Freedom felt heady. It made her feel giddy—like a new-born lamb stumbling from the darkness into a sunlit meadow. No longer did she feel fearful whenever she opened the door. She didn’t have to rescue anyone or bail them out. She didn’t have to pretend that things were hunky-dory when patently they were not. She could stay out late and not have to explain herself. Not that there were many opportunities to stay out late—when the nearest big town was miles away and the buses irregular. It was just the principle of freedom which she found so exhilarating.
She was trained for nothing in particular, but she was bright and adaptable and her willingness to work meant that the rest of the hotel staff liked her. Her bookworm habit had given her a knowledge of the world which didn’t match her haphazard schooling, which meant she could talk easily to anyone—so the customers liked her, too. A year after joining the Hindmarsh Hotel, she could begin to see a future for herself in the hospitality industry.
The barmaid had been off sick one day and Catrin had stepped in at short notice, when Murat Al Maisan walked into the bar. A sudden silence descended and Catrin glanced up to find herself looking into a pair of inky eyes. He was staring very hard and it took a moment or two for her to realise that his narrowed gaze was directed at her. If she hadn’t been standing with her back against a wall, she might have thought he was looking at someone else. But he wasn’t.
He was looking at her.
His eyes were travelling over her in a way which if it had been anyone else, Catrin might have found offensive. But with him it didn’t feel a bit offensive. With him, it felt...natural. As if she had been waiting all her life for him to look at her that way. Every vein in her body seemed to open wider to let the ever-quickening pulse of blood through. She could feel her breasts growing heavy and the palms of her hands getting clammy. Her reaction confused her. It scared her and excited her. It made her words come out sounding more clipped than usual, although nothing could disguise the soft lilt of her Welsh accent.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
There was a pause. His eyes were still narrowed. His voice was low and caressing. ‘I suspect you can help me in ways you haven’t even begun to dream of,’ he said, in an accent she’d never heard before.
‘I’m sorry?’
He shook his head, the way people did when they were trying to clear their ears after they’d been swimming. As if he’d just found himself in a place he hadn’t expected to be. ‘Some coffee, I think.’
Catrin raised her eyebrows and spoke to him in exactly the same way as she might speak to any young farmer who had taken temporary leave of their manners. ‘I usually respond better to the word “please”.’
He smiled then, before looking at her with a hard and playful gleam in his eyes. The way a cat looked at a bird which was high up in a tree. ‘Please.’
Afterwards she would discover that it had been impulse which had brought him into the old-fashioned hotel, leaving a whole fleet of accompanying bodyguards kicking their heels outside. He told her later that fate must have lured him there, because he had been meant to meet her. And that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Of course, she hadn’t known any of this as he sat down and began to sip his coffee and asked what her name was. And although she rarely socialised with customers, she found herself standing on the other side of the bar talking to him—or, rather, listening to what he was saying about wind farms, which was the reason for his visit to the area. At that point she still hadn’t discovered that he was a sultan who ruled a vast area of oil-rich land and was wealthy in a way which was outside her understanding.
All she knew was that he spoke like no one else she’d ever heard. His accented voice made her think of velvet and stone. He exuded an air of self-possession she found irresistible. And he flirted in a way she knew was dangerous, but which didn’t stop her from responding. She would have defied any woman on the planet not to have responded.
‘I suppose people must tell you all the time that your eyes are very beautiful,’ he said, making her stomach flip as he sucked on a coffee-dunked lump of sugar. ‘They are the colour of a cactus.’
‘A cactus!’ She looked at him perplexed, and pursed her lips together. ‘A horrible prickly cactus?’
‘That is the general perception of the plant, yes,’ he agreed, his voice dipping into a silken caress. ‘But it happens to be one of the world’s most underrated examples of vegetation. Not only can they can store water and survive in the most arduous of conditions, but they provide nourishment and have many medicinal properties.’ He smiled again. ‘As well as producing flowers of quite breathtaking beauty.’
Rapt now, Catrin nodded. His words sounded...incredible. Like poetry. She wanted to hear more of them. They made her want him to whisper things. Things which weren’t about plants. Things about her. Things about...
Her cheeks were burning as she walked to the other end of the bar and took ages pulling a pint of beer for another customer, because it was wrong to think that way. She knew that there were two types of men and this one was the wrong type. Hadn’t her mother always told her to look in the mirror if she needed any proof about the wrong type?
‘Why are you blushing?’ he asked softly.
She looked up and suddenly she could think of nothing but him. Common sense and playing safe seemed like quite reasonable endeavours for other people, but not for her. Everything she’d ever been told about handsome, dangerous men began to trickle away, like the froth on top of the pint she was pulling. She looked deep into his eyes and wondered what it would be like to kiss him.
‘I’ve never actually seen a flowering cactus,’ she said.
He smiled, and there was the heartbeat of a pause. ‘Haven’t you?’
The next day, a delivery was made. At first it looked like a regular florist’s delivery—with its shiny cellophane and fancy ribbon. It was only when she opened it that Catrin discovered the succulent green leaves of a cactus on which bloomed miniature petalled suns, in shades of cerise and rose. She’d never been sent flowers before and she’d certainly never been given anything like this. The originality and unexpectedness of the gesture stabbed at her heart with a fierce kind of joy.
She guessed it was inevitable that she should agree to have dinner with him. What she didn’t anticipate—and which afterwards surprised her as much as him—was ending up in Murat’s four-poster bed overlooking Bala Lake that very same night.
It was wild. Or rather, she was wild. She had never known something could feel so good. Her hands splayed eagerly over his naked body as he kissed her and she clung to him as greedily as a barnacle to a rock. At first, he seemed a little taken aback by her passion, but the moan he gave as he thrust deep inside her made her feel almost powerful.
The next bit wasn’t great because it hurt and because he was furious that she’d omitted to mention the small matter of her virginity.
‘Why me?’ he demanded afterwards, as if giving someone your innocence were a burden rather than a gift.
‘Because...because I’d waited for someone who knew what they were doing and you fitted the bill. I wanted it be fantastic. And it was. Why?’ She rolled over, resting her elbows on his chest and looking straight into his eyes. ‘Is it important?’
‘Of course it is,’ he said. ‘I’m not in the habit of seducing virgins. Their dreams are still intact.’
‘Too late,’ she teased, her mouth trailing over his hair-roughened chest.
He did it to her again. And again. And the third time she lay trembling in his arms, kissing the same spot on his shoulder, over and over again. He was stroking her hair and when she spoke, her voice was dazed.
‘That was...amazing.’