‘Rashid is a very moral man—everyone who knows him knows that. He has very strong values. Zara, my friend and second cousin, says that she feels embarrassed for her own sex when she sees the way that women pursue him. He is very rich, you know, and when they come to the hotel complex and see him they try to attract his attention. But he is not interested in them. Zara says that this is because…’ He paused with a self-conscious look in Petra’s direction, but she was too infuriated by his naïve revelations to pay much attention.
‘Rashid is a very proud man and he would never permit himself or anyone connected with him to do anything to damage the name of his family,’ Saud continued solemnly.
At any other time Saud’s youthful fervour and seriousness would have brought an amused and tender smile to Petra’s lips, but right now his innocent declaration had really got her back up and reinforced her fast-growing animosity to this as yet unmet man, who had patronisingly deigned to consider her as a potential wife.
Well, he was going to discover in no uncertain terms, and hopefully very soon, that she was exactly the type of woman he most despised!
In fact, Petra reflected grimly, the more she heard about Sheikh Rashid the more she knew that there was no way she could ever want to marry him!
They had reached the family villa now, and Petra held her breath a little as they drove through the almost fortress-like entrance into the courtyard that lay beyond it.
Her grandfather insisted on remaining in what had been the family’s original home when Zuran had been a trading port and the family rich merchants—although, as her aunt had explained to her, in recent years Petra’s uncle had persuaded him to add a large modern extension to the villa. In this older part, though, traditional wind towers still decorated the roofline.
The family no longer adopted the traditional custom of separate living quarters for women, as Petra’s mother had told her had been the case when she was a girl, but her aunt quickly explained to Petra, once she had been ushered inside to a cool, elegantly furnished salon, that her grandfather still preferred to keep his own private quarters.
‘Kahrun, his manservant, will take you to him,’ her aunt informed her. ‘He has been very ill, Petra,’ she continued hesitantly, ‘and I would ask that you… make allowances for… for his ways, even though they are not your own. He loved your mother very much, and her death…’ She paused and shook her head whilst Petra forced herself to bite back on her instinctive fierce need to question what her aunt was saying.
A maid arrived with a welcome drink of strong fragrant coffee. Her mother had never lost her love of the drink, and just to smell it reminded Petra so much of her.
Several minutes later, when Petra had refused a second cup, a soft-footed servant arrived and bowed to her, before indicating that she was to follow him.
Her heart thudding but her head held high, Petra did so. They seemed to traverse a maze of corridors before he finally paused outside a heavily carved pair of wooden doors.
The room beyond them was cool and shadowy, its narrow windows overlooking an enclosed garden from which Petra could hear the sound of water so beloved by desert people. The air inside the room smelled of spices—the frankincense she had breathed in this morning, and sandalwood, bringing back to her vivid memories of the small box in which her mother had kept her most precious memories of her lost home and family.
As her emotions momentarily blurred her vision it was impossible for Petra to fully make out the features of the man reclining on the divan several feet away from her.
She could hear him, though, as he commanded, ‘Come closer to me so that I may see you. My doctor has forbidden me to overtire myself and so I must lie on this wretched divan on pain of incurring his displeasure.’
Petra heard the small snort of derisive laughter that accompanied the complaint as she blinked away her emotional reaction.
Her mother had described her father in terms that had conjured up for Petra a mental vision of a man who was cruelly strong and stubborn—a man who had overwhelmed and overpowered her mother emotionally—and now that her vision was clearing she had expected to see all those things reflected in him now. But the man in front of her looked unexpectedly frail. One long-fingered hand lay on top of the richly embroidered coverlet, and Petra could see in his profile the pride her mother had described to her so often. But in the dark eyes whose scrutiny seemed to search her face with avid hunger she could see nothing of the rejection and anger that had hurt her mother so badly.
‘I don’t look very much like my mother,’ Petra told him coolly.
‘You do not need to look like her. You are of her, and that is enough. Child of my child! Blood of my blood! I have waited a very long time for you to come here to me, Petra. Sometimes I have feared that you would not come in time, and that I would never know you with my outer senses. Although I have always known you with my heart. You are wrong,’ he added abruptly, his voice suddenly stronger. ‘You are very like my Mija. She was the child of my heart—my youngest child. Her mother was my third wife.’
Angrily Petra looked away.
‘You do not approve. No, do not deny it—I can see it in your eyes. How they flash and burn with your emotions! In that too you are like your mother.’
Petra couldn’t trust herself to speak.
It had shocked her, though, to realise how frail he looked. She had known that he would be old—he had been in his forties when her mother had been born—but somehow she had convinced herself that he would still be the strong, fierce man her mother had remembered from her own childhood. Not this obviously elderly white-bearded person whose dark eyes seemed to hold a mixture of compassion and understanding that unsettled her.
Somehow the curt words she had intended to speak to him, the demands she had planned to make to know just why he had wanted to see her, the cynicism and contempt she had planned to let him see, refused to be summoned.
Instead… instead…
As she lifted her hand the gold bangle caught the light. Immediately her grandfather stiffened.
‘You are wearing Mija’s bracelet,’ he whispered. ‘It was my last gift to her… I have a photograph of her here, wearing it.’
To Petra’s astonishment he reached out and picked up a heavy photograph album which Petra hadn’t previously noticed, beckoning her to come closer so that she could see what he wanted to show her.
As his frail fingers lifted the pages Petra felt her heart turn over. Every photograph in the book was of her mother, and some of them…
She could feel her eyes starting to burn with tears as she recognised one of them. It was a photograph of herself as a very new baby with her mother. Her father had had exactly the same picture on his desk, in the room which had been his office when he’d worked at home!
Immediately she put out her hand to stop him from turning any more of the pages, unable to stop herself from demanding in a shaky voice, ‘That photograph—how…?’
‘Your father sent it to me,’ he told her. ‘He sent me many photographs of you, Petra, and many letters, too.’
‘My father!’ This was news to Petra, and it took her several minutes to absorb it properly. It was hard enough to accept that her father could have done such a thing,
