thinking that very occasionally her husband could be startlingly naive. ‘The book was probably a whitewash sanctioned and proofread by your father, Jaul. I bet there’s not a disrespectful, critical word in it.’
As the exact same thought had already occurred to Jaul, he swallowed hard, black lashes lowering over his lustrous golden eyes. ‘You are undoubtedly right but Yusuf will tell me the truth on all counts,’ he declared with assurance. ‘But nothing can ever eradicate the effect of my wife actually asking me if I too have kept concubines.’
Chrissie flushed a slow, painful pink. ‘I didn’t ask—’
‘But you were dying to ask,’ Jaul cut in drily. ‘Do you trust me so little still? Do you really believe that my people would accept a man leading a dissolute life on their throne? My country wants to be seen as modern and forward-thinking and our women have an increasingly strong voice in society. I must be seen to practise what I preach in public and in private...’
What Jaul said was common sense and Chrissie was mortified that for a few overwrought minutes after leaving his grandmother’s presence she had entertained such fantastic suspicions. Even more crucially she had not missed the flash of pain in his eyes that she could even think to ask him such a question. He was furious too but thankfully not in the same way as his late father. He didn’t suffer from uncontrollable rages and watched his tongue when he lost his temper but the downside of those positives was that he would be pretty much silent until he had mulled everything over in depth.
‘I’m sorry!’ Chrissie said loudly and abruptly as he began to turn away. ‘It was stupid...but just for a moment I felt I had to know for sure,’ she endeavoured to explain, struck to the heart by his condemnation but not sure she could blame him for it.
‘If you appreciated how prim and proper my father was you would never have felt that need,’ Jaul asserted with a wry curve of his sensual mouth. ‘He waged a war against immorality in every form inside and outside the palace. He was a repressive ruler. One of my first acts was to repeal the law restricting music and dancing in public places. If it makes you feel any happier about things, I will ask Yusuf to fill me in on what he knows about my father’s dealings with my grandmother.’
As Jaul left the room with the giving of that concession, Chrissie slumped down on a sofa. Maybe she shouldn’t have interfered by visiting Lady Sophie, she reasoned heavily. She had waded in blindly, seeing herself as doing something good and helpful but in actuality she had hurt and offended Jaul. His self-control in the face of the provocation she had offered could only embarrass her because she had controlled neither her imagination nor her tongue. In the circumstances Jaul had been very understanding and that shamed her the most. He was never going to love a woman stupid enough to ask him if he kept concubines, was he?
* * *
Jaul spent a couple of hours talking to his father’s former aide. Yusuf left, relieved to have cleared his conscience of the secrets he had kept throughout his working career. Jaul, however, was in a far less happy frame of mind. In point of fact, he was stunned, furious and bitter and as soon as the keys he had requested were brought to him he strode through the huge palace complex and down a flight of stairs in a far corner. A servant wrestled with the giant key and then Jaul waved his guards back and entered the building alone.
The sheer size of the place shook Jaul even more. He prowled through empty rooms and courtyards, studied fountains and bathing places. Everything was in very good condition and he marvelled that his father’s mania for historic conservation had triumphed over the older man’s desire to rewrite the past and bury the family’s murkier secrets. Rage was his overriding response to what he had learned from Yusuf until the point when he focused on the great bed placed on a dais. Slowly his dark, angry eyes widened as he finally registered the tenor of the murals swirling across the walls round the bed.
Utterly disconcerted, he froze, imagining his strait-laced father’s reaction to such artistic licence and something infinitely more surprising bubbled up inside Jaul without warning. Gales of incredulous laughter convulsed his lean, powerful frame and when he had recovered from his inappropriate amusement he lounged back breathless against the edge of the bed. His brilliant eyes flared to the purest gold when he pictured how Chrissie would react to the paintings.
* * *
A note was delivered to Chrissie minutes after she had emerged from a long relaxing bath. Instantly recognising Jaul’s copperplate black print, she tore it open.
You are cordially invited to spend a night in the harem with your husband.
A surprised giggle fell from her lips while a warm sense of relief swelled inside her. Jaul had recovered sufficiently from his annoyance with her to make a joke. It was a joke, of course it was, and Jaul had always had a terrific sense of humour. She leafed through drawers and selected her fanciest lingerie with hot cheeks before choosing a perfectly circumspect plain blue tailored dress, which gave not the smallest hint of what she wore underneath. A night in the harem? What did that entail? Her entire skin surface heated up and she smiled dreamily, knowing exactly what she was hoping that note meant while being wryly amused by her own secret conviction that there was something different about Jaul in recent days. Didn’t that note prove how mistaken she had been?
One of Jaul’s guards was waiting to take her to her husband and they trudged a long way down endless corridors and down stone flights of stairs before they reached their destination. A big, ugly, ironclad door faced them. Opening it for her, the guard stood back and Chrissie entered, wondering why the man was trying not to smile. But that question was quickly answered because a spectacular scene confronted her two steps beyond the door.
Candles were burning everywhere she looked, glowing in the dark to cast leaping shadows across the soaring domed ceiling and elaborate mosaic-tiled walls and ensuring that the water droplets cascading from the fountains sparkled like diamonds. It was beautiful, incredibly beautiful, and Chrissie knew instinctively that Jaul had done it for her. Her bright eyes stung painfully and she had to blink when the man himself appeared from behind a pillar about thirty feet from her. In contrast to their highly exotic surroundings Jaul sported faded jeans and a partially unbuttoned white shirt, the pale fabric accentuating his bronzed skin and the blackness of his unruly hair. For a split second she felt as though time itself had slipped for this was Jaul as she remembered him as a student, shorn of every atom of his forbidding reserve.
‘Where on earth are we?’ Chrissie asked.
‘In the heart of the al-Zahid family’s shadiest secret,’ Jaul proffered wryly. ‘The harem that even I didn’t know still existed until this evening. Of course, I knew there would have been one at some stage but, taking into account my father’s delicate sensibilities, I assumed it was long gone.’
Chrissie gazed past him at the giant bed. ‘That looks like a bed people would throw an orgy on,’ she said before she could think better of it. ‘Not that I know anything about...er...orgies—’
‘Look at the walls,’ Jaul invited.
In the flickering shadows she saw the murals and the naked male and female figures engaged in flagrant sexual play and a hot flush lit her cheeks. ‘My goodness...’
‘I’m amazed that my father didn’t have this place razed to the ground, but he idolised my grandfather.’ Jaul sighed. ‘How he retained that respectful attitude when confronted with the reality that Tarif was a man with licentious habits, I cannot begin to imagine.’
‘Nor can I,’ she whispered, beginning to understand why he had brought her to the harem. He had found out the truth and immediately acted with the open-minded candour she had always loved him for. When Jaul was in the wrong he never tried to cover it up or excuse himself.
‘I’ve phoned Sophie’s daughter, Rose, and apologised through her for taking so long to make an approach to my grandmother.’
‘You phoned Rose...already?’ Chrissie exclaimed.
‘There were concubines here well into the last century. My grandmother wasn’t lying,’ Jaul confirmed with a sardonic