by Penny Jordan
Sam didn’t know quite what she had expected. Perhaps not exactly outriders and half an army, but certainly rather more formality.
She was even more bewildered when, instead of leaving the runway, they were driven over to a waiting plane. She looked at Vere questioningly.
‘We’re going to Zuran,’ he told her, as they were ushered out of the car and towards a waiting plane, where he stopped to say something to the pilot as Sam was escorted on board by the flight attendants.
Sam had never flown in a privately owned jet before.
‘The flight time to Zuran is one hour,’ the male flight attendant was telling her as he offered her a glass of champagne, which she refused. She felt giddy enough already, without drinking alcohol.
She stared round the interior of the plane, her eyes widening at the luxury of its cream carpet and blue-grey walls. Instead of rows of seats there were plush-looking leather chairs and a desk.
‘If you wish to rest, there is a bedroom here,’ the steward continued, opening a door and ushering her towards it. Uncertainly Sam looked inside. The bedroom was luxuriously appointed, with its own en suite bathroom, and it was all Sam could do not to betray just how out of her depth she was beginning to feel in the midst of so much luxury. Would Vere expect to consummate their new relationship here? Her face began to burn and her heart pumped too fast.
‘Perhaps you would like something else to drink?’ the steward asked
‘Just water...thank you,’ Sam answered and then tensed, knowing that Vere had entered the cabin even though she couldn’t see him.
She turned round, her heart racing, whilst the steward made a deep obeisance. She waited for him to leave before she burst out shakily, ‘I don’t think I can do this. It was different in the desert, but I’m not—this...’ She gestured helplessly around the cabin. ‘This kind of thing...I don’t think...I don’t know anything about royal protocol, and even if I did that’s not the way I want to live.’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Vere told her dismissively.
He couldn’t afford for her to be having second thoughts now, and ruining his plans. Not when he was already aching for the hot sweet pleasure of holding her through the night, knowing she was his. Vere dismissed his unwelcome thoughts angrily. It was not for that reason that he was doing this.
‘Dhurahn isn’t Zuran,’ he told Sam. ‘We live relatively simply. Now, sit down and make yourself comfortable. We’ll be taking off soon.’
Obediently Sam found that she was subsiding into one of the leather chairs and accepting the glass of water the steward had brought for her.
Their take-off was smooth and swift, and by the time they had eaten the meal the steward served them they had begun their descent into Zuran.
Here, though, when they left the aircraft they were met by several important-looking officials, then ushered to a waiting limousine with blacked-out windows and a motorcycle escort, the Zurani flag flying on its bonnet.
Sam hadn’t thought to ask why they had come to Zuran, assuming it must be on some kind of state business, and she wasn’t expecting it when they pulled up outside the entrance to what she knew to be Zuran’s most exclusive and expensive shopping mall.
Uniformed flunkeys held open the doors for them, but when they stepped into the air-conditioned marble-floored mall it was completely empty of shoppers.
Bewildered, Sam turned to look at Vere.
‘You’re now my official mistress,’ he told her. ‘It will shame me if you are not appropriately clothed. The Ruler of Zuran has kindly offered to make the facilities of this mall available to us, so that you can be provided with all that is necessary.’
‘You mean you’ve brought me here to buy me clothes?’ Sam demanded angrily, too shocked to hide her feelings.
Vere frowned. She sounded more displeased than pleased. It was his understanding that women liked nothing better than a new designer wardrobe, and it irked him slightly that Sam was not reacting with more enthusiasm and appreciation.
‘You can’t have imagined that what you have will be suitable for your new role. Naturally my people will expect you to be dressed as befits that position.’
Sam wanted to tell him that she hated the thought of him paying for her clothes because it demeaned and hurt her, it turned her into an object—the appropriately dressed mistress—but a stunningly beautifully dressed young woman was coming towards them, making any further private conversation impossible.
‘Highness,’ she greeted Vere respectfully, before turning to Sam. ‘I am to be your personal dresser, madam. If you would like to come this way, we have arranged a private room for you in which you can relax whilst clothes are brought for your inspection.’
At last it was over.
Sam refused to look at Vere as a team of sales assistants wrapped her new clothes in tissue paper. Her eyes felt dry, burning with the shamed tears she refused to let herself cry.
The clothes Vere had bought for her were beautiful—exquisite Chanel suits and tops, Jimmy Choo shoes, Vera Wang evening wear, and so much more, all of it designer label and all of it earning only a brief nod of the head from Vere after she had been dressed in them and then paraded in front of him.
With each successive humiliating nod of his head Sam had felt her outrage give way to misery, until her misery had been overtaken by what she felt now. The bleak certainty that she couldn’t do this.
Vere frowned as he watched Sam’s reaction to the growing pile of shiny bags and boxes. The more the quantity grew, the more she seemed to withdraw into herself—so much so that she was actually physically stepping back from the garments and from him. Her normal warmly vivacious expression had been replaced with blank withdrawal as she focused her gaze away from both her new clothes and him.
Vere might never have been responsible for providing a woman with a brand-new designer wardrobe before, but even without that experience he knew enough to recognise that this was not the reaction he might have expected.
Half a dozen men dressed in livery that wouldn’t have disgraced a Hollywood extravaganza representing the court of an Arabian Nights Caliph had been summoned to carry Sam’s new clothes. And it would take a fleet of limousines to ferry everything to the airport, Sam reflected bleakly, forcing herself to smile at the girls who had served her. After all, it wasn’t their fault that she felt the way she did. It was her own.
She had been so naïve, never envisaging anything like this when she had let her heart rule her head and agreed to enter into this relationship with Vere. She was now beginning to recognise she would not be able to endure it. She didn’t want to be his mistress, with all that that implied, she wanted to be his lover... No, that wasn’t true, was it? What she really wanted, she acknowledged wretchedly, was to be his love, as he was hers. But she had already told herself that that was impossible. She had already said to herself that she accepted the limitations of what he was offering her and that she could live with them. Was she now saying that she had changed her mind and she couldn’t?
Tears were burning her eyes behind the protection of her sunglasses. She felt so very alone. Her parents, living in their neat detached house in a London suburb, would never understand any of this.
She hesitated in mid-step and, as though he sensed her desire to flee, Vere reached out and took hold of her hand. He continued to hold it until they had reached the waiting limousine.
They got into it in mutual silence, and the first thing Vere did once they wer
e inside it was close the partition that separated them from the driver, ensuring they could speak without being overheard.
‘I can’t do this,’ Sam burst out as soon as Vere had closed the screen.
Vere’s mouth compressed. ‘You have already agreed.’
‘That was when I thought...before...’
‘Before what? Nothing has changed.’
‘Of course it has. Have you any idea how humiliating it was to parade in front of you in those clothes, knowing that you would be paying for them, knowing that because I’m your mistress everyone will assume that you are paying me for sex.’
‘That is often the assumption when a man takes a mistress.’
‘That depends on how you define the word “mistress”. I assumed that what you meant was that you wanted us to be lovers. Everything was so different when we were in the desert. There we were just two people who...who wanted one another. I love the desert. There’s something so pure and pared-down about it. It makes you confront things about yourself—’ Sam broke off and shook her head. ‘Everything seemed so right there. Just the two of us and the desert. Nothing more. That’s all I want from you, Vere. The right to be with you because it’s what we both want. I don’t want to be dressed up like...like an expensively wrapped trophy... .’
Vere could hear the pain in her voice. It touched a place within him that he had thought protected from any touch. The desert stripped away the folly of consumerism and status and reduced a man to blood and bone and flesh. It demanded that a man meet it with only that. One either loved the desert or one feared it. Vere loved it.
He could feel the echo of Sam’s emotional words striking a chord within him. It pierced the hard, protective wall he had built around his own emotions. Unwanted, dangerous thoughts and feelings pressed against that barrier, threatening it, fuelling Vere’s anger against the woman who had caused them.
‘It is too late to change your mind now,’ he told her.
He knew that news of their shopping trip would reach the ears of the Emir, and that it would add substance to the fiction he wanted to create that Sam was indeed his mistress.
Ignoring the glossy magazines that had appeared in the jet’s cabin whilst they had been in the shopping mall, Sam picked up the paperback she had bought for herself instead.
She had no idea where all the new clothes were, nor did she care. She felt weighed down with her own despair.
When Vere had asked her to be his official mistress she had envisaged long hours of sexual intimacy—not shopping trips followed by Vere involving himself in paperwork without so much as attempting to even kiss her. Admittedly the bedroom of his private jet couldn’t provide the privacy she would have preferred, but if he really wanted her surely he would have managed to find some excuse to draw her in there to hold her and kiss her? He must know how alien and overwhelming she was finding all of this. After all, there couldn’t be many young women in her position who wouldn’t have been feeling the same.
Vere’s mobile rang, showing the private number that belonged to his twin.
When he stood up and turned his back to her to take his call, Sam guessed that it must be personal and got up herself, heading for the bedroom cabin to give Vere privacy in which to take the call.
‘Drax,’ Vere welcomed his twin.
‘I’m just about to leave for the Alliance of Arabic-Speaking Nations finance conference, but I thought I’d better let you know that the reports have come through from our agents on your Miss McLellan.’
Vere was on the point of denying that Sam was ‘his’, when he realised that it was hardly true any more. He needed to bring Drax up to speed with his decision.
However, before he could do so, Drax was continuing. ‘We’ve drawn a blank, I’m afraid. Whoever it is who is in the Emir’s pay it is definitely not Samantha McLellan. Our people have been over her life and her finances in microscopic detail, and there is nothing that can tie her into the Emir in any kind of way. Interestingly, though, they did discover that her computer has been hacked into whilst she’s been working in the field, and their feeling is that someone has been very interested in her work.’
Sam was not in the Emir’s pay.
Outrunning his shock was a wave of emotion that kicked away his defences. Now he had nothing to shield him from what she was doing to him. No way of protecting himself from the way she made him feel.
Vere struggled to wrest control from these sensations and focus on practical issues, regain some control.
‘She raised the queries about the Dhurahni River being re-routed,’ he managed to tell his twin. ‘It could be that whoever is working for the Emir got to hear about them and thought there might be something there the Emir could use.’
‘We’d better have her colleagues checked out, then,’ Drax suggested.
‘Yes,’ Vere agreed. ‘When do you expect to be back in Dhurahn?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ve sent Sadie home ahead of me, so I don’t intend to linger. She’s got several weeks to go yet before the baby is due, of course, but much as I shall miss her she needs to rest—even though she insists she would rather be with me.’
‘Drax?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m on my way back to Dhurahn now, and I’m taking Samantha McLellan with me. It’s a long story,’ Vere added quickly, ‘but—’
‘Ah, you need say no more, brother.’ Drax was laughing before Vere could tell him why he had planned to have Sam accompany him. ‘I have been there myself, remember? I can tell from your voice what is happening... If you are having trouble persuading her to marry you, then...’ Drax’s voice faded, and then the connection was broken.
There was no point in trying to phone Drax back, Vere acknowledged. What, after all, could he say? Drax had obviously got hold of the wrong idea. Like everyone in love, Drax automatically assumed that everyone else wanted to share his exalted state. Besides, for once in his life Vere had something more important to think about than what his brother might think.
Sam was completely innocent of any wrong-doing.
The agents they employed were far too good at their job to make any mistakes, and Vere didn’t even think of disputing what Drax had told him. So now he didn’t need her as his mistress at all. There was no point in him establishing her in that role since she was not in the Emir’s pay.
A mixture of emotions twisted through him. Fear, anger, hostility, all bound together by the ties linking him to his past and the loss of his mother. And joy, tenderness and guilt for misjudging her, woven like a gentle chain around his heart.
Out of habit, it was the older, darker emotions he allowed to claim him. They were the emotions he felt safe with. They did not require him to do anything other than go on believing as he had done for so long. They did not require a blind leap of faith. All they required and demanded was that he dismissed Sam from his life immediately.
It would be easy enough for him to tell her that he had changed his mind, and it would be a simple exercise for him to arrange for her to be taken back to the camp where she could resume her work. After all, there was no rational reason now to keep her with him, was there?
Immediately his emotions rejected the thought of letting her go. A sharp, unwanted stab of anguish pierced his heart at the thought of not having her in his life. His heart was hammering against his ribs and his whole body was tensed in rejection of the thought of losing her, whilst a battle raged within him between his need to protect himself and the desire Sam arous
ed within him.
He couldn’t send her back, even if he wanted to, he reasoned to himself. The cartographer’s position she had vacated had already been filled, and anyway, he could hardly expect her to simply carry on working at the camp as though nothing had happened. Those working with her were bound to ask questions. He surely had a duty to protect her from that.
But if he hadn’t misjudged her in the first place... Though he’d had no option but to suspect her, given the circumstances, Vere defended himself.
And no option but to make love with her? His heart slammed into his ribs.
No, he had had no option there either—but for very different reasons.
He wasn’t proud of what he had done, or of his own weakness, but it was for her sake and not his own that he intended to keep her with him in Dhurahn whilst he formulated some satisfactory way of compensating her for the damage his suspicions might have done to her career, as he now considered himself honour-bound to do.
And was that the only reason? Were his motives purely altruistic, and nothing whatsoever to do with his own feelings, his own desires?
She would be housed in her own quarters, and he would not intrude on those. He would find some way to ensure that her presence in Dhurahn was recognised as the professional visit of a qualified cartographer. The mouth of the Dhurahni where it reached the sea had never been properly mapped; silting had changed the course of river there. Mapping the coastline would be a very worthwhile project, and would surely go some way to redressing the harm he could have done her.
But he had already advertised the fact that she was his mistress.
She could be his lover and work professionally in Dhurahn. That way he could both make amends and keep her close to him. Close enough for them to...
To what?
That wasn’t a question Vere could allow himself to answer.
She had told him, though, that she had changed her mind and no longer wanted to go with him. If he had any sense he would accept that and let her go.