Jenna sighed, knowing that she did not have to ask Brad to keep what she was about to tell him completely confidential; he more than anyone knew how to keep secrets. ‘He wants to marry me.’
Brad almost choked on his coffee. ‘Say that again?’ he demanded incredulously.
Jenna put the mug down and shook her head. ‘Maybe I phrased that badly. I don’t think he actually wants to marry me—it is just something he believes he must honour—an agreement which was made between our parents a long, long time ago.’
‘Jenna—I don’t have a clue what you’re saying!’
She supposed that it must sound positively barbaric to a modern professional American man—and in truth didn’t it sound more than a little barbaric to her? She sighed again, pushing a damp strand of hair from her cheek and fixing him with a candid look.
‘I’ll try to explain. Rashid’s late father and my father were great, great friends—and when I was still in my cradle they decided that, provided I fulfilled certain…’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘Certain criteria, then I would one day make the perfect wife for Rashid.’
‘And those criteria were what?’ he questioned astutely.
Faint colour crept into her cheeks. ‘Physically, I must be pleasing to Rashid’s eyes—’
‘Well, there couldn’t be any doubt about that, surely?’ he laughed.
False modesty would help no one. She shrugged. ‘I understand that in that particular condition I met his specifications,’ she answered slowly.
‘You make it sound like the guy is picking out decor for a house!’
‘Maybe it is a little like that,’ she admitted, but she felt a shiver of memory as she recalled their last chaperoned meeting when she had surprised a hot, fleeting look of hunger in Rashid’s enigmatic black eyes as he had greeted her. A look which had washed over her and made her skin tingle with awareness, even while the knowledge that Rashid desired her had filled her with fear and trepidation. ‘The Ruler’s needs must always be met. That is a given.’
‘What other criteria?’ asked Brad quietly.
Jenna bit her lip. ‘The obvious one, of course. That I must go to him unsullied—but I really don’t want to talk about that.’
Brad nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said understandingly. ‘So what is it that you aren’t telling me, Jenna? Surely the idea can’t be that abhorrent to you? I’ve seen pictures of the guy and he sure looks like he fits the bill of conforming to most women’s fantasy man!’
Jenna swallowed as unwilling images of his hard, lean body and cruel, dark face swam tantalisingly into her mind. ‘Oh, no one is disputing Rashid’s appeal,’ she said carefully. ‘Not even me. He is a most spectacular man. It’s just that America has changed me—or rather knowledge has changed what I thought I once wanted.’
Brad pulled a face. ‘You’ve lost me!’ he protested.
Time had deadened some of the pain of discovery, but not all of it, and it still hurt to say it. ‘When I first came to the States I had access to the free press for the first time in my life. I read newspapers with gossip columns—columns which documented Rashid’s lifestyle with disturbing clarity.’
Brad nodded. ‘I think I’m beginning to get the picture,’ he said slowly.
Jenna splayed her hands over her thighs and curled her f
ingernails so that they bit into her through the denim. ‘Rashid is almost twelve years older than I am,’ she said. ‘But when I was little he looked out for me—protected me.’
He had indulged her hero-worship of him. Taken her with him when he went falconing. And from the age of fourteen she had thought she would almost die with pleasure to see that formidable presence astride his night-dark stallion, subduing the bird of prey as if he could communicate with it by instinct alone. And maybe he could, she thought bitterly. For wasn’t he a creature of prey himself?
Somewhere along the way she had acquired the rare ability to make him laugh, to gently tease him, and she had been the only person allowed to get away with what he would have regarded as insurrection in others. She had thought that the world began and ended with Rashid, and had grown to long for the wedding she knew must one day come.
‘So what happened to make you hate him?’ asked Brad.
Jenna lifted her head, surprised. ‘Hate him? I’m not sure that I hate him.’
‘You sound like you do—the way you talk about him.’
Did she? Wasn’t hate too powerful an emotion to describe her feelings for Rashid? Too closely and dangerously linked to the flipside of such an emotion—love itself? A love which would never be anything more than one-sided and, consequently, never enough for the woman she had become.
Because when she had turned eighteen their relationship had changed fundamentally. Had it been the onset of womanhood which had made the magnificent sheikh grow so wary and distant in her company? she wondered. The atmosphere between them had been brittle with some kind of unnamed tension. Their earlier ease in each other’s company had evaporated like the rare desert rains which sizzled beneath the intensity of the fierce Quador sun.
And she had missed that ease. Desperately. Without Rashid as her confidant she had felt as though she was in limbo—existing and not really living at all.
‘Rashid made no move to marry me when I came of age,’ she said slowly. ‘And my pride wouldn’t let me show my disappointment. I had no wish to stay in Quador, just waiting and waiting for some distant wedding, and so I told him that I wished to learn something of my late mother’s country, that I wanted to study in America. It had always been her dearest wish that I should know something of her homeland.’