Kitabı oku: «Summer Sheikhs: Sheikh's Betrayal / Breaking the Sheikh's Rules / Innocent in the Sheikh's Harem», sayfa 2

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.