ALEXANDRA SELLERS - Beloved Sheikh

As a tableau it ranked with the most beautiful miniature paintings in the prince’s own extensive collection. Even the Companions were not proof against it. Everyone in the room was frozen in some posture, half with their arms in their robes. All eyes were on them. If she were not so covered with embarrassment, she could have laughed at the picture of so many startled, curious, gawking faces.

But it was her own reaction that was the danger. Zara felt molten, like the golden robe, electrified by the man’s touch, his whispered words.

“I—I’m so sorry,” she stammered, struggling from his grasp to her feet. “I don’t know what made me so clumsy.”

“Do you not?” he smiled. He solicitously helped her to gain her feet.

“Ah... well...” She hardly knew what she was saying. Trying for calm, for the ordinary—so far as anything in this remarkable evening could be called ordinary—Zara lifted the robe and put it on.

It was breathtakingly beautiful, utterly rich and luxurious. It fanned out at the back in a broad curving sweep to the floor, while in front it was cut shorter, the hem just skimming her toes. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Trying to give her breathing room, Gordon sat down and said to Prince Rafi, “I think I should tell you that one of our team saw a group of mounted bandits the other morning. There seemed to be quite a number of them, and I’m afraid our security may not be sufficient.”

Prince Rafi’s head straightened with surprise. “Bandits!” he exclaimed. “So near! We do not often see Jalal on our side of the river. His headquarters is in my brother’s land. Where, exactly, were they seen?”

“At the wadi. Members of the team go there to relax away from the heat whenever they get a chance. Everyone has been warned not to go off the site alone, but I’m afraid the waterfall there is very tempting.”

“At the waterfall?” Rafi repeated, in a different voice. He turned his head towards Zara, who had sat down to listen. “When, and how many?”

Zara smiled. “It was three days ago. I didn’t stop to count their numbers. I just took one look and ran! But I think there were ten or twelve, anyway. All on the most magnificent horses.”

He was watching her intently. “Were you frightened?”

“Terrified,” she agreed without emphasis.

“Their captain—did you see him?”

“I think so,” Zara told him, repressing a shiver at the memory of the bandit chief’s gaze and her own reaction to it. Not much different from the response Prince Rafi raised in her. Maybe she had a weakness. “There certainly was one man with an air of command.”

“And he—did he see you?”

That passionate black gaze rose up in her mind’s eye, and, pressing her lips together, Zara only nodded.

“But you were not taken? Twelve men and you escaped?”

“I don’t think he—they tried. I am sure if they had ridden out of the enclosure and around—well, on horseback they could have caught up with me before I got back to the tents.” Her mouth was dry, she didn’t know why. Something she had noticed but which hadn’t filtered through to her conscious mind was making her uneasy.

“Then he is a fool,” said Prince Rafi. “When a man sees what he wants, should he not take pains to achieve it instantly?”

Zara smiled. “Maybe he didn’t see what he wanted,” she said, and shivered, knowing it was a lie. The bandit chief had wanted her. There must be something about her that appealed to the Arab temperament, too.

A marriage made in heaven, then, she told herself dryly.

“What man would not have wanted you, so beautiful under the fall of water, your limbs bare and your skin so silken? He must have been jealous even of the eyes of his companions for the fact that they also saw the vision. If he did not pursue you across the sand and catch you up on his horse then, it can only be because he had other plans to obtain you. Did not King Khosrow fall madly in love with Shirin when he caught sight of her bathing? And he stopped at nothing to gain her.”

It was the naked passion in his eyes, more than anything else, that told her the truth. He had been veiling it from her all evening, letting her see only a portion of what was there. But now she saw again the black flame of complete and determined need burn up behind his gaze.

Her hand snapping to her open mouth, Zara gasped, an electric sound that caused conversation everywhere to stop. Her hand slowly lowered, while her eyes gazed helplessly into his. Take away the white keffiyeh that had enwrapped the bandit’s head and chin...

“A man would do all in his power,” Prince Rafi promised her softly.

“It was you!” she whispered.

His black eyes fixed hers, letting her read the truth. That was the reason, then, for the prince’s sudden interest in the team, for this dinner . . . she saw it all..That was why he had singled her out.

His Serene Highness Sayed Hajji Rafi Jehangir ibn Daud ibn Hassan al Quraishi was the man at the wadi she had thought the bandit chief.

Four

Zara succeeded in tearing her eyes away from the prince’s at last, and glanced up to see that the gaze of every member of the archaeological team was rivetted on her. The Companions, more socially skilled, pretended not to notice, and were making light conversation to their inattentive neighbours.

She really couldn’t think. She needed air, and solitude.

“Excuse me,” she said. Struggling to her feet again, the coat billowing and glowing behind her, Zara walked down the length of the room, past little clusters of people who tried to cover their fascination with chatter but could not help following her with their eyes.

Outside, the full moon glowed on the broad desert, its sweeping dunes, the tents of the archaeological team in the distance, and closer, the outcrop where the tall palms that surrounded the pool and waterfall were just visible above the rocks.

Pressing her hands to her hot cheeks, the robe billowing behind her, Zara moved towards it. There was a narrow defile in the rocks from this direction, dark now with moonshadow, but she knew her way through. Soon she was inside, listening to the rushing sound of the falling water.

It was Gordon’s theory that this was the original course of the river, before Queen Halimah, in one of her public projects, had diverted it, and that an underground stream remained as testimony, forced to the surface here by some geological fault, to form the delicious waterfall and its pools before disappearing underground again.

She was walking where Alexander the Great had probably once walked. Zara sank down on the rocks by the pool and dipped one hand in, leaning over to press the cool water to her cheeks.

The moon was strong, casting black shadows under the walls of rock, but she sat in full moonlight, and it glistened on the water, on her hair, and on her golden robe.

It was two thousand, three hundred and thirty years since Alexander had come here with his armies, but humankind had not changed very much. Men were still consumed by jealousies and passions . . . and sex was still like this river...try to divert it, and its power went underground, to force its way up at any weak spot...

She did not know what to do about Prince Rafi. That there was a powerful attraction between them she couldn’t, wouldn’t try to deny. She had felt it for him when she thought him a bandit, and finding him a king had certainly not lessened its force.

But she was a stranger in a strange land, a woman desired by a king. She had no idea what dangers awaited her if she gave in to what she felt, what he wanted. She spoke only a little of the language, knew not nearly enough about the country and its culture. Her knowledge of the area was all of the distant past, and she wasn’t sure that the autocratic powers and ways of the ancient kings whose names she knew had altogether passed into history.