Seduced by the Sultan(36)

                With her hands lying clasped on her lap and her simple blue dress seeming to echo her muted mood, he couldn’t remember her ever looking quite so serene, nor so beautiful.

                Tightly, his hands clenched into fists where they lay on top of his tensed thighs. Was it because the end was in sight that he found himself wanting her more than ever? Or had her own accusation contained more than a kernel of truth? Was it a case of his competitive nature governing him as it had always governed him—driven by the knowledge that he was rarely refused anything, by anyone?

                Yet deep down he recognised that it wasn’t quite that simple. The woman she had become since she’d discovered his secret courtship had been like the Cat he’d fallen for. The feisty beauty who had blown him away within seconds of meeting her. Who had looked at the powerful potentate standing in that humble Welsh hotel and spoken to him as if he were...

                An equal?

                Maybe.

                This past weekend, she had been like a butterfly fluttering in out of the sunshine in order to be admired and yet somehow managing to remain tantalisingly aloof. Suddenly, everything had been on her terms. She had kept him guessing. Waiting. She had made him feel uncertain in a way which was totally new to him. And in the time it had taken before she had finally let him back into her arms, he had felt as if he were going out of his mind.

                He shook his head in consternation, for he was not given to self-analysis. From childhood, he had been taught to be ruthless and strong. He had been told that his role was to protect and to provide for his country; to sublimate his own desires in the pursuit of those goals. It had been drummed into him that his destiny was to rule with resilience and never appear vulnerable. And that had been the maxim he had embraced all his life.

                He had seen less war than his father, mainly because he didn’t share the dead king’s unquenchable lust to conquer new territories, and because he had preferred to use the intricate skills of international diplomacy rather than force. But Murat had seen his own fair share of battle. Etched into his memory was that terrible clash with insurgents at Port D’Leo, when his two most senior commanders had been slain before his eyes. He remembered holding the hand of one of the men, as his lifeblood had seeped like liquid rust into the hot, desert sand. He remembered the choked words which the soldier had asked Murat to take back to his wife: words of regret that he would not live to see his unborn child. And Murat could still recall his own guilt that he had been powerless to save them.

                He thought back to his spartan childhood. Of the loneliness of his life in the palace and of the powerful father who had never been there for him, nor for any of his family. Any snatched hours spent with his son had been spent teaching him weaponry and horsemanship, and drumming into him that women could weaken a man and sap his essential strength.

                But Murat could never remember being shown affection by the man who had sired him. Even his mother’s love had been diluted by her long, depressive illness, when she would sit staring at the blank wall of her sitting room, rather than engaging with Murat or his sister.

                And wasn’t that the truth about human emotion—that you could never rely on it? He thought of his friend Suleiman, the person to whom he had once been closer than to anyone in the world, and the man Murat had relied upon to give his sovereign one hundred per cent unswerving loyalty.

                Yet Suleiman had let the wiles of a woman twist him away from that loyalty and devotion, hadn’t he? He had taken the woman destined to be Murat’s bride and had made her his own. And although Murat had now forgiven his oldest friend, he still felt the bitter twist of pain when he remembered how his blood brother had betrayed him.

                And that was why he had always kept his heart steeled against an emotion which some men called love, but which Murat saw as nothing but trouble. Human hearts could not be trusted, nor relied upon—and ‘love’ was the most unreliable emotion of all. Far better to stay clear of the clutches of something which had the power to destroy much of what it touched.