edged with gold, and a filmy pair of lace briefs and matching bra, the likes of which Bethany had never harboured in her plain white cotton underwear drawer. A flush of increasing rage mantling her cheeks, she dressed and stood at the mirror with a silver-backed brush, yanking it brutally through her long, wild mane of tangled curls.
‘I have displeased you, sitt?’ Zulema pressed in a small, tearful voice. ‘Why you not like my help?’
Bethany felt all mean and small-minded and contemptible and handed over the brush, taking a seat on a divan. How the heck could you force the principle of equality on someone when equality was neither acknowledged nor desired?
‘Such glorious hair. I have never seen such wonderful hair,’ Zulema sighed, delicately teasing out each snarl with reverent fingers. ‘It is the colour of the setting sun, just as was said.’
‘Said by whom?’
Zulema giggled shyly. ‘Prince Razul’s guards, they talk... It is forbidden that they talk, but men, they gossip too. A long time ago we hear about the English lady with the hair of glorious colours...soon all our people know and talk and the King, he got very angry indeed to hear the whispers about his beloved son. Ah...the English breakfast is here!’ Zulema carolled excitedly as the door opened.
What kind of whispers? Bethany wanted to know as she stood up, but Zulema threw wide yet another door, revealing a dining table and chairs. ‘Just like home,’ she told Bethany as a procession of servants bearing trays followed in her wake.
Open-mouthed, Bethany stared as the trays were unloaded and the lids on the metal dishes were lifted one by one. Fruit juices, cereals, toast, croissants, breakfast rolls, wheaten bread and every possible kind of preserve. Fried eggs, boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, even coddled eggs. Kippers, devilled kidneys, beef sausages, fried bread, tomatoes and French toast. It was lunchtime but she was receiving breakfast.
Zulema pulled out a chair and Bethany collapsed down onto it, surveying the banquet before her. She was hungry but never in her life had she seen such a spread for one individual. The entire table was covered.
‘You like?’
‘I’m very impressed.’ Her voice wobbled in the presence of such shamelessly conspicuous consumption.
‘Prince Razul bring in chef from Dubai. If you not like his cooking, he go back,’ Zulema informed her cheerfully.
Razul had hired a chef specifically to cook Western food for her? Heavens, did he actually think that she would be staying long enough for it to matter? Bethany took a deep breath, feeling more and more as though she was existing in some outrageous fantasy world, aeons removed from her own life of quiet, sensible practicality.
She was finishing her tea when Zulema approached her again.
‘The Prince...he say he meet with you now,’ Zulema whispered, as if she were setting up an incredibly exciting romantic assignation.
Bethany stood up and straightened her narrow shoulders with Amazonian spirit. ‘And don’t spare the horses.’
‘The horses?’
‘Never mind.’
The palace was an astonishingly large building. It rambled all over the place in a hotchpotch of corridors, screened galleries and sunlit courtyards.
At the head of a superb marble staircase Zulema abruptly halted and drew back several steps. ‘We must wait, sitt.’
Bethany looked over the wall down into the magnificent courtyard below, but her attention had not been attracted by the lush selection of tropical plants and the beautiful playing fountains. It was Razul she saw, his luxuriantly black, slightly curly hair gleaming like raw silk in the strong sunlight...and then the woman, sobbing and clutching frantically at his ankles.
‘We go for walk, sitt,’ Zulema urged uncomfortably.
‘No, thanks.’ In all her life Bethany had never seen a woman humiliate herself to such an extent. She was appalled. She needed no grasp of Arabic to interpret that distraught voice, that subservient posture and the passionate intensity with which the poor woman was hanging onto him.
Razul hissed something in his own language and literally stepped over her. As she attempted to follow him he snapped his fingers furiously at a cluster of servants cowering in a corner. Within seconds they were rushing to lift the woman from the ground and hurry her away through one of the archways off the courtyard.
‘Who is that woman?’ Bethany whispered.
‘The Princess Fatima,’ Zulema muttered thinly. ‘Prince Razul take only one wife. Always he say that... only the one.’
Bethany’s stomach lurched sickly. Perspiration broke out on her brow. So Razul was married. Dear heaven, that tormented woman was his wife, and it did not take great imagination to comprehend the source of her hysteria, did it? Razul had brought another woman into the palace and the poor creature was quite naturally distraught. The sheer cruelty of his behaviour devastated Bethany. He was every inch the savage, despotic Arab prince, who believed his own desires to be innately superior to any mere female’s wants and needs.
In a tempest of pain she refused to acknowledge Bethany descended the marble stairs. Razul swung round, his starkly handsome features flushed and still set with cold anger and hauteur. And then, as his stunning golden eyes settled on Bethany, the tension went out of him. A dazzling smile completely transformed his strong dark face.
That smile hit her like a shock wave, made her steps falter and her heart give a gigantic lurch behind her breastbone. For a split second she was hurled back two years to the evening they had first met. She had been coming out of the library. He had been leaning against the bonnet of his Ferrari, surrounded by gushing female students, every one of whom had been blonde and not known for her inhibitions with men. And then he had looked up and focused on Bethany and perceptibly stilled, treating her to a narrowed, intent stare before suddenly flashing that spectacularly glorious smile. Riveted to the spot, she had dropped her books.
But not this time, she swore to herself, despising her own shameful susceptibility and the disturbing emotions and responses which could block out every rational thought.
‘I’ve always been told that the Arab male cherishes and protects the women in his family,’ she shot at him in stark challenge, ‘but report really doesn’t match reality, does it? The Princess Fatima does not appear to qualify for even an ounce of your respect.’
His smile vanished as though she had struck him. A dark rise of blood delineated his hard cheek-bones. ‘You saw...?’
‘I saw,’ Bethany confirmed shakily.
‘I am disturbed that you should have witnessed so distressing a scene but, in honour, I may not discuss it with you,’ Razul delivered in a grim undertone.
Bethany turned away. She could not bear to look at him. So he had that much decency—a tiny kernel of loyalty to his wife. And he was profoundly embarrassed that she had seen that distasteful encounter...amazing. It was almost as though he expected her to pretend that these other women did not exist in his life. Concubines and a wife.
Yet she had never been able to hate him properly for his lifestyle. Just as she was a product of her world, he was a product of his. Nor was she foolish enough to imagine that Datar was the only country in the world where concubines were kept. It was not a subject referred to; it was a subject politely ignored lest people in high places be offended. And she had often wondered how many Western males could truthfully say that, given the same opportunity and society’s silent blessing, they too would not indulge in the freedom of such sexual variety.
‘Did you sleep well?’
A laugh that was no laugh at all bubbled in her throat. ‘You should know...you drugged me—’
‘You were in great pain. I could not bear to see you suffer,’ Razul imparted tautly, on the defensive. ‘A sleeping potion allowed you to rest.’
A sudden unbearable sadness