The Desert Castle

by Isobel Chace

  It was Gregory.

  ‘But you’re at Denise’s party!’

  ‘That was last night,’ he reminded her. ‘Wake up, Marion! This isn’t the time or the place for you to go off into one of your day-dreams. I had a hell of a job persuading them that I had to come after you, and I’m in no mood for you to be anything but grateful that I managed to get here!’

  But she could only stand there and stare at him, still not believing that it was really he. No wonder he thought her a complete ninny, she thought crossly. If she didn’t pull herself together soon, she wouldn’t blame him if he lost all patience with her and went away again. And she still had to tell him that Lucasta and Gaston were missing. How was she going to find the words to tell him that? He had trusted her—

  ‘Marion, was I wrong after all? Aren’t you at all glad to see me?’

  ‘Oh yes!’

  ‘Then what are you crying about?’

  ‘I’m not!’

  He put his hands on her shoulders and shook her till her teeth rattled. ‘Now tell me what it’s all about!’ he commanded grimly.

  ‘Oh, Gregory!’ she sobbed. ‘How did you get here? Wasn’t it a nice party?’

  ‘It had its moments. I drove down through the night, if you want to know. I’d have been here earlier if it hadn’t been for the rain.’

  Marion sniffed, wiping her face with her hands.

  ‘Didn’t you get any sleep at all?’ she asked him.

  He shook his head. ‘I was looking forward to showing you Petra,’ he said wryly.

  ‘But you said you wouldn’t bring me here! You said nothing would induce you to come here with me!’

  He grinned. ‘Did I?’

  The kaffiyeh on his head gave him a rakish air that was borne out by the gleam in his eye. She took a hasty step backwards out of his reach and patted her horse’s streaming neck. The animal was remarkably unappreciative, tossing his head and moving away from her until the driver pulled on the leading rein and took him away to the nearest shelter. Gregory called after him and handed over his own mount too, turning to the young guide and slapping him warmly on the back.

  ‘Well, Fawzi, how are you these days?’ he asked him.

  ‘Well, Mr. Gregory, as well as this weather will let anyone be!’

  Gregory chuckled. ‘I’m afraid we’re stuck here until it clears up. Will you go ahead to the camp and tell them we’ll want some kind of a meal and that Miss Shirley will want to try to dry out her clothing? I’m sure they’ll be able to fix up something for her.’

  ‘It is my pleasure,’ the young man assured him.

  Marion watched him splash his way down the ancient Roman street beside the line of columns that the Romans had raised and which an earthquake had thrown down again, feeling that her last friend in the world was departing. There was no excuse now for not telling Gregory about Lucasta.

  ‘Why don’t we go with him?’ she asked.

  He put his head on one side and looked at her, taking in her agitated, damp features, innocent of any makeup, her wet clothes that clung to her body in the most revealing way, and the give-away movements of her fingers that betrayed her extreme nervousness.

  ‘You’re not frightened to be alone with me, are you, Marion?’

  ‘Of course not!’ she denied.

  He waited for her smile to break across her face and was disappointed when it didn’t come.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked her gently. ‘I had hoped you might be pleased to see me!’

  If he only knew! Her eyelids fluttered and she hung her head, searching for some way of telling him about Lucasta.

  ‘You’re going to be terribly angry,’ she said abruptly. ‘And I don’t blame you!’ She paused, rallying herself. ‘I’ve lost Lucasta!’

  To her indignation he threw back his head and laughed. ‘Is that all? My dear Marion, don’t you know how pleased I am to have you to myself—’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ she interrupted him. ‘It was all my fault! I should have known how it was, but I didn’t think for a moment they were fooling me. I thought they’d quarrelled, I really did! But now I’m not so sure. They must have knocked on the wall and arranged to go off then—and I didn’t even wake up!’

  ‘My poor love!’ He was still laughing and she cast him a speaking glance that should have restored his sobriety but somehow only had the opposite effect. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ he went on, still amused, ‘and I refuse to discuss it any further out here in the rain. You can tell me all about it when we get inside somewhere. Have you seen the Urn Tomb?’

  She nodded. ‘Fawzi was going to show me the Silk Tomb,’ she volunteered.

  ‘Then we’ll go there. We’ll throw in the Corinthian Tomb for good measure. It isn’t the same in the pouring rain, but we’ll come again one day and you can stay as long as you like.’

  Her heart turned over within her. When would she come again? The answer seemed to her to be a certainty. She would never come to Petra again, with or without Gregory.

  She wasn’t aware of the exact moment when he had taken possession of her hand, but when she wriggled her fingers in his trying to get free, his grip tightened alarmingly and she gave up the attempt, pretending to herself that she didn’t care either way. But she did. She liked to feel his strong fingers against hers. She liked it far too much!

  ‘You should have gone straight to sleep when you reached the Rest House,’ she chided him. ‘You must be exhausted!’

  He smiled intimately into her eyes and it was like standing in the face of a stiff wind. She couldn’t breathe at all and yet it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her.

  ‘It felt like crossing the Atlantic, ploughing through all that water,’ he said, on the edge of laughter.

  She remembered he had talked about America, his new-found-land, before, but she thought he had probably forgotten. Besides, there had been nothing to tell her that she was on the right side of the Atlantic. Denise might be there, and she no more than a responsibility, the old country, the one he had to get rid of before he could make his conquest of the new.

  Her hand trembled in his. ‘Was Denise very angry when you left?’

  ‘She was a little put out. Your friend Jean-Pierre had done nothing to improve her humour by making it very clear that he wished he had stayed behind with you after all.’

  ‘Oh.’ Marion was nonplussed by that. ‘He isn’t my friend.’

  ‘He talked as if he were,’ Gregory drawled out.

  ‘Well, he isn’t. I don’t have friends like that!’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  She peeped up at him, her misery slipping away from her. Did he know, she wondered, that she had to almost run to keep up with him, and, if he did know, did he care?

  ‘I don’t see why it should matter to you,’ she murmured. ‘It was I who had to put up with him.’

  He tugged at her hand, hauling her along across the multitude of rivulets that had formed on the rough ground. ‘Did you now? Well, let me tell you, young woman, that you’d better forget all about that young man. I now know how the British felt when they disembarked and found the French had got there before them. You were never destined to be French!’

  She chuckled, her face bright with laughter. He had been talking about America after all! ‘The French had a great reputation for bringing their brand of civilisation to the most remote areas,’ she reminded him.

  ‘But it was the British who broke the virgin land to their hand,’ he retorted, ‘and made it their own.’

  Marion missed her footing, recovered herself, and felt obliged to protest at the pace he was setting. ‘I can’t keep up with you!’ she complained.

  He hardly slowed at all. ‘Are you trying to?’ he asked her.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘but my legs aren’t as long as yours and you don’t make allowances—’

  He did slow down then. ‘I’ll always wait for you, Marion,’ he said.
‘You know that, don’t you? Take your own time and set your own pace, I’ll be waiting for you.’

  ‘I don’t mind running—a little,’ she stammered.

  ‘I wasn’t only talking about the difference in our strides,’ he remarked.

  ‘Weren’t you?’

  He shook his head very slowly from side to side.

  ‘Will you trust me?’

  ‘I do!’ she exclaimed. She remembered Lucasta and died a little inside. ‘Only, when I tell you, you’ll never trust me again. You must listen to me, Gregory! Lucasta’s gone!’

  ‘Gone where?’

  She hunched her shoulders, looking down at her feet. ‘She’s gone with Gaston. I’m most awfully sorry! I only came here today because I thought they might have come on ahead, and now we can’t even get back to look for them. Gregory, what are we going to do?’

  His grasp on her wrist tightened, drawing her closer to him. ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘If anything’s happened to Lucasta, you’ll hate me!’

  ‘Would that be so bad?’

  There was no answer to that. His dislike had scorched her to the bone, his hatred would be more than she could bear.

  ‘She could have been gone all night,’ she said, trying to bring home to him the enormity of what had happened.

  ‘My dear, there’s no need to be so tragic about it. If you hadn’t lost your head and gone rushing out into the tempest to look for them, the chamber boy would have given you the note they left for you. They didn’t think Petra would be much fun in the rain, so they went off to Kerak to have a look at the Crusader castle there.’ His face tightened into sternness. ‘I’ll have something to say to them for leaving you behind on your own, but I don’t suppose they were thinking very straight if they’d quarrelled as you say. Still, it won’t hurt Lucasta to learn that other people deserve some consideration from the Hartley clan. She can’t learn the lesson any younger.’

  Marion ignored most of what he had been saying. ‘They left a note?’ she breathed.

  He pulled her closer still, smiling down at her. ‘I’m very grateful to them as a matter of fact, because they also left you to me!’ The corners of his mouth kicked up into a distinctly mocking line. ‘And I mean to make the most of it!’ he added, and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  CHAPTER X

  His lips were cold and wet against hers. For that first kiss they were no more than tentative, exploring the sweetness of hers with a restraint that confused her. But when she uttered no complaint, the tempo changed and his kisses grew more demanding, leaving her in no doubt as to which of them was in command, and in her heart she was glad that it should be so and she willingly surrendered herself into his arms, straining closer still to the warmth that surrounded her.

  ‘Please, Gregory, don’t!’ She didn’t expect him to pay any attention, but he raised his head and smoothed her dripping hair away from her face with a loving hand.

  ‘Did I pounce again?’

  She could feel his laughter rather than hear it, he was holding her so tightly against his ribs. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Well then, why shouldn’t I kiss you?’

  She had no reason to offer. All she knew was that it was sheer bliss to be in his arms, but that she suspected that it wouldn’t last and that away from him the world was going to be a very cold place indeed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  He tipped up her face to his and kissed her again, very gently and with such tenderness that she ached with her own need for him. ‘I’d forgotten that timidity of yours, my little houri,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘But, between the two of us, I don’t despair of overcoming your shyness, do you? If I kiss you a little more each day, will you try to get used to my holding you tight and do your best to come to like it?’

  Her eyes opened wide. ‘It isn’t funny, Gregory,’ she reproved him. ‘You shouldn’t have come away from your party!’

  He silenced her with his forefinger across her mouth.

  ‘No, it isn’t funny,’ he agreed. ‘You must study your part better than you have done, Marion Shirley. Houris are not known for arguing the toss every inch of the way. Their whole existence is to give pleasure and to welcome the attentions of the man who chooses them. Even the most timid ones are not exempt from that!’

  ‘But I’m not a houri,’ she protested weakly. The whole argument was getting out of hand and she blamed him for it. Why couldn’t he accept that she was already aware that the girls he knew would all compete for his favours, and that she would too if she had not known right from the very beginning that she would be badly hurt if she did?

  ‘The picture on your wall gives you the lie,’ he mocked her. ‘Even Zein could see the likeness between you!’

  Yes, and she had not forgotten what he had told Zein when she had remarked on the fact.

  ‘I’m not waiting for you!’ she denied.

  ‘No?’ His eyes danced with laughter. ‘We’ve already established that I am having to wait for you, and that you don’t mind running—a little—to catch up!’

  ‘Gregory, please don’t tease me. I know it’s only a game to you, but I don’t want to play.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She wondered what he would say if she told him the stakes were too high for her. But then it was foolish to ask herself that. She knew with a sickening, cold certainty in the pit of her stomach that he would scorn her as a coward.

  ‘I don’t gamble,’ she said primly.

  ‘I hope you don’t!’ he replied promptly. He looked down at her for a long moment m silence. ‘If this is a game, Marion, I mean to win it. You can dodge the whole celestial army as it marches into Paradise, but you won’t escape me, and I think in your heart of hearts you know it.’ He smiled suddenly, tapping her cheek to lend force to what he was saying. ‘If you’re going to bet on anyone, you’d best put your all on me and then you won’t lose too much, my love.’

  ‘I’m not betting on anyone!’ she declared in a panic. ‘I’m not playing!’

  ‘Because you don’t want to lose to me?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. To lose to him would be a miracle of joy, it was the certainty of losing to Denise that held her back. ‘It isn’t that,’ she said.

  She saw the naked triumph in his eyes and gave him a confused look, wondering that it should mean so much to him.

  ‘Then what is it?’ he insisted. ‘Is it only because you’re shy?’

  ‘It’s because it wouldn’t last,’ she tried to explain. ‘It wouldn’t, would it?’

  ‘That’s something you must make up your own mind about.’ His voice was very dry, almost as if he didn’t care at all. ‘But I think I should warn you,’ he added, ‘that what is mine, I keep, no matter who wants to take it from me.’

  His arrogance amused her and her eyes sparkled with sudden laughter. ‘Would anyone dare?’ she wondered.

  His own smile was rather bitter. ‘I have never doubted your courage,’ he answered.

  ‘Then you should,’ she confessed. ‘I am often afraid. I’d have been afraid to have been cut off here by myself.’ She put her hand back in his with an unselfconsciousness that was very appealing. ‘I’m glad you came.’

  He threaded his fingers through hers. ‘That’s reassuring. It’s nice to know that you trust me to look after you in such a desperate situation. Thus far and no further, because you still think I may hurt you, don’t you?’

  She was appalled that he should think her so ungrateful. ‘I’d trust you with my life any time,’ she assured him lightly.

  He gave her a quick hug. ‘Not yet you don’t, my love, but I hope you will one day. You have plenty of time to get to know me better.’

  ‘But I haven’t! Whatever you say, I shall have to go back to England with Lucasta. I can’t stay with you all by myself!’

  But nothing could damp her spirits at that moment. He had left Denise and had come to her and, for the moment, that was enough for her. She intended to enjoy every minute of these unexp
ected riches and to make it fun for him too. If she possibly could she would make it up to him that he had spent a sleepless night and was now almost as wet as she was.

  ‘So you said,’ he remembered. He paused, watching the clouds, heavy with rain, as they drifted through the valley. ‘I thought your mother might like to come on a visit and keep you company.’

  She was startled put of her moment of contentment. ‘My mother? But will she want to leave Devon? I don’t think she’ll come!’

  ‘She’ll come,’ he said with certainty.

  Marion gave him a frightened look. ‘Why do you want to keep me here?’ she asked him. She stood in the rain, feeling as though she were about to meet her executioner. His answer meant everything to her. On it turned all her hopes—hopes which he himself had raised only a few minutes before.

  ‘I need you to finish restoring the frescoes. Why else?’

  She turned her face away. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘What else should there be?’ he asked. He was as tense as she, watching her closely as she struggled to hide the despair that swept over her.

  ‘Nothing.’ She held her head high and looked him straight in the eye. ‘I shouldn’t want to lose your castle!’

  He shrugged. ‘I won’t live there for ever, but I shouldn’t like to move quite yet,’ he agreed.

  ‘Where will you go when you leave Jordan?’ She was not quite in control of her voice and it trembled lamentably, which she tried to disguise with a cough and very nearly choked. ‘To the Lebanon, I suppose,’ she said when she could.