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Time and time again Bethany had been urged to make her father feel at home, keep him happy, act as if he were a permanent fixture rather than someone just passing through. Even remembering that period of her life made Bethany’s stomach churn sickly. She had promised herself then that, unlike her mother, she would find her fulfilment in a career. She would be independent and self-sufficient. She would never, ever make herself vulnerable by building her life round some man.
‘Who taught you such a lesson?’ Razul probed.
Dragged back in a shaken state from her own painful memories, Bethany focused on him, feeling that wild, crazed lurch of her every sense and hating him for having the power to do that to her. It was terrifying to feel that she was no longer in control of her own responses.
‘Twenty-seven years old and you behave like a mixed-up teenager... Why do you fight me like this?’
‘Because this is an impossible attraction...why the hell can’t you see that and accept it?’ she practically screamed at him from her turmoil of ragged nerves, on the edge of a breakdown. ‘Why couldn’t you just leave me alone? Don’t you ever think about anybody but yourself? Luring me out here and subjecting me to this nightmare is positively sadistic! You...are... hurting...me!’ And then her voice broke off in horror that she should have revealed that reality.
His veiled dark eyes were impenetrable. ‘You hurt yourself, aziz. When you gain the courage to see that, perhaps you will also have the grace to be grateful that I chose to give you a second chance.’
Her mouth wobbled below her outraged emerald-green eyes. ‘A second chance?’ she parroted in a strangled voice, scarcely believing her ears.
‘Which you have yet to prove yourself deserving of. Did I not desire you so greatly, I would have set aside all thought of you a long time ago,’ Razul delivered harshly.
‘I hate your guts...can’t you see that?’ she blistered back at him rawly.
‘What I see is...fear.’
‘Fear?’
‘There’s nowhere to run this time. And when you retreat I advance. You are losing ground fast.’
‘Are we playing war games now?’ she derided shrilly.
‘This is no game.’ Razul glanced with irritation at his watch. ‘I have a meeting—’
‘You have to let me go!’ Bethany asserted, incredulous at the lack of effect she was having on him.
He took a step closer. Bethany leapt back. He laughed with genuine amusement, tremendous charm in that sudden, spontaneous smile. Approaching her, he lifted a hand and curved long, caressing fingers to the taut line of her jaw. ‘I anticipate a long, hot summer in which you will change from the woman you are into the woman you could be... You will not want me to let you go,’ he forecast with immense confidence.
‘Don’t touch me!’ Bethany jerked her head back out of reach of that disturbingly intimate caress, trembling all over, feeling cornered and menaced and infuriated by the unfamiliar sense of inadequacy that he was evoking within her.
In answer Razul knotted his fingers into a hank of curling hair and brought his mouth down on a collision course with hers. Almost incoherent with rage, she tried to evade him but he held her fast, forced her to be still and kissed her, and she went down into the heat of hellfire and damnation without a murmur, electrified by the force of her own hunger. He pressed her back against the wall, both of his hands linking fiercely with hers, and kissed her breathless, crushing her ripe mouth under his until her senses swam in hot, drowning pleasure.
‘I will count the hours until I have you in my bed...’ Razul confessed raggedly, and withdrew from her.
Wildly dizzy and dazed, she stayed upright on the power of shock alone. She opened her heavy eyes. He was gone. She slid down the wall like a boneless rag doll and shivered and shook, devastated by what he could make her feel, emotionally and physically drained by her own turmoil. What the hell was she going to do if Fatima didn’t help her? How long would it take the brunette to make what she had called ‘arrangements’?
But Fatima reappeared within half an hour of Razul’s exit. Again the door opened without any prefatory knock. A veiled shape stood on the threshold. Fatima was cloaked in the voluminous folds of the chador which screened the female form from head to toe, and it was indeed an effective disguise. Bethany only recognised her visitor by her acid-yellow court shoes. A bundle of cloth was tossed at her feet.
‘Hurry...the car is waiting for us!’ Fatima hissed impatiently.
‘Now?’
‘Have you changed your mind?’
‘Of course not!’ Bethany gasped.
Her heart beating like a drum, she pulled on the tent-like chador.
‘Conceal your hands in the pockets,’ Fatima instructed. ‘And keep your head down and do not speak.’
There was no sign of Zulema in the corridor outside. Bethany found it incredibly difficult to walk with all that fabric flapping around her. When I get home I’ll laugh about this, she promised herself, but she knew that she wouldn’t... Indeed, all she could think about was the fact that she would never, ever see Razul again, which made her furiously, bitterly angry with herself.
CHAPTER FOUR
FATIMA led Bethany out to a dusty, cobbled yard bounded by a long line of garages. A Range Rover was sitting there with the engine already running. Bethany clambered into the back like a drunken sailor in her companion’s graceful wake. The car roared off and, mindful of the driver, Bethany continued to keep her head bent. Half an hour would take them to the airport—maybe a little more, she conceded, fingering the weight of her shoulder bag beneath the chador. She had her passport but no flight ticket... Hell, a seat on a flight anywhere would do as long as it got her out of Datar!
The car lurched and jolted, the engine thundering. They were moving at considerable speed. Bethany finally emerged from her reverie to notice that the drive was taking a lot longer than she had expected. Twisting, she peered out of a side-window and was astounded to realise that the four-wheel drive was crossing a flat salt plain and there was no sign of a road or, indeed, of any other traffic. Her lips parted. ‘Where—?’
A startled gasp of pain escaped her as a set of pincer-like nails bit into the back of her exposed hand. Her head spun round. Her eyes collided with seething brown ones and she gulped. She dug her hand shakily into the pocket again but she could feel the slow seep of blood from the stinging slash of Fatima’s assault.
Tense minutes passed. Bethany didn’t know what to do. Ahead of them the plain vanished into a rolling landscape of dunes. Where on earth was Fatima taking her? There was a sudden rustle of movement from the front of the car. Bethany gasped as a veiled female shape uncoiled from her hiding place on the floor and settled herself into the front seat.
‘Two women left the palace and two women will return,’ Fatima informed her smugly. ‘Nobody will suspect that you left in my company.’
‘Where the heck are we?’
The Range Rover lurched to a halt in the shadow of a great rolling dune. Springing out, the driver opened the door beside Bethany.
‘Get out!’ Fatima planted both hands on her and gave her a violent push.
Bethany got such a shock that she was easily unbalanced and went flying out headlong onto the ground. It knocked the breath out of her lungs but didn’t deprive her of hearing Fatima’s shrieked abuse and the prophecy that the sun would wreck that pasty white skin of hers and make her hair fall out so that no man would ever want her again.
Bethany picked herself up and wrenched herself out of the suffocating folds of the chador. ‘You can’t leave me out here alone!’
As the Range Rover raked into reverse she very narrowly missed being knocked flat by the swinging door that Fatima had yet to pull shut. She leapt out of harm’s way and then stood there in the burning heat of the sun, gripped by a brand of quite paralysing incredulity that anyone could do such a thing. Then she was furious with herself for trusting a woman who she had known was blazing with jealousy and rage. She checked
her watch and paled. How many miles could that car have covered in well over an hour? Worse, it would be dark soon.
