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The sheer size of the place shook Jaul even more. He prowled through empty rooms and courtyards, studied fountains and bathing places. Everything was in very good condition and he marvelled that his father’s mania for historic conservation had triumphed over the older man’s desire to rewrite the past and bury the family’s murkier secrets. Rage was his overriding response to what he had learned from Yusuf until the point when he focused on the great bed placed on a dais. Slowly his dark, angry eyes widened as he finally registered the tenor of the murals swirling across the walls round the bed.
Utterly disconcerted, he froze, imagining his strait-laced father’s reaction to such artistic licence and something infinitely more surprising bubbled up inside Jaul without warning. Gales of incredulous laughter convulsed his lean, powerful frame and when he had recovered from his inappropriate amusement he lounged back breathless against the edge of the bed. His brilliant eyes flared to the purest gold when he pictured how Chrissie would react to the paintings.
* * *
A note was delivered to Chrissie minutes after she had emerged from a long relaxing bath. Instantly recognising Jaul’s copperplate black print, she tore it open.
You are cordially invited to spend a night in the harem with your husband.
A surprised giggle fell from her lips while a warm sense of relief swelled inside her. Jaul had recovered sufficiently from his annoyance with her to make a joke. It was a joke, of course it was, and Jaul had always had a terrific sense of humour. She leafed through drawers and selected her fanciest lingerie with hot cheeks before choosing a perfectly circumspect plain blue tailored dress, which gave not the smallest hint of what she wore underneath. A night in the harem? What did that entail? Her entire skin surface heated up and she smiled dreamily, knowing exactly what she was hoping that note meant while being wryly amused by her own secret conviction that there was something different about Jaul in recent days. Didn’t that note prove how mistaken she had been?
One of Jaul’s guards was waiting to take her to her husband and they trudged a long way down endless corridors and down stone flights of stairs before they reached their destination. A big, ugly, ironclad door faced them. Opening it for her, the guard stood back and Chrissie entered, wondering why the man was trying not to smile. But that question was quickly answered because a spectacular scene confronted her two steps beyond the door.
Candles were burning everywhere she looked, glowing in the dark to cast leaping shadows across the soaring domed ceiling and elaborate mosaic-tiled walls and ensuring that the water droplets cascading from the fountains sparkled like diamonds. It was beautiful, incredibly beautiful, and Chrissie knew instinctively that Jaul had done it for her. Her bright eyes stung painfully and she had to blink when the man himself appeared from behind a pillar about thirty feet from her. In contrast to their highly exotic surroundings Jaul sported faded jeans and a partially unbuttoned white shirt, the pale fabric accentuating his bronzed skin and the blackness of his unruly hair. For a split second she felt as though time itself had slipped for this was Jaul as she remembered him as a student, shorn of every atom of his forbidding reserve.
‘Where on earth are we?’ Chrissie asked.
‘In the heart of the al-Zahid family’s shadiest secret,’ Jaul proffered wryly. ‘The harem that even I didn’t know still existed until this evening. Of course, I knew there would have been one at some stage but, taking into account my father’s delicate sensibilities, I assumed it was long gone.’
Chrissie gazed past him at the giant bed. ‘That looks like a bed people would throw an orgy on,’ she said before she could think better of it. ‘Not that I know anything about...er...orgies—’
‘Look at the walls,’ Jaul invited.
In the flickering shadows she saw the murals and the naked male and female figures engaged in flagrant sexual play and a hot flush lit her cheeks. ‘My goodness...’
‘I’m amazed that my father didn’t have this place razed to the ground, but he idolised my grandfather.’ Jaul sighed. ‘How he retained that respectful attitude when confronted with the reality that Tarif was a man with licentious habits, I cannot begin to imagine.’
