The Call of the Desert

His face had been a mask of cool civility. “You think six months of a summer fling means that I know you?”

Julia could remember flinching so violently that she’d taken a step backwards. “I didn’t think of it as a fling. I thought what we had was—”

He had slashed down a hand, stopping her words, his face suddenly fierce. “What we had was an affair, Julia. Nothing more and nothing less than what you were engaging in wi

th that man the other night. You are not from this world.” His mouth had curled up in an awful parody of a mocking smile, “You didn’t seriously think that you would ever become a permanent part of it, did you?”

Of course she hadn’t. But her conscience niggled her. Deep within her, in a very secret place, she’d harboured a dream that perhaps this was it. He’d even mentioned his London apartment. Bile rose as she acknowledged that perhaps all he’d meant by that was that he’d give her the role of convenient mistress.

Horror spread through her body as the awful reality sank in. It was written all over every rejecting and rigid line of his body. Everything she’d shared with Kaden had been a mere illusion. He’d been playing with her. A western student girl, here for a short while and then conveniently gone. Perfect for a summer fling. And now he was ruler, a million miles from the carefree young man she thought she’d known.

Shakily she said, “You didn’t have to tell me you loved me. You could have spared yourself the platitudes. I didn’t expect to hear them.” And she hadn’t. She truly hadn’t. She knew she loved this man, but she hadn’t expected him to love her back … and yet he had. Or so she’d been led to believe.

Kaden shrugged and looked at a cuff, as if it was infinitely more interesting than their conversation. He looked back at her with eyes so black they were dead. “I went as far as you did. Please don’t insult my intelligence and tell me that you meant it when you said it. You can hardly claim you did when within days you were ready to drop your pants for another man.”

Julia backed away again at his crude words, shaking her head this time, eyes horrifically glued to Kaden. “I told you, it wasn’t like that.”

She realised in that moment that she’d not ever known this man. And with that came the insidious feeling of worthlessness she’d carried ever since she’d found out she was adopted and that her own birth mother had rejected her. She wasn’t good enough for anyone. She never had been …

To this day Julia couldn’t actually remember walking out of that room, or the night that had followed, or the journey to the airport the next day. She only remembered being back in grey, drizzly autumnal England and feeling as though her insides had been ripped out and trampled on. The feeling of rejection was like a corrosive acid, eating away at her, and for a long time she hadn’t trusted her own judgement when it came to men. She’d locked herself away in her studies.

Her husband John had managed to break through her wall of defences with his gentle, unassuming ways, but Julia could see now that she’d fallen for him precisely because he’d been everything Kaden was not.

When she thought of what had happened last night, and Kaden’s cool assertion that he would see her later—exactly the way a man might talk to a mistress—nausea surged again, and this time Julia couldn’t hold it down. She made it to the toilet in time and was violently ill. When she was able to, she stood and looked at herself in the mirror. She was deathly pale, eyes huge.

What cruel twist of fate had brought them together like this again?

And yet even now, with the memory of how brutally he’d rejected her still acrid like the bile in her throat, Julia felt a helpless weakness invade her. And, worse, that insidious yearning. Shakily she sat down on the closed toilet seat and vowed to herself that she would thwart Kaden’s arrogant assumption that she would fall in with his plans. Because she didn’t know if she could survive standing in front of him again when he was finished with her, and hearing him tell her it was over.

CHAPTER FIVE

KADEN sat in his car outside Julia’s modest-sized townhouse. He was oblivious to the fact that his stately vehicle looked ridiculously out of place in the leafy residential street. His mind and belly were churning and had been all day. Much to his intense chagrin he hadn’t been able to concentrate on the business at hand at all, causing his staff to look worried. He was never distracted.

He’d struggled to find some sense of equilibrium. But equilibrium had taken a hike and in its place was an ever-present gnawing knowledge that he’d been here before. In this place, standing at the edge of an abyss. About to disappear.

Kaden’s hand tightened to a fist on his thigh. He was not that young man any more. He’d lived and married and divorced. He’d had lovers—many lovers. And not one woman had come close to touching that part of him that he’d locked away years before. When Julia had turned and walked out of his study.

He shook his head to dislodge the memory, but it wouldn’t budge. That last meeting was engraved in his mind like a tattoo. Julia’s slate-grey eyes wide, her cheeks pale as she’d listened to what he’d said. The burning jealousy in his gut when he’d thought of her with that man. It had eclipsed even his grief at his father’s death. The realisation that she was fallible, that she was like every other woman, had been the start of his cynicism.

Most mocking of all though—even now—was the memory of why he’d gone looking for her on that cataclysmic night of his father’s death. Contrary to his father’s repeated wishes, Kaden had insisted that he wanted Julia. He’d gone to find her, to explain his absence and also to tell her that he wanted her to be his queen some day. That he was prepared to let her finish her studies and get used to the idea and then make a choice. Fired up with love—or so he’d thought—he hadn’t been prepared for seeing her entangled in that embrace, outside in the street, where anyone could have seen her. His woman.

He could remember feeling disembodied. He could remember the way something inside him had shrivelled up to nothing as he’d watched her finally notice him and start to struggle. In that moment whatever he’d felt for her had solidified to a hard black mass within him, and then it had been buried for good.

Only a scant hour later, when Kaden had sat by his dying father’s bed and he had begged Kaden to “think of your country, not yourself”, Kaden had finally seen the future clearly. And that future did not include Julia.

It had been a summer of madness. Of believing feelings existed just because they’d been each other’s first lover. He’d come close to believing he loved her, but had realised just in time that he’d confused lust and sexual obsession with love.

As if waking from a dream, Kaden came back to the car, to the street in suburban London. He looked at the townhouse. Benign and peaceful. His blood thickened and grew hot. Inside that house was the woman who stood between him and his future. On some level he’d never really let her go, and the only way he could do that was to sate this beast inside him. Prove that it was lust once and for all. And this time when he said goodbye to her she would no longer have the power to make him wake, sweating, from vivid dreams, holding a hand to his chest to assuage the dull ache.

Julia felt as if she was thirteen all over again, with butterflies in her belly, flushing hot and cold every two seconds. She’d heard Kaden’s car pull up and her nerves were wound taut waiting for the doorbell. What was he doing? she wondered for the umpteenth time, when he still didn’t emerge from the huge car.

Then she imagined it pulling away again, and didn’t like the feeling of panic that engendered. She’d vacillated all day over what to do, all the while knowing, to her ongoing sense of shame, that she’d somewhere along the way made up her mind that she wasn’t strong enough to walk away from Kaden.

By the time she’d returned from work, with a splitting headache, she’d felt cranky enough with herself for being so weak that she’d decided she wouldn’t give in so easily. She would greet Kaden in her running sweats and tell him she wasn’t going anywhere. But then she’d had an image of him clicking his fingers, having food delivered to the house and staying all night. She couldn’t forget the glint of determination in his eye that morning. And the thought of having him here in her private space for a whole night had been enough to galvanise her into getting dressed in a plain black dress and smart pumps.

The lesser of two evils was to let him take her out. She’d thank him for dinner, tell him that there couldn’t possibly be a repeat of last night, and that would be it. She’d never see him again. She was strong enough to do this.

She’d turned away from her furtive vigil at the window for a moment, so she nearly jumped out of her skin when the doorbell rang authoritatively. And all her previous thoughts were scrambled into a million pieces. Her hands were clammy. Her heart thumped. She walked to the front door and could see the looming tall, dark shape through the bubbled glass. She picked up her bag and cardigan and took a deep breath.