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

She sat up, drew her legs under her, pressed a cushion behind her back.

‘So, you never actually told me—how many hours will we be on the road?’

‘Hours? What do you mean?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Desi, the trip across the desert will take four days at least, probably five.’

Chapter Eight

HOW was flight? Have you seen HIM yet?

Where R U?? Please call!

There were five texts from Sami on her BlackBerry, each one more frantic than the last, and a half a dozen missed calls. Desi should have texted Sami from the Arrivals hall or, failing that, the car, and was stunned to realize she had forgotten. She’d completely forgotten her phone, if not her life, from the moment she’d met Salah.

Has he murdered U? What is going onnnnnnnnnn?

Desi sat with the thing in her hand. She should call Sami to update her, but…she just did not want to talk about Salah and their meeting and the dinner she’d just shared with him.

Or the fact that she had turned down the chance to share his bed.

Meanwhile, she had to respond.

Sry, sry!! Horrible jetlag. S picked me up, going to sleep now. Ttyl, she sent.

She ruthlessly shut the phone off before Sami could call. Then she lay in the fairy-tale bed, surrounded by soft lamplight and ancient luxury, trying to think. Trying to get distance on the evening she had just experienced.

Five days in the desert alone with Salah! How was it possible? How had Sami not known?

What would she do, alone with him day after day, night after night, a forbidding stranger who somehow shared a past with her? A man who thought making love with her would give him closure?

He wanted her. His love might be dead—he said it was, and she believed him—but Salah wanted her. She was alone now because she had chosen it. He would have come to her bed if she’d wavered for one second. If she’d flicked an eyelash.

Might he still come? She couldn’t be sure. She had said no, but—he might think that if he came to her room she wouldn’t be able to keep on saying it.

And he’d be right. Desi was afraid. All the defences she thought she’d built up over ten years had disappeared in the space of one short breath. She was vulnerable in a way she hadn’t been with any other man. And she didn’t know what he really wanted.

Closure. That was such an extraordinary thing for a man like Salah to say! What closure would sex give him? You have haunted me, Desi. Was it true? Or did he have some ulterior motive for saying it?

Desi flung the sheet back, swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and sat with her head in her hands. After a moment she got up and began to pace.

The intimacy of the roof garden. The constant harking on the past. The fact he had ordered food he had lovingly described to her ten years ago. The irresistible way he’d chosen tidbits for her, fed her. Painful reminders of their love, scorching tokens of intimacy, the actions of a man determined to win back an old love.

All false. All stage dressing. Salah did not want to win her back. He had made that very plain, a long time ago.

Why, then?

He wants revenge. The thought dropped into her head with an almost audible click. Four days. Five. He could find a dozen ways to get revenge, she was sure, alone with her in the desert for five days. But what could he want revenge for?

Everything that happened had been his own doing.

A few days after he left, Salah had phoned her. He begged her, he pleaded his love. He knew now that it was jealousy that had motivated him. He had believed that look in her eyes was only for him, and there it was in the photo, for anyone who looked at her. He had taken refuge in blaming her, too easy to do.

‘But I will never do anything like that again, Desi. I will understand myself better.’ If only she would forgive him.

The call came too late. Their argument had shaken Desi to the core, and suddenly all the changes that before had seemed so easy frightened her. Move away from her family and friends, to a country on the other side of the world whose language she didn’t speak, whose people and culture and religion she knew nothing of, where she knew no one save Salah? Have children who would be citizens of another country?

History was against them, too. That week there had been a graphic television documentary showing a woman stoned to death in the capital of Kaljukistan. Television news was full of the atrocities towards women there. Women dying because no male doctor was allowed to attend them. Girls’ schools closed, women teachers and doctors thrown out of work. Women beaten in the street by armed policemen for showing a lock of hair.

Desi was deeply frightened. How well did she really know Salah? How could she love him when she didn’t know who he was?

She was too young by far to handle the terrible, contradictory feelings that raged through her at the sound of his voice.

‘I don’t love you,’ she cried.

‘You do,’ he insisted, but he was young, too. ‘You love me, Desi. We love each other. I love you! I love you more than the world. Please, please, Desi, we are going to get married!’

But her wild fears had proved stronger than his young courage.

‘You’re just like the Kaljuks!’ she accused him at last. ‘You want to stop me doing anything except stay at home and have babies!’

Two weeks later she learned from Sami that Salah was in Parvan, fighting alongside Prince Omar and the Cup Companions. The agonizing pain in her heart told Desi the truth of her own feelings, but there was no way to tell Salah now.

Desi had felt utterly helpless. She had destroyed something precious, and now that she saw her mistake, there was no way back.

Before she could think what to do, Leonard J. Patrick came to town.

Leonard J. Patrick was the hot North American modelling agent. He had a nose for what he called raw star quality. When he came gunning for Desi, her future was practically guaranteed: supermodel status, celebrity, stardom. And just then, it seemed like the answer.

He swept Desi off to the best consultants on the continent, gave her a movement coach and a personal trainer. He created a signature look for her.

Desirée. Leo launched her with fanfare, and his nose wasn’t mistaken.

Sometimes she had the feeling, almost too deep to reach, that just because others envied her didn’t mean the life was right for her. She ached for Salah with a need so deep it burned her.

Salah’s been wounded.

Standing by an ocean, plugging one ear against the music and laughter floating from the balcony above the exclusive stretch of beach, Desi had stumbled and almost fallen, as if the ricochet from the bullet had hit her.

‘Wounded? How?’

‘He was leading the charge on a Kaljuk position,’ Sami sobbed out. ‘Baba’s trying to find out more. We think he’s in a field hospital…’

‘A friend of mine has been wounded in the Parvan-Kaljuk War,’ Desi told Leo. ‘I have to go there. Please don’t take any more bookings for me right now.’

But hard as he tried, Leo never managed to make space in her booking calendar…