by Penny Jordan
‘Precautions?’
Vere was looking at her as though she were speaking a foreign language, Sam thought.
‘I’m not using any form of birth control,’ she told him quietly. ‘And then there’s the matter of our mutual sexual health. I... . My last partner was my first, and that was a long time ago, so I know there is no question of me being a risk to you... .’ She was stumbling a little over her words now, self-conscious in the reality they were creating in a way she hadn’t been during their physical intimacy.
Vere registered the surge of male pleasure it gave him to hear her hesitant admission about her lack of any real kind of sexual history, but it was pushed slightly to one side by his outrage that she should find it necessary to question his own sexual morality and healthiness.
Vere looked so affronted that had it not been for the seriousness of the situation Sam could almost have laughed.
‘You cannot imagine that my sexual health could in any way put you at risk,’ he challenged her.
‘Why not?’ Sam countered steadily. ‘You’re a sexually active man, after all.’ Her voice might have sounded steady, but she was glad to be able to duck her head so that he couldn’t look into her eyes and see there the pain it caused her to think of him with other women.
‘How do you deduce that?’ Vere demanded peremptorily. ‘Since, by your own admission, I am only the second man you have given yourself to.’
‘A man in your position is bound to...to have experienced more of life in every way than a woman in mine,’ Sam answered him and then added huskily, ‘besides, I cannot imagine that a man could...’
‘Could what?’ Vere demanded, when she suddenly went silent and refused to look at him.
‘Could make love to a woman as beautifully as you made love to me without...without having a lot of previous experience,’ Sam said reluctantly.
Somehow or other he had reached for her hand, was holding it tightly in his own.
‘If the experience was beautiful then that was because of the uniqueness of what you brought to it yourself.’
Vere hesitated. He wanted to tell her how much her soft and honest words meant to him. He want to tell her too that he shared her feelings, but he had spent too long forcing himself to keep his emotions under control and hidden, sometimes even from himself.
‘I assure you that there is no risk to your health from the intimacy we have shared,’ he told her briefly instead, then hesitated before adding, ‘however, as to the risk of you conceiving my child...’
If she hadn’t known how she felt about him before, she must know now. On hearing him say those words, at the thought of having his child, she felt her emotions close around her heart, the pressure of them like a giant fist, making the organ thud and kick. If only she might!
Sam knew she ought to be shocked by her own reckless thoughts, but the seed of an unexpected yearning had been placed inside her, and was already swelling and growing. An unplanned pregnancy was the last thing she needed in her life. But to have this man’s child...his son...to have a part of him with her for ever...
Luckily for her that was unlikely to happen, Sam realised as she did a bit of quick mental arithmetic and then told Vere lightly, ‘I doubt very much that I will have conceived, given the...the timing.’
‘And if you have?’ Vere challenged her.
‘I haven’t,’ Sam insisted.
Abruptly Vere released her and turned away from her, getting up from the bed. The glow from the lamp lovingly illuminated every perfect male line of his body—but not as lovingly as she wanted to trace and kiss them with her fingers and her lips, Sam thought achingly. She didn’t want him to leave her. She wanted him to stay with her and hold her, love her...
She wanted what she already knew she could not have, she warned herself as Vere reached for his clothes in silence.
Vere had no idea why Sam’s assertion that she had not conceived his child should make him feel that dark bitterness and pain. All he did know was that it also made him feel angry and alone. Shamefully, it also made him feel that he wanted to take her back in his arms and make love to her until she was crying out to him to possess her. And this time when he did so he wanted to ensure that... That what? That he impregnated her with his seed? That her body, her womb, would ripen with it and with his child? The fierce clutch of savage joy at his heart was giving him a message that was totally at odds with the logical rejection inside his head.
He was Dhurahn’s ruler. It was impossible for him to father a child, his first child, capriciously and outside marriage. How would he ever be able to assuage the guilt he would feel towards his people and towards that child—especially if it were a son—knowing he had deprived him of his birthright?
There must be no such child, and therefore no more unprotected sex. That meant no sex at all, since it was impossible for him to procure the protection they would need unless he made an incognito visit to Zuran.
Now he was being ridiculous, Vere told himself as he finished dressing and then strode towards the exit of the tent without turning round to say anything to Sam. He knew that if he did he would not be able to leave her.
He had gone and Sam was alone. Her eyes were burning with tears she was determined were not going to fall. It was all her own fault. She couldn’t pretend to herself that she hadn’t ached to know him as a lover because she had—from the very first moment she had bumped into him. And now she did know, she knew too that, no matter what happened in the rest of her life, no man would ever be able to take her to the heights Vere had shown her. Nor the depths of pain and despair she was now feeling because he had left her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘AND as you can see from the shape of the natural depression here, this must originally have been a deeper pool in the riverbed. My guess is that the river must at one time have cascaded down into it over this rocky outcrop to form a natural pool before flowing on.’
They were standing in the basin, in the shadow of the rock above them. Sam knew that her voice sounded stiff and over controlled as she underlined for him just why she was so sure that the course of the river had been changed. She focused straight ahead of herself, instead of turning to look at Vere. How could she behave naturally towards him now, after last night? She had barely slept, and had been unable to eat anything before he had driven her out here just as dawn was breaking. She felt so strung out by the intensity of her own emotions that just having to breathe separately from him, when all of her was screaming to be as physically and emotionally close to him as she could get, required her total concentration.
She could feel herself shaking with need. In an attempt to conceal it she bent down and picked up a handful of smooth pebbles.
‘These must have been worn smooth by the river,’ she told him. ‘There is no other way that could have happened. The river must once have flowed into this pool and then out of it. You can even walk along what must have been the riverbed to the marshy area where it would have joined what is now the new course of the Dhurahni.’
It was obvious to Vere that she wasn’t going to be persuaded that she was wrong—which meant he would need to find another way of neutralising the information she was selling to the Emir.
‘We are over twenty miles from our border with Khulua, and you are talking about a change of direction in the river of a matter of a few hundred yards, if that. I fail to see what relevance it could possibly have,’ he told her.
Vere’s voice was clipped, and like
Sam he avoided any eye contact. He had still noticed, though, how the breeze that sunrise always brought had stroked her hair, and he had been filled with a fierce, irrational need to tangle his own fingers in its silky length and bind her to him.
Her, this woman it made far more sense for him to despise rather than desire.
Last night she had given herself to him so sweetly and so completely, with such trust, that just holding her had touched and soothed sore places within himself, as though she possessed a magical ability to heal him.
No. Last night she had acted as only the most skilled of deceivers could act, and he was a fool for allowing himself to feel what he had felt.
Swiftly Vere clamped down on the argument raging inside him. He needed to think only as the Ruler of Dhurahn, and to remember the hard lesson the death of his mother had taught him. There was no place here for the man he had foolishly allowed himself to be the previous night—vulnerable, in need, responsive to a certain woman’s hold on his senses to such an extent that everything else was forgotten.
Sam couldn’t look at Vere. If she did... If she did, she would end up begging him to hold her, and she must not do that. She had humiliated herself enough already. Last night had shown her yet again that she meant nothing to him. If he had used her to satisfy his lust then that was her own fault, for loving him so much that she had allowed him to do so.
She had to focus on being professional. Sam took a deep breath and then said firmly, ‘It must have had some relevance to whoever changed it, and it’s that that fascinates me. Why would anyone want to go to the trouble of altering it, especially in view of the work it must have involved? A new channel would have had to be cut through the rock, and that would have been expensive. To what purpose? No benefit could have been gained from it.’
‘To your western mind, perhaps, but the Eastern mind thinks differently.’
Sam turned towards him, forgetting that she had promised herself she wouldn’t look at him.
‘So there was a reason?’
Her mouth looked soft and swollen still from his kisses, and the khaki shirt she was wearing couldn’t conceal the aroused thrust of her nipples. Her face wore a tell-tale paleness that spoke of a night’s sensual languor. The ache that was tormenting him immediately became a dervish-driven whirlwind of torture. He wanted her. He wanted to claim her now, here. He wanted— He stopped, knowing he wasn’t free to feel like this, to need like this.
‘Yes, there was a reason,’ he agreed, forcing himself to deny the images that were tempting him. ‘But it has nothing to do with protecting our right to the river, because that has never been necessary. The Dhurahni River belongs to Dhurahn. That is a legal reality that can never be changed or questioned.’
‘Then why?’
Sam’s persistence reactivated Vere’s suspicions, and reminded him of why they were here.
It was plain to him that she was digging for information so that she could pass it on to the Emir. There was no need for him to answer her. But then neither was there any need to conceal the truth, since it was obvious that she was not going to allow herself to be persuaded that she was wrong.
Sam thought that he wasn’t going to answer her. He was looking towards the rocks from where the water must once have flowed, down into the now dried-out pool in which they were standing, sheltered from the growing strength of the morning sun by the shadows cast by the rocks.
‘There is a story that has been passed down through our family by word of mouth...’
The air had gone still, waiting for the sun’s warmth—hungering for it, Sam guessed, in the same way that she hungered for Vere. Why had this happened to her? Why was fate subjecting her to this cruelty? Why couldn’t she have loved another man? A different man? A man who might love her in return?
‘When the borders between our states were originally drawn up,’ Vere continued, ‘my great-grandfather claimed as his wife the daughter of a British diplomat. It is said that after their marriage my ancestor and his bride spent their first night together as man and wife here, on their journey to Dhurahn city. A camp was set up, and my great-grandfather and his bride swam together alone here—for, as you have said, this was the course of the river then. It flowed over those rocks behind us and down into a pool here.
‘The story goes that the pool was one of great beauty, fringed with all manner of plants and flowers, with an olive grove beyond it. The newly married couple consummated their vows to one another here in privacy, and it was here that their first child, a son, was conceived.
‘Such was my ancestor’s love for his wife that he commanded that the course of the river should be diverted, so that no other man could ever look upon the pool that held within it the memories of their love and her beauty, or imagine what anyone but him had the right to know. It was their special place, and he preferred to destroy it rather than let anyone else look upon it.’
‘He must have loved her very much and...and very passionately’ was all that Sam could manage to say.
‘Yes,’ Vere agreed.
Vere watched Sam from the protection of the shadows that cloaked his own expression. Last night, in giving herself to him, she had taken a part of him he could never reclaim. He had to admit that to himself because there was no way now he could evade that knowledge.
Without him knowing quite how, she had managed to touch his carefully protected emotions. But she was not someone with whom he could ever share his life, or to whom he could ever make a commitment. No matter how much he wanted her.
How could he do that when she was in the Emir’s pay? Whatever his personal feelings, his duty was to his people and their best interests. The days were gone when a man like his great-grandfather had believed it was right to put his love for a woman above all else.
His love for a woman?
He did not love her. He could not—would not. It was impossible, unthinkable.
When he had guarded his heart against love he had thought he was protecting it from a woman who would know him as a man, a poet—someone to whom the desert was a sacred well from which he refilled his inner being—and that it would be her knowledge of this true essence of himself that would bind them together in mutual love. She would love him despite the fact that he was a prince, not because of it, and she would share his belief that true honesty and trust were essential components of their love for one another. The woman would love him as his mother had loved his father—before and beyond anything or anyone else, even their children.
That woman was not this woman. He did not love this woman.
But his heart was thudding in sledgehammer-like blows, beating out a message that said he was lying to himself.
Having listened to Vere, Sam found that she was averting her gaze from the pool, not wanting to see the images Vere’s story had brought to life. The young bride, her pale skin covered only by the water, and her husband, his skin darker, his body hardened by the desert and by tribal warfare, his passions aroused by his love for her. Their faces were concealed from her but their feelings were not.
To let her thoughts go further was too intrusive, and yet the images and the emotions they aroused in her couldn’t be dismissed. Sam closed her eyes to shut them out, but when she opened them again the figures were still there, inside her imagination. Only now she could see their faces, and they belonged not to two unknown people but to herself and Vere. A shudder of naked longing racked her whole body.
The sun was fully risen now, its light shar
pening the shadows glittering on the pebbles in the dried-out pool, now no more than an empty husk of what it had once been. It held no indication of the beauty it had known.
Vere looked at it and then looked away. His great-grandfather had loved passionately and intensely, and he had loved only one woman. To love like that was in his genes, a fate he could not avoid. But he must avoid it. He must not love this woman whom he could never trust.
Sam made a huge effort to redirect her thoughts to where they ought to be.
‘If you knew the story behind the river, then why did you insist that I was wrong and that the course hadn’t been changed?’
Her voice sounded low and strained in her own ears. She prayed that Vere wouldn’t guess how difficult she was finding it to focus on what she was saying and the reason they were here.
‘Why was it of so much interest to you that it had?’ Vere countered, without answering her.
‘Because I knew that I was right that it had been moved, and I knew that there had to be a reason.’
She was being very persistent. The Emir must have paid her very well indeed. So at least she had some kind of loyalty. Vere could feel the sharp acid bitterness of his own anger. It raked at his heart like wickedly sharp knives, driving him past caution.
‘But of course you would have preferred that reason to be political rather than emotional?’ he accused Sam bitingly.
Sam stared at him, not understanding his anger or his attack.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Why do you think I say it?’
He was talking in riddles now, and Sam had no idea what they meant.
‘I didn’t have any preconceived idea about why the river had been re-routed. In fact that was part of what made it so intriguing. Logically there was no reason to move it. It isn’t as though it forms part of a border, or is disputed in any way, but there had to be some motive. Everything must have a motive...’
