An Arabian Courtship

by Lynne Graham

  ‘You are sure?’ he repeated.

  As she nodded, still a little dazed by what was happening, his tautness evaporated. He smiled, and her pulses went haywire. He bent over her and the thrumming in the air sizzled with pure electricity. ‘When you are near or far,’ he confessed, ‘I burn for you, night and day. No woman has ever had that power over me.’

  Sadness entered her briefly. Berah reigned on upon her pedestal, divorced from earthly pleasures. The incandescent chemistry of the bedroom was Polly’s only weapon. A few weeks ago she would have scorned it. An inner voice jeered at her present frailty. Was this how she would hold him? With the desire that could make him swerve from cool logic in a moment’s temptation? Quote fatalism in smooth excuse for his inconsistency? She wouldn’t listen to that voice. He didn’t love her, and that wasn’t fair, but there were many unfair things in life. This would be enough, she told herself squarely. This time—it would be enough.

  His mouth dipped to caress the tempting pink-budded breast invitingly shaped by silk. Her fingers speared deep into his black hair, holding him to her, for she was racked by an intolerable hunger. Almost roughly he found her mouth again, his hands hard on her hips as he raised her to the thrusting evidence of his arousal beneath the tight denim. Passion flared white-hot and uncontrollable and sealed them together. What followed was the most indescribable physical pleasure Polly had ever experienced.

  * * *

  A rapped-out Arabic command awakened her. Peeping sleepily over Raschid’s restraining arm, she was just in time to see Ismeni vanish through the same concealed panel she had entered by the night before.

  ‘That woman, she is crazy!’ Raschid declared with a distinct lack of charity. ‘She actually crept in here to try and waken you up and trail you out of my bed—then she argues with me. Why should I care about my wife being found in my bed? Where else should she be? Why should I hide this?’

  Polly blushed fierily. ‘I hope you didn’t upset her.’

  ‘Upset her? When I told her that you were staying, she smiled smugly at me. So why did she argue?’

  Polly was having some very strange ideas about what Raschid’s grandparents had got up to in the dead of night when everybody else thought they weren’t speaking. It was time for confession. Polly remained mute. Raschid had succumbed to that wildly seductive siren who had shamelessly thrown herself at his head last night. Now was not the time to stand up and be counted as a fraud. Exciting, she savoured blissfully. She would give Ismeni the most enormous bunch of roses. ‘She still thinks I’m Louise,’ she said.

  ‘Are you seriously suggesting that my grandfather kicked his wife out of bed at dawn like a concubine…’

  ‘How do you know he didn’t?’

  ‘By what I know of my grandmother he would not have survived to see the sun come up,’ he whipped back drily. ‘In any case, they never lived here together.’

  ‘But he visited.’

  ‘They were separated,’ he reminded her.

  As silence fell, uncertainty reclaimed her. The old lady’s early-morning visit had taken the spotlight off their renewed intimacy. Suddenly she was afraid that Raschid might regret the night that had passed.

  Veiled eyes tabulated her fluctuating expression. ‘There’s something I must say…’ he began.

  ‘Don’t!’ she rushed in nervously.

  ‘You cannot inhabit an ivory tower forever.’ As his mouth quirked, his thumb gently mocked the protective down-sweep of her lashes. ‘I won’t talk of our parting again, but that option must always remain open to you.’

  In astonishment her eyes flew wide, drowned in the proximity of dense blue. ‘You think I need that option?’

  A powerful wave of emotion stirred her. In a few words Raschid removed her deepest fear. He settled back against the tumbled pillows and shifted a sinuous shoulder, sudden constraint marking his firm mouth. ‘Who can foretell the future? We must be realistic,’ he murmured. ‘You are very young now, but some day you will want a child. That desire will take you as surely as the dawn follows darkness, and human nature being what it is, what you know you cannot have you will want all the more. But in denying what is between us, I was trying to avoid that dilemma, I was making the decision for you.’

  ‘That wasn’t your right,’ Polly muttered shakily.

  ‘I don’t want you to be foolishly blind, aziz.’

  She didn’t know how to answer him. What he said was true. It would be some time in the future when she really came to terms with the impossibility of ever bringing her own baby into the world. As she sat up a twinge of nausea irritated her and automatically she lay back again, lost in her serious thoughts. Whatever regrets or pangs might seize her some day, she would keep them to herself. Thanks to Berah she would have to keep them to herself completely. Berah’s failure to accept the situation had left Raschid vulnerable, and Raschid, to put it mildly, did not cope very well with the ignominy of vulnerability. He was much more likely to walk away from any relationship which might expose that weak spot. Was that savage pride of his all that had kept him from her? Oh, how much she wanted to believe that, but in her heart she could not believe it. He had had the power to deny her because she did not have the power to inspire the uncritical love and loyalty he had awarded Berah. Why was she upsetting herself like this? She had enough love for both of them, and, aware of his tension, she muttered something trite about crossing that bridge when or if they came to it.

  ‘You know, there’s something that I’ve always been curious about,’ she admitted, eager to leave that other subject behind. ‘What did you and your father argue about on our wedding day?’

  A sudden, unexpected smile banished his serious aspect. ‘Is that important now?’

  Her bosom swelled with chagrin. ‘It was about me, then,’ she condemned. ‘You were complaining about having to marry me, weren’t you?’

  He burst out laughing. ‘Polly, your imagination is an unfailing source of entertainment! Very well,’ he capitulated with veiled eyes, ‘I shall tell you what I was told that day. There was never an assassination attempt on my father’s life, and the promise made was not made with serious intent.’

  ‘There was never an assassination attempt? But that’s impossible!’ Polly exclaimed.

  ‘Your father mistook one of the guards for an assassin.’ The faintest tremor roughened Raschid’s explanation. ‘When he dragged my father to the ground, the guard concerned shot at him, believing that he was assaulting mine.’

  ‘But it can’t have happened like that,’ she argued shakily.

  ‘I am afraid it did. My father was naturally relieved that Ernest sustained only a minor injury. Fearing that a serious diplomatic incident might result from the misunderstanding, my father allowed Ernest to believe that he had saved his life, and he made that pledge in part jest.’

  Setting the incongruous truth beside her memory of her father’s overweening delight in recounting the story of his one hour of heroic valour, Polly was almost overtaken by an irreverent tide of mirth. ‘Dad must never find out the truth,’ she whispered tautly.

  ‘When your father requested an interview with mine, he assumed that he was coming to request that the promise be fulfilled, and it was then that he had enquiries made into your background,’ Raschid went on. ‘Having an undutiful son determined to remain a widower, and being impressed with what he learnt of you, he turned the situation to his advantage.’

  ‘It was very cruel of him to tell you the truth…’ Suddenly she went off into gales of laughter, unable to hold it any longer. ‘Oh, I wish I’d been there!’ she gasped. ‘I’d love to have seen your father’s face when mine hurled him down on the ground…he must have been absolutely raging!’

  ‘I confess that at the time I was not very amused.’ Laughing now himself, Raschid caught her to him, rakish eyes brightly appraising her. ‘But now I would concede that he chose you very well.’

  He possessed her parted lips in a blindingly hungry kiss, glancing down at her to
murmur mockingly, ‘By Allah, I have missed you, but you will not have the advantage of distance again. When next I go abroad, you will come with me. You have become indispensable to my comfort, aziz.’

  Polly touched the heights of happiness in the following week. Every morning they went out riding, and under Raschid’s patient tutelage she lost the nervous unease on horseback which had been instilled in her by her father’s neck-or-nothing expectations when she was a child. The third morning they returned to the soft rush of water. The fountains were playing again. Raschid had had the ancient plumbing overhauled to please her.

  She was enjoying a kaleidoscopic desert sunset from the vantage point of the terraced gardens one evening when he came to find her. The grey gravel plain surrounding the palace’s hilly basalt setting was bathed in illusory gold and scarlet. The bleak, enduring mystery of the wilderness possessed a savage beauty and an endless, fascinating variation of colour, shape and texture that reminded her potently of Raschid.

  ‘You look very pensive,’ he commented.

  He had had work to do this afternoon. The plane had come in, bringing the mail, and then for some reason it had come back again later. When Polly had walked outside, Raschid had accompanied her on a walk through the gardens. She suspected that he was afraid she had felt neglected, left to her own designs for a few hours. Now here he was again.

  Gracefully she arose from the stone seat. ‘I was just relaxing,’ she said.

  ‘Or were you thinking that it is Christmas Eve and you are far from home? No snow, no holly, no roaring log fires, no stocking,’ he teased, rather unfeelingly, she felt, for she was hopelessly sentimental about Christmas.

  ‘I’m a little old for a stocking,’ she muttered repressively.

  ‘I suppose you are.’ Raschid flashed her a slow smile. ‘I almost forgot—we have visitors.’

  ‘Visitors?’ Polly exclaimed in dismay.

  He gripped her hand when she would have parted from him in the hall. ‘You will do very nicely as you are.’

  As he guided her determinedly into the salon, she faltered in her steps several feet into the room. Her dazed scrutiny climbed the height of an eight-foot pine tree shimmering with starry lights and glittering baubles. The carpet beneath was heaped with gaily wrapped parcels. Somewhere in the background the strains of ‘Deck the Halls,’ erupted loudly.

  Strong arms encircled her from behind. ‘Have I only made you homesick? I would have invited your family, but your father is not fit enough to travel yet.’

  Her eyes filled and she swallowed thickly. ‘You did this for me?’

  Raschid turned her round. ‘It is a small thing if it makes you happy.’

  The pleasure of having overwhelmed her showed in his eyes alone. His head descended in slow motion and she stretched up instinctively for his lips to encircle hers, something vague about visitors receding into her subconscious as wildfire raced through her veins. He lifted his head, still holding her close. ‘I love you,’ he whispered half under his breath.

  She didn’t look up. She didn’t believe him. She wished he had kept quiet, although it was herself that she ought to blame. By thoughtlessly hurling her love at him, she had made him uncomfortable, she had made him feel that he had to respond. And with such conviction he did it too, she reflected, torn between pain and amusement. He dropped it in a constrained, unsophisticated aside. He didn’t lie very well.

  Somebody coughed noisily. Raschid jerked back from her.

  ‘Would you like us to go out and come in again?’ Asif grinned from the doorway with Chassa by his side. ‘Then again, I’m not that easily shocked.’

  Chassa smiled at Polly’s astonishment. ‘I hope that you don’t mind that we’ve invited ourselves to Christmas lunch?’

  ‘How could she? We brought it with us, along with a Swiss chef. Airsick, by the way. Just as well he has got until tomorrow to get his act together,’ Asif laughed. ‘Chassa dressed the tree. Have you any idea how much trouble it was to transport that tree out here?’

  Warmly embracing Polly, Chassa whispered, ‘Don’t listen to him. Raschid arranged it all, and we have had a lot of fun helping him to surprise you.’

  It was a wonderful evening. Delighted by the efforts Raschid had made on her behalf, Polly felt her pleasure was increased by the awareness that she really was accepted as a part of his family. Chassa bubbled with an effervescence which Polly would never have associated with her a brief five weeks ago. She was a different woman, while Asif, once he had finished showing off, seemed curiously quieter. But whatever had strained their marriage had clearly been dealt with and set behind them. Chassa glowed with the confidence of a woman who knew she was loved.

  When the other couple left them alone at midnight Polly could no longer resist the heaps of presents. Raschid had even arranged for her family’s gifts to be collected in London and flown out. By one o’clock she was in a welter of torn wrapping paper under his indulgent eye, dazed by the extravagance of all that he had bought her and hard put to it to understand how he had contrived to do so with only a telephone at his disposal.

  ‘All I’ve got for you is an anthology of poetry, and it’s not even wrapped,’ she confided shakily. ‘I wasn’t sure if I was even going to give it to you. I thought you might think I was being silly.’

  Laughing, he gathered her up in his arms. ‘You are my Christmas present, but if you are about to start crying again I shall leave you under the tree!’

  ‘I’m so happy,’ she sniffed, and it hit her then, a piercing, frightening arrow of foreboding as if she was offending some jealous fate by daring to be so happy. ‘I don’t think I ever want to leave here.’

  The stark fear in her eyes had covertly engaged his attention, to etch a faint frown line between his brows. ‘What is really wrong, Polly?’ he asked.

  ‘Wrong?’ she gulped, staving off that horrible feeling that had briefly attacked her and knowing that she was being ridiculous to pay heed to it. Tensely she laughed. ‘I was just trying to work out where I’ll ever wear all that jewellery!’

  ‘There is a State banquet next month and there is Paris next week,’ Raschid murmured into her hair. ‘But that was not really what was worrying you, was it?’

  Cursing his perception, she buried her face in his shoulder. ‘I can’t help wondering how Dad will bear up to a festive season without parties,’ she lied. ‘I hope he’ll be sensible.’

  ‘I’m sure he will be. We’ll find time to visit again soon,’ he promised, his tone ever so slightly cool. But Polly didn’t notice. She was thinking what a silly fool she would be to let insecurity plague her, and she looked up at him with a bright smile.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS the day after Boxing Day when Polly bounced exuberantly out of bed to go riding and instead keeled over in a dead faint at Raschid’s feet. Bedlam had broken out when she resurfaced. Zenobia, who had been flown out with the clothes Polly had required several days earlier, was down on her knees weeping. Raschid was biting out harsh comments to some unfortunate out of view and from the corridor outside came the babble of excitable voices, signifying the gathering of the servants scenting a drama.

  ‘Lie still.’ Before she could sit up to sheepishly announce her recovery, Raschid was pressing a restraining hand to her shoulder. ‘You are not to move until the doctor arrives.’

  ‘Where are you going to get a doctor from?’

  He sighed. ‘I had already arranged for Mr Soames to see Ismeni this morning. Now he will see you as well.’

  ‘But we’re supposed to be leaving today,’ Polly argued. ‘And I don’t need a doctor.’

  ‘Have you no respect for your health?’ he demanded. ‘Be grateful that I have!’

  Expelling his breath, he sat down beside her. ‘You scared the heart from my body. Repetition had not accustomed me to this habit of yours,’ he said, attempting a taut smile. ‘But don’t worry. I am sure it is nothing serious.’

  His restless pacing over the next few hours told her h
is imagination was roaming at large over a list of killer diseases. But it didn’t occur to Polly that she had anything to worry about. Feeling vaguely out of sorts once or twice was surely excusable with all that had been happening in recent weeks? She didn’t like to say that to Raschid in case he felt that she was blaming him for it. Perhaps she had let herself get overtired, something like that.

  When the doctor arrived, Raschid announced that he would stay. Polly objected and, emanating disapproval and reproach, he left them. Mr Soames was familiar and cheerful, but he threw her completely with his third question. When had she last been bedevilled by that particular female curse? It seemed shrouded in the mists of time. Raschid had been in New York…but that had been months ago. It couldn’t have been that long, it simply couldn’t have been…

  Mr Soames cleared his throat. ‘Haven’t you suspected the cause for yourself, Your Highness? You’re pregnant.’ Taking her pulse, his examination complete, he missed the arrested paralysis of her face. ‘I would say ten to twelve weeks, and…’

  ‘I can’t be…I can’t be pregnant! It’s just not possible!’ Her interruption was a strangled squeak.

  His beetling brows rose in concert. ‘There’s no room for doubt, Your Highness. Your condition is too well advanced.’

  The intermittent nausea which had bothered her and then vanished came to mind…her disappearing waist. She gulped, welded visually to the older man’s cool professional confidence. ‘Honestly? I mean…I really am?’

  The poor man probably wondered if she required a long-overdue chat about the birds and the bees. He had no idea why his announcement should reduce her to dazed incoherency. She drifted out of the rigidity of deep shock on to a euphoric plane and nodded like a vacant marionette while Mr Soames gave forth about sensible diet and regular rest and the excellence of Chassa’s obstetrician. She didn’t hear a word. Under the sheet her hands slunk covertly over her stomach. The hows, whys and wherefores could not preoccupy her. Somebody had made a mistake. Or whatever had been amiss had miraculously come right. Polly was in no mood to question a miracle.