by Penny Jordan
And yet the desert was also very cruel. She had seen falcons wheeling in the sky above the carcases of small animals, destroyed by the merciless heat of the sun. She had heard tales from the scarily expert Arab drivers supplied to the team, who were not allowed to drive themselves, of whole convoys being buried by sandstorms, never to be seen again, of oases there one day and gone the next, of tribes and the men who ruled them, so in tune with the savagery of the landscape in which they lived that they obeyed no law other than that of the desert itself.
One such leader was due to arrive in the camp tomorrow, according to the gossip she could not help but listen to. Prince Vereham al a’ Karim bin Hakar, Ruler of Dhurahn, was by all accounts a man who was much admired and respected by other men. And desert men respected only those who had proved they were strong enough for the desert. Such men were a race apart, a chosen few, men who stood tall and proud.
She had been tired when she came to bed, but now—thanks to her own foolishness—she was wide awake, her body tormented by a familiar sweet, slow ache that was flowing through her as surely as the Dhurahni River flowed from the High Plateau Mountains beyond the empty quarter, travelling many, many hundreds of miles before emerging in its Plutonian darkness into the State of Dhurahn.
Why didn’t she think about and focus on that, instead of on the memory of a kiss that by rights she should have forgotten weeks ago?
It had, after all, been three months—well, three months, one week and four and a half days, to be exact—since she had accidentally bumped into a robed stranger and ended up...
And ended up what? Obsessing about him three months later? How rational was that? It wasn’t rational at all, was it? So they had shared an opportunistic kiss? No doubt both of them had been equally curious about and aroused by the cultural differences between them. At least that was what Sam was valiantly trying to tell herself. And perhaps she might have succeeded if she hadn’t been idiotic enough immediately after the incident to fall into the hormone-baited trap of convincing herself that she had met and fallen in love with the one true love of her life, and that she was doomed to ache and yearn for him for the rest of her life.
What foolishness. A work of fiction worthy of any Arabian Nights’ Tale, and even less realistic.
What had happened was an incident that at best should have simply been forgotten, and at worst should have caused her to feel a certain amount of shame.
Shame? For sharing a mere kiss with a stranger? That kind of thinking was totally archaic. Better and far more honest, surely, to admit the truth.
So what was the truth? That she had enjoyed the experience?
Enjoyed it?
If only it had been the kind of ephemeral, easy, lighter than light experience that could be dismissed as merely enjoyable.
But all it had been was a simple kiss, she told herself angrily.
A simple kiss was easily forgotten; it did not bury itself so deeply in the senses that just the act of breathing in an unguarded moment was enough to reawaken the feelings it had aroused. It did not wake a person from their sleep because she was drowning in the longing it had set free, like a subterranean river in full flood. It did not possess a person and her senses to the extent that she was possessed.
Here she went again, Sam recognised miserably. She was twenty-four years old—a qualified professional in a demanding profession, a woman who had so longed to train in her chosen field that she had deliberately refused to allow herself the distraction of emotional and physical relationships with the opposite sex, and had managed to do so without more than a few brief pangs of regret.
But now it was as though all she had denied herself had suddenly decided to fight back and demand recompense. As though the woman in her was demanding recompense for what she had been denied. Yes, that was it. That was the reason she was feeling the way she was, she decided with relief. What she was feeling had nothing really to do with the man himself, even though...
Even though what? Even though her body remembered every hard, lean line of his, every place it had touched his, every muscle, every breath, every pulse of the blood in his veins and the beat of his heart? And that was before she even began to think about his kiss, or the way she had felt as if fate had taken her by the hand and brought her face-to-face with her destiny and her soul mate. She was sure she would never have allowed herself to be subjected to such emotional intensity if she had stayed at home in England. Her loving but pragmatic parents, with their busy and practical lives, had certainly not brought her up to think in such terms.
If she was to re-experience that kiss now—that moment when she had looked into those green eyes and known that this was it, that neither she nor her life would ever be the same again, that somehow by some means beyond either her comprehension or her control, she was now his—it would probably not be anything like as erotic or all-powerful as she remembered. Imagination was a wonderful thing, she told herself. That she was still thinking about something she ought to have forgotten within hours of it happening only proved that she had far too much of that dangerous quality. After all, it wasn’t as though she was ever likely to see him again—a stranger met by chance in a hotel corridor in a foreign country.
Instead of thinking about him, what she ought to be thinking about was tomorrow, when Sheikh Fasial bin Sadir, the cousin and representative of the Ruler of Zuran, who had been here at the camp since they had first arrived to oversee everything, would be handing over control of the project to Vereham al a’ Karim bin Hakar, Sheikh of Dhurahn. In turn, in three months’ time, he would be replaced by the nominated representative of the Emir of Khulua.
Sheikh Sadir was a career diplomat who had made it his business to ensure that both the camp and the work they were doing were run in a well-ordered and harmonious fashion. He had stressed to them—in perfect English—in an on-site briefing, that all three Rulers were determined to ensure that none of the small bands of nomads remaining in the empty quarter should in any way feel threatened by the work they were doing. That was why each working party would have with them an Arab guide, who would be able to speak with the nomads and reassure them about what was going on.
He had also gone on to tell them that whilst each state technically had rights over their own share of the empty quarter, where it came within their borders, it was accepted by all of them that the nomads had the right to roam freely across those borders.
Sam knew nothing about the Ruler of Dhurahn, but she certainly hoped he would prove to be as easy to work under as Sheikh Sadir. After all, she was already experiencing the problems that came with working alongside someone who was antagonistic towards her.
She gave a faint sigh. From the moment he had arrived four weeks ago, to take the place of one of the original members of the team who’d had to return home for personal reasons, James Reynolds had set out to wrong-foot her. He was two years her junior and newly qualified, and she had initially put his determination to question everything she said and did as a mere youthful desire to make his mark. So she hadn’t checked him—more for the sake of his pride than anything else. She had assumed that he would soon realise that here they worked as a team, not as individuals trying to score points off one another, but instead of recognising that he was at fault James had started to become even more vocal in his criticism of her.
Sam really regretted ever having mentioned to James in conversation how interested she was in the origins of the river that flowed into and through Dhurahn. Sin
ce she had James had continually made references to it that implied she was spending the time she was paid for checking the status of the borders in trying, as James put it, ‘to mess around with the source of a river that we all know is there’, and in doing so avoiding doing any ‘proper work’. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
‘Take no notice of him,’ Talia had tried to comfort her before she had injured herself. ‘He obviously has issues with you, and that’s his problem, not yours.’
‘The trouble is that he’s making it my problem,’ Sam had told her. ‘I really resent the way he’s making such an issue of my interest in the source of the river—as though he thinks I’ve got some kind of ulterior motive.’
‘I should just ignore him, if I were you,’ Talia had told her. ‘I mean, we’ve all heard the legend of how the river was first supposed to have been found—and who, in all honesty, wouldn’t find it fascinating?’
Sam had nodded her head.
The story was that, centuries earlier, the forebears of Dhurahn’s current Ruler, desert nomads, had been caught in a sandstorm and lost their way. After days of wandering in the desert, unable to find water, they had prayed to Allah to save them. When they had finished praying their leader had looked up and seen a bird perched on a rocky outcrop.
‘Look,’ he had commanded his people. ‘Where there is life there must be water. Allah be praised!’
As he had spoken he had brought his fist down on a rock, and miraculously water had spouted from that rock to become a river that watered the whole of Dhurahn—the land he had claimed for his people.
‘It’s been proved now, of course, that the river runs underground for hundreds of miles before it reaches Dhurahn,’ she’d reminded the other girl. ‘The legend probably springs from the fact that a fissure of some kind must have allowed a spring to bubble up from underground. And luckily for Dhurahn it happened on their land.’
Dawn! Here in the desert it burst upon the senses fully formed, taking you hostage to its miracle, Vere acknowledged, as he brought his four-by-four to a halt so that he could watch it.
Naturally his was the first vehicle in the convoy, since it would be unthinkable for him to travel in anyone’s dust. He had, in fact, left the others several miles behind him when he’d turned off the road that led to an oasis where the border-mapping team had set up camp, to drive across the desert itself instead.
As teenagers, both he and Drax had earned their spurs in the testosterone-fuelled young Arab male ‘sport’ of testing their skill against the treachery of the desert’s sand dunes. Like others before them, they had both overturned a handful of times before they had truly mastered the art of dune driving—something which no one could do with the same panache as a desert-dwelling Arab.
These days, with modern GPS navigation systems, the old danger of losing one’s bearings and dying from dehydration before one could be found wasn’t the danger it had once been, but the desert itself could never be tamed.
The Oasis of the Doves, where the team was encamped, was just inside Dhurahn’s own border, at the furthest end of a spear of Dhurahni land, which contained the source of the river that made so much of Dhurahn the lushly rich land that it was.
Their ancestors had fought hard and long to establish and hold on to their right to the source of the river, and many bitter wars had been fought between Dhurahn and its neighbours over such a valuable asset before the Rulers had sat down together and reached a legal and binding agreement on where their borders were to be.
Vere could remember his father telling him with a rueful smile that the family story was that their great-grandfather had in part legally secured the all-important strip of land containing the beginnings of the river that they had claimed by right of legend for so many generations because he had fallen passionately in love with the daughter of the English diplomat who had been sent to oversee the negotiations—and she with him. Lord Alfred Saunders had quite naturally used his diplomatic powers in favour of his own daughter once he had realised that she could not be dissuaded from staying with the wild young Arab with whom she had fallen in love.
It had been at Vere’s insistence that the scientific and mapping teams had been housed in the traditional black tents of the Bedou, instead of something more westernised. It might be Drax who was the artist, but Vere’s own eye was very demanding, and the thought of seeing anything other than the traditional Bedou tents clustered around an oasis affronted his aesthetic sense of what was due to the desert.
He restarted the four-by-four’s engine and eased it easily and confidently down the steep ravine that lay ahead of him. His mother had always loved this oasis, and it was now protected by new laws that had been brought in to ensure that it remained as it was and would never, as some oases had, become an over-developed tourist attraction.
The oasis itself was a deep pool of calm water that reflected the colour of the sky. It was fringed with graceful plants, and the narrow path that skirted it was shaded by palm trees. Migrating birds stopped there to rest and drink, the Bedou nomads drove their herds here, and held their annual trading fairs here. Bedou marriage feasts took place here.
It was a place for the celebration of life, symbolised by the oasis itself—the preserver of life. But for once being here was not soothing Vere.
Instead he felt hauntingly aware of an emptiness inside himself, and the ache that emptiness was causing. How was it possible for him to feel like this when it wasn’t what he wanted? He had grown so used to believing that he could control his own emotions that he couldn’t accept that somehow his emotional defences had been breached. It shouldn’t have been possible, and because of that Vere was determined to believe that it wasn’t possible.
The pain he had felt on losing his parents had shocked and frightened him—something that he had never admitted to anyone, not even Drax, and something he had tried to bury deep within himself. He had reasoned at the time that it was because his father’s death had made him Dhurahn’s new ruler—a role that demanded for the sake of his people that he show them that he was their strength, that they could rely on him as they had relied on his father. How could he manifest that strength when alone in his room at night he wept for the loss of his mother? For the sake of Dhurahn and his people he’d forced himself to separate from his love for his mother and the pain of his loss. He had decided there must be a weakness within him that meant he must never, ever allow himself to become emotionally vulnerable through love, for the sake of his duty. He couldn’t trust himself to put his duty above his own personal feelings should he fall in love and marry and then for any reason lose the woman he loved.
Those feelings and that decision still held as good for him now as they had done the day he had made them, sitting alone in his mother’s private garden, sick with longing for her comfort. His father had worshipped and adored their mother, but Vere knew that, had he survived the accident, he would somehow have continued to be the Ruler of Dhurahn, not a grieving husband, because that was his absolute and predestined duty. The weakness within him, Vere had decided that day, was one he must guard against all his life. And as a young, passionately intense and serious-minded teenager it had seemed to him that the only way he could guarantee to do this would be to lock the gates of his heart against the risks that would come with falling in love. He could not trust himself to have the strength to put duty before love. That was his secret shame, and one he spoke of to no one.
Now, the discovery that, after
so many years of believing he had conquered and driven out of himself the emotions and needs he feared, he was aching constantly for a woman he had met fleetingly and only once, was creating inside him an armed phalanx of warrior-like hostile emotions. Chief amongst these was the inner voice that told him that the woman had deliberately set out to arouse him, and that his lust for her was unacceptable and contemptible.
Sam had woken up over an hour ago, with the first hint of dawn, and had been unable to get back to sleep. It would have been easy to blame her inability to sleep on the unease that James was causing her. Easy, but untrue, she admitted, as she pulled on the traditional black robe worn by Muslim women, which she had found so very useful as a form of protection against the sun and the sand.
She stepped barefoot out of the tent into the still coolness of the early morning.
Traditionally, all the members of a nomad tribe would have been up and busy at first light, to make the most of the cooler hours of the day before the sun rose too high in the sky for them to bear its heat, but in these days of air-conditioning units there was no need for anyone to rise early, and Sam knew from experience that she would have the early-morning peace of the oasis to herself.
A narrow pathway meandered along the water’s edge, the ground flattened out in certain areas where animals came to drink. As Sam walked along the path a cloud of doves rose from the palm trees and then settled back down. A bird, so swift and graceful that all she saw was the flash of its wings, dipped down to the water and then rose up again with a small fish in its beak.
Sam turned a curve in the path and then came to such an abrupt halt that she almost fell over her own feet as she stared in disbelief at the man standing facing her. Her heart soared as easily as the doves on a surge of dizzying delight.
