The Sheikh's Baby Omnibus (27 page)

As for Sam herself... Vere frowned. He would make sure she was
well reimbursed for her trouble, and that she knew she would be. All she needed
to know was that he desired her and that he wanted her to be with him. If she
was greedy and immoral enough to accept the Emir’s bribe then she was hardly
likely to turn down his offer, was she? A rich lover, ready to pay for the
pleasure of having her in his bed, wasn’t something she was going to turn her
back on, was it? It was probably the kind of offer she had been hoping for from
the start.

But, no matter how much he underpinned his decision with such
thoughts, Vere knew that something deep inside him recoiled from it and felt
tainted by it.

She had shown such trust and innocence last night, such
sweetness in the way she had given herself to him so freely. Or had she? Had he
simply allowed himself to think that because it was what he wanted to think? If
things had been different, if
she
had been
different, then his own future could have been so much happier than he had ever
dreamed.

It was pointless thinking like that, Vere warned himself. He
had a duty to do what must be done to protect Dhurahn.

‘It’s time we returned to the main camp,’ he told Sam.

Sam nodded her head—but when she turned on her heel to start
walking back to the four-by-four she slipped on the pebbles and lost her
balance.

She could feel herself falling and cried out automatically—only
to feel the breath leaking from her lungs as Vere reacted to her plight,
catching hold of her and supporting her.

She looked up at him, intending only to thank him, she assured
herself, but somehow her gaze slithered as helplessly to his mouth as her feet
had done on the pebbles. And once there she couldn’t remove it. Instead her
imagination burned her senses with vivid images of a cool deep pool of water in
which their naked bodies entwined as they swam together, before they stopped to
stand body to body in its shallows, their hands and lips discovering one
another.

‘No...’

But it was too late. As though he had shared her intimate
vision Vere was kissing her once, then twice, and then over and over again, as
though his hunger for her was such that nothing could assuage it. Just like her
hunger for him.

And when he did release her it was only to take her hand and
lead her back to the four-by-four.

Neither of them spoke as he drove them back to the small camp.
There was no need, Sam thought. She knew exactly what was in his mind, what he
ached and yearned for, because the same thing was in her own.

In the cool shadows of her tent she watched as he undressed
her, his lean long-fingered hands trembling visibly, but no more than her own
fingers did when it was her turn to reach out and touch him.

Her body, knowing the delights ahead after last night, pulsed
with eagerness and longing. Shrugging off the last of her clothes, she reached
up to him, unable to wait any longer, urging him down towards her.

Outside the tent the sun scorched the earth in an embrace that
was almost too much for it to bear. Inside, Sam lay in Vere’s arms and felt that
her desire for him was almost too much for her senses to bear. Several times
tears scalded her eyes, and she cried out when Vere’s touch carried her too
close to her own pleasure.

‘We mustn’t,’ she whispered to him. ‘The risk...’

‘Trust me, there will be no risk,’ Vere soothed her, assuring
himself that there would be no danger if he contented himself with simply
pleasuring her and taking his own pleasure from that. He kissed her breasts and
her belly, then moved lower, the tip of his tongue inscribing circles of
indescribably intense pleasure against her thigh.

When he reached the swollen lips of her sex he stroked his
fingertip along the length of its secrets. She was moist and ready, quickening
to his touch, her flesh as sweet as fruit ripened to the moment of perfection.
His hunger to taste her thundered through him, driving him beyond what he
thought he knew of himself and what he was. It stripped away everything but his
own need, forcing it and him into a single desire.

He tasted her with his tongue and then his lips. But even that
wasn’t enough to satisfy his need.

Unable to withstand her own pleasure, Sam cried out, her back
arching and inviting. The feel of Vere sliding his body the length of hers made
her sob with relief and cling to his shoulders. There was no need for her to
urge him, though. He was already surging into her, filling her and completing
her. He drove them both through their pleasure and beyond it to another level,
and then another, each plateau more intense than the last, until finally all
boundaries disappeared and they were at one with the universe, both of them
oblivious to the risk they had taken.

Sam surfaced slowly
through the
layers of sleep that, when she had first closed her eyes, had cocooned her as
securely as Vere’s arms. Her body felt boneless and relaxed, and at the same
time heavily sweet with the echoes of pleasure that clung to her like an
invisible veil of sensation. She had never felt happier, nor more aware of how
vulnerable she was. Of how finely balanced her emotions and senses were on the
see saw edge of the intimacy she had shared with Vere. The heights and the
depths were both there within her reach. With a single smile Vere could make her
soar up to one and plunge down to the other.

Vere!

He was seated on the edge of the bed, fully dressed now, she
realised, but with his head still bare. She could smell the freshly showered
scent of his skin separating him from her, because her body was still perfumed
with their intimacy.

‘This can’t be allowed to continue. For the Ruler of Dhurahn
such clandestine behaviour is not fitting. Matters cannot continue as they are.
Changes will have to be made.’

His harsh words plunged Sam down into the darkness of loss and
despair. He was going to have her dismissed from her job, she recognised
miserably.

She wanted to protest, but how could she? What could she say?
No matter how much both of them might try to deny it, it was obvious that the
sexual chemistry between them was too powerful for them to resist.

‘I refuse to be forced to creep into your quarters under cover
of darkness and then have to leave them again before the break of day, like some
thief taking what he should not have. Instead I propose that you become my
official mistress, and that I publicly acknowledge you as such. You will return
with me to Dhurahn, where you will have your own suite of rooms in the royal
palace. Your status will be recognised and respected. It is a great honour in
the eyes of our people for a woman to be chosen to be their Ruler’s mistress.
You will share my life and my bed for as long as we continue to desire one
another, and no one will dare to question our relationship.’

‘You want me
to be your mistress?’
Sam could barely take in what he was saying, though she could feel the
hollowness inside her filling with pain.

His
mistress
. How cold and unloving
he made it sound—a union purely for sex, with no love or emotional bonding
shared between them. There were no words from him to reassure her that, even if
his position meant that he did not want to marry her, at least he cared enough
to understand how important it was to her to know that he felt love for her.

‘It seems a logical solution to a situation which we both know
now is becoming untenable.’

She ought to turn him down and walk—no, run away from him just
as far as she could, if only for the sake of her own pride. But how would she
feel once she had done that? How would she feel back home in England, knowing
she could have been with him? Would her pride sustain her then, when she was
lying awake at night hungering for him?

It shocked her that she could feel like this, that there could
even be any question of what she should do. What had happened to her inner
belief that it was only within a secure and mutually committed, loving
relationship that she would experience true sexual pleasure and satisfaction?
What had happened to the conviction that for her a relationship without those
things just wasn’t worth having? That without being loved and loving in return,
without being valued and valuing in return, there was no way she would want to
be with a partner?

Vere offered her none of those things. Even his desire for her
was a desire she felt he resented and in part blamed her for—a need which, when
he wasn’t being intimate with her, she suspected he felt extremely hostile
towards.

Surely knowing all of these things her logic and common sense
could only urge her in one direction. That direction being the opposite one from
the one Vere was taking.

By rights she ought to be refusing him, telling him quite
categorically that she had no wish to become his mistress. His
mistress
, she reminded herself. Not his lover. Even
in choosing his wording Vere was offering her a position in his life which made
them unequal.

But maybe it was understandable that he should withhold himself
emotionally from her. A man in his position would have to be wary and careful.
Women must throw themselves at him in their dozens. He had already accused her
of doing exactly that, and said he wanted nothing more to do with her, but he
had been the one who had instigated their lovemaking, and there Sam could find
no fault with him at all. There, he had given her everything she had dreamed of
in her wildest dreams and more.

She knew instinctively that it just wasn’t possible for any
other man to take her to such heights or show her such pleasures. No matter what
she did from now on no one could ever match the sensuality of Vere’s lovemaking.
Her body would forever have desire for it and for him. Why not allow it to have
what pleasure it could, even if she knew that ultimately that pleasure would be
brought to an end?

She could live like that, couldn’t she? She could endure the
heights of sexual delight, knowing that what they had already shared had tipped
her over the edge of fantasising about Vere into the painful reality of loving
him, whilst Vere felt nothing emotionally for her. Was she sure she had the
right degree of strength and self-discipline to separate her sexual fulfilment
from the emotional barrenness of the relationship he was proposing without it
destroying her?

But what if with time Vere should grow to love her? What if the
sexual pleasure they shared led him to fall in love with her? Could she really
bear to turn her back on the chance that that might happen?

The chance? It was a very small chance!

Yes, but it was there, wasn’t it? And whilst it was there she
could hope. Wasn’t her love for him worth taking a risk for?

She gulped in a shallow breath of air and then exhaled, trying
to steady her nerves.

‘Some people might think it’s an insult to a woman to offer her
such a role,’ she told Vere lightly.

‘Might they? I doubt it. On the contrary. My opinion is that
people will view the fact that I am publicly acknowledging you as a mark of my
respect for you. Surely it is more insulting by far for me to be with you in
secret, as though I feel that being with you shames me? As my mistress you will
have status and position. Financially—’

‘No!’ Sam stopped him sharply. ‘I don’t want money to come into
this. If I agree, then it is because...’ She looked proudly at him. ‘It is
because I want you, not your money.’

‘You say that, but if it is true then why do you hesitate?
After all, I already know you want me.’

He had cut the ground from beneath her so neatly she had fallen
straight into his trap, Sam acknowledged. She opened her mouth and then closed
it again. Shaking her head, she finally admitted, ‘Since you put it like that,
then I don’t suppose I can refuse, can I?’

‘No,’ Vere agreed softly. ‘You can’t. And nor would I have
allowed you to do so.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

S
AM
suspected that it wasn’t just the
motion of the helicopter Vere had summoned to transport them swiftly to Dhurahn
that was making her feel slightly dizzy. From the second she had given her
agreement to Vere’s proposition things had moved so fast that Sam had barely had
time to catch her breath at all.

When she had protested that she needed time to explain things
to her colleagues, Vere had told her arrogantly that no explanation would be
needed. The very fact that she was with him would be enough. And of course he
had been right.

Anne, who had come to see her whilst she had been packing, had
shaken her head and taken hold of Sam’s hands in hers to say, almost maternally,
‘Oh, my dear, are you sure?’

‘That I’m doing the right thing? No,’ Sam had admitted, choking
back a small laugh. ‘But I’m sure that if I don’t go with him I shall regret
it.’

‘You’re in love with him,’ Anne had guessed. ‘Well, I can’t
blame you. But these men are autocrats, my dear, and their way of life...’

‘I know it won’t last for ever,’ Sam had told her bravely.

Anne had patted her hand without reassuring her, saying only,
‘I do so hope that you won’t end up being hurt.’

Would she end up being hurt? Sam wondered now, as they flew
over the fertile area of land irrigated by the Dhurahni River. Or would the
miracle she longed for occur and Vere fall in love with her?

Down below them she could see fields of crops, olive groves,
and a wide, straight arterial road.

‘Our farmers grow the crops that feed the tourists who flock to
Zuran,’ Vere told her, leaning across her slightly, his body hard against the
softness of her own.

She had already noticed the respect with which she had been
treated by the men who had accompanied Vere to the camp when he had escorted her
from her tent to the helicopter. She shivered a little now, still not really
able to take in the public change in her circumstances. All she wanted was Vere
the man, as her lover and her love, but Vere was more than Vere the man; he was
also the powerful Ruler. How would she fit in to his environment?

They were flying into what Sam assumed must be Dhurahn’s
airport.

Sam looked uncertainly at Vere, suddenly feeling very
vulnerable and anxious.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ she asked him. ‘I mean,
with you being Dhurahn’s Ruler...and your brother...what will he—’

‘Drax will thoroughly approve.’

Sam could see how Vere’s expression softened and lightened when
he mentioned his twin. She felt a small pang of jealousy. Vere loved his
brother. She so desperately wanted him to love her. She knew so little about
Vere’s life, but she felt unable to ask too many questions. What did that tell
her about the imbalance in their relationship?

The helicopter had come to rest. Vere touched her arm,
indicating that she was to follow him.

By the time they were standing on the concrete runway a vehicle
had pulled up in front of them, the driver getting out and salaaming to Vere
before opening the car doors for them.

Sam didn’t know quite what she had expected. Perhaps not
exactly outriders and half an army, but certainly rather more formality.

She was even more bewildered when, instead of leaving the
runway, they were driven over to a waiting plane. She looked at Vere
questioningly.

‘We’re going to Zuran,’ he told her, as they were ushered out
of the car and towards a waiting plane, where he stopped to say something to the
pilot as Sam was escorted on board by the flight attendants.

Sam had never flown in a privately owned jet before.

‘The flight time to Zuran is one hour,’ the male flight
attendant was telling her as he offered her a glass of champagne, which she
refused. She felt giddy enough already, without drinking alcohol.

She stared round the interior of the plane, her eyes widening
at the luxury of its cream carpet and blue-grey walls. Instead of rows of seats
there were plush-looking leather chairs and a desk.

‘If you wish to rest, there is a bedroom here,’ the steward
continued, opening a door and ushering her towards it. Uncertainly Sam looked
inside. The bedroom was luxuriously appointed, with its own
en suite
bathroom, and it was all Sam could do not to betray just
how out of her depth she was beginning to feel in the midst of so much luxury.
Would Vere expect to consummate their new relationship here? Her face began to
burn and her heart pumped too fast.

‘Perhaps you would like something else to drink?’ the steward
asked

‘Just water...thank you,’ Sam answered and then tensed, knowing
that Vere had entered the cabin even though she couldn’t see him.

She turned round, her heart racing, whilst the steward made a
deep obeisance. She waited for him to leave before she burst out shakily, ‘I
don’t think I can do this. It was different in the desert, but I’m not—this...’
She gestured helplessly around the cabin. ‘This kind of thing...I don’t
think...I don’t know anything about royal protocol, and even if I did that’s not
the way I want to live.’

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Vere told her dismissively.

He couldn’t afford for her to be having second thoughts now,
and ruining his plans. Not when he was already aching for the hot sweet pleasure
of holding her through the night, knowing she was his. Vere dismissed his
unwelcome thoughts angrily. It was not for that reason that he was doing
this.

‘Dhurahn isn’t Zuran,’ he told Sam. ‘We live relatively simply.
Now, sit down and make yourself comfortable. We’ll be taking off soon.’

Obediently Sam found that she was subsiding into one of the
leather chairs and accepting the glass of water the steward had brought for
her.

Their take-off was smooth and swift, and by the time they had
eaten the meal the steward served them they had begun their descent into
Zuran.

Here, though, when they left the aircraft they were met by
several important-looking officials, then ushered to a waiting limousine with
blacked-out windows and a motorcycle escort, the Zurani flag flying on its
bonnet.

Sam hadn’t thought to ask why they had come to Zuran, assuming
it must be on some kind of state business, and she wasn’t expecting it when they
pulled up outside the entrance to what she knew to be Zuran’s most exclusive and
expensive shopping mall.

Uniformed flunkeys held open the doors for them, but when they
stepped into the air-conditioned marble-floored mall it was completely empty of
shoppers.

Bewildered, Sam turned to look at Vere.

‘You’re now my official mistress,’ he told her. ‘It will shame
me if you are not appropriately clothed. The Ruler of Zuran has kindly offered
to make the facilities of this mall available to us, so that you can be provided
with all that is necessary.’

‘You mean you’ve brought me here to buy me clothes?’ Sam
demanded angrily, too shocked to hide her feelings.

Vere frowned. She sounded more displeased than pleased. It was
his understanding that women liked nothing better than a new designer wardrobe,
and it irked him slightly that Sam was not reacting with more enthusiasm and
appreciation.

‘You can’t have imagined that what you have will be suitable
for your new role. Naturally my people will expect you to be dressed as befits
that position.’

Sam wanted to tell him that she hated the thought of him paying
for her clothes because it demeaned and hurt her, it turned her into an
object—the appropriately dressed mistress—but a stunningly beautifully dressed
young woman was coming towards them, making any further private conversation
impossible.

‘Highness,’ she greeted Vere respectfully, before turning to
Sam. ‘I am to be your personal dresser, madam. If you would like to come this
way, we have arranged a private room for you in which you can relax whilst
clothes are brought for your inspection.’

At last it
was over.

Sam refused to look at Vere as a team of sales assistants
wrapped her new clothes in tissue paper. Her eyes felt dry, burning with the
shamed tears she refused to let herself cry.

The clothes Vere had bought for her
were
beautiful—exquisite Chanel suits and tops, Jimmy Choo shoes, Vera Wang
evening wear, and so much more, all of it designer label and all of it earning
only a brief nod of the head from Vere after she had been dressed in them and
then paraded in front of him.

With each successive humiliating nod of his head Sam had felt
her outrage give way to misery, until her misery had been overtaken by what she
felt now. The bleak certainty that she couldn’t do this.

Vere frowned as he watched Sam’s reaction to the growing pile
of shiny bags and boxes. The more the quantity grew, the more she seemed to
withdraw into herself—so much so that she was actually physically stepping back
from the garments and from him. Her normal warmly vivacious expression had been
replaced with blank withdrawal as she focused her gaze away from both her new
clothes and him.

Vere might never have been responsible for providing a woman
with a brand-new designer wardrobe before, but even without that experience he
knew enough to recognise that this was not the reaction he might have
expected.

Half a dozen men dressed in livery that wouldn’t have disgraced
a Hollywood extravaganza representing the court of an
Arabian Nights
Caliph had been summoned to carry Sam’s new clothes.
And it would take a fleet of limousines to ferry everything to the airport, Sam
reflected bleakly, forcing herself to smile at the girls who had served her.
After all, it wasn’t their fault that she felt the way she did. It was her own.

She had been so naïve, never envisaging anything like this when
she had let her heart rule her head and agreed to enter into this relationship
with Vere. She was now beginning to recognise she would not be able to endure
it. She didn’t want to be his mistress, with all that that implied, she wanted
to be his lover... No, that wasn’t true, was it? What she really wanted, she
acknowledged wretchedly, was to be his love, as he was hers. But she had already
told herself that that was impossible. She had already said to herself that she
accepted the limitations of what he was offering her and that she could live
with them. Was she now saying that she had changed her mind and she
couldn’t?

Tears were burning her eyes behind the protection of her
sunglasses. She felt so very alone. Her parents, living in their neat detached
house in a London suburb, would never understand any of this.

She hesitated in mid-step and, as though he sensed her desire
to flee, Vere reached out and took hold of her hand. He continued to hold it
until they had reached the waiting limousine.

They got into it in mutual silence, and the first thing Vere
did once they were inside it was close the partition that separated them from
the driver, ensuring they could speak without being overheard.

‘I can’t do this,’ Sam burst out as soon as Vere had closed the
screen.

Vere’s mouth compressed. ‘You have already agreed.’

‘That was when I thought...before...’

‘Before what? Nothing has changed.’

‘Of course it has. Have you any idea how humiliating it was to
parade in front of you in those clothes, knowing that you would be paying for
them, knowing that because I’m your mistress everyone will assume that you are
paying me for sex.’

‘That is often the assumption when a man takes a mistress.’

‘That depends on how you define the word “mistress”. I assumed
that what you meant was that you wanted us to be lovers. Everything was so
different when we were in the desert. There we were just two people who...who
wanted one another. I love the desert. There’s something so pure and pared-down
about it. It makes you confront things about yourself—’ Sam broke off and shook
her head. ‘Everything seemed so right there. Just the two of us and the desert.
Nothing more. That’s all I want from you, Vere. The right to be with you because
it’s what we both want. I don’t want to be dressed up like...like an expensively
wrapped trophy... .’

Vere could hear the pain in her voice. It touched a place
within him that he had thought protected from any touch. The desert stripped
away the folly of consumerism and status and reduced a man to blood and bone and
flesh. It demanded that a man meet it with only that. One either loved the
desert or one feared it. Vere loved it.

He could feel the echo of Sam’s emotional words striking a
chord within him. It pierced the hard, protective wall he had built around his
own emotions. Unwanted, dangerous thoughts and feelings pressed against that
barrier, threatening it, fuelling Vere’s anger against the woman who had caused
them.

‘It is too late to change your mind now,’ he told her.

He knew that news of their shopping trip would reach the ears
of the Emir, and that it would add substance to the fiction he wanted to create
that Sam was indeed his mistress.

Ignoring the glossy
magazines that
had appeared in the jet’s cabin whilst they had been in the shopping mall, Sam
picked up the paperback she had bought for herself instead.

She had no idea where all the new clothes were, nor did she
care. She felt weighed down with her own despair.

When Vere had asked her to be his official mistress she had
envisaged long hours of sexual intimacy—not shopping trips followed by Vere
involving himself in paperwork without so much as attempting to even kiss her.
Admittedly the bedroom of his private jet couldn’t provide the privacy she would
have preferred, but if he really wanted her surely he would have managed to find
some excuse to draw her in there to hold her and kiss her? He must know how
alien and overwhelming she was finding all of this. After all, there couldn’t be
many young women in her position who wouldn’t have been feeling the same.