The Desert Bride

‘C-courtship?’ Bethany slid upright, no longer able to bear the simple fact that he was looking down at her—both mentally and physically. He was driving her clean up the wall.

‘You treat me neither like a lover nor a husband. You deny me all intimacy...except when you look at me.’ His dark appraisal mocked her with an all-knowing sexual awareness that burned her right down to her toes. ‘But, if I had to learn English to communicate with you, you too must learn the language which I desire to hear.’

‘You want it all don’t you?’ Revenge, she thought bitterly. So much for the violins that he had played at the hospital when he had talked about her being his dream! He knew that if he touched her she was his...as much his as if he had a brand on her backside, she reflected furiously. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy him-oh, no, indeed, he wanted to sneak inside her head as well and prise out her every secret so that his control was absolute.

‘Have you ever doubted it?’

‘Well, what do you want to know?’ Bethany slung at him with a scornfully elevated brow. ‘I have nothing to hide,’ she declared.

‘Really, aziz.’ His tawny eyes danced with infuriating amusement. ‘Are you so desperate for me that you must stun me with so immediate an offer?’

Bethany spread her hands in an arc of screaming frustration and then she caught his irresistible smile and began to feel foolish. ‘You know how to send me up now, don’t you?’

‘I should have resisted the temptation...but then you take yourself so very seriously. You have accused me of so many ridiculous things. I look back in laughter now on my two hundred concubines, my other wife, your view of me as a potentially violent man...and more recently still the assumption that I am a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, who will turn into a monster within hours of wedding you,’ Razul enumerated, and his mouth twisted. ‘If I could not laugh I would be in deep trouble.’

Bethany swallowed convulsively. Now that he had reeled off all her accusations like that she was severely embarrassed by his tolerance. ‘I’m sorry but...well, there was some justification for my suspicions.’ She lifted her chin. ‘My aunt was married to an Arab and she had a pretty ghastly experience. But I’m quite sure you are aware of that, since you had me investigated.’

A frown-line had drawn his fine brows together. ‘I was not aware of it. The investigation only embraced your life over the past year, nothing more,’ Razul stated very quietly. ‘I too felt that I was intruding upon your privacy and sought only the information that you were free of any entanglement with another man.’

‘Oh.’ It was Bethany’s turn to be disconcerted.

‘Your aunt?’ he prompted as they began to walk along a stone terrace under the trees.

Bethany’s aunt was only seven years older than she was. She had been a frequent visitor in her older sister’s home throughout Bethany’s childhood. When she had been nineteen and studying for her degree, Susan had met an Iranian engineer at a party. Faisal had been utterly charming and seemingly as much in love with Susan as Susan had been in love with him. Their whirlwind romance had ended in marriage...ended in more ways than one.

‘It was a disaster right from the start,’ Bethany told Razul with stark emphasis. ‘From the moment they were married he changed. He treated her like a prisoner. He objected to her clothing, her make-up and her friends. He accused her of flirting with other men. He tried to stop her going to her classes. He didn’t even like her visiting her family. He turned against us too. In the end he was knocking her about and she was terrified of him... She had to go to the police.’

‘And you cite this to me as evidence of a cultural gulf?’

‘Wasn’t it?’ Bethany snapped.

‘Surely such men exist within every culture? They are emotionally inadequate, irrationally jealous and possessive and they invariably turn to violence, do they not?’ Razul drawled quietly.

Her tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lower lip. She was really quite devastated by a line of argument that she had never acknowledged before, because of course such men existed in every culture.

‘He was a sick man and a dangerous man. It is fortunate that your aunt escaped him before he did more serious damage. But what was your family about in allowing so young and inexperienced a girl to marry a foreigner about whom they knew nothing?’

‘He seemed so romantic,’ Bethany said gruffly, recalling how reluctantly impressed even she had been by Faisal. ‘He seemed absolutely devoted to her.’

‘It must have been most disturbing for you to witness the aftermath of such a marriage.’

‘Disturbing’ barely covered it. Susan on their doorstep night after night, her haunted eyes swollen, face drawn, weight falling off her, all her youthful energy drained away by stress and misery and growing fear of Faisal’s threats. It had been a nightmare period. But Razul was right, loath as she was to admit it. Susan could well have married one of her own countrymen and ended up in the same predicament.

‘It was,’ she agreed rather woodenly. ‘But Susan did go on to get her business degree and she emigrated to Canada soon afterwards. She’s actually a director in an international company now.’

‘Has she remarried?’

‘No.’ Bethany almost laughed at the idea. ‘She’s very ambitious.’

‘Your role model?’

Bethany flushed, thinking of the long talks she had had with Susan when she had fled to Canada two years earlier. Her aunt had hailed her as a virtual heroine for walking away from so dangerous and impossible an attraction. Susan had never regained her trust in the male sex. She was still very bitter about her two-year nightmare with Faisal, and for the first time Bethany fully acknowledged how deeply affected she herself had been by that same nightmare.

Faisal’s apparent adoration of Susan had impressed her so much. The young Arab had seemed strong and caring, his relationship with her aunt before their marriage—in Bethany’s adolescent eyes—seemingly the very essence of romance. Scarred as she was by growing up in the atmosphere of a bad marriage, Bethany had nonetheless been touched and delighted to see two people really loving each other. She had been absolutely shattered when that relationship had failed as well. It had seemed to her then that there was no such thing as a trustworthy or reliable man.

Bethany bent her head, admitting, ‘I do admire what Susan’s done with her life since that awful period.’ But she was no longer sure that she could admire her aunt for allowing that one, admittedly ghastly experience to turn her off all men.

‘Some women manage to combine both career and marriage,’ Razul murmured.

‘Superwomen, you mean...baby under one arm, vacuum cleaner under the other and a mound of work they bring home every night from the office!’

‘Servants do make a difference. My sister Laila has managed this combination most successfully,’ Razul pointed out. ‘As soon as their youngest child began school she embarked on her medical training.’

‘How on earth did she manage it?’

‘Strong will and Ahmed’s support.’

Involuntarily Bethany grinned. ‘I have this feeling that Ahmed jumps every time Laila snaps her fingers.’

‘This is true,’ Razul conceded with a pronounced air of reluctance. ‘But he is a skilled and most kindly man, somewhat in awe of my sister even after all these years. She has broken many taboos in our family and he is very proud of her achievements. They have a very happy marriage, a true partnership—’

‘I wasn’t criticising Ahmed,’ Bethany broke in uncomfortably, wondering why he was labouring the point of his sister’s blissfully happy marriage and successful career to such an extent. If anything it made her feel inexcusably and meanly envious.

‘There must be a certain amount of compromise in all relationships between men and women.’

‘And I know who usually does the compromising,’ Bethany muttered with the cynicism of habit. ‘The woman.’

‘You know that is not always true.’

‘Well, it’s true m

ore than it should be,’ she countered, thoroughly irritated by the persistent way Razul contrived to put her in the wrong and make her sound like some man-hating feminist...like Susan? she asked herself uncomfortably, seeing much that she had refused to see before. Perhaps her aunt had become her role model because she had not been able to respect her own mother for the treatment she withstood from her father.

‘Are you telling me that there are no women who take advantage of men?’

Her teeth gritted. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

‘You need to be challenged, for you are very stubborn.’

Involuntarily her gaze connected with his brilliant dark eyes and her heart skipped an entire beat, her mouth going dry. ‘And you are not?’

‘This is not a competition to see who can be most inflexible.’