But once she had gone, Rose only picked uninterestedly at the dishes on offer.
How could she concentrate on something as mundane as food, when her mind and her senses were filled with the memory of Khalim and his exquisite love-making? He had been everything. Tender and yet fierce. His kisses passionate and cajoling. He had moaned aloud in her arms, had not held back on showing her his pleasure—and that in itself felt like a small victory.
With disturbing clarity she recalled the vision of their limbs entwined, his so dark and so muscular, contrasting almost indecently with her own milky-white skin, and then she sighed, wondering if she would ever be able to concentrate on anything other than her Marabanesh prince ever again.
More as diversion therapy than anything else, she picked up Robert Cantle’s book on Maraban, and read the chapter on Khalim’s forefathers, and the establishment of the mountain kingdom.
There were richly painted portraits of his recent ancestors—and one in particular which had her scanning the page avidly. Malik the Magnificent, she read. It was him! Khalim’s great-great-grandfather whose thwarted love had borne such a striking and uncanny resemblance to Rose herself.
She studied a face almost as proudly handsome as Khalim’s with its hard, sculpted contours and those glittering black eyes and luscious lips, and she sighed again. Don’t start getting all hopeful, Rose, she told herself fiercely. You could not have had it spelt out more explicitly that love affairs like this have no future.
At eleven, she put the book down, telling herself that he would not come tonight. She began pulling the brush through her hair, telling herself not to be angry, but she was angry. Was this a taste of things to come? How he thought he could treat his women? Keep them hanging around at his convenience?
She flung the hairbrush down just as the door slowly opened, and there stood Khalim in robes of deepest sapphire, his eyes narrowing with undisguised hunger as he caught the unmistakable outline of her body through the thin material of her clothes.
Rose bristled. ‘I didn’t hear you knock.’
‘That’s because I didn’t,’ he said, shutting the door softly behind him.
‘Why not?’
He stilled as he heard the reprimand in her voice, and he turned to meet the blue blaze of accusation which spat from her eyes. ‘Because we are now lovers, Rose. This afternoon you gave yourself to me with an openness which suggested that we have no need for barriers between us. Do I need to knock on your door?’
The voice of reason in her head told her to back off, but she had missed him, wanted him, and felt hurt by his unexplained disappearance, and so she ignored it. ‘Damned right you need to knock!’ she retorted. ‘I may be mature enough to realise that this is a very grown-up affair with no promises or expectations on either side—but that does not mean that I’m prepared to be trampled on like some sort of chattel!’
If he hadn’t wanted her so much, he would have walked out there and then. No woman had ever spoken to him with such a flagrant lack of respect—especially when he had had her gasping and sighing in his arms on the desert grass!
‘I do not treat you as a chattel,’ he answered coldly.
‘No? You just make love to me and then waltz off for the evening without bothering to tell me where you are going?’
He hid a smile. Ah! So she was jealous, was she? Good! ‘But you just told me that neither of us have any expectations, Rose,’ he demurred.
‘That’s not an expectation!’ she declared wildly, wondering where all her powers of logic had flown to. ‘That’s just simple courtesy. Where were you?’
He had been foolish to imagine that he would not have to tell her. He had not wanted to hurt her, but now he saw that by not telling her he must have hurt her more. He was not used to analysing what effect his actions would have on a woman’s feelings. Usually, he did what the hell he liked, and was allowed to get away with it. With anything.
‘I had dinner with my mother and my father,’ he said softly. ‘My father is too frail to accommodate—’ he very nearly said ‘strangers’ but bit the word back in time ‘—guests,’ he finished heavily.
Rose stared at him. ‘And that’s all? Why didn’t you tell me that?’
She would never be able to find out, and yet Khalim realised that if he was anything less than truthful with his fiery Rose, he would lose her.
‘No, that isn’t all.’ He sighed. ‘There was a young woman there, too.’
Rose froze as some new and unknown danger shimmered into her subconscious. ‘I’m not sure that I understand what you mean.’
‘My father is very frail—’
‘I know that.’
‘Soon he will die,’ he said starkly, and there was a long, heavy pause. ‘And I must take a bride when the year of mourning is complete.’
It was the most pain she had ever felt and she felt like smashing something—anything—but somehow, miraculously, she managed to keep her face composed. Why crumple when this was what her instincts and her common sense should have told her? ‘And this—young woman—was, I presume, one of the suitable candidates being lined up for you?’
How preposterous it sounded coming from his beautiful, English Rose! ‘Yes.’ He thought back to the girl being brought in by her mother, her slim, young body swathed in the finest embroidered silks. Only her eyes had been visible, and very beautiful eyes they had been, too—huge, and doe-like, the deep rich colour of chocolate.
But she had been tongue-tied at first, and then so docile and submissive—so adoring of her prince and heir. He had seen his mother’s approving nod, and the sharp look of pleasure on the face of the girl’s mother, and had tried to imagine being married to a woman such as this.