by Lynne Graham
Tears prickled at the back of her eyes. Strange how she had failed even to see that chilling single-minded ruthlessness in Tariq fourteen months ago when he had courted her with white roses and candlelit dinners. Yes, courted her, old-fashioned word that but very apt for those two months they had dated before Percy had wrecked everything. Of course, Tariq had thought he loved her back then and the officer-and-a-gentleman syndrome had ruled supreme. He hadn’t tried to get her into bed, although he could have done so easily. He had not mentioned love or made any false promises.
No, even then Tariq had not asked her to love him or encouraged her to love him. But, regardless of common sense, she had fallen in love and had never stopped loving him, she now acknowledged painfully. It was impossible to continue denying the strength of her own feelings for Prince Tariq Shazad ibn Zachir. However, admitting that truth only made her feel more vulnerable than ever.
Loving Tariq put her more in his power. The guy she loved despised her yet continued to desire her. Only, now that he had slaked that hunger over and over again on her wanton and willing self, he just wanted her out of his sight. Banished to the Muraaba. How low could she sink that she should long to stay with him? Didn’t she have any pride at all?
Her hands curled into tight, hurting fists. ‘Sex is a seductive force,’ he had said. Well, in her case, sex was a destructive force. With her body she had already given him eager consent to being his mistress. That was what she was…his mistress. She didn’t even have the wedding ring any more. He had kept that. Yet he must have considered her as being his wife at some stage, possibly only momentarily, she reasoned, for why else would he have referred to his need to take another wife?
Yet even after he had told her that, she had still behaved like a lovelorn, stupid fool. She cringed, unable to credit the woman she had become during the hours of darkness. As she shifted her feet she felt the weight of the sapphire anklet which had some sort of trick lock on it that refused to be undone. She skimmed a trembling hand down her leg and wrenched at it for it suddenly seemed like a badge of servitude.
‘Shiran, I want someone to speak to His Royal Highness and find out how to get this thing off me…’
The little maid departed. It was fifteen minutes before she reappeared. She got down on her knees and whispered, ‘Prince Tariq says that it is his pleasure that you should wear his gift, my lady.’
His pleasure? Faye quivered with disbelief for it seemed to her that the entire country of Jumar revolved round Prince Tariq ibn Zachir’s pleasure. So unassailable was his status with his devoted subjects that he could even parade his foreign mistress off to bed without offending anyone’s sensibilities!
‘His Royal Highness also said…’ Shiran visibly swallowed.
‘Yes, what did he say?’ Faye’s charged enquiry shook.
‘Please not to bother him with trivial enquiries when he is engaged in matters of state.’
As Faye plunged to her feet as though jet-propelled by that arrogant jibe, Rafi provided a distraction by bursting in on them like a missile shot out of a cannon, servants in hot pursuit. Throwing himself at Faye, he clutched at the skirt of her summer dress with frantic hands. ‘You can’t go away…you take me with you…you take Rafi too!’
‘What on earth…?’ Faye lifted the little boy in an effort to calm him down.
‘Prince Rafi knows you are returning to the Muraaba.’ Shiran sighed.
Rafi wrapped his arms round Faye. ‘I come too…I be good…I will be really good boy.’
‘Will Prince Rafi accompany us and the babies too?’ her maid asked her.
‘I don’t have the authority to make a decision like that—’
‘There is only Prince Tariq but he will be too busy for the children while he is with the sheikhs.’
‘Can I come…can I come?’ Rafi demanded.
Nobody else? For even little Basma and Hayat, Faye wondered in surprise. ‘Surely the twins have parents?’
Shiran gazed back at her in wide-eyed surprise. ‘No, my lady. All their family were lost.’
‘Lost?’ Faye queried.
‘People go away…they die,’ the little boy in her arms told her woodenly. ‘Bang bang…the plane fall out of the sky…all die.’
That explanation chilled the blood in Faye’s veins and she paled.
‘Terrible, terrible day…’ Shiran said chokily, eyes swimming.
‘Prince Tariq does not cry…Prince Rafi does not cry,’ Rafi chimed in, but his strained little face was dripping tears.
Her arms tightening round the child, Faye hugged him to her, her own eyes stinging. She would never have opened the subject of the whereabouts of Basma and Hayat’s parents had she been aware that they were dead. ‘Well, if no one minds you and I and the twins can all go back to the palace together,’ she heard herself promising.
Rafi said that he would have to fetch his toys and took off at speed.
‘Tell me about the plane crash,’ Faye urged Shiran.
Rafi’s mother, his cousin and his wife, who had been the parents of the twins, and even the twins’ grandparents had all died in the same tragedy. On a flight between Jumar city and Kabeer on the Gulf coast, the plane had developed engine trouble and had attempted a crash landing which had failed. Basma and Hayat’s father had entrusted his daughters to Tariq’s care in his will. The poor man could never have dreamt that he might die so young and leave Tariq responsible for two babies still only months old.
In one appalling day, Tariq had lost a good number of his closest relatives. I do not believe in unnecessary flights being made merely to save time. Small wonder, Faye conceded sickly, sinking deep into shock.
It took four Toyota Landcruisers to transport so large a party back to the Muraaba and, during that lurching and often torturously slow drive over the desert sands, Faye had plenty of time to think over what she had learnt. She now fully understood why Tariq had spent an entire year in mourning and she felt terrible that she had not known for the tragedy must have been widely reported. However, she rarely watched television and the only newspaper she read at home was a local one which did not cover international events. Tariq, she finally grasped, had the responsibility of raising three orphaned children.
The entrance hall of the Muraaba was full of silent kneeling servants.
‘Why are they doing that?’ Faye whispered to Shiran in dismay. ‘Who are they waiting for?’
‘They are showing respect, my lady,’ Shiran explained. ‘Wave your hand and they will go about their duties again.’
Faye did so and passed on by. With Rafi tagging along, she was shown upstairs to a magnificent suite of rooms that rejoiced in balconies that overlooked the beautiful gardens. Signs of Tariq’s occupancy were everywhere. Polo trophies, family photographs, the portrait of a gorgeous blonde woman with stunning dark eyes. His mother, Shiran told her with positive reverence. In another age, Tariq’s late mother might have been a supermodel and no longer did Faye marvel at the surrendering of the hundred concubines.
Lunch was served to her in an imposing dining room but the presence of Rafi, Basma and Hayat made it a lively occasion. She spent the rest of the day with the children, relieved by their inability to sense the painful conflict of her warring emotions. For no sooner was she separated from Tariq than she felt empty, abandoned and miserable. She got very angry with herself and with the feelings she could not control. That evening when she had tucked the twins into their cots she read Rafi a story, but only after overcoming his temper tantrum at her refusal to allow him to share her bed.
By eleven, Faye was in bed reading the historical romance she had brought out to Jumar with her but hadn’t got around to opening. It was a good book. Having lifted her head briefly at the noise of a helicopter landing on the palace heli-pad, she had returned her attention to her novel when the bedroom door opened.
Her head shot up. Tariq lounged in the doorway with a wolfish grin. ‘I thought I would surprise you.’
Dry-mouthed, Faye s
tared at him. Clad in a crisp white short-sleeved shirt, open at his brown throat, and smoothly tailored cream chinos, he looked sensational. All sleek and sexy and sophisticated.
‘Success…’ Tariq murmured, indolently shouldering shut the door and strolling across the room. ‘You look good in my bed.’
‘I thought you had other responsibilities…’ she said breathlessly.
‘I will fly back to the talks at dawn.’
‘I don’t think you know what you want.’
‘It is simple…I want you.’
Her violet-blue eyes dilated at the flashburn effect of his glittering golden gaze and the husky, intimate timbre of his dark, deep drawl. Beneath the fine cotton of her strappy nightdress, she was mortified to feel the languorous swell of her breasts and the tightening of her nipples as they pushed against the cloth.
Lean fingers twitched the book out of her nerveless grip. He studied the scantily clad Viking hero on the cover with very male amusement. ‘Colourful.’
‘Just something to pass the time—’
Stunning eyes glittering, Tariq studied the rising pink in her lovely face as she sat rigidly upright in the bed. ‘But now I am here…’
‘So?’ Faye lifted her chin.
‘I am much more accessible than the guy in the book…better taste in clothes too.’ Sinking down on the side of the bed, Tariq closed his lean hands to her slim shoulders to tilt her forward into his arms.
I will freeze him out…I will not respond, she swore vehemently to herself.
‘Ice is a challenge to those born in the desert,’ Tariq breathed with audible amusement, the sun-warmed scent of him flaring her nostrils as he toyed with her tremulous lips in a provocative, darting foray. ‘You know that you burn for me too.’
No more, she told herself feverishly. Ten ones are ten, she chanted inside her head as he pressed her lips apart and she quivered, suffering not only from temptation but also from the sheer weight of her anticipation. Ten twos are twenty, she continued, struggling not to lean into him, struggling not to moan as he let his tongue flick in a sexy intrusion between her parted lips. Parted lips? Close them! Think about something else, desperation urged.
Tariq laced one hand into her hair and kissed her slow and deep until the blood drumming in her veins hit fever pitch and her heart was hammering. A second wife hurtled up to grab her memory at the last moment, for during the afternoon she had wondered whether one of the reasons for remarrying that he had not declared was his responsibility for three young children. She jerked her head back from his, a sudden chill dousing her shameless heat and said jerkily, ‘Last night, you used the expression “a second wife”…’
‘Yes.’
‘That suggested that you had had another wife…so I want to know if that was me you were sort of referring to?’ Faye pressed awkwardly.
‘Who else?’ Tariq confirmed drily.
All of a sudden Faye had no need of multiplication tables to keep her brain focused. She drew back from him with a bewildered look. ‘So you are saying that we were really married…properly married, even if it didn’t last long?’
‘What else?’
What else? What else? In complete shock as the reality that they had been truly married that day a year ago sank in, Faye snaked back from him, taut spine bracing to the banked-up pillows behind her. She studied him with huge, shaken eyes. ‘But you told me that that wedding ceremony was a total sham!’
‘No,’ Tariq contradicted with extreme coolness. ‘I told you that the essential meaning of a ceremony into which I felt forced was a sham but I never at any stage suggested that it was not a true marriage in the eyes of the law.’
Faye was transfixed as he made that outrageous nit-picking distinction. She just gaped at him. ‘You mean I was genuinely your wife after that ceremony?’
‘What else could you have been?’ Tariq asked even more sardonically. ‘You were my bride.’
‘Your b-bride…?’ she stammered, all wits having deserted her. ‘Percy told me the ceremony could only have been some kind of Jumarian mumbo-jumbo when I told him that you had already divorced me again—’
‘But I had not already divorced you and there is no mumbo-jumbo in the law of Jumar,’ Tariq ground out, his dark, deep-set eyes hard with disgust. ‘But how typical that offensive suggestion was of the man who made it! How could your stepfather have made that judgement when I forbade him the right to attend? Naturally it was a legal marriage and, considering that we were first wed by a Christian man of the cloth, how could you pretend to believe otherwise? Unlike your stepfather, I am a man of honour.’
Faye was staring at him with a heart sinking further with every second that passed and every word he spoke. ‘I’m not pretending, but the Christian minister didn’t use a word of English either and I wasn’t sure he was what I thought he was. I only believed it was all a sham because you said it was… And you knew I thought that—’
‘I know you say you thought that now. When we talked at the Haja, that is certainly the excuse you attempted to employ for your behaviour in accepting that bank draft and fleeing the embassy last year,’ Tariq outlined with daunting precision. ‘I soon realised that.’
‘The excuse?’ No matter how hard Faye tried to master the stupor of shock settling over her, she failed. Only two days back, she was recalling that when they had sheltered from the storm Tariq had made comments that had struck her as utterly incomprehensible. ‘In the cave, you said something about me not having followed you back to Jumar…you said a true wife would never have left the embassy. At the time, I didn’t understand because your saying that made no sense—’
‘I see no point in rerunning this drama so long after the event,’ Tariq spelt out coolly.
Faye studied his lean, strong face fixedly. ‘But I have a right to know. Are you telling me that a year ago you would have accepted me as your wife if I had stayed or later flown out to Jumar?’
‘I have no crystal ball to tell me what I might have done in a set of circumstances that did not arise…so that is a foolish question.’
‘A f-foolish question,’ Faye parroted but inside her had sparked a flame ready to surge into a towering inferno of incredulous raging pain. ‘I didn’t notice you trying to haul me back from running away that day—’
‘Naturally not—’
‘Because you couldn’t get rid of me fast enough! At least, be honest about that,’ she urged him bitterly.
‘Understandably I was still very angry with you but I was not responsible for the decisions that you made—’
‘But I didn’t know I was making any decision…I thought the decision had been made for me! For goodness’ sake, I believed that you had divorced me within minutes of our wedding, so there wasn’t the slightest chance that I would have hung around, was there?’ she argued with feverish emotion.
Tariq dealt her a shimmering appraisal, his lip curling. ‘Perhaps you would like to be my wife now that the money I gave you then is spent—’
‘I won’t even dignify that with an answer!’ In receipt of that ultimate put-down, Faye felt a convulsive sob clog up her throat. ‘You let me walk out on our marriage and you didn’t come after me—’
‘Why would I have done so?’ Tariq countered with sardonic bite. ‘You were in the wrong…I was not. You made no attempt to discuss our differences or defend yourself at the time. You simply took the money and ran.’
Faye trembled. All too late she was recognising Tariq’s worst flaw. A level of stubborn, unyielding pride that appalled her. He had been so stubborn and so proud that he had let her walk away from their marriage for ever, never once allowing for the fact that she might have misunderstood the situation or that she might have been innocent.
‘What else would I have done when I believed you had just divorced me and I had no idea there was a bank draft in that envelope for I never opened it? You misjudged me, yet I would have forgiven you for that…’ An unsteady laugh empty of humour fell from her lips. ‘But
you can’t believe that you could be wrong about anything. Aside of lying about my age which is something teenagers the world over do, my only sin was just accepting your marriage proposal—’
‘Faye—’
She moved a shaking hand, too wounded to look at his lean, bronzed features. ‘But you were offering me what I wanted more than anything in the world. I loved you… And, yes, guilty as charged, I desperately wanted to be your wife!’
Tariq closed a strong hand over hers but his own hand was not quite steady and she was able to detach her fingers with ease. ‘No one of us may change the past.’
Faye turned her back on him, bitterness enclosing her along with a mortification so deep it hurt. How could she talk as she had to him? How could she reveal so much? What was the point? He had never wanted to marry her in the first place, so naturally he was proofed against her every attempt to argue in her own defence.
‘I’ve got only one more thing to say.’ She breathed unsteadily. ‘You know about as much about real love as I know about ruling Jumar so don’t kid yourself that that was love you were feeling! Your horse has got more sensitivity. Percy tried to make a fool of you and that outraged you because I bet no one had ever dared to do that to you before. So you took it out on me and you’re still taking your hurt pride out on me…’
The silence that followed seethed and sizzled.
‘Are you quite finished?’ Polar ice would have been warmer than that ground-out question.
She squeezed her eyes shut in misery. Hurt pride. Two words her macho desert warrior would never forgive her for. But then he was no good at forgiving anything, so why should she care? He thought she was a horrible little gold-digger, an inveterate liar and schemer, still set on trying to feather her own nest. But, worst of all, he had cared so little for her that he had let her leave him even though she had been his wife. You were in the wrong…I was not. She shuddered. No, that had not been love, not what she recognised as love, so she need not torment herself with the belief that she had lost his love, but tears still coursed silently down her cheeks.