The Desert Bride

CHAPTER THREE

PASSING beneath the nearest archway, Bethany found herself in an elaborate reception room. Fighting for self-control, she closed her eyes. ‘Prince Razul take only one wife. Always he say that...only the one.’ Zulema’s explanation for Fatima’s distress returned to her now. Seemingly Razul was now prepared to break that promise to his wife, and in a society where he was all-powerful what could the wretched woman possibly do? Presumably she could live with her husband’s other female diversions but felt both betrayed and threatened by the prospect of another woman acquiring the same status as herself.

Marriage...woman-stealing was all above board as long as you offered holy matrimony to satisfy the conventions. A strangled laugh, empty of amusement, escaped her. Little wonder she had been treated like royalty at the airport, little wonder she was being waited on hand and foot. Everybody but her had expected marriage to follow her arrival!

A polygamous marriage. The teachings of the Koran taught that a Muslim was entitled to up to four wives at any one time. In a lifetime he could get through many more than that number, if he so desired, by the judicious use of divorce. The ex-wives, of course, had to be liberally provided for. One of the reasons why polygamy was becoming less prevalent in the Arab world was the sheer expense of maintaining multiple families. But Razul was fabulously rich.

Oddly enough it had never occurred to her two years ago that Razul might already be a married man. The tabloid hadn’t picked up on that...but then maybe he had not been married then. She raised trembling hands to her stiff, cold face.

‘Why are you distressed?’ It was a ferocious demand, raw with a frustrated lack of comprehension. ‘Perhaps you are ashamed to have misjudged me so badly,’ Razul suggested with savage bite. ‘This is not Bluebeard’s castle. I am not some filthy rapist who would force his unwanted attentions upon an unprotected woman! Do you seriously believe that my father would have agreed to me bringing an Englishwoman here had I not intended to marry her? Do you think us savages?’

Bethany wanted to howl with hysterical laughter and slap him hard to express her emotions at one and the same time. ‘The Princess Fatima?’ she whispered chokily.

‘Fatima must learn to adjust. This is not my problem,’ Razul dismissed, slashing the air with an angry and imperious hand. ‘I do nothing to be ashamed of. I have waited two long years for you and she is well aware of this...’

Bethany gazed at him in horror. ‘Your compassion is overwhelming,’ she muttered sickly.

‘Compassion is not infinite...no more is tolerance. Why do you treat me to this response?’ Razul launched at her. ‘It makes no sense!’

‘Last night...’ Bethany was struggling to think straight while dimly wondering what he could possibly find incomprehensible about her response. Dear heaven, did he fondly imagine that a marriage proposal two years ago would have been sufficient to change her attitude towards him? Did he think. that she would have fallen gratefully at his feet in welcome? And when he now offered what he no doubt saw as the ultimate of honours, did he think that that would magically overcome her resistance?

‘What last night?’ Razul appealed with driven emotion.

‘You kept on saying that when I went back to my world... You weren’t thinking of marriage then!’ she reminded him.

Razul set his incredibly eloquent mouth into a grim line. ‘I was making it clear that were you to be unhappy I would set you free. I would give you a divorce, but only after you had given our marriage a fair and reasonable trial.’

Inside herself, beyond her angry disbelief, she hurt. She turned her head away. She would never have married Razul in any circumstances. Even if he hadn’t had Fatima and those other women, she reflected painfully, she still would have said no. Marriage was not for her and would never be for her. She had seen far too much of the misery of marriage while she had been growing up, and, beyond that again, the even greater misery of a cross-cultural union.

Even so, she was shattered by the idea that Razul would want to marry her. Two years ago he had wanted an affair...and she wouldn’t have been his first affair on campus—no, far from it! She might not have met Razul until his second term but she had heard about him...oh, boy, had she heard! His fame had gone before him.

Razul had flung himself with immense enthusiasm into a world where women were willing to share his bed without the smallest commitment on his part. Blessed by gorgeous good looks, charming broken English intermingled with fluent French, enormous wealth and the certainty that he would one day become a king, Razul had hit the female student body much like a winning lottery ticket blowing in the wind, hopefully to be captured by the most determined of his many admirers. A kind of communal hysteria had reigned in his radius, she recalled painfully.

‘I could never marry you,’ Bethany informed him tightly.

‘Do not say never to me...I will not accept it’

‘I insist that you call a car to take me to the airport!’

‘I refuse.’ Razul sent her a raw, shimmering glance of gold.

‘You are thinking of the loss of face...’ Bethany assumed, suddenly wishing that she did not understand his culture to the degree that she did. If he had informed his family that he intended to marry her and she refused, it would be a humiliation for him. A public humiliation. There was undoubtedly not a woman in Datar who would deny herself the great honour of becoming one of his wives.

‘Again you go out of your way to insult me.’ Razul slung her a look of wrathful reproach, his hands clenching into fists by his sides. ‘What lies between us runs too deep to rest on something so superficial as what you term a “loss of face”!’

Bethany was paper-pale, but rigid with a strength of will every bit as unyielding as his own. ‘There is nothing between us and there never will be. You must accept that. In my opinion my sole attraction in your eyes is the fact that I said no two years ago! Your ego can’t live with the startling concept that there exists one woman in the world who wants nothing to do with you!’

‘When you speak such barefaced lies I lose all patience with you!’ Razul blazed at her with such explosive suddenness that she flinched. He closed the distance between them in one long, panther-like stride and reached for her. ‘These lies are naked provocation!’

As he hauled her into his arms Bethany stiffened in shock. Glittering golden eyes roamed over her startled face with a scorching heat that made her skin tauten over her bones. ‘You burn for me as I burn for you—’

‘No!’

‘I saw your hunger last night.’ Razul lifted a shapely hand and knotted long fingers very slowly into the fiery tumble of her long hair. ‘I hold you and your heart beats as madly as that of a gazelle hunted down in the desert. It beats for me and for no other man. Yet I have never touched you,’ he breathed, in a throaty undertone of frustration which sent taut quivers rippling down her rigid spine. ‘Never... How many men in your world could say that of the woman they longed to possess? How many men would treat you with such unquestioning respect?’

His thumb was rubbing against the lobe of her ear. A tiny little shiver ran through her, fracturing her breathing. Eyes as keen as those of a hawk in flight scoured her hectically flushed face, beating down on her with merciless insight. She trembled, a whirling tide of dizziness assailing her, the hiss of her indrawn breath shatteringly loud in the stillness. ‘Razul, I—’

‘You trust me to observe the boundaries...why?’ Razul demanded roughly, yet the long forefinger he lifted to trace the tremulous fullness of her lower lip was tormentingly gentle, brushing across the tender skin with innate eroticism. ‘In the mood I am in your trust is a step too far. Perhaps I have been too honourable...I made it too easy for you to drive me away in Engl

and, but I will not make it easy this time.’

‘Let go of me,’ Bethany mumbled thickly, her slender length slipping from rigidity into sudden, shivering weakness as that expert finger slid against her trembling mouth. A tide of sexual awareness strong enough to wipe out her every defence was infiltrating her now.

‘Have other men not held you...touched you?’ Unhidden anger harshened his rich dark voice. ‘Why do you expect me to be different?’

Her breasts rose and fell, heavy, swelling, her nipples peaking inside the gossamer-fine covering of her bra. A languorous heat was uncoiling between her thighs, making her shift like a cat arching its back in the sunshine, but in the depths of her unthinking mind lurked an equally animal fear of her own responses. ‘Don’t!’

‘But your eyes say do...and if I had behaved as a man of your world you would not have shunned me two years ago. I allowed you to stay free,’ Razul intoned with mesmeric intensity. ‘Do you know why an unmarried woman is not left alone with a man in Arabia? A man is expected to sin and a woman is deemed too weak to resist temptation, for was she not fashioned to be the greatest pleasure of a man’s existence? As you will be mine, heart, soul and body...for that I promised myself in England and I will fulfil that promise more sweetly than you can believe...’

‘Airport!’ Bethany said jerkily, as if he had yanked a string and that was the best her blitzed reasoning powers could come up with by way of a contradiction.

Razul laughed softly. A lean hand sank to the shallow indentation of her spine and pressed her closer as he slowly lowered his arrogant dark head. ‘The image of a jet taking off...the heavens opening as the gates to your secret garden...most fitting, but then you are an extraordinarily sensual woman,’ he murmured thickly. ‘Did I not sense that from the first?’

A violent shudder snaked through her as his warm breath fanned her cheek. He took her mouth in a hot, hungry surge of possession and dragged her down so deep and so fast into a world she didn’t know, she was lost. He prised her lips apart with the tip of his tongue and probed the moist, tender interior that she instinctively opened to him. With a strangled moan Bethany caught fire in a surging blaze of passion.