‘What I wonder,’ she declared as she looked Marni up and down, then down and up again, ‘is how our father knew his son would be so difficult to please as far as women went, so he solved the problem early on, betrothing him to you.’
‘I think it was probably a joke,’ Marni said, the words popping out before she realised it was probably the wrong thing to say. But Alima was unfazed.
‘My father never joked and, believe me, having cast upwards of a dozen beautiful and intelligent women in my brother’s path over the years, I am more than ever convinced of my father’s prescience.’
‘You do rattle on,’ Gaz said to his sister, but Marni heard fondness in his voice. ‘Now, do your duty and introduce Marni around. I’ve told her she needn’t remember all the names—in fact, any of them except for Meena and Ismah, and I assume you’ve seated her near them for dinner.’
Gaz—why when he was with Marni did he think of himself this way—watched Alima lead Marni into the throng, seeing the way the fluid material of her tunic swayed about her body, noticing the strands of fine silvery hair escaping from the dark blue shawl she’d draped over her head.
His silver wraith!
His body had tightened the moment she’d stepped out of the car, and he was sorry he’d chosen to wear a suit tonight. His kandora hid far more than trousers.
A string of oaths echoed through his head. He’d brought this on himself, betrothing himself to her, so if he wanted her, and he did, he’d better organise a wedding, and soon!
‘Well chosen, brother!’ He turned to find Nimr standing beside him. ‘But you’d better secure her before my boys are old enough to challenge you. Karim is already in love with her—he talks of nothing but the soccer-playing blonde he found in the gardens.’
‘Surely he’s too young to be thinking of women,’ Gaz protested, and Nimr laughed.
‘Don’t believe it for a minute. They mature early, our boys, and didn’t we, as youngsters, believe an older woman could teach us much?’
Gaz laughed but he was looking around the room at the same time, and realised that not only were all four of his nephews included in the party—very smartly dressed in miniature suits—but Karim was right now chatting up Marni, making her laugh at something he’d said.
He’s twelve, he reminded himself as he moved away from Nimr, easing his way through the crowd, hopefully unobtrusively but heading for his fiancée nonetheless.
‘We’ll have to lead the way into dinner,’ he said when he arrived, taking Marni’s arm in a possessive grasp. ‘It’s the way things are done.’
‘Oh, but dinner won’t be for ages,’ Karim told him, ‘and there must be people you have to see.’
‘People Marni has to meet as well,’ Gaz said firmly, at the same time telling himself he couldn’t possibly be jealous of a twelve year old boy.
He was leading Marni towards Ismah’s husband when two youngish men swerved into their path—Nimr’s youngest brothers, unmarried as yet and more than a little wild. He introduced Marni and was pleased at their manners, although, as they moved away, Marni smiled and said, ‘The wild ones of the family?’
The effect of the smile left him floundering to catch up with the question, and he had to find an echo of it in his head before it made sense.
‘What makes you ask?’
Even that was a stalling tactic—he was still trying to come to grips with why a smile would stir his blood and have his body thinking about ravishment.
Marriage or distance—they were the only two options—and hadn’t he promised he wouldn’t rush her into marriage?
Well, not actually promised…
Although marriage hadn’t been an issue when he’d asked her to pretend to the betrothal!
‘They look like young men who are constantly seeking amusement—the kind that usually leads to trouble. I’ve met young men like them staying as guests at the hotel, young men with too much money and too much time on their hands, always looking for what they call fun but which often translates into something illegal.’
He heard the words but his mind was still following his body down the sex trail so he took little notice, although the word ‘hotel’ registered enough to give him the glimmer of an idea.
‘Will you give me your grandfather’s phone number? I should have asked before. I must phone him to—’
Marni giggled.
‘To ask for my hand in marriage? Oh, really, Gaz! That is so old-fashioned. Besides, he is in hospital. Nelson emailed this afternoon to say the operation will be within the next few days.’
The giggle—such an inconsequential thing—had further activated the inappropriate desire he was feeling, but the idea was even better now. Out there, in Australia, anything might happen…
‘Then we should fly out right away. You will want to be there when he has the operation and I can stay in the hotel so I don’t put your Mr Nelson out at all.’
Pale eyes looked up at him, no mirth in them now, only fear and sorrow.
‘He definitely doesn’t want me there, Gaz,’ she said softly. ‘That’s the main reason I’m over here. He’s a proud man and doesn’t want me to see him all weak and tied to tubes in the ICU, or have me around while he’s recovering. I promised him I’d stay away.’
‘But you’ll be riven with worry and concern and feel helpless because you’re so far away.’
She tried a smile but it wavered with apprehension and he wondered if the response that burned through his body might not be more than lust.
‘I’ll just have to deal with it, won’t I?’ she said, the smile getting better. ‘I promised! Besides, I’d be just as helpless there! I know he’s in the best possible hands.’
‘Ghazi, you must not monopolise your betrothed in this manner!’
Alima had appeared and before he could object, she whisked Marni away.
He’d drive her back to Tasnim’s later! At least that way they could kiss.
But wouldn’t kisses make the longing worse, the desire stronger?
Maybe putting some distance between them would be better…
Marni allowed herself to be led through the crowd, introduced to this one and that, realising Gaz had been right, she’d never remember all the names. Meena would be easy. She was very like Tasnim in looks.
‘We are full sisters,’ the pretty woman explained, ‘the daughters of our father’s third wife, the one before Ghazi’s mother.’
‘I was just thinking I’ll never remember everyone’s names and now you’re making me realise I’ll have to remember relationships as well.’
Meena touched her softly on the arm.
‘Do not worry. It will come to you in time. For the moment, it is more than enough for us all that Ghazi is happy—that he has found the right woman to love.’
The ‘love’ word had its almost predictable effect in Marni’s chest, but she was getting used to it so ignored it, reminding Meena instead that it wasn’t love but an arrangement made by her father.
‘Ah, but the old ones know,’ Meena said. ‘My marriage was arranged but when I met my husband I knew my father had been right for there was no one else in the world I could love as much.’
Intrigued by a culture so different from her own, Marni couldn’t help asking, ‘Were all your marriages arranged?’
The question was probably too personal but Meena didn’t seem to mind.
‘Not really, although when Alima was about eight she decided she was going to marry Nimr, so then our father and our uncle betrothed them. Ismah met her husband at university in America. He is from a neighbouring country and will one day rule it so our father couldn’t object to him. Tasnim, of course, just told our father she was going to marry Yusef and no one could ever argue with Tasnim.’
‘I can understand that,’ Marni put in, but if Meena heard her she didn’t show it, continuing on down or up the family tree.
‘Our other sisters, well, you’ll meet them eventually, but Zahrah is married to a Westerner, the son of o
ne of our father’s old friends and advisors, Maryam is married to her work, she is a doctor like Ghazi, and Rukan is married to another of our cousins. They were both betrothed to others but ran away to get married and our father forgave them both because they were obviously meant for each other.’
Just as Marni decided it would be impossible to remember even the sisters’ names, Alima rescued her, taking her off to meet other guests, including Ismah, a slight, plump woman with such beautiful eyes Marni could barely stop staring at her.
‘She is beautiful, yes?’ the man beside Ismah said, and Marni could only nod and smile.
‘As are you,’ Ismah said quietly, and Marni shook her head. Among these exotically beautiful women she faded into oblivion.
Gaz returned to lead her into dinner, explaining on the way that although all those present were family, the women would still sit together at one end of the table and the men at the other.
Marni smiled at him.
‘Sounds like an Aussie barbeque,’ she said. ‘The men in one group the women in another.’
‘Here it makes sense as most of the women live with their husbands, so at gatherings like this they enjoy gossiping with the other women, and the men enjoy catching up on politics or, more likely, the latest football scores and transfers.’
‘Most of the women live with their husbands?’
His turn to smile.
‘As against the old days when they would all have lived in the harem, visiting their husband in his tent, or later his palace, when invited.’
The teasing glint in his eyes made Marni’s insides flutter. What had she got herself into, and where was this going?
Had he read the questions in her eyes that he gave her hand, where it rested on his arm, a slight squeeze before abandoning her to his sisters at the women’s end of the table?
To Marni’s great relief the meal was not a banquet in the true sense of the word, with endless plates of food laid out in the middle of the table. Instead, light-footed serving women offered plates of this and that, placing small or large spoonfuls of each dish directly onto the guests’ plates.
And contrary to her impression that personal conversation was off limits in this country, she was peppered with questions about herself, her home and her family.
‘We all remember that visit to the beautiful hotel,’ Ismah told her. ‘Alima and Rukan were betrothed already, but Maryam and Meena flirted shamelessly with the young man who worked on the concierge desk, flashing their eyes at him and teasing him so he blushed whenever one of us came near, because he couldn’t really tell us apart.’
‘You flirted too,’ Meena reminded her. ‘And remember the day Zahrah went out without her abaya, in Western jeans and a T-shirt and her hair in a ponytail for everyone to see.’
The sisters laughed.
‘Oh, I remember that,’ Alima said. ‘She went to Sea World to ride on the big roller-coaster and she was so sick she had to ring the hotel and ask them to send a car to take her back there.’
‘And Father said she’d shamed the family and would never get a husband.’
‘That’s probably why he sent her to America,’ Meena said, and the women laughed, as if that had been a good thing, not a punishment.
The talk turned to other holidays, other places all the women had stayed at one time or another, London and Berlin apparently favourites with them all. Sitting listening to them, Marni realised how at ease with each other they all were, even the women married to Nimr’s brothers.
Was this normal in all families?
Not having one—not an extended one—she couldn’t judge, but their obvious closeness once again reminded her that her position was a false one, and the niggle of disquiet that rarely left her these days began to make itself felt more persistently.
‘I will drive you home.’
Gaz appeared at her side as the women left the dining room. He took her hand once again and placed it on his arm in the formal manner he had used before.
She said goodbye to the women she had met, sought out Alima to thank her for the evening, then let Gaz guide her to the door, exhaustion nipping at her heels as the tension she hadn’t realised she’d been feeling drained from her.
Pausing at the front door, she managed to get one sandal on but was having trouble with the second when Gaz knelt and slipped it on her foot.
‘Oh, no!’ she protested, not sure whether to laugh or cry, ‘that is just far too Cinderella! Is your car a pumpkin?’
He looked at her, bemused, but at least it gave her something to talk to him about, explaining the story of Cinderella and her prince.
‘They were real, these people?’ he asked, driving through night-quiet streets, the engine in the big saloon purring quietly in the background.
‘No, it’s a children’s fairy-tale,’ Marni told him. ‘It’s just that I can’t help thinking of it.’ She paused, then added quietly, ‘Probably because it’s easier to be thinking of my life right now as a fairy-tale than be worrying over deceiving nice people like your sisters and their friends.’
He had pulled the car over as she was talking and she looked around, seeing a long wall with an arched opening in it, an ornate gate protecting whatever lay behind the walls.
‘You have the photo,’ he said, turning and taking both her hands in his. ‘How is there deceit?’
‘It’s pretence—you asked me to pretend, remember, to get your sisters off your back.’
‘And it is working,’ he said, lifting her hands and kissing the backs of her fingers, one by one, so she had to struggle to keep her brain working while her body melted from something as unsexy as finger kisses. ‘So much so they are asking about the wedding—about when it will be.’
If finger kisses had melted her bones, talk of a wedding sent such heat washing through her she could barely breathe.
Had to breathe!
Had to protest.
‘But we’re doing this to give you time to get to know your job,’ she reminded him, hoping he wouldn’t hear just how shaky her voice was. ‘A wedding, even if we wanted to marry—well, the kind of fuss that would surely entail would interrupt your schedule far more than just being betrothed. It would be a terrible distraction.’
He didn’t reply, simply using his grasp on her hands to draw her closer then dropping his head to kiss her on the lips.
‘This particular distraction,’ he said a long time later, tilting her head so he could look into her eyes, ‘is interrupting my schedule more than you could ever know. If we were married there’d be one distraction less.’
She frowned at him.
‘Are you talking about sex? Is that the distraction that’s so hard to handle?’
He kissed her again, but lightly.
‘Do you not find it so?’ he teased, and just as she was about to admit she felt it, too, she remembered the virginity thing and was flooded with embarrassment.
Should she tell him now?
But how?
What would he think?
That she was frigid, or had something wrong with her?
Or decide she was pathetic, locked in adolescence, as the last man she’d dated had. Christmas cake, he’d called her, apparently a foreign insult for an older virgin, dried out the way a cake did after the twenty-fifth of December.
He’d laughed at the notion that there was anything special about virginity—not that she’d considered it that way. As far as he’d been concerned, it was nothing more than an embarrassing nuisance. Men, he’d told her, expected a woman to have had experience and be able to please a man in bed.
And that had been a man she’d thought she loved!
The thought of telling Gaz—of his reaction—made her tremble. It was one thing to think she could tell some man with whom she was having a virginity-relieving fling about it, but telling Gaz?
‘I think we’d better just stay betrothed,’ she muttered, her voice sounding like a very creaky gate in desperate need of oil.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘ARE YOU TIRED, or would you walk with me a little way?
Marni, who’d been expecting an argument, or at least further discussion, over the marriage business, was startled.
‘Walk?
‘In the oasis,’ Gaz said, waving a hand towards the gate. ‘Have you been there?’
‘I remember going past the wall on my way somewhere, but haven’t been inside it. Won’t it be dark?’
‘Wait and see,’ Gaz said. He was already opening his door, coming around to open hers and offering his hand to help her out.
He led her to the gate and unlatched it, ushering her inside onto a path between what seemed like a jungle of palm trees. The path was lit by lampposts placed at intervals, and the palms were lit from below by soft floodlights.
‘It’s like an enchanted forest,’ she whispered as they walked through shadows.
‘It has been here for thousands of years,’ Gaz explained. ‘There is a spring, and our ancestors built a series of narrow canals out from it so the palms would thrive. It is here for all our people to enjoy, and the dates are free to anyone who wishes to pick one or many.’
The soft air smelled sweet, and a slight breeze ruffled the fringed palm leaves, so it seemed as if they walked through a world apart.
‘Will you pick one?’ Marni asked, enjoying the sight of the palms growing so closely, and the little paths that led this way and that but still wondering what they were doing here, given the late hour and the marriage conversation, which seemed to have been forgotten.
‘Of course, that is why we are here.’
He held her hand and was leading her to the right then to the left, taking paths seemingly at random. Yet when he answered, she’d heard something in his voice—something that was Ghazi, not Gaz. This place must be special to him—like the desert—part of who he was…
Why?
‘Dates and camels, these have kept my people alive down through the ages,’ he said quietly, apparently answering her unspoken question. ‘The date is especially miraculous as it can be eaten fresh, or dried and kept for months while the tribes travelled across the desert. The pulp makes sweets and bread, the seeds can be ground for flour, the fibrous mass that holds the dates is used for brooms, the palm leaves for thatch. But it is the legend that brings us here tonight.’
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