The Sheikh's Blackmailed Mistress. Penny Jordan

that lay behind the formal reception room where he held his public divans, to which his people were entitled to come and speak to him and be heard, he might be alone in the flesh, but in spirit the room was peopled with all those of his blood who had gone before him.

      His formidable great-grandfather, who had ridden with Lawrence of Arabia and fought off all comers to maintain his right to his lands. His French grandmother, so elegant and cultured, who had bequeathed to him a love of art and design. And his own parents: his father, so very much everything that a true ruler should be—strong, wise, tender to those in his care—and his lovely laughing mother, who had filled his life with happiness and joy and the traditions of her homeland. Here in this room, at the heart of the palace and his life, he had always believed that he would never really be alone.

      And yet now, thanks to one incident that was impossible to forget, that sense of comfort had been stolen from him and replaced with a stark awareness of his own inner solitude that he could not escape.

      If he were reckless enough to close his eyes he knew that immediately he would be able to conjure up the feel of the thick silk of her wild curls beneath his hand, the scent of her woman’s flesh—sweet and warm, like honey and almonds—the stifled heat of her breath when her body discovered the maleness of his own. And most of all her eyes, so darkly blue that they’d caught exactly the colour of the desert sky overhead just before the sun finally burned into the horizon. A man could lose his reason if he looked too long at such a sky, or into such eyes…

      Was that what he believed had happened to him? Vere grimaced, bringing himself abruptly back to reality. He was a modern man, born in an age of facts and science. The fact that he had turned a corner in a hotel corridor and bumped into a young woman with whom he had shared a kiss—no matter how intensely passionate and intimate, no matter how bitterly regretted—hardly constituted an act of fate that had the power to change his whole life. Unless he himself allowed that to happen, Vere warned himself.

      He strode across the room and pulled at the double doors that opened into the wide corridor beyond it, its floor tiled in the mosaic style that was true Arab fashion.

      His parents had instituted a tradition that these rooms were the preserve of themselves and their children and no one else. Normally Vere relished that privacy, but now for some reason it irked him.

      Was that the reason for the deep-rooted and ever-present ache that pursued him even in his sleep? Tormenting him with images and memories—the smell of her, the feel of her in his arms, the feel of her body against his, the sound of her breathing, the scalding, almost unbearable heat of the moment their lips had met?

      It was just a kiss—that was all…A mere kiss. A nothing—just like the woman with whom he had shared it. She hadn’t even had the type of looks he found physically attractive. The type of women he liked to take to his bed were tall and soignée cool, worldly blondes—women who could satisfy him physically without involving him in the danger of them touching him emotionally.

      Vere had never forgotten that loving a woman with the whole of his heart meant that ultimately he would be broken on the wheel of that love when she abandoned him. He had learned that with his mother’s death, just as he had learned the pain that went with it. Better not to love at all ever again than to risk such agony a second time.

      He still burned with shame to remember the nights he had woken from his sleep to find his face wet with tears and his mother’s name on his lips. A man of fourteen did not cry like a child of four. Emotional weakness was something he had to burn out of himself, he had told himself. And that was exactly what he had done. Until a chance encounter in a hotel corridor had ripped off the mask he had gone through so much trouble to fix to himself, and revealed the unwanted need that was still inside him.

      CHAPTER TWO

      SAM stepped under the surprisingly sophisticated shower in the ‘bathroom’ compartment of the traditional black tent that was her current personal accommodation, soaping her body and taking care not to waste any water when she rinsed herself off—even though she had been assured that, thanks to the efficiency of the Ruler of Zuran’s desalination plants in Zuran, there was no need for them to economise on the water that was driven in to the camp almost daily in huge containers.

      Sam had been over the moon with joy when she’d learned that against all the odds she had secured this so coveted job of working as part of the team of cartographers, anthropologists, statisticians, geologists and historians brought together to embark on what must surely be one of the ambitious and altruistic ventures of its kind.

      As a cartographer, Sam was part of the group that were remapping the borders and traditional camel caravan routes of this magical and ancient part of the world. Just the words ‘the empty quarter’ still brought a shiver of excitement down her spine. After all, hadn’t her youthful desire to come to the Gulf initially sprung from reading about the likes of Gertrude Bell?

      Normally Sam shared her comfortable and well-equipped accommodation with Talia Dean, one of the other three women who were also on the team, but the young American geologist had cut her foot two days ago, and was now hospitalised in Zuran.

      Others before them had mapped the empty quarter and explored it, searching for hidden cities and routes, and the borders between the three Arabian states involved in the present exercise were already agreed and defined. However, modern technology combined with the excellent relations that existed between the three states meant that it was now possible, with satellite information combined with on-the-ground checks, to see what effect five decades of sandstorms that had passed since they were agreed might have had on the borders.

      Now, with their evening meal over and the camp 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