Penny Jordan Tribute Collection

Today she had overcome an important hurdle. Umm Faisal’s friends had accepted her, despite the differences in their cultures—East and West could blend happily, no matter what Raschid said. With the light of battle in her eyes, Felicia went to meet the man waiting for her in the paved courtyard.

Dim light filtered in through the tall narrow windows of the entrance hall, and at first she could not see him. Then he moved and she caught the white flash of his shirt, the cuffs immaculate as he shot one back to glance at his watch. The gesture, so typically male, made her smile, and that was when he turned and saw her, poised in the doorway, the dark wood a perfect foil for her translucent beauty, laughter trembling the generous curve of her mouth, her eyes calm and composed.

He came towards her, his expression unreadable. This time Felicia was determined to retain the upper hand.

‘I’m sorry if I kept you waiting,’ she apologised formally, ‘but your sister’s friends….’

‘You have no need to explain the female of the species to me, Miss Gordon. I’m perfectly conversant with its addiction to senseless chatter.’

His arrogance all but took her breath away.

‘If it’s senseless, it’s because men like you refuse to give them the opportunity to be anything else,’ she retorted, the serenity dying out of her eyes to be replaced by anger, but Raschid merely looked amused.

‘Is that what you have been doing? Lecturing Fatima’s guests on the rights of the liberated woman? You will not be very popular with their husbands, Miss Gordon.’

‘I don’t care whether I am or not,’ Felicia announced recklessly.

‘Foolish of you,’ was Raschid’s only comment. ‘For those same husbands have the power to forbid their wives to have anything to do with you, if they wish, and Faisal would not approve of that. He may appear Westernised to you, Miss Gordon, but he will expect his wife to adhere to the rules of his own society, I assure you.’

Ignoring the warning, Felicia tossed her head, walking past Raschid to where the car was parked. Where once she had wanted to gain his approval for Faisal’s sake, now she seemed to derive intense satisfaction from deliberately needling him—a trait so alien to her personality that she wondered a little bitterly why it had to be Faisal’s guardian of all people who should arouse it within her.

‘Faisal and I will not be living in Kuwait,’ she told Raschid, remembering what Faisal had said.

‘No?’ His sideways glance was mocking. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something, Miss Gordon?’

She refused to look at him, preceding him across the courtyard, where the scent of early roses already hung intoxicatingly on the warm air.

‘If I am I’m sure you’ll remind me of it.’

‘Exactly so,’ Raschid agreed urbanely. ‘As an employee of the bank—and make no mistake, Faisal is an employee—he has a duty to go where the Board decides he will be of most use.’

‘The Board?’ Felicia queried bitterly. ‘Don’t you mean yourself?’

‘In these circumstances I think I can agree that the two are synonymous.’

His suave satisfaction jarred, like a nerve in an aching tooth probed by an unwary tongue. Felicia hesitated, on the point of refusing to accompany him, but then she remembered Zahra’s approaching birthday, and accepted that there would probably be no other suitable opportunity to buy her a present. Swallowing the words, with her pride, she contented herself with a cold glare in Raschid’s direction.

For the last few days the household had gone busily frantic over the arrangements for transporting Umm Faisal, Raschid, Zahra and herself, as well as the staff and everything that they would require, to the oasis for the duration of the birthday celebrations. Only that morning Zahra had laughingly confided that without Raschid to master-mind the move she doubted if they would get any farther than Kuwait City. Felicia had suggested rather hesitantly that perhaps she ought to return home, in case her presence at such a time proved to be a nuisance, but Zahra’s swift dismay soon reassured her. In point of fact, she and Zahra had become very close, and it was only her growing affection for the younger girl that prevented Felicia from giving full rein to her growing antipathy towards Raschid. As he had so rightly said, it would hurt Zahra if she thought they were quarrelling, and Felicia had as little desire to cast a blight over the birthday festivities as Raschid. For that reason an uneasy—on her part at least—truce had developed between them.

‘A wise decision,’ Raschid drawled suddenly, startling her. She glared at him suspiciously, caught off guard when he said smoothly, ‘Don’t bother denying that you were contemplating refusing my company. I dislike liars almost as much as I despise fortune-hunters.’

The sheer rage engendered by his dismissive tones rendered her speechless, totally unable to retaliate, and it wasn’t until he walked round to the opposite side of the parked car and opened the driver’s door that Felicia realised that Ali would not be accompanying them. Raschid leaned across the passenger seat, unlocking the door and pushing it open.

‘I think I would prefer to sit in the back,’ she said stiffly. ‘Isn’t that what you think good women should do—dutifully take a back seat and leave the driving to their lords and masters?’

‘On this occasion I think we will opt for the Western custom,’ Raschid replied drily. ‘Otherwise I shall be endangering both our lives by constantly having to look over my shoulder to converse with you—Or do you perhaps read a more sinister purpose into my request? Your imagination runs away with you, Miss Gordon.’

If anything his voice had become even more cuttingly unkind, and Felicia flushed painfully, knowing he was deliberately taunting her.

‘Even if such was my desire,’ he continued, ‘which most assuredly it is not, I never, but never make love on the open carriageway between my home and the city. Kuwaiti drivers are not the most polite in the world, nor the most tolerant of dawdlers, as you will soon discover. I am sorry if I don’t match up to the prowess of your previous escorts in this regard, but in the East we prefer to suit the activity to our surroundings.’

Felicia stood by the car, longing to slam the door shut, wishing she could think of a suitably cutting retort to burst for once and for all the complacent arrogance with which Raschid surrounded himself. She had forgotten that even though she was standing by the side of the Mercedes, Raschid could still read her expression quite accurately in the driving mirror, and she jumped when he drawled mockingly, ‘I can almost feel the knife entering my heart, Miss Gordon. Be careful. In this country we believe in taking a life for a life.’

‘Heart? What heart?’ she retorted, too furious to pay much attention to the rest of the sentence. ‘You don’t possess such a thing, Sheikh Raschid!’

‘Get in the car, Miss Gordon, and save your anger to fuel something more profitable than pitting your wits against mine.’

The arrogance of it! Felicia seethed as she slid into the seat, ignoring his smile as he leaned across her to close the door. At such close quarters an aura of taut masculinity emanated from him. She was pulsatingly aware of the warm sheen of his skin, drawn tightly over the narrow bones of his face; the way his eyelashes lay, long and dark against the sculptured bone; silk against satin, she thought irrelevantly, shiveringly aware of him in a way that she had never been aware of Faisal, but underneath lay a core of pure steel.

‘Do I pass muster?’

She flushed as vividly as the roses blooming in the inner courtyard, hating to be caught out paying him any attention, no matter what the reason—and in this case, pure curiosity had drawn her eyes to his face, unwilling admiration keeping them there to wonder at the perfect symmetry of the bone structure underlying the smooth skin, even while the arrogant profile made her anger rise like a river in a flash flood, coming out of nowhere to appal her with its ferocity. How strange it was that a mingling of East and West should have produced this lordly, sensual man, while Faisal’s pure Arab blood had produced a man in a much softer mould.

While she battled with her anger, she told herself that for Faisal’s sake she must learn to tame it, to sit meek and docile under the razor-sharp tongue and probing glance. She had once read that a falcon could focus on its prey from many thousands of feet above it in the sky; so it was with Raschid. Those grey eyes held all the latent power of a modern laser beam.

They took the coast road. The day was deliciously warm, the merest breath of fresh air from the air-conditioning fanning her hair as they sped towards the city. The leather seats reclined to contour the body, and the radio emitted soothing music, but Felicia could not relax. She was as tense as a coiled spring, unwittingly betraying her anxiety in her tightly clenched fists.

‘Relax,’ Raschid surprised her by saying. ‘Or is it merely the fact that you are a passenger rather than the driver which makes you so tense? How you European women rob yourselves of your very femininity by insisting on doing everything for yourselves!’

‘Perhaps because our experience of your sex has taught us how unwise it is for us to rely on them for anything,’ Felicia retorted unwisely, thinking of Uncle George, and how selfishly he had refused to allow either her aunt or herself the slightest little pleasure, begrudging every small thing he had done for them.

‘Is that why you want to marry Faisal?’ Raschid asked astutely. ‘Because you see in him a shoulder on which to lean? Strange—I had not thought of you as a clinging vine; I see I shall have to revise my strategy. Clinging vines are notoriously difficult to remove, but Faisal is weak, Miss Gordon; whoever marries him will need to be mother, lover, and even jailer at times. Are you sure you are able to fulfil all those roles?’

‘It’s easy to list his failings when he’s not here to defend himself,’ Felicia retorted hotly, trying not to acknowledge the truth of what Raschid had said. Hadn’t she sometimes noticed an inclination to adopt the role of helpless little boy by Faisal, when all was not going his way?

‘You are loyal at least,’ Raschid responded in clipped accents, as though the admission displeased him, then changed the subject to draw her attention to the British Embassy. Because he hoped that she would soon be entering that building, asking to be sent home, all her dreams of marriage to Faisal turned to so much dust.

Not for the first time Felicia wondered at her own foolish impetuosity in allowing Faisal to persuade her to come to Kuwait. He had paid for her air ticket; her own slender savings had gone on her new wardrobe, but Faisal had glibly assured her that it would not be long before he was able to join her in Kuwait, taking it for granted that she would remain with his family until their marriage. If that was not to take place until he was twenty-five she would have to return to England. Which meant that she would have to write and ask Faisal for the money for her ticket, for she was convinced that Raschid would never allow him to return to Kuwait while she was there.

As soon as Zahra’s birthday was over she would write to him, she promised herself, comforted by this gesture of independence.

They drove past the Sief Palace, where guards stood stiffly to attention. A flag flew from the tall, square clock tower.

‘His Highness the Emir is holding his majlis,’ Raschid told her.

‘And I’m sure I’m safe in assuming the Emir’s government is overwhelmingly male,’ Felicia could not resist retorting.

‘You seem to have an outsize chip on your shoulder regarding my sex, Miss Gordon—or is it that having gained your independence, you find you no longer want it?’

Felicia turned away from the malice-spiked glance. She had never been an advocate of Women’s Lib, being quite happy to play the role for which nature had intended her; a role which she did not in any way consider to be subservient, however, so she now found herself saying quite heatedly, ‘You do not deny that in your country women often still have to fight for equal status?’

‘And that arouses your crusading instinct? Would it surprise you to know that women do have rights here; that they can vote or run for office?’

‘But they didn’t have those rights until very recently,’ Felicia responded briefly, looking away, suddenly conscious of the insolent appraisal of narrowed grey eyes.

Raschid swung the car over, throwing her heavily against him, his arm brushing against her breasts and leaving her tingling with an awareness she had never experienced in Faisal’s arms. What was this tension that seemed to vibrate in the air whenever she was near him? Whatever it was she did not like it.

‘We are now entering the main souk and banking area, Miss Gordon,’ Raschid informed her. ‘I suggest that I park the car so that we can do the rest of our tour at a more leisurely pace.’