Summer Sheikhs: Sheikh's Betrayal / Breaking the Sheikh's Rules / Innocent in the Sheikh's Harem

‘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.

‘Stop?’ He handed her another little bouquet of naan-wrapped herb. ‘How, stop? You are here in my country, where you promised to come. Now I keep my side of the bargain. I promised you would delight in these herbs. Do you?’

She took it from him again, and put it in her mouth, because there was nothing else to do. Not even in her nightmares had she imagined such ferocity as this.

‘Very nice,’ she said woodenly.

‘The freshness in your mouth. I told you then that I would kiss you after every bite.’ Her lips parted in a little gasp. ‘A kiss with every mouthful. You remember, Desi? Shall I keep that part of the promise, even though ten years have passed?’

‘No, I don’t,’ she said woodenly, and ‘No,’ again.

‘No?’ he said. She couldn’t see his eyes. ‘That is not what you came for, my kiss? But then, what did you come here for, Desi? Why do you come to my country, to the heart of my family, if not for this?’

He offered her another little twist of bread and herb, but she shook her head and reached into the basket herself.

‘Why did you get involved?’ she countered. ‘There was no need!’

‘But yes!’ He lifted a palm. ‘My father was determined to allow you to visit. The rest followed.’

‘He said he would arrange a guide. Why should it be you?’

‘Who else? You know what I owe your family—so many years of hospitality! You know that such hospitality must be reciprocated.’ A fleeting instinct told her there was something else here, but she was too bombarded to be able to pin it down. ‘So, Desi, I say to you that you knew your guide would be me. Our meeting was inevitable. And I ask again, why are you here? What do you want from me?’

‘I want nothing from you, Salah.’ She opened her mouth to tell him that she would hire someone else to be her guide, thought of Sami, and closed it again. He was right, after all. This was all according to plan. He was only mistaken in whose plan it was.

‘Why do you lie? What you come for is no shame. A woman has a right to experience pleasure. If her Western lover can’t give it to her, she must look for one who does.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she countered. ‘But believe me when I say I really don’t need to search so far afield.’

He lifted his hands. ‘How can I believe it, when you are here?’

A puff of irritated laughter escaped her.

‘And even if I did, you are the very last person I’d come to.’

‘No,’ he said, with such certainty she almost believed he could read her mind.

‘Trust me, Salah,’ she said. ‘You are imagining this. Every part of what you imagine is the product of your own fantasy. I am not remotely interested in reviving old times with you.’

He laughed and before she could stop him, clasped her wrist. She felt her pulse hammering against his thumb. She thought he was going to pull her against him again, it would be so easy, but abruptly he let go.

‘It is in your blood. In every part of you. As in me,’ he said, with a kind of angry self-contempt. Her heart kicked.

He waved a sultan’s wave and a waiter came from nowhere and cleared the little baskets away.

Now there was nothing but space between them. He lay resting on one elbow, looking at her. He didn’t move, but he seemed to come closer. Drawing back was agonizing to her, an iron filing trying to move out of the magnet’s powerful field.

‘Shall we make love here, Desi, as we did under the dock?’

‘Don’t be—’

‘I can tell them to go. We will blow out the candles. There will be only you and me and the stars.’

‘And your conscience.’ She felt desperate, grasping at anything that would keep him away. ‘Wouldn’t that get in the way?’

‘My conscience?’

‘Aren’t you engaged to Sami?’ she said.

Chapter Seven

SHE hadn’t meant to blurt that out. She had planned to act as if she didn’t know. Some things she could do. Pretend to be someone who would go after her best friend’s fiancé wasn’t one of them.

But Desi was grasping at any defence. It had become sharply clear in the past few minutes that she could not trust herself if Salah made a serious assault. The armour that had served her for years was not up to this challenge. Her heart was melting with grief and regret, her skin was electric with feeling.

She wouldn’t let it happen. It would be a betrayal of everything. It would kill her to make love with him.

‘But isn’t that why you’ve come just at this moment, Desi?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your timing is too good to be coincidence. You know I can never again make love to you once I am married. Our chance would be lost forever.’

‘You don’t think being engaged to my best friend puts you out of bounds already?’

‘We are not engaged. No discussions have yet taken place. And a man must come to terms with his past before he marries, isn’t that so?’ Salah said. ‘So that he can go to his wife without…regret. You have haunted me, Desi, how can you imagine otherwise? If I am going to marry, first I should have—what do you call it?—closure.’

Her heart was beating in hard, painful thumps. In her worst imaginings she had not foreseen losing control over the proceedings so quickly.

‘And how, exactly, would sex with me give you closure?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Is it an ego thing? Are you hoping to hear me say that sex with you set the bench-mark and nothing since has lived up to it?’

‘Is it true?’

‘No, it is not!’

‘You always lied badly,’ he said.

‘And you always had an ego as thick as butter.’

‘I judge by my own experience, Desi,’ he said.

The admission rushed through her like wildfire. She felt faint.

‘I don’t believe you! A few weeks, ten years ago!’

‘And what about you? Don’t you, too, wish for this closure?’

‘I got closure long ago,’ she lied. No closure was possible for a blow like the one he’d delivered. ‘The day you told me I was soiled merchandise.’

‘And this old man, was he a good lover?’ Salah asked, an expression in his eyes she couldn’t read.

‘What old man would that be?’

‘The one you nearly married, Desi. Do you forget lovers so easily? Did he please you as I did?’

‘Leo was forty-five!’

‘Was it—’

‘And it’s none of your bloody business!’

She picked up one of the glasses and took a gulp of water. It blasted into her mouth, burned her throat, stung her nerves. She gasped and coughed.

‘My God! What is this?’ she cried, staring down at the glass in horror.

Salah laughed aloud. ‘Wine, Desi,’ he said, just as her brain belatedly interpreted the taste and gave her the answer.

‘Oh, that’s wild!’ The tension of the past minutes exploded into laughter as she sank back against the cushions. ‘For a minute there I thought you…’ She broke off when she saw where she was heading. ‘Have you ever done that?’

‘Tried to poison you?’

‘Drunk one thing when you were expecting something else!’

‘In England, once,’ he confided, ‘I drank what I thought was coffee. It was not coffee. For two seconds, I thought, They have given me pigs’ urine to insult me! Then I realized it was tea.’

She let out a whoop. The incident shook them both out of the mood of angry recrimination. They lay laughing together over nothing, like the old days, the old nights, under the moonlit dock.

They had always laughed together. It was one of the things she’d loved most, missed most…

Laughter shared with a lover. It didn’t get better than that.

And now, when he was no longer threatening, when her guard was down, the layers of protection she had laid down over the past tore away. In one moment she was naked again. Her heart coiled with yearning. Oh, what had they done? What had they lost?

The waiter arrived with the next course, a tray with a dozen little dishes that all looked impossibly succulent. Just as Salah had promised, ten years ago.

She had to stop this. Salah was already dangerous enough without help from her own feelings. If there was one thing she was not going to do on this trip, it was get seduced into sex for the sake of closure.

For him it would be closure. For her, she saw suddenly, it might be just the opposite.

Desi sat up and tucked her feet under her.

‘So, when do we go?’ she asked in a bright voice, as the dishes, one by one, were laid on the cloth between them. ‘Do we leave first thing in the morning?’

He jerked his chin in the way she remembered. ‘Not tomorrow. You need at least a day to acclimatize before going into the desert. Maybe two.’

‘But—’

‘And I have business tomorrow. The day after, if you insist. At sunrise.’

She nodded agreement. ‘How long does it take to get to the site?’

‘How long?’ Salah was examining the various offerings with close attention. ‘That depends.’

‘It depends? On what?’

The last dish was set down, the waiter bowed and left, and Salah began spooning various bits of food onto a small plate.

‘On what?’ he repeated absently. ‘Oh—it may depend on the weather, the wind…’

‘The wind? What, we’ll be sailing?’ she asked ironically.

‘You are not so ignorant about the desert that you do not know that wind can be a dangerous enemy.’

‘I suppose weathermen predict the weather in Barakat as well as elsewhere.’

‘Climate change impacts the desert as well as elsewhere, also.’

‘So a big wind might blow up from nowhere and we’ll get stuck in the sand?’

‘It is not unknown. Not even unusual. Try this, Desi,’ Salah said, reaching out a long arm to set an array of taster-size morsels in front of her.

The odour of the food reached her nostrils then, utterly intoxicating.

‘Oh, that smells amazing!’ she cried, scooping up a morsel of something mysterious, then heaved a sigh as the flavour hit her taste buds. ‘That’s delicious. That’s the food of the gods!’

You make it sound like the food of the gods, she had said.

He looked at her, and she knew he was there again, too. She sought for something to say to dislodge the time shift.

‘So do we—’

‘Why does my father’s work interest you, Desi?’

Her heart sank. She tossed her hair back to look at him. ‘It was all in my letter. Didn’t your father tell you?’

‘You tell me.’

Damn. This wasn’t fair. The letter, mostly composed by Sami, was supposed to have paved the way, established all the lies. Desi was all right about living the lie, since so much depended on it, but she hated having to tell it, face to face. Especially to Salah. Especially now.

Especially as it was, she knew, so ludicrously unlikely a lie.

‘Did he tell you that I’m going back to university to do a degree?’

‘Now?’

She nodded uncomfortably. ‘I’ll start part-time this year…if I can. Middle Eastern history and archaeology.’

‘Why? Don’t you have a very successful career?’

‘Modelling won’t last forever,’ she said, and it was perfectly true. ‘I want a smooth transition when the time comes.’

‘A smooth transition into archaeology? What awoke this sudden interest?’

‘Not that sudden. I’ve been curious about archaeology ever since that summer the university came to dig on the island,’ she said. ‘Remember that First Nations site they were digging? We used to go and watch every day. I never forgot the thrill of seeing someone uncover an arrowhead!’

That part at least was true—eleven-year-old Desi had been fascinated as the past was unveiled: the discovery of the floor of the longhouse, the settlement’s refuse mound, the arrowheads of chipped stone. One of the students had encouraged her interest, telling her what each find said about the people who had lived on the site, showing her how the history of two hundred years ago could be discovered even without written records.

‘Two hundred years?’ Salah had said in youthful disdain. ‘In my country we have cities five thousand years old!’

Desi had reacted to the challenge with predictable outrage. ‘So what?’ she had cried. ‘I bet there are lots of countries where they have them ten thousand years old!’

His mouth smiled when she reminded him; his eyes were too shadowed to read.

‘You made me so mad! But I think I made up my mind then that one day I’d come to Barakat and see what you were talking about, a city five thousand years old!’

‘And now you are here.’

She hated the way he said it.

‘Won’t you find archaeology tame after a career as a supermodel?’

‘It beats marketing a perfume called Desirée,’ she said dryly. Her distaste for that at least was no lie. ‘“Feminine, delicate, but with a smouldering hint of sensuality.” Or a chain of restaurants: Desi’s Diner. How would you like it?’

He had the grace to laugh.

‘But isn’t a chain of restaurants with a smouldering hint of sensuality just what the world needs?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Not from me.’

‘And only an urgent visit to my father’s site will save you from this fate?’

How she hated the lies! But Sami’s anguished voice was there in her head…I’ve only got one chance to derail this thing…

‘I told you—it’s the only time I have free,’ she said. ‘This is the time I go to the island every year. I thought how great if I could get in on the ground floor with your father and he let me volunteer on the site for a couple of seasons. That’s a requirement of the course.’

The explanation had sounded halfway reasonable during the planning stage. She wasn’t sure now.

To her relief, Salah hardly seemed to hear. He was tearing at a chicken wing.

‘Try this,’ he said, leaning right over to hold up to her mouth a piece thick with a purply-black sauce. Desi automatically opened her mouth and bit into the tender flesh, then grunted at the rich, melting flavour.

‘Mmm! What is that black stuff? I’ve never tasted anything so yummy in my life!’ she said when she could speak.

‘Pomegranate sauce. Another speciality of the mountain tribes.’

A drop of sauce was on her cheek too far for her tongue to reach. Salah caught it with a fingertip and presented it to her mouth. She licked instinctively, then her eyes flew to his.

He slid his wet finger deliberately across her lower lip.

The hoarse intake of her breath told him everything. A jolt of electricity zapped the night air. In his black eyes two tiny golden flames were reflected, as if to warn her his touch would burn. His white teeth tore off a bite from the same piece he had offered her, and the sensual intimacy of that hit her another blow.

Desi dropped her eyes and made a business of wiping her cheek with a napkin. She tried to think of something to say, but her mind had been tipped onto its back and lay there, kicking helplessly. She felt gauche, inexperienced. As if the ten years were smoke and mirrors.

Silence fell, a silence thick with feeling, expectation, a question asked and answered.

She began to eat.

The little lamps on the cloth lighted his hand as he ate, emphasizing the strength of his fingers, the fluid grace of his wrist that transformed into power whenever he grasped a bit of naan or a goblet. Involuntarily the memory came to her of that same hand, painted in moonlight and shadow, rough and tender with inexperienced passion as they lay under the dock.

Sometimes, too, his mouth and jaw were touched with gold: a stern mouth, a full lower lip that the chiaroscuro painted in more sensual lines than was revealed in ordinary light. His eyes were mostly shadowed, except for a black glinting in the darkness.

‘You go to the island still?’ he asked. She wished he had started any topic but that one, but she had to answer.

‘My parents live there full-time now. I spend a month there every summer, and Christmas if I can.’

He asked after her parents, her young sister, after Harry, her brother. Softly, softly, he drew her into remembering. She knew it was deliberate, to prove some point, to set some mood—but she could neither prevent it, nor resist.

The shadows, the stars, his voice, the talk of those island summers—everything conspired to take her back to the sweet hours they had lain undetected and undisturbed in their refuge under the ancient dock, their world of two. She began to feel like that child-woman again, on the brink of discovery of self and other, of love and desire, of her own sexual power, and another’s.

He had been her lover. She knew what it meant for those hands, with light and shadow playing on them like this, to caress and stroke her. Sometimes when his hand disappeared again into shadow, her body shivered in the unconscious expectation of a caress.

Desi sank into the embracing cushions as they talked, her legs folded with unconscious grace, naked toes curling as she rested on one elbow and ate with her fingers. All her guard had come down. She was eating more food than she’d had at one go for a decade. This was a total sensual delight.

He watched her soften, and the predator in him gloried in his success even as he told himself it meant nothing.

The last course was put in front of them then, a pastry oozing with the promise of sweetness, and she summoned resistance at last. ‘That looks lovely, but I never eat sugar,’ she said.

‘This is made with honey.’

‘Or honey.’ But for once she could not resist. ‘Just a taste,’ Desi said.

Fatal mistake. ‘Oh, that is just too delicious!’ she exclaimed, hastily dropping the little gold fork.

Salah bent his head, and she saw his eyes clearly. They glinted amusement at her, and something else, and her blood leapt so painfully in response she almost whimpered.

‘Do you push temptation away so easily, Deezee?’ he asked, his voice caressing her nerve endings like soft sandpaper.

She looked at him, a hard man if there ever was one. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Not such temptation as this,’ he said. She knew he did not mean the little honey-crusted sweet. Flame flickering in the black eyes, he picked up the sweetmeat from her plate with his fingers, tilted his head back and caught it on his tongue.

It nearly flattened her. Sensation roared over her skin, bringing every cell to attention.

His gaze caught hers before she could turn away, and it was all there in her eyes. She saw him read it. The heat rose up in her cheeks, but she could not tear her gaze from his.

Her eyes were emerald with desire. He smiled like a wolf, dark and determined, and said what he did not want to say…

‘Shall I come to your bed tonight, Desi?’

Warmth flooded her body. Oh, how could she be so weak? She’d had ten years to get over this!

‘No.’

He shrugged. ‘Then you must come to mine.’

‘Mmm. I’ll be riding a flying pig.’

She was falling apart, and it was only the first day. Desi took a deep, trembling breath. She was headed out of her depth here. The sooner she got out of the palace and onto the dig with other people, the better.

She sat up, drew her legs under her, pressed a cushion behind her back.

‘So, you never actually told me—how many hours will we be on the road?’

‘Hours? What do you mean?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Desi, the trip across the desert will take four days at least, probably five.’

Chapter Eight

HOW was flight? Have you seen HIM yet?

Where R U?? Please call!

There were five texts from Sami on her BlackBerry, each one more frantic than the last, and a half a dozen missed calls. Desi should have texted Sami from the Arrivals hall or, failing that, the car, and was stunned to realize she had forgotten. She’d completely forgotten her phone, if not her life, from the moment she’d met Salah.

Has he murdered U? What is going onnnnnnnnnn?

Desi sat with the thing in her hand. She should call Sami to update her, but…she just did not want to talk about Salah and their meeting and the dinner she’d just shared with him.

Or the fact that she had turned down the chance to share his bed.

Meanwhile, she had to respond.

Sry, sry!! Horrible jetlag. S picked me up, going to sleep now. Ttyl, she sent.

She ruthlessly shut the phone off before Sami could call. Then she lay in the fairy-tale bed, surrounded by soft lamplight and ancient luxury, trying to think. Trying to get distance on the evening she had just experienced.

Five days in the desert alone with Salah! How was it possible? How had Sami not known?

What would she do, alone with him day after day, night after night, a forbidding stranger who somehow shared a past with her? A man who thought making love with her would give him closure?

He wanted her. His love might be dead—he said it was, and she believed him—but Salah wanted her. She was alone now because she had chosen it. He would have come to her bed if she’d wavered for one second. If she’d flicked an eyelash.

Might he still come? She couldn’t be sure. She had said no, but—he might think that if he came to her room she wouldn’t be able to keep on saying it.

And he’d be right. Desi was afraid. All the defences she thought she’d built up over ten years had disappeared in the space of one short breath. She was vulnerable in a way she hadn’t been with any other man. And she didn’t know what he really wanted.

Closure. That was such an extraordinary thing for a man like Salah to say! What closure would sex give him? You have haunted me, Desi. Was it true? Or did he have some ulterior motive for saying it?

Desi flung the sheet back, swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and sat with her head in her hands. After a moment she got up and began to pace.

The intimacy of the roof garden. The constant harking on the past. The fact he had ordered food he had lovingly described to her ten years ago. The irresistible way he’d chosen tidbits for her, fed her. Painful reminders of their love, scorching tokens of intimacy, the actions of a man determined to win back an old love.

All false. All stage dressing. Salah did not want to win her back. He had made that very plain, a long time ago.

Why, then?

He wants revenge. The thought dropped into her head with an almost audible click. Four days. Five. He could find a dozen ways to get revenge, she was sure, alone with her in the desert for five days. But what could he want revenge for?

Everything that happened had been his own doing.

A few days after he left, Salah had phoned her. He begged her, he pleaded his love. He knew now that it was jealousy that had motivated him. He had believed that look in her eyes was only for him, and there it was in the photo, for anyone who looked at her. He had taken refuge in blaming her, too easy to do.

‘But I will never do anything like that again, Desi. I will understand myself better.’ If only she would forgive him.

The call came too late. Their argument had shaken Desi to the core, and suddenly all the changes that before had seemed so easy frightened her. Move away from her family and friends, to a country on the other side of the world whose language she didn’t speak, whose people and culture and religion she knew nothing of, where she knew no one save Salah? Have children who would be citizens of another country?