CHAPTER SIXTEEN

      GABI WALKED OVER to a dresser and took some paper and wrote down three little words.

      No, thank you.

      She placed them by the stone that Alim had left out for her.

      Gabi would not be kept.

      She would not be another Fleur, paid for in diamonds, rich in everything save respect.

      Then she undressed and, naked, walked to the closed doors of the bedroom.

      She would not cry and she would not be a martyr as she took those final steps, for Gabi wanted this.

      Gabi stepped into darkness. The air was fragrant and sweet but there was the now familiar musky note of Alim and the pull of arousal as she came to the side of the bed.

      ‘What kept you?’ Alim asked.

      ‘My thoughts.’

      ‘And they are?’

      ‘That I’ll never be your mistress.’

      ‘Then why are you here?’ Alim asked as his hands roamed her naked body.

      ‘I shall be your lover,’ Gabi told him, and she knelt on the bed and kissed his salty chest. ‘I will be your lover in the desert at times and at others I will be your lover in Rome.’

      And when once she had been demure, she was not so much now, for she wanted to intimately taste every inch of him. Gabi kissed down his stomach and between hot kisses she told him how it would be.

      ‘I don’t want your diamonds, I owe you nothing.’

      And in the dark she could not see his smile, for he loved it that she stood up to him.

      ‘But I do want the contract for your wedding,’ Gabi said, and she blew onto his wet skin as his fingers dug into her thigh. ‘I’m going to stand there and you can damn well watch what you’re saying goodbye to, because your mistress I shall never be.’

      His scent was her addiction and her undoing; she could feel him against her cheek and so she took him in her hand and tasted him.

      She took him deep; his hands went into her hair and his hips rose at the bliss of unskilled but willing lips and to the heat of her tongue.

      And then he pulled her up before he came, yet still she told him how it would be.

      ‘The day your bride is chosen I’ll cease to be your lover.’

      Gabi had not finished school, neither was she versed in the rules, yet she, Alim knew, was as clever and as powerful as he.

      He pulled her up to his kiss and as their tongues touched he lowered Gabi onto him.

      The relief of him inside her was unrivalled.

      A future she could now see.

      He held her hips and they found their rhythm. She danced as if free, for that was how she felt when they were together.

      She wanted the light on, she ached to see him, but as she leant and reached for the bedside lamp his hand grabbed at hers. Gabi lost her stride and toppled forward. There was a tussle and he flipped her and then entered her again, and she lay in the dark, being taken.

      Gabi did not bring him to his knees but to his forearms.

      ‘Yes,’ Alim said as he thrust into her. ‘You shall be at my wedding.’

      ‘Alim...’ Gabi sobbed, for she had meant it as a threat yet it seemed to turn him on.

      It was the way she said his name that called to him. Like a plea from the soul. And when Gabi said it again he came hard into her. She fought not to, Gabi really did—fought not to cave to the flood of warmth and want and the orbit of them.

      She lost.

      Near spent, Alim had the pleasure of the full clutch of her passion and his body pinned her as she writhed, and when she wanted to breathe it was the only need his body denied her, for he then took the air from the room.

      ‘You shall be at my wedding...as my bride.’

      She was always a little dizzy when Alim was close—for Gabi it was a constant state of affairs. Held in his arms, breathing his scent, and her body still coming down from the high he so readily gave, she told herself she had misheard him.

      And then light invaded for Alim reached over and turned on the bedside lamp and his bedroom was not as she recalled it.

      There were flowers.

      Sweet peas.

      Ten thousand of them, she was sure, and the flowers in the foyer had, in fact, been for her.

      But that was not all.

      A stunning portrait had been blown up and set on an easel beside the bed.

      It was the image of them.

      Alim had moved more than mountains, he had turned back the hands of time. For days he had pored over the rules he had studied for years, searching, discounting and trying to find a way to make it work for them.

      ‘You and Lucia are the most wonderful things that have ever happened to me,’ Alim told her.

      ‘According to your land, we never happened.’

      ‘No.’ Alim shook his head. ‘When the Sultan offers a commitment it is to be taken seriously...’ He took her in his arms. ‘I committed to you that night.’

      ‘You offered a year.’

      ‘I vowed fidelity.’

      He had.

      ‘And unless it has been broken, you are still mine.’

      ‘Alim?’

      ‘There has been no one else,’ Alim said. ‘There could be no one else. Had you not spoken of other men you would have walked into this room and I would have got down on my knees and asked you to be my wife.’

      Gabi laughed.

      Still dizzy, still confused, she laughed, because even if he had planned the perfect proposal she would not change how it had transpired.

      There was nothing about them she would change.

      Even now, could she go back to their first night and be on the Pill, she would not. There was nothing she would change save for the cruel rules of his land, and now her laughter died.

      ‘Your father will never agree.’

      ‘Reluctantly, very reluctantly, he already has.’ Now it was Alim who smiled. ‘I am more stubborn than he. I went through the rules and the diktat and then I showed him this image. I told my father that there had been no one else and that that would remain the case, for the rest of my life if need be.’

      ‘I don’t understand.’

      ‘My father caved in to the Sultan of Sultans’ demands when Fleur would not come to the desert. I told him that I would not.’

      And still she did not understand.

      ‘We think the same, Gabi. For the decision you reached was mine too. We would have more than made it as lovers. I would have come to Italy regularly, and brought you on occasion to the desert, and you would have remained the one and only woman in my life.’

      And