The Sheikh's Blackmailed Mistress

How was it possible for one woman, a complete stranger, to invade the most private and strongly guarded recesses of his heart and mind and possess them, haunting and tormenting him almost beyond his own endurance?

It was mid-afternoon. He planned to leave for the desert camp of the surveyors as the sun began to set, so that he and his small entourage could make the most of the cooler night hours in which to travel. He had some work to do first, though, he reminded himself.

Whilst Drax and his wife occupied the new wing of the palace that Drax had designed for his own occupation before his marriage, Vere’s personal apartments were in the older part of the palace, and had traditionally housed Dhurahn’s rulers through several generations.

Thus it was that when he stood in the elegantly furnished and decorated private salon that lay behind the formal reception room where he held his public divans, to which his people were entitled to come and speak to him and be heard, he might be alone in the flesh, but in spirit the room was peopled with all those of his blood who had gone before him.

His formidable great-grandfather, who had ridden with Lawrence of Arabia and fought off all comers to maintain his right to his lands. His French grandmother, so elegant and cultured, who had bequeathed to him a love of art and design. And his own parents: his father, so very much everything that a true ruler should be—strong, wise, tender to those in his care—and his lovely laughing mother, who had filled his life with happiness and joy and the traditions of her homeland. Here in this room, at the heart of the palace and his life, he had always believed that he would never really be alone.

And yet now, thanks to one incident that was impossible to forget, that sense of comfort had been stolen from him and replaced with a stark awareness of his own inner solitude that he could not escape.

If he were reckless enough to close his eyes he knew that immediately he would be able to conjure up the feel of the thick silk of her wild curls beneath his hand, the scent of her woman’s flesh—sweet and warm, like honey and almonds—the stifled heat of her breath when her body discovered the maleness of his own. And most of all her eyes, so darkly blue that they’d caught exactly the colour of the desert sky overhead just before the sun finally burned into the horizon. A man could lose his reason if he looked too long at such a sky, or into such eyes…

Was that what he believed had happened to him? Vere grimaced, bringing himself abruptly back to reality. He was a modern man, born in an age of facts and science. The fact that he had turned a corner in a hotel corridor and bumped into a young woman with whom he had shared a kiss—no matter how intensely passionate and intimate, no matter how bitterly regretted—hardly constituted an act of fate that had the power to change his whole life. Unless he himself allowed that to happen, Vere warned himself.

He strode across the room and pulled at the double doors that opened into the wide corridor beyond it, its floor tiled in the mosaic style that was true Arab fashion.

His parents had instituted a tradition that these rooms were the preserve of themselves and their children and no one else. Normally Vere relished that privacy, but now for some reason it irked him.

Was that the reason for the deep-rooted and ever-present ache that pursued him even in his sleep? Tormenting him with images and memories—the smell of her, the feel of her in his arms, the feel of her body against his, the sound of her breathing, the scalding, almost unbearable heat of the moment their lips had met?

It was just a kiss—that was all…A mere kiss. A nothing—just like the woman with whom he had shared it. She hadn’t even had the type of looks he found physically attractive. The type of women he liked to take to his bed were tall and soignée cool, worldly blondes—women who could satisfy him physically without involving him in the danger of them touching him emotionally.

Vere had never forgotten that loving a woman with the whole of his heart meant that ultimately he would be broken on the wheel of that love when she abandoned him. He had learned that with his mother’s death, just as he had learned the pain that went with it. Better not to love at all ever again than to risk such agony a second time.

He still burned with shame to remember the nights he had woken from his sleep to find his face wet with tears and his mother’s name on his lips. A man of fourteen did not cry like a child of four. Emotional weakness was something he had to burn out of himself, he had told himself. And that was exactly what he had done. Until a chance encounter in a hotel corridor had ripped off the mask he had gone through so much trouble to fix to himself, and revealed the unwanted need that was still inside him.

CHAPTER TWO

SAM stepped under the surprisingly sophisticated shower in the ‘bathroom’ compartment of the traditional black tent that was her current personal accommodation, soaping her body and taking care not to waste any water when she rinsed herself off—even though she had been assured that, thanks to the efficiency of the Ruler of Zuran’s desalination plants in Zuran, there was no need for them to economise on the water that was driven in to the camp almost daily in huge containers.

Sam had been over the moon with joy when she’d learned that against all the odds she had secured this so coveted job of working as part of the team of cartographers, anthropologists, statisticians, geologists and historians brought together to embark on what must surely be one of the ambitious and altruistic ventures of its kind.

As a cartographer, Sam was part of the group that were remapping the borders and traditional camel caravan routes of this magical and ancient part of the world. Just the words ‘the empty quarter’ still brought a shiver of excitement down her spine. After all, hadn’t her youthful desire to come to the Gulf initially sprung from reading about the likes of Gertrude Bell?

Normally Sam shared her comfortable and well-equipped accommodation with Talia Dean, one of the other three women who were also on the team, but the young American geologist had cut her foot two days ago, and was now hospitalised in Zuran.

Others before them had mapped the empty quarter and explored it, searching for hidden cities and routes, and the borders between the three Arabian states involved in the present exercise were already agreed and defined. However, modern technology combined with the excellent relations that existed between the three states meant that it was now possible, with satellite information combined with on-the-ground checks, to see what effect five decades of sandstorms that had passed since they were agreed might have had on the borders.

Now, with their evening meal over and the camp settling down for the night, Sam dried her newly showered body and then made her way into her blissfully air-conditioned tented bedroom.

Furnished with rich silk rugs and low beds piled high with velvet-covered cushions and throws, and scented with the most heavenly perfumes from swinging lanterns heated with charcoal, its combination of modern comfort-producing technology and traditional Bedouin tent produced an exotic if somewhat surreal luxury, which immediately struck the senses with its sharpness of contrast to the harshness of the desert itself.

But the desert also had its beauty. Some members of the team found the desert too harsh and unforgiving, but Sam loved it—even whilst she was awed by it. It possessed an arrogance that had already enslaved her, a ferocity that said take me as I am, for I will not change. There was something about it that was so eternal and powerful, so hauntingly beautiful, that just to look out on it brought a lump to her throat.

And yet the desert was also very cruel. She had seen falcons wheeling in the sky above the carcases of small animals, destroyed by the merciless heat of the sun. She had heard tales from the scarily expert Arab drivers supplied to the team, who were not allowed to drive themselves, of whole convoys being buried by sandstorms, never to be seen again, of oases there one day and gone the next, of tribes and the men who ruled them, so in tune with the savagery of the landscape in which they lived that they obeyed no law other than that of the desert itself.

One such leader was due to arrive in the camp tomorrow, according to the gossip she could not help but listen to. Prince Vereham al a’ Karim bin Hakar, Ruler of Dhurahn, was by all accounts a man who was much admired and respected by other men. And desert men respected only those who had proved they were strong enough for the desert. Such men were a race apart, a chosen few, men who stood tall and proud.

She had been tired when she came to bed, but now—thanks to her own foolishness—she was wide awake, her body tormented by a familiar sweet, slow ache that was flowing through her as surely as the Dhurani River flowed from the High Plateau Mountains beyond the empty quarter, travelling many, many hundreds of miles before emerging in its Plutonian darkness into the State of Dhurahn.

Why didn’t she think about and focus on that, instead of on the memory of a kiss that by rights she should have forgotten weeks ago?

It had, after all, been three months—well, three months, one week and four and a half days, to be exact—since she had accidentally bumped into a robed stranger and ended up…

And ended up what? Obsessing about him three months later? How rational was that? It wasn’t rational at all, was it? So they had shared an opportunistic kiss? No doubt both of them had been equally curious about and aroused by the cultural differences between them. At least that was what Sam was valiantly trying to tell herself. And perhaps she might have succeeded if she hadn’t been idiotic enough immediately after the incident to fall into the hormone-baited trap of convincing herself that she had met and fallen in love with the one true love of her life, and that she was doomed to ache and yearn for him for the rest of her life.

What foolishness. A work of fiction worthy of any Arabian Nights’ Tale, and even less realistic.

What had happened was an incident that at best should have simply been forgotten, and at worst should have caused her to feel a certain amount of shame.

Shame? For sharing a mere kiss with a stranger? That kind of thinking was totally archaic. Better and far more honest, surely, to admit the truth.

So what was the truth? That she had enjoyed the experience?

Enjoyed it?

If only it had been the kind of ephemeral, easy, lighter than light experience that could be dismissed as merely enjoyable.

But all it had been was a simple kiss, she told herself angrily.

A simple kiss was easily forgotten; it did not bury itself so deeply in the senses that just the act of breathing in an unguarded moment was enough to reawaken the feelings it had aroused. It did not wake a person from their sleep because she was drowning in the longing it had set free, like a subterranean river in full flood. It did not possess a person and her senses to the extent that she was possessed.

Here she went again, Sam recognised miserably. She was twenty-four years old—a qualified professional in a demanding profession, a woman who had so longed to train in her chosen field that she had deliberately refused to allow herself the distraction of emotional and physical relationships with the opposite sex, and had managed to do so without more than a few brief pangs of regret.

But now it was as though all she had denied herself had suddenly decided to fight back and demand recompense. As though the woman in her was demanding recompense for what she had been denied. Yes, that was it. That was the reason she was feeling the way she was, she decided with relief. What she was feeling had nothing really to do with the man himself, even though…

Even though what? Even though her body remembered every hard, lean line of his, every place it had touched his, every muscle, every breath, every pulse of the blood in his veins and the beat of his heart? And that was before she even began to think about his kiss, or the way she had felt as if fate had taken her by the hand and brought her face to face with her destiny and her soul mate. She was sure she would never have allowed herself to be subjected to such emotional intensity if she had stayed at home in England. Her loving but pragmatic parents, with their busy and practical lives, had certainly not brought her up to think in such terms.

If she was to re-experience that kiss now—that moment when she had looked into those green eyes and known that this was it, that neither she nor her life would ever be the same again, that somehow by some means beyond either her comprehension or her control, she was now his—it would probably not be anything like as erotic or all-powerful as she remembered. Imagination was a wonderful thing, she told herself. That she was still thinking about something she ought to have forgotten within hours of it happening only proved that she had far too much of that dangerous quality. After all, it wasn’t as though she was ever likely to see him again—a stranger met by chance in a hotel corridor in a foreign country.

Instead of thinking about him, what she ought to be thinking about was tomorrow, when Sheikh Fasial bin Sadir, the cousin and representative of the Ruler of Zuran, who had been here at the camp since they had first arrived to oversee everything, would be handing over control of the project to Vereham al a’ Karim bin Hakar, Sheikh of Dhurahn. In turn, in three months’ time, he would be replaced by the nominated representative of the Emir of Khulua.

Sheikh Sadir was a career diplomat who had made it his business to ensure that both the camp and the work they were doing were run in a well-ordered and harmonious fashion. He had stressed to them—in perfect English—in an on-site briefing, that all three Rulers were determined to ensure that none of the small bands of nomads remaining in the empty quarter should in any way feel threatened by the work they were doing. That was why each working party would have with them an Arab guide, who would be able to speak with the nomads and reassure them about what was going on.

He had also gone on to tell them that whilst each state technically had rights over their own share of the empty quarter, where it came within their borders, it was accepted by all of them that the nomads had the right to roam freely across those borders.

Sam knew nothing about the Ruler of Dhurahn, but she certainly hoped he would prove to be as easy to work under as Sheikh Sadir. After all, she was already experiencing the problems that came with working alongside someone who was antagonistic towards her.

She gave a faint sigh. From the moment he had arrived four weeks ago, to take the place of one of the original members of the team who’d had to return home for personal reasons, James Reynolds had set out to wrong-foot her. He was two years her junior and newly qualified, and she had initially put his determination to question everything she said and did as a mere youthful desire to make his mark. So she hadn’t checked him—more for the sake of his pride than anything else. She had assumed that he would soon realise that here they worked as a team, not as individuals trying to score points off one another, but instead of recognising that he was at fault James had started to become even more vocal in his criticism of her.

Sam really regretted ever having mentioned to James in conversation how interested she was in the origins of the river that flowed into and through Dhurahn. Since she had James had continually made references to it that implied she was spending the time she was paid for checking the status of the borders in trying, as James put it, ‘to mess around with the source of a river that we all know is there’, and in doing so avoiding doing any ‘proper work’. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

‘Take no notice of him,’ Talia had tried to comfort her before she had injured herself. ‘He obviously has issues with you, and that’s his problem, not yours.’

‘The trouble is that he’s making it my problem,’ Sam had told her. ‘I really resent the way he’s making such an issue of my interest in the source of the river—as though he thinks I’ve got some kind of ulterior motive.’

‘I should just ignore him, if I were you,’ Talia had told her. ‘I mean, we’ve all heard the legend of how the river was first supposed to have been found—and who, in all honesty, wouldn’t find it fascinating?’