‘Then I think it’s very important I keep practising,’ she said solemnly and he laughed.
‘You are a curious mixture,’ he observed slowly, ‘of the unworldly and the seasoned.’
‘And is that a good thing or a bad thing?’
‘I can’t quite decide,’ came his answer. ‘All I know is that I find you quite enchanting and I’m not sure that I’m prepared to let you go.’
She snuggled up to him. ‘Then don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Keep on holding me, just like that.’
They were both talking about different things, of course. As someone who had learnt never to project, Catrin was thinking about the glorious present, while—unusually for him—Murat was speculating about the future. She said goodbye, telling herself that she would probably never see him again—but to her astonishment he returned the following week, when she had two whole days off.
‘You see,’ he said lightly. ‘I just can’t keep away from you.’
She made no attempt to hide her delight as he pulled her into his arms. For the first time in her life she understood the meaning of the expression walking on air. She found herself thanking some unknown fate, which had brought her to the other side of Wales, leaving her to conduct her love affair without fear of her mother turning up and creating a scene.
But that was something else she liked about Murat. He wasn’t interested in her family, or her background. Why would he be, when this was never meant to be anything but temporary? It meant that she didn’t have to go through the agonising torture of explaining what her home life had been like.
They booked into the same hotel overlooking Bala Lake and for two whole days they scarcely left the bedroom. She wondered how she was going to cope when he went back to his other life. His real life. His desert life, which he’d told her about and which had no room for someone like her.
She tried not to think about it, but it was impossible not to. It was hard to equate her fierce lover with a man who ruled a vast kingdom and rode a black stallion over hot and arid sands. She ran her fingertips through the rich silk of his ebony hair and tried not to think about losing him.
Did he guess at her thoughts, or did he read it in her eyes? Was that why he came out with his extraordinary proposition on that last afternoon, before he was due to drive back to London for a business dinner?
‘Come away with me,’ he said, pulling on the jacket of his elegant Italian suit.
She blinked. ‘Where?’
‘To London. I have an apartment there. You could live there.’
‘With you?’
He gave a funny kind of smile. ‘Well, sometimes.’
If only she hadn’t been so naïve. If only she’d realised what she was getting herself into, and that women like her were never offered permanence. The only permanence in Murat’s life was his palace and his busy schedule in Qurhah. The trips he made to England were fleeting and irregular and he certainly wasn’t offering her a conventional relationship.
But she wasn’t used to convention—or relationships. She was a stranger to commitment and she told herself she didn’t do emotion. Emotion brought chaos—and she’d had enough chaos to last a lifetime.
She thought of turning him down and then asked herself why she would do something that insane. And really, what alternative did she have, when the thought of him walking out of her life made her feel as if someone were trying to hack open her heart with a blunt chisel?
That was when and how she had become a rich man’s mistress. She had gone to London to be with Murat and slowly but surely her independence had begun to ebb away. The job she’d found at a big hotel soon proved incompatible with her new life, because quickly she learned that was the first rule of being a mistress.
You always needed to be available.
Murat told her that his world was full of pressure and that she—uniquely—soothed his frazzled nerves. He liked her being there when he arrived in England and didn’t want her working shifts and wasting precious time when she could be with him. He waved aside her initial protests that she couldn’t possibly use his charge card. He told her that he had more than enough money for both of them. That she was, in effect, acting as his housekeeper since she made his apartment feel like a home.
So she had let him slide that plastic card into her brand-new designer wallet. Just as she’d let him kit her out in silks and satins and started having her hair done regularly at one of London’s most exclusive hair salons.
She hadn’t thought about how long it would last. She hadn’t thought beyond each glorious day. But she had started to like him more and more. And that was when she had started trying to make it perfect. The perfect relationship to make up for her very imperfect childhood.
She learned that expensive fabrics felt better against the skin than cheap ones. She learned to enjoy visiting the spa in preparation for his visits, and having her body pummelled and anointed with buttery creams. She learned to fill his many absences with the short courses available to rich women with plenty of time on their hands. She did musical appreciation and flower arrangement. She got herself a cordon bleu certificate and learned about different wines. She found that she had a real passion for the history of art. Suddenly, she was getting herself an education.
He introduced her to first one colleague, and then another. Sometimes they brought their wives, sometimes their mistresses. She discovered that her time at the Hindmarsh Hotel had proved very useful, because she could talk to almost anyone with an easy charm. She learnt to read up about people before meeting them and to impress them with her knowledge of wind farms, or fracking—or whatever was currently occupying the business life of her royal lover.
In a way, she was teaching herself to become the perfect consort of a powerful man, but there was no prospect of such a permanent role. Not for her. He needed to marry a pure-blooded royal; a bona fide desert princess. He had been very honest about that, right from the start.
They had understood each other, or so she’d thought. And because there had been no lies or pretence, she’d thought it would be easy to accept the rigid terms of their relationship.
And it was. At least, at the beginning it was. It was love which was the killer. Love which made her want more than she was ever going to get...
* * *
‘Cat?’
Murat’s shuddered use of her name brought her thoughts crashing back to the present and Catrin opened her eyes to find his face inches away from hers. She could see the gleam of his black eyes and feel the warmth of his breath as his naked body melded close to hers, her breasts flattened against his hair-roughened chest.
‘What is it, my beauty?’ he questioned, his breathing unsteady as he ran his hand possessively down over the curve of her hip. ‘You were miles away.’
No way was she going to admit to inhabiting the dangerous landscape of the past—or tell him about all the stupid doubts which had been crowding her mind. She shook her head and pressed her body closer, feeling his hardness pushing insistently against her wet heat.
‘I’m here now,’ she whispered. ‘And I’m all yours.’
But for how long? she wondered.
Parting her thighs, he thrust deep inside her—but even as her body opened up to welcome him, she could feel another hint of darkness closing around her heart.
‘OKAY. SO HOW about this? Does it work for you?’ Walking across the room on sky-high heels, Catrin stopped in front of the TV soccer game which was currently engrossing the Sultan. ‘Am I suitably dressed for this dinner with Niccolo Da Conti?’
Either