settling down for the night, Sam dried her newly showered body and then made her way into her blissfully air-conditioned tented bedroom.
Furnished with rich silk rugs and low beds piled high with velvet-covered cushions and throws, and scented with the most heavenly perfumes from swinging lanterns heated with charcoal, its combination of modern comfort-producing technology and traditional Bedouin tent produced an exotic if somewhat surreal luxury, which immediately struck the senses with its sharpness of contrast to the harshness of the desert itself.
But the desert also had its beauty. Some members of the team found the desert too harsh and unforgiving, but Sam loved it—even whilst she was awed by it. It possessed an arrogance that had already enslaved her, a ferocity that said take me as I am, for I will not change. There was something about it that was so eternal and powerful, so hauntingly beautiful, that just to look out on it brought a lump to her throat.
And yet the desert was also very cruel. She had seen falcons wheeling in the sky above the carcases of small animals, destroyed by the merciless heat of the sun. She had heard tales from the scarily expert Arab drivers supplied to the team, who were not allowed to drive themselves, of whole convoys being buried by sandstorms, never to be seen again, of oases there one day and gone the next, of tribes and the men who ruled them, so in tune with the savagery of the landscape in which they lived that they obeyed no law other than that of the desert itself.
One such leader was due to arrive in the camp tomorrow, according to the gossip she could not help but listen to. Prince Vereham al a’ Karim bin Hakar, Ruler of Dhurahn, was by all accounts a man who was much admired and respected by other men. And desert men respected only those who had proved they were strong enough for the desert. Such men were a race apart, a chosen few, men who stood tall and proud.
She had been tired when she came to bed, but now—thanks to her own foolishness—she was wide awake, her body tormented by a familiar sweet, slow ache that was flowing through her as surely as the Dhurani River flowed from the High Plateau Mountains beyond the empty quarter, travelling many, many hundreds of miles before emerging in its Plutonian darkness into the State of Dhurahn.
Why didn’t she think about and focus on that, instead of on the memory of a kiss that by rights she should have forgotten weeks ago?
It had, after all, been three months—well, three months, one week and four and a half days, to be exact—since she had accidentally bumped into a robed stranger and ended up…
And ended up what? Obsessing about him three months later? How rational was that? It wasn’t rational at all, was it? So they had shared an opportunistic kiss? No doubt both of them had been equally curious about and aroused by the cultural differences between them. At least that was what Sam was valiantly trying to tell herself. And perhaps she might have succeeded if she hadn’t been idiotic enough immediately after the incident to fall into the hormone-baited trap of convincing herself that she had met and fallen in love with the one true love of her life, and that she was doomed to ache and yearn for him for the rest of her life.
What foolishness. A work of fiction worthy of any Arabian Nights’ Tale, and even less realistic.
What had happened was an incident that at best should have simply been forgotten, and at worst should have caused her to feel a certain amount of shame.
Shame? For sharing a mere kiss with a stranger? That kind of thinking was totally archaic. Better and far more honest, surely, to admit the truth.
So what was the truth? That she had enjoyed the experience?
Enjoyed it?
If only it had been the kind of ephemeral, easy, lighter than light experience that could be dismissed as merely enjoyable.
But all it had been was a simple kiss, she told herself angrily.
A simple kiss was easily forgotten; it did not bury itself so deeply in the senses that just the act of breathing in an unguarded moment was enough to reawaken the feelings it had aroused. It did not wake a person from their sleep because she was drowning in the longing it had set free, like a subterranean river in full flood. It did not possess a person and her senses to the extent that she was possessed.
Here she went again, Sam recognised miserably. She was twenty-four years old—a qualified professional in a demanding profession, a woman who had so longed to train in her chosen field that she had deliberately refused to allow herself the distraction of emotional and physical relationships with the opposite sex, and had managed to do so without more than a few brief pangs of regret.
But now it was as though all she had denied herself had suddenly decided to fight back and demand recompense. As though the woman in her was demanding recompense for what she had been denied. Yes, that was it. That was the reason she was feeling the way she was, she decided with relief. What she was feeling had nothing really to do with the man himself, even though…
Even though what? Even though her body remembered every hard, lean line of his, every place it had touched his, every muscle, every breath, every pulse of the blood in his veins and the beat of his heart? And that was before she even began to think about his kiss, or the way she had felt as if fate had taken her by the hand and brought her face to face with her destiny and her soul mate. She was sure she would never have allowed herself to be subjected to such emotional intensity if she had stayed at home in England. Her loving but pragmatic parents, with their busy and practical lives, had certainly not brought her up to think in such terms.
If she was to re-experience that kiss now—that moment when she had looked into those green eyes and known that this was it, that neither she nor her life would ever be the same again, that somehow by some means beyond either her comprehension or her control, she was now his—it would probably not be anything like as erotic or all-powerful as she remembered. Imagination was a wonderful thing, she told herself. That she was still thinking about something she ought to have forgotten within hours of it happening only proved that she had far too much of that dangerous quality. After all, it wasn’t as though she was ever likely to see him again—a stranger met by chance in a hotel corridor in a foreign country.
Instead of thinking about him, what she ought to be thinking about was tomorrow, when Sheikh Fasial bin Sadir, the cousin and representative of the Ruler of Zuran, who had been here at the camp since they had first arrived to oversee everything, would be handing over control of the project to Vereham al a’ Karim bin Hakar, Sheikh of Dhurahn. In turn, in three months’ time, he would be replaced by the nominated representative of the Emir of Khulua.
Sheikh Sadir was a career diplomat who had made it his business to ensure that both the camp and the work they were doing were run in a well-ordered and harmonious fashion. He had stressed to them—in perfect English—in an on-site briefing, that all three Rulers were determined to ensure that none of the small bands of nomads remaining in the empty quarter should in any way feel threatened by the work they were doing. That was why each working party would have with them an Arab guide, who would be able to speak with the nomads and reassure them about what was going on.
He had also gone on to tell them that whilst each state technically had rights over their own share of the empty quarter, where it came within their borders, it was accepted by all of them that the nomads had the right to roam freely across those borders.
Sam knew nothing about the Ruler of Dhurahn, but she certainly hoped he would prove to be as easy to work under as Sheikh Sadir. After all, she was already experiencing the problems that came with working alongside someone who was antagonistic towards her.
She gave a faint sigh. From the moment he had arrived four weeks ago, to take the place of one of the original members of the team who’d
