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

‘What?’ Desi stared at him blankly. Then her eyes narrowed as suspicion took hold. ‘What do you mean? What wasn’t true?’

‘Sami sent me a magazine clipping. A picture of you with this old man. It said…’

Her head went back as if he had hit her. She stared at him, and for a moment they were frozen there, locked in mutual horror.

‘You believed it?’ She was open-mouthed with shock as the fact sank in. She stared, shook her head to try to clear it. ‘Is that why—?’ she whispered. ‘How could you believe it?’

‘Desi—’

‘You, of all people! Did you really imagine that within a few weeks I could—? With you on a battlefield, for Christ’s sake! You thought I had—’ Suddenly feeling came rushing in to fill the blankness and her voice found its feet.

‘You read something about me in a damned cheap-thrills sell-your-soul-for-a-dollar celebrity magazine, and you believed it?’ She drew in a shuddering breath. ‘My God, it was bad enough when I thought…’

She didn’t know where to look. She turned away from him, lifted her chin, breathing with her mouth open like a wounded animal, trying to get air. Chills rushed over her skin.

‘Oh, God!’ she moaned. ‘This can’t be true! This is a nightmare…’

She closed her eyes. Opened them again. Fury flooded her.

‘That was why you wrote that letter. Wasn’t it? You—you faithless…my love not strong enough? How dare you talk to me as if—You! What was your love worth, if you could believe that? Without asking, without even accusing—you just read some innuendo in a photo caption, and believed it? Leaving me to the mercy of those vultures who were surrounding me! Nothing! I had nothing to defend myself with, if you didn’t love me! Did you think of that?’

Salah looked like the survivor of an explosion. He stared at her, his eyes black with shock.

‘No,’ he said.

‘A caption under a picture! Not even a story! I wanted to deny it, but Leo told me if we made a fuss it would only confirm it in people’s minds. It was better to let it pass. Anyway, he said, this would make it easier for him to protect me from predatory men, the way he’d promised my father!

‘And it did give me protection—of sorts! I was sixteen and pretty and not engaged to you. If Leo hadn’t been in the background I’d never have had a moment’s peace!’

With an upsurge of the sick bitterness that Leo’s betrayal of trust had created, she added, ‘It didn’t protect me from Leo himself, of course. He was the most predatory of all, but he could play the long game.’

‘Ya Allah,’ Salah whispered. She had never seen his face the way it looked now.

‘I hated it all. I’d never wanted the life, never! I always felt I was living some other girl’s dream. But because it was so fantastic I somehow had to live it. I missed you so much! I wished and wished I’d never done that stupid ad. Then you’d never have said what you said, and we’d have been married and I wouldn’t ever have met Leo. But I was so nervous. Over and over I started a letter to you, but each time I thought…

‘And then you were wounded, and I knew none of that mattered, because I loved you and I would never love anyone else, and if you died, I died, too. I waited for you to answer my card, wondering if you would live, praying—God, how I begged for you to recover! And when I saw your letter lying there—!’ Her eyes squeezed shut. ‘I nearly died from joy. I thought my heart was going to burst out of me and fly.

‘Then I read it—and you know what? He may have waited three years before he physically climbed into my bed, but Leo got me in spirit the day I read your letter. I gave up that day. I gave up thinking what we had was special, that anything was special! I gave up what I’d believed about myself. I wasn’t good enough for you, Salah. I’d loved you and wanted you too much, and because of that you thought I—’

She began to sob helplessly, feeling as if all the tears of a lifetime were waiting to be shed.

‘I felt so cheap! I thought, well, if Salah can say such horrible, disgusting things…then it was all nothing. What I thought we had was nothing. It was never real. You betrayed your honour. It burned me like an iron. I’ll remember that feeling till the day I die. I’d have given up that life in a minute, if you’d asked, but that letter told me it was more than being a model. I’d demeaned myself in your eyes by making love with you, too, that’s what I believed. What we had wasn’t beautiful at all, it was cheap and dirty. That was the end of everything.’

He was silent, his eyes black, watching her, knowing without doubt that what she spoke was the truth.

‘And now you tell me you wrote that filth because you believed—how could you believe it? And not even to ask me if it was true!’ she cried, as the barriers gave way and all the hurt rushed into her throat, demanding release. ‘How could you think for a moment that I could go from you to him? I couldn’t stand any other man touching me! Even three years after—the first time Leo…I was sick afterwards! I ran into the bathroom and threw up!’

She stopped and groped in her bag for tissues, then lifted her head and looked at him.

‘It was bad enough when I thought you despised me for loving you or for being a model, but this! It’s too much, Salah. This is unforgivable. You destroyed the most beautiful…What a cold, judgmental, untrusting bastard you were. Are. Well, I’m glad I know at last. And to think I’ve spent these few days with you regretting what we missed!’ she added, in a self-disgust so total she could hardly breathe. ‘Imagining that we still had something that could…but we never had anything, did we? It was all a lie from the get-go. I’ll never regret it again. I was lucky. I had a bloody lucky escape.’

Then there was silence, broken only by the sound of her weeping.

Chapter Sixteen

SALAH felt blank, the way one feels after a bullet has hit: the emptiness of waiting for the pain.

He sat staring into the past, as all the carefully constructed armour of ten years collapsed into rubble around him. He had destroyed the dream by his own hand. Feeling began to blast in, a storm of grief and self blame.

She was completely blameless. The fault had been entirely his from the beginning.

She was right. He had acted towards her without generosity, without honour, all the while pretending that the lack of honour was hers. Even the least degree of decency had required that he ask her for the truth before judging her. And even believing it true, shouldn’t he have tried to understand the pressures of that new world? A man of forty-two, a girl of sixteen. What chance would she have stood? Why hadn’t he seen it before? Why hadn’t he judged differently when he got a little older?

He opened his mouth three times before he could speak.

‘Desi. There isn’t a word strong enough. What have I done? Desi, forgive me.’

He put his hand out to her but, still weeping, she twisted away.

‘Forgive? How can I forgive it?’ she howled.

‘Desi.’ His voice sounded completely unlike him. ‘My God. What a fool I am. Worse than a fool. A devil.’

She was sobbing inconsolably. ‘You said you loved me, you say now it was the biggest thing in your life—how could you think such a thing? How could you begin to believe it? Why didn’t you at least give me a chance?’

He swallowed. Ten years. What could make amends for such a waste of life and love?

‘Desi, I am sorry.’

‘Oh, great. Yes, that makes all the difference!’

The car was insufferably hot. Sweat was pouring off her, and she wound down the window and tried to catch her breath.

Salah started the engine. ‘We can’t stay here.’

He put the vehicle in gear and backed out onto the road again.

The sun was in the west, streaming into the car now from the front, now on the right, as the road curved and turned. It was burning hot, in spite of the air conditioning, and Desi felt sick with the brightness and the heat on her skin. For a few miles she twisted the sun visor this way and that, trying to block the rays, and then Salah pulled over again.

He got out, rummaged in the back for a moment, then came around to her side. Without a word he opened the door, lowered the window, tucked a cardboard window protector over the glass and rolled it back up. It covered the passenger window and a few inches of the windscreen, putting her in welcome shade.

When they were moving again, she said, ‘Thank you.’

He nodded, swallowing, as if he could not trust himself to speak.

‘You could have done that any time over the past three days, I suppose. But then, you had to sweat the truth out of me.’

They drove in silence, passing other cars on the road, glimpsing herds of camels and goats at distant nomad camps in the bleak, bleak desert. After a while Salah turned off the road and headed out over the sand again.