Seduced by the Sultan

by Sharon Kendrick

  Yet she, more than most, had cause to.

  She had kept so much hidden from him...though at last he could understand why. Hers was not the kind of background you’d want to shout about from the rooftops—especially to a man who came from one of the oldest and proudest dynasties in the world. And he had never pressed her, had he? Arrogantly, he had breathed a sigh of relief that she hadn’t been one of those women who wanted to yank out every emotion and memory, and then analyse them to death.

  He kept his eyes fixed on her pale face. ‘I don’t know that I’m ready to say goodbye just yet. Are you?’

  Catrin blinked rapidly until she was certain that she wasn’t going to let herself down by bursting into tears, though she wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep it together. If she got out of the car now, she could make it safely back to her room and nobody but her would see her cry.

  Yet didn’t part of her want to extend this bit for as long as possible? Because she knew that this really would be the last time she would ever see Murat. He would never come into her life again after today.

  Her heart gave a little twist of pain. He had returned because he had been worried about her and had discovered much more than he’d ever bargained for. The stark differences between them had been revealed with much greater clarity than she would have chosen. But now he could turn his back on her for good, his conscience clear. He had done his duty. He had helped her mother—and now the slate was wiped perfectly clean.

  This was the last time she would ever stare into that face—a hard face which disguised his surprising kindness and even—she bit her lip—a gentleness which had made her heart want to melt. He had not judged her mother but had simply sought a practical solution to her dilemma, and for that she would be grateful to him for ever.

  Yet she wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye either. Like him, she wanted to prolong it, just a bit more. ‘We could go and have coffee if you like,’ she said.

  His dark brows knitted together. ‘In your room?’

  ‘No, not there,’ she said quickly. It was too small. Too intimate. And there was a bed there, wasn’t there? She didn’t want to be anywhere near a bed. She didn’t trust herself not to make a fool of herself one last time. What if she found herself begging him to hold her close, so that she could feel his hard body warm against hers? Maybe she might even be weak enough to have sex with him one last time. ‘There’s a little place, near here. Down by the harbour. We could go there.’

  He nodded and pressed a button so that the interconnecting glass slid open and Catrin leaned forward and gave directions to the driver.

  The light changed as they approached the quayside and she could see the bobbing of the boats in the distance. It was another reason why she had come back to work in this area. Putting her mother’s illness aside, living here was no hardship. A cheap little Welsh seaside town she’d once visited on a school trip and which she had never forgotten.

  She remembered that it had been a day when, for once, she’d felt just like any other child. She had eaten ice cream and paddled in the sea and the water had been so cold that her legs had turned blue. But she recalled her exhilaration and the sense of freedom, and she’d held onto that memory for a long, long time. The people who still came here on holiday didn’t have lots of money to spend, but Catrin still liked it here. The sea was the sea wherever you went, and she thought the small harbour was as pretty as any Murat had taken her to in Europe. It was certainly a much cheaper place to buy a cup of coffee.

  ‘Let’s leave the car up here, out of sight,’ she said as they got out into the drizzle and she pointed down the steep road towards the glitter of the waves.

  ‘Why?’ questioned Murat.

  She shrugged. ‘Because this is a small town and I don’t want people wondering what I was doing in a car like this. They might draw their own conclusions—some of them not very nice—and I’d rather they didn’t.’

  Murat reflected that this was the first time in his life when his credentials hadn’t been paraded in an attempt to obtain some reflected royal glory. He turned to look at her, noting that her skin was pale and her eyes smudged by shadows, and suddenly it felt as if an iron fist had been clamped around his heart. He wanted to cradle her and to hold her close. He wanted to kiss her hair and her eyes and her lips. But he knew that he couldn’t keep taking from her and giving nothing back.

  ‘But you’ve been ill,’ he said harshly. ‘I don’t think you should be walking anywhere.’

  ‘I’m fine. Your Dimdar worked like magic, and, besides, what would the alternative be? Are you proposing to carry me down there?’

  ‘If you like. I’d carry you in an instant, Cat,’ he said. ‘You only have to say the word.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, but she knew he meant it. Murat came from the kind of world where men were definitely men, and would scoop up a woman into their arms if the need arose. She realised that he was as much a protector as a king. And all these things made her love him more.

  And I don’t want to love him. It hurts too much to keep loving him.

  It was one of those cold September days which gave a chill foreshadowing of the winter to come. A thin wind whipped the leaves from the trees and her ponytailed hair flew behind her. As they approached the small harbour she could see the cascade of frothy white waves and hear the mournful cries of seagulls as they circled overhead.

  The café was very basic. The mugs were thick and the tea too strong. What usually sold the place to Catrin was the view, but today it was difficult to get enthusiastic about the water outside, or the clouds billowing like smoke in a gunmetal sky.

  She slid into a chair opposite Murat and wondered if he’d ever sat at a scratched Formica table before, with bottles of tomato sauce and vinegar in front of him. She watched as he tipped two small sachets of sugar into his tea, the white granules flowing like the sands of time, and she was reminded of that first time she’d ever met him when he had dipped a sugar cube into his coffee and sucked it.

  Why remember that now? she asked herself fiercely. How is it going to help if you reinforce how attractive you found him? Wrong tense. Find him. Wrong tense again. Will always find him.

  Aware of the mother and toddler at a nearby table, she spoke in a low voice. ‘I want to thank—’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted, his voice just as low. ‘Please don’t. You’ve thanked me enough and we’ve said everything I want to say on that particular subject. Now, all we can do is pray that the treatment works. We have very little time left, Cat, and I don’t want to waste a second of it. Not when I suspect that you have spent more years than anyone should, worrying about your mother.’

  His remarks were thoughtful and perceptive, but they didn’t really help. It wasn’t going to aid her own recovery if she carried on thinking of him as her knight in shining armour. So think of the reality. Think what he’s been doing since last time you saw him.

  ‘So how have you been?’ she said. ‘During your time back in Qurhah?’

  He gave a faint smile. ‘Mostly good. There is relative peace in the region at the moment and our exports are up. I’m heralding a drive to build new schools in the east of the kingdom.’

  ‘That’s all very commendable, Murat,’ she said quietly. ‘But that wasn’t what I meant.’

  ‘No.’ There was a pause. ‘I guess it wasn’t.’

  ‘How is the hunt for a suitable bride going?’ she questioned brightly. ‘Has any particular candidate caught your eye?’

  ‘Cat, don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’ She tilted her head to one side and looked at him quizzically. ‘Don’t face facts? Don’t square up to the truth of what’s really happening?’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss it. Especially not with you.’

  ‘But I do,’ she persisted. ‘I really do. Think of it as an exercise in le
tting go. It helps me realise what your real life is like, rather than allowing myself to construct fantasies about what it might have been like. Have you...’ She stirred her tea, even though it contained no sugar. ‘Have you seen many women?’

  He leaned back in his chair. ‘Not many. Some.’

  ‘And those you have seen, what of them? Were their feet too big for the glass slipper, or was there some other reason why they wouldn’t make a suitable royal bride?’

  He gave the briefest of smiles before a hard look entered his eyes and then he thought, Damn you, Cat. Did she think he was finding this easy? Did she? ‘One of the problems is that I require a virgin, but unfortunately many of these princesses are not. Some of them have been away to school in Europe and America, and have entered into relationships with other men.’

  Catrin put her mug down on the table with a clatter. ‘I can’t believe you just said that. All these years you’ve steadily been working your way through scores of beautiful women. You’ve probably got more notches on your bedpost than the average Hollywood stud, yet you expect your future bride to behave as if we’re still living in the Middle Ages. Do you have any idea how much of a hypocrite you sound?’

  ‘I am not judging these women for the sake of judging them,’ he bit out. ‘But it is my duty to marry a virgin princess! That is what is decreed in the Qurhahian statute, as it has always been decreed.’

  ‘But times change, and so do people. In every way. Think about it, Murat.’ Pushing the mug out of the way, she leaned forward, her elbows resting on the Formica table. ‘Once, your country relied solely on oil for energy, you exported it and you used it, you told me that yourself. But now you’ve expanded into wind farms and you said that you’re investing in solar energy as well.’

  ‘This much is true,’ he conceded.

  ‘Years ago, you would have relied on messengers riding on horseback across the desert to relay news but now you use the Internet and telephones, just like everyone else. I remember you telling me about that guy you brought in to shake up Qurhah’s international profile—the one who ended up marrying your sister.’

  ‘Gabe Steel,’ he said automatically.

  ‘That’s right. And you told me what a brilliant job he did. But hasn’t it occurred to you that you’ve modernised everything except the man at the top—you? You’ve moved with the times and yet you’re sticking to some outdated law which says that you’ve got to marry a virgin, when hardly anyone is these days.’

  ‘But you were,’ he said suddenly. ‘You were.’

  His words swiftly brought her to her senses and Catrin’s mouth closed, her objections fizzling away to nothing as she wondered what on earth she was trying to do here. Was she trying to argue her corner in some mistaken belief that Murat would consider taking her as a bride? Did she really think that was ever going to happen—especially now, when he’d just seen what dodgy genes she had?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s none of my business. You must marry who you choose.’

  He leaned forward himself, mirroring her own elbowed pose, so that their faces were close as they looked at one another across the table.

  ‘But if I could choose with my heart rather than with my head, then I would choose you, Cat,’ he said softly. ‘Because you are the woman I love.’

  Her heart gave a hard and painful beat. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I must. I need you to understand,’ he said. ‘No matter what happens, I need you to know what you mean to me.’

  ‘Murat...’

  ‘Because after everything that has happened, I owe you this much,’ he said, then took a deep breath. ‘You captivated me from the first moment I set eyes on you. You fulfilled every fantasy I’d ever had. You were beautiful and spirited and, yes, you were a virgin, too—and I will not lie when I tell you how much that meant to me, once I’d got over my initial shock. So I brought you back to London with me, not thinking beyond the first month or even the first week.’

  ‘Neither was I,’ she whispered.

  He lifted his fingertips to her face, running them down over her cheek and Catrin could do nothing to stop herself from shivering beneath his touch.

  ‘I had never lived with a woman before you,’ he said. ‘And I suppose if I’m being really honest maybe I was trying it out for size. Seeing what it was like to share your life with someone.’

  Like test-driving a new car, thought Catrin, but she didn’t say anything.

  ‘And then you changed,’ he said. ‘Maybe that was inevitable. I don’t know. You became more...polished. It was like a transformation. You fitted into my life so well. More than you should have done. Living with you was easy, maybe too easy, and I guess we were just drifting along.’

  ‘And then I found out about your secret courtship.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And you were furious—rightly so. And that was when you stopped being the textbook mistress. You stopped being the smooth, unflappable Cat I had become used to. You became the Cat I had fallen for all that time ago. Fiery Cat. Outspoken Cat. You showed me your claws, Cat. You scratched me and drew blood, and I...I found myself falling in love with you.’

  Catrin pulled away, sitting back and locking her trembling fingers together, because this was terrible. Terrible and wonderful all at the same time, because it was all too late. ‘Why on earth are you telling me all this?’ she whispered. ‘And why now?’

  ‘Because I want you to know how I feel about you,’ he said. ‘I need you to know that I love you. Very much. I love you in a way I hadn’t thought myself capable of. But I am. And I do.’

  She received the words in disbelieving silence, wondering if she dared tell him that she felt exactly the same way. Or had he guessed a long time ago that a woman would never behave as she had behaved unless she also loved?

  But she was cautious. He had hurt her before and he was capable of still hurting her. ‘What is it you’re saying?’ she questioned boldly. ‘That we have some kind of future together?’

  He shook his head and swallowed. ‘Not the kind of future which another man will one day be able to offer you,’ he said, and now his face looked as if it had been carved from some cold, dark stone. ‘I can’t marry you, Cat, no matter how much I might wish that I could. And anyway, it is all academic now. Because my advisors in Qurhah have informed me...’ there was a pause while he seemed to be struggling to find the right words ‘...have informed me that a perfect bride has at last been found. Apparently, she fulfils all the criteria.’

  Catrin was grateful that she hadn’t eaten, because for one brief moment she honestly thought she might throw up. And that thought was quickly followed by the desire to punch him. How dared he raise her hopes like that and then smash them down again? She wanted to beat her fists hard against his chest and demand to know whether he took some kind of perverse pleasure from engaging in a sadistic form of torture...

  But she quashed that instinct and relied instead on the cool logic she had become so good at. He was being honest, that was all. She couldn’t complain when he didn’t tell her what was going on his life and then moan when he did, just because she didn’t like it.

  He had cared for her when she’d been sick. He had provided her mother with a bail-out package and sent her to an expensive clinic in Arizona. He had let down his guard enough to tell her that he loved her and she knew him well enough to recognise that such an admission would not have come easily. He was a good man, not a bad man. A man who was governed by a strong sense of duty and doing the right thing for the country he served.

  She couldn’t blame him for that, just because she didn’t agree with it. Just because her heart felt as if he had taken a sledgehammer to it and smashed it into a thousand little pieces.

  ‘I think you’ll understand if I don’t show any interest in hearing about this perfect bride of yours,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’m qu
ite modern enough to do that.’

  Pushing back her chair, she got to her feet, aware that the mother of the toddler was still looking at them. ‘We’ve said all there is to say, Murat. I don’t think there’s any point in prolonging this, do you?’

  She walked out of the café without a backward glance but it seemed that he wasn’t letting go of her that easily. Outside, he caught her by the arm and she whirled around, the soft rain on her face mingling with the tears she couldn’t hold back any longer.

  ‘What is it you want from me?’ she demanded brokenly.

  ‘You know the answer to that. I want you.’

  ‘Well, you can’t have me. Not in the way you mean. I won’t be your mistress any more. I...can’t. It’s over, Murat, so leave me alone. Please. Promise me that much at least.’

  There was a long silence, broken only by the cawing sound of distant seagulls. She thought his face looked almost grey now. That it matched the sky and the sea and her heart.

  ‘I promise,’ he said.

  It was only when she heard the break in his voice that she realised her own heartache was mirrored in his eyes. And it came as something of a shock to realise that Murat was struggling to hold onto his own composure.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MURAT PACED THROUGH the room, oblivious to the gleam of gold or subtle scent of sandalwood, or to the hawk-faced portrait of his great-great-grandfather, which glowered down from above the mighty oak desk. He was oblivious to everything except the cold and heavy feeling in his heart.

  There was a tap on the door and he knew he could no longer ignore his advisor. For wasn’t it the mark of a coward to hide from something he could not bear to face?

  ‘Come!’ he said, and the huge door opened to admit Bakri, the trusted emissary who had been with him since his friend Suleiman had left to make himself a fortune.