The Desert Bride

Seeking a lookout point, she started climbing the sliding wall of sand with raw determination. It took her far longer and required far more effort than she had expected. Near the top she bent double, struggling to breathe in the hot air and overwhelmed by dizziness. Finally achieving her objective, she strained her eyes against the fiery blaze of the sun and thought that she was hallucinating when she saw the lines of black tents beginning less than thirty yards below her.

She blinked dazedly and looked again. Her terror of being found as a set of bleached bones after a long and painful decline brought on by thirst and third-degree sunburn died there and then. Indeed her attack of panic now made her feel distinctly foolish. It was a Bedouin encampment and a very large one. She did not believe in so miraculous a coincidence. It would seem that Fatima’s driver might appear to do her bidding but he was not a maniac and he had chosen the drop site, aware that Bethany could come to little harm here. She started down the slope.

A clutch of colourfully clad children saw her first. They ran ahead of her, shouting at the top of their voices. Women peered out of dim tent interiors. Bethany followed the children until a whole horde of men piled out of an enormous tent and blocked her path, their dark, weather-beaten faces arranged in expressions that went from initial shock to outright rigid disapproval. They stood around her exchanging volleys of excitable Arabic and waving their hands about with gusto. Their reaction, so entirely foreign to the indelible rule of Arab hospitality, completely disconcerted Bethany.

A tubby little man with a grey beard, clad in gold-edged blue robes, paced forward and fixed stern black eyes on her. ‘You are Prince Razul’s bride?’

Red hair in Datar was like having two heads, Bethany decided. When some idiotic Englishwoman with a flaming head of hair came huffing and puffing out of the desert wastes wearing a silly, strained smile, evidently the locals could name her on sight. Zulema had not been exaggerating when she’d said that everybody knew about her. Now...should she say that she was not Razul’s intended or should she play dumb?

‘I am Razul’s great-uncle, Sheikh Abdul al Rashidai Harun.’

Dumb wasn’t likely to carry her through, she registered. Her smile slid away. She sensed the principles of family solidarity looming large, and she had the nasty suspicion that Sheikh Abdul found the sight of Razul’s bride apparently loose and on the run in the wrong direction an offence of no mean order.

‘I got lost,’ she muttered stupidly, but she was so hot and so exhausted that the world around her was beginning to spin.

‘You will not become lost again,’ Sheikh Abdul announced, producing a mobile phone from his sleeve with a flourish. ‘My nephew has a temper like a sandstorm, most dangerous when roused. It is a joy to behold.’

As Bethany swayed a woman tugged at her sleeve and she was carted off to the welcome shelter of a large tent. In daunting silence she was brought water to wash with, then was served with tea and a delicious selection of food. As darkness folded in the elaborate brass lamps attached to the tent-poles were lit. Left alone, she sank down on a kelim-covered ottoman and curved her cheek into a silk cushion, the vibrant colours of the gorgeous Shiraz rugs hung on the cloth walls of the tent swimming before her as her weighted eyelids sank down.

When Bethany finally awakened after a very restless night she was lying under a blanket which she immediately thrust off her, the stickiness of her skin telling her that a new day had begun. She shifted and sat up, her tumbled hair falling round her like a vibrant curtain of flame as she glanced at her watch. It was only eight. She lifted her fingers to thrust the tangle of curls off her damp brow and then she froze.

Sheathed in desert robes, Razul was standing mere feet away with the stillness of a graven image. Sizzling gold eyes as brilliant as sunlight in that hard-boned, hawkish face splintered into her with powerful effect. His complete silence was intimidating. But the most menacing thing of all for Bethany was the instant flood of pleasure and relief she experienced. That instinctive response was her worst nightmare come true.

She turned her head away. ‘OK, so I made a break for freedom and ended up a long way from the airport,’ she conceded in a tone of nervous irony. ‘So what now? You bury me up to the throat in sand at the hottest part of the day, paint me with honey and set scorpions on me? Or do you just send me home in disgrace? What is the traditional approach?’

‘According to tradition, I beat you.’

Bethany lost every scrap of colour, plunged into sudden, unavoidable recall of her aunt’s disastrous marriage to an Arab. Violence had played its part in the final breakup of that union. ‘That’s something of a conversation-killer, Razul,’ she murmured not quite steadily.

‘You left me.’ The intense condemnation with which he spoke mirrored the powerful anger that he was visibly struggling to contain.

‘That’s the problem with stealing women,’ Bethany retorted with helpless defiance as her chin came up. “The stupid creatures may well cherish a peculiar desire to regain their freedom.’

‘Do you want me to lose my temper?’ Fierce strain was etched on his startlingly handsome features.

And Bethany discovered that yes, she did. She needed a cure for the madness afflicting her, and the proof that he was the kind of male likely to employ his infinitely greater strength to the task of subjecting a woman would surely provide quite unparalleled therapy. She bent her head, her emotions in so much conflict that she felt torn apart. The madness of her own reasoning hit her hard. Had she enjoyed a single truly rational thought since she’d entered Datar? Angry bitterness consumed her in a sudden, scorching tide.

She slid upright, her jewel-bright eyes slicing back at him. ‘Why not? Isn’t this whole crazy mess your fault? It’s certainly not mine! How dare you bring me to this country? And how dare you stand there now and try to intimidate me?’

‘Do not raise your voice to me here where we may be overheard.’ The pallor of his increasing anger had spread savagely across his high cheek-bones.

‘I’ll do whatever the hell I like. I don’t belong to you like some sort of rug you can walk on when you feel like it, and you have no rights over me!’ she blazed back.

‘Have I not?’ Razul bit out very softly.

‘None whatsoever, so you can keep the macho-man act for your harem!’ Bethany spat at him in a mood of pure vitriol, wanting every scornful word to find its target. ‘Your chances of reducing me to the level of crawling round your feet are zero...I’d sooner slit my throat! How dare you talk about your honour when you’ve already got a wife? When I called you primitive, barbaric and uncivilised in England I was understating the case!’

His strong face a mask of fury, Razul moved forward with such terrifying abruptness that Bethany threw herself backwards over the ottoman and screamed. A powerful hand closed over her shoulder and began hauling her bodily back up onto the seat which she was endeavouring to employ as a defensive barrier. The sheer strength he exhibited sent her into even deeper panic, and another few strangled yells escaped her before Razul laid the palm of his hand firmly across her trembling mouth, enforcing her silence.

Huge green eyes, dark with fear, looked up at him as he pinned her flat.

‘Keep quiet,’ Razul intoned.

That controlled command wasn’t at all what she had expected. As she braced herself for a blow, her shocked eyes grew even bigger. Her heart was pounding fit to burst behind her breastbone. The hard heat and weight of his body imprisoned her as securely as chains.

‘My people will think I cannot control my woman but I know very well how to control my woman,’ Razul asserted with savage quietness. ‘In bed and out of bed. But I have never yet sunk to shameful violence, nor would I. Do you understand that, or is that beyond your understanding?’

In a daze of quivering uncertainty she stared back up at him and drowned helplessly in the entrapment of compelling golden

eyes raw with anger and derision.

‘So, aziz...one more scream and all you get is a bucket of water over you to douse your hysterics. Am I speaking English clearly enough for comprehension?’

Bethany gave a mesmerised nod under his hand.

With a final searing glance he released her.

She was still in a condition of such bemusement that she couldn’t function. She had gone from rage to terror within seconds and lost control. A kind of appalled embarrassment was beginning to steal over her.

Razul stared down at her. ‘You said...you said that I already had a wife. Was that some childishly inept attempt to further defame my character?’

She closed her eyes in sudden agony, assuming that he intended to lie to her. ‘I know that Fatima is your wife.’

‘I have never had a wife. I was betrothed at the age of twenty-two to Hiriz, my second cousin. Five years ago she died in a car accident shortly before we were to be married. Hiriz had a younger sister called Fatima,’ Razul proffered in the same harsh, unemotional tone, although his biting tension was palpable. ‘She is not my wife. Perhaps you would like me to call witnesses to this truth?’

Bethany slowly began to sit up. She was trying to remember what Zulema had said, and recalled that Fatima had at no stage claimed Razul as her husband but had certainly looked pretty smug when Bethany had made reference to what she had believed to be fact.

A quiver of darkly suppressed emotion rippled through Razul’s lean length as he studied her with icy dark eyes. ‘Had you sought to know me at all, you would already be aware that I do not believe in the practice of polygamy. Nor indeed does my father. One wife at a time is quite sufficient for any man. But no!’ Razul uttered a harsh laugh. ‘You do not see this. Your blind prejudice is shameful, your assumptions for an academic mind inexcusable!’