The Sheikh's Baby Omnibus (18 page)

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

S
AM
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 most
ambitious and altruistic ventures of its kind.

As a cartographer, Sam was part of the group that were
re-mapping 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 Dhurahni River flowed from
the High Plateau Mountains beyond the empty quarter, travelling many, many
hundreds of miles before emerging in its Plutonian darkness into the State of
Dhurahn.

Why didn’t she think about and focus on
that
, instead of on the memory of a kiss that by rights she should
have forgotten weeks ago?

It had, after all, been three months—well, three months, one
week and four and a half days, to be exact—since she had accidentally bumped
into a robed stranger and ended up...

And ended up what? Obsessing about him three months later? How
rational was that? It wasn’t rational at all, was it? So they had shared an
opportunistic kiss? No doubt both of them had been equally curious about and
aroused by the cultural differences between them. At least that was what Sam was
valiantly trying to tell herself. And perhaps she might have succeeded if she
hadn’t been idiotic enough immediately after the incident to fall into the
hormone-baited trap of convincing herself that she had met and fallen in love
with the one true love of her life, and that she was doomed to ache and yearn
for him for the rest of her life.

What foolishness. A work of fiction worthy of any
Arabian Nights’ Tale,
and even less realistic.

What had happened was an incident that at best should have
simply been forgotten, and at worst should have caused her to feel a certain
amount of shame.

Shame? For sharing a mere kiss with a stranger? That kind of
thinking was totally archaic. Better and far more honest, surely, to admit the
truth.

So what
was
the truth? That she had
enjoyed the experience?

Enjoyed
it?

If only it had been the kind of ephemeral, easy, lighter than
light experience that could be dismissed as merely enjoyable.

But all it had been was a simple kiss, she told herself
angrily.

A simple kiss was easily forgotten; it did not bury itself so
deeply in the senses that just the act of breathing in an unguarded moment was
enough to reawaken the feelings it had aroused. It did not wake a person from
their sleep because she was drowning in the longing it had set free, like a
subterranean river in full flood. It did not possess a person and her senses to
the extent that she was possessed.

Here she went again, Sam recognised miserably. She was
twenty-four years old—a qualified professional in a demanding profession, a
woman who had so longed to train in her chosen field that she had deliberately
refused to allow herself the distraction of emotional and physical relationships
with the opposite sex, and had managed to do so without more than a few brief
pangs of regret.

But now it was as though all she had denied herself had
suddenly decided to fight back and demand recompense. As though the woman in her
was demanding recompense for what she had been denied. Yes, that was it. That
was the reason she was feeling the way she was, she decided with relief. What
she was feeling had nothing really to do with the man himself, even
though...

Even though what? Even though her body remembered every hard,
lean line of his, every place it had touched his, every muscle, every breath,
every pulse of the blood in his veins and the beat of his heart? And that was
before she even began to think about his kiss, or the way she had felt as if
fate had taken her by the hand and brought her face-to-face with her destiny and
her soul mate. She was sure she would never have allowed herself to be subjected
to such emotional intensity if she had stayed at home in England. Her loving but
pragmatic parents, with their busy and practical lives, had certainly not
brought her up to think in such terms.

If she was to re-experience that kiss now—that moment when she
had looked into those green eyes and known that this was
it
, that neither she nor her life would ever be the same again, that
somehow by some means beyond either her comprehension or her control, she was
now
his
—it would probably not be anything like as
erotic or all-powerful as she remembered. Imagination was a wonderful thing, she
told herself. That she was still thinking about something she ought to have
forgotten within hours of it happening only proved that she had far too much of
that dangerous quality. After all, it wasn’t as though she was ever likely to
see him again—a stranger met by chance in a hotel corridor in a foreign
country.

Instead of thinking about him, what she ought to be thinking
about was tomorrow, when Sheikh Fasial bin Sadir, the cousin and representative
of the Ruler of Zuran, who had been here at the camp since they had first
arrived to oversee everything, would be handing over control of the project to
Vereham al a’ Karim bin Hakar, Sheikh of Dhurahn. In turn, in three months’
time, he would be replaced by the nominated representative of the Emir of
Khulua.

Sheikh Sadir was a career diplomat who had made it his business
to ensure that both the camp and the work they were doing were run in a
well-ordered and harmonious fashion. He had stressed to them—in perfect
English—in an on-site briefing, that all three Rulers were determined to ensure
that none of the small bands of nomads remaining in the empty quarter should in
any way feel threatened by the work they were doing. That was why each working
party would have with them an Arab guide, who would be able to speak with the
nomads and reassure them about what was going on.

He had also gone on to tell them that whilst each state
technically had rights over their own share of the empty quarter, where it came
within their borders, it was accepted by all of them that the nomads had the
right to roam freely across those borders.

Sam knew nothing about the Ruler of Dhurahn, but she certainly
hoped he would prove to be as easy to work under as Sheikh Sadir. After all, she
was already experiencing the problems that came with working alongside someone
who was antagonistic towards her.

She gave a faint sigh. From the moment he had arrived four
weeks ago, to take the place of one of the original members of the team who’d
had to return home for personal reasons, James Reynolds had set out to
wrong-foot her. He was two years her junior and newly qualified, and she had
initially put his determination to question everything she said and did as a
mere youthful desire to make his mark. So she hadn’t checked him—more for the
sake of his pride than anything else. She had assumed that he would soon realise
that here they worked as a team, not as individuals trying to score points off
one another, but instead of recognising that he was at fault James had started
to become even more vocal in his criticism of her.

Sam really regretted ever having mentioned to James in
conversation how interested she was in the origins of the river that flowed into
and through Dhurahn. Since she had James had continually made references to it
that implied she was spending the time she was paid for checking the status of
the borders in trying, as James put it, ‘to mess around with the source of a
river that we all know is there’, and in doing so avoiding doing any ‘proper
work’. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

‘Take no notice of him,’ Talia had tried to comfort her before
she had injured herself. ‘He obviously has issues with you, and that’s his
problem, not yours.’

‘The trouble is that he’s
making
it
my problem,’ Sam had told her. ‘I really resent the way he’s making such an
issue of my interest in the source of the river—as though he thinks I’ve got
some kind of ulterior motive.’

‘I should just ignore him, if I were you,’ Talia had told her.
‘I mean, we’ve all heard the legend of how the river was first supposed to have
been found—and who, in all honesty, wouldn’t find it fascinating?’

Sam had nodded her head.

The story was that, centuries earlier, the forebears of
Dhurahn’s current Ruler, desert nomads, had been caught in a sandstorm and lost
their way. After days of wandering in the desert, unable to find water, they had
prayed to Allah to save them. When they had finished praying their leader had
looked up and seen a bird perched on a rocky outcrop.

‘Look,’ he had commanded his people. ‘Where there is life there
must be water. Allah be praised!’

As he had spoken he had brought his fist down on a rock, and
miraculously water had spouted from that rock to become a river that watered the
whole of Dhurahn—the land he had claimed for his people.

‘It’s been proved now, of course, that the river runs
underground for hundreds of miles before it reaches Dhurahn,’ she’d reminded the
other girl. ‘The legend probably springs from the fact that a fissure of some
kind must have allowed a spring to bubble up from underground. And luckily for
Dhurahn it happened on their land.’

Dawn! Here in
the desert it burst upon the senses fully formed, taking you hostage to its
miracle, Vere acknowledged, as he brought his four-by-four to a halt so that he
could watch it.

Naturally his was the first vehicle in the convoy, since it
would be unthinkable for him to travel in anyone’s dust. He had, in fact, left
the others several miles behind him when he’d turned off the road that led to an
oasis where the border-mapping team had set up camp, to drive across the desert
itself instead.

As teenagers, both he and Drax had earned their spurs in the
testosterone-fuelled young Arab male ‘sport’ of testing their skill against the
treachery of the desert’s sand dunes. Like others before them, they had both
overturned a handful of times before they had truly mastered the art of dune
driving—something which no one could do with the same panache as a
desert-dwelling Arab.