a flight of stairs in a far corner. A servant wrestled with the giant key and then Jaul waved his guards back and entered the building alone.
The sheer size of the place shook Jaul even more. He prowled through empty rooms and courtyards, studied fountains and bathing places. Everything was in very good condition and he marvelled that his father’s mania for historic conservation had triumphed over the older man’s desire to rewrite the past and bury the family’s murkier secrets. Rage was his overriding response to what he had learned from Yusuf until the point when he focused on the great bed placed on a dais. Slowly his dark, angry eyes widened as he finally registered the tenor of the murals swirling across the walls round the bed.
Utterly disconcerted, he froze, imagining his strait-laced father’s reaction to such artistic licence and something infinitely more surprising bubbled up inside Jaul without warning. Gales of incredulous laughter convulsed his lean, powerful frame and when he had recovered from his inappropriate amusement he lounged back breathless against the edge of the bed. His brilliant eyes flared to the purest gold when he pictured how Chrissie would react to the paintings.
* * *
A note was delivered to Chrissie minutes after she had emerged from a long relaxing bath. Instantly recognising Jaul’s copperplate black print, she tore it open.
You are cordially invited to spend a night in the harem with your husband.
A surprised giggle fell from her lips while a warm sense of relief swelled inside her. Jaul had recovered sufficiently from his annoyance with her to make a joke. It was a joke, of course it was, and Jaul had always had a terrific sense of humour. She leafed through drawers and selected her fanciest lingerie with hot cheeks before choosing a perfectly circumspect plain blue tailored dress, which gave not the smallest hint of what she wore underneath. A night in the harem? What did that entail? Her entire skin surface heated up and she smiled dreamily, knowing exactly what she was hoping that note meant while being wryly amused by her own secret conviction that there was something different about Jaul in recent days. Didn’t that note prove how mistaken she had been?
One of Jaul’s guards was waiting to take her to her husband and they trudged a long way down endless corridors and down stone flights of stairs before they reached their destination. A big, ugly, ironclad door faced them. Opening it for her, the guard stood back and Chrissie entered, wondering why the man was trying not to smile. But that question was quickly answered because a spectacular scene confronted her two steps beyond the door.
Candles were burning everywhere she looked, glowing in the dark to cast leaping shadows across the soaring domed ceiling and elaborate mosaic-tiled walls and ensuring that the water droplets cascading from the fountains sparkled like diamonds. It was beautiful, incredibly beautiful, and Chrissie knew instinctively that Jaul had done it for her. Her bright eyes stung painfully and she had to blink when the man himself appeared from behind a pillar about thirty feet from her. In contrast to their highly exotic surroundings Jaul sported faded jeans and a partially unbuttoned white shirt, the pale fabric accentuating his bronzed skin and the blackness of his unruly hair. For a split second she felt as though time itself had slipped for this was Jaul as she remembered him as a student, shorn of every atom of his forbidding reserve.
‘Where on earth are we?’ Chrissie asked.
‘In the heart of the al-Zahid family’s shadiest secret,’ Jaul proffered wryly. ‘The harem that even I didn’t know still existed until this evening. Of course, I knew there would have been one at some stage but, taking into account my father’s delicate sensibilities, I assumed it was long gone.’
Chrissie gazed past him at the giant bed. ‘That looks like a bed people would throw an orgy on,’ she said before she could think better of it. ‘Not that I know anything about...er...orgies—’
‘Look at the walls,’ Jaul invited.
In the flickering shadows she saw the murals and the naked male and female figures engaged in flagrant sexual play and a hot flush lit her cheeks. ‘My goodness...’
‘I’m amazed that my father didn’t have this place razed to the ground, but he idolised my grandfather.’ Jaul sighed. ‘How he retained that respectful attitude when confronted with the reality that Tarif was a man with licentious habits, I cannot begin to imagine.’
‘Nor can I,’ she whispered, beginning to understand why he had brought her to the harem. He had found out the truth and immediately acted with the open-minded candour she had always loved him for. When Jaul was in the wrong he never tried to cover it up or excuse himself.
‘I’ve phoned Sophie’s daughter, Rose, and apologised through her for taking so long to make an approach to my grandmother.’
‘You phoned Rose...already?’ Chrissie exclaimed.
‘There were concubines here well into the last century. My grandmother wasn’t lying,’ Jaul confirmed with a sardonic twist of his lips. ‘But I only learned the truth this afternoon from Yusuf. He knows all the family secrets and learning about how cruelly my grandmother was treated was only the first of several shocks I received after I questioned him.’
A frown dividing her brows, Chrissie made an instinctive move forward and rested her hand soothingly on his forearm, feeling the muscles that were pulled whipcord tight with fierce tension. ‘I’m sorry, Jaul.’
As if he found her touch unbearable, Jaul shifted back a defensive step. ‘For what are you sorry? That I was too much of a fool to appreciate that my father would say or do anything to wreck my marriage?’ he framed with unleashed bitterness. ‘Chrissie, I would’ve trusted him with my life! He was a difficult man and very controlling but in many of the ways that mattered he was a good father.’
Discomfited by his rejection of her sympathy, Chrissie stiffened. ‘And you loved him, of course you did. I loved my mother when I was a child even though I had a pretty miserable childhood. Parents don’t have to be perfect to be loved. But I still don’t understand why your father stayed so dead set against his own mother and me when he knew your grandfather was the one at fault.’
‘My father chose the easy way out. He was never going to admit the embarrassing truth. If he laid the blame of cultural differences at his mother’s door, he could continue to idolise his father and believe that he was right to protect me from all Western influences.’ Jaul’s brilliant dark eyes veiled. ‘Apparently he was afraid that I may have inherited Tarif’s fatal weakness for women. I was finally able to understand why I had to rebel against him to gain the right to study in the UK.’
Chrissie was listening closely. ‘You had to...rebel? You never told me that before.’
‘I was ashamed of it. I was raised to believe that a decent son always respects a parent’s greater maturity and wisdom,’ Jaul admitted grudgingly. ‘After the experience of a military boarding school followed by army life, I longed for the freedom to make my own choices.’
‘Of course you did,’ she whispered feelingly, newly aware of what a domineering old tyrant his late father had been. ‘And I respect you more for having taken a stand and it’s hardly surprising that you went a little wild when you first started university. I never appreciated how restricted your life had been before you came to the UK.’
Jaul studied her lovely face fixedly, the turquoise eyes soft with compassion. He was shaken that she was still trying to comfort him when he didn’t deserve comfort because he had let her down worst of all. ‘But that period of going wild almost cost me you,’ he pointed out. ‘It gave you the wrong
