The Sheikh's Blackmailed Mistress

Sam had nodded her head.

The story was that, centuries earlier, the forebears of Dhurahn’s current Ruler, desert nomads, had been caught in a sandstorm and lost their way. After days of wandering in the desert, unable to find water, they had prayed to Allah to save them. When they had finished praying their leader had looked up and seen a bird perched on a rocky outcrop.

‘Look,’ he had commanded his people. ‘Where there is life there must be water. Allah be praised!’

As he had spoken he had brought his fist down on a rock, and miraculously water had spouted from that rock to become a river that watered the whole of Dhurahn—the land he had claimed for his people.

‘It’s been proved now, of course, that the river runs underground for hundreds of miles before it reaches Dhurahn,’ she’d reminded the other girl. ‘The legend probably springs from the fact that a fissure of some kind must have allowed a spring to bubble up from underground. And luckily for Dhurahn it happened on their land.’

Dawn! Here in the desert it burst upon the senses fully formed, taking you hostage to its miracle, Vere acknowledged, as he brought his four-by-four to a halt so that he could watch it.

Naturally his was the first vehicle in the convoy, since it would be unthinkable for him to travel in anyone’s dust. He had, in fact, left the others several miles behind him when he’d turned off the road that led to an oasis where the border-mapping team had set up camp, to drive across the desert itself instead.

As teenagers, both he and Drax had earned their spurs in the testosterone-fuelled young Arab male ‘sport’ of testing their skill against the treachery of the desert’s sand dunes. Like others before them, they had both overturned a handful of times before they had truly mastered the art of dune driving—something which no one could do with the same panache as a desert-dwelling Arab.

These days, with modern GPS navigation systems, the old danger of losing one’s bearings and dying from dehydration before one could be found wasn’t the danger it had once been, but the desert itself could never be tamed.

The Oasis of the Doves, where the team was encamped, was just inside Dhurahn’s own border, at the furthest end of a spear of Dhurahni land which contained the source of the river that made so much of Dhurahn the lushly rich land that it was.

Their ancestors had fought hard and long to establish and hold on to their right to the source of the river, and many bitter wars had been fought between Dhurahn and its neighbours over such a valuable asset before the Rulers had sat down together and reached a legal and binding agreement on where their borders were to be.

Vere could remember his father telling him with a rueful smile that the family story was that their great-grandfather had in part legally secured the all-important strip of land containing the beginnings of the river that they had claimed by right of legend for so many generations because he had fallen passionately in love with the daughter of the English diplomat who had been sent to oversee the negotiations—and she with him. Lord Alfred Saunders had quite naturally used his diplomatic powers in favour of his own daughter once he had realised that she could not be dissuaded from staying with the wild young Arab with whom she had fallen in love.

It had been at Vere’s insistence that the scientific and mapping teams had been housed in the traditional black tents of the Bedou, instead of something more westernised. It might be Drax who was the artist, but Vere’s own eye was very demanding, and the thought of seeing anything other than the traditional Bedou tents clustered around an oasis affronted his aesthetic sense of what was due to the desert.

He restarted the four-by-four’s engine and eased it easily and confidently down the steep ravine that lay ahead of him. His mother had always loved this oasis, and it was now protected by new laws that had been brought in to ensure that it remained as it was and would never, as some oases had, become an over-developed tourist attraction.

The oasis itself was a deep pool of calm water that reflected the colour of the sky. It was fringed with graceful plants, and the narrow path that skirted it was shaded by palm trees. Migrating birds stopped there to rest and drink, the Bedou nomads drove their herds here, and held their annual trading fairs here. Bedou marriage feasts took place here.

It was a place for the celebration of life, symbolised by the oasis itself—the preserver of life. But for once being here was not soothing Vere.

Instead he felt hauntingly aware of an emptiness inside himself, and the ache that emptiness was causing. How was it possible for him to feel like this when it wasn’t what he wanted? He had grown so used to believing that he could control his own emotions that he couldn’t accept that somehow his emotional defences had been breached. It shouldn’t have been possible, and because of that Vere was determined to believe that it wasn’t possible.

The pain he had felt on losing his parents had shocked and frightened him—something that he had never admitted to anyone, not even Drax, and something he had tried to bury deep within himself. He had reasoned at the time that it was because his father’s death had made him Dhurahn’s new ruler—a role that demanded for the sake of his people that he show them that he was their strength, that they could rely on him as they had relied on his father. How could he manifest that strength when alone in his room at night he wept for the loss of his mother? For the sake of Dhurahn and his people he’d forced himself to separate from his love for his mother and the pain of his loss. He had decided there must be a weakness within him that meant he must never, ever allow himself to become emotionally vulnerable through love, for the sake of his duty. He couldn’t trust himself to put his duty above his own personal feelings should he fall in love and marry and then for any reason lose the woman he loved.

Those feelings and that decision still held as good for him now as they had done the day he had made them, sitting alone in his mother’s private garden, sick with longing for her comfort. His father had worshipped and adored their mother, but Vere knew that, had he survived the accident, he would somehow have continued to be the Ruler of Dhurahn, not a grieving husband, because that was his absolute and predestined duty. The weakness within him, Vere had decided that day, was one he must guard against all his life. And as a young, passionately intense and serious-minded teenager it had seemed to him that the only way he could guarantee to do this would be to lock the gates of his heart against the risks that would come with falling in love. He could not trust himself to have the strength to put duty before love. That was his secret shame, and one he spoke of to no one.

Now, the discovery that, after so many years of believing he had conquered and driven out of himself the emotions and needs he feared, he was aching constantly for a woman he had met fleetingly and only once, was creating inside him an armed phalanx of warrior-like hostile emotions. Chief amongst these was the inner voice that told him that the woman had deliberately set out to arouse him, and that his lust for her was unacceptable and contemptible.

Sam had woken up over an hour ago, with the first hint of dawn, and had been unable to get back to sleep. It would have been easy to blame her inability to sleep on the unease that James was causing her. Easy, but untrue, she admitted, as she pulled on the traditional black robe worn by Muslim women, which she had found so very useful as a form of protection against the sun and the sand.

She stepped barefoot out of the tent into the still coolness of the early morning.

Traditionally, all the members of a nomad tribe would have been up and busy at first light, to make the most of the cooler hours of the day before the sun rose too high in the sky for them to bear its heat, but in these days of air-conditioning units there was no need for anyone to rise early, and Sam knew from experience that she would have the early-morning peace of the oasis to herself.

A narrow pathway meandered along the water’s edge, the ground flattened out in certain areas where animals came to drink. As Sam walked along the path a cloud of doves rose from the palm trees and then settled back down. A bird, so swift and graceful that all she saw was the flash of its wings, dipped down to the water and then rose up again with a small fish in its beak.

Sam turned a curve in the path and then came to such an abrupt halt that she almost fell over her own feet as she stared in disbelief at the man standing facing her. Her heart soared as easily as the doves on a surge of dizzying delight.

‘You,’ she breathed, helpless with longing.

CHAPTER THREE

WHAT a strange thing the senses were in the way they could instantly recognise a person and then immediately cause one’s body to react to that recognition, Sam thought giddily, as she stared across the space that divided them at the man who was looking back at her.

She had known he was tall, but she had not realised quite how tall. She had known how virile and broad-shouldered and how muscular his body was, but not how strong and corded those muscles would be with the morning sun delineating the power beneath the flesh.

She hesitated, engulfed by the intensity of her own emotional and sexual arousal, and torn between flight from it and submission to it. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened to her before—which, of course, was why she had tried to initially evade and then deny it. Now, though, she was face-to-face—quite literally—with a truth she could not escape, with a knowledge about herself and her emotions, and she had no idea how to cope with it.

How was it possible for her to feel the way she did? How was it possible for her to want him so completely and unreservedly that all she wanted to do was go to him and give herself into his keeping for ever?

It was crazy, reckless…. dangerous. And if she had any sense she wouldn’t be thinking such things. She looked at his mouth. Sense. What was that? Nothing that mattered. Not like the aching sweetness pouring through her.

‘How did you find me?’ She was filled with awe and delight, humbled and elated. Reality belonged to another universe, not this magical place she had suddenly stepped into, where a person’s most secret dreams could come true.

Perhaps she was dreaming? Only in daylight now, instead of during the protective darkness of the night hours. If so, Sam knew that she did not want to wake up again—ever. Why had she wasted all those hours trying uselessly to convince herself that nothing life-transforming had really happened between them? Why had she not had more faith in what she felt? He obviously had, because here he was. He had found her. He had come for her. Joy flooded through her.

Vere felt as though he had been turned to stone. No, not stone—because stone could not have felt what he was feeling right now. Stone could not have been pierced by the sharp, immediate and intense male surge of overpowering need to take her, to let his body satisfy the elemental force that was filling his head with images of their bodies together: naked flesh to naked flesh, her head thrown back in ecstasy whilst he moulded her to him, shaping her with his hands, spreading open the softness of her eager thighs, possessing her as she was begging him to do, endlessly and erotically, as she cried out to him over and over again in her pleasure until it became his, until he knew even as fulfilment rushed through him that its satisfaction would never be enough, that like a drug once tasted he would need more, and then still more.

The young boy’s fear translated into a grown man’s savage anger against what gripped him. He had to get away from her.

Sam could hardly contain her emotions. They made her tremble like a gazelle scenting the hunter and knowing its fate. In another minute he would reach her and take her in his arms, and then…She started to walk towards him, her pace quickening with the intensity of her need to touch him and be touched by him. A wild thrill of excitement shot through her—only to turn to a sharp stab of shocked disbelief when, just as she had almost reached him, he abruptly turned his back on her and started to walk away.

Pain and confusion swirled through her, leaving her feeling unsteady and insecure, desperate to stop him from leaving her.

‘No!’

The denial felt as though it had been torn from her heart, it hurt so much.

Another man had appeared from a side path and was coming between them, bowing low in front of him, to murmur respectfully, ‘Highness.’

Highness?

Had she actually whispered her appalled dismay? Was that why he had turned to look at her, that brilliant emerald-green gaze homing in on her, transfixing her to the spot, unable to move, unable to do anything, until it had been removed from her and the two men were walking away from her back down the path.

Sam searched her too pale expression in the mirror. If she didn’t go and join the others soon, not only would she miss breakfast, she’d almost certainly have someone coming to ask why she wasn’t there and if she was all right.

All right? She gave a small shiver. She wasn’t sure she would ever be that again.

Had she actually seen him by the oasis, or had she only thought she had? Had he been merely a mirage, conjured up by her own imagination? And if he had, what did that tell her about the state she was in?

‘Sam—at last. I was just about to come and look for you in case you’d overslept.’

The anxiety combined with just a hint of reproach in the voice of Anne Smith, the female half of a pair of married statisticians who were part of the team, caused Sam to give her an apologetic look.

‘Sorry—’ she began, but to her relief, before she was obliged to come up with an explanation as to why she was so late, Anne continued.

‘You’ve never missed breakfast before, and with Sheikh Sadir telling us that the Ruler of Dhurahn has arrived, and that we are all to be formally presented to him, I was getting really worried that you wouldn’t make it.’