The Desert Bride

Fifteen nail-biting minutes later the airport manager reappeared and ushered her out...out onto a red carpet which had not been in place earlier. Bethany began to get all hot and bothered, her nervous tension rocketing to quite incredible heights. The VIP treatment staggered her. Everybody was looking at her. Indeed it was as though the whole airport had ground to a dead halt and there was this strange atmosphere of what could only be described as...electric excitement.

It had to be a case of mistaken identity, Bethany decided, struggling to hold onto her usually bomb-proof composure. Who on earth did Hussein bin Omar think she was? Or did an acquaintance with Razul automatically entitle one to such extraordinary attention at the airport?

What an idiot she had been to claim friendship with him...especially as it was a lie...a really quite blatant lie, she conceded inwardly, grimly recalling her last volatile meeting with the Crown Prince of Datar, slamming down hard on the piercing pain that that memory brought with it. She had had a narrow escape—a damned lucky narrow escape, she reminded herself fiercely. She had very nearly made an outsize fool of herself, but at least he had never known that. She hadn’t given him that much satisfaction.

A whole column of spick and span policemen were standing to attention on the sun-baked pavement outside. Bethany turned pale. The heat folded in, dampening her skin beneath the loose beige cotton shirt and serviceable trousers she wore. Her discreet little trip to Datar had gone wildly off the rails.

‘Your escort, Dr Morgan.’ Hussein bin Omar snapped his fingers and a policeman darted forward to open the door of the waiting police car.

‘My escort?’ Bethany echoed shakily just as a young woman hurried forward and planted an enormous bunch of. flowers in her startled hands. As if that were not enough, her fingers were grasped and kissed. Then for a split second everybody hovered as though uncertain of what to do next.

‘Allah akbar...God is great!’ the airport manager suddenly cried. Several other excited male voices eagerly joined him in the assurance.

At that point Bethany simply folded backwards into the police car. The whole bunch of them were crazy! Instantaneously she scolded herself for the reflection. As an anthropologist trained to understand cultural differences, such a reflection ill became her. As the car lurched into sudden motion and the driver set off a shrieking siren to accompany their progress she told herself. to be calm, but that was difficult when she noticed the two other police cars falling in behind them.

Common sense offered the most obvious explanation. Hussein bin Omar had been appalled by the mistake over her visa because she had claimed that she knew Razul. In short, this outrageous fuss was his attempt to save lost face and simultaneously demonstrate his immense respect for the Datari royal family. That was why she had been supplied with a police escort to take her to her hotel outside the city. All very much over the top, but then this was not England, this was Datar—a feudal kingdom with a culture which had only recently begun to climb up out of the dark ages of medievalism.

She closed her eyes in horror as her driver charged a red light, forcing every other vehicle to a halt. Fearfully lifting her lashes again, she gazed out at the city of Al Kabibi as it sped by far too fast. Ultra-modern skyscrapers and shopping malls mingled with ancient, turquoise-domed mosques, the old and the new coexisting side by side.

As it left the lush white villas of the suburbs behind, the broad, dusty highway forged a path through a landscape of desolate desert plains. Bethany sat forward to get a better view of the fortress-like huge stone walls rising out of the emptiness ahead. Her driver jabbered excitedly into his radio while endeavouring to overtake a Mercedes with only two fingers on the steering wheel.

Bethany was on the edge of her seat, praying. And then, without any warning at all, the car swerved off the road outside the fortress and powered through a set of enormous turreted gates. A clutch of robed tribesmen suddenly appeared directly in their path. They were brandishing machine-guns. The driver jumped so hard on the brakes that Bethany was flung along the back seat, and then she heard the splintering crack-crack of gunfire and threw herself down onto the floor, curling up into as tight a defensive ball as possible.

The car rolled to a halt. She stayed down, trembling with fear, wondering if the driver had been shot but not prepared to raise her head until the bullets stopped flying. The door clicked open.

‘Dr Morgan?’ a plummy Oxbridge voice enquired expressionlessly.

Bethany peered up and met the politely questioning gaze of a dapper little Arab gentleman with a goatee beard.

‘I am Mustapha—’

‘The g-guns...?’ she stammered.

‘Merely the palace guards letting off a little steam. Were you frightened? Please accept my apologies on their behalf.’

‘Oh...’ Feeling quite absurd, Bethany flushed and scrambled out of the car; only then did alarm bells start ringing. ‘The palace guards?’ Wide-eyed, she stared at the older man. ‘This isn’t my hotel?’

‘No, indeed, Dr Morgan. This is the royal palace.’ He permitted himself a small smile of amusement. ‘Prince Razul requested that you be brought here without delay.’

‘Prince Razul?’ Bethany repeated in a strangled voice, but Mustapha had already swept off towards the arched and gilded entrance of the vast sprawling building ahead, clearly expecting her to follow him.

The airport manager must have contacted Razul about her arrival, Bethany registered in horror. But why on earth would Razul demand that she be brought to the palace? After the manner in which they had parted two years earlier he could not possibly wish to see her again! Lifelong conditioning to the effect that he was every woman’s fantasy did not prepare an Arab prince for the shattering experience of having his advances rebuffed. By the end of their last, distressing encounter Bethany had been left in no doubt that Razul had been very deeply offended by her flat refusal to have anything to do with him.

Yet she had planned what she would say to him in advance, employing every ounce of tact at her disposal. She had known the strength of his pride. She had gone to great lengths in her efforts to defuse a volatile situation gently. Her face shadowed now, the cruel talons of memory digging deep. Razul had unleashed his temper and goaded her into losing her head. She wasn’t proud of the derision with which she had fought back but he had been tearing her in two. She had been fighting for her own self-respect...why not admit it?

As she followed the older man into a huge, echoing hall lined with slender marble columns she was in a daze. Her exotic surroundings merely increased the sensation. Tiny mosaics were set into wildly intricate geometric patterns in shades of duck-egg green and ochre and palest blue on every inch of the walls and ceiling. The effect was dazzlingly beautiful and centuries old. A tiny sound jerked her head.

A giggle...a whisper? She looked up and saw the carved mishrabiyyah screens fronting the gallery suspended far above her. Behind the delicate yet wholly effective filigree barrier she caught flutters of movement, fleeting impressions of shimmering colour and then a burst of girlish laughter, excited whispers emerging from far more than one female voice and then swiftly stifled. A drift of musky perfume made her nostrils flare.

A tiny window onto the outside world for the harem? Bethany froze and turned white, a terrible pain uncoiling inside her. The thesis which had earned her both her doctorate and her current junior lectureship at a northern university had been on the suppression of women’s rights in the Third World. This was not the Third World but, even so, the dreadful irony of her almost uncontrollable attraction to Razul had boiled her principles alive two years ago. Her colleagues had laughed their socks off when he’d come after her...an Arab prince with two hundred concubines stashed in his harem back home!

‘Dr Morgan!’ Mustapha called pleadingly.

Numbed by the onslaught of that recollection, Bethany moved on again. At the far end of the hall two fierce tribesmen stood outside a fantastically carved set of double doors. They wore ceremonial swords but carried guns. At a signal from Mustapha they threw back the doors on a magnificent audience room. The older man stepped back, making it plain that he was not to accompany her further.

At the far end of the room sunlight was flooding in from doors spread back on an inner courtyard. It made the interior seem dim yet accentuated the richness of its splendour. Her sturdy leather sandals squeaked on the highly polished floor. She hesitated, her heartbeat hammering madly against her ribcage as she stared at the shallow dais, heaped with silk cushions and empty. But a terrible excitement licked at her every sense and she felt it even before she saw him—that frightening mix of craving and anticipation which for the space of several weeks two years earlier had made her calm, well-ordered life a hell of unfamiliar chaos.

‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’

She jerked around, that honey-soft accented drawl sending a quiver down her taut backbone. Her breath shortened in her throat. Thirty feet away on the threshold of the courtyard stood the living, breathing embodiment of a twentieth-century medieval male—Razul al Rashidai Harun, the Crown Prince of Datar, as uncivilised a specimen of primitive manhood as any prehistoric cave would have been proud to produce.

‘All that outfit lacks is a bush hat. Did you think you were coming to darkest Africa?’ Razul derided lazily, and her serviceable clothing suddenly felt like foolish fancy dress.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him as he walked with cat-like fluidity towards her. Breathtakingly goodlooking... terrifyingly exotic. With those hard-boned, hawkish features, savagely high cheek-bones and that tawny skin he might have sprung live from some ancient Berber tapestry. He was very tall for one of his race. Sheathed in fine cream linen robes, his headdress bound by a double royal golden iqual, Razul gazed down at her with night-dark eyes that were as hard as jet.

It took enormous will-power to stand her ground. Her mouth went dry. Razul strolled calmly around her, for all the world like a predator circling his kill. It was not an image which did anything to release her tension.

‘So very quiet,’ Razul purred as he stilled two feet away. ‘You are in shock...the barbarian has at last learnt to speak proper English...’

Bethany lost every drop of her hectic colour and flinched as though he had plunged a stiletto between her ribs. ‘Please—’

‘And even how to use your dainty Western cutlery,’ Razul imparted with merciless bite.

Bethany dropped her head, anguish flooding her. Did he really think that such trivia had mattered? Her heart had gone out to him as he’d struggled, with all that savage pride of his, to fit into a world which his suspicious old father had denied him all knowledge of until he’d reached an age when the adaptation was naturally all the more difficult to make.

‘But the barbarian did not learn one lesson you sought to teach,’ Razul murmured very quietly. ‘I had no need of it for I know women. I have always known women. I did not pursue you because I was prompted by my primitive, chauvinistic arrogance to believe myself irresistible. I pursued you because in your eyes I read blatant invitation—’

‘No!’ Bethany gasped, galvanised into ungluing her tongue from the roof of her dry mouth.

‘Longing...hunger...need,’ Razul spelt out so softly that the hairs prickled at the nape of her neck. “Those ripe pink lips said no but those emerald eyes begged that I persist. Did I flatter your ego, Dr Morgan? Did playing the tease excite you?’

Appalled that he appeared to recall every word that she had flung at him, Bethany was paralysed. He had known. He had known that on some dark, secret level she’d wanted him, in spite of all her protestations to the contrary! She was shattered by the revelation, had been convinced that her defensive shell had protected her from such insight. Now she felt stripped naked. Even worse, Razul had naturally interpreted her ambivalent behaviour in the most offensive way of all. A tease...? Sexless, cold and frigid were epithets far more familiar to her ears.

‘If you believe that I misled you, it was not intentional, I assure you,’ Bethany responded tightly, studying her feet, not looking at him, absolutely forbidding herself to look at him again, not even caring how he might translate such craven behaviour. Maybe she owed Razul this hearing. He was finally having his say. Two years ago his fierce anger had not assisted his efforts to express himself in her language.

The silence smouldered. She sensed his frustration. He wanted her to fight back. Funny how she knew that, somehow understood exactly what was going through that innately devious and clever brain of his. But fighting back would prolong the agony...and she was in agony, with the evocative scent of sandalwood filling her nostrils and the soft hiss of his breathing interfering with her concentration. It took her back—back to a terrifying time when her safe, secure world had very nearly tumbled about her ears.

‘May I go now?’ She practically whispered the words, so great was her rigid tension.

‘Look at me—’

‘No—’

‘Look at me!’ Razul raked at her fiercely.

Bethany’s gaze collided with vibrant tiger-gold eyes and she stopped breathing. The extraordinary strength of will there mesmerised her. Her heartbeat thudded heavily in her eardrums. All of a sudden she was dizzy and disorientated. With a sense of complete helplessness and intense shame, she felt her breasts stir and swell and push wantonly against the cotton cups of her bra as her nipples pinched into tight little buds. Hot pink invaded her pallor but there was nothing she could do to control her own body. The electrifying sexual charge in the atmosphere overwhelmed her every defence.

Razul dealt her an irredeemably wolfish smile, his slumbrous golden eyes wandering over her, lingering on every tiny hint of the generous curves concealed by her loose clothing. Then, without warning, he stepped back and clapped his hands. The sound was like a pistol shot in the thrumming silence.