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

‘No, I don’t,’ she said woodenly, and ‘No,’ again.

‘No?’ he said. She couldn’t see his eyes. ‘That is not what you came for, my kiss? But then, what did you come here for, Desi? Why do you come to my country, to the heart of my family, if not for this?’

He offered her another little twist of bread and herb, but she shook her head and reached into the basket herself.

‘Why did you get involved?’ she countered. ‘There was no need!’

‘But yes!’ He lifted a palm. ‘My father was determined to allow you to visit. The rest followed.’

‘He said he would arrange a guide. Why should it be you?’

‘Who else? You know what I owe your family—so many years of hospitality! You know that such hospitality must be reciprocated.’ A fleeting instinct told her there was something else here, but she was too bombarded to be able to pin it down. ‘So, Desi, I say to you that you knew your guide would be me. Our meeting was inevitable. And I ask again, why are you here? What do you want from me?’

‘I want nothing from you, Salah.’ She opened her mouth to tell him that she would hire someone else to be her guide, thought of Sami, and closed it again. He was right, after all. This was all according to plan. He was only mistaken in whose plan it was.

‘Why do you lie? What you come for is no shame. A woman has a right to experience pleasure. If her Western lover can’t give it to her, she must look for one who does.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she countered. ‘But believe me when I say I really don’t need to search so far afield.’

He lifted his hands. ‘How can I believe it, when you are here?’

A puff of irritated laughter escaped her.

‘And even if I did, you are the very last person I’d come to.’

‘No,’ he said, with such certainty she almost believed he could read her mind.

‘Trust me, Salah,’ she said. ‘You are imagining this. Every part of what you imagine is the product of your own fantasy. I am not remotely interested in reviving old times with you.’

He laughed and before she could stop him, clasped her wrist. She felt her pulse hammering against his thumb. She thought he was going to pull her against him again, it would be so easy, but abruptly he let go.

‘It is in your blood. In every part of you. As in me,’ he said, with a kind of angry self-contempt. Her heart kicked.

He waved a sultan’s wave and a waiter came from nowhere and cleared the little baskets away.

Now there was nothing but space between them. He lay resting on one elbow, looking at her. He didn’t move, but he seemed to come closer. Drawing back was agonizing to her, an iron filing trying to move out of the magnet’s powerful field.

‘Shall we make love here, Desi, as we did under the dock?’

‘Don’t be—’

‘I can tell them to go. We will blow out the candles. There will be only you and me and the stars.’

‘And your conscience.’ She felt desperate, grasping at anything that would keep him away. ‘Wouldn’t that get in the way?’

‘My conscience?’

‘Aren’t you engaged to Sami?’ she said.

Chapter Seven

SHE hadn’t meant to blurt that out. She had planned to act as if she didn’t know. Some things she could do. Pretend to be someone who would go after her best friend’s fiancé wasn’t one of them.

But Desi was grasping at any defence. It had become sharply clear in the past few minutes that she could not trust herself if Salah made a serious assault. The armour that had served her for years was not up to this challenge. Her heart was melting with grief and regret, her skin was electric with feeling.

She wouldn’t let it happen. It would be a betrayal of everything. It would kill her to make love with him.

‘But isn’t that why you’ve come just at this moment, Desi?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your timing is too good to be coincidence. You know I can never again make love to you once I am married. Our chance would be lost forever.’

‘You don’t think being engaged to my best friend puts you out of bounds already?’

‘We are not engaged. No discussions have yet taken place. And a man must come to terms with his past before he marries, isn’t that so?’ Salah said. ‘So that he can go to his wife without…regret. You have haunted me, Desi, how can you imagine otherwise? If I am going to marry, first I should have—what do you call it?—closure.’

Her heart was beating in hard, painful thumps. In her worst imaginings she had not foreseen losing control over the proceedings so quickly.

‘And how, exactly, would sex with me give you closure?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Is it an ego thing? Are you hoping to hear me say that sex with you set the bench-mark and nothing since has lived up to it?’

‘Is it true?’

‘No, it is not!’

‘You always lied badly,’ he said.

‘And you always had an ego as thick as butter.’

‘I judge by my own experience, Desi,’ he said.

The admission rushed through her like wildfire. She felt faint.

‘I don’t believe you! A few weeks, ten years ago!’

‘And what about you? Don’t you, too, wish for this closure?’

‘I got closure long ago,’ she lied. No closure was possible for a blow like the one he’d delivered. ‘The day you told me I was soiled merchandise.’

‘And this old man, was he a good lover?’ Salah asked, an expression in his eyes she couldn’t read.

‘What old man would that be?’

‘The one you nearly married, Desi. Do you forget lovers so easily? Did he please you as I did?’

‘Leo was forty-five!’

‘Was it—’