The helicopter, when it arrived, was a huge, noisy, angry wasp, churning up the sand, landing just beyond the perimeter fence. It seemed like an invasion to Diana. As Nikos helped her aboard, ducking under the sweeping rotors, it was as if the twenty-first century was crashing back into her.
The machine took off with a deafening roar, wheeling up into the steel-blue sky, casting its wrinkled shadow over the dunes as it headed back to the coast. It took them back to their hotel, but Nikos was not there long—only long enough to shower, change into his business suit, take up his briefcase and depart again, leaving Diana alone and feeling dislocated and bereft in their suite.
Her head was all in pieces. The abrupt change was jarring. From the emptiness of the desert?
?the absolute privacy of their time there and all that that had brought—back now into the modern world, busy and crowded, demanding and bustling.
Here, time existed. Other people existed. Other priorities. Other realities.
Realities that now forced themselves upon her.
She did not want to face them—but she must.
Restlessly she paced about, netted by tension. There was a deep disquiet within her. A deep, fearful unease.
Danger was lapping at her feet...
CHAPTER EIGHT
NIKOS THREW HIMSELF into the back of his car, his face set. That meeting had not gone well. The damned internal politics of the sheikdom were raising their heads again. Sheikh Kamal’s cousin, Prince Farouk, who was against all development, was leaning on the minister to block him, Nikos, favoured as he was by Sheikh Kamal. So, although the minister had been urbane, he had also been regretful. And adamant.
There would be problems. Difficulties. Delays. It was unfortunate, but there it was.
He gave a frustrated sigh. Sheikh Kamal, shrewd and far-seeing, would, he knew, outmanoeuvre his cousin in the long term, and until then he would have to exercise patience—though it went against the grain to do so. All his life he’d targeted what he wanted, gone after it and achieved it. Wealth, a trophy mistress, and now a trophy wife.
Immediately his mood improved. After all, there was an upside to this delay in his business affairs here. It would give him more time with Diana...
He felt himself start to relax and his body thrummed with anticipation. She would be waiting for him in their suite, no longer the ice maiden but the warm, ardent, passionate woman of his desires, fully awakened by him, as by no other man, to the rich glory of her sensuality.
A sensuality that had swept him away.
Oh, Nadya had been a passionate woman—fiery and tempestuous—and he’d always chosen women for their passion. But with Diana... His expression changed, became wondering. With Diana it had been more than passion, that incandescent union with her beneath the stars.
He tried to understand it, to comprehend it. Was it because he’d had to wait so long to claim her? Was that the reason that those days with her in the desert had been so...so special? So different from any other days he’d known? Was it because she’d been that untouchable ice maiden, yielding to him only after so long a wait? An ice maiden only he could thaw, who only melted in his arms, no other man’s?
A frown drew his brows together as he tried to work it out. Work out why it was that those nights he’d spent with her had been so overwhelming.
Because it wasn’t just passion or desire—that was why. There was more than that. Oh, yes, there was a sense of triumph that she’d finally yielded to him and his patience had been so lavishly rewarded. But still there was more than that.
It was the sense of companionship they’d shared. Whether it had been watching the stars, knowing she was as beguiled by their majesty as he was—something that Nadya would have found incomprehensible and irrelevant—or laughing as they’d swayed on those poor camels, bearing the load of riders who were rookies, or leaning back into each other’s arms as they lounged on the divans by the poolside, under an awning out in the desert heat.
And talking—always talking. Sometimes about world affairs, sometimes just about anything or nothing. Stimulating and energising, or easy and uncomplicated—they could segue from one to the other effortlessly, seamlessly.
I like her company—I enjoy being with her—whether she is in my arms or just spending time with me.
Was it really that simple? If it was, then there was something else, too. Something basic, fundamental—something he’d never thought about before.
She is happy to be with me. She likes my company...enjoys being with me. As I enjoy being with her—for her company, for just being together...
That seemed an odd thing to think, in many ways, because it wasn’t something he’d ever considered before when it came to women. It made him realise that the time he’d spent with Nadya, with all of her predecessors had been entirely superficial. It had been about sex—nothing more than that. Nadya had been specifically chosen to be a trophy mistress—showing the world he could have so lauded and beautiful a woman in his bed, on his arm.
Memory flickered in him. He’d thought of Diana as the next step on from that. Did he still think of her that way? Merely as a trophy wife? Or could the woman he’d made his own beneath the desert stars mean something more to him?
Maybe I’ll never get bored with her! Maybe I’ll never tire of her?
The thought hovered in his mind. It was something that he’d never felt about any woman before and he did not know the answer—not yet. For now all he wanted was what he had had in the desert—Diana in his arms, clinging to him in ecstasy.
Arriving at the hotel, he strode across the vast atrium, hastening up to the honeymoon suite. To Diana—warm and ardent with all the passion he had awakened in her, all the desire he had released in her.