The Desert Sheikh’s Captive Wife

CHAPTER THREE

TILDA got on the train back to Oxford. She was in shock. Everything about her meeting with Rashad had shaken her up. Not least the manner in which she had reacted to that kiss! Her passionate physical response to him had coursed through her like a river in flood and she was furious with herself. Evidently loathing Prince Rashad Hussein Al-Zafar was no defence whatsoever against his persuasive sensuality. What did that say about her intelligence or her self-control?

In that field, Tilda conceded angrily, absolutely nothing had changed in five wretched years. Rashad had still only to touch her to set her on fire with longing. But nobody knew better than Tilda that it was a kind of weakness that could lead to disaster. Her family history bore that out. Her mother, Beth, had only been nineteen when she had fallen pregnant with Tilda and had had to get married in a hurry. Beth’s woes had not ended there for her husband had resented his new family obligations. An ambitious young lawyer, he had been a neglectful husband and an uninterested parent. Five years later, Beth had become a widow and an easy mark for Scott Morrison’s promises of undying devotion. Madly in love, Beth had conceived her third child just a few months into the relationship and had rushed back into marriage with seriously unhappy results.

Tilda suppressed a sigh. Although she felt guilty acknowledging it, she had tried to learn by her mother’s mistakes and had resolved that no man would ever be allowed to come between her and her wits, or her education, for that matter. In the early teenage years she had had little interest in boys. Scott’s bullying, drinking and womanising had put her off the entire male sex, while she had done what she could to support her mother and help out with the younger children.

At eighteen years old, she had been in her last year of school. When Scott had told her that he had fixed her up with part-time work as a waitress in a nightclub managed by one of his seedy friends she had been incensed, for she had already had a weekend job in a supermarket. Unfortunately whenever Tilda had dared to defy Scott, he had taken his temper out on the rest of her family, who had been much less able to stand up to him. Within a week the continual arguments and her mother’s distress had vanquished Tilda’s resistance. While dutifully agreeing with Beth that, yes, she would earn more money, she had known that the extra hours and late nights would scarcely be conducive to the intensive studying she had been doing for her final exams.

From the outset Tilda had hated the attention that her looks had drawn from the customers. The club had attracted slick, high-earning professionals and wealthy students and spoilt young men who had drunk too much and thought the female staff were fair game. Tilda had soon realised why the manager only seemed to hire waitresses who were more than ordinarily attractive. Some of them had regularly slept with the clientele in return for gifts or cash and their liberal ways had encouraged custom.

Tilda had worked there only a fortnight before she had first seen Rashad. His supple, sexy aura as he had descended the stairs had caught her eye first. When he had turned his head and locked dark golden eyes with hers, she had literally stopped breathing. Mentally it had been like running into a solid brick wall and seeing stars. She had found it impossible not to keep gazing around to see where he was, or to steal another transfixed glance at him. Every time she had looked, she had found that he was looking, too, and, even though that had embarrassed her, she had been helpless to resist temptation.

A big dark-haired guy had approached her towards the end of that evening. ‘Fancy coming to a party tonight?’ he asked, his foreign accent roughening his pronunciation.

‘No, thanks,’ she said flatly, turning away.

‘I’m Leonidas Pallis and I have a friend who wants to meet you.’ He dropped a card and a hundred pound note down on the tray she was holding. ‘Party kicks off around midnight. That should cover your cab fare.’

‘I said, no, thanks.’ Her cheeks scarlet, Tilda thrust the banknote back at him and walked away.

Soon afterwards, a waitress called Chantal came over to speak to her. ‘You really riled Leonidas. Don’t you know who he is? He’s the grandson of a Greek tycoon and he’s absolutely loaded. He gives incredible tips and throws amazing parties. What’s your problem?’

‘I’m just not interested in mixing with the customers outside working hours.’ Tilda could also have mentioned that she had school the next day, but the manager had banned her from admitting that she was still a schoolgirl as he had said it might give the club a bad name.

When she emerged into the car park at closing time, a surprising number of vehicles were still there. She heard a vigorous burst of male laughter. Her heart sank when she spotted the Greek guy drinking from a bottle and leaning up against the bonnet of a Ferrari with his mates. Then she saw Rashad straightening up and moving towards her. Something very like panic gripped her but her feet were frozen to the spot. He was so stunningly handsome she was mesmerised by the clean, hard-boned lines of lean dark features.

‘I’m Rashad,’ he murmured softly, and he extended his hand with a formality that took her entirely by surprise.

‘Tilda,’ she breathed, just touching his lean brown fingers.

‘May I drive you home?’

‘I get a lift with one of the other girls.’

Unexpectedly, Rashad smiled as if such an explanation was perfectly acceptable to him. ‘Of course. It is very late. Will you give me your phone number?’

That charismatic smile threatened her defences and she battened down the hatches, terrified of what he was making her feel. ‘No, sorry. I don’t date club members.’

The following evening the club manager, Pete, cornered her. ‘I hear you blew away our new royal VIP last night,’ he accused.

‘Royal?’ Tilda parroted, wide-eyed.

‘Prince Rashad, the heir to the throne of Bakhar and a string of oil wells.’ Pete dealt her an angry look. ‘Our two best customers-Leonidas Pallis and Sergio Torrente-brought him in. Those guys are minted, too. They spend thousands here and I don’t want any stupid little girl offending them. Is that clear?’

‘But I haven’t done anything.’

‘Do yourself a favour. Smile sweetly and give the prince your phone number.’

Pete changed the table rota so that, on her next shift, Tilda was serving the VIP table. Now that she knew who Rashad was, she noticed his thickset bodyguards trying unsuccessfully to stay in the background. Uneasily aware of his royal status, she tried very hard to put him out of her mind. But he dominated her every thought and response. It was as if an invisible wire attached her to him, so that she noticed his every tiny move. In comparison with him, his companions were immature. He seemed to be the only one of the group graced with morals or manners. He didn’t drink to excess, he didn’t fool around, he was always courteous. He was also absolutely, totally gorgeous and it did not escape her attention that every girl in the place had her eye on him.

The night she tripped and dropped a tray of drinks, everything changed. While his rowdy mates laughed at the spectacle she made, Rashad sprang to his feet and immediately helped her up from the floor.

‘You are unhurt?’

Her hand trembled in his and she connected with brilliant dark eyes enhanced by luxuriant ebony lashes.

‘When you fell my heart stopped beating,’ he breathed in a raw undertone.

That was the moment she went from being infatuated with his vibrant dark good looks to falling head over heels in love with him, but she still pulled her hand free with muffled thanks and hurriedly walked away. She saw it as being sensible and protecting herself from a broken heart. What future was there in loving a guy who was only a temporary visitor to her country and, even worse, destined to be a king? His two friends approached her later that evening. Making it clear that the shy stolen glances that betrayed her attraction to Rashad had not passed unnoticed, Leonidas and Sergio virtually accused her of being a tease.

‘How much do you want to go out with him?’ Leonidas demanded contemptuously, peeling off notes from the thick wad in his wallet.

‘You’re not rich enough!’ Tilda snapped in disgust.

She went home in tears that night only to find her stepfather, Scott, drunkenly upbraiding her mother with the club manager, Pete’s, complaint that Tilda had an unfriendly attitude towards the customers. The next weekend Pete told her that she had to stand in for one of the cage dancers who had called in sick. She refused. Threatened with the sack and worn down by what felt like everybody’s criticisms, she gave way, reasoning that the bikini-style outfit exposed no more than she would have revealed at the swimming pool. She persuaded herself that nobody really looked at the dancers except as gyrating bodies that added to the club atmosphere.

When Rashad arrived, a birthday cake was brought in for his benefit. Tilda still recalled the instant when he had registered who was dancing in the cage: the shock and consternation, the distaste he had been unable to hide. In the same moment cage dancing had gone from being what Tilda had told herself was essentially harmless to the equivalent of dancing naked and shameless in the street. When Rashad studiously averted his attention from her as though she were putting on an indecent display, she fled from the cage and refused to get back into it again. Chantal later revealed that Tilda had been set up.

‘It’s the prince’s twenty-fifth birthday. Sergio and Leonidas thought it would be a laugh to get you into the cage. They paid Pete to fix it for them.’

Tilda never did tell Rashad that truth. Telling tales about his best friends wouldn’t have got her very far. Instead, she blamed herself for not having had the guts to tell Pete where to get off. Eyes red from tears, she put on her uniform and got on with her usual waitressing. Already promised a full-time summer job at the firm owned by Evan Jerrold, she consoled herself with the prayerful hope that she would not be serving drinks for much longer. Unhappily, however, new employment would mean that she was unlikely to ever see Rashad again.

When she finished her shift, she emerged from the club to find the weather was wet and unseasonably cold, and that the girl who usually gave her a lift had gone off to a party without telling her. Shivering while she was trying to call a cab on her mobile, she tensed when a silver Aston Martin Vanquish pulled up in front of her with a throaty growl. Rashad sprang out and studied her in silence across the bonnet and she knew he wouldn’t ask anything of her because he had asked before and she had said no. He was too proud to ask again. Tears made her eyes smart; she still felt so utterly humiliated that she had let herself be pressed into dancing in the cage.

As Rashad walked round the bonnet and reached out to open the passenger door one of his bodyguards skidded up at speed to do it for him and prevent him from lowering himself to such a mundane task.

‘Thanks,’ she said gruffly and got in. At that moment she was not aware of having made a decision. She just couldn’t muster the mental resistance to walk away from him again. She told herself that if she kept things as light as though it were a holiday romance she wouldn’t get hurt.

‘You’ll have to tell me where you live,’ Rashad murmured as calmly as if she had been getting into his car every night for months.

‘Happy birthday,’ she said in a wobbly voice, as the excessively emotional surge of tears was still threatening her composure.

At the traffic lights he reached for her hand and almost crushed it within the fierce hold of his. ‘In my country we stopped putting people in cages when slavery was outlawed a hundred years ago.’

‘I shouldn’t have agreed to do it.’

‘You did not wish to?’

‘Of course not-apart from anything else, I’m not a dancer.’

‘Don’t do it again,’ Rashad told her with innate authority and instantly she wanted to do it again just to demonstrate her independence. She had to bite her lip not to respond with the defiance that she had acquired to hold her own with her stepfather.

And so it began: a relationship that attracted a great deal of unwelcome comment from others. Leonidas Pallis made it clear that he regarded her in much the same light as a call-girl. Sergio Torrente, the sleek, sophisticated Italian who completed the trio of friends, seemed equally disdainful of Tilda’s right to be treated with respect, but was not quite so obvious about revealing the fact. Had she been less green about the strength of male bonding, she might have realised then that with such powerful enemies her relationship with Rashad was utterly doomed to end in tears.

As the hateful Leonidas Pallis put it, ‘Why can’t you keep it simple?’ Tilda heard him ask Rashad this during a night out. ‘Boy meets girl, boy shags girl, boy dumps girl. You don’t romance waitresses!’

As her revolting stepfather put it: ‘Well, you can thank me for getting you the job that’s about to make your fortune. Tell him you like cash better than diamonds.’

Offered the chance to rent a room in a student house for the summer, she grabbed it to escape Scott and quit working at the club. At the same time she started her temporary job in the accounts department at Jerrold Plastics. The weeks that followed were the happiest but also the stormiest of her life, because Rashad laid down the law as if he were her commanding officer and did not adapt well to disagreement. She was challenged to keep his hands off her, but whenever passion threatened to overcome prudence she backed off fast. She was a virgin, well aware that she came from a very fertile line of women, and she was totally terrified of getting pregnant. She honestly believed, too, that keeping serious sex out of the equation would lessen the pain when Rashad returned to Bakhar.

Tilda was yanked out of those unsettling recollections only when the train pulled into the station. While she queued for the bus, she began putting the recent knowledge she had gained into those memories and she winced at the picture that began to emerge. Although she had had no idea of it, there had been a whole hidden dimension to her relationship with Rashad. That financial aspect encompassed, not only the embarrassing level of her family’s indebtedness, but also a seemingly brazen reluctance on her family’s part to pay rent or pay off the loan. Was it any wonder that over time Rashad had become suspicious of her motives and decided that all along she must have been a gold-digger out for all she could get?

Sex…It’s the only thing you have to give that I want. Still outraged by that declaration, Tilda could find no excuse for him on that score. Obviously that was all he had ever wanted from her and the brutal way he had ditched her had spelt out the same message. She was proud of the fact that she had not slept with Rashad five years earlier. But just as swiftly the false courage of offended pride and anger started to wane in the face of reality. When she began walking down the road where she lived her steps got slower and slower as she neared her home. After all, what had she achieved? She had got nowhere with Rashad. He was tough, resolute and ruthless. Emotion never got in the way of his self-discipline. Sadly, the strength, intellect and tenacity that she had once admired also made Rashad a lethally effective opponent.

Tilda was wrenched from her reflections by the startling sight of her former stepfather climbing into his beat-up car outside her home. As the older man had never demonstrated the smallest interest in maintaining contact with Katie, James and Megan, his three children by her mother, Tilda was taken aback. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in dismay.

‘Mind your own bloody business!’ Scott Morrison told her, his heavy face flushed with aggression below his thinning blond hair.

Seriously concerned, Tilda watched him shoot his vehicle back out onto the road. Why had he been visiting the house? He had come at a time when her mother would be alone. She went straight into Beth’s workroom. Her mother was sobbing and the room was in turmoil. Curtains were heaped on the floor in a tangle and a chair had been turned over. Perhaps most telling of all, the older woman’s purse lay open on the ironing board with only a few coins spilling out of it.

‘I bumped into Scott outside. Has he been taking money off you again?’ Tilda asked baldly.

Beth broke down and, piece by horrible piece, the whole story came tumbling out. When Scott had found out several years earlier that Rashad was the current owner of the house, he had accused Beth of defrauding him of his share of the property. Ever since then Beth had been living in fear of Scott’s visits and giving way to his threats and demands for money. While she soothed the distraught older woman, Tilda’s anger grew for she finally understood why Beth had found it impossible even to pay rent. From behind the scenes, Scott Morrison had still been bleeding Tilda’s family dry.

‘Scott got what he was entitled to when the divorce settlement went through the court. He has no right to anything more. He’s been telling you lies. I’m going to get the police, Mum-’

‘No, you can’t do that.’ Beth gave her a look of horror. ‘Katie and James would die of shame if their father was arrested-’

‘No, they’d die of shame at what’s been going on here, what you’ve been putting up with on their behalf! Silence protects bullies like Scott. Don’t you worry…I’ll sort him out,’ Tilda swore, furious with herself for not even suspecting what had been going on behind all their backs. The divorce had not gotten rid of Scott after all and working for a living had never been his way.

She was hanging her coat below the stairs when she noticed that the post had arrived. She tensed at the sight of the familiar brown envelope and scooped it up. Yes, just as she had feared it was yet another missive from Rashad’s solicitors. Taking a deep breath, she tore it open. Nervous perspiration broke out on her brow as she realised what the letter was. It was a written notice asking her mother to leave the house within fourteen days. As the rent was in arrears the landlord, it stated, would go to court seeking possession at the end of the month.

Tilda took the letter upstairs. She just could not face giving it to her mother at that moment. From the window she watched her sisters, seventeen-year-old Katie and nine-year-old Megan, walking up the drive in their school uniforms. James was shambling along in their wake, a tall gangling boy of fourteen, who had still to grow into his very large feet and deep bass voice. Her brother, Aubrey, currently in his fourth year of studying medicine, would be home later. Tilda was deeply attached to all of her siblings. They had gone through so much unhappiness when Scott had been making their lives hell but they had stayed close. They were good kids, hard-working and sensible. What would losing their home mean to them? Everything. It would shatter her family, because Beth’s agoraphobia would ensure that the older woman could not cope. When Beth fell apart at the seams, what then? Aubrey would probably drop out of med school and Katie would find it impossible to study for her A-levels.

There was only one way out, only one way of protecting her family from the horror of being put out on the street: Rashad.

Rashad…and sex. It would most probably be a major disappointment to Rashad, whose womanising exploits filled endless pages in the tabloid newspapers, to discover that Tilda did not possess a single special sexy talent to offer in the bedroom. Nothing but ignorance. It would serve him right, Tilda reflected, tight-mouthed. Even so, common sense urged that she would have to ensure that he wrote off all the debts and the house as well before it dawned on him that she really wasn’t worth the sacrifice of that much money. She shuddered, shame enveloping her from head to toe. She would be selling herself like a product in return for cash.

She reminded herself that if she hadn’t been so fearful of heartache and pregnancy, she would have ended up in bed with Rashad while she had been dating him. But it would have been different back then, because she had truly loved him and had certainly believed that he had more feelings for her than he had finally demonstrated. Would she be able to have sex just for the sake of it? Presumably other women did. There was no point being over-sensitive to the reality that she really had no choice if she wanted to protect the people she loved from having their lives devastated.

Standing by the window, she called Metropolis Enterprises on her mobile and asked to speak to Rashad. Various very well-trained personnel tried to head her off and make her settle for much smaller fry. She persisted with the reminder that she’d had an appointment with the prince earlier that day and added that he would be very annoyed if he did not receive her personal call.

Rashad was in a meeting when the message flashed up on his BlackBerry. Tilda. A slow, chilling smile curved his wide, handsome mouth as he took the call in his office. So, the fish was biting. He felt like a shark about to attend a banquet. She was his. Finally his to enjoy. At his leisure in a place of his choosing and for as long as he wanted her. He would make all the rules and she would really, really hate that. His brilliant dark golden eyes gleamed with anticipation. He pictured her greeting him when he returned from a long trip abroad and knew instantly where he would accommodate her. Somewhere where her talent for infidelity could not possibly be exercised. A discreet location where she had nothing to do but devote herself to being his sexual entertainment. He could think of no place more suitable than his late grandfather’s desert palace.

‘How may I be of assistance?’ Rashad drawled smoother than the most expensive silk in tone.

Instantly Tilda wanted to reach down the phone and slap him, for she knew that he knew exactly why she was ringing. She swallowed her pride with difficulty. ‘I’m willing to accept your offer.’

‘What offer?’

Her short upper lip dampened with perspiration. ‘You said it was the only thing I had to offer that you wanted.’

‘Your body,’ Rashad filled in gently, savouring every syllable. ‘You. We’ll have to meet to discuss the rules.’

‘What rules?’ she protested. ‘I just want to know that that eviction order won’t proceed.’

‘Meet me tomorrow afternoon at my town house.’ He quoted the address and a time. ‘We’ll sort out the details of our future association. You’ll be living abroad. I can tell you that now.’

As Tilda parted her lips to argue with that alarmingly unexpected assurance, Rashad concluded drily, ‘It will be as I say.’

At that juncture he terminated the call. He would not compromise on any point. The rules would not be negotiable. Everything would be as he wanted it to be. The sooner she learned that and accepted it, the better.