Seduced by the Sultan(50)

                Afterwards he took her back to her room and laid her on the bed and she looked up at him as he smoothed back her matted hair. She could feel that stupid great flare of love welling up inside her and wondered why it hadn’t left her, as she had been praying so hard for it to do. But he had been kind to her, hadn’t he? More than kind. And kindness could be seductive too—the most seductive thing in the world.

                ‘Thank you,’ she said, and fell into a deep sleep.

                When she awoke it must have been morning, because a chill grey light was coming in through the windows and Murat hadn’t moved from the chair he’d been sitting in. He didn’t even appear to have slept, for his gaze was sharp and alert as soon as she opened her eyes. Only the new beard at his jaw and the dark shadows hollowing his cheeks gave any indication that he must have been there for hours.

                And she was lying there in her bra and pants!

                Surreptitiously, she reached down for the duvet and hauled it over herself and saw him give a flicker of a smile.

                ‘This is the bit where you say “what happened?”,’ he said, handing her a glass of water.

                ‘What happened?’ she questioned, propping herself up on her elbows to gulp it down, achingly aware of him and his proximity.

                ‘You were sick and now you’re better.’

                Fragments of the night came filtering back. The way he’d pushed away those strands of sweaty hair from her brow. The way he’d carried her. She tried to push the image away. To think about things which wouldn’t make her realise how much she’d missed him. ‘I do remember. You gave me something disgusting to drink.’

                ‘I agree that taste-wise it’s not up there with nectar,’ he said wryly. ‘That was what we call a Dimdar. It’s an old desert remedy made from the sap of a rare cactus which grows in the Mekathasinian Sands, and which desert warriors have been using for centuries to treat their ailments.’

                She was horribly aware that the inside of her mouth felt gritty and stale. ‘I need a shower.’

                ‘I’m not stopping you.’

                But she felt horribly vulnerable as she struggled out of bed. As if she’d been caught with all her defences down and she wasn’t sure how best to erect them again. Grabbing an armful of clothes, she went along the corridor to the communal bathroom, but the face which stared back at her from the mirror confirmed her worst fears. She touched the sweat-soaked tendrils of her hair, which hung around her pinched face. Murat had seen her like this. Unwashed and pale and looking nothing like the woman he had once lived with.

                She told herself she was no longer his arm-candy, nor was she trying to impress him. Nonetheless, she spent a long time in the sputtering shower, half expecting him to be gone by the time she returned to her room. He hadn’t, of course, and she blinked at the scene which greeted her. He had made the bed and boiled the kettle and was now pouring boiling water into two mugs, in which bobbed a couple of teabags. It made such a comforting yet incongruous image, that for a moment she felt as if she were right back in the middle of her delirium.

                He glanced up as she walked in, his black eyes lingering on her for a moment longer than was necessary. ‘You look better,’ he commented.

                ‘That wouldn’t be difficult. I feel much better.’ She put her damp towel in the linen basket, knowing what she needed to say. But it felt strange to be doing so without her arms looped around his neck or her lips brushing against that unshaven jaw. ‘I want to thank you for what you did.’