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

‘But I don’t understand,’ Nadia said. ‘Why are you…?’

‘You haven’t seen Safiyah for a long time,’ Ramiz said to Salah, over her. ‘She misses you. You’ll be surprised by how much she’s grown. Tahir, too.’

‘Ayna Safiyah?’ Salah called. ‘Ayna walida jamilati?’

The child’s high shriek answered him, and then a little girl came tearing into the room and ran straight into his arms, followed by a woman carrying a baby.

‘Aga Salah! Aga Salah!’ the child cried.

Desi watched as Salah swung the shrieking child up into the air. His face was suddenly soft, his expression relaxed and warm. The face of the Salah she remembered.

He was not lost, the man she had loved. He was still there, underneath. If only she could reach him.

‘Have you really been camping out in the desert at this time of year?’ Nadia asked Desi against the background of the child’s chatter. ‘What’s Salah thinking of?’

‘He did warn me, but I insisted. This is the only time I had to visit. The first night we stayed with nomads. Last night at Halimah’s Rest.’

Nadia frowned and shook her head. ‘Was the water clean enough to bathe in?’

‘Call it a large puddle.’

Nadia looked at her. ‘And then you drove all morning in the desert to get here? Salah must be crazy!’

‘I haven’t felt so grubby and sticky since I was five and my father took me for a day at the fair.’ Desi laughed.

‘Desi,’ Nadia said hesitantly, ‘would you like to take a shower now? I am sure…’

‘Oh, could I?’

So Nadia showed her to a bathroom, gave her towels and soap, and left her to indulge herself. Never had water been such bliss! She could have stayed under the cool flow for half an hour, but even here in Wadi Daud water must be a precious resource at this time of year. She restricted herself to five minutes.

She came out feeling human again, her newly washed hair twisted up on top of her head, her face cleansed, her skin breathing for the first time in two days. Heaven.

In the sitting room, meanwhile, Nadia took a protesting Safiyah away to get her lunch. Ramiz and Salah were left alone.

‘Two days through the desert, via West Barakat, to get to your father’s dig?’ Ramiz asked softly.

‘And we’re only halfway there,’ Salah replied blandly. ‘It’s a four-day trip. Nadia’s not likely to mention where the dig is, is she?’

‘Does she know? I don’t, not with any accuracy. Subtle form of abduction, brother? She’s very beautiful.’

‘Subtle form of interrogation. I want to know why she wants to see it.’

‘Ah.’ Ramiz pursed his lips. ‘Nadia recognized her. Supermodel? She would have a lot of connections among the wealthy.’

‘Got it in one,’ Salah said.

‘Could she be an innocent pawn?’

‘No. I tried that one. She’s hiding something.’

Even as he spoke he wondered why he had brought Desi to this house, where the least slip would expose the truth of this expedition. Was he tired of the deception, had he somehow accepted that she was innocent, that last night had taught him her real reason for coming? Or had he merely fallen victim to her wiles in spite of his best intentions?

‘The big mystery is, why has your father allowed it? Isn’t the site completely shut down to outsiders?’

Salah nodded. ‘I advised him to refuse. His sense of justice wouldn’t allow it. Desi’s family in Canada hosted me very generously every summer for years when I was a kid learning English. He couldn’t say no, even though we have to assume that whoever is behind it chose her for that very reason.’

‘So the desert is going to sweat the truth out of her?’

Salah nodded.

‘And what else?’ Ramiz asked.

Salah raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s more going on between you than just a spy story, Salah. The air catches fire every time you look at her. What else are you trying to sweat out of her?’

‘I have an idea!’ Nadia said.

After a delicious cold lunch of various kinds of salad, Salah and Desi were making moves to go.

‘We have a very interesting site close to Qabila. Rock carvings, two thousand years old, Desi! If you stop the night with us, Salah, you can take Desi to see them this afternoon.’

Desi glanced at Salah. It was tempting, the thought of a comfortable bed and cool sheets and a shower in the morning. But she was unsure what such an offer of hospitality meant. Was this one of those moments when you were supposed to protest three times before accepting?

‘Thank you, that’s very kind,’ Desi said with a smile. ‘But it’s such a long trip, and I am really eager to get there as soon as possible.’

‘But if you leave now, you will not get to the site till nearly sunset, maybe even after dark,’ Nadia said. ‘You may as well stay here and go tomorrow morning. Anyway, the road is safer in daylight.’

A funny little silence fell over the table. Ramiz and Salah exchanged glances. Ramiz started to say something in Arabic, but Desi was already asking, ‘The road?’

‘Yes, in the dark, you know, you can hit blown sand before you see it. Salah is a very good driver, but when sand grabs your wheels, it can be very uncomfortable.’

‘What road would that be?’ Desi asked carefully.

Nadia smiled and waved vaguely with her hand. ‘The main road to Central Barakat, of course! I really don’t understand why—’

‘The dig is on the main road?’

‘No, didn’t you tell us once it’s an hour or two off piste, Salah? But the secret is knowing where to turn off!’

‘Really. A whole hour off the main road.’

‘Shokran, Nadia,’ Salah said. ‘But we’ll go on. I prefer to do the last leg under cover of darkness. Harder to track us, if anyone is trying.’

Chapter Fifteen

A FEW minutes later they were in the Land Cruiser again, heading down the valley.

‘So, are we going to continue the circular tour for another two days?’ Desi asked as soon as she was sure she could control herself. She had never been so angry in her life, mostly with herself. What a fool she had been! Dreaming dreams about a man who had already proven himself a selfish, faithless monster. A man, clearly, who was obsessed with honour because he had none.

‘Desi…’

‘Since your ancestors were faultless navigators, I assume the detour was planned. Did you mean me to get to the dig at all? Or was the great navigator planning to get lost and spend two weeks driving around in circles?’

‘I told you I would not let you discover the way, Desi.’

‘Five days? Was that much bluff really necessary?’

‘I have told you from the beginning that I am concerned about your motives. I thought after a few days in the desert you might tell me the truth.’

‘Your own particular brand of endurance test. Is that why you made love to me, too?’ Her heart convulsed so that she felt sick. ‘To try and break me down? Hoping for a pillow confession?’

‘I warned you there was no future for us.’

She began to laugh unhappily. ‘Oh, you’re as noble as they come! A true mountain warrior—what’s the code you once told me? Generosity, hospitality, bravery in battle, and a good lover? Oh, yes, everything’s there, except the generosity, the hospitality and the bravery! What a cowardly way to fight a battle against a woman! God, you make me sick!’

A cloud of sand billowed up around the car as Salah slammed on the brakes and pulled off the road under a cluster of date palms. He turned to her, his black eyes blazing.

‘What did you expect, Desi? You come to me with lies, but you want truth from me! I have to know why you came here, why you want to visit this place! My father could not say no to you, because I owe your family such a debt! Was it noble in you to take advantage of him in this way?’

‘I am not taking advantage of him! Why do you suspect me? Why won’t you believe me?’ she shouted.

‘Because you are lying to me. I know it. Do not deny it again, Desi, it makes you more of a liar!’

‘How can you make love to me at night and then in the day believe I could be a cheat?’

‘Because you are a cheat. You cannot be trusted. You are weak. This I learned ten years ago.’

Her jaw fell open. Her eyes blazed outrage at him.

‘Me! How dare you? I’m sick of this accusation, Salah! You’re ten years older now, isn’t it time you got a handle on what happened? All I did was love you, and if that’s a sin, well, I’ve paid for it in spades! You’re the one who was weak! You’re the one whose love didn’t last past the first hurdle. Not me!’

‘Do you pretend to rewrite history with me?’ he demanded. ‘Do you pretend to forget what you did?’

‘What I did? What did I do, exactly?’

‘Why do you want to open this? You did not love me.’

‘That’s what I said, all right. I was sixteen years old. You’re the one who wrote the letter. You’re the one who decided that we were not after all married in our hearts and therefore I wasn’t pure enough for you!’

He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Do you pretend still? You could not have gone to the bed of this old man if your love had been real. You know it.’

‘Old man? Bed? What are you talking about?’

‘You know. The one they called your agent. Why do you pretend with me?’

‘Leo?’ she screeched incredulously. ‘Three years later, Salah! How long did you expect me to wait for you to see the light?’

‘What?’ he whispered.

But she was in full flood.

‘Three years during which you never once tried to get in touch! What was I supposed to do? You rejected me in the most humiliating, shaming way possible! Was I supposed to beg? To promise to give up my too demeaning career? Grovel because I was weak and slept with you before we were bound in holy bloody matrimony?

‘I waited and waited in the hopes that when you wrote it you were delirious or something, but no! Your self-righteousness was fully conscious! I don’t know what the hell you think you had a right to expect…’

‘What do you mean, three years later?’ Salah finally found his voice, and it rasped like gravel against a screen.

‘I was nearly nineteen before Leo’s master plan came to fruition! Are you really presuming to blame me for that? You didn’t want me, but I should remain virgin forever? What was it, some kind of sanctity test? No one else got near me for three years, Salah. Did you wait that long? I’d like to know.’

His eyes were hollow with shock.

‘He was your lover from the beginning! You went from me to him.’

Her face convulsed with distaste. ‘No, he was not! I was sixteen, for God’s sake! He was forty-two!’

‘It wasn’t true?’ He was hoarse with horror.

‘What?’ Desi stared at him blankly. Then her eyes narrowed as suspicion took hold. ‘What do you mean? What wasn’t true?’

‘Sami sent me a magazine clipping. A picture of you with this old man. It said…’

Her head went back as if he had hit her. She stared at him, and for a moment they were frozen there, locked in mutual horror.

‘You believed it?’ She was open-mouthed with shock as the fact sank in. She stared, shook her head to try to clear it. ‘Is that why—?’ she whispered. ‘How could you believe it?’

‘Desi—’

‘You, of all people! Did you really imagine that within a few weeks I could—? With you on a battlefield, for Christ’s sake! You thought I had—’ Suddenly feeling came rushing in to fill the blankness and her voice found its feet.

‘You read something about me in a damned cheap-thrills sell-your-soul-for-a-dollar celebrity magazine, and you believed it?’ She drew in a shuddering breath. ‘My God, it was bad enough when I thought…’

She didn’t know where to look. She turned away from him, lifted her chin, breathing with her mouth open like a wounded animal, trying to get air. Chills rushed over her skin.

‘Oh, God!’ she moaned. ‘This can’t be true! This is a nightmare…’

She closed her eyes. Opened them again. Fury flooded her.

‘That was why you wrote that letter. Wasn’t it? You—you faithless…my love not strong enough? How dare you talk to me as if—You! What was your love worth, if you could believe that? Without asking, without even accusing—you just read some innuendo in a photo caption, and believed it? Leaving me to the mercy of those vultures who were surrounding me! Nothing! I had nothing to defend myself with, if you didn’t love me! Did you think of that?’

Salah looked like the survivor of an explosion. He stared at her, his eyes black with shock.

‘No,’ he said.

‘A caption under a picture! Not even a story! I wanted to deny it, but Leo told me if we made a fuss it would only confirm it in people’s minds. It was better to let it pass. Anyway, he said, this would make it easier for him to protect me from predatory men, the way he’d promised my father!

‘And it did give me protection—of sorts! I was sixteen and pretty and not engaged to you. If Leo hadn’t been in the background I’d never have had a moment’s peace!’

With an upsurge of the sick bitterness that Leo’s betrayal of trust had created, she added, ‘It didn’t protect me from Leo himself, of course. He was the most predatory of all, but he could play the long game.’

‘Ya Allah,’ Salah whispered. She had never seen his face the way it looked now.

‘I hated it all. I’d never wanted the life, never! I always felt I was living some other girl’s dream. But because it was so fantastic I somehow had to live it. I missed you so much! I wished and wished I’d never done that stupid ad. Then you’d never have said what you said, and we’d have been married and I wouldn’t ever have met Leo. But I was so nervous. Over and over I started a letter to you, but each time I thought…

‘And then you were wounded, and I knew none of that mattered, because I loved you and I would never love anyone else, and if you died, I died, too. I waited for you to answer my card, wondering if you would live, praying—God, how I begged for you to recover! And when I saw your letter lying there—!’ Her eyes squeezed shut. ‘I nearly died from joy. I thought my heart was going to burst out of me and fly.

‘Then I read it—and you know what? He may have waited three years before he physically climbed into my bed, but Leo got me in spirit the day I read your letter. I gave up that day. I gave up thinking what we had was special, that anything was special! I gave up what I’d believed about myself. I wasn’t good enough for you, Salah. I’d loved you and wanted you too much, and because of that you thought I—’

She began to sob helplessly, feeling as if all the tears of a lifetime were waiting to be shed.

‘I felt so cheap! I thought, well, if Salah can say such horrible, disgusting things…then it was all nothing. What I thought we had was nothing. It was never real. You betrayed your honour. It burned me like an iron. I’ll remember that feeling till the day I die. I’d have given up that life in a minute, if you’d asked, but that letter told me it was more than being a model. I’d demeaned myself in your eyes by making love with you, too, that’s what I believed. What we had wasn’t beautiful at all, it was cheap and dirty. That was the end of everything.’

He was silent, his eyes black, watching her, knowing without doubt that what she spoke was the truth.

‘And now you tell me you wrote that filth because you believed—how could you believe it? And not even to ask me if it was true!’ she cried, as the barriers gave way and all the hurt rushed into her throat, demanding release. ‘How could you think for a moment that I could go from you to him? I couldn’t stand any other man touching me! Even three years after—the first time Leo…I was sick afterwards! I ran into the bathroom and threw up!’

She stopped and groped in her bag for tissues, then lifted her head and looked at him.

‘It was bad enough when I thought you despised me for loving you or for being a model, but this! It’s too much, Salah. This is unforgivable. You destroyed the most beautiful…What a cold, judgmental, untrusting bastard you were. Are. Well, I’m glad I know at last. And to think I’ve spent these few days with you regretting what we missed!’ she added, in a self-disgust so total she could hardly breathe. ‘Imagining that we still had something that could…but we never had anything, did we? It was all a lie from the get-go. I’ll never regret it again. I was lucky. I had a bloody lucky escape.’

Then there was silence, broken only by the sound of her weeping.

Chapter Sixteen

SALAH felt blank, the way one feels after a bullet has hit: the emptiness of waiting for the pain.

He sat staring into the past, as all the carefully constructed armour of ten years collapsed into rubble around him. He had destroyed the dream by his own hand. Feeling began to blast in, a storm of grief and self blame.

She was completely blameless. The fault had been entirely his from the beginning.

She was right. He had acted towards her without generosity, without honour, all the while pretending that the lack of honour was hers. Even the least degree of decency had required that he ask her for the truth before judging her. And even believing it true, shouldn’t he have tried to understand the pressures of that new world? A man of forty-two, a girl of sixteen. What chance would she have stood? Why hadn’t he seen it before? Why hadn’t he judged differently when he got a little older?

He opened his mouth three times before he could speak.

‘Desi. There isn’t a word strong enough. What have I done? Desi, forgive me.’

He put his hand out to her but, still weeping, she twisted away.

‘Forgive? How can I forgive it?’ she howled.

‘Desi.’ His voice sounded completely unlike him. ‘My God. What a fool I am. Worse than a fool. A devil.’

She was sobbing inconsolably. ‘You said you loved me, you say now it was the biggest thing in your life—how could you think such a thing? How could you begin to believe it? Why didn’t you at least give me a chance?’

He swallowed. Ten years. What could make amends for such a waste of life and love?

‘Desi, I am sorry.’

‘Oh, great. Yes, that makes all the difference!’

The car was insufferably hot. Sweat was pouring off her, and she wound down the window and tried to catch her breath.

Salah started the engine. ‘We can’t stay here.’

He put the vehicle in gear and backed out onto the road again.

The sun was in the west, streaming into the car now from the front, now on the right, as the road curved and turned. It was burning hot, in spite of the air conditioning, and Desi felt sick with the brightness and the heat on her skin. For a few miles she twisted the sun visor this way and that, trying to block the rays, and then Salah pulled over again.

He got out, rummaged in the back for a moment, then came around to her side. Without a word he opened the door, lowered the window, tucked a cardboard window protector over the glass and rolled it back up. It covered the passenger window and a few inches of the windscreen, putting her in welcome shade.

When they were moving again, she said, ‘Thank you.’

He nodded, swallowing, as if he could not trust himself to speak.

‘You could have done that any time over the past three days, I suppose. But then, you had to sweat the truth out of me.’

They drove in silence, passing other cars on the road, glimpsing herds of camels and goats at distant nomad camps in the bleak, bleak desert. After a while Salah turned off the road and headed out over the sand again.

She wondered how she could ever have imagined such a landscape magnificent. It was nothing but emptiness.

RU still in desert? RU seducing Salah??? What is happening? Plz call as soon as U get coverage.

Desi read this message from another life dimly, hardly taking it in. Reception was poor, and she shut off the phone without answering.

Another hour passed, and then they were winding through a curious forest of rocky outcrops and into a valley between high walls of rock. Green scrub clung to the rock face here and there, and in places the wheels sank into mud or splashed through a stagnant puddle. In other places a thin trickle gave promise that this was a river bed.

‘In winter there are flash floods here,’ Salah said. ‘It is very dangerous.’ It was the first word that had passed between them for over an hour. ‘Two years ago all this area flooded for the first time in living memory. Even in the tribal traditions there was no history of such flooding.’

‘Ever the travel guide,’ she said.

Just before sunset the rock walls fell away and the vista opened up. The sky in the west was a brilliant fire of gold, with Mount Shir shining in white majesty over the growing shadows in the desert. In the distance she saw a collection of tents nestled beneath a stand of rock.

‘My father’s camp,’ said Salah.

It was as if a nomad encampment had entered a technology warp, and half its tents had been converted into air-conditioned caravans and trailers. All the modern equipment was nestled into the protective shadow between two large outcrops of black rock that jutted up from the desert floor. In front of them was ranged a nest of tents, half modern and half the low-slung nomadic type. And in front of that was the massive ancient site, where workers in straw hats toiled in rows, as if the nomads had taken to terrace farming. As they approached, an armed guard sitting on a rock peered at Salah’s face for a moment and waved the vehicle on.

‘I have to find out what arrangements have been made for us,’ Salah said, pulling up to park in the shade of a white trailer. ‘They are not expecting us yet. You can wait in the mess tent, Desi, or I can take you to my father.’

It was far too hot to sit in the car, though that was what she would have preferred. Desi squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, struggling to find focus in her shellshocked, blank state.

‘There will be people in the mess tent?’

Salah nodded.

‘Is there anywhere I can go and sit by myself?’

‘Not till I find out which trailer they have arranged for you.’

‘Your father, then.’

He led her to the long white caravan that served as the site office. Inside it was air-conditioned to a comparatively refreshing twenty-five degrees, nearly eighty Fahrenheit. Desi was desperately grateful to get out of the sun.

The archaeologist Dr. Khaled al Khouri was sitting at a desk inside. He was a solid, square-set man with grizzled grey hair, a face with deep lines furrowing his forehead and carved from his strongly cut nose to the corners of his mouth. When they entered he was engrossed in examining a dirt-impacted object with the sunburnt, intent young woman standing beside his chair.

Neither noticed them enter. They watched for a minute as the professor’s strong, competent fingers prised off the dirt of millennia to fall unheeded on his papers, and revealed a goblet.

With caressing strokes that reminded Desi of Salah’s hands on her body, he dusted down the little cup, turned it over, then held it still, gazing at the face of the bowl.

‘You’re right, Dina,’ he said at last. ‘Congratulations. Well done.’

‘Thank you, Dr. al Khouri.’

‘Leave it with me. I’ll take it to Hormuz later.’

As the young worker slipped through the door beside them, her eyes fell on Desi and she turned around to gasp in disbelief before continuing on her way. At the sound, the doctor lifted his head.

‘Yes?’ he said, and then, ‘Salah!’

‘Desi, meet my father,’ said Salah. ‘Father, this is Desirée Drummond—Desi.’

‘Desi! Hello!’ Dr. al Khouri exclaimed, getting to his feet. He put out his hand, giving her the same focussed attention he had bestowed on the found object. The clasp of his hand was firm, reminding her of Salah’s. The black eyes were friendly, but uncomfortably piercing.