He remembered the very first trip, being torn from his mother’s arms. He had been just five years old and had cried his eyes out. How remorselessly the others had teased him! And his father had told him that the painful separation was all part of the process of learning to be a man. He could imagine what a Western psychologist would say aboutthat !
‘Females were not part of the endeavour,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Their place was at the Palace.’
‘And didn’t they mind?’
He hesitated. ‘My motherdid mind, as it happens,’ he admitted. ‘And she made vocal her concerns. It caused a great deal of conflict between her and my father—but she was determined that the women of Qudamah should make some of the changes which women over the world were initiating at the time. Nothing like burning their bras, of course,’ he added hastily.
Sienna laughed. ‘Well, no.’
‘But through her efforts the women of Qudamah were gradually granted small freedoms.’
‘Such as?’
He shrugged. ‘Oh, they were allowed to walk in the capital unaccompanied by a man—though many still prefer not to.’ He saw her face. ‘To you this probably means nothing—a woman who has grown up with personal freedom and takes it for granted probably cannot comprehend that in my country it was a kind of revolution.’
‘She sounds like an amazing woman,’ she said.
‘She
is.’ The wordsI should like you to meet her hung unsaid on the air. For, no matter how true they were, how could he possibly utter them in the circumstances?
Sienna was quiet for a moment. She had heard the deliberate omission and she wouldn’t have been human if it hadn’t hurt her. What a different world he painted, and how his words emphasised the huge gulf between their cultures. If she had never understood his extreme reaction to her calendar shoot she certainly did now. If it was considered a mighty advance for a woman to go out on her own, then how must the baring of her breasts for an erotic calendar have seemed to a man of such a traditional upbringing?
But if ever she succumbed to the hopeless temptation of thinkingwhat if —then all she had to do was remind herself of the insurmountable differences which had always been there and always would. No matter what they did—it wasdoomed .
And Sienna had realised something else, too—Hashim might have been bordering on the brink of love all those years ago, but his feelings—and hers—had been nothing but a violent rush of emotion which had nothing to do with their real lives. Even now nothing had really changed. Their brief time together was spent in a vacuum.
He saw the clouds which had shadowed her eyes, but he did not enquire what had caused them. He had a pretty good idea, and some things were best left unspoken. Why go out and find hurt when it waited like a shadowy figure just around the corner? Instead, he touched her cheek. ‘And when didyou last have a holiday?’
‘Last year. I went to Australia to visit an old schoolfriend. She’s settled down there—married an Aussie.’ The spark of an idea began to form in her mind. ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a break together, Hashim?’ She looked around at the lavish yet soulless bedroom. ‘Somewhere that wasn’t in a hotel?’
He played along with her fantasy as she had played along with so many of his. ‘And where would we go?’
Sienna put her head to one side and considered. ‘I guess we’d stay in England. Travelling abroad would be too much hassle, and you travel too much anyway. It would be somewhere you could be completely incognito—completely free.’
‘Does such a place exist?’ he mocked.
Sienna nodded. ‘I know of a beautiful old converted farmhouse—it’s right in the middle of nowhere. I hired it once for a rock star’s fortieth birthday and everyone was raving on about it.’
‘But where would my bodyguards stay?’
‘There’s a cottage in the grounds. Not too far and yet far enough…’
Her voice tailed off and he read the erotic promise in her eyes. An unbearable temptation crept over him. Something was going to have to give in his life soon, and he knew that it was going to be his relationship with Sienna. But before it did…
Couldn’t he have the briefest taste of what it was like to be ‘normal’? Just an ordinary man taking a holiday with a woman who excited and calmed and provoked and stimulated him in dizzying succession? Someone who was part of his past and now his present, but could never be part of his future…
‘Can you arrange it?’ he questioned suddenly.
Sienna blinked. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Yes.’ He did a quick calculation in his head. ‘I can manage next weekend, if that fits in with your job?’
She was too excited to notice the faint sarcasm in his voice. Or to question whether two weekends on the trot was not pushing their luck.
She nodded. ‘Well, yes—of course I can. If we can get it. It’s quite short notice—but it should be fine. I mean—who in their right mind wants to holiday in the English countryside in the middle of February?’
‘Well, I do.’