Heart of a Desert Warrior

It had shocked her when the priest to whom she had written about her grandparents’ wishes had written back saying that she would need the permission of the Duke—a ‘formality’, he had called it—and that he had arranged the necessary appointment for her.

She would rather have met him in the bustling anonymity of her hotel than here in this quiet, ancient place so filled with the silent memories of those who lay here. But his word was law. That knowledge was enough to have her increasing the distance between them as she stepped further back from him, this time checking first to make sure there were no potential obstructions behind her, as though by doing so she could somehow lessen the powerful forcefield of his personality. And his sexuality…

A shudder racked her. She hadn’t been prepared for that. That she would be immediately and so intensely aware of his sexuality. Far more so now, in fact, than…

As she braked down hard on her accelerating and dangerous thoughts, she was actually glad of the sound of his voice commanding her concentration.

‘Your grandparents left Sicily for London shortly after they married, and made their home there, and yet they have chosen to have their ashes buried here?’

How typical it was of this kind of man—a powerful, domineering, arrogant overlord—that he should question her grandparents’ wishes, as though they were still his serfs and he still their master. And how her own fiercely independent blood boiled with dislike for him at that knowledge. She was glad to be given that excuse for the antagonism she felt towards him. No—she didn’t need an excuse for her feelings. They were hers as of right. Just as it was her grandparents’ right to have their wish to have their ashes interred in the earth of their forebears fulfilled.

‘They left because there was no work for them here. Not even working for a pittance on your family’s land, as their parents and theirs before them had done. They want their ashes buried here because to them Sicily was still their home, their land.’

Caesar could hear the accusation and the antagonism in her voice.

‘It seems…unusual that they should entrust the task of carrying out their wishes to you, their grandchild, instead of your mother, their daughter.’

Once again he was aware of the pressure of the letter in his pocket. And the pressure of his own guilt…? He had offered her an apology. That was the past and it must remain the past. There was no going back. The guilt he felt was a self-indulgence he could not afford to recognise. Not when there was so much else at stake.

‘My mother lives in Palm Springs with her second husband, and has done so for many years, whilst I have always lived in London.’

‘With your grandparents?’

Even though it was a question, he made it seem more like a statement of fact.

Was he hoping to provoke her into a show of hostility he could use against her to deny her request? She certainly didn’t trust him not to do so. If that was indeed his aim, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. She could hide her feelings well. She had, after all, a wealth of past experience to fall back on. That was what happened when you were branded as the person who had brought so much shame on her family that her own parents had turned their back on you. The stigma of that shame would be with her for ever, and it deprived her of the right to claim either pride or privacy.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed, ‘I went to live with them after my parents divorced.’

‘But not immediately after?’

The question jolted through her like an arc of electricity, touching sensitive nerve-endings that should have been healed. Not that she was going to let him see that.

‘No,’ she agreed. But she couldn’t look at him as she answered. Instead she had to look across the graveyard—so symbolic, in its way, as a graveyard of her own longings and hopes which the end of her parents’ marriage had brought about.

‘At first you lived with your father. Wasn’t that rather unusual for a girl of eighteen? To choose to live with her father rather than her mother?’

Louise didn’t question how he knew so much about her. The village priest had requested a history of her family from her when she had written to him with regard to the burial of her grandparents’ ashes. Knowing the habits of this very close Sicilian community, she suspected enquiries would have also been made via contacts in London.

The thought of that was enough to have fully armed anxiety springing to life inside her stomach. If she couldn’t fulfil her grandparents’ final wishes because this man chose to withhold his permission because of her…

Automatically Louise bowed her head, her golden hair catching the stray beams of sunlight penetrating the green darkness of the cypress-shaded graveyard.

It had been an unwelcome shock, and the last thing she had felt prepared for, to see him, and not the priest as she had anticipated. With every look he gave her, every silence that came before another question, she was tensing her nerves against the blow she knew he could deliver. Her desire to turn and flee was so strong that she was trembling inside as she fought to resist it. Fleeing would be as pointless as trying to outrun the deathly outpouring from a volcano. All it would achieve would be a handful of heart-pounding, stomach-churning, sickening minutes of time in which to imagine the awfulness of her fate. Better, surely, to stand and defy it and at least have her self-respect intact.

All the same, she had to grit her perfectly straight, neat white teeth very hard to stop herself giving vent to her real feelings. It was none of his business that she and her mother had never been close, with her mother always being far more concerned with her next affair or party than having a conversation with her daughter. In fact she’d been absent more than present throughout Louise’s life. When her mother had announced she was leaving for Palm Springs and a new life Louise had honestly felt very little other than a faint relief. Her father, of course, was rather a different story—his constant presence served as an endless reminder of her own failings.

It was a moment before she could bring herself to say distantly, ‘I was in my final year of school in London when my parents divorced, so it made sense for me to move in with my father. He had taken a service apartment in London, since the family house was being sold and my mother was planning to move to Palm Springs.’

His questions were far too intrusive for her liking, but she knew that to antagonise this man—even if she was coming to resent him more with every nerve-shattering dagger-slice he made into the protective shield she had wrapped around her past—would prove to be counterproductive. She was determined not to do so.

All that

mattered about this interview was getting this arrogant, hateful overlord’s agreement to the burial of her grandparents’ ashes in accordance with their wishes. Once that was done she could give vent to her own feelings. Only then could she finally put the past behind her and live her own life, in the knowledge that she had discharged the almost sacred trust that had been left to her.

Louise swallowed hard against the bitter taste in her mouth. How she had changed from that turbulent eighteen-year-old who had been so governed by emotion and who had paid such a savage price.

She still hated even thinking about those stormy years, when she’d witnessed the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the resulting fall-out, never mind being forced to talk about it. That fall-out had seen her passed like an unwanted parcel between her parents’ two separate households, welcome in neither and especially unwelcome where her father’s new girlfriend had been concerned. As a result of which, according to both her parents and their new partners, she had brought such shame on them that she had been no longer welcome in the new lives they were building for themselves.

Looking back, it was no wonder that her parents had considered her to be such a difficult child. Was it because her father’s work had made him an absent father that she had tried so desperately to win his love? Or had she known instinctively at some deep atavistic level even then that her conception and with it his marriage to her mother had always been bitterly regretted and resented by him?

A brilliant young academic, with a glowing future ahead of him, the last thing he had wanted was to be forced into marriage with a girl he had got pregnant. But pressure had been brought to bear on him by a Senior Fellow at Cambridge whose family had also been members of London’s Sicilian community. The brilliant young Junior Research Fellow had been obliged to marry the pretty student who had seen him as an escape from the strictures of an old-fashioned society or risk having his career blighted.

Louise didn’t consider herself to be Sicilian, but perhaps there was enough of that blood in her veins for her always to have felt not just the loss of love but also the public humiliation that came from not being loved by her father. Italian men—Sicilian men—were usually protective and proud of the children they fathered. Her father had not wanted her. She had got in the way of his plans for his life. As a crying, clingy child and then a rebellious, demanding teenager she had first irritated and then annoyed him. For her father—a man who had wanted to travel and make the most of his personal freedom—marriage and the birth of a child had always been shackles he did not want. Because of that alone her attempts to command her father’s attention and his love had always been doomed to failure.