LITMIR.BIZ

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and yet, somehow…not until this moment had Desi really believed that it was going to happen. That she’d be travelling across the desert for hours with only Salah for company…

      Her eyes hurt as she gazed at him, as if they were letting in too much sun.

      ‘Well, I’m sorry. Your father said a guide. I didn’t expect…’

      ‘No?’ His manifest disbelief infuriated her, even though he was right.

      ‘I’m sorry, but this is the only time I’ve got. It’s when I normally go to the island.’

      The word was electric between them.

      ‘And the case is so urgent,’ he said.

      There was no answer she could make to that, without looking even more of a selfish idiot. She turned her head to escape his cynic’s gaze, and a panel of exquisite, ancient tilework met her eyes.

      She had stayed in some pretty fabulous places in her time: a hot modelling career opened a lot of doors. But not so far an active royal palace. Never a place with such an aura of power, past and present.

      ‘Will I get to meet them?’ she asked. She knew that Prince Omar and Princess Jana had children of their own, as well as two daughters from Omar’s first marriage.

      Salah led her under a worn, intricately arabesqued stone archway onto a tiled path.

      ‘They go to Lake Parvaneh in summer. Princess Jana asked me to assure you of your welcome here, and apologizes for her absence.’

      He opened a door and ushered her along a path bordering a formal garden and thence into an internal courtyard so entrancing Desi stopped short and gasped.

      Columns, floor, stairs and walls were covered with beautiful, intricately patterned mosaic tiling. A perfectly still reflecting pool in the centre reflected greenery and sunlight and the balcony above, with a mirror’s clarity and water’s depth. Cloisters ran around the walls on all sides; an ancient tree rose up in one corner, its gnarled branches and thick leaves shading the space from the morning sun. More tumbled greenery cascaded down from the balcony, or entwined the tall columns and latticework.

      It was compellingly beautiful, deeply restful. The temperature seemed to have dropped by at least ten degrees. Desi heaved a sigh of sheer wonder.

      ‘Isn’t it spectacular!’

      ‘It is more beautiful in spring, with the flowers,’ said Salah and, pausing under the archway, he threw a switch.

      She heard a rumble, a groan, as if some great underground creature had been disturbed in its rest, and then the perfect reflection in the water shimmered and was lost as fountains leapt up into the air from the centre of the pool.

      The fine spray damped her face as she stood smiling up at the vision.

      ‘Now, that’s what I call air conditioning!’ Her spirits lifted and she laughed for sheer pleasure.

      Watching as the fine mist damped her lips, as if a kiss had moistened them, his face closed. He turned away to lead her through the spray up a flight of stairs and along the balcony.

      A sudden gust caught his cloak and it billowed around him, the image of the hero in an ancient tale. Desi was struck by the same promise of timelessness and belonging that the sands had whispered to her, as if they had met here a thousand years ago…

      He opened a door.

      She stopped to catch her breath again at the doorway. It was a magnificent room, huge, but divided into comfortable niches by the artistic use of rugs, furniture clusters, and intricately carved antique room dividers in cedar, ebony and sandalwood.

      Above the doorway and windows, panels of stained glass threw patterns of coloured sunlight onto the white-painted walls. Fat brocade cushions forming sofas and armchairs were interspersed with low tables; on the walls above hung fabulous paintings and patterned mirrors, with niches holding burnished bronze plates and pitchers that glowed like gold. Covering the dark polished wood floor was the biggest silk carpet she had seen outside a museum. A Chinese cabinet looked as if it had been painted for an emperor.

      The plates and jars that glowed like gold, she realized with a jolt, were gold.

      A sweeping arch gave onto a farther room, and against the opposite wall a soft breeze coming through the jalousies of an open window disturbed the silk canopy of a low bed whose pillows and spread were patterned in turquoises and purples.

      The luxury was suddenly and profoundly erotic. So different from the bed under the old dock ten years ago, but pulsating with sensual and sexual promise. As if that other bed, those places they had made their bed, had been a foreshadowing, a dream of which this, now, was the living, breathing, full-colour reality.

      They stood gazing at each other, locked in the moment, as the tentacles of memory reached out from the thing called bed and began to entwine them.

      She had thought herself immune. She had imagined that hatred had blanked out the love that had once consumed her, and that in the intervening years indifference had wiped out hatred.

      Desire, it seemed, was independent of such considerations. It operated outside them, it must, because right now his eyes were as hot on her skin as the desert sun.

      Desi thought wildly, with a kind of panic, If he kissed me now…

      A woman appeared silently, suddenly, as if from nowhere, and murmured a greeting. Salah drew in a controlled breath, spoke a few words to her, and when he turned back to Desi all sign that he had been affected by the moment was blanked out behind obsidian shutters.

      ‘I have a meeting now. Fatima speaks a little English. She will look after you and bring you lunch later. It will be best if you remain in the palace today. We will have dinner about sunset. Do you wish something to eat or drink now? Fatima will bring it.’

      ‘Nothing, thanks. Do you live in the palace?’ she asked, not sure which answer she was hoping for.

      ‘I have rooms here, yes,’ he said. ‘We all do.’

      ‘“We”?’

      ‘Prince Omar’s Cup Companions have offices and apartments in the palace.’

      Desi remembered all about the Cup Companions. In ancient times holders of the title had had duties no more onerous than to carouse with the monarch and take his mind off affairs of state.

      ‘Now they work very hard,’ Salah had told her, that day he confided his dreams of one day serving with Prince Omar. ‘They are the Prince’s working cabinet. One day, inshallah, I will achieve this—to work with Prince Omar.’

      I don’t know what Salah’s exact mandate is, but my brothers have heard he’s in Prince Omar’s confidence, Sami had explained more recently. They’re convinced he’s very, very VIP.

      ‘We heard about your appointment, of course. Congratulations, Salah, I know it was always your dream,’ she said now. ‘Your parents must be proud.’

      ‘Mash’allah,’ he said dismissively. It was God’s will.

      In another life, he would have come to her first with the news.

      Looking up at the shuttered face, the arrogant tilt of his chin, the hanging judge’s eyes, Desi could well believe that Salah had a Prince’s ear. But she herself wouldn’t marry him now for all the power and influence in six continents. She was suddenly violently, intensely glad she’d agreed to help Samiha. Marriage to Salah would be a hell of a life.

      Chapter Five

      ‘THEY want me to marry Salah,’ Samiha had said.

      The harassment had begun during the last year of her undergraduate degree, after Sami’s father had been killed in a work accident. With his death, her eldest brother, Walid, became ‘head of the family’. The trouble started almost immediately, and because her mother caved in under the pressure,

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