by Penny Jordan
'Very wise,' he told her coolly, as though he had guessed what she was thinking.
'Stay here,' he ordered her. 'Do not leave the tent.'
'Where are you going?' Katrina demanded wildly as he started to walk away from her.
Turning round, he told her smoothly. 'To my sleeping quarters to remove my soiled clothes.'
Oh! Katrina felt herself begin to blush.
'Oh, your cuts,' she remembered with guilt. 'Shouldn't you have them attended to?'
He shrugged carelessly. 'They are mere scratches, that is all, and will heal quickly enough.'
Katrina suddenly remembered something. 'Why was it Sulimen who lost the fight when you were the one who was injured?' she asked him curiously.
'The aim is not to carve slices from one's opponent, but to disarm him,' he told her dispassionately.
As he turned away again she looked towards the exit.
'There are two hundred miles of empty desert between here and Zuran City.'
The clinically detached words sent a tingle of apprehensive hostility and despair zinging over her skin. The desert was its own kind of prison—a guard designed by nature to prevent her from escaping him, and he of course knew that. Did he also know how afraid she had been when Sulimen had claimed her as his trophy? How relieved she had been when he had stepped in? How complex and disquieting the tangled mass of her own emotions was? Her mouth compressed. She sincerely hoped not! He was already making her feel far more emotionally vulnerable than she knew was wise.
Determinedly she turned round to confront him. 'You won't get away with this, you know. Richard will alert the authorities and—'
'We are in the empty quarter—beyond the reach of both your lover and the authorities,' he replied chillingly.
'Richard is my boss, not my lover.' Katrina's face burned as she saw the way he was looking at her.
'So why else would you be at the oasis, together and alone? Though I'm not surprised that you should deny your relationship with him after the way he has abandoned you.'
'He obviously thought it made good sense for him to go for help rather than for both of us to be taken hostage,' Katrina returned shortly.
' "Good sense"? Oh, of course, you are European!' he taunted her. 'Here in the desert it is not "good sense". 'We are driven by our interactions with your sex, especially when we are bound to a woman, emotionally committed to them. But then, of course, your culture does not consider such things important, does it? I would rather cut out my own heart than abandon the woman who held it to any kind of discomfort or danger.'
Something, in his voice was raising goose-bumps on Katrina's skin and a dangerous burning sensation at the backs of her eyes. The intimate and intense images his words were conjuring for her were intruding on dreams she held so private and secret that just the sound of his voice was enough to bring them to the front of her mind. Hadn't she always longed for such a man and such a love and hadn't she told herself that she was hungering for something that did not exist? Hadn't she strived to make herself put aside such foolishness and to concentrate instead on the realities of life?
Swallowing hard against the ball of emotion blocking her throat, she turned away from him.
'Go if you wish,' she heard him say carelessly from behind her. 'If Sulimen does not take you, then the desert most surely will.'
Katrina made no response. How could she when she knew that he was speaking the truth?
Although she had her back to him, disconcertingly she knew immediately when he had left the living area of the pavilion and gone through to his sleeping quarters.
The rush of adrenalin that had given her the courage to speak so challengingly to him had gone and she felt weak and shaky. The pavilion and its owner were her prison and her guard, but they were also her place of safety and her protection, she acknowledged.
But she must not allow herself to forget just what he was! She could remember reading somewhere of the intense and dangerous emotional dependence a captive could end up having on his or her captor. She must not let that happen to her.
Because he had kissed her? Just because he had used her? Her head had begun to ache and she was beginning to feel slightly sick on the heavy mixture of adrenalin and anxiety unleavened by anything else.
She paced the soft carpet of the pavilion, checking and tensing at every alien sound, but she was still caught off guard when she turned round and saw that Xander had padded soft-footed into the room and was standing watching her.
He was wearing a clean soft white tunic that he was still fastening, his feet and head bare. In the lamplight she could see the golden gleam of his chest through the soft mesh of fine dark hair.
A feeling she couldn't control exploded deep down inside her body, releasing an ache so shocking and intimate that it made her catch her breath on a betraying indrawn rattle.
His hair was damp and as he walked across the carpet towards her he brought with him the smell of clean skin and the subtle cologne she was already associating with him. Her heart did a neat double somersault inside her body and then just in case she had not got the message, it took a high dive on a trapeze that left her feeling as though it had somehow become lodged in her throat.
He was making her feel uncomfortable and very aware of the difference between his clean, fresh appearance and her own tired stickiness. But even without that he was making her feel uncomfortable, full stop, Katrina acknowledged mutely. She was trying desperately to drag her traitorous gaze away from the dark hand casually fastening the robe buttons and concealing from her the matt satin gold of his bare flesh.
In an attempt to cover what she was feeling she demanded sharply, 'Just how long do you plan to keep me here?'
He shot her a look of cold arrogance. 'For as long as I have to!'
She was finding it difficult to swallow. 'What… what will you do?' Could he hear the nervousness in her voice?
He gave her a look of narrow-eyed scrutiny and then questioned mockingly, 'Do?'
'Yes. I mean—' She had to stop speaking to swallow again. 'I mean, how will you let the expedition know that—?'
'You ask far too many questions! There is a saying, isn't there, in your country about curiosity?'
'About curiosity killing the cat, you mean?' Katrina managed to croak.
'In your shoes I should concern myself more with questioning how willing your friends are to buy your freedom and at what price than how I intend to go about informing them of your whereabouts.'
Katrina could feel the panic biting into her, but she refused to give in to it. Her parents' death had forced her into self-reliance at a young age and the habit of depending on herself and facing up to sometimes very unpleasant truths and realities was one she had forced herself to adopt.
And right now there was a very unpleasant question she had to have an answer to. Moistening her over-dry lips, she pressed him huskily, 'And if my…if the company cannot pay the ransom demand?'
There was a small pause and a flash of something she couldn't interpret in his eyes before he said softly, 'Then in that case I shall have to take my goods to a wider market.' When she looked blankly at him he derided her, 'Who else will pay handsomely for a young attractive woman?'
Katrina's eyes widened as she stared at him in appalled anxiety. He couldn't mean what he was saying. Could he?
Without another word he pulled on his Tuareg headdress, slid his feet into a pair of sandals and, pulling back the heavy curtain, stepped out of the tent.
She was alone! He had gone! She could simply walk out if she wished. But walk out to what? She was pretty sure that a group of men such as these, bound together by their illegal activities, would post guards on their camp. If she tried to leave she would suffer the ignominy of being forcibly brought back, and even if she should succeed in escaping, she knew she could not possibly walk back to Zuran City. No, she had no option other than to wait tamely here, for him and whatever fate he chose to impose on her. And of course he knew that!
Supposing he himself should decide that he found her desirable? Her heart thumped heavily against her ribs, and a frisson of sensation that shamingly had nothing whatsoever to do with either fear or outrage stroked feather touches of liquid and dangerous excitement over her.
His dishonesty must obviously pay him well, she decided cynically, at least if the interior of the pavilion and its furnishings were anything to go by.
The carpets covering the floor and 'walls' were exquisitely worked and far superior to anything she had seen in the shops she had visited. She touched one of them tentatively, stroking her fingertip along one of the branches and then down the thick trunk of its richly hued tree of life. The silky threads felt as warm as though they were a living, breathing entity. If she closed her eyes she could almost imagine…
Her face was on fire as she snatched her hand back from the carpet as though she had been burned. The carved and gilded raised divan was draped with something dark and soft, jewel-coloured velvet cushions piled on top of it. The flickering oil lamps cast mysterious shadows, which echoed the sensual richness of the fabrics. A discarded lute-like instrument lay on the floor to one side of the divan, and behind them she could see a pile of leather-bound books.
Automatically she went over to them and picked one of them up. Its title was picked out in gold leaf, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam… A book of poetry. It seemed out of character somehow. She put the book back and sat down on one of the cushions. Her head was still aching and she felt both physically and emotionally exhausted. Tiredly she closed her eyes.
Pensively Xander picked his way through the tents towards his own, pausing to check on the mare he had been riding earlier. When she saw him she tossed her head and pushed her nose into his arm, begging for the tidbit he always gave her. The boy whom he paid to keep an eye on her sprang up from where he had been lying several feet away from her and then settled down again as he recognised him.
Katrina's challenge to him about his European inheritance had rubbed against a raw place in his emotional make-up. His mother had been loved and respected by all of his Zurani family, with the exception of Nazir and Nazir's late father. And, according to his half-brother, his mother had happily embraced the way of life of her husband. She had loved the desert and its people, as he did himself, but she had not been totally and completely desert blood, bone and sinew, just as he wasn't himself. His father had chosen to have him educated in Europe, wanting him to experience his European cultural inheritance, and to keep the promise he had made to his dying wife, but Xander had never forgotten overhearing a conversation between his father and the British government official who had undertaken to escort him to his new school in England.
'The thing is that the boy is neither fish nor fowl, really…' the diplomat had announced critically, or so it had seemed to Xander's ears at that time.
And the diplomat had spoken the truth, Xander acknowledged bleakly now. Whilst the greatest part of him would always belong here in the desert, there was another part of him that felt most fulfilled when he was involved in the cut and thrust of diplomacy in Washington and London and Paris, and the work he did promoting Zuran. He had grown up surrounded by the love of his Zurani relatives, yes, but at the same time he had been aware that he was different from them. He was not European, but neither was he totally Zurani either!
And because of that, coupled no doubt with the loss of his mother, he carried with him the secret, guarded burden of his own inner sense of isolation.
But somehow Katrina had breached his defences and touched the darkness buried deep within his own soul. And because of that more than anything else he wanted her out of his life!
After all, whilst as a child he had seen his mixed heritage as a source of confusion and anxiety, as an adult he had learned to view it in a much more positive light and to use it for the benefit of others. But, even so, he was still very much aware that in some people's eyes his mixed heritage made him an object of their contempt.
With his elder half-brother's blessing he had worked tirelessly to promote better relations between his country and the rest of the world, and indeed he had been honoured for the work he had done by the Ruling Council by being appointed as a Special Envoy. It was a scheme he had personally advocated and set up involving a student exchange between Middle Eastern and European students so that each might better understand the other, and had been so highly acclaimed that there was talk of his name being put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize.
But right now his emotions were turbulent rather than peaceful! And all because of Katrina Blake! Of all the complications and problems he could have envisaged that might jeopardise his carefully made plans, the unexpected and unwanted presence of Katrina Blake was surely the last one he could have logically expected. It was certainly the last one he wanted, he acknowledged savagely. And definitely the last one he had been prepared for! She was a danger, both to him and to herself! By rights, surely the situation she was in should have caused her to be struck dumb with fear, not bombarding him with questions. And certainly not making her observations and information about him common knowledge. Potentially she could ruin everything! She was a liability he could not afford to have, here where she could threaten and unwittingly sabotage his own secret mission. But El Khalid had given the edict that no one was to leave the camp. Otherwise he could have driven her safely out of the way, radioed ahead and got a car and a driver to pick her up and take her back to her friends—and her laggardly cowardly lover—and then been left unencumbered to return here to do what he had come here to do.
Instead of which…
He should have left her to fate and to Sulimen, he decided bitterly. Reluctantly he found himself acknowledging that she had spirit and courage. And she had a mouth that smelled of scented damask roses and tasted of honey-drenched almonds. Her body was as slender as a young gazelle's and her eyes…
He wrenched his thoughts back under control. His half-brother's wife had introduced any number of suitable young women to him as potential brides but none of them had interested him. They had been too sweet, too docile, too lacking in spirit. Soft, tame doves, who would flutter to any man's hand, where something in him craved a little of the proud independence, the desert wildness of the she falcon, who would only allow herself to be tamed by one man—and even then only on her own terms.
A woman who would melt into his arms in a sweetly wild passion, which would meet and match his own fiercely strong male hunger for her. A woman who would give herself to him body and soul and who would demand from him in return all that there was of him. A woman who would race him neck and neck across the desert sands and who would place her head upon his lap whilst he played music for her and read her the sweetest and most tender of love poems. A woman who was all that he had been told his own mother had been and yet who at the same time was individually and uniquely herself.
He had long ago decided that such a woman could not and did not exist, outside his own imagination, and he still thought that, he told himself fiercely. Katrina Blake certainly wasn't such a woman. How could she be?
And more importantly by far: how could he be wasting time thinking about her when his thoughts and his energies should be focused on much more important matters? He was as sure as he could be that the important personage El Khalid had spoken of had to be Nazir.
Even though he had tried discreetly to persuade El Khalid to be more specific about when he was expecting the important person to arrive, the rebel leader had insisted that a definite time had not yet been arranged, and Xander had been reluctant to push El Khalid too hard for information in case he began to suspect his motives.
Nazir could not afford to delay too long. The celebration of the country's National Day was only five days away, after all. And Nazir certainly would not welcome Katrina's presence within the camp—a woman who, if she chanced to see him, could potentially betray him if she was returned to her own people. Indeed, from Nazir's point of view
it would be far simpler and safer if she did not return!
The smell of cooking food reminded him that he had not had anything to eat. Going over to the communal fire, he helped himself to a plate of lamb stew from the pot and then picked up some of the flat unleavened bread.
CHAPTER THREE
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The first thing Xander saw when he swept aside the heavy curtain and walked into the pavilion was Katrina, lying fast asleep on one of the cushions, her face pale with exhaustion and her lashes lying in delicately curled twin black semi-circles against her skin.
He started to frown. Her hair, which had been caught back, had started to escape and several tendrils clung to the exposed curve of her throat. Such a pretty colour couldn't possibly be natural, Xander decided contemptuously, and would no doubt be as false as everything else about her, right down to the lie she had told him about being forced to come to the oasis.
His frown deepened. If she continued to sleep lying the way she was she would end up with cramped muscles and a stiff neck. He put the food he was carrying down on the table and went over to her, hunkering down beside her.
His mother had been very pale skinned and fair-haired, which was no doubt why his own skin was warmly golden rather than teak brown. His mother had loved his father passionately and he her, at least according to his half-brother, and he had no reason to doubt him.
The angle of Katrina's sleeping body revealed the softly rounded curves of her breasts beneath the short-sleeved round-necked shirt she was wearing. He could see where the fabric of her shirt pulled slightly to reveal the soft thrust of her nipples. His stomach muscles contracted sharply, the pressure of his fierce attempt to quell his body's fierce surging reaction to her causing the air to squeeze out of his lungs.
He had seen plenty of nubile young women dressed far more revealingly and provocatively—and not just on the streets of the European cities he had visited—without ever feeling even the slightest twinge of sexual reaction, and it both disturbed and infuriated him that he should be so immediately and intensely aroused now and by a woman he had no business allowing himself to feel such a physical reaction to.