arab world. I seek to liberalise our culture for the benefit of our people...but I know what you think, aziz, as I say this.’ He sent her a dark, level appraisal. ‘You think how can I talk of liberalisation and then steal a woman.’

‘I’m well aware that stealing women is an element of the tribal culture,’ Bethany informed him in a frozen voice. ‘But—’

A brilliant smile crossed his beautifully shaped mouth. ‘It is not a crime as long as the woman is treated with respect and honour,’ he smoothly inserted.

Bethany bent her fiery head, staggered to find herself on the brink of laughter. When it suited Razul, he was wondrously, deviously simplistic, and her mere admission that woman-stealing was a tradition practised for centuries in his culture delighted him in so far as he saw that as ample justification for his conduct.

‘But naturally the marriage must take place within a short space of time,’ Razul remarked softly. ‘It is expected.’

Her head flew back, shimmering green eyes fixing on him in unconcealed shock.

The silence stretched, taut as a rubber band, between them.

With a muffled expletive in Arabic Razul took a long stride forward and then stilled, sheer incredulity sufficient to match her own flashing across his staggeringly handsome features. ‘In the name of Allah, aziz...surely you could not think I would insult you with anything less than an offer of marriage? Last night... was this why you panicked?’ he demanded starkly, and reached for her hands to tug her relentlessly upright. ‘I brought you here to become my wife!’

His second wife. In a storm of outrage Bethany looked at him in absolute disbelief, and then she tore her hands violently free and fled.

CHAPTER THREE

PASSING beneath the nearest archway, Bethany found herself in an elaborate reception room. Fighting for self-control, she closed her eyes. ‘Prince Razul take only one wife. Always he say that...only the one.’ Zulema’s explanation for Fatima’s distress returned to her now. Seemingly Razul was now prepared to break that promise to his wife, and in a society where he was all-powerful what could the wretched woman possibly do? Presumably she could live with her husband’s other female diversions but felt both betrayed and threatened by the prospect of another woman acquiring the same status as herself.

Marriage...woman-stealing was all above board as long as you offered holy matrimony to satisfy the conventions. A strangled laugh, empty of amusement, escaped her. Little wonder she had been treated like royalty at the airport, little wonder she was being waited on hand and foot. Everybody but her had expected marriage to follow her arrival!

A polygamous marriage. The teachings of the Koran taught that a Muslim was entitled to up to four wives at any one time. In a lifetime he could get through many more than that number, if he so desired, by the judicious use of divorce. The ex-wives, of course, had to be liberally provided for. One of the reasons why polygamy was becoming less prevalent in the Arab world was the sheer expense of maintaining multiple families. But Razul was fabulously rich.

Oddly enough it had never occurred to her two years ago that Razul might already be a married man. The tabloid hadn’t picked up on that...but then maybe he had not been married then. She raised trembling hands to her stiff, cold face.

‘Why are you distressed?’ It was a ferocious demand, raw with a frustrated lack of comprehension. ‘Perhaps you are ashamed to have misjudged me so badly,’ Razul suggested with savage bite. ‘This is not Bluebeard’s castle. I am not some filthy rapist who would force his unwanted attentions upon an unprotected woman! Do you seriously believe that my father would have agreed to me bringing an Englishwoman here had I not intended to marry her? Do you think us savages?’

Bethany wanted to howl with hysterical laughter and slap him hard to express her emotions at one and the same time. ‘The Princess Fatima?’ she whispered chokily.

‘Fatima must learn to adjust. This is not my problem,’ Razul dismissed, slashing the air with an angry and imperious hand. ‘I do nothing to be ashamed of. I have waited two long years for you and she is well aware of this...’

Bethany gazed at him in horror. ‘Your compassion is overwhelming,’ she muttered sickly.

‘Compassion is not infinite...no more is tolerance. Why do you treat me to this response?’ Razul launched at her. ‘It makes no sense!’

‘Last night...’ Bethany was struggling to think straight while dimly wondering what he could possibly find incomprehensible about her response. Dear heaven, did he fondly imagine that a marriage proposal two years ago would have been sufficient to change her attitude towards him? Did he think. that she would have fallen gratefully at his feet in welcome? And when he now offered what he no doubt saw as the ultimate of honours, did he think that that would magically overcome her resistance?

‘What last night?’ Razul appealed with driven emotion.

‘You kept on saying that when I went back to my world... You weren’t thinking of marriage then!’ she reminded him.

Razul set his incredibly eloquent mouth into a grim line. ‘I was making it clear that were you to be unhappy I would set you free. I would give you a divorce, but only after you had given our marriage a fair and reasonable trial.’

Inside herself, beyond her angry disbelief, she hurt. She turned her head away. She would never have married Razul in any circumstances. Even if he hadn’t had Fatima and those other women, she reflected painfully, she still would have said no. Marriage was not for her and would never be for her. She had seen far too much of the misery of marriage while she had been growing up, and, beyond that again, the even greater misery of a cross-cultural union.

Even so, she was shattered by the idea that Razul would want to marry her. Two years ago he had wanted an affair...and she wouldn’t have been his first affair on campus—no, far from it! She might not have met Razul until his second term but she had heard about him...oh, boy, had she heard! His fame had gone before him.

Razul had flung himself with immense enthusiasm into a world where women were willing to share his bed without the smallest commitment on his part. Blessed by gorgeous good looks, charming broken English intermingled with fluent French, enormous wealth and the certainty that he would one day become a king, Razul had hit the female student body much like a winning lottery ticket blowing in the wind, hopefully to be captured by the most determined of his many admirers. A kind of communal hysteria had reigned in his radius, she recalled painfully.

‘I could never marry you,’ Bethany informed him tightly.

‘Do not say never to me...I will not accept it’

‘I insist that you call a car to take me to the airport!’

‘I refuse.’ Razul sent her a raw, shimmering glance of gold.

‘You are thinking of the loss of face...’ Bethany assumed, suddenly wishing that she did not understand his culture to the degree that she did. If he had informed his family that he intended to marry her and she refused, it would be a humiliation for him. A public humiliation. There was undoubtedly not a woman in Datar who would deny herself the great honour of becoming one of his wives.

‘Again you go out of your way to insult me.’ Razul slung her a look of wrathful reproach, his hands clenching into fists by his sides. ‘What lies between us runs too deep to rest on something so superficial as what you term a “loss of face”!’

Bethany was paper-pale, but rigid with a strength of will every bit as unyielding as his own. ‘There is nothing between us and there never will be. You must accept that. In my opinion my sole attraction in your eyes is the fact that I said no two years ago! Your ego can’t live with the startling concept that there exists one woman in the world who wants nothing to do with you!’

‘When you speak such barefaced lies I lose all patience with you!’ Razul blazed at her with such explosive suddenness that she flinched. He closed the distance between them in one long, panther-like stride and reached for her. ‘These lies are naked provocation!’

As he hauled her into his arms Bethany stiffened in shock. Glittering golden eyes roamed over her startled face with a scorching heat that made her skin tauten over her bones. ‘You burn for me as I burn for you—’

‘No!’

‘I saw your hunger last night.’ Razul lifted a shapely hand and knotted long fingers very slowly into the fiery tumble of her long hair. ‘I hold you and your heart beats as madly as that of a gazelle hunted down in the desert. It beats for me and for no other man. Yet I have never touched you,’ he breathed, in a throaty undertone of frustration which sent taut quivers rippling down her rigid spine. ‘Never... How many men in your world could say that of the woman they longed to possess? How many men would treat you with such unquestioning respect?’

His thumb was rubbing against the lobe of her ear. A tiny little shiver ran through her, fracturing her breathing. Eyes as keen as those of a hawk in flight scoured her hectically flushed face, beating down on her with merciless insight. She trembled, a whirling tide of dizziness assailing her, the hiss of her indrawn breath shatteringly loud in the stillness. ‘Razul, I—’

‘You trust me to observe the boundaries...why?’ Razul demanded roughly, yet the long forefinger he lifted to trace the tremulous fullness of her lower lip was tormentingly gentle, brushing across the tender skin with innate eroticism. ‘In the mood I am in your trust is a step too far. Perhaps I have been too honourable...I made it too easy for you to drive me away in England, but I will not make it easy this time.’

‘Let go of me,’ Bethany mumbled thickly, her slender length slipping from rigidity into sudden, shivering weakness as that expert finger slid against her trembling mouth. A tide of sexual awareness strong enough to wipe out her every defence was infiltrating her now.

‘Have other men not held you...touched you?’ Unhidden anger harshened his rich dark voice. ‘Why do you expect me to be different?’

Her breasts rose and fell, heavy, swelling, her nipples peaking inside the gossamer-fine covering of her bra. A languorous heat was uncoiling between her thighs, making her shift like a cat arching its back in the sunshine, but in the depths of her unthinking mind lurked an equally animal fear of her own responses. ‘Don’t!’

‘But your eyes say do...and if I had behaved as a man of your world you would not have shunned me two years ago. I allowed you to stay free,’ Razul intoned with mesmeric intensity. ‘Do you know why an unmarried woman is not left alone with a man in Arabia? A man is expected to sin and a woman is deemed too weak to resist temptation, for was she not fashioned to be the greatest pleasure of a man’s existence? As you will be mine, heart, soul and body...for that I promised myself in England and I will fulfil that promise more sweetly than you can believe...’

‘Airport!’ Bethany said jerkily, as if he had yanked a string and that was the best her blitzed reasoning powers could come up with by way of a contradiction.

Razul laughed softly. A lean hand sank to the shallow indentation of her spine and pressed her closer as he slowly lowered his arrogant dark head. ‘The image of a jet taking off...the heavens opening as the gates to your secret garden...most fitting, but then you are an extraordinarily sensual woman,’ he murmured thickly. ‘Did I not sense that from the first?’