by Lynne Graham
‘You’re not wearing traditional dress…’ She stared at him, her heartbeat quickening and her mouth running dry. Sheathed in a dark formal business suit of superb fit, Tariq looked sensational.
‘Robes were only worn for ceremonial occasions and often in the desert, for in truth they are more practical than Western clothing. Yesterday at the Haja, I was in Majilis, holding open court for my people to approach me as I do every week. They bring their disputes for me to settle, they come to seek redress for injustice. I stand in the place of a judge.’
Resting one lean hand on the canopy of the bed, he gazed down at her with smouldering eyes that skimmed over her hot face, glided across the smooth fair skin of slim shoulders crossed only by the straps of her nightdress, and then extended with flashing mockery to the sheet she still hugged beneath her arms. The atmosphere throbbed with the undertones of sensual threat he emanated.
‘You said you couldn’t find me but this is a tent…’ Faye mumbled, desperate to break the build of that pulsing silence.
‘A tent that covers several acres.’ Thrusting a wayward curtain out of his path, Tariq came down with lithe elegance on the side of the bed in a movement that stopped her breathing altogether. ‘A tent palace no less and often in use. We are a desert people and the need to escape the confinement of stone walls still burns in us. My father would often live out here with considerably less comfort for months at a time. He would send for a woman whenever he felt like one…’
‘Send for a woman…?’ Faye parroted shakily.
Tariq had curved long brown fingers into the folds of the sheet she was clutching and he was almost casually tugging it back towards him inch by inch. From below the black inky luxuriance of his lashes, he glanced at her with burning amusement. ‘You look so shocked. Before he married my mother, my father had at least a hundred concubines. Sex was remarkably non-pc in those days, a fact of life to my people, unworthy of any comment or indeed particular interest…’
‘But not now?’ Horrendously conscious that the sheet was now under slight stress as he eased it back from her, Faye splayed a hand across her ribcage to hold it in place.
‘I don’t have to send for you. You are here waiting for me.’ A wolfish smile played about the corners of his lips as he abandoned that idle play to loosen the sheet, the masculine gleam in his clear gaze telling her that he knew he would win any such bout with ease should he so desire. ‘Some things do not change. But on this occasion, your presence here is as public as a press announcement.’
‘And why is that?’ At that statement, her embarrassment rose to an all-time high.
‘Look to your own adventures yesterday. You can’t walk the walls of the Muraaba like a trapeze artiste, borrow Omeir and force me to follow you into the teeth of a storm without rousing considerable public comment,’ Tariq advised with taunting cool, watching her eyes drop and her mouth tighten and her colour rise as he spoke. ‘I was angry but I am now calm. Tonight you will come to me as you should have come to me a year ago and I need practise no discretion.’
‘Come…to you?’
‘As a woman comes to a man. And not in a bath towel in a bedroom full of girlish fluffy toys…and not with a stepfather poised to interrupt with a vulgar pretence of shock and anger. Believe me, tonight there will be no interruptions from any source,’ Tariq swore with silken satisfaction.
‘But I—’
‘What can you possibly find to argue about?’ His golden eyes roamed over her with provocative satisfaction. ‘Once you were far from shy in demonstrating your desire for me. What has changed?’
‘I got older and wiser fast. I thought I loved you…you soon cured me of that—’
‘And I thought I loved you too.’ Releasing a derisive laugh to punctuate that startling declaration, Tariq skimmed her with a sardonic appraisal, his stubborn, passionate mouth compressed, his jawline at an aggressive slant. ‘I too was cured when you lured me into your trap.’
Faye tried and failed to swallow, studying him in disbelief. And I thought I loved you too. No, no, a little voice screamed inside her head, no, she did not want to credit that admission for it had been so much more bearable to believe that he had never really cared about her and that she could hardly lose what, essentially, she had never had. ‘You didn’t love me—’
In a flurry of sudden movement, Tariq sprang upright, disconcerting her even more. He swung back to her and rested splintering dark eyes of condemnation on her disbelieving face. ‘Do you know the moment you killed anything I still felt for you? It was when I proposed marriage the next day and you said yes without hesitation. That was what damned you…that was what convinced me that you had conspired with your stepfather to rip me off for whatever you could get!’
Beneath the onslaught of that blunt speech, every scrap of colour had drained from Faye’s complexion. Had she been a target with a tender heart in the centre, Tariq would have hit a killing bullseye with his first dart. Furthermore he had not yet finished.
‘When I asked you to marry me, you knew it was not right, you knew I was not myself, but you said nothing. By not acknowledging the true state of affairs, you let the whole sordid sham continue beneath a pretty pretence of normality…with your wedding gown and your wearing of something blue for luck. Oh, yes, I satisfied my curiosity as to the significance of the something blue in your culture. But what possible luck could you have hoped to attract when practising such blatant dishonesty?’ Tariq’s low-pitched drawl vibrated with his contemptuous distaste in the spreading silence.
‘Tariq, please…’ Faye muttered painfully, sick to the heart to have the one sin she could not lay at the door of naivete or stupidity exposed and known by him and thrown back in her face.
‘No, you will hear me out. You were only nineteen but you knew enough to know that it was not normal for a man to come to you as grave as a judge to ask you for your hand in marriage without ever having spoken of love or commitment!’ Tariq did not conceal his scorn. ‘Yet only yesterday you dared to accuse me of destroying your wedding day. As I said that day and I say now…a marriage into which a man feels forced is a charade and no true bond to be respected.’
Faye’s hands trembled and she laced them tightly together, tears closing up her throat in a convulsive surge.
‘I looked at my beautiful bride…and you did look very, very lovely, but your calculated campaign to catch me made you as soiled in my eyes as any whore is by her trade! So do not talk to me of spoiling the happiest day of your life. I at least was honest in what I was feeling that day. Angry, bitter, disappointed in you. You were not worthy of loving…I was ashamed that I had been blinded by your beauty into imagining you as perfect on the inside as you were on the outside.’
Faye was frantically fighting back the sobs welling up in her throat. She was devastated by what her own bitter recriminations the day before had unleashed on her. Not once had she allowed herself to believe that Tariq might have guessed what was in her own heart and mind that day, what she had hidden even from herself in her shameless, selfish longing to be his wife.
‘And that is what I said in Arabic when I was ranting and roaring. Forgive me for feeling so much more than you were capable of feeling that I forgot to speak in English,’ Tariq completed grittily.
He strode out through the curtained exit like the proud desert warrior Percy had once labelled him. A great sob escaped Faye as she stumbled out of bed.
Shiran came running. ‘My lady?’
‘Is there a bathroom in this place?’ Faye covered her eyes with one hand and turned away.
Mercifully there was and, in the mood that Faye was in, it was pure relief rather than a source of surprise to discover that the canopied passageway led to sanitary facilities sited behind a solid wooden door and enclosed within sturdy stone walls. Ushered into a giant marble bathroom, Faye took care of her most imminent needs and freshened up as best she could while she was still sobbing her heart out. At a sink anchored on the spread wings of a grandios
e swan, she studied herself with swollen swimming eyes.
A ‘calculated campaign to catch me…’ She honestly thought her heart was either going to break right through or she was going to die of shame and humiliation right there and then. She did not think she would ever, ever look Tariq in the face again for there had been a dreadful mortifying truth in his every harsh word. Had she not slavishly followed her sister-in-law’s every word of advice on how to keep Tariq interested? Lizzie had been so helpful on how she should behave, when to be available, when not to be, how to be a good listener, how to flatter with silence.
And although her entire relationship with Tariq had not been conducted on such superficial terms, it was horribly ironic that the one time she had strayed from Lizzie’s rigid rules of dating she had wrecked everything. Lizzie had certainly not suggested that she invite Tariq to spend the night with her.
A frantic series of knocks was being rapped out on the door. But Faye was too distraught to open it. Sitting on the hard, cold floor, she wrapped her arms round herself and struggled to calm down. Tariq was clever and very quick off the mark. In the end, all illusions about her supposed perfection for ever buried, he had looked back and seen and recognised every single calculating move engaged to attract him. She was humiliated beyond belief and there was no hiding place.
Unlocking the door, Faye padded back to her tent room, uncaring of the massed rank of anxious female servants twittering in her wake. Slipping out of her nightdress, Faye made no demur when she was presented with a cool kaftan to don. Breakfast was brought to her in another airy section furnished with silk-upholstered low divans. Shiran watched with troubled eyes as Faye hiccuped through a piece of toast and sipped at a cup of tea both looking and feeling like tragedy personified.
‘May we bring the children to see you?’ the maid then enquired.
What children? Was Rafi one of them? Was she now a sight to be seen for entertainment purposes? But, not wishing to cause offence and scolding herself for doubting the courteous goodwill shown to her by everyone, Faye nodded assent. Indeed, she was surprised that there was not a distinct coolness in the air around her, for her escape attempt the day before had put Tariq in considerable danger.
Prince Rafi arrived first. Like a small adult he approached her with a stiff little face and for the first time she noted his resemblance to Tariq. ‘I am sorry for upsetting you yesterday.’
‘That’s all right…as long as you don’t do anything like that again.’
His brown eyes flooded with unexpected tears. ‘I can’t…they’re all gone. Prince Tariq took them away.’
‘They’ being his retinue of slavish servants, Faye gathered, for Tariq had told her that that was what he would do. Prince Tariq? Was that how he had to refer to a brother old enough to be his father? Did such stifling formality in the ibn Zachir royal family exercise its rule even over little children? And, she thought sadly, yes, yes, it did for Tariq’s hard self-discipline was the proof of it. Without even thinking about it, Faye scooped Rafi up and set him on her knee.
‘I’m a big boy. Big boys don’t get cuddled,’ Rafi told her chokily.
‘Shall I put you down again?’ She wasn’t teasing. She was afraid of embarrassing herself or him by doing something unacceptable.
Suddenly the little boy just pushed his head into her shoulder and sobbed out loud, clinging to her in considerable distress. She nursed him until the storm of tears was over, compassion stirred by the depth of the unhappiness he revealed. Even Tariq had called his little brother ‘obnoxious’, not an encouraging sign. So who did the poor child have to turn to? It was not his fault that he had been taught to behave like a little monster, but how hard it must be for Tariq, who had been raised far more strictly, to appreciate that fact.
‘You like children.’ Shiran wore a huge and relieved smile and she turned to address the servants waiting in the passageway.
Faye blinked in surprise as two middle-aged nursemaids hurried in with a pair of identically clad baby girls in their arms.
‘Basma and Hayat,’ Shiran announced.
‘Twins? My goodness, what age are they?’ Faye was enchanted.
‘Nine months. You would like to see them closer?’
‘They’re only girls!’ Rafi exclaimed fiercely.
Settling the little boy down on the seat beside her, Faye smiled at the twins. The little girls wore elaborate long pink satin frilly dresses with full net underskirts: so impractical and uncomfortable for babies she reflected with rueful sympathy. ‘Basma and Hayat…those are pretty names—’
‘I don’t like them!’ Rafi howled at the top of his voice.
‘I don’t like shouting, so please behave yourself—’
‘I don’t like you either!’ Rafi threw himself off the divan and stormed away.
Ignoring him, Faye went on getting to know the little girls, who were easily told apart for they were not identical twins. Basma was full of confident mischief, her sister Hayat more anxious and shy.
Eventually, Rafi slunk back. ‘You like them better than me.’
‘Of course not,’ Faye said gently. ‘I like all of you.’
‘Nobody likes me,’ Rafi muttered fiercely and kicked at the divan base.
Faye looked down into his miserable little face and curved a wry arm round his rigid little body. ‘I do…’
Toys were brought in then. Rafi was a pain, wanting all her attention, sulking when he couldn’t have it but, between sulking and clinging, a kind of peace emerged. The morning hours passed and Faye was surprised when lunch was announced. The children were removed again to their own quarters. At the last minute, Rafi darted back. ‘I see you soon…?’
‘If you want.’
Some time after she had eaten, Shiran approached her to tell her that it was time for her bath. Faye frowned. ‘Isn’t it a little early?’
‘It will take many hours to dress you for the ladies’ reception tonight, my lady.’
‘Oh…’ Faye wasn’t sure how she felt about making any form of public appearance. She still could not face the prospect of seeing Tariq again. The night he had promised her stretched before her like the worst of threats and the sweetest of dreams for the conflicting emotions dragging her first one way and then another would give her no peace.
She had only slipped into the water already drawn for her use when her maids hurried in loaded with baskets of lotions and she realised that privacy was not on offer. Rose petals were hastily scattered on the surface of the scented water and Shiran insisted on washing her hair. Such a production was made of the varying rinses that Faye sighed at the longevity of the experience.
There was washing and there was washing, but Faye felt as if she were being scrubbed within an inch of her life. Wrapped in a towel, she was urged into another room in the same block, a steam room full of billowing clouds which almost sent her to sleep, so lethargic did it leave her. Next she was persuaded to lie down on a special couch to be massaged. The rich perfume of the oil rubbed into her skin made her eyes even heavier but she enjoyed the stiffness being eased out of her muscles, the smooth feel of her own pampered skin. Tea was served in the aftermath, all the maids giggling and chattering with an informality that charmed her.
Her hair was dried and polished with a silk scarf. A manicure and a pedicure followed and a great debate opened over the shades of nail polish available. While that was going on and Faye lay back on her sofa feeling like a beauty queen, a slim leather box arrived and her companion became very excitable. With great ceremony the box was brought to Faye and opened. Within lay a note.
‘Wear the anklet for me,’ ran the note and it was signed by Tariq.
Anklet? Faye hooked a finger into an anklet studded with large dark blue sapphires.
‘How His Royal Highness honours you!’ Shiran proclaimed. ‘This belonged to Prince Tariq’s late mother.’
Faye wondered if a chain went with it. Since she rarely wore jewellery, it struck her as a very exotic item but she kn
ew she was sentenced to wear it for, if she said no, she might then seem rude. A bouquet of white roses arrived an hour later. Again her companions were ravished by their admiration but Faye’s heart turned as cold as the Ice Queen’s. Too many memories that hurt were stirred by those pale perfect blooms.
When it was time to get dressed, she was taken aback by the fabulous outfit laid out for her perusal on the bed. But then she had nothing worthy in her case of any social occasion at which a sapphire anklet might be worn. Indifferent to her own appearance, she donned the gold silk strappy sheath which was worn as an underdress. Then with reverence she was inserted into an extraordinary violet-blue chiffon gown, every inch of which caught the light with exquisite gold embroidery overlaid with precious stones, and which dragged a fan-shaped train in its wake. The dress weighed a ton. Gold shoes with incredibly high heels were slipped onto her feet and she wondered how on earth she would move in so much heavy finery.
Another leather box was delivered. This time the maids whooped with unconcealed delight. Excitement was at a high. Faye undid the clasp to reveal a breathtaking diamond tiara, a pair of drop earrings and a bracelet. Why the heck was Tariq sending her such items? But the answer was writ large in the appreciative faces surrounding her. He was good as his own PR firm, she decided. His generosity in loaning her such hugely valuable articles to wear impressed everyone to death.
The tiara was slid into place, the earrings inserted, the bracelet attached to her wrist. A mirror was then carted over to her.
‘You are so beautiful, my lady.’ Shiran sighed happily.
In heels which elevated her a good few inches, Faye hardly recognised herself. Her hair had been transformed into a shining silken mane to support the tiara and fell smooth as a sheet of pale gold far below her shoulders. She glittered from head to toe like a fantastic jewellery display. In strong light, she would blind the unwary.
Led from the room, she had to walk with small shuffling steps. It was a long walk to the vast reception area thronged with women in outfits that soon gave her a different view of her own theatrical glamour. She still had the edge, but only just. Guided to a seat of honour and the cynosure of all eyes, she was introduced to one woman after another. Arabic phrases were murmured, no English was spoken. The amount of bowing and scraping she received increased her tension to the extent that she could almost have believed that she were dreaming the whole strange event.