She left the building and walked out into the fresh air, where a gust of wind seemed to blow right through her. She hugged her sheepskin coat closer and began to walk, thinking about the things Suleiman had said to her.
Thoughts she’d been trying to block out were now given free rein as she examined them. Had she run away from her old life and tried to deny it? Pretended that part of her didn’t exist?
Yes, she had.
Had she behaved thoughtlessly, neglecting the only family she had? Rushing away from the wedding celebrations and not even bothering to get on a plane to go and see her new niece?
She closed her eyes.
Yes, again.
She’d thought of herself as so independent and mature, and yet the first thing she had done was to lift up the phone to Suleiman. What had she been planning to say to him? Start whining that she missed him and wanted him to come back to make her feel better?
That wasn’t independence, was it? That was more like co-dependence. And you couldn’t rely on somebody else to make you feel better about yourself.
She needed to face up to the stuff she’d locked away for so long. She’d been so busy playing the part of Sara Williams who had integrated so well into English life and making sure she fitted in that she had forgotten the other Sara.
The desert princess. The sister. The auntie.
And that other Sara was just as important.
A lump came into her throat as she lifted her hand to hail a cab and during the drive to her apartment she started making plans to try to put it right.
She managed to get a flight out to Dhi’ban later that evening. It meant she would have a two-hour stopover in Qurhah, but she could cope with that. Oddly enough, she wasn’t tempted to ask her brother to send a plane to Qurhah to collect her—and she would sooner walk bare-footed across the desert than ask Suleiman to come to her aid.
She spent the intervening hours shopping and packing and then she dressed as conservatively and as unobtrusively as possible, because she didn’t want anyone getting wind of her spontaneous visit.
The journey was long and tiring and she blinked with surprise when eventually she arrived at Dhi’ban’s main airport, because she hardly recognised it. The terminal buildings had been extended and were now gleaming and modern. There were loads of shops selling cosmetics and beautiful Dhi’banese jewellery and clothes. And there...
She looked up to see a portrait of her brother, the King, and she thought how stern he looked. Sterner than she’d ever seen him, wearing the crown that her father had worn.
Inevitably, she was recognised as she went through Customs, but she waved aside the troubled protestations of the officials, telling them that she had no desire for a red carpet.
‘I didn’t want any kind of fuss or reception,’ she said, smiling as she held up the large pink parcel she had purchased at Qurhah’s airport. ‘I want this to be a surprise. For my niece, the princess Ayesha.’
The palm-fringed road was reassuringly familiar and when she saw her childhood home appear in the distance, with the morning light bouncing off the white marble, she felt her heart twist with a mixture of pleasure and pain.
She’d never seen the guards outside the main gates look more surprised than when she stepped from the airport cab into the bright sunshine. But today she wasn’t impatient when they bowed deeply. Today she recognised that they were just doing their job. They respected her position as Princess—and maybe it was about time that she started respecting it, too.
She walked through the grounds and into the palace. Her watch told her that it was almost two o’clock and she wondered if her brother was working. She realised that she didn’t know anything about his life and she barely knew Ella, his wife.
But before she could decide what to do next, there was Haroun walking towards her. His features—a stronger, more masculine version of her own—were initially perplexed and then he broke into a wide smile as he held out his arms.
‘Is it really you, Sara?’
‘It really is me,’ she whispered, glad that he chose that moment to gather her in his arms in a most un-Kingly bear-hug, which meant that she had time to blink away her tears and compose herself.
Within the hour she was sitting with Haroun and his wife Ella and begging their forgiveness. She told them she felt guilty about her absence, but if they were prepared to forgive her—she would like to be part of their lives. And could she please see her niece?
The royal couple looked at one another and smiled with deep satisfaction, before Ella hugged her tightly and said Ayesha was sleeping, and that Sara could see her once they had taken tea.
The three of them sat in the scented bower of the rose garden and drank mint tea. She started to tell them about the Sultan, but of course Haroun knew about the cancelled wedding, because the politicians and diplomats from the two countries were working on a new alliance.
‘So you’ve seen Murat?’ she asked cautiously.
‘I have.’
‘And did he...did he seem upset?’
‘Not unless your idea of upset is being photographed with a stunning woman,’ laughed Haroun.
It was only after gentle prompting that she was persuaded to tell them about Suleiman and how much she loved him. Her voice was shaky as she said it, because she’d realised that the truth was something she couldn’t keep running from either.
‘But it’s over,’ she said.
Ella looked at Haroun, and frowned. ‘You like Suleiman, don’t you, darling?’
‘I don’t like him when I’m playing backgammon,’ Haroun growled.
Sara was shown to her old room and there, set between the two gold-framed portraits of her late mother and father, was a book about horses, which Suleiman had bought for her twelfth birthday, just before she’d left for England.
For the brave and fearless Sara, he had written. Your friend, Suleiman. Always.
And that was when the sobs began to erupt from her throat, because she had been none of those things, had she? She had not been brave and fearless—she had been a coward who had run away and hidden and neglected her family. She hadn’t lived up to Suleiman’s expectations of her. She hadn’t been a real friend. She hadn’t fulfilled her potential in so many ways.
She bathed and changed and dried her eyes and Ella knocked on the door, to take her to the nursery. And that was poignant, too. Shielded from the light by swathed swags of softest tulle lay a sleeping baby in the large, rocking cot she had slept in herself. For a moment Sara touched the side and felt it sway, watching as Ella lifted out the sleepy infant.
Ayesha was soft and smiling, with a mop of silken curls and a pair of deep violet eyes. Sara felt her heart fill with love as she touched her fingertip to the baby’s plump and rosy cheek.
‘Oh, she’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘How old is she now?’
‘Nine months,’ said Ella. ‘I know. Time flies and all that. And by the way—they say she looks just like you.’
‘Do they?’
Ella smiled. ‘Check out your baby photos if you don’t believe me.’
Sara stared into the baby’s eyes and felt the sharp twist of pain. Was it normal to feel wistful for what might have been, but now never would? To imagine what kind of baby she and Suleiman might have produced?
‘I wonder if she’d come to me,’ she said, pulling a smiley face at the baby as she held out her arms.
But Ayesha wriggled and turned her face away and started to cry.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Ella. ‘She’ll get used to you.’
It took four days before Ayesha would consent to have her auntie hold her, but once she had—she seemed reluctant to ever let her go. Sara wondered if the baby instinctively guessed how badly she needed the cuddles. Or maybe there was some kind of inbuilt recognition—the primitive bond of
shared blood.
She fitted in with Haroun and Ella’s routine, and began to relax as she reacquainted herself with Dhi’ban and life at court. She went riding with her brother. She helped Ella with the baby and quickly grew to love her sister-in-law.
One afternoon the two women were wheeling the pram through the palace gardens, their heads covered with shady hats. The week off work which Gabe had given her was almost up and Sara knew that she needed to give some serious thought to her future.
She just hadn’t decided what she wanted that future to be.
‘Shall we go back now?’ questioned Ella, her soft voice breaking into Sara’s thoughts.
‘Yes, let’s.’
Along the scented paths they walked, back towards the palace, but as they grew closer Sara saw a dark figure silhouetted against the white marble building. For a moment her eyes widened, until she forced her troubled mind to listen to reason. Please stop this, she prayed silently. Stop conjuring up hallucinations which make me think I can actually see him.
She ran her hand across her eyelids, but when she opened them again he was still there and her steps faltered.
‘Is something wrong?’
Did Ella’s voice contain suppressed laughter—or was she imagining that, too?
‘For a minute then, I thought I saw Suleiman.’
‘Well, that’s because you did,’ said Ella gently. ‘He’s here. Suleiman’s here.’
The ground seemed suddenly to shift beneath Sara’s feet—the way it did when you stepped onto a large ship which looked motionless. She was aware of the rush of blood to her ears and the pounding of her heart in her chest. Questions streamed into her mind but her lips seemed too dry to do anything other than stumble out one bewildered word. ‘How?’
But Ella was walking away, wheeling the pram towards one of the side entrances, and Sara was left standing there, feeling exposed and scared and impossibly vulnerable. Now her legs felt heavy. As if her feet had suddenly turned to stone and it was going to be impossible for her to walk. But she had to walk. Independent women walked. They didn’t stumble—weak-kneed and hopeless—because the man they dreamed of had just appeared, like a blazing dark comet which had fallen to earth.
He didn’t move as she went towards him and it was impossible to read the expression on his dark face. Even as she grew closer she still couldn’t tell what he was thinking. But hadn’t he told her himself that he was famous at the card table for being able to keep a poker-straight face?
She was trying to quell the hope which had risen up inside her—because dashed hopes were surely worse than no hope at all. But she couldn’t keep her voice steady as she stood before him, and the pain of wanting to hold him again was almost physical.
‘Suleiman,’ she said and her voice sounded croaky and unsure. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come to speak to your brother about the possibility of drilling for oil in Dhi’ban.’
Her heart plummeted. ‘Are you being serious?’
He looked at her, an expression of exasperation on his face. ‘Of course I’m not being serious. Why do you think I might be here, Sara?’
‘I don’t know!’
She was shaking her head and, for the first time, Suleiman saw that she had changed—even if for a moment he couldn’t quite work out what that change was. Her skin was a little paler than usual and her lips looked as if they had been bitten into—but beneath all that he could see something else. Something which had been missing for a long time. He swallowed down the sudden lump in his throat as he realised that something was peace. That there was a new strength and resolution which shone out from her shadowed eyes as she looked at him.
And now he began to have doubts of his own. Had Sara found true contentment—without him? For a moment he acknowledged that his motives for being here today were entirely selfish. What if she would be better off without him? Had he stopped to consider that? Was her need for independence such that she considered a man like him to be an impediment?
His heart turning over with love and pain, he looked into her beautiful face and suddenly he didn’t care. He knew there were no guarantees in this life, but that didn’t mean you shouldn’t strike out for the things which really mattered. Let Sara tell him that she didn’t want him if that was what she truly believed—but let her be in no doubt about his feelings for her.
‘I think you do know,’ he said softly. ‘I’m here because I love you and I can’t seem to stop loving you.’
‘Did you try?’ she questioned, her voice full of pain. ‘Is that why you walked away? Why you left my life so utterly when you walked out of my apartment?’
There was a silence for a moment, broken only by the sound of a bird calling from high up in one of the trees. ‘I couldn’t stay when you were like that,’ he told her truthfully. ‘When you were too scared to let go and be the woman you really wanted to be. You were pushing me away, Sara—and I couldn’t stand that. I knew you needed to come home before you could think about making any kind of home of your own.’ He smiled. ‘Then I heard on the desert grapevine that you’d come back to Dhi’ban. And I thought that was probably the best thing I’d heard in a long time.’
She turned big violet eyes up at him. ‘Did you?’
‘Mmm.’ He wanted to go to her. To cup her chin in the palm of his hand and hold it safe. To run the edge of his thumb over the tremble of her lips. But he needed her to hear these words before he could touch her again. He owed her his honesty.
‘As for the answer to your question. I’m here because you make me feel stuff—stuff I’ve spent a lifetime trying not to feel.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘Love.’
‘Oh. You think you love me?’ she questioned, echoing the words he had used in Paris.
‘No.’ His voice was quiet. ‘I love you—without qualification. I love you fully, completely, utterly and for ever. I’m here because although I’m perfectly capable of living without you, I don’t want to. No. That’s not entirely true. If you want the truth, I can’t bear the thought of living without you, Sara. Because without you I am only half the man I’m capable of being and I want to be whole.’
There was silence for a moment. She lowered her gaze, as if she had found something of immense interest on the gravelled palace forecourt. For a moment he wondered if she was plucking up the courage to tell him that his journey here had been wasted, but when she lifted her face again, Suleiman could see the shimmer of tears in her violet eyes.
‘And without you I’m only half the woman I’m capable of being,’ she said shakily. ‘You’ve made me whole again, too. You’ve made me realise that only by facing our biggest fears can we overcome them. You’ve made me realise that independence is a good thing—but it can never be at the expense of love. Nothing can. Because love is the most important thing of all. And you are the most important thing of all, Suleiman—someone so precious who I thought I’d lost through my own stupidity.’
‘Sara,’ he said and the word was distorted by the shudder of his breath. ‘Sweet Sara. My only love.’
And that was all it took. A declaration torn from somewhere deep inside him. A declaration she returned over and over again in between their frantic kisses, although Suleiman first took the precaution of walking her further into the gardens, away from the natural interest of the servants’ eyes.
By the time they returned to the palace—where Ella and Haroun had perceptively put a bottle of champagne on ice—Sara was wearing an enormous emerald engagement ring.
And she couldn’t seem to stop smiling.
EPILOGUE
‘YOU DO REALISE,’ said Sara as she removed her filmy tulle veil and placed it next to the emerald and diamond tiara, which her sister-in-law had lent her, ‘that I’m not going to be a traditional desert wife.’
; ‘Shouldn’t you have mentioned this before we got married?’ murmured Suleiman. He was lying naked waiting for his bride to join him on her old childhood bed, and had decided that there was something gloriously decadent about that.
‘I did.’ She stepped out of her ivory lace gown and hung it over the back of the chair, revelling in the look in his eyes as he ran his gaze over her bridal lingerie. ‘Just as long as you know that I meant it.’
‘And I meant it when I said that I didn’t expect you to be. Just as I did when I said that I will not be a traditional desert husband. I will not try to possess you, Sara—not ever again. I will give you all the freedom you need.’
She gave a happy sigh as she smiled at him. Wasn’t it a strange thing that when somebody gave you freedom, it meant you no longer wanted it quite so much?
Suleiman had told her that of course she could carry on working for Gabe—just as long as they came to some compromise over her long hours. The crazy thing was that she no longer wanted to work there—or, at least, not as she’d done before. She had loved her job, but it was part of her past and part of her life as a single woman. She had a different life now and different opportunities. Which was why she had agreed to carry on working for the Steel organisation on a freelance basis. That way, she could travel with her husband and everyone was happy.
She gave a contented sigh. Their wedding had been the best wedding she’d ever been to—although Suleiman told her she was biased. Alice from the office had been invited—and her expression as she’d been shown around the Dhi’ban palace had been priceless. Gabe had been there too—and Sara thought that even her cynical boss had enjoyed all the ancient ritual and ceremony which accompanied the joining of her hand to Suleiman’s.
The best bit had been the Sultan’s surprise appearance, because it signified that he had forgiven Suleiman—and her—for so radically changing the course of desert history.
‘Murat seemed to get on well with Gabe, don’t you think?’ she questioned as she slid her diamond bracelet onto the dressing table, where it lay coiled like a glittery snake. ‘What do you suppose they were talking about?’
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