Desert Destiny

by Sarah Holland

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to Desert Destiny! I wrote it when I was twenty-eight and working as a theater actress. By day I was hurtling across a desert with a sexy Arab sheikh, and by night I was a Victorian heroine pursued across the stage by a Spanish nobleman! I’m now thirty-six but I’ve been writing for Harlequin since I was eighteen and that’s exactly half my life. It’s a wonderful real-life Harlequin Destiny for me that the twenty-fifth birthday of Presents® should fall this year. So I hope you’ll understand how much it means to me when I say, “Happy birthday, Presents,” and here’s to another twenty-five years of drama, passion and romance!

  Love,

  Sarah Holland

  Desert Destiny

  Sarah Holland

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE sheikh towered over her, a whip in one savage hand. She knelt at his feet, sweat on her parted lips. The hot desert sun beat down on them, and as the music rent the air she inched away from him on her knees, the whip cracking mercilessly on the sand near her sprawling thighs.

  The harem silks she wore were peacock-blue. Sun-kissed hair tumbled in gold curls around her ravishing face, her belly left bare and her full breasts pouting in a golden cleavage. She was covered in gold…anklets and belly-chains and bracelets of bells, and a necklace flashing at her throat.

  The shiekh’s whip tore the silk on her thigh and she gasped, staring up at him. He laughed and reached for her, his strong hand catching her wrist as he dragged her to her feet and inflicted a punishing kiss on her mouth.

  Suddenly, the sound of hoof-beats rent the air.

  ‘What the…?’

  She was turning. They were all turning, and as they stared in shock across the golden ocean of desert they saw the sands clouding up around a pack of horses riding fast towards them.

  Led by a man in white robes, the horsemen thundered nearer, and as Bethsheba stared she saw the gleam of gold on the leader’s head-dress and knew he was a sheikh.

  ‘Leave this to me!’ Chris shouted from behind the cameras.

  But Bethsheba barely heard. Her heart was thudding louder than the horses’ hoofs and her eyes were riveted on the sheikh: the real sheikh, the man who rode towards her with narrowed hawk-like eyes and a mouth that could strike passion into the heart of any woman.

  He was upon them now. The white stallion danced beneath him as he brought it to a halt, sand flying up as though to clothe him in the aura of a desert god.

  ‘I am Sheikh Suliman El Khazir of the Auda Khazir!’ His voice rang out in dark authority. ‘And this land is mine! Who gave you permission to be here?’ His English was perfect, only the slightest trace of Arabic turning his voice throaty.

  ‘Sir——’ Chris—ever the diplomat—stepped forward with a deep salaam ‘—my name is Chris Burton. I am in charge here. Please accept my apologies for trespassing. I had no idea I needed permission. I assumed——’

  ‘I see clearly what you assumed, English.’ The sheikh’s hard mouth flickered into a cruel smile. ‘But you were mistaken. This is the land of the Auda Khazir, and I am their master.’

  Yes, Bethsheba thought, breathless: that dark face held the stamp of power. Deeply tanned and hard-boned, he sat astride that Arab stallion with aristocratic ease. His eyes were narrowed, hawk-like and black, and they flicked now, suddenly, in Bethsheba’s direction, the look in their dark depths making her body quiver with awareness.

  ‘Then may I again extend our apologies?’ Chris Burton said with a charming smile. ‘And perhaps ask your permission to continue filming here?’

  The shiekh slid his dark gaze insolently over Bethsheba’s body without even glancing at Chris. ‘What exactly,’ he asked, studying Bethsheba’s full breasts and bare belly, ‘are you filming?’

  ‘A pop video,’ Chris told him as Bethsheba’s heartbeat thudded faster. ‘We work in the music industry.’

  He looked at Chris coolly. ‘The girl is a singer?’

  ‘Yes.’ Chris nodded. ‘A very famous singer. Her name is Bethsheba and she——’

  ‘Sheba…?’ The shiekh said under his breath, staring at her.

  ‘Bethsheba,’ Chris repeated, struggling to win over the desert leader, ‘a very big star in the West. She’d sold millions of records and-—’

  ‘I care nothing for records,’ said the sheikh, and nudged his white steed into motion, walking him over to Bethsheba, a look of dark intent in his eyes.

  Involuntarily, Bethsheba backed in alarm.

  ‘Don’t back away from him!’ Chris muttered to her.

  Pulses leaping, she stood still and looked up into the face of Sheikh Suliman El Khazir. The dark eyes watched her, black and heavy lidded and intent.

  ‘So,’ he said under his breath, ‘you are truly the Sheba?’

  ‘You—you have heard of me?’ she asked huskily.

  ‘Oh, I have heard of you, bint!’ he said softly, so softly that for a moment she wondered if he had said it at all. His mouth was curved suddenly in a smile, and she felt a shiver run through her body as though a premonition had touched her soul when he’d spoken.

  Then, the sheikh turned, strong dark hands touching the leather reins as he wheeled the Arab stallion in a perfect circle and moved back with regal arrogance towards the cameras, towards the crew, towards Chris Burton.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, head lifted, ‘you may continue to film on the land of Auda Khazir.’

  A sigh of relief hushed through the gathered crew.

  Thank you very——’ Chris began gratefully.

  ‘But there is a price, English!’ interrupted the sheikh with a slow, soft drawl, and he leant forward, one strong arm resting on the pommel of his saddle.

  Chris blinked blond lashes rapidly. ‘Of course!’ The diplomatic mask was nailed in place as he smiled. ‘Name it!’

  The dark hawk-like eyes flicked suddenly to Bethsheba. ‘I will hear your songbird sing.’

  There was a little silence, and under his strong, arrogant gaze she felt, to her humiliation, her nipples become prominently erect beneath the blue silk harem bodice she wore. The dark eyes flicked to her face, met her gaze, and made her heart skip a beat.

  ‘Sing?’ Chris looked baffled for a moment, staring. ‘You want to hear her sing? Well, sure…of course…I mean——’

  ‘Tomorrow night!’ The sheikh straightened on his horse. ‘I will hear her sing at my palace. It is the House of the Seven Suns on the outskirts of Agadir, the gateway to the Western Sahara.’

  ‘The House of the Seven Suns…’ Chris was saying, mystified, and someone with initiative behind the cameras grabbed a piece of paper and wrote it down.

  ‘It is my birthday tomorrow,’ drawled the sheikh with a faint, hard smile. ‘You will eat with me, Burton, while your songbird pleasures me with her voice.’

  Bethsheba swallowed, her throat dry, and studied him through lashes damp with sweat as the sun burnt down on her tousled gold hair, her full cleavage and her bare arms and belly.

  Chris had no choice but to make a deep salaam and say, ‘We are honoured.’

  The sheikh gave a thin smile, and turned his horse. ‘Bring her to me tomorrow night at seven!’

  Suddenly he was riding away, nudging his horse into a gallop as his men turned their horses, too, and galloped away at his side in a menacingly silent display of desert loyalty, the only sounds the thunder of hoofs.

  Everything around Bethsheba felt so Western, so tame and somehow conventional. The cameras that surrounded her filled her with boredom. Just the latest in a long, long line of promotional videos for her records. Even the excitement of knowing it was a brilliant song, and would hit number one, no longer affected her.

  But in the dark landscape of her mind a secret fantasy stirred in its long-forgotten, long-ab
andoned grave, and she knew she would have ridden away into the desert with Sheikh Suliman El Khazir had this been that dark, potent landscape instead of reality.

  Suddenly she was very much looking forward to singing at his palace tomorrow night…

  Next day they worked in the studio. Chris owned a villa in Tangier, and it was here that they were staying to record and film. High on a curving hill overlooking the city, the villa gave a ravishing view of flat red roofs and clean white walls leading down to the rich, spicy heart of Tangier: the bazaars and little dirty alleyways filled with jewels and rugs and spices. The wail from a nearby mosque filled the air at regular intervals and the cry of ‘Allah!’ echoed in the city heat.

  ‘We’ll take it once again from the top,’ Chris said through Bethsheba’s headphones.

  ‘Can’t you drop me in for that line?’ she asked over the microphone, watching him through the smoked-glass studio windows.

  ‘I can if you prefer not to work hard,’ Chris said flatly, watching her from the control-room.

  ‘Oh, all right, then! From the top!’ And she sang the whole chorus verse again, her pride rising to the fore as always when Chris criticised her. It had always been this way between them. Their platonic relationship was like a family relationship that blended perfectly with business.

  ‘Perfect!’ Chris said when she had finished. ‘Outstanding vocal! Well done, Beth!’

  Bethsheba studied him, wondering why she no longer felt a thrill of pleasure when he was pleased with her. She hung her headphones on the mike, walked across the gleaming parquet floor and slid open the glass doors to the control-room.

  ‘We’ll add all the choruses tomorrow for the sampler,’ Chris said.

  ‘You don’t need me for that, do you?’ she asked rhetorically.

  Chris replied by pressing the sampler keyboard, making Bethsheba’s voice burst through the speakers, singing, ‘Sheikh! Sheikh! Sh-sh-sh-sh-sheikh!’

  ‘We’ll have to release a greatest-hits album for you soon,’ Prudence, her pneumatic peroxide-blonde backing singer, drawled from the sofa. ‘Listen to this,’ she said, flicking through last month’s Q magazine: ‘“Bethsheba’s fifteenth number-one single proves the old adage that you can never underestimate the stupidity of the masses!”‘

  ‘Bastards!’ said Chris.

  ‘I never read my reviews.’ Bethsheba sank on to a stool beside Chris at the control-desk and toyed idly with the sampler. ‘It’s too painful!’

  ‘They’re just jealous.’ Chris flicked off the power and dropped a kiss on her tawny-gold head. ‘It’s the name of the game. Success brings criticism—failure brings praise. If you only sold ten records a month they’d call you an artist and you’d be worshipped as a cult figure.’

  ‘Or you could always commit suicide on stage,’ Prudence drawled. ‘That’ll get you sensational reviews!’

  Chris laughed. ‘Do you want to be famous or do you want to be famous!’

  Bethsheba felt an overwhelming urge to escape again. It gnawed at her constantly these days. Her life had become a trap, and there was no way out of studio work, concerts, touring, television appearances, interviews, photograph sessions…

  Suddenly the urge to escape was too strong. Her gold eyes flicked to the walls of the studio. Black walls…windowless walls…oppressive walls. No light, no view, no outside world. No sense of time; here, in this airless room with its forty-eight-track mixing-desk, it could be morning, afternoon or evening; winter, summer or spring; London, New York or Paris.

  ‘I’m going out,’ Bethsheba said suddenly, standing up.

  Everyone turned to look at her. Mark, pro-gramming the drum computer, almost dropped his ice-cold beer.

  ‘Out?’ Chris frowned. ‘What do you mean—out?’

  ‘I need some air,’ she said rapidly. ‘I want to go out!’

  ‘But we’ve got to leave in an hour.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We’ve got to be at the sheikh’s palace at Agadir at seven. It’ll take at least four hours to drive there.’

  ‘I won’t be long,’ she said quickly, and moved to the door.

  ‘Wait!’ Chris leapt in her way, at his most autocratic now, that RADA training leaping into evidence as his voice took on a distinctly Shakespearian ring. ‘You are not, I repeat, not going out into town. I know you love the place, Beth, but I can’t allow you to walk off into a bazaar and get lost.’

  Frustration made her mouth tremble. ‘But, Chris, I haven’t been out of this studio since I arrived!’

  ‘Yes, you have—you were in the desert yesterday.’ He patted her head. ‘Now, be a good girl and go down to the pool. Prue will go with you, won’t you, Prue?’

  ‘I’m a great chaperon,’ drawled Prudence, getting to her feet.

  Bethsheba struggled to be obedient, nodding and saying, ‘You’re right…it’s best…I’ll go to the pool and have a swim.’ But the resentment burned in her—was Chris so blind that he didn’t see how she was changing?

  ‘Good girl.’ Chris smiled and moved back to the desk. ‘I’ll stay here and play around with the mix. I’ve got a great idea for the middle section…’

  They drove to Agadir in the black limousine through acres of desert on a road that seemed incongruous. It cut a black swathe through gold sands with strange rock formations on either side, scattered boulders and sand around a modern road with modern signs in blue Arabic and English.

  Occasionally they passed a village of tiny bleached stone hovels without glass or windows, dogs as skinny as the boys who threw sticks at them, and old men in long caftans smoking spindly pipes.

  Bethsheba sat in the back of the limousine with Prudence and Chris. They drove past Agadir as night fell. Then, suddenly, they saw the palace, standing in magnificent splendour in the centre of endless desert, its bleached and dusty walls like a Moorish castle.

  ‘What a magnificent place!’ Bethsheba was breathless with the impact of it. ‘So romantic!’

  ‘Talk about cultural differences,’ Chris agreed, staring at the forbidding walls.

  They swung into ancient stone gates. A vast courtyard opened out around them, fountains lilting cool water on marble, mosaic walls gleaming with palace lights under the velvet sky, guards holding guns and dogs.

  ‘Whoever he is,’ Chris murmured as the car halted, ‘he’s obviously very rich and very powerful. I’m glad we didn’t make an enemy of him.’

  Bethsheba got out of the car, trembling with nerves and excitement. Her ivory silk strapless dress clung to her slender curves. She wore a long gold silk jacket over it.

  ‘Greetings!’ A tall dark Arab in red robes appeared at the doors to welcome them. He gave a deep salaam. ‘Follow me, please.’

  Excitement quickened Bethsheba’s step as she followed him into corridors of Moorish beauty, arched hollows in walls of blue-white mosaic, fountains in other courtyards, statues of lions and Arabic script flowing on bleached stone walls.

  They swung into a final corridor. Two bare-chested Arabs in red-gold harem trousers stood guarding double doors like living art nouveau statues. The Arab leading them clapped his hands. The bare-chested Arabs swung open the double doors.

  Music filled the air. Bells, tambourines, flutes and handclaps. Dazzling colours littered the magnificent Arabic ballroom, and Bethsheba stepped in, staring, her breath caught in her throat.

  Bethsheba looked immediately for Sheikh Suliman El Khazir, but he was nowhere to be seen, and as her gold eyes moved restlessly around the room so she reeled under the dizzying impact of what she saw.

  There were rows of richly embroidered silk cushions scattered on the floor in purple, blue, red, maroon, oxblood, royal blue, bright blue, sky-blue…Incense filled the air with a sweet, spicy opiate scent, flowing from gold filigree lamps which hung from the ceiling on gold chains. The walls were ivory stone, engraved in gold with Arabic script, and the sensual ribbons were words, words she did not understand but longed to.

  ‘My God…’ she breathed, pulses leaping at the sig
ht of such barbaric luxury, ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful!’

  ‘I thought you were born in Bahrain?’ Chris said, frowning.

  ‘Yes,’ Bethesda turned in surprise, ‘but I never saw the inside of a sheikh’s palace. I was only allowed to mix with army officers’ children.’

  ‘Snobbery!’ Prudence’s beautiful nose curled. ‘Can’t stand it!’

  ‘Do you know where the word “snob” came from?’ Chris asked lazily. ‘It just means sans noblesse—without title. They used to write it next to pupils’ names at Eton. Some were titled—some not. So they wrote either noblesse or sans noblesse next to your name.’

  ‘Well, whoever this guy is,’ drawled Prudence, ‘he’s got more noblesse than he knows what to do with.’

  Suddenly, all music ceased. The doors at the far end of the ballroom were flung open. Footsteps approached, and as they were heard so people stood up, bowing deeply.

  Sheikh Suliman El Khazir strode into the ballroom in white robes, dark eyes flashing round restlessly then fixing on Bethsheba as she met his arrogant gaze, golden head lifted, unaware of her equally regal stance.

  For a second they studied each other across those bowed heads. Then a slight smile touched the hard mouth of the sheikh and he clapped his hands.

  The music began again. Everyone sat down on the rich cushions. Flutes and bells and tambourines cascaded in the air as the sheikh walked towards Bethsheba.

  ‘Good evening,’ Sheikh Suliman said in that deep, rich voice as he reached them. ‘Welcome to my palace.’

  ‘Good evening,’ Chris said, taking charge as usual. ‘Your palace is magnificent. We are honoured to be your guests tonight.’

  The sheikh inclined his head coolly, and Bethsheba noticed for the first time how very tall he was: at least four inches taller than Chris Burton, and Chris was six feet.

  ‘Is Beth to sing in here?’ Chris asked now, glancing around the room. ‘She might need a microphone to be heard above——’