The Sheikh's Blackmailed Mistress. PENNY JORDAN

be accomplished without depriving the tribes of their right to their own way of life. The Emir, not wanting to be excluded even though he was a more old-fashioned and traditional ruler, had also indicated that he wanted to be involved in the project, and as a first step the Ruler of Zuran had funded the cost of a team of cartographers to thoroughly map out the whole of the area.

      It had been the Emir who had suggested that whilst this was being done it might be a good idea to reassess and establish their own individual borders with one another, which met at the empty quarter.

      It was a good idea that made sense—as long as the Emir, who was known for his skill at adapting situations to suit his own ends, did not make use of the re-mapping to claim territory that was not strictly his. During private talks with the Ruler of Zuran, both he and Drax had agreed to keep a very strict eye on any attempts the Emir might make to do that. As part of their agreed preventative measures against this it had been decided that each ruler should take it in turn to be involved ‘on the ground’ with the project, and now it was Vere’s turn to drive out to the border region of the empty quarter.

      A movement on the balcony above him caused Vere to look upwards, to where his twin brother Drax and his wife Sadie were standing. The sight of their happiness and their love for one another touched a place inside him he hadn’t known existed until Drax had fallen in love.

      As twins they had naturally always been close, but the car accident that had killed their parents when the brothers were in their teens had made the bond between them even stronger. In the eyes of the world he, as the elder twin, was the one to step into their father’s shoes, but both he and Drax knew that it had always been their father’s intention that they would share the rulership and the responsibility for Dhurahn. However, every country was expected to have a single figurehead—and that duty rested with him.

      Up until recently the duty had never been one he considered irksome. Where Drax embraced modernity, especially in architecture and design, he preferred to cling to tradition. Where Drax was an extrovert, he was more of an introvert. Where Drax enjoyed the buzz of busy civilisation, he preferred the silent solitude of the desert. They were as all those who knew them best often said, two halves of one whole.

      Like many cultured Arab men, Vere revered poetry and studied the verse of the great poets, but just recently—although he hated having to admit it—the beauty of those words had brought him more pain than pleasure.

      Normally he would have welcomed the chance to spend time in the desert, embracing the opportunity it gave him to be at one with his heritage, but now the knowledge of how close the desert was brought him to those things within himself that he felt the most need to guard. It was making him feel irritable and on edge.

      Because he knew that being in the desert would exacerbate that sense of emptiness and loss that lay within him, and with it his vulnerability?

      Vere swung round angrily, as though to turn his back on his own unwanted thoughts. His pride hated having to acknowledge any kind of flaw, and to Vere what he was experiencing was a weakness. He wanted to wrench it out of himself and then seal it away somewhere, deprived of anything to feed on so it would wither and die.

      But, no matter how hard he fought to deny it any kind of legitimacy, every time he thought he had succeeded in destroying it, it returned—like a multi-headed monster, infuriating him with the mirror it kept holding up to him, reflecting back his faults.

      Generations of proudly arrogant male blood ran through Vere’s veins. The moral code of that blood was burned into him by his own will. He came from a race that knew the value of self-control, of abstinence, of starving the body and the spirit in the eternal battle to survive in a harsh desert environment. Real men, the kind of man Vere had always considered himself to be, did not allow uncontrolled hungers of any kind to rule them. Not ever.

      And certainly not in a hotel corridor, with an unknown woman, and in such a way that—

      He wheeled round again, his body tight with anger, ignoring the harsh glare of the sun as it fell across his face, highlighting the jut of his cheekbones and the searing intensity of his gaze. Not for Vere the protection of designer sunglasses to shadow and colour reality.

      Lust must surely be the most despicable of all human vices. It was certainly the cause of a great deal of human misery. Vere had always considered himself above that kind of selfish weakness. As the Ruler of Dhurahn he had to be. And yet he could not escape from the knowledge that for handful of minutes he had been rendered so oblivious to his position by his own senses that nothing had mattered more to him than his desire for the woman he had held in his arms.

      Another man might have shrugged his shoulders and accepted that he was a man, and thus vulnerable to the temptations of the flesh, but Vere’s pride refused to accept that he was could be so vulnerable, so prone to human frailty. He had fallen below the demands he made upon himself to meet certain standards. Others might not condemn him for doing so, but Vere condemned himself.

      He wasn’t entirely alone, though, in his belief that a man needed to prove he could withstand the most rigorous of tests before he could call himself a man and a leader of other men. There was an ‘other’ to share his belief, and that ‘other’ was the desert.

      The desert had a way of drawing out a man and highlighting both his strengths and his weaknesses. Normally Vere looked forward to the time he could spend in the desert as a means of replenishing his sense of what he truly was—but right now he wasn’t sure that he wanted to submit his current state to that test. He had found himself wanting, and he feared that so too would the desert—that he would no longer be at one with it, just as he could no longer feel at one with himself.

      More than anything he wanted and needed to dismiss the woman and the incident from his mind for ever—and then to deal with the damage she and it had done to his pride.

      But the truth was he couldn’t. The memory of her was branded into him and he couldn’t seem to free himself from it—no matter how much he loathed and resented its presence. And her. He hadn’t slept through a full night since it had happened. He didn’t dare to let himself dream too deeply, fearing that if he did his dreams would be filled by her, and the ache of need he managed to control during the day would overpower him when he was asleep. It was bad enough having to acknowledge that every time he let his concentration slip the memory of her was there, waiting to taunt him. At its worst, that memory had him mentally lifting his hands to her body, determined to push her from him as he should have done all along, but knowing that in reality he would end up binding her to him.

      How was it possible for one woman, a complete stranger, to invade the most private and strongly guarded recesses of his heart and mind and possess them, haunting and tormenting him almost beyond his own endurance?

      It was mid-afternoon. He planned to leave for the desert camp of the surveyors as the sun began to set, so that he and his small entourage could make the most of the cooler night hours in which to travel. He had some work to do first, though, he reminded himself.

      Whilst Drax and his wife occupied the new wing of the palace that Drax had designed for his own occupation before his marriage, Vere’s personal apartments were in the older part of the palace, and had traditionally housed Dhurahn’s rulers through several generations.

      Thus it was that when he stood in the elegantly furnished and decorated private salon 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