Surrender to the Sheikh

She lost that particular battle—but the crazy thing was that she didn’t particularly care. She didn’t care about anything, she realised.

Except for her dark lover with the soul of a poet, who would never truly be hers.

They went out—of course they did—just like any other couple. Except that they were not—and excursions into the outside world brought that fact crashing home. For trips to restaurants or the theatre were always shadowed by the discreet but ever vigilant bodyguard, who was never more than a few steps away from Khalim. Several times they ate with Sabrina and Guy, and Rose found herself glancing at Sabrina’s shiny new wedding band with more than a little envy.

And each morning they both left for work, just like any other couple.

‘Do you have to go to work?’ Khalim demanded sleepily from their bed one morning, when the thought of having her in his arms for the rest of the day was just too much to resist. Philip could deal with all the most urgent matters, he thought hungrily. He threw her a sizzling look. ‘I mean, really?’

‘I most certainly do!’ she replied crisply, steeling herself against the promise in those night-dark eyes. ‘Why, are you offering to “support” me from now on, Khalim?’

He smiled, knowing that her challenge was an empty one. That his feisty, independent Rose would sooner sweep the streets than accept money from him! ‘Any time you like,’ he mocked. ‘Any time at all.’

And it said a lot about her emotional state for Rose to realise that the offer actually tempted her for a moment. She spent one heady moment thinking how wonderful it would be to be ‘kept’ by Khalim, before swiftly taking herself out of the flat and heading off for her offices in Maida Vale.

Each day, Khalim went to his suite at the Granchester to join Philip Caprice where he locked himself into matters of state affecting Maraban, settling down to study the papers which had been sent for his attention.

And lately there were more and more of them, he acknowledged as he began to accept that the burden of his inheritance began to creep ever closer.

The heady, pleasure-filled weeks crept stealthily by. Each night he received reports on his father’s health, and the physicians assured him that he was weak, but stable.

But one evening he replaced the telephone receiver with a heavy hand, tension etching deep lines on the dark, beautiful face, and Rose’s heart went out to him, even as a cold feeling of the inevitable crept over her. ‘Don’t you want to go out to see him?’ she asked softly. ‘Shouldn’t you be there, with him?’

He met her troubled gaze, her foreboding echoed in his own eyes as he saw their fantasy life coming to an end. He nodded. ‘I shall go at the weekend,’ he told her. ‘Once I have concluded the American oil deal.’

Her heart began to pound as she heard something new in his voice. Something she would have preferred not to have heard. Distance. She had heard it once before in Maraban and it had frightened her then.

Distance.

She stumbled over the words. ‘And you may…you may stay there, I suppose?’

There was a long pause. ‘That depends—’

‘Please be honest with me, Khalim! Otherwise what good will this whole…’ she couldn’t think of a single word which would sum up the magic of their weeks together, and so she plumped for the prosaic ‘…affair have been, if the truth deserts us when it really counts?’

‘Affair?’ he echoed thoughtfully and then nodded slowly. ‘Yes. I may have to stay. And I won’t be able to take you with me, you know, Rose.’

‘I know that. I never expected you to.’

‘No.’ She had placed no demands on him whatsoever, apart from a stubborn determination for him to do his share of the household chores. Would it have made him happier if she had broken down? Wept? Begged him not to go, or to smuggle her back to some anonymous house in Maraban? Because that at least might have given him some indication of her true feelings for him.

Never before had he encountered a woman who didn’t demand words of love and commitment—particularly in the aftermath of love-making. But Rose had not. Did she not want emotional reassurance from him, then? Or was her eminently practical side simply telling her that such words meant nothing. That actions were what counted—and that soon he would have to leave.

‘Then we’d better make the last of these two days,’ she said unhappily.

He nodded, wishing that he could take the sadness from her eyes. ‘Let’s start right now.’ And he pulled her into his arms and kissed her, dazed by the emotional effect of that sad, sweet kiss. ‘A kiss like there was no tomorrow,’ he murmured.

I wish tomorrow never would come, thought Rose as she kissed him back with a hunger which verged on desperation, a desperation which grew into a storm of passion which left them shaking and helpless in its wake.

They were slavish in their attention to detail, to try to make their last hours together as perfect as possible. The meals they cooked were their favourite meals; the music they played the most poignant.

And their love-making took on an extra dimension—the sense of inevitable loss they both felt making it seem more profound than it had ever done before.

She played with his body as she would a violin, fine-tuning every single one of his senses until he would moan with helpless pleasure beneath her hands and her lips.

The night before he was due to leave, they ate a sensual supper in bed and she was just licking off the strawberry yogurt which she had trickled on the dark matt of hair which sprinkled his chest when the phone rang.

‘Leave it to the machine,’ he instructed, his eyes tight shut with the pleasure of what she had been doing with her tongue.