Desert Barbarian

Marie saw the barman eye her curiously, and lowered her lids. It would become tiresome, she thought, if she had to keep up the fiction of being sweet seventeen for hours. But it was all in a good cause if she was to keep her mother happy and satisfy her father.

After their drinks they repaired to the dining-room to eat. Clare gazed at the menu with glazed despair, then ordered melon and salad. Marie decided to follow suit to keep her company, and was rewarded with another smile.

'Very sensible. You must look after your figure.' Clare studied her with knowledgeable eyes. 'Tell me about your boy-friends.'

Unconsciously, Marie wrinkled her nose, thinking of the men she knew, her escorts in past months: Nigel with his bland smile and passion for cars, Daniel who talked obsessively of cricket and danced like a rogue elephant, Stephen, the shortest man she had ever met, who was aggressively masculine and carried a chip on his shoulder the size of a tree.

Clare saw the expression and laughed suddenly, her eyes bright. 'Darling! I know just how you feel! Dull, are they?'

'As ditchwater,' said Marie.

Their eyes met in a smile of entirely new sympathy. Clare leaned her elbows on the table in an attitude of confidentiality. 'Poor girl! Has there never been anyone who…?' Her carefully pencilled brows rose enquiringly.

Marie, caught off guard, thought of Khalid, and at once her mother's face reflected an amused curiosity.

'I see there was someone. Who was he? Was he ex­citing?'

Marie laughed ruefully. 'Very.'

'English?'

'No,' Marie admitted.

'No, darling, they rarely are,' her mother mourned. 'Are you still seeing him?'

Marie shook her head, her lower lip caught between her teeth, and Clare's blue eyes shrewdly assessed her.

'Serious?'

Marie shrugged. 'I don't know. But…' words failed her and she broke off the sentence, unable to put into words what she felt.

Clare sighed sympathetically. 'I see—like that. Well, if you want my advice, darling, which of course you don't, but I'll give it all the same… go after him if you want him. They say men are the hunters, but that's just a myth invented by women to flatter the poor deluded creatures. Of course it's the woman who pursues, but she does it so subtly that he always imagines it was his own idea.'

Marie laughed aloud, and as she did so her laughter attracted some attention from a party just entering the dining-room. They halted to look at her, and she, look­ing up, aware of being watched, saw her father smiling at her across the room. She smiled back at him, delighted to see him. Then her glance moved on to his com­panions, and something happened to her heart. She felt a quick fierce pain, as though someone had squeezed her heart in a vice. Her breath seemed to stop and her pulses to accelerate.

For what seemed an endless eternity her blue eyes looked into the mocking dark eyes of Khalid.

Then he bowed, and Clare, who had turned in her chair to see what Marie was staring at, gave a little cry of amazement.

'Why, there's James, and he has Stonor Grey with him. Now what are those two doing together, I won­der?'

'Which one is Stonor Grey?' Marie asked with an, effort, trying to silence the thunder of her pulses, her eyes moving around the little group of men who were now advancing towards them with polite smiles. She recog­nised Ian MacIntyre, a stooped man of fifty with a tired smile, but the other two men were strangers to her. One was in his early thirties, with short curly brown hair and trendy clothes. The other was plump, smooth, cordial, his dark suit cut on fashionable lines.

'Darling, you must have heard of Stonor Grey,' said Clare in scornful disbelief. 'He's the whizz-kid behind Unex; of course, he started with an enormous personal fortune. His mother was the granddaughter of an oil sheik, so he had a lot of money from her, and his father was Sir Ronald Grey, the stationery king. You know, they make paper and office equipment by the billion…'

Clare had said all this very fast, very softy, while she kept smiling towards the men. She had just finished before they joined them, and she extended her hand to Stonor Grey with a charming, eyelash fluttering smile. 'Stonor! How are you?'

He bent his black head to kiss the back of her hand with a courtly gesture. 'Clare, you look as enchanting as ever. What magic spells do you say? You look about twenty-five.'

'Ssh, don't mention age!' she pouted. 'I'm old enough to have a daughter who's nearly grown up… Marie, this is Stonor Grey. Stonor, my little girl.'

Marie coolly offered him her hand. He took it, turning slightly away from the others, so that only she could see his expression. The dark eyes mocked her as he bent over her hand. The courtly gesture was somehow different this time. As he brushed his lips over her hand he let them slide down until they touched the little blue pulse beating with telltale speed at her wrist.

She was so angry she could scarcely breathe. Rage sent sparks into her blue eyes; made her fingers shake and her lips tremble so that she had to bite at their inner skin to stop them from visibly trembling.

No doubt he thought himself a great humorist. The full situation burst upon her gradually, like a series of wild explosions. He had prete

nded to kidnap her in order to make her look a fool. All that stuff about a ransom… carrying her off into the desert for a few hours… just to teach her a lesson!