by Lynne Graham
And then the last woman approached, a flamboyant raven-haired beauty in her twenties. She was sheathed in an emerald-green gown, and her full pink mouth had a hard, sullen curve. The tension in the room was electric.
‘I am Prince Tariq’s first cousin, Majida. I offer you no compliments.’ Her sultry eyes flared over Faye with derision. ‘I say you are no virgin!’
The silence was ruptured by stricken gasps. Shocked faces were cast down, covered. An older woman rose heavily to her feet and wailed like a soul in torment. Faye’s cheeks glowed red. How on earth was she supposed to meet such a very personal accusation flung at her in public? And why should that nasty brunette question whether she was or was not a virgin? How could such a thing be of interest to anyone?
At her feet, Shiran buried her face and moaned. ‘This is a grievous insult, my lady. The woman crying is the lady Majida’s mother. It is her way of expressing her shame at her daughter’s behaviour.’
The wailing woman sank back down as if she had been disgraced. The food arriving was a very welcome diversion. Every dish was presented to Faye first but her appetite had died. As the lengthy meal ended, Majida approached her again and proffered a smooth apology. Feeling that the apology was as calculated as the insult, Faye responded with a tight smile of strain.
In that all female gathering, she was disconcerted when Tariq made an entrance to be greeted by a series of equally surprised but uniformly delighted cries of welcome. Looking at him, Faye drew in a sharp breath. Magnificent in silks as rich with gold decoration as her own, Tariq had never looked more exotic or more stunningly attractive. But, unable to forget the bitter anger he had shown her earlier, she stiffened and averted her attention from him to the other men filtering in behind him, some smiling, some looking a little awkward. Latif entered last, his wide smile suggesting that he was in the very best of good humour.
No fan of being ignored, Tariq took the seat beside Faye and leant towards her to murmur with the pronounced air of a male priding himself on his generosity, ‘Let there be peace between us now.’
Faye compressed her generous mouth. ‘I shouldn’t think there’s much chance of that breaking out tonight. According to you I’m so wicked, it’s amazing a heavenly bolt of lightning hasn’t struck me down—’
‘In the name of Allah do not say such a thing even in amusement.’
‘Not much amusement where I’m sitting,’ Faye said stonily.
‘We will exchange no more recriminations.’
‘Well, you would be repeating yourself if you said anything more.’
‘I am trying to mend bridges.’
‘It’s fences actually and you blew the bridges to kingdom come.’ Having paraded into the centre of the room, musicians were beginning to play but it was very discordant stuff.
‘It is not like western music but it is a traditional melody always played at such occasions,’ Tariq volunteered, sounding just a little defensive.
A singer came on. She had a gorgeous husky voice but Faye took extreme exception to the suggestive way in which her lithe bodily undulations seemed to take place exclusively in front of Tariq. ‘You’re in with a good chance there,’ she whispered, a poisonous, exhilarating edge to her tongue such as she had never before experienced and could not resist. ‘There’s a woman just gasping to get into your harem.’
‘I do not have a harem,’ Tariq gritted close to her ear.
‘Too many women breaking out of it? Bad for the macho image?’
‘One more word from you—’
‘And you’ll what? Have me delivered back to the airport? Well, I’ll need to be carried because I’m literally weighed down by my fancy trappings. Tell me, do you only sleep with virgins?’
‘What has got into you?’ Tariq demanded in a shaken undertone.
‘I’m coming to terms with being a concubine. Tell me, do I get sown into a sack and dropped into the Gulf when you get bored with me?’
‘A sack would be very useful right now. You want me to apologise, don’t you?’
‘Oh, no, even you couldn’t apologise for the embarrassment of a complete stranger stating that I’m not a virgin in front of so many people. Allow me to tell you that I found that weird and kinky and medieval—’
Both lean hands suddenly clenching on the arms of his chair, Tariq rounded on her like an erupting volcano. ‘Who said that to you? Who dared?’
For the first time since his entrance, Faye focused on him in shock for he had not troubled to lower his voice. Outrage glittered in his flaring golden gaze, dark colour scoring his superb cheekbones. ‘For goodness’ sake, calm down—’
‘After such offence is offered to you?’ Tariq growled like a lion ready to spring. ‘What man would be calm in the face of so great an affront?’
‘You’re making me nervous.’
‘You will tell me the name of the offender.’
‘Not the way you’re carrying on, I won’t. There’s been enough drama for one evening.’
‘This hurts my honour,’ Tariq informed her doggedly.
Faye closed her eyes. It had been a day in which culture shock had made itself felt on several occasions. In fact she had been in almost continual shock from the day of her arrival in Jumar for absolutely nothing seemed comprehensible to her. Not the way she was treated, not the way Tariq behaved. He reached for her hand and gripped it in emphasis. ‘My honour is your honour.’
‘But I have no honour…you’ve said as much.’
At that far from generous reminder, Tariq sprang upright. He lifted an imperious hand. The music stopped with a mid-chord crash. He spoke a few words in Arabic. Then he swung round and swept Faye up out of her chair and into his arms to an astonished chorus of more gasps and strode from the reception area, leaving a screaming silence in their wake.
CHAPTER SIX
‘WARS have broken out over lesser insults,’ Tariq breathed with brooding darkness as he strode down canopied passageways. ‘You do not appear to understand how high is the regard for a woman’s virtue in my culture.’
Now, had Faye been his new bride, she would have understood his fury, but she was totally bewildered by his smouldering rage on such a score when she was not his wife. She was to be his mistress and there was nothing respectable about that, was there? Indeed, in her humble opinion, it was entirely his fault that she had been insulted in the first place! It was madness for her to have been treated as a guest of honour in the presence of women who had to believe she was a totally wanton hussy. True, with the exception of his cousin, Majida, she had received nothing but smiling courtesy, but no doubt that was the effect of Tariq’s feudal power as a ruler. What else could it be? In fact, if his late father had once had a hundred concubines, it was quite possible his people thought having just one was the ultimate in self-denial and restraint on his part.
Regardless, here she was right now, being carted off very publicly to his bed, past innumerable guards saluting and standing to attention, past servants flattening themselves back out of his path. Faye was aghast. How could Tariq do this to her? Speeding up as he thrust his aggressive passage through a number of interconnecting tent rooms that convinced her that she would never in a million years find her way back to where she had slept the night before, Tariq finally came to a halt. He settled her down with immense and unexpected care. He smoothed down her dress where it was rumpled and stepped back from her.
‘That you are not a virgin is my business alone,’ Tariq announced, hard, stubborn jawline set like rock.
Faye reddened and attempted to walk away. It involved taking tiny, tiny steps and she wobbled on the unfamiliar heels. She was in a huge tent room, even more opulently furnished than her own and distinguished by a beautiful carved wooden bed large enough to sleep six. She studied it, butterflies suddenly flying loose in her tummy.
She flinched as about ten feet from her something metallic flew across the room and buried itself with a thud in the carved headboard of the bed. Her lips parting company, she
gaped at the ornate dagger she had last noted attached to Tariq’s sword belt. Now drawn from its jewel-studded sheath, the dagger was lodged halfway up to its hilt in solid wood.
‘I will cut myself and smear blood on the sheet,’ Tariq murmured in the most unnaturally calm tone she had ever heard. ‘No more needs to be said.’
With difficulty, Faye dragged her attention from the dagger still twanging in the wood. She opened her mouth but no sound would emerge from her throat. It was finally dawning on her that virginity appeared to be a major issue on all fronts as far as he was concerned. It was medieval but there was something terribly, strangely, crazily sweet about his equally barbaric solution to this lack he believed she had. Her desert warrior was prepared to shed his own blood and mount a cover-up on her behalf.
His tawny eyes rested on her with raw intensity as if he believed she must have been distressed by the same insult which had sent him up in volatile fireworks. Finally, Faye was recognising the pronounced change in him. The angry bitterness he had revealed at the outset of the day had vanished along with the icy forbidding distance he could assume at will.
‘Tariq…’ she said a little shakily because, although she was embarrassed, a hysterical giggle brought on by nerves was tugging at her throat and she was terrified it would escape and cause huge offence for she could see he was trying to be diplomatic and reassuring. ‘I really can’t believe we’re having this crazy conversation.’
‘When we first met, I made the mistake of assuming that you were as innocent as you appeared.’ Tariq lifted a broad shoulder in a fluid dismissive shrug. ‘But that was a boy’s fantasy. Many Arab men cherish similar fantasies but I am now more contemporary in my outlook.’
Contemporary? His use of that particular word absorbed Faye the most. She focused on the dagger in the headboard and skimmed her gaze away again, suddenly extraordinarily reluctant to state an opinion on that score.
Powerful emotion was welling up inside her but she could not have put a name to what she was feeling. Tariq ibn Zachir was what he was, a feudal prince. His patina of cool sophistication had once grossly misled her. Not too far below that surface was the infinitely more conservative male whose existence she had not recognised until too late. The male with the reputation of a womaniser who had, nonetheless, been shattered when she’d asked him to stay overnight.
Why? Only now could she understand why. Prior to that fatal invite, Tariq had placed her on a lofty pedestal labelled ‘pure as driven snow’. And then she had so shaken his faith in his image of her that he had decided he had never known her at all. She had made it that much easier for him to credit that she had been involved in her stepfather’s strenuous efforts to make money out of their relationship.
Cheeks warm, Faye plucked an imaginary piece of lint from her sleeve. ‘You seem very sure that I’ve had other lovers…’
‘What else am I to believe after that invitation you gave me last year?’
So they were back to the catastrophic phone call during which she had virtually asked him to sleep with her and she could still only cringe at the mention of it. Barely twelve months had passed but the resulting fallout had ensured that she had since grown up a lot for, while she had believed she was being daring and romantic, he had believed she was being crude and cheap. While she was willing to admit to herself that she had misjudged her man and made a mistake, she was not prepared to admit that to him.
Ignoring what she saw as a most ungallant reminder of her most humiliating moment, Faye said tightly, ‘What if I told you…well…er…that there hadn’t been other men?’
Tariq screened his stunning golden eyes. ‘I would tell you that you don’t need to lie on that score.’
‘But I wouldn’t be lying if I told you that…and if you have so much respect for a woman’s virtue, you should be keeping your hands off me, shouldn’t you be?’
His amusement broke through to the surface in a flashing smile that disconcerted her a great deal. ‘No…’
‘Why not?’
‘Take it from me, you are a special case…so last-ditch efforts to change my mind are destined to fail. I cannot understand why you should even attempt to change my mind. With every look you give me you let me know how much you want to feel my hands on you. I saw that at our first meeting in the Haja.’
‘Really?’ Her face was hotter than hell-fire. She met molten golden eyes set between lush ebony lashes. She saw the kind of absolute confidence that shook her.
‘Seeing that longing in you filled me with an unholy rush of triumph…I freely admit that as a fault.’ With that frank admission, Tariq strolled up to her and lifted her back into his arms with complete cool. He settled her down on the edge of the bed and removed the tiara from her hair. Long, sure fingers detached the earrings, first one, then the other before dropping to her wrist to unclasp the bracelet. It was all achieved at a leisurely pace. ‘But then I was not brought up to be a good loser. I was taught to be ruthless and competitive. I was made to be strong.’
Dumbfounded by his dexterity with jewellery and that sense of being in the power of an overwhelming force, Faye watched him set the exquisite diamond set down on a silver tray on a dresser and mumbled in dazed and belated repetition. ‘A fault?’
‘You have already noticed the temper—’
‘Rafi has it too—’
Dispensing with his sword belt and kaffiyeh, Tariq sent her a dark look of reproof which let her know just how much he still felt the shame of his little brother’s behaviour. ‘Never have I raised my hand to anyone in anger!’
‘He’s four and all mixed-up…you’re twenty-eight and…’ A slight gasp escaped her parted lips as he bent down to tug off her shoes. His proud, dark head was within reach. She curled her fingers to stop herself from stretching out a hand to touch the enticing luxuriance of his black hair.
It was really going to happen, Faye thought, swallowing hard; they were definitely about to share the bed. No sandstorm, no Percy to keep them apart. But now that they were finally at the brink, Faye just could not imagine being in bed with Tariq, when to date she had never so much as seen him with his shirt off…
‘I’m twenty-eight and?’ Tariq prompted.
‘I’ve forgotten what I was about to say. You’re really planning on going through with this, aren’t you?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I just…I just can’t imagine it—’
‘I have more than sufficient imagination for both of us.’
‘Well, I’ve had enough of this!’ Faye threw herself off the bed with the intention of stalking away. But she had forgotten the length of the gown she wore and the train wrapped round her ankles, tripping her up. As she teetered dangerously, Tariq caught her back into his arms to steady her.
‘I think I have only had enough of you talking.’ Running down the zip on the gown, he eased it off her taut shoulders. The sheer weight of the embroidered fabric sent the garment sliding straight down her arms and into a heap at her feet. In speedy succession, the underdress travelled the same way.
‘Tariq!’ Faye, left standing in her lacy bra and panties with little warning, was paralysed by dismay and mortification.
Scanning her hot face and the self-conscious arms she folded in front of her, his gaze narrowed. ‘Ignore my last comment,’ he advised softly. ‘I do believe you should talk some more.’
‘What about?’
A sudden smile curved his wide, passionate mouth. She saw the charm, the rueful amusement which had once reduced her to a mindless level of tongue-tied longing. It did so again. As he lifted her up and settled her on the bed again, she coiled back against the crisp white pillows, conscious only of a heartbeat that seemed to be thumping madly in her eardrums rather than where it ought to have been.
In the thrumming silence, Tariq reached up and plucked the dagger from the headboard. Sheathing the blade, he tossed it aside again. Smouldering golden eyes roamed over the full swell of her breasts, the feminine curve of her hi
p and the slim, shapely length of her legs and then whipped back to her strongly disconcerted face.
‘So…’ he murmured lazily ‘…perhaps you would care to explain why a virgin would make the kind of bold invitation you made to me last year?’
Her soft mouth compressed and she jerked a shoulder, eyes veiled, chin at a mutinous angle. ‘Since you didn’t take me up on it, I don’t think you have the right to ask that—’
‘When I saw you in that towel in your bedroom, I had every intention of taking advantage of the offer,’ Tariq countered in level disagreement. ‘However, it seems obvious to me now that your stepfather must’ve forced you into making that distasteful phone call…’
Her lovely face taut with flushed discomfiture, Faye muttered, ‘No. I can’t let Percy be blamed for that. That call was entirely my own idea—’
‘So even now you will not tell me the truth!’ Raising a highly expressive lean hand and dropping it again in scornful dismissal, Tariq strode away from the bed, soundless and graceful as a jungle cat on the prowl.
‘No,’ Faye said tensely. ‘I just won’t tell you any more lies…no matter what the cost.’
Tariq swung back, unimpressed brilliant eyes clashing with hers.
Faye sucked in a deep breath. ‘I still don’t know how my stepfather found out that I had asked you to the house that night. Maybe it was just a horrible coincidence…him turning up when he was supposed to be in London and walking in on a situation which he thought he could use to his own advantage. But there was no set-up as far as I was concerned. I honestly believed we would be alone that night—’