Choose your battles.
His uncle had been so right. There had been no point picking that one. He had never been going to win where Mustafa was concerned. Not back then.
She waited for more but he went quiet then, staring fixedly at the road ahead, so she turned to look out her own window, staring at the passing dunes, wondering what kind of person did something like that for kicks and wondering about all the things Zoltan wasn’t telling her.
He was an enigma, this man she was married to, and, as much as she hated him for who and what he was and what he had forced her into, maybe she should be grateful she had been saved the alternative. Because she would have been Mustafa’s wife if this man had not come for her. She shuddered.
‘Princess?’
She looked around, blinking. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you all right? You missed my question.’
‘Oh.’ She sat up straight and lifted the heavy weight of the ponytail behind her head to cool her neck. ‘I’m sorry. What did you ask?’
He looked at her for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not, before looking back at the interminably long, straight road ahead. ‘Seeing as we were talking about Mustafa,’ he started.
‘Yes?’
‘There is something I don’t understand. Something you told me when we rescued you.’
‘Some rescue,’ she said, but her words sounded increasingly hollow in the wake of Zoltan’s revelations about his half-brother’s cruel nature. Maybe he had saved her from a fate worse than death after all. ‘What about it?’ she said before she could explore that revelation any further.
‘How did you convince Mustafa not to take you right then and there, while he had you in the camp? Why was he prepared to wait until the wedding? Because if Mustafa had laid claim to you that first night he held you captive, if he had had witnesses to the act, then no rescue could have prevented you from being his queen and him the new king.’
She swallowed back on a surge of memory-fed bile, not wanting to think back to those poisoned hours. ‘He told me he did not care to wait, you are right.’
‘So why did he? That does not sound like the Mustafa I know.’
She blinked against the sun now dipping low enough to intrude through her window and sat up straighter to avoid it, even if that meant she had to lean closer to him in the process, and closer to that damned evocative scent.
‘Simple, really. I told him that he would be cursed if he took me before our wedding night.’
‘You told him that and he believed you?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘But there must have been more reason than that. Why would he believe that he would be cursed?’
Beside him she swallowed. She didn’t want to have to admit to him the truth, although she rationalised he would find that truth out some time. And maybe he might at least understand her reluctance to jump into bed and spread her legs for him as if the act itself meant nothing.
‘Because I told him that, according to the Jemeyan tenets, if he took me before our wedding night the gods would curse him with a soft and shrivelled penis for evermore.’
‘Because you are a princess?’
‘Because I am a virgin.’
‘And he believed you?’ He laughed then as if it was the biggest joke in the world, and she wasn’t tempted in the least to rake her nails down his laughing face again—this time she wanted to strangle him.
Instead she turned away, pretending to stare out of the window and at the sea, fat tears squeezing from her eyes, but only half from the humiliating memories of being poked and parted and prodded by the wiry fingers of some old crone who smelt like camel dung.
The other half was because it never occurred to Zoltan to believe her. It never occurred to him that she might be telling the truth, that she might actually be a virgin. And the rank injustice of it all was almost too much to bear. She angled her body away from him to mask the dampness that suddenly welled in her eyes.
To think she had saved herself all this time only to be bound to someone like him instead. The one thing she had always thought hers to give; the one thing she had thought hers to control, and when all was said and done she had no control at all. No choice. It was not to be given as a gift, but a due.
What a waste.
‘It would seem your half-brother is superstitious,’ she managed to say through her wretchedness to cover the truth.
And from behind the wheel, Zoltan’s words sounded as though he was still smiling. ‘Yes. He always was a fool.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE could smell the salt on the air long before she could see the sea. They had left the highway some time ago. The track across the desert sands was slower going, until they topped one last dune and suddenly a dry desert world turned into paradise.
From their vantage point, she could see the rocky peninsula jutting into the crystal-clear sapphire waters, and where before she had seen no signs of vegetation beyond small, scrubby salt-bushes clinging to the sand for their meagre existence for miles, now the shores and rocks were dotted with palms, the rocky outcrops covered with lush, green vegetation.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said as they descended, heading for the long, white strip of sandy beach. ‘But how?’
‘A natural spring feeds this area. If you like, I will take you and show you where the water runs clean and pure from the earth. If I try hard enough, I’m sure I’ll remember the way.’
The offer was so surprising, not only because he was asking her again, but because he had revealed a part of himself with his words—that he had been here before, and clearly a long time ago.
‘I would like that,’ she said, wondering what he would have been like as a child. Overbearing, like he was now? Although that wasn’t strictly true, she was forced to admit. He wasn’t overbearing all the time.
Which was a shame, really, because he was much easier to hate when he was. And she didn’t want to find reason not to hate him, because then she might be tempted to wonder.
But no. She shook her head, shaking out the thought. She didn’t wonder. She didn’t care. She didn’t want to know what it would be like to be made love to by a man like this one, who clearly was no virgin himself, who had no doubt had many lovers and who probably knew all about women and what they might enjoy.
‘Is something wrong, Princess?’
She looked up at him, startled. ‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘Because you made some kind of sound, kind of like a whimper. I wondered if there was something wrong.’
‘No.’ She turned away, her cheeks burning up. ‘I’m fine, just sick of sitting down. Are we nearly there?’
Thankfully they were. A cluster of tents had been erected below a stand of palm trees in preparation for their arrival, one set apart from the rest.
‘Is that one mine?’ she asked, half-suspecting, half-dreading the answer.
‘That one is ours, Princess,’ he said, pulling open her door and offering her his hand to climb from the car. ‘It would not do to let everyone know the true state of our marriage.’
‘But I told you …’
He found it hard not to grind his teeth together. So she had—how many times already? Did she think he wanted to be reminded how much she did not want to lie with him? ‘I am sure you will be more than satisfied with the sleeping arrangements.’