Not only can they can store water and survive in the most arduous of conditions, but they provide nourishment and have many medicinal properties.’ He smiled again. ‘As well as producing flowers of quite breathtaking beauty.’
Rapt now, Catrin nodded. His words sounded...incredible. Like poetry. She wanted to hear more of them. They made her want him to whisper things. Things which weren’t about plants. Things about her. Things about...
Her cheeks were burning as she walked to the other end of the bar and took ages pulling a pint of beer for another customer, because it was wrong to think that way. She knew that there were two types of men and this one was the wrong type. Hadn’t her mother always told her to look in the mirror if she needed any proof about the wrong type?
‘Why are you blushing?’ he asked softly.
She looked up and suddenly she could think of nothing but him. Common sense and playing safe seemed like quite reasonable endeavours for other people, but not for her. Everything she’d ever been told about handsome, dangerous men began to trickle away, like the froth on top of the pint she was pulling. She looked deep into his eyes and wondered what it would be like to kiss him.
‘I’ve never actually seen a flowering cactus,’ she said.
He smiled, and there was the heartbeat of a pause. ‘Haven’t you?’
The next day, a delivery was made. At first it looked like a regular florist’s delivery—with its shiny cellophane and fancy ribbon. It was only when she opened it that Catrin discovered the succulent green leaves of a cactus on which bloomed miniature petalled suns, in shades of cerise and rose. She’d never been sent flowers before and she’d certainly never been given anything like this. The originality and unexpectedness of the gesture stabbed at her heart with a fierce kind of joy.
She guessed it was inevitable that she should agree to have dinner with him. What she didn’t anticipate—and which afterwards surprised her as much as him—was ending up in Murat’s four-poster bed overlooking Bala Lake that very same night.
It was wild. Or rather, she was wild. She had never known something could feel so good. Her hands splayed eagerly over his naked body as he kissed her and she clung to him as greedily as a barnacle to a rock. At first, he seemed a little taken aback by her passion, but the moan he gave as he thrust deep inside her made her feel almost powerful.
The next bit wasn’t great because it hurt and because he was furious that she’d omitted to mention the small matter of her virginity.
‘Why me?’ he demanded afterwards, as if giving someone your innocence were a burden rather than a gift.
‘Because...because I’d waited for someone who knew what they were doing and you fitted the bill. I wanted it be fantastic. And it was. Why?’ She rolled over, resting her elbows on his chest and looking straight into his eyes. ‘Is it important?’
‘Of course it is,’ he said. ‘I’m not in the habit of seducing virgins. Their dreams are still intact.’
‘Too late,’ she teased, her mouth trailing over his hair-roughened chest.
He did it to her again. And again. And the third time she lay trembling in his arms, kissing the same spot on his shoulder, over and over again. He was stroking her hair and when she spoke, her voice was dazed.
‘That was...amazing.’
‘I know,’ he said, running the tip of his tongue over her ear. ‘They say it takes a little practice for a woman to orgasm.’
‘Then I think it’s very important I keep practising,’ she said solemnly and he laughed.
‘You are a curious mixture,’ he observed slowly, ‘of the unworldly and the seasoned.’
‘And is that a good thing or a bad thing?’
‘I can’t quite decide,’ came his answer. ‘All I know is that I find you quite enchanting and I’m not sure that I’m prepared to let you go.’
She snuggled up to him. ‘Then don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Keep on holding me, just like that.’
They were both talking about different things, of course. As someone who had learnt never to project, Catrin was thinking about the glorious present, while—unusually for him—Murat was speculating about the future. She said goodbye, telling herself that she would probably never see him again—but to her astonishment he returned the following week, when she had two whole days off.
‘You see,’ he said lightly. ‘I just can’t keep away from you.’
She made no attempt to hide her delight as he pulled her into his arms. For the first time in her life she understood the meaning of the expression walking on air. She found herself thanking some unknown fate, which had brought her to the other side of Wales, leaving her to conduct her love affair without fear of her mother turning up and creating a scene.
But that was something else she liked about Murat. He wasn’t interested in her family, or her background. Why would he be, when this was never meant to be anything but temporary? It meant that she didn’t have to go through the agonising torture of explaining what her home life had been like.
They booked into the same hotel overlooking Bala Lake and for two whole days they scarcely left the bedroom. She wondered how she was going to cope when he went back to his other life. His real life. His desert life, which he’d told her about and which had no room for someone like her.
She tried not to think about it, but it was impossible not to. It was hard to equate her fierce lover with a man who ruled a vast kingdom and rode a black stallion over hot and arid sands. She ran her fingertips through the rich silk of his ebony hair and tried not to think about losing him.
Did he guess at her thoughts, or did he read it in her eyes? Was that why he came out with his extraordinary proposition on that last afternoon, before he was due to drive back to London for a business dinner?
‘Come away with me,’ he said, pulling on the jacket of his elegant Italian suit.
She blinked. ‘Where?’
‘To London. I have an apartment there. You could live there.’
‘With you?’
He gave a funny kind of smile. ‘Well, sometimes.’
If only she hadn’t been so naïve. If only she’d realised what she was getting herself into, and that women like her were never offered permanence. The only permanence in Murat’s life was his palace and his busy schedule in Qurhah. The trips he made to England were fleeting and irregular and he certainly wasn’t offering her a conventional relationship.
But she wasn’t used to convention—or relationships. She was a stranger to commitment and she told herself she didn’t do emotion. Emotion brought chaos—and she’d had enough chaos to last a lifetime.
She thought of turning him down and then asked herself why she would do something that insane. And really, what alternative did she have, when the thought of him walking out of her life made her feel as if someone were trying to hack open her heart with a blunt chisel?
That was when and how she had become a rich man’s mistress. She had gone to London to be with Murat
