by Penny Jordan
She looked so vulnerable and alone. There were smudges beneath her eyes—had she been crying? He could feel the weight of his own guilt.
Somehow he managed to wrench his thoughts back to where they should be. She was just a sleeping woman, that was all.
A sleeping woman whom he had held in his arms in the tranquillity that had followed the intensity of their shared orgasm. He could remember how it had felt to have her burrowing against him, wanting and needing him, finding her security in being with him. Trusting him.
Shame vied inside him with a feeling of almost melancholic sweetness that poured softly through his veins like warmed honey. Now was not the time to disturb her, and possibly distress her with what he had to say. His admissions and her questions could wait until morning. Though he couldn’t leave her there to sleep so uncomfortably.
He leaned down, lifting her from the chair, his intention merely to carry her over to the bed and then leave her.
However, he had barely taken more than a couple of steps when she woke up, stiffening, and then relaxing as she said his name with recognition and relief.
She reached out to hold on to him, turning her own body into his. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ Her voice was soft with sleep and contentment. Automatically Vere tightened his hold on her.
Sleepily Sam clung to Vere’s strength as he carried her into the bedroom and towards the bed. She had been so angry, so determined to tell him that she wanted to leave, but somehow now that he was here, and she was in his arms, that anger had evaporated like the pools of water created overnight by the cold desert air, disappearing in the morning heat of the sun as though they had never been.
She loved him so much. Surely with that love she would be able to show him how much she needed the respect that came from knowing he valued her and cared about her.
He was placing her on the bed. Lovingly she reached up to him, twining her arms round his neck as the towel slipped away from her body, and she breathed out his name against his skin in a soft sound of pleasure.
He must not stay here, Vere warned himself. But as he reached to unclasp her hands from behind his neck Sam pressed her mouth against his in a kiss of sweet command, the tip of her tongue tormenting the closed line of his lips with eager little impatient caresses.
Vere could feel his resolve crumbling to dust—less than dust. It was nothing, gone, forgotten as he let her tease him into submitting to her pleasure. Her tongue slipped between his parted lips, causing Vere to shudder in violent need as it found his and flirted with it, coaxing and cajoling. In the moonlight Vere could see the stiff tightness of her nipples, erect with arousal, and the curve of her breast demanding the cup of his hand around its soft weight. He probed the urgent thrust of her nipple with the pad of his thumb, stroking it, rubbing it erotically, feeling her going wild with sexual excitement. Her tongue meshed with his, submitting to its control of their pleasure. Her hands were trying to push away the fabric that was coming between her and his flesh. She moaned beneath his kiss, her whole body trembling.
He reached out with his free hand to caress the curve of her hip, his own body gripped by unbearable need when she arched upwards, opening her thighs to offer him the gift of her desire for him.
Her sex pulsed with the frantic demand that was throbbing through his own aroused flesh. She was moist and hot, crying out to him when he touched her.
It was more than he could endure.
He undressed quickly and Sam wound her arms around him, pressing her body close to him and kissing every bit of him she could reach...his throat, his shoulder, his chest, and then, to his shock, his belly, making his already hard erection swell and stiffen even more. Abandoning the last of his clothes, Vere picked her up and placed her down on the bed, his mouth against her breast, tightening around her nipple and drawing rhythmically on it whilst Sam gasped and cried out that it was too much pleasure for her to bear.
Her body was already convulsing into the beginning of her orgasm when he entered her, and he felt her flesh tighten on him and possess him, until his cry of release mingled with her own.
‘Oh, Vere. I knew right from the start that it would be like this for us.’ Sam clung to him emotionally, her voice reflecting the intensity of her experience whilst her heartbeat slowed back down to its normal rate.
How could she not love him and want him to love her after what they had just shared? She felt so bonded with him, so very aware of how much he completed her in ways that no one else ever could. During their lovemaking she had given herself to him, completely and totally. This was how she would want their child to be conceived, in an act of total commitment and giving, so that it would be born carrying that gift of love within its genes.
‘Stay with me,’ she whispered.
How had it come to this? Vere wondered helplessly as his arms closed round her, holding her to him. This wasn’t what he had intended when he had come to her.
Wasn’t it? Did he really believe that? Or had he known all along what the outcome would be once he touched her?
Soon Sam had fallen asleep. Vere rested his chin on top of her head. It felt so right, being here with her like this—she felt so right. A sensation as though a rock was being lifted away from a guarded, painful place inside him eased gently though him.
‘Stay with me,’ she had asked him, those words like a tender healing touch on a sore place, overlaying his own painful teenage cry to his parents of, ‘Don’t leave me’.
Sam woke up abruptly, her hand on the empty space in the bed where Vere should have been. He had gone, left her. The pain inside her was raw and cruel.
She could smell coffee, and the shutters to the French doors had been opened to let in the bright morning light. She pulled on her robe, its long filmy sleeves covering her arms, and stepped through the open doors into the enclosed private courtyard garden.
The sun warmed her skin, and bees hummed busily as they worked. Sam paused to breathe in the scent of a newly opened rose. A shadow fell across the path, and her heart turned over inside her chest in a leap of joy.
‘Vere!’
He was showered, his hair still damp, and the smell of soap was on his skin as he came and stood beside her.
‘I want to talk to you,’ he told her quietly.
Vere had been awake before dawn, lying with Sam’s body a sweet weight in his arms, whilst a much heavier and less pleasant weight lay on his conscience.
It had been his own manservant who had discreetly brought fresh coffee and fruit.
‘If it’s about the clothes—’ Sam began, but Vere shook his head
‘No, it isn’t about the clothes. When we first met in Zuran you had no idea who I was, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Sam agreed truthfully.
Vere exhaled.
‘I know you thought...that is, you suggested...I don’t normally...I couldn’t help myself,’ Sam admitted. ‘I looked at you and I knew that my life had changed for ever.’
How could he ever have thought of her as duplicitous? Her honesty shone from her, shaming him.
‘I...I felt...something too.’
It astonished Vere that he should make such an admission, but he had been compelled to do so, unable to deny the words that had surely come from his conscience.
‘Not that I wanted to.’
‘No. I could tell that,’ Sam agreed. But something had changed. She could sense it, although she wasn’t sure yet what it was. She knew what she was hoping
it was. Perhaps miracles could happen? Perhaps Vere could love her? Not just physically desire her.
‘Before I left here for your camp we’d been alerted to the fact that someone within the camp was in the pay of the Emir of Khulua. The Emir is our neighbour, and on the surface there is cordiality between us, but he is of the old school and likes nothing better than to create situations, which he can work to his advantage. We’d been warned that he was likely to raise questions about the legitimacy of our shared borders. Not because he genuinely believes they are not legitimate. They are. No, what he was looking to do was to put us in a defensive position.’
Sam listened, wondering if his natural concern about such a matter had been responsible for the way he had behaved towards her initially when he had arrived at the camp. Perhaps what she had thought was hostility had merely been anxiety and preoccupation. She could understand that this was a serious matter for him as the Ruler of Dhurahn.
Vere’s expression was very grave, and he was speaking slowly, as though he was having to choose his words with great care.
‘When I discovered that you had been questioning the course of the Dhurahni River—’
‘You were very angry with me?’ Sam supplied for him. She shook her head and then reached out to him, placing her hand on his arm. ‘I was hurt at the time, because I didn’t understand why you were angry. I understand now that you’ve explained about the Emir, though. Do you know who it is the Emir has been paying?’
Here was the opportunity, the opening he needed. A gut-wrenching pain tore at him. She was being so tender and understanding. She had no idea how little he deserved her concern, or how badly he had maligned her in his own thoughts. But soon she would.
‘I believed that I did.’ Vere turned away from her. He couldn’t bear to look at her when he told her. He didn’t want to see the warmth die from her eyes to be replaced by the condemnation he knew he deserved.
Sam could feel the first prickle of an uneasy sense of anxiety, and dread chilled through her body.
Something was wrong. In fact something was very wrong indeed.
‘When I saw you on the path by the oasis I didn’t want to recognise you. What had happened between us in Zuran wasn’t something I wanted to remember—nor was it fitting behaviour for the son my parents would have expected me to be.’
Vere could see the pain in her eyes, and it shocked him to realise how much he wanted to take that pain away from her. He put his hands on her upper arms, struggling not to allow himself to be distracted by the soft smoothness of her skin beneath the sleeves of her robe,
Sam bit into her bottom lip. She was being over-emotional, she knew, but it hurt knowing that he had had such a low opinion of her.
‘The truth was that I hadn’t forgotten you—because I couldn’t. Your memory was embedded in my senses. But I couldn’t let it stay there. I needed a reason to make myself resist you. It was no longer enough for me to tell myself that my desire was something I had to control. Out of that need I convinced myself that you were the Emir’s tool and in his pay.’
Sam’s face had lost its colour. She looked every bit as shocked and upset as he had imagined she would. She pulled back from him and he let her go.
‘You thought that of me? But you made love to me... you asked me to be your mistress.’ Sam was stumbling over the words, trembling as she spoke them, desperately wanting to hear him say that she had misheard him.
‘I believed it was my duty to...to get close enough to you to find out what you were doing.’
Sam could feel horror dripping through her, numbing her at first, and then seizing her with a gigantic pain that held her like a vice, allowing her no escape.
‘No...’ she protested.
She wanted to turn and run, to hide herself from him. But there was no escape. He was speaking again, paralysing her where she stood.
‘I decided that the best way to undermine the Emir would be for me to publicly take you, his tool, as my mistress.’
Vere heard her small whimper, like that of a small creature caught in the cruel talons of a hawk.
‘I had to put Dhurahn first.’
Sam listened in silence. Was that an explanation or an excuse? she wondered. Did she even care any more? He had hurt her more than she deserved, and certainly more than she could endure. He had used her, knowing she’d believed he wanted her.
From somewhere she summoned the last shreds of her pride to demand, ‘Why are you telling me this now?’
‘Because whilst we were on our way here my brother rang to say that the investigations I had ordered showed that it wasn’t possible for you to be in the Emir’s pay. I have wronged you, and for that I can only apologise and beg your forgiveness. Naturally I shall make whatever recompense is needed to ensure that your career does not suffer because of this. As a cartographer—’
‘My career?’ Sam stopped him as she battled against her pain. ‘How do you propose to recompense me for my loss of pride and self-respect? For the fact that you let me think you wanted me, and that you—’
She couldn’t go on. Tears flooded her eyes, emotion suspending her voice.
Vere went to her.
‘No!’ She denied him as he made to take her in his arms, beating her fists impotently against his chest in an agony of distraught despair, forcing Vere to let her go.
She had turned away from him, heading back inside the palace, when it happened: a darting movement, liquid and quicksilver, then Sam’s shocked cry, the telltale puncture wound in her leg. Then his own reaction as he reached her and told her not to move, knowing what even the slightest action would send the snake’s venom speeding fatally towards her heart.
‘Keep still and trust me,’ he told her, pausing only to call for help before he dropped down on his haunches to take hold of her leg and place his mouth against the puncture marks, desperately trying to suck the poison from them.
Vere’s voice had become oddly distorted and echoy, his expression contorted. She tried to move, but his fierce command of, ‘No—keep still,’ ricocheted through her.
Servants alerted by Vere’s cry came hurrying towards them, but even whilst he told them to summon his doctor Vere didn’t take his gaze off Sam, fixing it on her as though by doing so he could fill her with his own strength and somehow keep her alive until she could be given the necessary antidote to the snake’s poison.
The gardens were kept rigorously free of snakes, but somehow this one—one of the most poisonous of all—had got in. Vere could feel his heart thudding and pumping with the life force that Sam so badly needed. If he could have opened his veins and given her life he knew he would have done so. She was everything to him. Without her he was nothing, his life an empty wasteland.
Like a desert sandstorm whipped up by the winds of fate the truth stormed through him, refusing to allow him to deny its existence any longer.
He loved her.
Vere’s eyes burned with emotion. He couldn’t lose her. Not now—not when he loved and needed her so much.
He could feel the beat of Sam’s heart slowing down. Her pulse was so weak it was barely there. He would not lose her. He would not.
The doctor arrived, his expression grave and taut with concern. In the space of the time it took him to reach into his case for the antidote Sam’s lips turned blue.
The doctor put down the hypodermic needle.
‘No!’ Vere denied fiercely. ‘No!’
‘Highness, it is too late.�
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The doctor’s voice held a finality that Vere could not accept. Images, memories flooded through his heart: the messenger who had brought them the news of their parents’ death, the long flight he and Drax had had to make to accompany their bodies back to Dhurahn for their state funeral, the grief and anger that had possessed him ever since. He could not lose Sam as well. He could not. His hand tightened on her wrist, and miraculously he felt a pulse; her chest lifted slightly.
‘Look,’ he commanded.
Nodding his head, the doctor reached for the syringe.
CHAPTER TEN
SAM put down the book she had been trying to read. She was sitting in the elegant drawing room that Vere had told her had been decorated for his great-grandmother. She had eaten her solitary dinner, and now she looked at her watch.
Vere had been so loving and tender towards her whilst she had been recovering, coming to talk to her often and letting her know that it was her colleague James who had been the Emir’s pay. But now that she had been pronounced fully well and allowed to get up out of bed he had retreated into a coldness that left her feeling desperately hurt and confused. She hadn’t seen him at all today, apart from one brief visit during which he had made no attempt to hold her or even talk properly to her. His voice had been sharp and somehow almost hostile.
She was beginning to feel that she must have imagined that moment when she had opened her eyes to find him sitting at her bedside, had thought she had heard him whispering to her that he loved her and feared to lose her. She must have done, because he certainly wasn’t behaving as though he loved her now. She suspected that he regretted having spoken such words to her. But why? He must know that she loved him. After all, she hadn’t made any attempt to hide her feelings from him.
