‘And I do not wish to have it thrown at me.’
‘Really?’ Bethany breathed dangerously.
‘I would hate to subject you to the indignity of being dumped in the nearest pool. Rumour of your paddling experience in the fountain on our wedding day has already spread beyond these walls.’
She went scarlet and counted from twenty to fifty in the simmering silence.
‘That your temper matches the fire of your hair is no longer any secret.’
The count made it to a hundred at supersonic speed.
‘Now what would you like to talk about?’ Razul drawled with outstanding cool and a gently encouraging smile.
‘Methods of torture and death,’ she bit out shakily before she drew in a deep, sustaining breath and could bring herself to look at him again. ‘You make me so mad sometimes,’ she conceded, with a rueful groan.
‘At least I do not bore you as my father bored my mother.’
‘You said she left him before she died,’ Bethany recalled abruptly.
His expressive mouth twisted. ‘She is not dead.’
She frowned in astonishment. ‘But Zulema told me—’
‘I assure you that she is very much alive—the socialite wife of a prominent French politician and the mother of two other adult children.’
‘Did your father divorce her?’
‘She divorced him on her return to her family. My father was too proud to admit that he was a holiday romance which soured...thus the false report of her death.’
Bethany was fascinated. ‘A holiday romance?’
‘Laila’s mother had died, leaving my father a widower with four daughters. He met my mother in Paris,’ Razul explained calmly. ‘She was young and rich and spoilt and she thought it might be fun to marry an Arab prince. My grandfather was still on the throne then—’
‘Are you telling me that your mother was French?’ Bethany interrupted helplessly. ‘Christian?’
‘Yes. Scarcely a problem. Over a third of the population of Datar is Christian,’ Razul reminded her gently.
She had forgotten that fact. A century ago a large number of Christians of the Coptic faith had migrated from Egypt and begun settling in Datar. Their presence had led to a greater degree of religious tolerance and a smoother passage into a more secular society than was possible in many other Muslim countries. But she was stunned to learn that Razul was part French and, as if he understood her astonishment, he gave her a wry look.
‘I resemble my father, not my mother.’
‘How long were they married?’
‘Longer than she desired for she became pregnant the first month. She left Datar when I was two weeks old.’
‘Your father wouldn’t have allowed her to take you with her,’ Bethany assumed.
‘She had no wish to do so. A half-caste child would have been an embarrassment to her. It was much easier for her to remarry without me in the picture.’
Half-caste? Bethany felt quite sick at the expression. ‘Was that what your father told you?’
‘You are keen to put all blame upon my father’s shoulders,’ Razul sighed, his dark eyes revealing his exasperation. ‘He was deeply in love with her—an older man, perhaps not very wise to the ways of Western women but most vulnerable to so crushing a rejection, and that I, too, should be rejected inflicted the deepest wound of all.’
Bethany had flushed. But picturing that right old misery of a tyrant, as she had always imagined him, as a vulnerable, relatively unsophisticated older man, unceremoniously dumped by his bored young wife, took some doing. ‘Have you ever had any contact with your mother?’
‘Once. I went though my father warned me that it would be foolish.’ His lean fingers tautened round the glass he held and he gave a rueful laugh. ‘A skeleton rising from the grave could not have inspired more horror than I did. She does not like to remember that there was ever another marriage or another child because her husband does not love those of my race. In my presence she swore her servant to secrecy about my call.’
‘What a hateful thing to do to you!’ Bethany exclaimed hotly, appalled that any mother could have faced her son with such a repudiation, most particularly a son who, in spite of her desertion, had still retained sufficient generosity to seek her out.
‘You sound as though you actually care, aziz.’
Bethany froze; her gaze collided with compellingly intense dark eyes and she glanced away at speed, guarding her heart, guarding her tongue. ‘Of course I do. I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to go through an experience like that!’
‘I did not suffer so much,’ Razul countered drily. ‘I had a father who loved me and, by the time I was three, a stepmother who raised me as though I were her own child. I also have two younger sisters whom you would have met had our marriage not been arranged at such speed. Both are married and living abroad.’
‘So you are the only son.’
‘Which may explain to you why my father is so embarrassingly protective of me. Laila did not joke. I sneeze in his presence and he turns pale,’ Razul revealed with wry exasperation. ‘I have often wished that Allah had blessed him with more sons.’
‘His beloved son,’ she recalled Laila saying. It had not occurred to her then that Razul was in fact the only son that King Azmir had. Six girls and one little boy, who must have been more precious then gold-dust from the hour of his birth, but equally that same circumstance must have placed an enormous weight of responsibility on Razul’s shoulders to be the perfect son and fulfil all expectations. Her hazy image of her father-in-law had taken quite a beating: not an old tyrant where his son was concerned, but, by all accounts, a loving, indeed over-protective father.
‘My father began developing his famous distrust of the Western world after his marriage failed. He was unreasonably embittered by the experience. For that same reason I was educated here in Datar...’
Bethany almost groaned out loud. ‘And then the one time he let you go to the West—’
‘I met you.’ Razul drained his glass and set it aside. A bitter curve twisted his firm mouth. ‘And when the rains come and you leave he will say... No, I will not think now of what he will say.’
No doubt there would be an entire week of joyous celebration at the old palace and convivial relations would be fully restored between father and son. ‘Of course...he didn’t want you to marry me.’ She had to force herself to say that out loud.
‘He did not.’ Razul made no attempt to duck the issue.
‘So why did you do it?’ she whispered helplessly, understanding better than most the incredible courage it must have taken for Razul to defy his elderly parent. Arab sons honoured their fathers. Arab sons were expected to regard paternal wishes as absolute rules to be obeyed without question.
‘I have already told you why.’ Perceptibly Razul had withdrawn from her again, his hard-boned features harshly set.
‘You wanted me that much?’ Bethany persisted unsteadily.
‘Do you think I make a habit of kidnapping women and springing sudden mar
riages upon them?’ A shadowy glimmer of his beautiful smile briefly crossed his mouth. ‘I hear you have already inspected the stables...can you ride?’
The change of subject was so swift as to leave her breathless. ‘Ride?’
‘I ride at dawn every day when it is cool. Tomorrow, were you willing, I would take you with me. The desert is a place of wondrous beauty at that hour...I would share it with you.’
‘Not much point in us sharing anything, is there?’ Bethany muttered tightly, suddenly attacked on all sides by a tidal wave of bitter pain.
‘Because you will leave?’ Razul rose to his feet. ‘Defeatist as always, aziz. If I can live with this knowledge, why cannot you? And why should I wish to settle for some empty charade of a relationship in the time that remains to us? I want the gold, not the gilt. I will not devalue what we might have together as you would devalue it. We will do more than share a bed before you return to your world.’
Bethany breathed in deeply and leant back fully to take in all six feet two inches of him as he stood with complete poise in the brilliant sunlight. ‘Ten days ago nothing I could say or do would persuade you to leave me alone,’ she reminded him fiercely.
‘Ten days ago, even one week ago, I was foolish enough to believe that your attitude to me was...shall we say...warming, softening, thawing?’ Razul queried with galling amusement. ‘But when I visited you here in your sickbed I learnt my mistake. We have discussed the weather although there is nothing to discuss. Does not a hot sun rise with every dawn? We have also discussed your reading matter, your research and world politics.’
‘Have I been boring you?’ Her face was as hot as hellfire at that crack about the weather.
‘You are far too intelligent to be a bore and your observations and opinions are always of interest to me,’ Razul retorted gently. ‘But, while you evade every personal subject and are scrupulously careful to show no more real interest in me than you might show in a stranger passing by you in the street, I feel we are still in a phase of courtship—’