The Desert Bride Read online

  ‘Now...now!’ she pleaded.

  ‘I must—’

  Her glazed green eyes collided with smouldering golden ones; she felt him begin to pull away and then she remembered—remembered what he must not be allowed to do. ‘No need...it’s safe,’ she gasped unevenly, hanging onto him with both hands in case he didn’t get the message.

  ‘Safe?’ he groaned uncertainly.

  ‘Absolutely...’ Hoping to take his mind off the idea altogether, she lifted herself up to him and found his gorgeous mouth again for herself, and so enjoyed that rediscovery that she quite forgot why she had deviously embarked on it.

  The fierce heat of him burned her as he spread her thighs. She was at a pitch of excitement beyond bearing and, at that first driving thrust, cried out in ecstasy, her eyes closing, her head falling back. Then he was moving on her and in her, answering a need as old as time with the hard, primal force of his sexual possession.

  Her response was mindless, drugging in its completeness. There was nothing but him and the wildly torturous drive for satisfaction, and when one final electrifying spasm of delight pushed her over the edge she gasped his name and went spinning off into hot, quivering ecstasy. He shuddered violently over her and climaxed with a hoarse shout of pleasure.

  They subsided in a damp tangle of limbs. She was in heaven, didn’t ever want to descend to earth again. A tidal wave of love and tenderness flooded her, making her eyes sting. She curved her head into his strong brown throat and a long sigh escaped her. ‘I have never felt so happy,’ she whispered dazedly because it really did feel so strange.

  ‘Nor I.’ He released her from his weight and rolled over, pulling her with him so that she lay sprawled on top of him. ‘Safe?’ he queried lazily.

  Bethany tensed, not having been prepared for so immediate an enquiry.

  But Razul was not tense. Indeed he was totally relaxed. He skimmed a teasing forefinger along her sensitive jawbone. ‘I feel I should warn you that what I suspect you regard as safe is not a remarkably reliable method of birth control.’

  ‘I’m on the Pill,’ she lied.

  ‘The contraceptive pill?’ he questioned incredulously, and closed his hands on her forearms to tip her up so that he could look at her. ‘But why would you be taking such a precaution?’

  ‘S-skin problems,’ she stammered, flushing scarlet.

  ‘Your skin is flawless.’

  ‘I got a rash,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘You should not take such medication for only a rash.’

  ‘What is this...the third degree?’

  ‘I think you should consult Laila...I will mention—’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ Bethany cut in, aghast. ‘Is nothing sacred?’

  ‘Your health is.’ He dealt her a wry look of reproof. Her colour fluctuated wildly. All of a sudden she felt horribly guilty for setting out to deceive him. She dropped her head again. He thrust an arrogant hand into her tumbling hair and tilted her reddened mouth up, his breath fanning her cheek as he caressed her lips tenderly with his. ‘You are a very precious woman,’ he told her gently. ‘I would protect you with my life. Do not deny me the pleasure of looking after you.’

  Nobody had ever wanted to look after Bethany before. Nobody had ever been too bothered about what might happen to her. Razul might as well have put a hand on her heart and squeezed it. She was unbearably touched and unbearably saddened too. To meet with such tender caring and know that she would lose it again tortured her, but she closed out that awareness with all the strength that was the backbone of her character. One day at a time, she reminded herself fiercely.

  ‘It troubles me that you have had no communication with your parents since our marriage,’ Razul remarked wryly.

  A finger of tension prodded Bethany’s lazily reclined body. Her brows pleating, she looked out over the desert from the vantage point of their cliff-top eyrie. With canvas walls on three sides, the structure was a highly realistic replica of a traditional Bedouin tent, and it was permanently sited on the edge of the palace gardens. Rich carpets, fabulous cushions and a coffee hearth distinguished its cool interior. Over the past weeks she had learnt to appreciate how very much the desert was still home to Razul. This was where he came to relax towards the end of a long day and recoup his energies, disdaining all the many magnificent rooms in the palace.

  Conscious that he was patiently awaiting a response, Bethany shrugged uneasily. ‘We’re not close.’

  ‘That is something of an understatement,’ Razul remarked after a sizeable pause, and passed her a tiny cup of coffee. ‘For an Arab, the family is everything. It is the very foundation of our culture and such strong loyalties impose often painful decisions and duties.’

  Her face shadowed. Was their lack of a future the most painful duty he had ever faced or did she deceive herself? Since that day she had cried in his arms Razul had not made any reference to the subject of their eventual parting. Not once had he again revealed the smallest hint of tension or concern on that point.

  The past three weeks had been the happiest weeks of Bethany’s life, yet to maintain that glorious contentment she had had to suppress rigorously every thought of what tomorrow might bring. Was Razul following the same unspoken rule or was it simply that he had already reached a stage where he could think of her leaving without emotion? Was indeed their whole relationship just some pleasant little fling which he could calmly accept as having an inevitable end?

  ‘Bethany?’ he prompted.

  ‘Oh, my family.’ She grasped his meaning abstractedly, her fingers tightening tautly round the cup as she struggled to repress her fears. ‘Well, I have a slight relationship with my mother and a non-existent relationship with my father, and that really doesn’t bother either of them.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  She gave him a rueful smile. ‘I suppose you do. Let me explain. My mother believes that having me almost wrecked her marriage—’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘My father’s first infidelity coincided with my birth. If you knew him you would understand why. He has to be the centre of attention, and naturally a new baby interfered with that need. But, looking at his track record over the years, it’s obvious to me that he would have been unfaithful anyway.’

  ‘He was persistently unfaithful?’ Razul studied her face with a frown.

  ‘He was forever walking out for some other woman.’ Bethany shrugged again. ‘And then he would roll home again and Mum would greet him with open arms. As I got older and understood what was going on I hated him for the way he treated her. It took me a long while to appreciate that, in accepting his behaviour, Mum was and is a willing victim. He’s a very attractive man...physically,’ she adjusted grimly. ‘But he just uses her. She’s his port in every storm.’

  ‘Do you still hate him?’

  ‘If I think about him at all, I guess I’m ashamed of him,’ she admitted. ‘He’s got nothing but that surface charm to recommend him.’

  ‘I had no idea that you had endured such a childhood,’ Razul sighed.

  ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ she said ruefully. ‘It’s just that I was never very important to either to them. My father isn’t interested in children. If I’d been an absolutely adoring daughter like his absolutely adoring wife, maybe it would have been different, but, you see, I couldn’t hide the way I felt about him...I couldn’t pander to his ego as my mother did and I made him uncomfortable and resentful. He doesn’t like me. Frankly, when I left home for university it was a relief all round.’

  ‘I am sorry that I questioned your lack of contact with your parents. I did not understand the circumstances. But I wish I had known these things sooner. I would have better understood your resistance to me.’

  ‘I wish I still had some of that resistance.’ She was sinking helplessly into the depths of those dark, intense eyes which were trained on her.

  ‘I do not wish it,’ he responded with very masculine amusement, reaching forward fluidly to dep
rive her of her cup. ‘This is how it should be between lovers.’

  ‘Lovers,’ she repeated inwardly, stifling an odd little stab of pain. Funny how Razul never, ever referred to her now as his wife or to himself as her husband, or, indeed, in any way to the fact that they were actually married. Funny how those surely deliberate omissions could now fill her with a sense of rejection and deep insecurity and, no matter how hard she tried, an ever present awareness that she was living on borrowed time.

  He leant over her and her heartbeat thundered so wildly that she was convinced he would be able to hear it. Brilliant golden eyes flamed over her with primitive satisfaction, and she trembled, feeling the spreading languor of desire constrict her breathing and flush her skin. The level of awareness between them now was so intense that he only had to look at her or she at him and the heat surged, closing. out everything else.

  ‘Allah has truly blessed us with passion.’

  A tide of hotter colour embellished her cheeks; her guilty conscience stirred as she shamefacedly recalled a certain three days just over a fortnight ago when they had not got out of bed at all except to eat, and he had no doubt come to the conclusion that he had been blessed by an absolutely insatiably passionate woman. And admittedly he did make her feel insatiable, but she had the sinking, horrible suspicion that Razul would be appalled if he were ever to find out that she had had a rather more scientific purpose for ensuring that he stayed in that bed those particular days, and that even now she was anxiously waiting to find out whether or not all that passion had metaphorically borne fruit.

  ‘You are very quiet.’ He skimmed a blunt forefinger along the ripe curve of her lower lip. ‘What do you think of?’

  Her guilty conscience attacked her, releasing a sudden, dismaying cloud of uncertainty. Had she made a very selfish decision in trying to become pregnant? If Razul ever found out he would totally despise her for it. Was it fair to bring a child into the world without a father and without a father’s knowledge simply to give herself some comfort? It seemed to her now that it was anything but fair, and what would she tell that child when it grew old enough to ask awkward questions? That she had deprived him or her of his birthright and heritage?

  ‘What is wrong aziz?’ Razul frowned down at her.

  He called her ‘beloved’. Ever since she had discovered from a smiling Zulema what that particular word meant she had hugged it jealously to herself and tried not to think that Razul might use it as casually as some men used such endearments in English. She looked up at him with swimming eyes, studied that hard-boned, sun-bronzed face which was so terrifyingly dear to her, and her awareness of her own deception bit hard. He had been so honest with her from the beginning.

  ‘Nothing—’

  ‘That was not nothing which I saw in your eyes,’ he incised. ‘You are becoming homesick?’ His usually level drawl fractured on the last word.

  Home? She didn’t have a home, she decided wretchedly. She had a cat in a cattery and three bonsai trees being lovingly looked after by her neighbour. Nowhere was ever going to feel like home again without Razul. ‘No.’

  ‘I think you are not telling the truth—’

  She read the fierce tension stamped into his lean features and it frightened her. She could not bear to talk about losing him, had become an utter coward where that subject was concerned. It was as if talking about it would somehow bring the time closer and kill the happiness they did have. Now reacting to the sudden turmoil of her emotions, she reached up to him, smoothing unsteady fingers across his high cheek-bones and pressing her lips passionately, desperately to his with the tears still damp and stinging on her cheeks.

  For a paralysing moment Razul was tense and savagely unresponsive, and then, with a hungry groan, he caught her to him with strong hands and ravished her soft mouth with hot, hard insistence, and it was a relief when she felt that wild, wanton need fill her with a drowning sweetness that locked out her ability to think.

  But there had been something disturbingly different in their lovemaking, she thought dimly in the aftermath. Certainly her own heightened emotions had lent a painful and yet immensely greater depth to her response, and just as she was striving to work out exactly what had been different she was shocked back into full awareness by what happened next. Razul literally thrust her away from him, sprang up and began to dress.

  The tension in the air was so thick that it brought her out in a cold sweat. The silence was unbelievably oppressive. Sitting up, Bethany drew her discarded dress against her, suddenly agonisingly unsure of herself. ‘Razul?’

  ‘This is how you would say goodbye to me. You still think of the end of the summer, do you not?’ he demanded fiercely.

  Bewilderment gripped her as she focused on the muscles rippling on his smooth brown back as he tugged on his shirt. ‘What are you trying to say?’ she whispered.

  He swung round, his bronzed features a frozen mask but tension emanating from every aggressively poised line of his lean, powerful. body. ‘You still think of leaving...I see it in your eyes!’ he grated.

  ‘How can I help thinking about it?’ Bethany was plunged into a vortex of all the pain that she had struggled to hold off for weeks and she lowered her head to conceal her anguish.

  ‘I can no longer live with this hangman’s rope swinging above my head. It is intolerable. You are like a curse upon me!’ Razul bit out with an embittered savagery that cut her to the bone. ‘But I will no longer endure this curse. I am leaving you.’

  She was in so much shock that she could barely hear him. A curse? She was a curse? He was leaving her? But it’s not time yet, she wanted to scream at him in torment, and she wasn’t ready yet, not prepared, not able yet to face that severance. ‘You are leaving me?’

  ‘I should have thrown you onto that helicopter!’ Razul seethed back at her. ‘It would have been wiser to end it then than now.’

  ‘And now you’re running home to Daddy,’ Bethany mumbled thickly, helplessly.

  An expression of such naked and incredulous outrage flashed across his strong, dark features that she was transfixed. ‘You are not fit to be my wife,’ he murmured with chilling emphasis, his self-discipline asserting itself with an immediacy that cruelly mocked her own loss of control.

  And then he was gone, and she was left sitting there staring into space, sick with pain and completely at the mercy of it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BETHANY lurched nauseously out of bed like a drunk and only just managed to make it to the bathroom in time. After she had finished being horribly ill she sank down in a heap on the floor and sobbed her heart out.

  Razul had been gone a week—the worst week of her life—and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do next. She didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to stay. Most of the time she just wanted to die. In any case how could she even get home without that visa signed in triplicate which he had mentioned? She couldn’t even leave Datar without his permission. Her teeth ground together at that humiliating awareness.

  For seven utterly miserable days she had lurched between hating him and loving him, but it was extraordinarily hard to hate someone whom you missed more with every passing hour.

  . And she was pregnant. She had got her wish and right now there was a lot of repetition of that old adage about being careful about what you wished for washing around in her mind. Her breasts ached and her stomach heaved every morning, and somehow there was no joy in the discovery that she was expecting the baby of a male who had rejected her on the cruellest, most inexcusable terms. She had thought that she knew Razul and in the space of minutes had been forced to face the fact that she did not know him at all!

  He had been wildly infatuated with her but now that had burnt out. Once her mystery and challenge had gone, the pleasant little fling had run its course. After all that specious talk about her being precious and beloved he had rejected her and gone home to that hateful, vicious, nasty old man, and she now saw very clearly the resemblance between Razul a
nd his hateful father. She had let herself be used and this was her reward and it served her right, didn’t it? But, unsurprisingly, lashing that hard reality home to herself only made her feel more wretched than ever.

  It was a couple of hours later that Zulema came to tell her that the Princess Laila was waiting for her downstairs. ‘Tell her I’m not well,’ Bethany instructed, and then groaned, recalling that Razul’s sister was a doctor. ‘No, tell her I’m very sorry but I don’t want to see anyone right now.’

  Zulema’s dismay was unhidden. ‘This will cause very grave offence, my lady.’

  Her mistress reddened, recalling Laila’s kindness to her while she had been in hospital. It wasn’t Laila’s fault that her brother was a creep of the lowest denomination or that Bethany was still incomprehensibly and insanely attached to that same creep. In fact, maybe she could mention that visa problem to Laila and employ her as a go-between.

  Laila stood up as soon as she entered the room. ‘You will be wondering why I am here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You look unhappy.’ Laila surveyed her pallor and shadowed eyes with grim satisfaction.

  ‘All I want now is to go home,’ Bethany stated tightly.

  ‘But if you are pregnant you cannot possibly go home,’ Laila said very drily.

  The assurance with which the older woman made that statement shattered Bethany. She found herself staring back at Laila in wide-eyed dismay. How on earth could she know or even suspect such a secret?

  Razul’s sister gave a humourless laugh. ‘Bethany...you cannot walk into a chemist in the centre of Al Kabibi and purchase a pregnancy test and expect it to remain a secret. Naturally you were recognised, naturally such an interesting purchase was eagerly noted and discussed—’