out of sight, as though responding to some unseen summons.
‘They often have displays of falconry at the desert village where we’ll be spending the night,’ Blaize informed her. ‘Most people find the birds too fearsome to approach, but in actual fact the camels are probably more dangerous.’
‘So my mother told me,’ Petra replied.
She was finding it a little disconcerting that Blaize, the beach bum, should so suddenly and unexpectedly prove to be so knowledgeable about the local culture and history. Not wanting to be outdone, she was quick to remind him that she was, after all, a part of that culture, even if this was the first time she was experiencing it firsthand.
There was quite definitely a stirring awesomeness about the desert, but Petra was finding it difficult to give her exclusive attention to her surroundings because of the effect that Blaize himself was having on her.
But that did not mean that she had fallen in love with him, she reassured herself fiercely. Just because her heart was beating with an unfamiliar speed, and she dared not look properly at him because when she did she wanted to keep on looking… and do much, much more than just merely look, she admitted breathlessly. But that did not mean… anything. In fact it meant nothing—nothing at all other than that she was physically aware of him.
Aware of him and responsive to him… And surely, if she was truly honest with herself, not just physically…
‘You look flushed,’ she heard Blaize telling her brusquely. ‘You must make sure that you drink plenty of water. The desert is the last place to get dehydrated.’
Perhaps she ought to be glad that he believed her heightened colour was caused by the sun’s heat rather than guessing that it was caused by the unwanted sensuality of her own desire for him, Petra reflected inwardly.
She had believed that her mother’s reminiscences of her own childhood trips into the desert had prepared her for what she might expect, but Petra still found that she was holding her breath and then expelling it in a sharp sound of excitement as they crested yet another sand dune. There before them, shimmering beneath the sun’s heat like a mirage, lay the oasis and the encampment which had been recreated to give tourists like herself a taste of what desert living had been all about in the days when Nomad tribes had still roamed the desert, travelling from one oasis to another.
Several other four-wheel drive vehicles were already parked close to one another and Blaize pulled up next to them.
‘Wait here,’ Blaize told her. ‘I’ll go and find out which tent has been assigned to us.’
To them? Petra’s stomach muscles were quivering with the effort of controlling her emotions when Blaize returned several minutes later and she walked into what was more properly a pavilion than a mere tent, at the farthest edge of the encampment. She discovered that it was divided inside into three completely separate sections, which comprised a living room area, complete with rich, patterned oriental carpets and silk-covered divans, as well as two separated bedrooms. The shower block, Blaize informed her, was more mundanely housed on its own, and provided up-to-the-minute facilities.
Petra was only half listening to him. She had unfastened the doorway leading to one of the bedrooms and was staring in disbelieving delight at its interior.
Unlike her very modern bedroom at the hotel, this really was straight out of an Arabian Nights fantasy.
The interior ‘walls’ of the pavilion were hung with a rich mixture of embroidered silks in shimmering oriental colours, embellished with gold thread which caught the light from the lamps placed on low, heavily carved chests dotted around the surprisingly spacious room.
The bed itself, whilst only slightly raised off the rug-covered floor, like the walls was covered in beautiful silk throws, and from the ceiling there hung sheer muslin voiles, currently tied back, which Petra suspected would cover the whole bed when untied. The effect was one of unsurpassable opulence and sensuality, and Petra was half afraid to even blink, just in case she discovered that the entire room was merely a mirage.
‘Something wrong?’ she heard Blaize asking from behind her.
Immediately Petra shook her head.
‘No. It’s… it’s wonderful…’
‘Arabian Nights meets MGM,’ Blaize pronounced briefly and almost sardonically as he glanced past her into the room.
‘It’s beautiful.’ Petra defended her new temporary home.
‘Officially, it’s the honeymoon suite,’ Blaize informed her drily, adding, ‘But don’t worry—just in case they don’t get any honeymooners—or if they do but they fall out—they keep the other room kitted out as a second bedroom.’
The honeymoon suite! Why had they been given that? Or had Blaize perhaps asked for it deliberately, to reinforce the idea that they were lovers?
‘If you want to have a camel ride, now’s the time,’ Blaize was continuing, patently oblivious to the sensuality and allure of the silk-hung bedroom and the temptation that was affecting Petra so forcibly.
‘More coffee?’
Smiling, Petra shook her head, covering her cup with her hand in the traditional gesture that meant that she had had enough.
It was nearly eleven o’clock in the evening, and the dishes had been cleared away following their evening meal, ready for the entertainment to begin.
Petra could feel the excited expectation emanating from the gathered onlookers as the musicians changed beat and out of one of the tents a stunningly beautiful woman shimmied, dressed in a traditional dancing costume, jewels sparkling on her fingers and of course in her navel as she swayed provocatively to the sound of the music. Her body undulated sensuously, her dark eyes flashing smoky temptation above her veil as she rolled her hips, her whole body, and most especially the bare, smooth, taut brown expanse of her belly in rhythmic time to the music.
To one side of her a group of tourists were passing a hubble-bubble pipe between one another, the girls giggling softly as they breathed in the sweet taste of the strawberry-flavoured smoke. Its effect was supposed to be mildly euphoric, and Petra hesitated a little when it was passed on to her.
‘If you don’t try it you have to pay a forfeit and get up and dance with our belly dancer,’ the tour guide with the large party who had just passed her the pipe teased Petra.
Rather than appear standoffish, Petra took a quick breath, relaxing as she smelled the innocuous scent of the strawberries and then offering the pipe to Blaize, only to realise that he had got up and walked away. He was talking to the falconer, who was still holding one of his now hooded birds, the gold tooling on the leather gloves, gleaming in the firelight.
As she handed the pipe back to the waiting tour guide, Petra realised that she wasn’t the only woman there looking at Blaize. The belly dancer was focusing her gaze and her openly inviting body movements on him, ignoring the rest of them and turning to face him, moving closer and closer to him.
And as for Blaize…! A sensation of sheer white-hot jealousy knifed through Petra as she saw the way he was watching the dancer and smiling at her.
Petra had believed that she knew pain, but now, shockingly, she realised that all she had experienced was one of its many dimensions. Right now, watching Blaize look at another woman
