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

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.