Scandal: His Majesty's Love-Child

She spoke again, ‘You don’t seem particularly pleased.’

Tahir shrugged, then stiffened as abused muscles shrieked in protest.

He didn’t explain his innermost thoughts to anyone.

‘Why is it green? Where are we?’ He kept his head averted, preferring not to face the owner of that voice till he had himself in hand. He felt strangely at a loss, unable to summon his composure, as if this last beating had shattered the brittle shell of disdain he used to maintain distance from the brutality around him.

Tahir blinked, amazed at how vulnerable he felt. How weak.

‘We’re at the Darshoor oasis, in the heart of Qusay’s desert.’ Her voice slid like rippling water over him and for a moment his hazy mind strayed.

Till her words sank in.

‘The desert?’ He whipped his head round then shut his eyes as a blast of white-hot pain stabbed him.

‘That’s right. The light’s green because you’re in my tent.’

A tent. In the desert. The words whirled in his head but they didn’t make sense.

‘My father—’

‘He’s not here.’ She broke in before he could cobble his thoughts together. ‘You seemed to think he was here too but you’re confused. You were…disturbed.’

Tahir frowned. None of this made sense. His father lived in the city, with easy access to his vices of choice: women, gambling and brokering power and money corruptly.

‘You seemed to think you’d been beaten.’

Instantly Tahir froze. He would never have admitted such a thing, especially to a stranger! Not even to his closest friends.

Who was this woman?

He forced his eyelids open again and found himself sinking into warm sherry-tinted depths.

By daylight she looked even better than she had the first time. For he remembered her now, this woman who’d haunted his thoughts. Or were they dreams?

‘Who are you?’ A swift glance took in hair scrupulously pulled back from her lovely face, an absence of jewellery, a long-sleeved yellow shirt and beige cotton trousers. She didn’t dress like a local in concealing skirts. Yet surely only a local would be here?

From where he lay, looking up, her legs looked endless. She moved and he watched the fabric pull tight over her neatly curved hip and slim thighs. A moment later she sat on the floor beside him, her faint, sweet fragrance tantalising his nostrils. Her shirt pulled across her breasts as she leaned towards him.

A jolt of sensation shot through his belly.

No. He wasn’t dead yet.

Perhaps there were some compensations after all.

‘My name is Annalisa. Annalisa Hansen.’ She paused, as if waiting for him to say something. ‘You arrived at my campsite days ago. Just walked out of the desert.’

‘Days ago?’ How could he have lost so much time?

‘You’re injured.’ She gestured to his head, his side. ‘My guess is you were in the desert for quite a while. When you reached me you were seriously dehydrated.’ She lifted a hand to his brow. Her palm was cool and curiously familiar.

He had a jumbled recollection of her touching him earlier. Of blessed water and soothing words.

‘You’ve been drifting in and out of consciousness.’ She leaned back, lifting her hand away, and Tahir knew a bizarre desire to catch it back.

‘Your little friend has been worried.’

‘Little friend?’ Automatically he looked past her, taking in the cool interior of the tent, the neatly stowed gear in one corner. A ripple of pages as a furtive breeze played across a book left open a few metres away.

‘You don’t remember?’ She surveyed him seriously.

‘No.’ He remembered just in time not to shake his head. He was no masochist and the pain was already bad enough. ‘I don’t recall.’

It was true. His thoughts were fluid and incomplete. He was unable to fix anything in his mind.

‘That’s all right,’ she said with the calm air of one who’d perfected a soothing bedside manner. Vaguely he wondered who this woman was, caring for him at a desert oasis. ‘You’ve taken a nasty knock to the head so things could be jumbled for a while.’

‘Tell me,’ he murmured, forcing down rising concern at his faulty memory. He recalled a casino. A woman all but climbing into his lap as the chips rose before him. He remembered a cruiser in a crowded marina. A party in a city penthouse. A meeting in a hushed boardroom. But the faces were blurred. The details unclear. ‘What little friend?’

The woman…Annalisa, he reminded himself…smiled. A shaft of sunlight pierced the interior of the tent, or so it seemed, as he stared up into her calm, sweet face.

‘You were carrying a goat.’