One Desert Night

CHAPTER SIX

NABIL FELT AS if he was on fire. He was surprised that there hadn’t been a trail of scorch marks along the floor to mark their progress from the banqueting hall to his private apartments. It was as if he had come alive after ten long years in the dark and he was so hot and hungry that he felt it was about to cause an explosion. He wanted; he ached. And yet he knew that the ending to this night was never going to be the one that he had anticipated earlier.

With the door closed safely between them and his overly attentive servants, he slammed to a halt, swinging Aziza round so that she thudded up against him, the softness of her body colliding with the hardness of his.

And that was a near-fatal mistake because it set his pulse rate into overdrive. The pressure of her breasts crushed against his chest, the scent of her skin and her hair and the way it felt to know the heat and hardness of his arousal cradled in the bowl of her hips made his head swim in sexual need.

Which warned him how right he had been to worry. That all was not as it seemed. Because how the hell could he feel this newly awakened hunger for two women—Aziza and the maid—in such a short time? He knew what the guests at the wedding thought about their precipitous departure. Hell, he wanted them to be right. Wanted them to think that he had thoughts only of taking his wife to bed and setting about the process of creating an heir. But they didn’t know that he’d been here once before. And barely escaped with his life.

He didn’t know what had stayed his hand at the banquet. What had stopped him from wrenching up her veil and exposing the truth to everyone there? The political implications if he was right. The fact that he wasn’t sure. And the thought of doing that to his new bride, to Aziza, if that was truly who she was.

But how was he supposed to think when his mind was wiped clean of anything but the hardness of his body and the hunger that was such a brutal physical need?

She’d come with him easily enough, turning at the tug of his hand on hers, her feet in the jewelled slippers moving silently down the corridor. He couldn’t let her go; he held her crushed up against his side where she was small enough to be slotted underneath his armpit, her head resting against his shoulder, his left arm curved round her ribcage, left hand just below the swell of her left breast. With every movement he could feel the sway of her bosom, the heat from it seeming to burn into his skin. He wanted more—more contact—more of her. But at the same moment he wished she was anywhere but here if what he suspected was true.

He had thought that tonight would go so very differently. He’d believed that he would have to spend their first night as husband and wife persuading her into his bed. That he would need to take time and care with her, initiate her into lovemaking. He’d been prepared for that. He’d even anticipated a sort of extra pleasure in it as it awoke feelings, needs that had been buried in him too long. Now it seemed those needs had woken so fiercely that he was burning up inside just thinking of them. At the moment when he had to doubt, to fight, to recognise the dangers in what he was feeling.

And now, barely inside the room, he stopped and swung round to face Aziza.

‘Come to me, my bride.’

My bride.

Aziza didn’t know whether the shivers that ran down her spine at the sound of the words were the thrill of excitement or blind panic. The wedding night they were meant to share had been looming on the horizon like a heavy cloud, both terrifying and thrilling at the same time. She’d given her heart to this man all those years ago when she was still a child and had adored him from a distance ever since. But, following that meeting on the balcony on the night of the anniversary party, everything she had learned about him had challenged those fantasies.

Challenged but not destroyed them. They had soon pushed through her doubts, and this time they were blended in a dangerous, intoxicating cocktail with the new, adult, intensely female feelings she had for him. The feelings that a woman had for a man—and that she should have for the man who was her husband, who would father her child.

Just the thought of it took the strength from her legs so that she almost collapsed on to the floor. Hastily she covered it up by turning it into a curtsey instead, spreading out the rich golden robes of her wedding dress as she sank into a low sign of deference. It did not get the response she anticipated.

‘No! Is this any way for a wife to greet her husband? On your feet, woman—and greet me as you promised.’

‘As I—promised?’

‘At the banqueting table—in return for the sweet treats I gave you.’

Now she understood. Part of it, at least. He wasn’t just talking about the way she had used his name at his urging but the other, silent, sensual promises she had given him when she had taken the grape from him, moulding her mouth around his fingers.

‘I thought you were angry. That I’d done something wrong.’

She was sure he’d been furious with her and that that had driven him to the unexpectedly hasty departure from his own wedding reception. But there was still something wrong with his tone, something that twisted deep inside her, warning her to tread carefully.

‘Should I be angry?’ Nabil demanded. ‘Tell me—have you done anything wrong?’

‘I thought that you thought perhaps I was too familiar...’

‘You’re the first person—apart from Clementina and Karim—the first person to behave in a real way ever since...’

He was thinking of Sharmila. Of the woman who had been his wife. His love. His life.

For a moment Aziza couldn’t see straight enough to focus on the hand he held out to help her to her feet. Just in the same moment that he had given her something of what she yearned for, he had managed to take it all away again. In the heightened atmosphere of the ceremony, she had allowed herself to think that for once she was someone who mattered. Someone who was not just the ‘other daughter’, the one her father had to find a husband and provide a dowry for.

Now she knew that while she might be his bride, his Queen, she was only a queen of convenience, chosen because his duty to the country demanded it. The wife of his heart was dead, and no one would ever replace her. Certainly not the woman he only remembered as a child all those years before. His ‘other wife’ as she now was.

‘You treated me as a man.’

Nabil’s voice had deepened, grown rough, and his hands tightened on her arms as he hauled her to her feet, holding her so firmly that she felt her skin must bruise where his fingers dug into her.

Why the hell had he had to remember Sharmila now, when those memories could only add to the brutal conflict inside him? It was those memories that stilled his hand, he realised, stopped him from grabbing at that damned veil and flinging it up over her head to see what she really looked like—who she really was. He should have done that immediately, revealed who she was from the start so that he knew what he was dealing with, but the simple fact that he had hesitated told him more than he wanted to know about his own feelings.

Damn it, he should have gone with his first instincts and taken the maid called Zia there and then on the balcony on the night of the celebration, when there would have been no legal, no dynastic, implications involved. If this was indeed Zia who had recognised his hunger for her and used it as part of a plot to trap him.

‘A man you wanted. Was that true?’

‘True?’ Aziza echoed shakenly, the harsh demand in his tone making her see her own behaviour through his eyes, and quail inside at the thought of how brazen it must have seemed. ‘Y-Yes.’

She had been so stunned by her own immediate and urgent response to him that she hadn’t been able to hide it. He was a man whose reputation with women was well-known. He had the freedom to play the field as he wanted, but surely he was traditional enough to expect a virgin, innocent bride? She was definitely the former; any daughter brought up under her father’s strict regime would have to be untouched until married.

But what would Nabil want? How would he view her after that admission? The whole reality of the moment in her life she had come to ricocheted around her head. She was married. To the most gorgeous, devastating male she had ever met, and this was her wedding night. When her husband would have the right to take her, to make her his. Uncertainty flooded through her at the thought. Was it possible that he was regretting his choice?

‘And I want you.’

Nabil’s voice, rough and raw, broke into her whirling thoughts, setting her mind spinning off on to another track altogether. Was it possible that she could have this effect on this powerful, forceful male?

‘But—everyone thought... Jamalia...’

‘Your sister?’ A brusque, almost violent gesture of rejection underlined his words in a way that startled and confused. ‘Sure, she’d look wonderful on the stamps. But you...’

The word sounded thick and raw, making a stunned excitement start to uncoil in her stomach. The sting of need that tightened her breasts was like an electric current passing through her so that she shifted uncomfortably where she stood.

‘Damn it to hell, Aziza, but I hate this blasted veil.’

His fingers tangled in it, tugging at the delicate material roughly in a way that pulled painfully at the many tiny pins that held it in place. ‘How do we get rid of it?’

‘Let me...’

The hand she put up to her head, hunting out the first of the pins in her hair, shook almost as much as her voice. But at least she knew what she was doing with this. When her mother, aided by her personal maid, had put the veil on her, working her way around her head to fasten it to the twists and braids of the ornate hair style into which her black hair was piled up underneath, she had made sure that her daughter knew just where each fastening would be placed, and how many pins there were so that Aziza would know how to remove the concealing covering for herself.

‘It’s designed so that it won’t move or come loose—until...’

Just for a second the flying fingers slowed, stilled, came to a complete stop with the last couple of pins in their reach as Aziza struggled with the reality of just what was happening. Apprehension fought with anticipation, a wild, fizzing excitement at the thought that this man—her husband—really had wanted her, not her sister.

‘Done!’ she managed on a long exhalation of breath, taking the veil in one hand, lifting it, flinging it in the opposite direction to the pins so that it rose wildly into the air, hovered for a moment then drifted slowly and elegantly down to the floor like some giant gauzy cloud.

Then she turned to see Nabil, to meet his eyes, for once free and unrestricted by the concealing curtains.

And saw his whole face change. Saw every muscle draw tight over his harsh, etched bone structure, pulling the skin white around the nose and mouth. Saw the light fade from his eyes to be replaced by a heavy shadow that spoke of the exact opposite of what she had hoped to see in his reaction.

He even took a single step backwards, away and so much more distant from her than the paces between them. His obvious mental withdrawal was far, far worse than any physical response he had made.

‘Nabil...’

It was just a whisper, dragged from a mouth that was suddenly too dry to speak properly. Even as she said it, she was forced to wonder whether in fact that was the biggest mistake of all.

Had he given her permission to use his name? She’d thought he had, but as she met the polished jet darkness of those deep-set eyes she saw no lessening of the frozen coldness, no warming to soften them.

‘Sire...’ she tried again, anxious to repair the mistake—if a mistake it had been. Desperate to appease him she sank into a deep curtsey too, giving him the respect and deference he was owed as the Sheikh.

Her husband but still the Sheikh.

‘Sire...’ he muttered, echoing her shaken response with dark cynicism.

With a movement like the pounce of a hunting cat, he moved forward, reached for her left hand, grabbing it and lifting it from where it was partially hidden by the sweeping skirt of her wedding gown.

‘Sire,’ he said again and the danger in that dark tone drained all the power from Aziza’s legs so that she could only stay crouched halfway to the floor, staring with unfocused eyes as she watched him lift the hand he’d captured, turn it so that he could see it more clearly. His black frowning gaze fixed on the slightly damaged shape of her littlest finger and too late she realised that he had stared at it in something of the same way before. On the night on the balcony.

The night when she had told him...

‘Zia...’ Nabil said again, his tone turning the sound of her nickname into a fiendish curse. ‘Not Aziza—but Zia.’

He spat the word at her, not troubling to hide the fury he was feeling.

‘Hellfire and damnation—I have married the maid!’

CHAPTER SEVEN

HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION—I’ve married the maid!

Or have I?

Nabil tried to make his mind focus but nothing registered except the appalling truth of those seven impossible words. Was that his pulse thundering inside his head, beating at his temples, or had a storm really broken on the horizon, threatening to drown any attempt to think straight?

‘Who the hell are you?’

No—stupid question. He knew exactly who she was—or did he? Aziza, his arranged bride—or Zia, ‘just a maid’? Shaking his head violently as his scrambled brain refused to put any words together in a logical sequence, Nabil tried to enforce some control on the thinking processes that had been shattered by shock and savage rage. The fact that his body was still rock hard with desire only made matters even worse.

Just moments before he had been burning up with sexual hunger; turned on as he had never been before in his life. Now it felt as if someone had punched him right in the gut and the throbbing ache of frustration only soured his temper even more than the mental bruising.

‘Who?’

He got a grim sort of satisfaction from the way she started in nervous reaction as he flung the word into her white face. A face he’d been so impatient to see, never realising until too late that he’d seen it already, and so much more recently than the child Aziza he had been trying to remember.

Against the pallor of her skin, her golden eyes looked huge and dark, the lush fringes of her black lashes making them look even wider than before. He had been enchanted by those eyes that night on the balcony, he remembered. They had drawn him in like some witch’s spell woven deliberately around him. Was it then that the plan to deceive him had come to her mind—or was there some other way that this scheme had been created? A maid couldn’t have arranged all this by herself, could she? There had to be someone else behind all this. The answer seemed obvious.

How much had Farouk been planning all this time?

‘Who put you up to this?’

‘No one... I mean...’

For a moment it looked like she was about to get to her feet, then obviously thought the better of it. But the slight movement was enough to remind Nabil of the implications of the situation and to have him checking in the belt under his robe. Feeling the cool slide of metal there under his fingertips, he relaxed again and flung a repeat of the question at her with cold virulence.

‘I asked you—who?’

‘No one put me up to it.’

She’d regained some sort of strength in her voice and was able to make it sound as if she was actually defying him. He was glad to see that. He didn’t want to see her go down without a real contest. He wanted a worthy opponent to give him a chance to release some of the tumult of emotions he was feeling inside.

All he should be feeling was anger and betrayal. He’d been deceived again, trapped—this wasn’t Aziza, was it? But it was intensely disturbing to realise that there was so much more. The desire was only part of it.

‘It was you.’

‘Me! Are you mad, woman? Are you actually claiming that I...?’

Aziza—or Zia—or whatever her name was—had obviously had enough of being down on the floor. She put her hands to the floor and pushed herself upwards, scrambling to her feet as she faced him boldly, her neat little chin set into a firm declaration of defiance. Strangely, she looked even more defenceless standing before him like this when she had clearly tried to draw herself up to her full height.

‘You are the one who asked me—who picked me out as his prospective bride.’

‘Not you...’

He was remembering the moment when he had seen her and her mistress—Jamalia—through the two-way mirror, recalling the hot wave of physical hunger that had swept through him just from touching her, kissing her, on the balcony. The same hunger that had alerted him to the fact that something was not as he had anticipated when he had fed her the sugared grape at the banquet table.

When he had caught the scent of her perfume.

‘I never chose you.’

Aziza winced under the sting of that lashing dismissal. She had been so overjoyed to think that Nabil had chosen her. That he wanted her above all the other candidates. The beautiful women he could have chosen. Even her sister. But he had picked her. The one her father had always believed was second best.

But now Nabil was saying that he hadn’t chosen her—he didn’t even want her! Her mind flashed back to the scene in the crowded, brilliantly lit banqueting hall. The knowing looks of the guests who had watched as Nabil had stood up and grabbed hold of her hand.

She had thought she knew what that meant. She’d believed that very soon she would be a proper wife, sharing her husband’s bed. But now what would happen?

I never chose you.

How would she ever face everyone all over again and let them know that Sheikh Nabil—the man she had thought was to be her husband—had taken one look at her face and rejected her out of hand?

How could she go from being Queen one moment to a nobody—a rejected, spurned nobody—in less than a couple of hours? And how could she ever cope with knowing that Nabil had decided she was not the person he wanted? The thought of confronting her father’s rage at her failure was as nothing when compared with the prospect of having to leave now, when it had seemed that so much—her dreams and fantasies—had been within her grasp.

Her body still thrummed from the sensual tension that had seared through it. Every nerve was stretched so tight she felt it would snap if she moved, and the stinging, burning need that his kiss, his touch, had woken so newly in her refused to subside while he was still so near, so close that she only had to reach out her hand...

It was only when she saw the way Nabil’s head came up, the wary tensing of his long body, that she realised she had done just that, and somehow added fire to the suspicions he was already harbouring against her.

‘You asked for Jamalia’s sister,’ she managed, stumbling over the words.

‘And got her maid instead.’ Could he put any more darkness, any further rejection, into the words? ‘So what is this—some sort of plan to trap me, tie me into marriage with you?’

‘Oh, no, no! Why would I want to trap you?’

Just the horror at the thought that he might actually believe she had wanted to do that propelled her forward jerkily, both hands coming out this time, reaching for him.

She never actually saw him move; never even registered the sudden blink that revealed his reaction, the swift, flash of action that intercepted and reversed their positions so that suddenly, instead of facing him, she had been grasped by the wrist and twisted round against him. Her back was tight up against the hard strength of his chest, her body imprisoned by the iron-hard bands of his arms.

And in his hand was the polished gleam of metal, the narrow shape of a wicked, sharply honed knife held so tight in Nabil’s fist that his knuckles showed white where he gripped it hard.

‘Nabil, no!’

Aziza tried to turn to face him, realising her mistake when his arms tightened round her even more and she could hear the thud of his heartbeat against her ear. It was that rapid and uneven pulse that told its own story, making her realise the truth. She should have thought; should have remembered. Now, too late, the recollection of the way he had started when a door had banged in the banqueting hall came back to haunt her with a new and disturbing significance. The terrible memory of the day that he had survived the assassination attempt flashed behind her eyes.

‘You don’t need that—really you don’t.’

Immediately she made herself react, letting her body go limp against his as she held her own hands out in front of her, fingers splayed so that he could see there was nothing hidden there.

‘I’m sorry—I’m not really Jamalia’s maid—and there is nothing in this that was ever against you.’

At least she prayed not. Her father had seemed content enough with the marriage negotiations. He had never shown any inclination to turn his loyalties to the lingering group of revolutionaries who had threatened rebellion. But did Nabil suspect that he would?

‘I would never harm you—I promise. We were friends once.’

Friends...

The word seemed to have so much more significance than he could ever have imagined, Nabil acknowledged. She had said that she was not Jamalia’s maid and yet she was very definitely the woman he had met that night. If she truly was Aziza, his promised wife, the child who had been his friend now grown up, then he wanted to believe her—he wanted to trust her. But wanting to trust and being able to do so were two totally separate things, and the ability to think straight and read the signs accurately were severely compromised by the position he found himself in.