The Desert Prince's Mistress (14 page)

She looked directly into the golden eyes which were trained on her watchfully. Make it easy for him, thought Lara. No bitterness, nor regrets, no tears or recriminations. Let it be a fond memory, something to warm him during the long, cold Maraban nights, until he finds another woman to replace me.

She nodded. ‘I shall leave as soon as possible,’ she said.

‘How soon is soon?’ demanded Darian.

Khalim glanced at his watch. ‘You can be airborne within the hour.’

That quickly? Her head swam. But wasn’t anything possible for the Sheikh of Maraban? That didn’t even leave them time for one last, loving goodbye.

‘I’ll go and pack,’ she said, noticing that Darian didn’t attempt to change her mind for her.

She went back to their room, looking sadly at the rumpled sheets, which would normally have been changed
while they were at dinner so that they would return to a neat and pristine bed for another night of long lovemaking.

It wasn’t enough, she thought sadly. It had been too brief and all too beautiful, and then snatched away by chance and circumstance.

The door opened and her expression of regret quickly changed to one of acceptance. She would not burden him with her sadness, nor leave him remembering her face all crestfallen. And maybe in a way this was for the best. Ending naturally at its height rather than leaving her with a sour taste when it faded away, or he tired of her.

But inside her heart was breaking into a million pieces.

She clipped the suitcase closed and smiled. ‘There!’

Darian looked at the tumble of dark, silken curls, the brittle way she was smiling at him. Something had changed. He knew it and she knew it, too. Yet wasn’t it human nature to want things to stay exactly as they were?

‘I don’t want you to go, Lara.’

But Lara recognised that his words were inadequate, spoken only because it was the ‘right’ thing to say at a time like this. She shook her head. ‘You need me to go, Darian. There is stuff here for you to do, and my presence isn’t helping.’

‘Yes.’ There was silence for a moment, and when he spoke his voice was heavy. ‘You know, I can’t promise you anything, Lara. Not even whether or not I’ll see you again.’

‘I know that.’ Her eyes were very bright, but her voice was steady. ‘And neither should you. This has all been a very strange experience—perhaps it’s best that we put it down to just that…an experience.’

She was moving away from him, and unexpectedly he felt a wrench. He reached out his arms to her, but she shook her head and turned away. If he touched her she would dissolve with the tears which were threatening to
fill her eyes—and why leave him with
that
as an enduring vision?

‘I’d better get going,’ she said brightly. ‘Can’t keep Khalim waiting, can we?’

But he kissed her on the airfield, in full view of Khalim and servants and flight attendants and all. He brought his lips down on hers in a hard, almost punishing kiss, as if he wanted to physically imprint himself on her and leave her with a memory of him which no one else would ever be able to match.

But he hadn’t needed to kiss her to do that.

T
HE
first thing Lara saw on her return to England was her face—only for a moment she didn’t quite recognise it, for it was magnified to sixty-eight times its normal size, the blue eyes staring moodily down at her from a giant hoarding as her taxi drove out of Heathrow.

For a minute she blinked, disconcerted.

She had forgotten all about the job—the means she had used to get to Darian in the first place, which had ended up, ironically, with her winning the contract.

It was strange to see your features so enlarged. She looked all eyes—their sapphire-blue colour blinding—but there was a haunted, almost distracted quality to her smile, and she knew why.

It was the very first shot, and it had been taken just after he had put the shawl around her shoulders, when she had been disarmed by the soft and solicitous gesture. She was wearing the chiffon dress and holding the phone to her ear, and there was a dazed, almost dreamy expression on her face. It looked like the expression of a woman in love, but that was crazy. You couldn’t fall in love that quickly could you?

She supposed that depended on what your definition of love was. Maybe she should settle for having been blown away by the man—a feeling which had subsequently grown. Now she was back in England and he was over in Maraban she was missing him already.

‘That ain’t you, is it?’ asked the taxi driver, cocking his
head at the poster and then turning slightly to snatch a glance at her.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Cor! Nice work if you can get it!’ he enthused, and he screwed his nose up. ‘Pay much, does it?’

It paid well, though not half as well as most people imagined. But in the end she had been the one who paid, and she had paid with her heart.

There was a light on in the apartment when she arrived home, and she didn’t even have the energy or the inclination to fish around in her bag for her keys, just jammed her thumb on the bell and kept it there.

‘What the bloody hell….?’ An irate Jake flung the door open, his face immediately dissolving into an expression of concern when he saw her. ‘Lara!’ he exclaimed softly. ‘Darling, are you all right? What in heaven’s name has happened to you?’

‘Oh, Jake!’ And she dropped her bag onto the floor and collapsed, sobbing, into his arms.

It wasn’t until she was settled on the sofa, a fire lit and a huge mug of steaming tea beside her, along with the remains of a box of tissues, that she felt ready to face his anxious questions. But the whole set-up sounded mad—in fact, it
was
mad—and nobody had told her what to say. Or what not to say. It was Darian’s secret to tell. His story, not hers. And Jake was a darling, but what if he happened to let it slip to someone? She knew what the outcome of
that
would be. The press would have an absolute field-day, and Darian and Khalim’s lives would be made hell.

‘It’s a broken heart, Jake,’ she said. ‘It’s that simple.’

Jake was shaking his head. ‘And it’s that Darian Wildman who broke it? The one who, I hasten to add, was so foul-tempered to me! Want me to punch him for you, darling?’

Lara almost choked on her tea and laughed; it was a
relief to find that she still could.
‘You?’
she questioned, with more emphasis than she had intended. ‘Punch Darian? I don’t think so, but thank you all the same!’

‘I’ll have you know that I came top in boxing in my year at drama school!’ The famous blue eyes crinkled at the corners. ‘But it’s good to see you smiling. Now, sit there and put your feet up. I’m going to make us some supper.’

‘Jake, you’d make someone a wonderful wife,’ she sighed.

He turned round and raised his brows and for a moment looked so…so
imperious
that Lara suddenly got a good idea why he always featured in the ‘Top Ten Most Wanted Men’ lists which were periodically featured in newspapers and magazines.

‘Don’t push it, Lara!’ he warned.

It felt weird to be back in England.

She tried rationalising it—telling herself that she had been in Maraban hardly any time at all, and certainly not as long as the time she had gone on a safari in Africa and ended up staying three months.

But comparisons didn’t work. Maraban
wasn’t
like anywhere else—its magic and its differences touched a part of her in a way that no other place did. And anyway, it wasn’t the country she was yearning for. It was the man she had left behind there.

She forced herself to take a shower, even though she was reluctant to wash away the scent of him which still clung to her skin. That night her bed felt cold and empty, but not nearly so much as her body did. Strange how you could become used to someone. How quickly she had accommodated Darian’s physical presence—and how badly she missed the warmth of him, holding her in the night.

The night wore on, the clock ticking away with a vengeance, as if calling time on her affair, and she told herself
for the last time she would allow herself to cry, the tears sliding wet and warm down her cheeks and falling on the pillow.

In a way, it might have been better if it
had
been finished when she had left—at least then she might be able to mourn it properly and put a sense of closure on it. But it had been left unsatisfactorily open.

What had he said?
I can’t promise you anything, Lara.

It was hard not to try to read stuff into that—but if a girlfriend had told
her
a man had said that to her then how would Lara interpret it? As a courteous way of telling her there was no future in it?

Not even whether or not I’ll see you again.

Definitely no future.

At least it didn’t look as if there was going to be time to mope around the place, because the success of the poster campaign meant that work offers came flooding in. It was the highest public profile she had ever had, and suddenly it seemed that the world wanted to hire the tumble-haired brunette with the wide blue eyes.

Her professional life, it seemed, was on an all-time high, and she was impatient with herself for feeling that it was a very superficial kind of achievement. You worked all your life for something, and then when it came you couldn’t appreciate it because you couldn’t stop thinking about a wretched man!

She filmed a television commercial for a new brand of deodorant, and there were two magazine shoots lined up, as well as a whole diary full of ‘go-sees’. And if she suddenly found the work curiously hollow, then surely that was to do with the constant aching in her heart.

Time was a great healer, that was what all the relationship experts said, and it had to be true or they wouldn’t say it. If she never heard from Darian again then at least
she could tell herself that what she had known with him in Maraban had been perfect. Too perfect, really, but there was no point dwelling on that. If she allowed herself to remember the way he had made her feel then it didn’t exactly make the future seem a very rosy prospect, for she couldn’t imagine ever recapturing that with anyone else. But at least she had felt it—no matter how fleetingly. Many people lived their lives without even coming close to it.

She walked into the apartment one night to find Jake lying on the sofa. She hadn’t seen him for days because he’d been in Scotland, filming a new romantic comedy which was a follow-up to his last record-breaking success, and her mouth broke into a smile of welcome.

‘Jake! Oh, how lovely to see you!’

‘Hello, darling!’ He looked her up and down. ‘What’s with the weight-loss?’

‘Have I?’

‘Have I?
’ he mimicked. ‘Lara, you’ve dropped at least one dress size.’ He frowned. ‘From which I must deduce that you haven’t heard from the Wild-Man?’

‘I don’t know why you call him that!’ she said lightly.

‘Because it’s his name—only with maybe a slightly more sinister emphasis!’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘So have you?’

‘No.’

‘And how long’s it been?’

Superstitiously, she didn’t want to say it—because if she acknowledged just how long it had been then it might force her to confront the fact that it really was over. ‘Six weeks,’ she admitted reluctantly.

‘So that’s it, then? It’s over?’

‘Yes, Jake—that’s it! I don’t think you need to be a relationship counsellor to work that out! Now, I’m just
going to send my sister an e-mail, and then I’ll…I’ll cook you supper—how about that?’

He smiled. ‘That’s my girl—welcome back to reality, Lara!’

He could keep it, she thought moodily as she sat down at the desk.

At least the computer provided a kind of refuge; she could see the appeal of a life spent surfing in cyberspace. If you were staring at, and communicating with a screen, it meant that you could escape from the real world and all the cares and worries it generated.

She switched on, gazing out of the window while the computer chugged into life, at the bare branches of the trees which were sketched across the ice-blue beauty of the winter sky. Would it ever be spring again? She gave a wan smile as she clicked the mouse onto her inbox. It was time to stop dreaming and get real indeed.

Twelve messages. One from each of her sisters. One from her agent and one from a schoolfriend with whom she corresponded sporadically. The rest were junk—which seemed to arrive daily, no matter what. She scrolled down, ticking each little box to delete them, then she stopped. Her head spun and her mouth dried.

Golden Palace?

Her heart seemed to miss a beat, even though she told herself that it was probably a Chinese restaurant touting for new business. But a Chinese restaurant would hardly title its subject matter:
Akhal-Teke and other things.

Would it?

She clicked onto it, and now her heart was pounding with excitement. A sense of relief and delight washed over her as she realised that it was from him. Darian had e-mailed her!

The message read:

Khalim and I have just arrived back from several weeks in the Dahab desert.

So that was why she hadn’t heard from him!

Where he foisted upon me the most spirited Akhal-Teke you could imagine and told me to break her in! I did—after much bruising—and inevitably my new nickname as ‘Fallen Man’ has been confirmed. How’s life in London? Darian.

She read it over. And over. And over again. Her heart was bubbling with a kind of happiness that she was sure was inappropriate. It was only an e-mail, after all. But deep down she knew it was more than that. He had reestablished contact. He was still in her life. She wasn’t sure in just what capacity, but at least he was there.

Should she wait to reply?

Hell, no! She had waited six weeks to hear from him—why punish herself by doing something just to appear ‘cool’ when she didn’t feel in the least bit like that? In fact, her cheeks were flushed with a crazy excitement.

Her fingers were trembling. Keep it short, she told herself. And sweet.

London seems crazy and crowded—

And lonely of course…

But maybe that’s because I’m comparing it with Maraban, which seems a very long way away.

And then, because she couldn’t possibly write what she really wanted, which was When are you coming home?—he might have decided that Maraban was his home now—or, Darian, I love you and I really miss you—because that would be wholly inappropriate and he probably didn’t feel the same way, she signed it, simply.
Lara.

‘What’s up?’ asked Jake, when she walked back into the sitting room.

‘He’s written! E-mailed me!’

‘Wild-Man, I take it?’ he questioned wryly.

‘Will you stop calling him that?’

‘That’s his name, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, Jake,’ she sighed. ‘I didn’t know they had e-mail in Maraban.’

‘But they’ve got an army and a navy and an airforce,’ he answered seriously. ‘Why wouldn’t they? What did he say?’

‘Oh, just that he’s spent several weeks in the desert with Khalim, that’s all.’

‘As you do!’ joked Jake.

But Lara felt happy for the first time since she’d arrived back, and she hummed a little tune underneath her breath as she began to prepare a stir-fry for herself and Jake.

She developed a sudden and passionate interest in her e-mail inbox, forcing herself to only check it twice a day—once in the morning and once in the evening—though the temptation to sit there online all day, staring hopefully at the screen in case his name should float up, was almost overwhelming.

She knew that people said an e-mail didn’t carry the same kind of clout as a letter. A letter you had to sit down and think about while an e-mail was fast and instant. Though this was not quite true in her case, because she would sit there dreamily gazing into space while thinking up replies, searching for just the right note to strike, read
ing and re-reading every one in case the wrong interpretation could be made of an innocent sentence.

She kept it light, told him about her jobs and her life, and sent some amusing anecdotes about a bunch of female fans who had discovered where Jake lived and were laying seige to the house.

A rather stern reply bounced back.

Are they bothering you? Get the police to move them on if they show any sign of trouble.

And on one rare and wonderful occasion they managed to be online at the same time and he told her that he had met Rose. She wrote:

Was she angry that I’d been there without getting in touch?

He replied: