by Penny Jordan
To Vere, ruling Dhurahn as their father and mother would have wished was a duty that was almost sacred.
There had only been one previous occasion on which his longing for the desert and the solace it offered him had been as strong as it was now, and that had been the time following the tragic death of his parents—his mother’s passing having hit him particularly hard. That thought alone was enough to fill him with a savage determination to tighten his control over his current feelings, which he saw as a wholly unacceptable personal weakness.
It was unthinkable that his physical desire for the carnal pleasure afforded by one of those western women who came to the Gulf ready to trade their bodies for the lifestyle they thought their flesh could buy—a woman ready to give herself on the smallest pretext, shamelessly openly—should have driven him to the point where he felt his only escape from it could come from the same place where he had sought solace for the loss of his mother. It was more than unthinkable. It was a desecration, and a personal failure of the highest order.
It was more than half his own lifetime ago now since the death of their parents, but for Vere as a teenager, struggling to be a man and ultimately a ruler, with all the responsibilites that meant, the loss of the gentle Irish mother who had supplied the softening wisdom of her love against his desire to emulate his father’s strength, had been one that had taken from him something very precious, leaving in its place a need to protect himself from ever having to endure such pain again.
Some men might think that for a man in his position the answer to the sexual hunger that was threatening to destroy his self-control was to satisfy it via marriage or a mistress.
His brother Drax was, after all, already married, with his wife expecting their first child in the near future, and Drax had hinted to him that he would like to see Vere married himself.
Vere frowned as he watched the four-by-fours being loaded for the long overland drive to the empty quarter.
The initiative prompted originally by the Ruler of Zuran, to investigate and if necessary redefine the old borders that separated their countries from one another, and from the empty quarter, was one he fully supported. They all in their different ways held certain territorial rights over the empty quarter, but by long-held and unwritten tradition they tended to ignore them in favour of the last of the traditional nomad tribes, who had for centuries called the empty quarter home.
The Ruler of Zuran wanted to bring the small band of nomadic tribespeople within the protection of the opportunities for education and health welfare he provided for his own people, and to this end he had contacted his neighbours: the Emir of Khulua, and Vere and Drax.
His initiative was one that was very close to Vere’s own heart, provided it could be accomplished without depriving the tribes of their right to their own way of life. The Emir, not wanting to be excluded even though he was a more old-fashioned and traditional ruler, had also indicated that he wanted to be involved in the project, and as a first step the Ruler of Zuran had funded the cost of a team of cartographers to thoroughly map out the whole of the area.
It had been the Emir who had suggested that whilst this was being done it might be a good idea to reassess and establish their own individual borders with one another, which met at the empty quarter.
It was a good idea that made sense—as long as the Emir, who was known for his skill at adapting situations to suit his own ends, did not make use of the re-mapping to claim territory that was not strictly his. During private talks with the Ruler of Zuran, both he and Drax had agreed to keep a very strict eye on any attempts the Emir might make to do that. As part of their agreed preventative measures against this it had been decided that each ruler should take it in turn to be involved ‘on the ground’ with the project, and now it was Vere’s turn to drive out to the border region of the empty quarter.
A movement on the balcony above him caused Vere to look upwards, to where his twin brother Drax and his wife Sadie were standing. The sight of their happiness and their love for one another touched a place inside him he hadn’t known existed until Drax had fallen in love.
As twins they had naturally always been close, but the car accident that had killed their parents when the brothers were in their teens had made the bond between them even stronger. In the eyes of the world he, as the elder twin, was the one to step into their father’s shoes, but both he and Drax knew that it had always been their father’s intention that they would share the rulership and the responsibility for Dhurahn. However, every country was expected to have a single figurehead—and that duty rested with him.
Up until recently the duty had never been one he considered irksome. Where Drax embraced modernity, especially in architecture and design, he preferred to cling to tradition. Where Drax was an extrovert, he was more of an introvert. Where Drax enjoyed the buzz of busy civilisation, he preferred the silent solitude of the desert. They were as all those who knew them best often said, two halves of one whole.
Like many cultured Arab men, Vere revered poetry and studied the verse of the great poets, but just recently—although he hated having to admit it—the beauty of those words had brought him more pain than pleasure.
Normally he would have welcomed the chance to spend time in the desert, embracing the opportunity it gave him to be at one with his heritage, but now the knowledge of how close the desert was brought him to those things within himself that he felt the most need to guard. It was making him feel irritable and on edge.
Because he knew that being in the desert would exacerbate that sense of emptiness and loss that lay within him, and with it his vulnerability?
Vere swung round angrily, as though to turn his back on his own unwanted thoughts. His pride hated having to acknowledge any kind of flaw, and to Vere what he was experiencing was a weakness. He wanted to wrench it out of himself and then seal it away somewhere, deprived of anything to feed on so it would wither and die.
But, no matter how hard he fought to deny it any kind of legitimacy, every time he thought he had succeeded in destroying it, it returned—like a multi-headed monster, infuriating him with the mirror it kept holding up to him, reflecting back his faults.
Generations of proudly arrogant male blood ran through Vere’s veins. The moral code of that blood was burned into him by his own will. He came from a race that knew the value of self-control, of abstinence, of starving the body and the spirit in the eternal battle to survive in a harsh desert environment. Real men, the kind of man Vere had always considered himself to be, did not allow uncontrolled hungers of any kind to rule them. Not ever.
And certainly not in a hotel corridor, with an unknown woman, and in such a way that—
He wheeled round again, his body tight with anger, ignoring the harsh glare of the sun as it fell across his face, highlighting the jut of his cheekbones and the searing intensity of his gaze. Not for Vere the protection of designer sunglasses to shadow and colour reality.
Lust must surely be the most despicable of all human vices. It was certainly the cause of a great deal of human misery. Vere had always considered himself above that kind of selfish weakness. As the Ruler of Dhurahn he had to be. And yet he could not escape from the knowledge that for a handful of minutes he had been rendered so oblivious to his position by his own senses that nothing had mattered more to him than his desire for the woman he had held in his arms.
Another man might have shrugged his shoulders and accepted that he was a man, and thus vulnerable to the temptations of the
flesh, but Vere’s pride refused to accept that he could be so vulnerable, so prone to human frailty. He had fallen below the demands he made upon himself to meet certain standards. Others might not condemn him for doing so, but Vere condemned himself.
He wasn’t entirely alone, though, in his belief that a man needed to prove he could withstand the most rigorous of tests before he could call himself a man and a leader of other men. There was an ‘other’ to share his belief, and that ‘other’ was the desert.
The desert had a way of drawing out a man and highlighting both his strengths and his weaknesses. Normally Vere looked forward to the time he could spend in the desert as a means of replenishing his sense of what he truly was—but right now he wasn’t sure that he wanted to submit his current state to that test. He had found himself wanting, and he feared that so too would the desert—that he would no longer be at one with it, just as he could no longer feel at one with himself.
More than anything he wanted and needed to dismiss the woman and the incident from his mind for ever—and then to deal with the damage she and it had done to his pride.
But the truth was he couldn’t. The memory of her was branded into him and he couldn’t seem to free himself from it—no matter how much he loathed and resented its presence. And her. He hadn’t slept through a full night since it had happened. He didn’t dare to let himself dream too deeply, fearing that if he did his dreams would be filled by her, and the ache of need he managed to control during the day would overpower him when he was asleep. It was bad enough having to acknowledge that every time he let his concentration slip the memory of her was there, waiting to taunt him. At its worst, that memory had him mentally lifting his hands to her body, determined to push her from him as he should have done all along, but knowing that in reality he would end up binding her to him.
How was it possible for one woman, a complete stranger, to invade the most private and strongly guarded recesses of his heart and mind and possess them, haunting and tormenting him almost beyond his own endurance?
It was mid-afternoon. He planned to leave for the desert camp of the surveyors as the sun began to set, so that he and his small entourage could make the most of the cooler night hours in which to travel. He had some work to do first, though, he reminded himself.
Whilst Drax and his wife occupied the new wing of the palace that Drax had designed for his own occupation before his marriage, Vere’s personal apartments were in the older part of the palace, and had traditionally housed Dhurahn’s rulers through several generations.
Thus it was that when he stood in the elegantly furnished and decorated private salon that lay behind the formal reception room where he held his public divans, to which his people were entitled to come and speak to him and be heard, he might be alone in the flesh, but in spirit the room was peopled with all those of his blood who had gone before him.
His formidable great-grandfather, who had ridden with Lawrence of Arabia and fought off all comers to maintain his right to his lands. His French grandmother, so elegant and cultured, who had bequeathed to him a love of art and design. And his own parents: his father, so very much everything that a true ruler should be—strong, wise, tender to those in his care—and his lovely laughing mother, who had filled his life with happiness and joy and the traditions of her homeland. Here in this room, at the heart of the palace and his life, he had always believed that he would never really be alone.
And yet now, thanks to one incident that was impossible to forget, that sense of comfort had been stolen from him and replaced with a stark awareness of his own inner solitude that he could not escape.
If he were reckless enough to close his eyes he knew that immediately he would be able to conjure up the feel of the thick silk of her wild curls beneath his hand, the scent of her woman’s flesh—sweet and warm, like honey and almonds—the stifled heat of her breath when her body discovered the maleness of his own. And most of all her eyes, so darkly blue that they’d caught exactly the colour of the desert sky overhead just before the sun finally burned into the horizon. A man could lose his reason if he looked too long at such a sky, or into such eyes...
Was that what he believed had happened to him? Vere grimaced, bringing himself abruptly back to reality. He was a modern man, born in an age of facts and science. The fact that he had turned a corner in a hotel corridor and bumped into a young woman with whom he had shared a kiss—no matter how intensely passionate and intimate, no matter how bitterly regretted—hardly constituted an act of fate that had the power to change his whole life. Unless he himself allowed that to happen, Vere warned himself.
He strode across the room and pulled at the double doors that opened into the wide corridor beyond it, its floor tiled in the mosaic style that was true Arab fashion.
His parents had instituted a tradition that these rooms were the preserve of themselves and their children and no one else. Normally Vere relished that privacy, but now for some reason it irked him.
Was that the reason for the deep-rooted and ever-present ache that pursued him even in his sleep? Tormenting him with images and memories—the smell of her, the feel of her in his arms, the feel of her body against his, the sound of her breathing, the scalding, almost unbearable heat of the moment their lips had met?
It was just a kiss—that was all... A mere kiss. A nothing—just like the woman with whom he had shared it. She hadn’t even had the type of looks he found physically attractive. The type of women he liked to take to his bed were tall and soignée cool, worldly blondes—women who could satisfy him physically without involving him in the danger of them touching him emotionally.
Vere had never forgotten that loving a woman with the whole of his heart meant that ultimately he would be broken on the wheel of that love when she abandoned him. He had learned that with his mother’s death, just as he had learned the pain that went with it. Better not to love at all ever again than to risk such agony a second time.
He still burned with shame to remember the nights he had woken from his sleep to find his face wet with tears and his mother’s name on his lips. A man of fourteen did not cry like a child of four. Emotional weakness was something he had to burn out of himself, he had told himself. And that was exactly what he had done. Until a chance encounter in a hotel corridor had ripped off the mask he had gone through so much trouble to fix to himself, and revealed the unwanted need that was still inside him.
CHAPTER TWO
SAM stepped under the surprisingly sophisticated shower in the ‘bathroom’ compartment of the traditional black tent that was her current personal accommodation, soaping her body and taking care not to waste any water when she rinsed herself off—even though she had been assured that, thanks to the efficiency of the Ruler of Zuran’s desalination plants in Zuran, there was no need for them to economise on the water that was driven in to the camp almost daily in huge containers.
Sam had been over the moon with joy when she’d learned that against all the odds she had secured this so coveted job of working as part of the team of cartographers, anthropologists, statisticians, geologists and historians brought together to embark on what must surely be one of the most ambitious and altruistic ventures of its kind.
As a cartographer, Sam was part of the group that were re-mapping the borders and traditional camel caravan routes of this magical and ancient part of the world. Just the words ‘the empty quarter’ still brought a shiver of excitement down her spine. After all, hadn’t her youthful desire to
come to the Gulf initially sprung from reading about the likes of Gertrude Bell?
Normally Sam shared her comfortable and well-equipped accommodation with Talia Dean, one of the other three women who were also on the team, but the young American geologist had cut her foot two days ago, and was now hospitalised in Zuran.
Others before them had mapped the empty quarter and explored it, searching for hidden cities and routes, and the borders between the three Arabian states involved in the present exercise were already agreed and defined. However, modern technology combined with the excellent relations that existed between the three states meant that it was now possible, with satellite information combined with on-the-ground checks, to see what effect five decades of sandstorms that had passed since they were agreed might have had on the borders.
Now, with their evening meal over and the camp settling down for the night, Sam dried her newly showered body and then made her way into her blissfully air-conditioned tented bedroom.
Furnished with rich silk rugs and low beds piled high with velvet-covered cushions and throws, and scented with the most heavenly perfumes from swinging lanterns heated with charcoal, its combination of modern comfort-producing technology and traditional Bedouin tent produced an exotic if somewhat surreal luxury, which immediately struck the senses with its sharpness of contrast to the harshness of the desert itself.
But the desert also had its beauty. Some members of the team found the desert too harsh and unforgiving, but Sam loved it—even whilst she was awed by it. It possessed an arrogance that had already enslaved her, a ferocity that said take me as I am, for I will not change. There was something about it that was so eternal and powerful, so hauntingly beautiful, that just to look out on it brought a lump to her throat.