Exposed: The Sheikh's Mistress

She took his words at face value, as he clearly wanted her to. ‘So, when did you last have a holiday?’

‘A holiday?’ he questioned, as surprised by the choice of topic as by her sudden change of subject.

She laughed, pleased to have perplexed him. ‘Yes, a holiday. That’s the thing that most people do when they’re tired and they want to relax.’

He screwed up his eyes. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

‘No recent bucket and spade job in Spain?’ she teased.

‘Bucket and spade job?’ He frowned.

‘Have you never built sandcastles, Hashim?’ she questioned.

He laughed. ‘Sand is not a big deal in Qudamah—not with so much of it around. We tend to escape from it rather than build our leisure time around it,’ he added drily.

‘I’d never thought of that.’ She snuggled up to him. ‘So what kind of holidays did you have when you were a child?’

He frowned. ‘You don’t really want to know.’

Which meant he didn’t really want to tell her. But a woman could not exist on sex alone, no matter what her status. ‘Oh, yes, I do!’ she said firmly.

And Hashim found himself smiling as he allowed himself a rare dip into nostalgia. How long ago a childhood could seem, and yet how astonishingly clear the memories if you opened the floodgates on them. ‘My male kin and I used to take our falcons up into the forests, where we trained them to kill.’

‘Nice!’

Idly, he circled the pad of his finger around one of her nipples, feeling it instantly point and peak, and he felt the heavy stir of desire returning. ‘There we learned to be men,’ he said dreamily.

‘No women?’

‘Not one.’

‘But what about your mother? Didn’t she want to go along?’

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 about that!

‘Females were not part of the endeavour,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Their place was at the Palace.’

‘And didn’t they mind?’

He hesitated. ‘My mother did 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 words I 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 thinking what 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 was doomed.

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 did you last have a holiday?’