Penny Jordan Tribute Collection

Aware of him and responsive to him… And surely, if she was truly honest with herself, not just physically…

‘You look flushed,’ she heard Blaize telling her brusquely. ‘You must make sure that you drink plenty of water. The desert is the last place to get dehydrated.’

Perhaps she ought to be glad that he believed her heightened colour was caused by the sun’s heat rather than guessing that it was caused by the unwanted sensuality of her own desire for him, Petra reflected inwardly.

She had believed that her mother’s reminiscences of her own childhood trips into the desert had prepared her for what she might expect, but Petra still found that she was holding her breath and then expelling it in a sharp sound of excitement as they crested yet another sand dune. There before them, shimmering beneath the sun’s heat like a mirage, lay the oasis and the encampment which had been recreated to give tourists like herself a taste of what desert living had been all about in the days when Nomad tribes had still roamed the desert, travelling from one oasis to another.

Several other four-wheel drive vehicles were already parked close to one another and Blaize pulled up next to them.

‘Wait here,’ Blaize told her. ‘I’ll go and find out which tent has been assigned to us.’

To them? Petra’s stomach muscles were quivering with the effort of controlling her emotions when Blaize returned several minutes later and she walked into what was more properly a pavilion than a mere tent, at the farthest edge of the encampment. She discovered that it was divided inside into three completely separate sections, which comprised a living room area, complete with rich, patterned oriental carpets and silk-covered divans, as well as two separated bedrooms. The shower block, Blaize informed her, was more mundanely housed on its own, and provided up-to-the-minute facilities.

Petra was only half listening to him. She had unfastened the doorway leading to one of the bedrooms and was staring in disbelieving delight at its interior.

Unlike her very modern bedroom at the hotel, this really was straight out of an Arabian Nights fantasy.

The interior ‘walls’ of the pavilion were hung with a rich mixture of embroidered silks in shimmering oriental colours, embellished with gold thread which caught the light from the lamps placed on low, heavily carved chests dotted around the surprisingly spacious room.

The bed itself, whilst only slightly raised off the rug-covered floor, like the walls was covered in beautiful silk throws, and from the ceiling there hung sheer muslin voiles, currently tied back, which Petra suspected would cover the whole bed when untied. The effect was one of unsurpassable opulence and sensuality, and Petra was half afraid to even blink, just in case she discovered that the entire room was merely a mirage.

‘Something wrong?’ she heard Blaize asking from behind her.

Immediately Petra shook her head.

‘No. It’s… it’s wonderful…’

‘Arabian Nights meets MGM,’ Blaize pronounced briefly and almost sardonically as he glanced past her into the room.

‘It’s beautiful.’ Petra defended her new temporary home.

‘Officially, it’s the honeymoon suite,’ Blaize informed her drily, adding, ‘But don’t worry—just in case they don’t get any honeymooners—or if they do but they fall out—they keep the other room kitted out as a second bedroom.’

The honeymoon suite! Why had they been given that? Or had Blaize perhaps asked for it deliberately, to reinforce the idea that they were lovers?

‘If you want to have a camel ride, now’s the time,’ Blaize was continuing, patently oblivious to the sensuality and allure of the silk-hung bedroom and the temptation that was affecting Petra so forcibly.

‘More coffee?’

Smiling, Petra shook her head, covering her cup with her hand in the traditional gesture that meant that she had had enough.

It was nearly eleven o’clock in the evening, and the dishes had been cleared away following their evening meal, ready for the entertainment to begin.

Petra could feel the excited expectation emanating from the gathered onlookers as the musicians changed beat and out of one of the tents a stunningly beautiful woman shimmied, dressed in a traditional dancing costume, jewels sparkling on her fingers and of course in her navel as she swayed provocatively to the sound of the music. Her body undulated sensuously, her dark eyes flashing smoky temptation above her veil as she rolled her hips, her whole body, and most especially the bare, smooth, taut brown expanse of her belly in rhythmic time to the music.

To one side of her a group of tourists were passing a hubble-bubble pipe between one another, the girls giggling softly as they breathed in the sweet taste of the strawberry-flavoured smoke. Its effect was supposed to be mildly euphoric, and Petra hesitated a little when it was passed on to her.

‘If you don’t try it you have to pay a forfeit and get up and dance with our belly dancer,’ the tour guide with the large party who had just passed her the pipe teased Petra.

Rather than appear standoffish, Petra took a quick breath, relaxing as she smelled the innocuous scent of the strawberries and then offering the pipe to Blaize, only to realise that he had got up and walked away. He was talking to the falconer, who was still holding one of his now hooded birds, the gold tooling on the leather gloves, gleaming in the firelight.

As she handed the pipe back to the waiting tour guide, Petra realised that she wasn’t the only woman there looking at Blaize. The belly dancer was focusing her gaze and her openly inviting body movements on him, ignoring the rest of them and turning to face him, moving closer and closer to him.

And as for Blaize…! A sensation of sheer white-hot jealousy knifed through Petra as she saw the way he was watching the dancer and smiling at her.

Petra had believed that she knew pain, but now, shockingly, she realised that all she had experienced was one of its many dimensions. Right now, watching Blaize look at another woman when she ached, yearned, needed to have him look only at her, unlocked for her the door to an agonising new world of pain!

Thoughts, longings, needs hitherto denied and forbidden broke loose from the control she had imposed on them, one after the other, until she was exposed to an entire avalanche of them. They buried for ever any possibility of her denying what her feelings for Blaize really were!

Frantically she struggled to make sense of what was happening. In the eerie pristine silence that followed the inner explosion, her thought processes were frozen.

How was it possible for her to love Blaize? Petra felt as though she had suddenly become one of those small figures in a child’s snowstorm ball, who had just had her whole world and all her perceptions of what was in it turned vigorously upside down. But say she had got it wrong. Say she did not really love Blaize. Mentally she tried to imagine how she would feel if she were never to see him again.

The intensity of her pain made her catch her breath. Was this how her mother had felt about her father? It must have been. But things had been different for her mother, Petra had to remind herself. Her mother had known that her love was returned… shared… That she was loved as much as she herself loved.

The music was reaching a crescendo, and Petra shivered as she felt and saw the raw sensuality of the dancer’s movements, her passionate determination to make Blaize notice her, choose her. Blaize himself had turned round and was watching her. The girl danced faster and faster, and then as the music exploded in climactic triumph she flung herself bodily as Blaize’s feet.

Petra could tell from the reaction of the guides and the robed men watching that this was not the normal finale to the dance. Instinctively she knew that the girl did not normally offer herself with such sexual blatancy to one of the male onlookers the way she just had done to Blaize, and immediately her own jealousy burned to a white heat.

She wanted to run to the girl and push her away—to tell her that Blaize belonged to her. But of course he did not!

The audience were good-humouredly throwing money onto the floor for the dancer, as they had been encouraged to do, but the dancer remained prostrate in front of Blaize, not acknowledging their generosity. It was left to one of the male fire-eaters who had been entertaining them earlier to pick it up.

As Petra watched Blaize watching the girl she wondered what he was thinking. He said something to one of the men he had been speaking with, who inclined his head as though in deference to Blaize before going over to the girl and bending towards her.

What was the man saying to her? Petra wondered jealously. What message had Blaize given the man to give her? Had he told her that he would see her later? The girl was getting up. She looked at Blaize, a proud, challenging flash of dark eyes, before walking slowly away, her hips swaying provocatively as she did so, her spine straight.

How could any man resist such an invitation? Petra wondered bleakly. Why would a man like Blaize even try to do so? And why, oh, why did a woman like her have to fall in love with him?

The evening was drawing to a close. People were finishing off their drinks and retiring to their pavilions.

Petra looked towards Blaize, who was still talking to the falconer and some other men. The dancer had disappeared, and Blaize was showing no signs of coming over to her or even looking at her.

Tiredly Petra got up and made her own way to their pavilion, collecting her things and then heading for the shower block. Too much was happening to her too quickly. Since arriving in this country she had been forced to confront aspects of herself and her feelings that it was very hard for her to accept.

Suddenly, standing beneath the warm spray of the shower, she longed achingly to be able to turn back the clock and return to a time when she had known nothing of the complexities that meeting her grandfather would bring. A time when she would have laughed out loud in disbelief if anyone had suggested that she would fall in love with a man like Blaize.

The camp was settling down to sleep when she made her way back to her pavilion. The soft glow of the lamps added to the air of mystery and enticement of its interior.

Someone had placed a dish of dates on one of the low carved tables in the sitting area, and silk cushions were placed invitingly on the floor in front of it, but Petra had no stomach for the sweetness of the dates—no stomach for anything, really, she admitted, now that her heart was soured by the anguish of her unreturnable love for Blaize. After all, even if he were by some impossible means to return her feelings, how could there be any future for them?

It wasn’t a matter of money. That didn’t come into it. Blaize could have had nothing and she would have loved him proudly and joyously. But how could she feel anything other than disquiet and distress at loving a man who used himself in the way that Blaize did? It was that which hurt her more than anything else! Even more than thinking about him with another woman? The belly dancer for instance?

Petra curled her hands into small fists. Where was he now? He was not in his room. The fabric covering the entrance to it was tied back so that she could see that the space beyond was empty.

Unlike hers, the ‘walls’ of his room were hung with darker, heavier fabric, which if anything was even more richly embroidered in gold than her own. Opulent fur-mimicking throws were heaped on the bed. There was a beautiful rug on the floor and a dish of sweet almond cakes on the table in front of the divan, along with a pot of richly fragrant coffee.

It was a setting fit for an Arabian prince, Petra reflected admiringly. And a retreat to which that same prince could bring the dancing girl of his choice, a dangerous inner voice taunted her.