is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

The Desert Bride

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

THE sheer opulence of Al Kabibi airport stunned Bethany. The acres of glossy marble floors, the huge crystal chandeliers and the preponderance of gold fittings made her blink and stare.

‘Pretty impressive, eh?’ Ed Lancaster remarked in the slow-moving queue to Visa Clearance. ‘And yet five years ago there was nothing here but a set of concrete sheds and an unrelieved view of the sand-dunes! King Azmir pumped the oil but he stockpiled the profits. His tightfisted attitude caused a lot of resentment, not only with the locals but with the foreign workers as well. Conditions used to be really primitive here.’

The American businessman had joined their flight at a stopover in Dubai. He hadn’t stopped talking for thirty seconds since then, but Bethany had been grateful to be distracted from the grim awareness that, had her departmental head not decreed that she centre her research on this particular part of the Middle East, nothing short of thumbscrews and brute force would have persuaded her to set one foot in the country of Datar!

‘When King Azmir fell ill the crown prince, Razul, took over,’ Ed rattled on, cheerfully impervious to the fact that Bethany had stiffened and turned pale. ‘Now he’s a different kettle of fish altogether. He’s packed fifty years of modernisation into five. He’s an astonishing man. He’s transformed Datari society...’

Beneath her mane of vibrantly colourful curls Bethany’s beautiful face had frozen, her stunningly green eyes hardening to polar ice. All of a sudden she wanted Ed to shut up. She did not want to hear about Prince Razul al Rashidai Harun. Nor did she have the smallest urge to admit that their paths had crossed quite unforgettably during Razul’s brief spell at university.

‘And the people absolutely adore him. Razul’s like their national hero. They call him the Sword of Truth. You mention democracy and they get real mad,’ Ed complained feelingly. ‘They start talking about how he saved them from civil war during the rebellion, how he took command of the army, et cetera, et cetera. They’ve actually made a film about it, they’re so proud of him—’

‘I expect they must be,’ Bethany said flatly, an agonisingly sharp tremor of bitterness quivering through her.

‘Yes, sirree,’ Ed sighed with unhidden admiration. ‘Although this divine cult they’ve built up around him can be painful, he is one hell of a guy! By the way,’ Ed added, pausing for breath, ‘who’s coming to collect you?’

‘Nobody,’ Bethany muttered, praying that the monologue on Razul was over.

Ed frowned. ‘But you’re travelling alone.’

Bethany suppressed a groan. Actually, she hadn’t been alone at Gatwick. A research assistant had been making the trip with her. But, with only minutes to go before they boarded, Simon had tripped over a carelessly sited briefcase and had come down hard enough to break his ankle. She had felt dreadful simply abandoning him to the paramedics but, aside from the fact that she barely knew the young man, work naturally had had to take precedence.

‘Why shouldn’t I be travelling alone?’

‘How on earth did you get a visa?’ Ed prompted, suddenly looking very serious.

‘The usual way... What’s wrong?’

‘Maybe nothing.’ Ed shrugged with an odd air of discomfiture, not meeting her enquiring gaze. ‘You want me to stay with you in case there should be a problem?’

‘Of course not, and I see no reason why there should be a problem,’ Bethany informed him rather drily.

But there was. Ed had just moved off with an uneasy wave when the Datari official scrutinised her visa and asked, ‘Mr Simon Tarrant?’

Bethany frowned.

‘According to your visa, you are travelling with a male companion. Where is he?’

‘He wasn’t able to make the flight,’ she explained with some exasperation.

‘So you are travelling unaccompanied, Dr Morgan?’ he stressed, with a dubious twist of his mouth, as if he could not quite credit the validity of her academic doctorate. That didn’t surprise her. Female children had only recently acquired the legal right to education in Datar. The concept of a highly educated woman struck the average Datari male as about as normal as a little green man from the moon.

‘Any reason why I shouldn’t be?’ Bethany demanded irritably, her cheeks reddening as she was drawn to one side, the embarrassing cynosure of attention for everyone else in the queue.

‘Your visa is invalid,’ the official informed her, signalling to two uniformed guards already looking in their direction. ‘You cannot enter Datar. You will be returned to the UK on the next available flight. If you do not possess a return ticket, we will generously defray the expense.’

‘Invalid?’ Bethany gasped in disbelief.

‘Obtained by deception.’ The official treated her to a frown of extreme severity before he turned to address the other two men in a voluble spate of Arabic.

‘Deception?’ Bethany echoed rawly, unable to credit that the man could possibly be serious.

‘The airport police will hold you in custody until you depart,’ she was informed.

The airport police were already gawping at her with blatant sexual speculation. Even in the midst of her incredulous turmoil at being threatened with immediate deportation, those insolent appraisals made Bethany’s teeth grit with outrage. Sometimes she thought her physical endowments were nature’s black joke on the male species. With her outlook on the male sex she should have been born plain and homely, not with a face, hair and body which put out entirely the wrong message!

‘You are making a serious mistake,’ Bethany spelt out, drawing herself up to her full height of five feet three inches. ‘I demand to speak to your superior! My visa was legitimately issued by the Datari embassy in London—’ She broke off as she realised that absolutely nobody was listening to her and the policemen were already closing in on her with an alarming air of purpose.

A sensation new to Bethany’s experience filled her. It was fear—sheer, cold fear. Panic swept over her. She sucked in oxygen in a stricken gasp and employed the single defensive tactic she had in her possession. ‘I would like you to know that I am a close personal friend of Crown Prince Razul’s!’

The official, who was already turning away, swung back and froze.

‘We met while he was studying in England.’ Her cheeks burning with furious embarrassment at the fact that she should have been forced to resort to name-dropping even to earn a hearing, Bethany tilted her chin, and as she did so the overhead lights glittered fierily over her long torrent of curling hair, playing across vibrant strands that ran from burning copper to gold to Titian in a glorious sunburst of colour.

The official literally gaped, his jaw dropping as he took in the full effect of that hair. Backing off a step, his swarthy face suddenly pale, he spoke in a surge of guttural Arabic to the two policemen. A look of shock swiftly followed by horror crossed their faces. They backed off several feet too, as if she had put a hex on them.

‘You are the one,’ the official positively whispered, investing the words with an air of quite peculiar significance.

‘The one what?’ Bethany mumbled, distinctly taken aback by the staggering effect of her little announcement.

He gasped something urgent into his radio, drawing out a hanky to mop at his perspiring brow. ‘There has been a dreadful, unforgivable misunderstanding, Dr Morgan.’

‘My visa?’

‘No problem with visa. Please come this way,’ he urged, and began to offer fervent apologies.

Within minutes a middle-aged executive type arrived and introduced himself as Hussein bin Omar, the airport manager. His strain palpable, he started frantically apologising as well, sliding from uncertain English into Arabic, which made him totally incomprehensible. He insisted on showing her into a comfortable office off the concourse, where he asked her to wait until her baggage was found. He was so servile that it was embarrassing.

Ironically, the very last thing Bethany had wanted was to draw any unwelcome attention to her arrival in Datar. Suddenly she fervently wished that she had kept her stupid mouth shut. Her reference to Razul had been prompted by a shameful attack of panic. Why on earth hadn’t she stayed calm and used logical argument to settle the mistaken impression that there was something wrong with her visa? And why all that silly fuss about the fact that she was travelling alone?

Fifteen nail-biting minutes later the airport manager reappeared and ushered her out...out onto a red carpet which had not been in place earlier. Bethany began to get all hot and bothered, her nervous tension rocketing to quite incredible heights. The VIP treatment staggered her. Everybody was looking at her. Indeed it was as though the whole airport had ground to a dead halt and there was this strange atmosphere of what could only be described as...electric excitement.

It had to be a case of mistaken identity, Bethany decided, struggling to hold onto her usually bomb-proof composure. Who on earth did Hussein bin Omar think she was? Or did an acquaintance with Razul automatically entitle one to such extraordinary attention at the airport?

What an idiot she had been to claim friendship with him...especially as it was a lie...a really quite blatant lie, she conceded inwardly, grimly recalling her last volatile meeting with the Crown Prince of Datar, slamming down hard on the piercing pain that that memory brought with it. She had had a narrow escape—a damned lucky narrow escape, she reminded herself fiercely. She had very nearly made an outsize fool of herself, but at least he had never known that. She hadn’t given him that much satisfaction.

A whole column of spick and span policemen were standing to attention on the sun-baked pavement outside. Bethany turned pale. The heat folded in, dampening her skin beneath the loose beige cotton shirt and serviceable trousers she wore. Her discreet little trip to Datar had gone wildly off the rails.

‘Your escort, Dr Morgan.’ Hussein bin Omar snapped his fingers and a policeman darted forward to open the door of the waiting police car.

‘My escort?’ Bethany echoed shakily just as a young woman hurried forward and planted an enormous bunch of. flowers in her startled hands. As if that were not enough, her fingers were grasped and kissed. Then for a split second everybody hovered as though uncertain of what to do next.

‘Allah akbar...God is great!’ the airport manager suddenly cried. Several other excited male voices eagerly joined him in the assurance.

At that point Bethany simply folded backwards into the police car. The whole bunch of them were crazy! Instantaneously she scolded herself for the reflection. As an anthropologist trained to understand cultural differences, such a reflection ill became her. As the car lurched into sudden motion and the driver set off a shrieking siren to accompany their progress she told herself. to be calm, but that was difficult when she noticed the two other police cars falling in behind them.

Common sense offered the most obvious explanation. Hussein bin Omar had been appalled by the mistake over her visa because she had claimed that she knew Razul. In short, this outrageous fuss was his attempt to save lost face and simultaneously demonstrate his immense respect for the Datari royal family. That was why she had been supplied with a police escort to take her to her hotel outside the city. All very much over the top, but then this was not England, this was Datar—a feudal kingdom with a culture which had only recently begun to climb up out of the dark ages of medievalism.

She closed her eyes in horror as her driver charged a red light, forcing every other vehicle to a halt. Fearfully lifting her lashes again, she gazed out at the city of Al Kabibi as it sped by far too fast. Ultra-modern skyscrapers and shopping malls mingled with ancient, turquoise-domed mosques, the old and the new coexisting side by side.

As it left the lush white villas of the suburbs behind, the broad, dusty highway forged a path through a landscape of desolate desert plains. Bethany sat forward to get a better view of the fortress-like huge stone walls rising out of the emptiness ahead. Her driver jabbered excitedly into his radio while endeavouring to overtake a Mercedes with only two fingers on the steering wheel.

Bethany was on the edge of her seat, praying. And then, without any warning at all, the car swerved off the road outside the fortress and powered through a set of enormous turreted gates. A clutch of robed tribesmen suddenly appeared directly in their path. They were brandishing machine-guns. The driver jumped so hard on the brakes that Bethany was flung along the back seat, and then she heard the splintering crack-crack of gunfire and threw herself down onto the floor, curling up into as tight a defensive ball as possible.

The car rolled to a halt. She stayed down, trembling with fear, wondering if the driver had been shot but not prepared to raise her head until the bullets stopped flying. The door clicked open.

‘Dr Morgan?’ a plummy Oxbridge voice enquired expressionlessly.

Bethany peered up and met the politely questioning gaze of a dapper little Arab gentleman with a goatee beard.

‘I am Mustapha—’

‘The g-guns...?’ she stammered.

‘Merely the palace guards letting off a little steam. Were you frightened? Please accept my apologies on their behalf.’

‘Oh...’ Feeling quite absurd, Bethany flushed and scrambled out of the car; only then did alarm bells start ringing. ‘The palace guards?’ Wide-eyed, she stared at the older man. ‘This isn’t my hotel?’

‘No, indeed, Dr Morgan. This is the royal palace.’ He permitted himself a small smile of amusement. ‘Prince Razul requested that you be brought here without delay.’

‘Prince Razul?’ Bethany repeated in a strangled voice, but Mustapha had already swept off towards the arched and gilded entrance of the vast sprawling building ahead, clearly expecting her to follow him.

The airport manager must have contacted Razul about her arrival, Bethany registered in horror. But why on earth would Razul demand that she be brought to the palace? After the manner in which they had parted two years earlier he could not possibly wish to see her again! Lifelong conditioning to the effect that he was every woman’s fantasy did not prepare an Arab prince for the shattering experience of having his advances rebuffed. By the end of their last, distressing encounter Bethany had been left in no doubt that Razul had been very deeply offended by her flat refusal to have anything to do with him.

Yet she had planned what she would say to him in advance, employing every ounce of tact at her disposal. She had known the strength of his pride. She had gone to great lengths in her efforts to defuse a volatile situation gently. Her face shadowed now, the cruel talons of memory digging deep. Razul had unleashed his temper and goaded her into losing her head. She wasn’t proud of the derision with which she had fought back but he had been tearing her in two. She had been fighting for her own self-respect...why not admit it?

As she followed the older man into a huge, echoing hall lined with slender marble columns she was in a daze. Her exotic surroundings merely increased the sensation. Tiny mosaics were set into wildly intricate geometric patterns in shades of duck-egg green and ochre and palest blue on every inch of the walls and ceiling. The effect was dazzlingly beautiful and centuries old. A tiny sound jerked her head.

A giggle...a whisper? She looked up and saw the carved mishrabiyyah screens fronting the gallery suspended far above her. Behind the delicate yet wholly effective filigree barrier she caught flutters of movement, fleeting impressions of shimmering colour and then a burst of girlish laughter, excited whispers emerging from far more than one female voice and then swiftly stifled. A drift of musky perfume made her nostrils flare.

A tiny window onto the outside world for the harem? Bethany froze and turned white, a terrible pain uncoiling inside her. The thesis which had earned her both her doctorate and her current junior lectureship at a northern university had been on the suppression of women’s rights in the Third World. This was not the Third World but, even so, the dreadful irony of her almost uncontrollable attraction to Razul had boiled her principles alive two years ago. Her colleagues had laughed their socks off when he’d come after her...an Arab prince with two hundred concubines stashed in his harem back home!

‘Dr Morgan!’ Mustapha called pleadingly.

Numbed by the onslaught of that recollection, Bethany moved on again. At the far end of the hall two fierce tribesmen stood outside a fantastically carved set of double doors. They wore ceremonial swords but carried guns. At a signal from Mustapha they threw back the doors on a magnificent audience room. The older man stepped back, making it plain that he was not to accompany her further.

At the far end of the room sunlight was flooding in from doors spread back on an inner courtyard. It made the interior seem dim yet accentuated the richness of its splendour. Her sturdy leather sandals squeaked on the highly polished floor. She hesitated, her heartbeat hammering madly against her ribcage as she stared at the shallow dais, heaped with silk cushions and empty. But a terrible excitement licked at her every sense and she felt it even before she saw him—that frightening mix of craving and anticipation which for the space of several weeks two years earlier had made her calm, well-ordered life a hell of unfamiliar chaos.

‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’

She jerked around, that honey-soft accented drawl sending a quiver down her taut backbone. Her breath shortened in her throat. Thirty feet away on the threshold of the courtyard stood the living, breathing embodiment of a twentieth-century medieval male—Razul al Rashidai Harun, the Crown Prince of Datar, as uncivilised a specimen of primitive manhood as any prehistoric cave would have been proud to produce.

‘All that outfit lacks is a bush hat. Did you think you were coming to darkest Africa?’ Razul derided lazily, and her serviceable clothing suddenly felt like foolish fancy dress.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him as he walked with cat-like fluidity towards her. Breathtakingly goodlooking... terrifyingly exotic. With those hard-boned, hawkish features, savagely high cheek-bones and that tawny skin he might have sprung live from some ancient Berber tapestry. He was very tall for one of his race. Sheathed in fine cream linen robes, his headdress bound by a double royal golden iqual, Razul gazed down at her with night-dark eyes that were as hard as jet.

It took enormous will-power to stand her ground. Her mouth went dry. Razul strolled calmly around her, for all the world like a predator circling his kill. It was not an image which did anything to release her tension.

‘So very quiet,’ Razul purred as he stilled two feet away. ‘You are in shock...the barbarian has at last learnt to speak proper English...’

Bethany lost every drop of her hectic colour and flinched as though he had plunged a stiletto between her ribs. ‘Please—’

‘And even how to use your dainty Western cutlery,’ Razul imparted with merciless bite.

Bethany dropped her head, anguish flooding her. Did he really think that such trivia had mattered? Her heart had gone out to him as he’d struggled, with all that savage pride of his, to fit into a world which his suspicious old father had denied him all knowledge of until he’d reached an age when the adaptation was naturally all the more difficult to make.

‘But the barbarian did not learn one lesson you sought to teach,’ Razul murmured very quietly. ‘I had no need of it for I know women. I have always known women. I did not pursue you because I was prompted by my primitive, chauvinistic arrogance to believe myself irresistible. I pursued you because in your eyes I read blatant invitation—’

‘No!’ Bethany gasped, galvanised into ungluing her tongue from the roof of her dry mouth.

‘Longing...hunger...need,’ Razul spelt out so softly that the hairs prickled at the nape of her neck. “Those ripe pink lips said no but those emerald eyes begged that I persist. Did I flatter your ego, Dr Morgan? Did playing the tease excite you?’

Appalled that he appeared to recall every word that she had flung at him, Bethany was paralysed. He had known. He had known that on some dark, secret level she’d wanted him, in spite of all her protestations to the contrary! She was shattered by the revelation, had been convinced that her defensive shell had protected her from such insight. Now she felt stripped naked. Even worse, Razul had naturally interpreted her ambivalent behaviour in the most offensive way of all. A tease...? Sexless, cold and frigid were epithets far more familiar to her ears.

‘If you believe that I misled you, it was not intentional, I assure you,’ Bethany responded tightly, studying her feet, not looking at him, absolutely forbidding herself to look at him again, not even caring how he might translate such craven behaviour. Maybe she owed Razul this hearing. He was finally having his say. Two years ago his fierce anger had not assisted his efforts to express himself in her language.

The silence smouldered. She sensed his frustration. He wanted her to fight back. Funny how she knew that, somehow understood exactly what was going through that innately devious and clever brain of his. But fighting back would prolong the agony...and she was in agony, with the evocative scent of sandalwood filling her nostrils and the soft hiss of his breathing interfering with her concentration. It took her back—back to a terrifying time when her safe, secure world had very nearly tumbled about her ears.

‘May I go now?’ She practically whispered the words, so great was her rigid tension.

‘Look at me—’

‘No—’

‘Look at me!’ Razul raked at her fiercely.

Bethany’s gaze collided with vibrant tiger-gold eyes and she stopped breathing. The extraordinary strength of will there mesmerised her. Her heartbeat thudded heavily in her eardrums. All of a sudden she was dizzy and disorientated. With a sense of complete helplessness and intense shame, she felt her breasts stir and swell and push wantonly against the cotton cups of her bra as her nipples pinched into tight little buds. Hot pink invaded her pallor but there was nothing she could do to control her own body. The electrifying sexual charge in the atmosphere overwhelmed her every defence.

Razul dealt her an irredeemably wolfish smile, his slumbrous golden eyes wandering over her, lingering on every tiny hint of the generous curves concealed by her loose clothing. Then, without warning, he stepped back and clapped his hands. The sound was like a pistol shot in the thrumming silence.

‘Now we will have tea and we will talk,’ Razul announced with an exquisite simplicity of utter command that made Bethany recall exactly who he was, what that status meant and where she was. This rogue male was one step off divinity in Datar.

Bethany tensed and jerkily folded her arms. ‘I don’t think—’

Three servants surged out of nowhere, one with a tray bearing cups, one with a teapot, one with a low, ebonised, brass-topped table.

‘Early Grey...especially for you,’ Razul informed her, stepping up on the dais and dropping down onto the cushions with innate animal grace.

‘Early Grey’? She didn’t correct him. The oddest little dart of tenderness pierced her, making her swallow hard. She remembered him surreptitiously shuffling that ‘dainty Western cutlery’ he had referred to at a college dinner. Then she locked the recollection out, furious with herself. Miserably she sank down onto the beautiful carpet, settling her behind onto another heap of cushions, but her disturbing thoughts marched on.

She had been infatuated with him—hopelessly infatuated. Every tiny thing about Razul had fascinated her. She had been twenty-five years old but more naive in many ways than the average teenager. He had been her first love, a crush, whatever you wanted to call it, but it had hit her all the harder because she hadn’t been sweet sixteen with a fast recovery rate. And she had been arrogant in her belief that superior brainpower was sufficient to ensure that she didn’t succumb to unwelcome hormonal promptings and immature emotional responses. But he had smashed her every assumption about herself to smithereens.

‘There was a bit of a mix-up over my visa at the airport...I wouldn’t have mentioned your name otherwise,’ she heard herself say impulsively, and even that disconcerted her. She was not impulsive, but around Razul she was not herself. The china cup trembled betrayingly on the saucer as she snatched it up to occupy her hands and sipped at the hot, fragrant tea.

‘Your visa was invalid.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Bethany glanced up in astonishment, not having expected to hear that nonsensical claim again.

‘Young women are only granted visas under strict guidelines—if they are coming here to stay with a Datari family, can produce a legitimate employment contract or are travelling with a relative or male colleague,’ Razul enumerated levelly. ‘Your visa stated that you would be accompanied. You arrived alone. It was that fact which invalidated your documentation.’

Bethany lifted her chin, her emerald-green eyes flashing. ‘So you discriminate against foreign women by making lists of ridiculous rules—’

‘Discrimination may sometimes be a positive act—’

‘Never!’ Bethany asserted with raw conviction.

‘You force me to be candid.’ Brilliant dark eyes rested on her with impatience, his wide mouth hardening. ‘An influx of hookers can scarcely be considered beneficial to our society.’

‘Hookers?’ Bethany repeated in a flat tone, taken aback.

‘Our women must be virgin when they marry. If not, the woman is unmarriageable, her family dishonoured. In such a society the oldest profession may thrive, but we did not have a problem in that field until we granted visas with too great a freedom.’

‘Are you trying to tell me that I was mistaken for some sort of tart at the airport?’ Bethany gritted in a shaking voice.

‘The other category of female we seek to exclude I shall call “the working adventuress” for want of a more acceptable label.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t follow,’ Bethany said thinly.

‘Young women come here ostensibly to work. They flock to the nightclubs that have sprung up in the city. There they dress, drink and conduct themselves in a manner which may be perfectly acceptable in their own countries but which is seen in quite another light by Datari men,’ Razul explained with a sardonic edge to his rich vowel sounds. ‘A sizeable percentage of these women do not return home again. They stay on illegally and become mistresses in return for a lifestyle of luxury.’

‘Really, I hardly look the type!’ Bethany retorted witheringly, but her fair skin was burning hotly. ‘And, fascinating as all this is, it’s time that I headed for my hotel.’

‘Lone women in your age group are not currently accepted into our hotels as guests.’

Bethany thrust a not quite steady hand through her tumbling hair. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘No hotel will offer you accommodation when you arrive alone.’ His strong dark face utterly impassive, Razul surveyed her intently. ‘Had I not brought you to the palace you would now be on a flight back to the UK.’

‘But that’s ridiculous!’ Bethany suddenly snapped, her nervous tension splintering up through the cracks in her composure. ‘It’s hardly my fault that my assistant broke an ankle before we boarded!’

‘Most unfortunate.’ But he said it with a faint smile on his beautifully moulded mouth, and his tone more than suggested that he was not remotely interested in the obvious fact that her planned stay in Datar had now run into petty bureaucratic difficulties, which she was quite sure he could brush aside...should he want to.

Bethany pushed her cup away with a very forced smile, behind which her teeth were gritted. ‘Look...this is an important research trip for me—’

‘But then you take all your work so seriously,’ Razul pointed out smoothly.

Her facial muscles clenched taut. ‘I am here in Datar to research the nomadic culture,’ she informed him impressively.

‘How tame...’

‘Tame?’ Bethany echoed in shrill disconcertion, having assumed that his own cultural background would necessarily prompt him to treat the subject with appropriate respect.

‘I have read your paper on the suppression of women’s rights,’ Razul murmured very softly.

‘You’ve read my paper?’ Bethany found herself gawping at him.

‘And, having done so, intend to generously offer you research in a field which could make you famous in the academic world when you return to the West.’ Burnished golden eyes suddenly struck hers with ferocious force.

‘What field?’ Bethany queried, a frown-line dividing her brows as she shifted uneasily on the cushions, instinctively reacting to the humming tension in the air.

Razul unleashed a predatory smile upon her. ‘A way of life never before freely opened to the scrutiny of a Western anthropologist. I feel remarkably like Santa Claus.’

‘Excuse me?’ The atmosphere was suffocatingly tense. Bethany scrambled upright and involuntarily backed away from the controlled menace that emanated from Razul in vibrating waves.

‘A prolonged stay in my harem will not only provide you with liberal scope for academic research, it will provide me with a long-awaited opportunity to teach you what being a woman is all about,’ Razul told her with silken self-satisfaction.

CHAPTER TWO

‘YOUR harem?’ For the count of thirty seconds Bethany simply stared at Razul, her bright green eyes open to their fullest extent. Then she visibly bristled, her naturally sultry mouth compressing into a thin, unamused line. ‘Very funny,’ she said flatly, but there was an unevenness to her response as she fought against the giant tide of bitterness threatening to envelop her.

‘You walk in my world now.’ Razul issued the reminder with indolent cool. Veiled dark eyes slid over her in an all-encompassing look that was as physical as a caress. ‘When you walk from it again you will be a different woman.’

Her aggressive stance—feet apart and arms taut—quivered as a tide of fury surged through her, leaving her light-headed. ‘If you look at me like that once more, so help me I will knock your teeth down your throat!’ Bethany blistered back at him.

A scorching smile slashed his hard mouth, perfect white teeth flashing against his golden skin. He surveyed her with intense pleasure. ‘My father said... “Is this woman worth a diplomatic incident?” If he saw you now, truly he would not have asked such a question.’

‘What do you mean, “worth a diplomatic incident”?’ Bethany demanded, her voice half an octave higher.

‘Sooner or later you will be missed,’ Razul pointed out gently. ‘Questions will be asked, answers must be given. Our ambassador in London will be called to the Foreign Office. But I suspect it will be many weeks before we reach that stage—’

‘The Foreign Office?’ Bethany shook her head as though to clear it, a daze of utter disbelief beginning to enfold her.

‘You see, you have so few people in your life to notice that you are missing. You write to your mother only once a month. You communicate with your father not at all. Your sole close friend is currently enjoying an extended honeymoon in South America—her fall from grace in allowing a man into her life very probably loosened the ties of that friendship. As for your academic colleagues...?’ Razul enumerated these facts in the same calm, measured tone, as though he was well aware of her growing incredulity. ‘This is the long summer vacation. I doubt if they will be expecting to hear from you. I find your life of isolation a sad testimony to your wonderful Western civilisation.’

The pink tip of Bethany’s tongue crept out to moisten her dry lower lip. Shock was reverberating through her in debilitating waves. ‘How...how do you know all these things about me?’ she whispered jerkily.

‘An investigation agency.’

‘You put a private investigator on me? But when? You didn’t even know I was coming to Datar!’

‘Did I not? A liberal endowment to your university ensured your eventual arrival—’

‘I b-beg your pardon?’ Bethany stammered, a painful throb of tension beginning to pulse behind her brow-bone.

‘Why do you think your superiors insisted that you base your research on Datar?’

‘The nomadic tribes here have not suffered the same level of exposure to the modern world as in other countries,’ she informed him harshly, her hands clenching in on themselves.

‘True...but who suggested the subject of your research?’

Bethany went rigid. The idea had come down from on high. It had not emerged from the anthropology department itself. Indeed there had been resentful mutters to the effect that she must have admirers in high places because such research opportunities abroad were, due to a shortage of finance, currently at an all-time low.

‘I’m building your university a brand-new library,’ Razul shared with her gently. ‘And my carefully chosen British representative, who stressed his special interest in Datar and also mentioned how very impressed he was by a series of lectures you gave last year, insisted on absolute and complete anonymity in return for the endowment.’

Bethany was starting to tremble. Without a flicker of remorse he was telling her that she had been lured out to Datar on false pretences. ‘No...I don’t believe you...I refuse to believe you!’

‘I have known the date of your arrival since you applied for your visa. I was not, however, prepared for you to arrive alone at the airport,’ Razul conceded wryly. ‘Or for the subsequent furore over your visa, but your solitary state has worked to my advantage. You now have no companion to raise the alarm...and I have you in my possession that much sooner.’

‘You have not got me in your possession, you maniac!’ Bethany snatched up her duffel bag and stalked to the exit doors. ‘I’ve listened to this nonsense long enough as well!’

‘You are prepared to endure bodily restraint?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Without my permission you are not allowed to leave the palace.’

‘Nobody allows me to do anything...I do what I want to do!’ Bethany spat back at him, and jerked at the ornate handles with furious fingers. ‘And I am returning to the airport!’

‘If you force my men to put their hands upon you they will be severely embarrassed that you should invite such an indignity...but they will not flinch from their duty,’ Razul warned.

The doors sprang open. Instantly the two guards outside spun round and faced her, yet they did not look directly at her and she remembered how at the airport, after she had mentioned Razul, the male eyes had swiftly averted from her as she’d passed. It was an insult for an Arab man to stare openly at an Arab woman who was not of his family...but she was not one of their women. Such pronounced respect ironically sent a shudder down her backbone, and the mere concept of instigating a pointless struggle with those fierce-looking men made her cringe. In one violent movement of frustration Bethany thrust the doors shut again.

‘If you don’t let me out of here I’ll scream!’ she hurled down the length of the room at Razul.

‘It will only make your migraine worse.’

How did he know that she got migraine headaches? How did he know that she could already feel the first dismaying signs of an attack?

‘You think I won’t scream, don’t you? You think I’m so damned impressed by your utterly ridiculous threats and your blasted throne room, I haven’t got the bottle!’ Bethany fired off at him, shaking all over with rage.

‘“The bottle”?’ A frown-line divided his winged ebony brows as he rose fluidly upright and began to move towards her.

‘Stay away from me...I’m warning you!’ On the edge of hysteria for the very first time in her life, Bethany threw back her shoulders and screamed. It hurt her ears, it hurt her throat, it hurt her head. But what shook her even more was the reality that nobody came running to see what was amiss.

‘Ask yourself what happiness your life in the West has brought you,’ Razul urged her softly as he moved towards her. ‘You work relentless hours. You drive yourself like a mouse on a treadmill and deny yourself every feminine pleasure.’

‘I am extremely happy!’ Bethany launched back rawly, her back pinned to the doors. ‘I’m totally fulfilled by my work.’

‘Being totally fulfilled by me will be infinitely more satisfying. It will release all that pent-up tension—’

‘The only way I am likely to release my pent-up tension at this moment is by physically attacking you...if you don’t keep your distance!’ Bethany swore, fighting against the increasing pounding of the building migraine, feeling her skin dampen, her stomach lurch. ‘Now maybe you think this little power game of yours is amusing but it has gone far enough...do you hear me? I want transport back to the airport right now!’

‘If I gave you what you say you want you would regret it for the rest of your life,’ Razul asserted wryly. ‘I will not permit you to make so foolish a decision.’

‘Back off, Razul!’ As he got too close Bethany took a defensive leap along the wall and saw swimming spots in front of her aching eyes, but she fought her own weakness to the last ditch. ‘The joke has gone stale. You cannot possibly intend to keep me here against my will. I couldn’t possibly be your type—’

‘I have catholic taste—’

‘Intellectually I find you—’

‘A challenge? When you have rested for a while you will feel more adjusted to the wonderful change in your circumstances. No longer are you alone—’

‘I like being alone!’ Bethany screeched.

‘You are afraid to share yourself—’

‘I am not sharing anything with you!’ It was a cry of despair. Suddenly, without warning, she snapped, the rigidity going out of her, hot tears burning her eyes, making her cover her rapidly working face with shaking hands.

A pair of strong hands inexorably peeled her off the wall which was supporting her. ‘No!’ she gasped in horror.

An even stronger set of arms relentlessly swept her off her feet. Her head was spinning in a cartwheel of fire. Her gaze clashed with glittering gold eyes set between lush ebony lashes longer than her own, and a stifled moan of mingled pain and defeat was dredged from her.

‘Stop fighting me.’

‘Put me down,’ she sobbed weakly.

‘Shush...’ he whispered softly, soothingly. ‘Surrender can be the sweetest pleasure of all for a woman. You were born to yield, not to fight.’

She closed her water-clogged eyes, feeling too ill to try and struggle against overwhelming odds. Overwhelming odds...Razul in a nutshell, she reflected wretchedly. Two years ago she had blown every penny she’d possessed on a trip to Canada to stay with her aunt to escape him. Like a drug addict she had suffered withdrawal symptoms of sleepless nights, lost appetite, mood-swings and, worse, the frightening conviction that she had a streak of masochism more than equal to anything that her martyred mother had ever displayed in her dealings with her wandering husband.

Razul was carrying her and without any apparent effort. The scent of him so close washed over her...clean, warm, intensely male. They had never been this close before. But she had wondered—oh, yes, she had wondered what it would feel like to be in his arms. Now it had been thrust on her when she was defenceless and, worst of all, she liked it, she registered in horror—liked the fact that he had taken charge, liked the soft, rich feel of his robes against her cheek, the raw male strength of him, the steady thump of his heartbeat. A sob that had nothing at all to do with her migraine escaped her.

A clamour of anxious female voices chattered in Arabic as she was laid down on a bed. A cool hand rested on her forehead. Razul. A part of her wanted to retain that contact and that made her feel worse than ever. He lifted her up. ‘Drink this...’

Her medication was in her bag but she drank the herbal concoction, lay back, weak as a kitten, and momentarily lifted her heavy eyelids. Two young women were kneeling on the carpet several feet from the bed and they both wore fixed and matching expressions of frantic concern and unholy fascination. Melodrama was born in Arabia, she thought helplessly.

‘The doctor is coming.’ Razul smoothed the fiery tangle of curls off her damp brow. His hand wasn’t quite steady. ‘Close your eyes; relax,’ he instructed in that dark, deep voice of his. ‘Tension must increase the pain.’

Relax? A spasm of anguish snaked through her. He had brought her to the harem. Those had to be his women watching her. Wives, concubines—Oh, dear heaven, what did it matter what they were? she asked herself bitterly. He was still one man with two hundred young and beautiful women at his disposal—gifts from his father’s adoring subjects.

Datar had made an official complaint to the British government when a certain notorious tabloid had spilt what the Dataris considered to be very private beans to an agog British public. Diplomatic relations had been cut off for six months. Contracts which should have gone to British firms had suddenly been awarded elsewhere. Since then the media had been tactfully silent about the Crown Prince of Datar’s exotic sex life. Not a murmur had appeared in print since those revelations two years earlier.

Razul had been shattered when she’d dared to fling those same facts in his teeth—so outraged, so furious, so nakedly incredulous that any woman should dare even to mention such an unmentionable subject, never mind berate him with a personal opinion of his morals, that he had forgotten every word of English that he did have, slamming back at her in his own language before he’d stormed out, leaving her sobbing and empty and bitter as gall.

In a haze of surprising drowsiness and broken shards of memory Bethany drifted at first, like a boat on a storm-tossed sea, but the boat slowly came into the calm of harbour, drawn there by the cool, strong fingers reassuringly linked with hers. Feeling inexpressibly relaxed, she slid into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Bethany wakened to the sound of chattering birds and stretched languorously. Her dark lashes lifted and she saw not a ceiling but a dome of incredibly beautiful stained glass far above her. She sat up with a stifled gasp. There was another shock awaiting her. She was not alone. Three brightly smiling young girls were kneeling in total silence on the carpet.

‘You are awake, sitt.’ One of them rose gracefully and shyly lifted gorgeous almond-shaped eyes to hers. Her slender body was garbed in a colourful, tight bodice and swirling skirt, her feet shod in embroidered slippers, gold jewellery tinkling with her every movement. ‘I am Zulema. We have been chosen to serve you. Many wished for this honour but only I speak English. Prince Razul say I speak English very good...is good enough?’ she checked in sudden dismay, the query undoubtedly prompted by the fact that Bethany was gaping at her.

Bethany snatched in a gulping breath, striving to get a grip on herself as she took in the fabulous room and its alarming unfamiliarity, then glanced down and fingered the equally unfamiliar filmy white silk gown she was mysteriously clad in. ‘You speak wonderful English, Zulema,’ she mumbled weakly.

‘I will run a bath for you, sitt. You must long to be fresh. You had a very long journey, but it is so thrilling, I think, to fly on a plane. Once I travelled to London with Princess Fatima—’ Zulema’s animated little face abruptly clouded and she dropped her shining dark head as if she had dropped a clanger.

Fatima...who was Princess Fatima? Razul’s sister, mother, aunt...wife? Bethany knew nothing about his family.

As Zulema hurriedly pressed the other girls into activity Bethany absorbed their unhidden high spirits and the rather discomfiting way they kept on stealing fascinated glances at her. Were they maids or was their connection with Razul of a more intimate nature? After all, every one of them was wearing enough gold jewellery to sink the Titanic. Dear God, Razul had put her in his harem just as he had promised. And he had drugged her to keep her here last night!

What had been in that seemingly innocuous drink that she had trustingly taken from his hand? She had never managed to sleep through a migraine before. Whatever he had given her had knocked her out cold. She had slept through what remained of yesterday late into a new day. And right now she was in shock—so much shock that her brain was traumatised. The sound of running water came noisily through a door now flung wide. In a sudden motion Bethany slid from the bed. Zulema gasped and surged to proffer slippers as if the wonderful, silk-soft rug were insufficient to protect her feet.

‘Please...’ Please leave me alone, she wanted to plead, but when Zulema looked up at her with a horribly embarrassing look of near-worship, as if she were some sort of goddess instead of a perfectly ordinary woman the same as herself, Bethany was struck dumb.

‘We will bathe you, sitt.’

Bethany, who found even communal changing rooms a mortification, was appalled by the suggestion. Fighting to hide the fact, she murmured tightly, ‘You don’t need to serve me, Zulema.’

‘But you are the one...you must be served,’ Zulema protested anxiously.

The one what? Bethany almost screamed, recalling that same phrase from the airport but restraining herself. ‘Where I come from,’ she said stiltedly, ‘we do not share bathrooms.’

Zulema giggled and delightedly shared this barbaric desire for privacy with her companions. Bethany took advantage of the huddle to slide past them into the bathroom and close the door. The ultra-modern appointments were reassuring. The bedroom, furnished with antique cedarwood inlaid with silver, had given her the disorientating impression that she had been snatched back to the time of Sheherazade. Peeling off the gown, she climbed into the bath which had been run for her, but she sat rigid in the richly scented water like a puritan invited to an orgy, furiously washed herself and clambered back out again as fast as she possibly could.

By the time she had finished with Razul he wouldn’t be able to get her back to the airport quickly enough! Was he crazy? Did he really imagine that he could make a prisoner of her? Of course, he could not seriously mean to try and keep her here by force. But everything he had told her the previous night flooded back to her—the endowment to the university... the strict anonymity demanded ...her own surprise, as a junior member of the department, when she had been offered the research trip.

She emerged from the bathroom wrapped in towels. ‘Where are my clothes?’

With pride Zulema indicated the fabulous heap of jewel-coloured silks now strewn over the bed.

‘My clothes...my suitcase,’ Bethany extended tautly.

Neither was forthcoming. Ignoring her audience, Bethany flicked open chests and closet doors. Nothing, not a stitch of her own clothing in sight! She wanted to stamp her feet and scream with temper, and it must have showed because Zulema and her helpers looked worried sick, as if any sign of dissatisfaction on her part was likely to bring punishment down on their unprotected heads.

‘OK... I’ll wear this stuff. Choose something for me,’ Bethany invited grudgingly.

Smiles broke out again like magic. Zulema extended an emerald-green silk caftan edged with gold, and a filmy pair of lace briefs and matching bra, the likes of which Bethany had never harboured in her plain white cotton underwear drawer. A flush of increasing rage mantling her cheeks, she dressed and stood at the mirror with a silver-backed brush, yanking it brutally through her long, wild mane of tangled curls.

‘I have displeased you, sitt?’ Zulema pressed in a small, tearful voice. ‘Why you not like my help?’

Bethany felt all mean and small-minded and contemptible and handed over the brush, taking a seat on a divan. How the heck could you force the principle of equality on someone when equality was neither acknowledged nor desired?

‘Such glorious hair. I have never seen such wonderful hair,’ Zulema sighed, delicately teasing out each snarl with reverent fingers. ‘It is the colour of the setting sun, just as was said.’

‘Said by whom?’

Zulema giggled shyly. ‘Prince Razul’s guards, they talk... It is forbidden that they talk, but men, they gossip too. A long time ago we hear about the English lady with the hair of glorious colours...soon all our people know and talk and the King, he got very angry indeed to hear the whispers about his beloved son. Ah...the English breakfast is here!’ Zulema carolled excitedly as the door opened.

What kind of whispers? Bethany wanted to know as she stood up, but Zulema threw wide yet another door, revealing a dining table and chairs. ‘Just like home,’ she told Bethany as a procession of servants bearing trays followed in her wake.

Open-mouthed, Bethany stared as the trays were unloaded and the lids on the metal dishes were lifted one by one. Fruit juices, cereals, toast, croissants, breakfast rolls, wheaten bread and every possible kind of preserve. Fried eggs, boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, even coddled eggs. Kippers, devilled kidneys, beef sausages, fried bread, tomatoes and French toast. It was lunchtime but she was receiving breakfast.

Zulema pulled out a chair and Bethany collapsed down onto it, surveying the banquet before her. She was hungry but never in her life had she seen such a spread for one individual. The entire table was covered.

‘You like?’

‘I’m very impressed.’ Her voice wobbled in the presence of such shamelessly conspicuous consumption.

‘Prince Razul bring in chef from Dubai. If you not like his cooking, he go back,’ Zulema informed her cheerfully.

Razul had hired a chef specifically to cook Western food for her? Heavens, did he actually think that she would be staying long enough for it to matter? Bethany took a deep breath, feeling more and more as though she was existing in some outrageous fantasy world, aeons removed from her own life of quiet, sensible practicality.

She was finishing her tea when Zulema approached her again.

‘The Prince...he say he meet with you now,’ Zulema whispered, as if she were setting up an incredibly exciting romantic assignation.

Bethany stood up and straightened her narrow shoulders with Amazonian spirit. ‘And don’t spare the horses.’

‘The horses?’

‘Never mind.’

The palace was an astonishingly large building. It rambled all over the place in a hotchpotch of corridors, screened galleries and sunlit courtyards.

At the head of a superb marble staircase Zulema abruptly halted and drew back several steps. ‘We must wait, sitt.’

Bethany looked over the wall down into the magnificent courtyard below, but her attention had not been attracted by the lush selection of tropical plants and the beautiful playing fountains. It was Razul she saw, his luxuriantly black, slightly curly hair gleaming like raw silk in the strong sunlight...and then the woman, sobbing and clutching frantically at his ankles.

‘We go for walk, sitt,’ Zulema urged uncomfortably.

‘No, thanks.’ In all her life Bethany had never seen a woman humiliate herself to such an extent. She was appalled. She needed no grasp of Arabic to interpret that distraught voice, that subservient posture and the passionate intensity with which the poor woman was hanging onto him.

Razul hissed something in his own language and literally stepped over her. As she attempted to follow him he snapped his fingers furiously at a cluster of servants cowering in a corner. Within seconds they were rushing to lift the woman from the ground and hurry her away through one of the archways off the courtyard.

‘Who is that woman?’ Bethany whispered.

‘The Princess Fatima,’ Zulema muttered thinly. ‘Prince Razul take only one wife. Always he say that... only the one.’

Bethany’s stomach lurched sickly. Perspiration broke out on her brow. So Razul was married. Dear heaven, that tormented woman was his wife, and it did not take great imagination to comprehend the source of her hysteria, did it? Razul had brought another woman into the palace and the poor creature was quite naturally distraught. The sheer cruelty of his behaviour devastated Bethany. He was every inch the savage, despotic Arab prince, who believed his own desires to be innately superior to any mere female’s wants and needs.

In a tempest of pain she refused to acknowledge Bethany descended the marble stairs. Razul swung round, his starkly handsome features flushed and still set with cold anger and hauteur. And then, as his stunning golden eyes settled on Bethany, the tension went out of him. A dazzling smile completely transformed his strong dark face.

That smile hit her like a shock wave, made her steps falter and her heart give a gigantic lurch behind her breastbone. For a split second she was hurled back two years to the evening they had first met. She had been coming out of the library. He had been leaning against the bonnet of his Ferrari, surrounded by gushing female students, every one of whom had been blonde and not known for her inhibitions with men. And then he had looked up and focused on Bethany and perceptibly stilled, treating her to a narrowed, intent stare before suddenly flashing that spectacularly glorious smile. Riveted to the spot, she had dropped her books.

But not this time, she swore to herself, despising her own shameful susceptibility and the disturbing emotions and responses which could block out every rational thought.

‘I’ve always been told that the Arab male cherishes and protects the women in his family,’ she shot at him in stark challenge, ‘but report really doesn’t match reality, does it? The Princess Fatima does not appear to qualify for even an ounce of your respect.’

His smile vanished as though she had struck him. A dark rise of blood delineated his hard cheek-bones. ‘You saw...?’

‘I saw,’ Bethany confirmed shakily.

‘I am disturbed that you should have witnessed so distressing a scene but, in honour, I may not discuss it with you,’ Razul delivered in a grim undertone.

Bethany turned away. She could not bear to look at him. So he had that much decency—a tiny kernel of loyalty to his wife. And he was profoundly embarrassed that she had seen that distasteful encounter...amazing. It was almost as though he expected her to pretend that these other women did not exist in his life. Concubines and a wife.

Yet she had never been able to hate him properly for his lifestyle. Just as she was a product of her world, he was a product of his. Nor was she foolish enough to imagine that Datar was the only country in the world where concubines were kept. It was not a subject referred to; it was a subject politely ignored lest people in high places be offended. And she had often wondered how many Western males could truthfully say that, given the same opportunity and society’s silent blessing, they too would not indulge in the freedom of such sexual variety.

‘Did you sleep well?’

A laugh that was no laugh at all bubbled in her throat. ‘You should know...you drugged me—’

‘You were in great pain. I could not bear to see you suffer,’ Razul imparted tautly, on the defensive. ‘A sleeping potion allowed you to rest.’

A sudden unbearable sadness swept over her. She found herself sinking down on the stone edge of a fountain, and she let her fingers trail restively in the water. ‘And how do you answer the kidnapping and imprisoning charge?’

‘You gave me no other option.’

Bethany breathed in deeply and looked at him where he stood, brushing aside the disturbing realisation that in the superbly tailored dove-grey suit which outlined his broad shoulders, narrow hips and long, lean legs he looked achingly familiar to her. On the outside touched by Western sophistication, she thought painfully, on the inside not touched at all, and not about to apologise for it either.

‘You know I won’t let you get away with a cop-out like that,’ she whispered.

‘Cop-out?’ Razul queried flatly, standing very tall and taut.

‘An evasion.’ She guessed that the women in his life let him off the hook every time he smiled, and then doubted if he even had a passing acquaintance with being pinned between a rock and a hard place by her sex. Fatima had been crawling round his feet like a whipped dog, not standing up to him like an equal.

Pain trammelled through her afresh. Was that what had attracted Razul to a woman outside his own culture...to her? Her spirit, her independence? In Datar even the male sex walked in awe of Razul al Rashidai Harun. One day he would be their king.

‘You cannot seriously intend to imprison me here—’

‘It does not have to be a prison. Give me your word that you will not attempt to escape and you may roam free.’

‘Something of a contradiction in terms.’ Unwarily she connected with smouldering golden eyes intently pinned to her and her throat closed over. Why am I talking to him so calmly instead of screaming at him? she wondered. Her own pain had risen uppermost, swallowing up the anger. Worse still, there was a treacherous part of her that greedily cherished every stolen moment in his company. The knowledge filled her with a deep, abiding shame.

‘Je te veux...’ he had said two years ago. ‘I want you.’

‘Tu es à moi,’ he had purred like a sleek jungle cat. ‘You are mine.’

Temptation—sinful, sweet, soul-destroying...

‘You are an educated man,’ Bethany muttered not quite steadily.

‘On the surface. Don’t flatter me,’ Razul said with sudden harshness. ‘I know your opinion of me. My father allowed thousands of Datari men to attend British and American universities over the last two decades. He did this only because it became clear to him that our country would become totally dependent on foreign workers if he did not encourage our young men to seek education and technological training in the West. But he would not permit me to enjoy a similar experience.

‘I am well aware that reading many books and spending a short spell at university does not make me an educated man...especially not in the eyes of a woman who has a string of letters after her name and many academic accomplishments.’

In the hot, still air the tension pulsed and throbbed, beating down on her from the electric force of his challenging gaze. He possessed one very powerful personality, one very volatile temperament which was also unashamedly emotional, but you were never in any doubt of the ferociously strong will that lay behind it all. But only now did she register the innate humility with which he viewed himself on an intellectual level, and that discovery pained her and made her want to put her hands round the throat of his obstinate old father, who had denied his own son what he freely gave to his subjects.

Her throat thickened. ‘Razul, nobody who has seen what you have managed to achieve here in Datar over the past five years could possibly think you anything other than an educated man.’

‘I make use of many advisors from all levels of our society. I will not tolerate nepotism, for placing the unfit in authority is the curse of the Arab world. I seek to liberalise our culture for the benefit of our people...but I know what you think, aziz, as I say this.’ He sent her a dark, level appraisal. ‘You think how can I talk of liberalisation and then steal a woman.’

‘I’m well aware that stealing women is an element of the tribal culture,’ Bethany informed him in a frozen voice. ‘But—’

A brilliant smile crossed his beautifully shaped mouth. ‘It is not a crime as long as the woman is treated with respect and honour,’ he smoothly inserted.

Bethany bent her fiery head, staggered to find herself on the brink of laughter. When it suited Razul, he was wondrously, deviously simplistic, and her mere admission that woman-stealing was a tradition practised for centuries in his culture delighted him in so far as he saw that as ample justification for his conduct.

‘But naturally the marriage must take place within a short space of time,’ Razul remarked softly. ‘It is expected.’

Her head flew back, shimmering green eyes fixing on him in unconcealed shock.

The silence stretched, taut as a rubber band, between them.

With a muffled expletive in Arabic Razul took a long stride forward and then stilled, sheer incredulity sufficient to match her own flashing across his staggeringly handsome features. ‘In the name of Allah, aziz...surely you could not think I would insult you with anything less than an offer of marriage? Last night... was this why you panicked?’ he demanded starkly, and reached for her hands to tug her relentlessly upright. ‘I brought you here to become my wife!’

His second wife. In a storm of outrage Bethany looked at him in absolute disbelief, and then she tore her hands violently free and fled.

CHAPTER THREE

PASSING beneath the nearest archway, Bethany found herself in an elaborate reception room. Fighting for self-control, she closed her eyes. ‘Prince Razul take only one wife. Always he say that...only the one.’ Zulema’s explanation for Fatima’s distress returned to her now. Seemingly Razul was now prepared to break that promise to his wife, and in a society where he was all-powerful what could the wretched woman possibly do? Presumably she could live with her husband’s other female diversions but felt both betrayed and threatened by the prospect of another woman acquiring the same status as herself.

Marriage...woman-stealing was all above board as long as you offered holy matrimony to satisfy the conventions. A strangled laugh, empty of amusement, escaped her. Little wonder she had been treated like royalty at the airport, little wonder she was being waited on hand and foot. Everybody but her had expected marriage to follow her arrival!

A polygamous marriage. The teachings of the Koran taught that a Muslim was entitled to up to four wives at any one time. In a lifetime he could get through many more than that number, if he so desired, by the judicious use of divorce. The ex-wives, of course, had to be liberally provided for. One of the reasons why polygamy was becoming less prevalent in the Arab world was the sheer expense of maintaining multiple families. But Razul was fabulously rich.

Oddly enough it had never occurred to her two years ago that Razul might already be a married man. The tabloid hadn’t picked up on that...but then maybe he had not been married then. She raised trembling hands to her stiff, cold face.

‘Why are you distressed?’ It was a ferocious demand, raw with a frustrated lack of comprehension. ‘Perhaps you are ashamed to have misjudged me so badly,’ Razul suggested with savage bite. ‘This is not Bluebeard’s castle. I am not some filthy rapist who would force his unwanted attentions upon an unprotected woman! Do you seriously believe that my father would have agreed to me bringing an Englishwoman here had I not intended to marry her? Do you think us savages?’

Bethany wanted to howl with hysterical laughter and slap him hard to express her emotions at one and the same time. ‘The Princess Fatima?’ she whispered chokily.

‘Fatima must learn to adjust. This is not my problem,’ Razul dismissed, slashing the air with an angry and imperious hand. ‘I do nothing to be ashamed of. I have waited two long years for you and she is well aware of this...’

Bethany gazed at him in horror. ‘Your compassion is overwhelming,’ she muttered sickly.

‘Compassion is not infinite...no more is tolerance. Why do you treat me to this response?’ Razul launched at her. ‘It makes no sense!’

‘Last night...’ Bethany was struggling to think straight while dimly wondering what he could possibly find incomprehensible about her response. Dear heaven, did he fondly imagine that a marriage proposal two years ago would have been sufficient to change her attitude towards him? Did he think. that she would have fallen gratefully at his feet in welcome? And when he now offered what he no doubt saw as the ultimate of honours, did he think that that would magically overcome her resistance?

‘What last night?’ Razul appealed with driven emotion.

‘You kept on saying that when I went back to my world... You weren’t thinking of marriage then!’ she reminded him.

Razul set his incredibly eloquent mouth into a grim line. ‘I was making it clear that were you to be unhappy I would set you free. I would give you a divorce, but only after you had given our marriage a fair and reasonable trial.’

Inside herself, beyond her angry disbelief, she hurt. She turned her head away. She would never have married Razul in any circumstances. Even if he hadn’t had Fatima and those other women, she reflected painfully, she still would have said no. Marriage was not for her and would never be for her. She had seen far too much of the misery of marriage while she had been growing up, and, beyond that again, the even greater misery of a cross-cultural union.

Even so, she was shattered by the idea that Razul would want to marry her. Two years ago he had wanted an affair...and she wouldn’t have been his first affair on campus—no, far from it! She might not have met Razul until his second term but she had heard about him...oh, boy, had she heard! His fame had gone before him.

Razul had flung himself with immense enthusiasm into a world where women were willing to share his bed without the smallest commitment on his part. Blessed by gorgeous good looks, charming broken English intermingled with fluent French, enormous wealth and the certainty that he would one day become a king, Razul had hit the female student body much like a winning lottery ticket blowing in the wind, hopefully to be captured by the most determined of his many admirers. A kind of communal hysteria had reigned in his radius, she recalled painfully.

‘I could never marry you,’ Bethany informed him tightly.

‘Do not say never to me...I will not accept it’

‘I insist that you call a car to take me to the airport!’

‘I refuse.’ Razul sent her a raw, shimmering glance of gold.

‘You are thinking of the loss of face...’ Bethany assumed, suddenly wishing that she did not understand his culture to the degree that she did. If he had informed his family that he intended to marry her and she refused, it would be a humiliation for him. A public humiliation. There was undoubtedly not a woman in Datar who would deny herself the great honour of becoming one of his wives.

‘Again you go out of your way to insult me.’ Razul slung her a look of wrathful reproach, his hands clenching into fists by his sides. ‘What lies between us runs too deep to rest on something so superficial as what you term a “loss of face”!’

Bethany was paper-pale, but rigid with a strength of will every bit as unyielding as his own. ‘There is nothing between us and there never will be. You must accept that. In my opinion my sole attraction in your eyes is the fact that I said no two years ago! Your ego can’t live with the startling concept that there exists one woman in the world who wants nothing to do with you!’

‘When you speak such barefaced lies I lose all patience with you!’ Razul blazed at her with such explosive suddenness that she flinched. He closed the distance between them in one long, panther-like stride and reached for her. ‘These lies are naked provocation!’

As he hauled her into his arms Bethany stiffened in shock. Glittering golden eyes roamed over her startled face with a scorching heat that made her skin tauten over her bones. ‘You burn for me as I burn for you—’

‘No!’

‘I saw your hunger last night.’ Razul lifted a shapely hand and knotted long fingers very slowly into the fiery tumble of her long hair. ‘I hold you and your heart beats as madly as that of a gazelle hunted down in the desert. It beats for me and for no other man. Yet I have never touched you,’ he breathed, in a throaty undertone of frustration which sent taut quivers rippling down her rigid spine. ‘Never... How many men in your world could say that of the woman they longed to possess? How many men would treat you with such unquestioning respect?’

His thumb was rubbing against the lobe of her ear. A tiny little shiver ran through her, fracturing her breathing. Eyes as keen as those of a hawk in flight scoured her hectically flushed face, beating down on her with merciless insight. She trembled, a whirling tide of dizziness assailing her, the hiss of her indrawn breath shatteringly loud in the stillness. ‘Razul, I—’

‘You trust me to observe the boundaries...why?’ Razul demanded roughly, yet the long forefinger he lifted to trace the tremulous fullness of her lower lip was tormentingly gentle, brushing across the tender skin with innate eroticism. ‘In the mood I am in your trust is a step too far. Perhaps I have been too honourable...I made it too easy for you to drive me away in England, but I will not make it easy this time.’

‘Let go of me,’ Bethany mumbled thickly, her slender length slipping from rigidity into sudden, shivering weakness as that expert finger slid against her trembling mouth. A tide of sexual awareness strong enough to wipe out her every defence was infiltrating her now.

‘Have other men not held you...touched you?’ Unhidden anger harshened his rich dark voice. ‘Why do you expect me to be different?’

Her breasts rose and fell, heavy, swelling, her nipples peaking inside the gossamer-fine covering of her bra. A languorous heat was uncoiling between her thighs, making her shift like a cat arching its back in the sunshine, but in the depths of her unthinking mind lurked an equally animal fear of her own responses. ‘Don’t!’

‘But your eyes say do...and if I had behaved as a man of your world you would not have shunned me two years ago. I allowed you to stay free,’ Razul intoned with mesmeric intensity. ‘Do you know why an unmarried woman is not left alone with a man in Arabia? A man is expected to sin and a woman is deemed too weak to resist temptation, for was she not fashioned to be the greatest pleasure of a man’s existence? As you will be mine, heart, soul and body...for that I promised myself in England and I will fulfil that promise more sweetly than you can believe...’

‘Airport!’ Bethany said jerkily, as if he had yanked a string and that was the best her blitzed reasoning powers could come up with by way of a contradiction.

Razul laughed softly. A lean hand sank to the shallow indentation of her spine and pressed her closer as he slowly lowered his arrogant dark head. ‘The image of a jet taking off...the heavens opening as the gates to your secret garden...most fitting, but then you are an extraordinarily sensual woman,’ he murmured thickly. ‘Did I not sense that from the first?’

A violent shudder snaked through her as his warm breath fanned her cheek. He took her mouth in a hot, hungry surge of possession and dragged her down so deep and so fast into a world she didn’t know, she was lost. He prised her lips apart with the tip of his tongue and probed the moist, tender interior that she instinctively opened to him. With a strangled moan Bethany caught fire in a surging blaze of passion.

Excitement, raw, wild and overpowering, took her by storm. With every fevered kiss she hung on the edge of desperation for the next, crushing her thrumming body into the hard, lean heat of him for the closeness that every fibre of her femininity greedily craved. Her hands swept up and found his broad shoulders, dug in there briefly to trace the hard stretch of his taut muscles beneath the rich fabric of his jacket before convulsively linking round his strong brown throat, her seeking fingers flirting deliciously with the luxuriant black hair at the nape of his neck.

With a stifled groan he suddenly tightened his arms around her as he lifted her up against him, kissing her breathless with an intense urgency that stoked the flames of her arousal to unbearable heights. She clutched at him, knotting her fingers into his thick, silky hair, for he was the only stable influence in a whirling vortex of violent passion. He muttered something rough against her swollen mouth, momentarily stiffening as if to withdraw, but she held him there, kissed him again with the same raw, answering hunger that he had chosen to awaken in her.

He drew her down, down onto softness and support, crushing her quivering length just as swiftly beneath his superior weight. As he sealed his long, muscular body to hers the heat of desire washed over her with such strength that she burned, her hips arching up, her legs torturously confined in the clinging cloth of her caftan. His hand closed round her breast and she gasped, shocked by sensation, instinctively straining her swollen, seeking flesh upwards to meet that possessive hold.

Razul dragged his lips free of hers, staring down at her with blazing golden eyes, his cheek-bones harshly delineated beneath his smooth, sun-bronzed skin as he snatched in a ragged breath. He loosened his grip, ran a torturous fingertip over the shamelessly distended nipple poking against the fine silk barrier, sending fire shooting to the very centre of the throbbing ache between her thighs. She closed her eyes in an agony of excitement and shuddered as if she were in a force-ten gale.

‘I cannot do this,’ Razul breathed with subdued ferocity, abruptly pulling back from her and yet carrying her with him, his strong hands grasping her arms as he tugged her upright again. ‘To do this is to shame you, and I will not have regrets between us. You will come to me as my bride or you will not come at all!’

He settled her down like a doll onto a low divan. Bethany didn’t know what had happened to her. Her entire body felt as though it had acquired a life of its own, and right now it was screaming with a clamouring dissatisfaction which was cruelly unwelcome. In short, she ached—ached for a physical completion which she had never desired in her life before—and she sat there, struck dumb by sheer horror as her mind fumbled up out of the darkness of complete shut-down to reason again. And yet she did not want to think...

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