Fretwork lamps stood in a glowing circle outside, casting intricate shadows onto the heavy canvas. The shadowed figure of a servant pulled back two lavishly embroidered flaps to reveal the lavish interior within.
‘Come,’ said Murat, adding something in Qurhahian, which caused the servant to melt into the darkness.
Still feeling shell-shocked, Catrin followed Murat into a lantern-lit room of unbelievable splendour. A long day-bed was covered by throws of gold and scarlet silk and heaped with a mishmash of silken cushions. On an engraved table stood a silver pot of what smelled like very strong coffee and beside it were two tiny silver cups. The air was scented with sandalwood though it was underpinned by something much richer and sweeter, something which might have been tuberose.
Catrin turned to see the low divan which stood at the far end of the tent and when she turned back again it was to find Murat’s eyes on her, his expression intense and very watchful. She studied him right back, acknowledging that this was a Murat she had never seen before, looking as if he had stepped straight from the pages of an ancient fable. And she hated the leap her heart gave nearly as much as she hated the way that her eyes ran so greedily over his powerful frame.
He looked...unfamiliar. She had never seen him in his desert robes before and she thought how unfair it was that she had not been given a chance to prepare herself for the impact of that.
He was all dark and gleaming power. The pale gold of the flowing garments emphasised the much darker hue of his skin, and somehow managed to emphasise the hard body beneath. His hair was covered by a matching headdress, knotted with an intricately woven circlet of black silk. And even that was a turn-on. She thought how privileged she had been to see the Sultan’s hair in a past life. To have run her fingers through it and kissed it.
Catrin’s hand flew to her throat in horror.
Privileged to see his hair?
Had she been slipped some kind of drug while she’d been on board the plane, which had wiped her brain clear of any logic or reason? She glared at him. Had he brought her here for his pleasure? To make love to his erstwhile Welsh mistress, before inevitably casting her aside for the princess he would one day marry?
‘Why have you brought me here, Murat? What the hell is going on?’
His gaze was steady; his eyes like chips of black ice.
‘I had to see you.’
She swallowed, telling herself not to fall for it. She couldn’t afford to fall for it. ‘Even if you did,’ she said, sucking in a deep breath and trying to slow down the rapid thunder of her heart, ‘couldn’t you have just gone about it using normal channels? Ever thought of sending an email or even phoning?’
‘And would you have answered?’ he demanded. ‘Would you have been prepared to come here, if I had asked you to? If I told you that the need to see you felt as imperative to me as breathing itself, would you have listened to me?’
There was no doubting the deeply poetic nature of his words, and no doubting that it made her heart race even more to hear them. And they certainly sounded sincere. But Catrin kept her face set in a mulish expression, instinct warning her to protect herself behind the steely armour of anger. ‘I don’t appreciate being bundled onto an aircraft and flown halfway around the world,’ she spat out, ‘just to satisfy some stupid whim of yours. How on earth did you manage to get my boss to cooperate?’
‘I asked him.’
‘Or bribed him, more likely.’