Penny Jordan - Prince of the Desert

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

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CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EPILOGUE

GWYNNETH exhaled with exhaustion as she paid off the taxi driver and stood looking up at the building in front of her—the building that contained her father’s apartment. No, not her father’s apartment any more, she reminded herself bleakly, but her own. Her father was dead, and in his will he had left all his assets to her.

And his responsibilities? He might not have willed those to her, but she nonetheless felt morally obliged to make them her own. Her slender shoulders bowed slightly. The last few weeks had taken their toll on her. Her father’s fatal heart attack had been shockingly unexpected. It might be true that they had never shared a traditional father and daughter relationship. How could they have? But that didn’t mean she hadn’t cared about him. He was—had been—her father, after all.

Yes, it was true that after her parents’ divorce her father had virtually abandoned her into the unloving care of her mother and stepfather. It was true that he had been absent from her life for most of the time she had been growing up, whilst he pursued his own hedonistic lifestyle and travelled the world. And it was also true that his absence had only been punctuated by sporadic visits to the small private boarding school where she had been left and virtually brought up by its kindly elderly headmistress. But of the two of them it was her mother who had hurt her the most. When a person had wealth and power, that person could break the rules and then remake them. And her stepfather was both very wealthy and very powerful.

Unlike her father, whose main assets had been his charismatic personality and his persuasive tongue. A rueful smile curved her lips as she remembered how he had boasted to her that it was via that latter asset that he had acquired this apartment in the Persian Gulf Kingdom of Zuran.

‘The block it’s in is right in the middle of a new marina development. I’m telling you, Gwynneth, I could have sold it ten times—no, a hundred times over, for double what I paid for it,’ he had told her excitedly.

Gwynneth hadn’t known very much about the desert kingdom of Zuran then—but she did now. Which was why she was here.

She shivered a little in the almost disturbingly sensual warmth of the Arabian Gulf night. It wrapped round her like silken gauze, teasing her skin with its subtle caress, cloaking the intimacy of its effect on her with its darkness, like a mystery lover whose face was hidden from her, his touch all the more erotic for being unknown. A deep shudder gripped her body as she tried to pull down the defensive inner blinds she always used to block out such sensual thoughts. She had fought all her adult female life to separate herself from the dangers of the deep, dark core of sexuality she had inherited from her father, which she tried so hard to deny and ignore.

So why, knowing that, had she reacted so emotionally to his recent claim that she was devoid of sexuality, and thus deprived of the pleasure of enjoying that sexuality? That was what she wanted, what she had chosen for herself, and so his words should have brought her pleasure instead of making her searingly conscious of what she was missing.

It was the stress of the last few weeks that was weakening those defences, somehow allowing an unfamiliar hunger and need to well up so forcefully inside her, she assured herself wearily. It was gone midnight here in Zuran, even though it was still only early evening at home.

She lifted her hand to push the slightly ‘boho’ tangle of long red-gold curls back off her face as she closed the sometimes too eloquent green eyes that, even at twenty-six, she could still not always control, and which could so easily betray what she was feeling. Like her dark eyelashes and her creamy skin, they were her heritage from her Irish mother, just as the delicacy of her bone structure and her supple, slender figure had come down from her paternal grandmother—at least according to her father. He had certainly once been a very handsome man. Once…

The familiar pain-cum-anger-cum-anguish knotted the muscles of her stomach. Her eyes opened, shadowed by hurtful memories. As a child she had often wondered what exactly she had done to deserve parents who did not love her. As an adult she had learned to tell herself that it was their inability to love one another that was responsible for their inability to love her, the child they had accidentally produced but never wanted.

Her mother had remarried within a year of the divorce, departing for Australia with her new husband to make a new life for herself. Her father, freed from a marriage he’d claimed he had never wanted, had roamed the world drinking, gambling, and on rare occasions turning up in England to see her—invariably when he was stoned, broke or drunk, and sometimes all three. A member of the hippy generation, her father had still in middle age embraced drugs and drink and the ‘free love’ culture. Had done. But no longer did—no longer could. Despite his lifestyle she had still been shocked by his death. A heart attack, the hospital had informed her, his daughter and next of kin.

His daughter, but not his only child. How could a man who had abandoned one child because he hadn’t wanted her have so carelessly fathered a second?

She had had no idea of what was to happen when he’d telephoned out of the blue and told her that he was in London and staying at one of its most exclusive hotels. She had gone straight from the City bank where she worked as an analyst to the hotel where, to her surprise, she had discovered he was staying in not merely a room but a suite. Then had come the discovery that he had not come to London on his own, but had brought with him his Filipina girlfriend, Teresa, and their baby son.

‘Teresa looks so young,’ Gwynneth had protested, unable to conceal her distaste at the thought of such a young and pretty girl with a man as life-worn and jaded as her father.

‘She’s twenty-two,’ he had told her carelessly.

Four years younger than she was herself. Her expression had obviously given her away, because he had shrugged his shoulders and told her unashamedly, ‘You can look like that all you want. So I enjoy sex. So what’s wrong with that? I never thought any kid of mine would turn out to be a sexless prude. Sex is a natural, normal, adult human appetite that should be a source of pleasure, not hang-ups. You don’t know what you’re missing. If I were you—’