‘A cerebral affair?’ he gritted.
‘Well...’ Bethany dropped her head, tied up in knots of horrible, mealy-mouthed discomfiture. He seemed to be going out of his way to make this more difficult for her. ‘Whatever might conceivably develop...I haven’t got a crystal ball—’
‘Had you been blessed with one, you would have closed your mouth five minutes ago and kept it shut, but I thank you for your honesty!’ There was a whitened edge to Razul’s compressed lips now. ‘I hope you are equally grateful for mine. My terms are marriage... marriage or you will be as one dead to me! I will never voluntarily rest my eyes on you again in this lifetime!’
Her jaw dropped. ‘You can’t be serious...’
‘I have never been more serious,’ Razul swore with savage bite.
Bethany was incredulous and furious into the bargain. She had laid her pride and her self-respect on the line. She had offered him a relationship which until today she had never once considered offering to any man. That had taken a great deal of courage, and even as she had voiced her proposition she had been frantically worried that she was impulsively overreacting to her own hopelessly confused emotions. ‘Right now I could live with never seeing you again just fine!’ she told him wrathfully.
Savage golden eyes raked over her. He spread his shapely hands wide and dropped them again with an air of cold finality. ‘Inshallah. Then I give you the freedom that you say you want. You may go. There is a helicopter out there. It will take you to the airport. There is a flight to London in two hours.’
Devastated by the assurance, Bethany gaped at him, her every expectation violently overthrown.
‘You have half an hour to make your choice.’
‘I don’t need half an hour!’ Bethany shot back at him, her eyes pure emerald in her hotly flushed face as she squared up to him. ‘Five minutes would be too long!’
Razul slung her a slashing glance from molten gold eyes, every line of his lean, muscular length whip-taut. ‘That is your decision, but be assured aziz...if you stay, you will be my wife by evening.’
‘That is as likely as me taking flight without jet engines!’ Bethany snapped in ringing disbelief. ‘You have to be out of your mind!’
‘We will see how out of my mind I am...this we will see.’ He made it sound like a threat written in blood. His strong, hard features rigid, he swung soundlessly on his heel and swept out.
CHAPTER FIVE
NOTHING like choosing the magic words to speed the parting guest...‘wife by evening’? Hah! thought Bethany. Razul was certifiably insane. She knew she would be into that helicopter so fast that she’d leave a trail of little flames dancing in her wake! Release...escape... freedom, here I come! Razul had decided to force the issue, which wasn’t surprising, not when you took that mile-wide streak of mean, moody, macho conditioning and added it to all that ferocious pride. Well, she thought with murderous satisfaction, he had made a gross miscalculation. Her little Middle Eastern adventure had come to an end and very grateful she was too!
Her attention fell on the suitcase that she hadn’t seen since her departure from the airport. She blinked, reading the message that went with its reappearance. Razul had clearly brought it with him. So, in other words, he had come prepared to face her with that choice. But first he had allowed her to make an outsize idiot of herself!
Her teeth gritting, Bethany was fired into sudden activity. She dug out her keys and unlocked the case. She had no plans to check in at Al Kabibi airport dressed in a caftan and silk slippers! Why the heck hadn’t she noticed that suitcase sooner? For a few minutes there a tide of remorse had gripped her with temporary insanity. She had actually sunk low enough to offer herself on a plate. If only she had kept her stupid mouth shut she could have boarded that helicopter with every ounce of her dignity still intact!
She took her time getting dressed in a pair of light cotton trousers and a voluminous white T-shirt. Then she combed her hair and finally checked her watch. Fifteen minutes had gone. She walked the length of the tent, pushed aside the ornate hangings and looked outside. The blazing rays of the sun were glinting off the silver body of the helicopter parked in the centre of the camp. Perspiration broke out on her skin. She lifted her case.
You will never see him again.
She could handle that...of course she could; hadn’t she got by for twenty-seven years without ever depending on a man?
Never is a long time.
Her teeth clenched. She thrust a furious hand through her tumbling hair. Damn him...damn him to hell and back! She was stronger than this. She was going to do the sensible thing no matter how blasted hard it was to do it!
All her life she had been prudent, practical and realistic. No nonsense, no silly romantic fantasies... well, only one, she conceded with boiling resentment. Him. Picking up her books on the library steps, smiling that soul-destroyingly charismatic smile, he had somehow stolen a part of her that she had never got back. Since then...always this nagging sense of loss, separateness, aloneness. She had hated him for having that power over her, and now she hated him ten times more as she wrestled with a hunger as frighteningly irrational as the unfamiliar sense of complete impotence now freezing her in her tracks.
Never is a long time...
What is the difference between an affair and a temporary marriage? an insidious little voice whispered. Stricken by the treacherous thought that had come at her out of nowhere, Bethany pressed unsteady hands to her hot face. She quelled that sly voice. Every fibre of her being revolted against being forced into a position that she had not freely and rationally chosen.
But where was her free choice when her only other option was never to see him again? And Razul would keep to that promise. Razul had the kind of dark, driven temperament which could make a sacred shrine out of self-denial. Overwhelmed by the emotional storm battling inside her, Bethany sank dizzily down on the edge of her suitcase. If thoughts had had the power to kill, Razul would have been dead. She was in mental torment. ‘Never’ stood like a giant wall between her and the freedom she cherished...
The rotor blades of the helicopter started up with a noisy, clattering whirl, and the tent walls rippled. Bethany, who made a virtue out of never crying, shocked herself by bursting into floods of furious tears. She despised herself; she hated him. In the space of forty-eight hours he had torn her inside out. He had cornered her and sprung a trap that she hadn’t recognised until it was too late. Dear heaven, she would never forgive him for pushing her to the wall like this and forcing surrender on her!
‘What is wrong, sitt?’
‘Everything!’ Bethany sobbed passiona
tely before she focused on the speaker.
‘Prince Razul was very angry. He was most disturbed for your safety. But on such a day his anger will melt away.’
Bethany’s distraught gaze rested on Zulema’s sympathetic face as the girl reached shyly for her left hand and clucked anxiously over the scratches. A sob still rattled in her throat as Zulema gently pressed her hand into a bowl of warm water from which the sharp odour of some form of antiseptic wafted. It stung like mad.
‘I understand that your family was threatened by Fatima,’ Bethany managed tautly.
‘But I need no longer fear this threat.’ Zulema smiled. ‘Now my family live in Prince Razul’s protection. He will give my father new employment.’
‘I’m glad.’ Bethany drew in a shaky breath, drained by her crying jag.
‘I am glad our Prince does not marry the Princess Fatima,’ Zulema revealed in a rush of covert confidence. ‘It is what the King wished but those who know her well did not wish it.’
So Fatima had had the official stamp of royal approval. Razul had not mentioned that fact. No wonder the brunette had been so bitterly hostile to Bethany’s arrival.
‘What you saw in the courtyard...do not pity her.’ The younger woman looked surprisingly cynical. ‘She made a big scene to try and shame the Prince into sending you away. It is wrong for a woman to embarrass a man like that. If her father hears of it she will be sent away! He would be disgraced.’
Zulema affixed a plaster to the scratches and then stood up and clapped her tiny hands. Instantly her usual two helpers appeared, laden with various articles. There was a burst of voluble chatter from outside the tent. Wrought-iron holders were set up and incense sticks lit, their heavy perfume filling the hot, still air. An aluminium bathtub was marched past her and settled behind the screen at the other end of the tent. Buckets of lightly steaming water arrived one by one.