Such flesh. Such pleasure. And not nearly enough time to indulge in it. In the last five days, between Azhar’s commitments and her completing her cataloguing, they had scraped only a few precious hours together. Azhar closed his eyes, reliving last night. When they were together he could lose himself in her delightful company, forget the mountain of work he must get through on Kamal’s behalf before he left.
Though he had also come to enjoy discussing that mountain of work with her. In fact it was becoming something of a habit. He had never discussed his business with anyone before. It was not that he needed Julia’s advice, nor even her affirmation but—but it was simply that he enjoyed her company. No, not only that. There had been several occasions when discussing a thorny matter with her had served to both clarify and resolve it, and a number of times her proposed solution was better than his. And the odd thing was, he didn’t mind.
Azhar stared down at the watch. Its relentless ticking seemed to be mocking him, reminding him that his time with Julia was rapidly coming to a conclusion. Tick-tock. Less than two weeks left before she left for England. The day he had looked forward to for so long, when he would leave Qaryma for ever was also approaching at a frightening rate. Tick-tock. So little time to accomplish so much. Precious little to spend with Julia. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that he would miss her, but he would. There was no other woman like her. Daniel Adam Edward Trevelyan had not appreciated Julia, but Azhar did.
Tick-tock. Azhar pushed the watch away from him with the tip of his index finger. In the days they had left together, he would do his best to demonstrate that to her.
* * *
It was late afternoon. Julia opened her notebook with some reluctance. Though cataloguing and cross-referencing was a crucial element of her botanical work, it was also the part she disliked the most. This was partly due to the fact that there was a tedious and repetitive element to it, but mostly, she realised with a flash of insight, because it had been a task which her husband had regularly delegated to her when he found something more interesting to occupy him.
‘Your diligence is proof that you are a true woman of science,’ he had once said to her. And on more than one occasion, when she had protested at his demand for her to make yet another fair copy of something, ‘But your elegant feminine hand is much neater than my masculine scrawl.’ Julia rolled her eyes. Daniel would have vehemently rejected any suggestion of condescension, but then he would have equally vehemently denied Julia’s ability to execute any component of his research on her own initiative—even though that was exactly what he’d been forced to demand of her on his deathbed.
It was that, she thought broodingly, the assumption that she had no mind of her own, that she had resented more than anything. No, actually what she had resented was her own inability to tell him so. She would not be such a timid little mouse now.
She rearranged several specimens which she had laid out on the table. Was that true? In the five days since they had returned from the desert, there had been several occasions when she could have shared her concerns regarding Kamal with Azhar, yet she had deliberately refrained from doing so.
They had had so little time together. Like him, she had been very busy, documenting and painting and consulting with Johara, who had made two trips to the palace with her precious book. And Azhar—for a man set upon renouncing his kingdom, Azhar was putting a great deal of effort into setting it to rights. No one understood better than Julia his desire to be free, but while the duties she must discharge to gain that freedom were finite, Azhar’s sense of duty to his kingdom seemed to her quite the opposite. With every passing day, he assumed more and more responsibilities under the guise of easing Kamal’s path. As he increasingly embraced matters of state, and dug deeper into the issue of the diamond mines, she became more convinced that Azhar’s fate was to rule Qaryma. If he could have refrained from pursuing the anomaly of the diamond yields, if he could delegate more tasks, if he could force Kamal to make some of the decisions he was taking upon himself, it might be different. But his conscience and his deep sense of honour made it impossible for him to do any of these things.
The personal consequences were potentially ruinous for him. No wonder Azhar did not want to face them. With a sickening jolt, Julia discovered that she was not particularly eager to think about them either. Despite her resolution not to wish for more time with him, she had been hoping there would be some times in the future that they might spend together. She had fantasised about trips she might make once she was free, when Azhar had resumed his old life, to visit him in his home in Naples perhaps, or even return to Damascus again. Her dreams were vague, she had no idea the form these visits might take, or whether Azhar would welcome them, but they existed none the less.
Julia swore under her breath. ‘What the devil are you thinking?’ she demanded of herself. ‘That once you have finally freed yourself from Daniel, you will immediately set about attaching yourself to a man who has made it perfectly clear that he wants no attachments?’
But she wasn’t contemplating any sort of formal arrangement. She did not want to marry any more than Azhar did. ‘What, then?’ she asked. ‘You become his occasional mistress, spending nine months of the year pining for the three months or three weeks or whatever it is he allots to you? And you think a man as attractive as Azhar would take no other lovers? How would you feel about that?’
She did not want to think about that, and that fact should be caution enough for her. She cared. She was very, very close to caring too much. Azhar liked women, he’d told her so. Women. Plural, not singular. Stupid, foolish, unrealistic Julia to imagine that he would want only her when there was a world of women for him to choose from while she waited alone for a summons as if she was part of a harem. Where was the freedom in that?
The answer was starkly simple. There was none. It was folly, utter folly to allow herself to think that way—or even to dream. She had come to care for Azhar, there was no harm in admitting that, but to cherish any notion that this was anything other than a moment out of time was madness.
Outside, the sky was a strange shade of violet. Aisha, bringing her afternoon mint tea, closed the windows leading on to the terrace, indicating that there was a storm brewing. ‘Prince Azhar had a visitor today,’ she said, speaking in the mixture of English, Arabic and gestures in which she and Julia customarily communicated. ‘The Prince of Murimon, an old friend. For ten years, since Prince Azhar left, he has not been here, but he is every bit as tall and handsome as I remember,’ she added with a saucy smile. ‘After our Prince, the second most handsome man in Arabia. Now they will be rulers together.’
After Aisha had gone, Julia sipped her mint tea pensively. Outside, the sky looked bruised, a mixture of violet and pink, the clouds an odd golden brown, leaden with dust. She felt tense and edgy, a little like the weather, as the sky grew more ominous. On impulse, she opened the long window and stepped out on to the terrace. The paving was gritty, covered with a thin film of sand. She sat down on the edge of the pool, dabbling her feet in the water. The surface of the water was gritty too.
Azhar had not mentioned any friends in their various conversations. Another bond he had cut from his life when he left Qaryma, determined to set himself free of his past. He had severed every single tie, and now he would have to sever them all afresh, if he were to leave again.
If?
She lay back on her hands and gazed up at the sky. A single large drop of rain fell on to the tiles. Above her, the clouds swirled. The surface of the pool rippled and the leaves of the lemon tree shivered as a breeze blew up. Another fat drop of rain fell, followed by a distant rumble of thunder, and then the skies opened.
It was warm, soft rain, not the cold, sharp rain of home. The thunder grew closer, more muffled than the sharp cracks of noise that used to split the sky above Marazion Bay, but she relished both all the same, leaning back on her hands, closing her eyes, letting the rain fall on her face, soak through her tunic, darken her hair and empty her mind.
* * *
Having received no answer to his knock on Julia’s door, Azhar entered,