Summer Sheikhs: Sheikh's Betrayal / Breaking the Sheikh's Rules / Innocent in the Sheikh's Harem

Chapter Nine

THE moonlight coming through the fan of coloured glass over the door threw shadows of red, blue and green onto her face as Desi pulled open the door and stepped out onto the balcony. All was still. Moonlight bathed the courtyard, was reflected from the smooth surface of the pool below, bright against the black water, shimmering a little as wind dusted across its surface. The tree rustled, touched by the same soft wind.

A sleepy bird asked the time. A night insect clicked and buzzed in the tumbled greenery.

The wind pressed the silk of her nightshirt against her body, the moon outlining in white gold everything the wind revealed. Wind and Moon conspiring in the revelation of beauty.

No wonder the pagans worshipped them, he thought, when they grant such favours as this.

She shivered, as if sensing his presence, but did not turn to the shadows where he stood waiting.

He had known she would come. True desire would always draw the desired. Desirée. The nightingale sang for the rose…the rose gave up her perfume to the night.

The moon rode fat and heavy in the sky, a few days to the full. Desi leaned on the parapet and looked up to where the dome glowed purple. The palace looked so different in moonlight. Mysterious, its beauty shadowed.

She had loved him so much. She had forgotten just how much. Made herself forget. But he had not killed her love. No, her love had survived that brutality. She had had to kill it by her own hand. Deliberately, so as to be able to live. It was the only way she knew to survive.

Or believed she had killed it. Tonight she understood that her love was a river driven underground, but no less a raging torrent for being secret. Now it flooded up from the fertile earth of her being, smashing its way into the light, gaining strength from the years of being suppressed.

Hot tears stung her eyes. ‘Salah,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Salah.’

And in that breath he was there, hard and real, his strong arms wrapping her in a sudden, fierce embrace against his naked chest.

‘I knew you would come,’ he growled, and even as she protested, his lips came down hard and possessive on hers. He kissed her until her protest was a moan of deliverance, until the hand that pressed against him melted into submission against his chest, moved up around his neck. Then he swept her up in his arms and carried her back through the doorway to the tumbled bed.

He laid her down among the tossed sheets, but did not take his mouth from hers for a moment. With one hand he tore off the sarong that was the only garment he wore, releasing his hot, hard flesh to press against her thigh as he flung himself against the length of her.

He was consumed with need. He was a fool, but this had been inevitable from the moment he saw her. Her power over him had only increased with time and absence, though he had believed it would be otherwise. Now memory was conspiring with her beautiful sensuality to bring him down.

But at least he would take her with him: she, too, was lost…

Never had she met such ferocity in a kiss. His lips devoured her, setting fire to her blood. He had laid her on the bed and stretched his long body beside her, and still his mouth did not let her go.

One hand caressed and held her throat, pushed at the silk collar, the heat of flesh on flesh. Then there was the high shriek of a tear, and cool air breathed over her breast, for a moment before the fire of his hand clasped her and stroked her.

Her flesh was scorched by the burning need in his touch. Her body arced under his kiss and lifted hungrily against the hungry palm enclosing her breast.

His hand slipped from her breast then, moved against her back, her stomach, her hip, discovering and defining at the same time. Then his hand moved to her thigh, and he cupped her sex with ferocious possession. She melted as if that statement of ownership alone would be enough to bring her to the peak.

He began to stroke her, his fingers hot and strong and knowing, and her body lifted wildly to the pleasure of his touch. She whimpered with pleasure and yearning, the sounds he remembered, and still he did not lift his hungry mouth, but drank in those little mews like wine.

She opened her mouth wider then, as pleasure climbed in her, and he thrust his tongue into the warm hollow, till the double assault left her sobbing with pleasure.

His mouth tore away from hers, and he lifted his head, and looked down into her face for one long, tortured moment before his mouth found hers again, plunging, hungry, devouring.

She was aflame, melted, an inferno of need. A fire of desire she hadn’t known existed roared up in her, consuming thought, reason, everything except the fact that he was there and she needed him.

His body was hard and urgent against her, as if with the need of years, and her hand found and encircled the hard, seeking flesh, and his groan shivered along her nerves to send her joy a notch higher.

Still the silk of her shirt thwarted his intent. He lifted away from her, grasped the fabric in two hands and ripped it again and again until it parted for him from top to bottom.

She lay with her body exposed now in the soft lamplight, exposed to the fire of his gaze, her throat arched and inviting as she looked up at him. His eyes ran greedily over the perfection of her, painted with the golden glow—hair, eyes, mouth, breasts, waist, hips, sex, thighs, ankles…sex.

He drew her against him then, the whole length of her bare skin aligned with his, and his arms wrapped her. Her face pressed into the hollow of his shoulder as his hand curved behind and between her thighs. Gently his fingers slipped into the moist depths that waited for him.

He stroked the delicate lips while her moist breath panted against his throat in little pleasured moans. His touch was sure, as if he had known her body intimately for ten years, or as if it had been waiting for this moment all that time. In what seemed like seconds she lifted against his expert touch, crying and sighing, a sound he remembered as if from yesterday.

She mewed and slid down from the peak, and then he drew away from her. Then his hand clasped her thigh, lifted her leg up, and his body shifted against her and, with a thrust that made her cry out, he pushed his way home at last.

He filled her to bursting. She cried out, arching into a pleasure that she had not experienced in ten long years. ‘Salah!’ she cried, in a voice he remembered, and a groan was torn from his own throat.

His body thrust again and again into the hot nest of her, and with each thrust they cried out together. His hand cupped her neck, so that they looked into each other’s eyes. She stroked his strong chest, his arms, greedily, hungry for the feel of his skin, and every caress drove him higher.

‘How I have waited for this!’ he cried then, gazing into her eyes, then down at the place where their bodies met, and his look held such passionate hunger that her pleasure began to peak in an overwhelming burst and she sobbed with too much pleasure.

It was too much for them both. The pitch of their joy, and their need, was overwhelming. He grunted, pushed in again and again, and as she melted into powerful, sobbing release, his head lifted, his neck arched up, his body swelled harder, made a convulsive thrust, and then he cried out with her, a long, involuntary sound that was half weeping, half joy, and fell down against her.

Desi awoke to shaded sunlight and lay for a moment in a mood of lazy well-being, wondering why it should be so. Behind her head the breeze blew in through the wooden slats shading the window, cool and fresh. As she yawned and stretched a muscle protested, and she remembered what had happened in the night. A smile played over her lips and she turned her head.

The bed beside her was empty. It was late, and he had said he had work today. She was not sorry. She needed time to think.

Ten years. She stretched like a cat, feeling that her arteries carried warm honey instead of blood from her heart to her body. Ten long years since she had felt this magic in her limbs.

He wants to marry Sami.

Her heart contracted at the thought, withdrawing the honey from her muscles, and Desi flung herself to her feet. What had she done? What kind of fool was she?

Sami was right. Salah had never got over her. The thought touched her in some deep part of herself that she was afraid to look at more closely.

She hadn’t got over Salah, either, that much was obvious. It might have been better if she had had some suspicion that that was the case, Desi reflected. She had been totally unprepared for the onslaught of his feelings, and her own. And she had fallen at the first fence.

Closure. If Salah now felt he had closure, she had done Sami no good at all. Instead of putting up a roadblock, she had only paved his way to marriage with her friend.

And as for her—what grief had she stored up for herself?

Breakfast was served to her in her suite, where she sat on cushions at a low table, beside a window open onto the fountain. Salah, Fatima told her, had arranged for one of the chauffeurs to take her on a tour of the city if she wished.

Desi spent a restless day, wandering through mosques and gardens, around the magnificent tomb and gardens of a thirteenth-century Barakati poet. It was all beautiful and impressive: soaring domes, exquisite mosaic and delicate stone arabesques, but Desi could take it in with only half her awareness. She kept thinking about what had happened last night, and what might be going to happen tonight.

Was once enough to give Salah the closure he was looking for? How could she bear to be with him for so many days and nights, with this bottomless need assailing her, if he no longer wanted her?

Another bout of the heartbreak she’d suffered ten years ago would kill her.

In the late afternoon, as she got into the car after a visit to a small, breathtakingly ancient mosque, her phone beeped with a text. Sami, just waking up in Vancouver.

How RU? What’s happening? Talk to me!

OK. Nothing to report, lied Desi, who just could not talk about what had happened. Sightseeing in city today, with guide. Leaving 2morrow 4 site.

Who is guide? Sami wanted to know.

Today, Faraj. Tomorrow, Salah. TRIP TAKES 5 DAYS ACROSS DESERT!!! WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN ME?

OMG! I had no idea. Vry sry but at least will give u lots of time to work your magic! Car will be air conditioned, LOL.

It’s not the heat, it’s the COMPANY!

ROFLMAO. Good luck. U know I wish u every success…

That was, oddly enough, the first time it occurred to her that if, for reasons of his own, Salah really was set on marrying Sami, he would not be very happy if she, Desi, managed to sabotage his plans. If she succeeded in getting permission for Sami to marry Farid from Khaled al Khouri against Salah’s wishes, five days in his company on the way to the site would be nothing compared to five days in his company on the return…

She could only cross that bridge when she came to it.

She arrived back at the palace at the end of the day sunburnt, tired and hungry, and desperate to see Salah again. Desperate to know that something had been awakened in him by their lovemaking.

‘His Excellency not come. All meeting very hard all,’ Fatima said. ‘He say tomorrow come up at fajr, breakfast very quick. You live after fajr. In summer go early!’

‘Get up at fajr?’

Fatima shook her head with her inability to translate the word. Thinking it must be a number, Desi held up fingers. ‘Seven o’clock? Six? Eight?’

Fatima, too, began to use sign language. She looked up and moved her hands in a broad arc. ‘Sky night, not sun. Sun—’ She stretched one arm out to indicate the horizon and wiggled her fingers.

‘Sunrise? Get up with the sun?’

Fatima shook her head vigorously. ‘Before sun! Fajr. Muezzin!’

Muezzin, she remembered, meant the call to prayer. The first call to prayer came when the world was still dark. So they would set out before daybreak.

That entailed no particular hardship for Desi, who might not wake up for less than ten thousand dollars, but who, when she did so, was often required in Makeup while the sky was still black.

But it was difficult to wait so long to see Salah. The more so as she suspected he was deliberately avoiding her. She would like to know why. Because he feared his own reactions, feared to be tempted again? Because he was feeling guilty about what had happened?

Or, worst—because once was enough, and now he would find it a burden to be with her?

Desi felt confused, at odds with herself. What did it mean, that she still wanted Salah, in spite of everything? That the sexual bond was as powerful now—more powerful, perhaps, with maturity—after ten years of thinking she hated him?

Why had she come here, and stirred up this hornet’s nest?

She ate alone, listening as the evening muezzin made his call, turned down Fatima’s invitation to watch television, and went to bed early. She was still jetlagged, and dawn would come early.

She phoned Sami, and was relieved when she got her friend’s voicemail.

‘It’s me. We’re leaving tomorrow at first light, and apparently there’s no coverage in the desert without a satellite phone,’ Desi said. ‘So I’ll be incommunicado for a few days. I know you wish me luck.’

She was restless. She read for a little, then knelt up on the bed, turned out the lamp, opened the wooden jalousie, and rested her elbows on the window sill, gazing out on the silent courtyard and the stars.

If only she could get a sense of where she was headed! But the future was as black and impenetrable as the sky. She felt nothing—no sense of impending doom anymore, no promise of release. Only an intense, unbearable yearning for his presence. His arms, his mouth, his body. Please, please, let him come to me…

After a while she slipped down into bed. She didn’t notice when sleep came.

She woke suddenly. Through the open window above her bed she saw stars in a clear black sky. A cooling breeze blew in over her, shaking the wooden jalousie, but that sound was not what had awakened her.

She leaned up and put her hand out to the lamp. Before she could turn it on, he was there, kneeling beside the bed.

‘Desi.’ His voice was hoarse with the struggle against longing. ‘Deezee.’

She reached for him, and in the next moment his body was hot against hers and she was drowning.

Chapter Ten

THE sun flamed up in the sky on the right, a perfect circle of burning fury that promised the greater ferocity to come, and the grey line of the mountains’ shadow rushed towards them, chased by golden sand.

‘That’s quite a vista,’ Desi murmured. It was a dizzying view all the way to white-topped Mount Shir, brooding high above the foothills like the lion it was named for.

Salah glanced at her, and away again. She looked like what she was—a beautiful woman who had known passion in the night. And he realized, from the change he saw in her, that it had been a long time since she had experienced the kind of lovemaking he had given her. Her skin had a glow that had not been there before; her eyes were soft with remembered pleasure, her mouth was swollen with the memory of kisses.

His kisses.

He felt a burst of masculine satisfaction. That was the measure of a man, or one of them: to give his woman true pleasure—so that afterwards she was sweet, like honey. His own body ached and sang with the thought of her sweetness, and for him, too, it had been lovemaking like nothing he had known for ten years.

‘I told you once that you would like it,’ he said, but he was not talking about Mount Shir.

Then he heard his own thoughts—his woman. But she was not his woman, not now, not ever again. And he was a fool if he let sex cloud his thinking about her. She had betrayed him once, when he needed her most. She was almost certainly betraying him now, betraying his country, perhaps—for although he had no proof of what she really wanted here, he could be very sure at least that she was lying to him.

Sex made fools of men. He knew that, he had seen it happen to others. He would not be of their number. He would keep a clear head. He had four or five days to get the truth from her. Desire must not blind him to the need to do it. Sex must not be allowed to interfere with his plans. He reached out and pressed the radio into life, to puncture the mood in the truck’s cabin.

He had been ten times a fool to think he could undertake this task without risk.

Desi smiled and stretched in her seat, letting the incomprehensible chatter from the radio blend into the background like music. Every muscle in her body simultaneously protested and relayed a honeyed memory of the lovemaking just past.

Salah had been wild with need in the night, seeking the solace of her body over and over, as if to make up for ten lost years in a single night. When they arose at daybreak Desi had no idea whether she’d slept. The mix of languor and energy in her body was like nothing she’d ever experienced before.

The memory of their lovemaking was in the vehicle with them now, heavy in the air, liquid in her cells. She was sensitive even to the pressure of the air against her skin; any movement was slow dancing in honey.

A few more minutes of driving in shade, and then, with a little explosion of light, they were in full sunshine.

There was a smile in her being, and it played with her eyes and the corners of her mouth. Desi leaned lazily back and watched the landscape. Silence fell for minutes, during which she savoured shimmering crystal sharp air, blinding light, purple-grey shadows under distant foothills.

Watching the shadows retreat across the desert as the sun climbed higher could almost be a life’s occupation, she reflected. And again she had that strange feeling of belonging, as if the desert had been waiting for her and would now claim her.

He had not mentioned the letter, but she thought he would soon. He had to. Could he explain, would he apologize? Surely now they could discuss what had happened so long ago with some detachment?

She shifted nervously. Everything was too overwhelming, happening too fast. If he did bring it up, where would that lead them? Was she ready for that?

Would she end up telling him about Sami? she wondered suddenly. No real explanation was possible between them without that, but…how would he react? She had promised Sami she would not tell Salah. If she risked betraying that…she had no idea where the discussion would go.

‘So much traffic!’ she said. ‘Does everybody start early, or have they been driving all night?’

‘This is the main road to the oil fields. In summer everyone avoids driving in the middle of the day.’

In his voice she thought she heard a reflection of her own nervous reluctance to start on something where they could not be sure of the end. Well, there was time. Five days they would be alone. Five days to try to sort her thoughts. No hurry.

They drove in silence. Now and then Salah pointed out an ancient ruin in the desert, or a distant nomad encampment. Desi laughed aloud when they came up behind a pickup truck carrying a young camel which was hunkered down with its legs folded beneath it, complacently regarding them over the tailgate, chewing its cud.

‘And my camera’s packed in my case!’