by Emma Darcy
She fretted over how best to beg his mercy, whether any approach at all would soften his heart or appeal to some generosity of spirit. She was totally blind to the beautiful works of art she passed in the corridors on her way to him; splendid mosaic murals, exquisite urns, ancient carvings, all testaments to a cultural heritage that was proudly displayed and cared for. She thought only of what she had to accomplish and the ways and means to accomplish it.
Her mind flitted over many explanations that would justify Upgrade’s betrayal to his sheikh. None satisfied her. She doubted Xa Shiraq would comprehend an emotional link that went beyond rationality.
The paired escort in front of her came to a halt at a double set of huge doors. With well-trained timing they opened them and stood back for Amanda to enter the room ahead of her by herself. As she had anticipated, it was no open court filled with people. It looked like a private library, the walls lined with books, the furniture comprising highly polished desks, leather armchairs, reading lamps.
Her gaze quickly swept the room as she stepped inside. She tried desperately to quell the nervousness and apprehension that threatened to reduce her to a jittery and hopelessly inadequate advocate for her cause. She was determined that none of what she really felt would show on her face or in her body language. If anything, she wanted to project defiance.
There were two men present, only two to confront and convince, she told herself in an attempt to minimise the mountainous problem facing her. While they looked intimidating in their official Arab robes and headdresses, Amanda steeled herself to think of them as ordinary human minds she could bend her way.
The one rising from the chair behind his desk was short and stout. The other, apparently perusing the book in his hands, was turned away from her but Amanda instantly identified him as the sheikh by the gold and black twisted ‘iqal that held his headdress in place.
He was a tall, formidable figure, and Amanda felt her stomach knot with apprehension as she heard the doors close behind her. An overwhelming sense of force and power emanated from him, holding her captive, yet he made no movement, gave no sign of acknowledgement that she had intruded on his consciousness.
She’d experienced this before.
Twice before.
Her heart clenched in painful yearning for the man who had made her feel so much. He had to be alive. If only he were here, Amanda was sure he could meet Xa Shiraq’s power with an equal strength that would have commanded respect. She had to act in a manner worthy of him.
The sheikh read on, ignoring her presence, or pretending to, perhaps waiting to see if she would crack, perhaps silently expressing contempt for her.
There was a waiting stillness about him that accelerated her heartbeat to a painful tempo. It reminded her of the stillness of the man who might at this moment be still for a more deadly reason.
She darted a glance at Xa Shiraq’s associate and was startled to find she recognised him. It was Mr Kozim, the man who had handed her the page telling of her promotion to general manager of the Fisa hotel.
A spark of hope kindled in Amanda’s heart. Surely he would be sympathetic to an appeal for the life of a man he had worked closely with, even though his first allegiance was to Xa Shiraq. Mr Kozim definitely had an air of stress about him. He cleared his throat with a nervous little cough.
‘Your Excellency, the...uh...geologist’s daughter is here.’
Amanda had no doubt the Sheikh of Xabia was aware of that. He was letting her stew, wanting to unnerve her. What was more, he was succeeding. She could feel his wish to torture her with his silence, to keep her on tenterhooks until she snapped into an outburst that he would use against her.
She grasped at the straw that Mr Kozim represented and did her best to turn the situation to her advantage.
‘Mr Kozim, you are a man of great understanding and humanity,’ she appealed, not knowing if he was or not, but a little flattery could not go astray. ‘I appeal to you on behalf of the man who carried the orders of Jebel Haffa at the Oasis Hotel at Fisa. I ask you to intervene on his behalf to Xa Shiraq himself.’
Mr Kozim’s face went pale. His hands fluttered nervously along the desk. He coughed. ‘You do not know what you ask,’ he said in a strangulated voice.
Not much help there, Amanda thought, and her eyes swung away from him so they would not reveal her despair.
She said no more. She grimly held her tongue, determined to outplay the sheikh in this contest of wills. She knew instinctively she would win nothing by grovelling. She had to convince him that the crystal caves meant nothing to her. Only then might he listen to her appeal to free the man who had gone against his will.
Amanda had the sinking feeling that few people went against Xa Shiraq’s will without suffering horrendous consequences. She had to quickly decide on her course of action.
Any lack of control on her part would raise suspicions about the reliability of the promises she would give him. A man such as he would only respect strength. She must show that strength and let nothing daunt her.
She straightened her shoulders more rigidly than they had even been set before. She turned to face him square on. She took one step forward to draw his attention, then stopped. She would go no further until he gave his response.
The book in his hands was slowly clapped shut. It was replaced in the empty slot on the shelf behind him. Amanda felt her chest constricting as he started to turn towards her. Her mind jammed with desperate prayers.
His profile came into view and shock hit her like a sledgehammer, completely smashing all her fiercely held resolutions.
‘You!’
The cry burst from her lips in a released avalanche of pent-up tension and frustration, combined with all the pain and bitter suffering that had tormented her waking hours since she had last been with him.
Blazing black eyes scorched over her with scathing contempt. ‘I trusted you...and you betrayed my trust.’
The condemnation in his voice lashed deeply into Amanda’s soul. It stung, yet shock anaesthetised the sting momentarily. Shock demanded explanations that would make sense of the unbelievable.
‘You’re supposed to be entombed in the crystal caves.’ That was the reality that had tortured her. Questions tumbled from her lips. ‘How did you get out? How did you escape? How did you get here?’
‘How much satisfaction it must have given you to leave me to die as you thought...’
‘I did everything I could to try and save you,’ she defended hotly, aghast that he had interpreted her actions so wrongly.
‘How clever you are, Amanda,’ he said sardonically. ‘Twisting the truth of your flight down the mountain to give yourself another chance to justify your father’s behaviour.’
His offensive manner riled her into pointing out a few little truths to be taken into account. ‘You set out to deceive me from our first meeting and you’ve obviously deceived me about no-one knowing where we were. You were never really in trouble, were you?’
His silence goaded her on. ‘And I almost killed myself trying to save you, worrying myself sick over whether you were dead or alive, while all the time...all the time...’
She was rendered speechless by the base calculations of the man who was now revealed as Xa Shiraq himself! There must have been another way out of the caves and he’d had some means of communicating with his people. That was why the helicopter had flown towards the peak...to collect him! He had been flown home in comfort, perhaps even seeing her manic ride on the way.
‘Do you think I can still be seduced by your lies?’ he demanded. ‘You knew I would stop you from doing what you wanted and you sacrificed me for the secret of the crystal caves.’
It focused Amanda’s mind on refuting the abominable idea of base treachery. ‘I did not! The hydraulic jack broke. I rode for help but you ordered people not to listen to me,’ she flung at him, outraged that he could accuse her of such dreadful things—premeditated murder, no less—when he was so palpably at fault for reacting
in a totally extreme and unjustified manner, making her suffer agonies for a crime she hadn’t committed.
‘Nor will I listen to you now,’ he bit out in icy, arrogant pride.
‘Examine the jack,’ she challenged in similar biting tone, glaring her scorn for his unreasonable stance.
‘I disdain to prove more clearly what is already proved.’
‘How can you call yourself just if you will not look at the evidence?’ Amanda retaliated, smarting over the fact that he had always been in control, never once risking anything while he tested her to the limit!
‘Be thankful I choose not to.’ His eyes seared her with a blistering indictment. ‘I prefer mercy to justice. If your perfidy were proved beyond all doubt I could show you no mercy at all.’
Amanda felt a quiver of fear. She suppressed it, and took another pace forward. ‘Are you too proud to face the truth?’ she hurled at him. ‘Is it your will to believe the worst of me? I thought more of you as a man than that.’
His lips compressed into a thin, bloodless line. His facial muscles tightened grimly. ‘You cannot hurt me with your words,’ he said, his black eyes boring into her with hard and unrelenting intensity. ‘I admired and respected your cleverness, the quick facility of your mind at seeing through to the end of what was possible. But you have used it against me.’
He was hurt. Deeply hurt. The realisation slammed into Amanda’s heart and pumped a different perception through her mind. This was why he was so unyielding. He had let himself be vulnerable to her and he hated her for supposedly fooling him, and himself for being fooled.
‘All my thoughts and energies were directed to finding and bringing back a rescue team to get you out,’ she said quietly, hoping to reach into him again. ‘I couldn’t move that huge rock. I had no choice but to leave you there until...’
‘You had a choice, Amanda. I gave it to you in the caves...whether to reveal the existence of the neodymite crystals as your father wanted...or whether to leave Xabia the way it is,’ he reminded her savagely. ‘You did not give a reply.’
‘I needed time to think.’
It must have seemed to him...afterwards...that she had fobbed off giving a reply, but Amanda knew it wasn’t true. When he had kissed her and asked her to give herself to him, that had seemed more important than bringing up something she had already decided and was no longer an issue between them.
‘I had made up my mind to keep the secret and let my father’s dream die with him,’ she pleaded. ‘I would have told you so once we were outside.’
Even as she spoke the words she realised it was too late to say them. The wrong time and the wrong place. There would never be a right time now. For years she had worked towards the goal of clearing her father’s name and proving him right. That single-minded purpose was burned into Xa Shiraq’s memory, reinforced by what she had done and all she had poured out to him in the intimacy of their togetherness.
‘I showed you the crystal caves,’ he said simply. ‘And you betrayed my trust and left me to die in darkness.’
Amanda cracked. She lifted her hands to her face in despair. ‘That’s so untrue,’ she cried brokenly. ‘So untrue.’
‘You’ve had a taste of the choice you could have made with me. Now you can have a taste of the choice you made for me.’
‘You’ve got it all wrong.’ It was a desperate bid for understanding. She pulled her hands down, spreading them out to him in appeal. ‘Surely what we felt together meant as much to you as it did to me. How can you imagine I would sacrifice that for...?’
She faltered under the terrible look in his eyes...the pain...the dull, black emptiness that followed it.
‘You will be placed in the deepest cellar of the lowest basement within the granary that supplies the palace,’ he intoned, as though he had pulled a hood of judgement over any last twinge of feeling he had for her. ‘There are no windows. There is no light. You will be in darkness...as I was in darkness...when you left me.’
Amanda shivered, remembering the claustrophobic feeling in the tunnel. ‘I don’t like being alone.’
‘You will not be alone,’ he said with dark derision.
‘Who...?’ She swallowed hard and tried to correct the quaver in her voice. ‘Who will be with me?’
‘The cellar has another name. A sobriquet. It is more commonly known as...the rat-hole. The rats are huge. They are voracious. I hope you will enjoy your new friends and acquaintances.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AMANDA stared at Xa Shiraq in glazed horror. Her skin prickled in revulsion. Her stomach turned queazy. Beads of sweat broke out on her forehead. Her hands went clammy. Her whole body shuddered.
‘You can’t do that to me,’ she whispered. It was the only defence her mind could construct against the terrifying picture he had drawn of the rat-hole. She would go insane in such a place.
The black eyes glittered with vengeful satisfaction. ‘Call the escort, Kozim,’ came the merciless command.
‘No...no!’ Amanda cried, turning a frantic look of appeal to Xa Shiraq’s personal aide. ‘I’m innocent of this charge. I swear it!’
Mr Kozim’s gaze determinedly evaded hers. He picked up a bell from his desk and rang it loudly. He obviously didn’t want to hear any more from her.
Amanda swung back to Xa Shiraq, her heart pounding in sheer panic. ‘You’re supposed to know everything. That’s what they say of you. Why don’t you know I couldn’t do what you accuse me of?’ she argued, hoping against hope he meant to relent.
He pointedly shunned her, walking off to a leather armchair on the far side of the library. He flung himself listlessly and dispiritedly into it without so much as a glance at her. His eyes focused on some empty spot on the ceiling.
Amanda heard the doors opening behind her, the tramp of military feet coming to take her away to the rat-hole. She couldn’t bear it.
Xa Shiraq waved a gesture of dismissal towards her.
He should know better, Amanda thought, her mind racing to find some solution. He would never do this if his emotions weren’t involved. But they were... they were!
‘Wait!’ Amanda cried imperiously, raising her extended arm above her shoulders.
It stopped nothing. The military feet kept advancing. Xa Shiraq ignored her. Mr Kozim found another empty spot on the ceiling for himself and gazed steadfastly at that.
Amanda was thinking more furiously than she had ever needed to before. Xa Shiraq might have submerged the link he felt with her but it had been a powerful, compelling link. Somehow she had to find that link again.
‘I have a better plan,’ she announced.
Boldness be my friend, she prayed wildly. If there was any substance in the form of address used by the old serving woman, she had to have some chance of changing what was happening.
The guards halted around her in escort position, ready to about-turn and take her out as soon as the order was given. Amanda swiftly forestalled the order.
‘Will you not allow me one last word?’ she demanded of Xa Shiraq.
His black eyes slashed at her. His fingers pressed savagely into the armrest, indenting the cushioned leather one by one, back and forth. He said nothing. The guards remained at attention. Amanda seized on the tacit permission to advance on Mr Kozim.
‘Is it constitutionally correct that a princess can be sent to the rat-hole?’ she asked, pulling his gaze down from the ceiling.
Mr Kozim not only looked sheepish but very, very unhappy at being chosen to interpret the sheikh’s will.
‘Over the centuries,’ he said ponderously, ‘more princesses ended up in the rat-hole, per capita of population, than any other category of our people. It was...uh...standard procedure in cases of...’ he coughed ‘...rebellious intransigence.’
That certainly fitted, Amanda thought, but did the rest follow? ‘Am I a princess?’ she pressed.
‘A proclamation was signed that you were to be treated as such,’ Mr Kozim mumbled, shooting a worried glance at the
sheikh.
Uh-huh! Amanda thought with satisfaction. A chink in the armour. Xa Shiraq was in two minds about her. Or rather, his heart was warring with his head. He wanted his people to honour her even as he condemned her as unworthy of being his true companion.
His mind was set on punishment to fit the crime he believed she had committed against him, but it wasn’t what he really wanted. Not deep down. He wanted the fulfilment of the promise that had shimmered through both of them in the crystal caves. And so did she.
Clutching that conviction to her heart, Amanda walked across the room to where Xa Shiraq indolently lounged, her clear aquamarine eyes reflecting strong and unwavering purpose.
‘There has to be a better way of resolving what is between us,’ she said.
‘Name one,’ he invited, his face stonily closed to her, his eyes watchful but giving nothing away.
She knelt beside the armrest of his chair, close enough so that only he could hear her words. ‘Tell me of your secret desires and passions,’ she said softly, caringly, her eyes openly promising an answer to them.
‘I do not desire you,’ he replied curtly, contemptuously. ‘You could not provoke it in me.’
Amanda refused to be deterred. ‘Let me try to change your mind,’ she persisted, trying to bore past his wounded pride to the primitive mating instinct that yearned for fulfilment.
His hand curved over the end of the armrest, his long, restless fingers lying still. She lifted her hand and stroked her fingers over the bare skin of his. She saw the sudden tightening of his neck muscles, the leap of his pulse at the base of his throat. He sprang to his feet, whipping his hand out from under hers. He towered over her, his black eyes ablaze with fierce turbulence.
‘You do have the capacity to gall me,’ he grated. ‘No more of this talk. You know nothing of men nor of their pleasure.’
‘How can you pass such judgements?’ Amanda immediately replied, whirling up off her knees to confront him head-on.