Книга - Hot-Blooded Husbands: the Sheikh’s Chosen Wife

Hot-Blooded Husbands: the Sheikh's Chosen Wife
Michelle Reid


To HaveOne year ago Leona had left her arrogant, passionate husband Sheikh Hassan ben Khalifa AlQadim, but now he’s tricked her into returning to his side, and it seems he is prepared to go to any lengths to keep her there…back in his bed! And Ethan Hayes thinks Eve Herakleides is nothing but a spoilt tease. But, when a senseless attack makes him her rescuer, Ethan ends up posing as her fiancé! Suddenly twentyfour seven with Eve and even ironwilled Ethan is tempted…To HoldMelanie fell in love with Rafiq AlQadim years ago. But when lies about her surfaced, he blew her out of his life like a grain of desert sand in the wind… Yet now Melanie is determined Rafiq will accept his son!












About the Author


MICHELLE REID grew up on the southern edges of Manchester, the youngest in a family of five lively children. Now she lives in the beautiful county of Cheshire, with her busy executive husband and two grown-up daughters. She loves reading, the ballet and playing tennis when she gets the chance. She hates cooking, cleaning and despises ironing! Sleep she can do without and produces some of her best written work during the early hours of the morning.




Hot-Blooded Husbands

The Sheikh’s Chosen Wife

Ethan’s Temptress Bride

The Arabian Love-Child



Michelle Reid

















www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)



The Sheikh’s Chosen Wife




CHAPTER ONE


DRESSED to go riding, in knee-length black leather boots, buff pants, a white shirt and a white gutrah held to his dark head by a plain black agal, Sheikh Hassan ben Khalifa Al-Qadim stepped into his private office and closed the door behind him. In his hand he held a newly delivered letter from England. On his desk lay three more. Walking across the room, he tossed the new letter onto the top of the other three then went to stand by the grilled window, fixing his eyes on a spot beyond the Al-Qadim Oasis, where reclaimed dry scrubland had been turned into miles of lush green fig groves.

Beyond the figs rose the sand-dunes. Majestic and proud, they claimed the horizon with a warning statement. Come any closer with your irrigation and expect retaliation, they said. One serious sandstorm, and years of hard labour could be turned back into arid wasteland.

A sigh eased itself from his body. Hassan knew all about the laws of the desert. He respected its power and its driving passion, its right to be master of its own destiny. And what he would really have liked to do at this very moment was to saddle up his horse, Zandor, then take off for those sand-dunes and allow them to dictate his future for him.

But he knew the idea was pure fantasy. For behind him lay four letters, all of which demanded he make those decisions for himself. And beyond the relative sanctuary of the four walls surrounding him lay a palace in waiting; his father, his half-brother, plus a thousand and one other people, all of whom believed they owned a piece of his so-called destiny.

So Zandor would have to stay in his stable. His beloved sand-dunes would have to wait a while to swallow him up. Making a half-turn, he stared grimly at the letters. Only one had been opened: the first one, which he had tossed aside with the contempt it had deserved. Since then he had left the others sealed on his desk and had tried very hard to ignore them.

But the time for burying his head in the sand was over.

A knock on the door diverted his attention. It would be his most trusted aide, Faysal. Hassan recognised the lightness of the knock. Sure enough the door opened and a short, fineboned man wearing the traditional white and pale blue robes of their Arabian birthright appeared in its arched aperture, where he paused and bowed his head, waiting to be invited in or told to go.

‘Come in, Faysal,’ Hassan instructed a trifle impatiently. Sometimes Faysal’s rigid adherence to so-called protocol set his teeth on edge.

With another deferential bow, Faysal moved to his master’s bidding. Stepping into the room, he closed the door behind him then used some rarely utilised initiative by walking across the room to come to a halt several feet from the desk on the priceless carpet that covered, in part, the expanse of polished blue marble between the desk and the door.

Hassan found himself staring at the carpet. His wife had ordered it to be placed there, claiming the room’s spartan appearance invited no one to cross its austere threshold. The fact that this was supposed to be the whole point had made absolutely no difference to Leona. She had simply carried on regardless, bringing many items into the room besides the carpet. Such as the pictures now adorning the walls and the beautiful ceramics and sculptures scattered around, all of which had been produced by gifted artists native to the small Gulf state of Rahman. Hassan had soon found he could no longer lift his eyes without having them settle on an example of local enterprise.

Yet it was towards the only western pieces Leona had brought into the room that his eyes now drifted. The low table and two overstuffed easy chairs had been placed by the other window, where she would insist on making him sit with her several times a day to enjoy the view while they drank tea and talked and touched occasionally as lovers do…

Dragging the gutrah from his head with almost angry fingers, Hassan tossed it aside then went to sit down in the chair behind his desk. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What have you to tell me?’

‘It is not good news, sir.’ Faysal began with a warning. ‘Sheikh Abdul is entertaining certain…factions at his summer palace. Our man on the inside confirms that the tone of their conversation warrants your most urgent attention.’

Hassan made no comment, but his expression hardened fractionally. ‘And my wife?’ he asked next.

‘The Sheikha still resides in Spain, sir,’ Faysal informed him, ‘working with her father at the new resort of San Estéban, overseeing the furnishing of several villas about to be released for sale.’

Doing what she did best, Hassan thought grimly—and did not need to glance back at the two stuffed chairs to conjure up a vision of long silken hair the colour of a desert sunset, framing a porcelain smooth face with laughing green eyes and a smile that dared him to complain about her invasion of his private space. ‘Trust me,’ he could hear her say. ‘It is my job to give great empty spaces a little soul and their own heartbeat.’

Well, the heartbeat had gone out of this room when she’d left it, and as for the soul…

Another sigh escaped him. ‘How long do you think we have before they make their move?’

The slight tensing in Faysal’s stance warned Hassan that he was not going to like what was coming. ‘If you will forgive me for saying so, sir,’ his aide apologised, ‘with Mr Ethan Hayes also residing at her father’s property, I would say that the matter has become most seriously urgent indeed.’

Since this was complete news to Hassan it took a moment for the full impact of this information to really sink in. Then he was suddenly on his feet and was swinging tensely away to glare at the sand-dunes again. Was she mad? he was thinking angrily. Did she have a death wish? Was she so indifferent to his feelings that she could behave like this?

Ethan Hayes. His teeth gritted together as an old familiar jealousy began mixing with his anger to form a much more volatile substance. He swung back to face Faysal. ‘How long has Mr Hayes been in residence in San Estéban?’

Faysal made a nervous clearing of his throat. ‘These seven days past,’ he replied.

‘And who else knows about this…? Sheikh Abdul?’

‘It was discussed,’ Faysal confirmed.

With a tight shifting of his long lean body, Hassan returned to his seat. ‘Cancel all my appointments for the rest of the month,’ he instructed, drawing his appointments diary towards him to begin scoring hard lines through the same busy pages. ‘My yacht is berthed at Cadiz. Have it moved to San Estéban. Check that my plane is ready for an immediate take-off and ask Rafiq to come to me.’

The cold quality of the commands did nothing to dilute their grim purpose. ‘If asked,’ Faysal prompted, ‘what reason do I give for your sudden decision to cancel your appointments?’

‘I am about to indulge in a much needed holiday cruising the Mediterranean with my nice new toy,’ Sheikh Hassan replied, and the bite in his tone made a complete mockery of the words spoken, for they both knew that the next few weeks promised to be no holiday. ‘And Faysal…’ Hassan stalled his aide as he was about to take his leave ‘…if anyone so much as whispers the word adultery in the same breath as my wife’s name, they will not breathe again—you understand me?’

The other man went perfectly still, recognising the responsibility that was being laid squarely upon him. ‘Yes, sir.’ He bowed.

Hassan’s grim nod was a dismissal. Left alone again, he leaned back in his chair and began frowning while he tried to decide how best to tackle this. His gaze fell on the small stack of letters. Reaching out with long fingers, he drew them towards him, picked out the only envelope with a broken seal and removed the single sheet of paper from inside. The content of the letter he ignored with the same dismissive contempt he had always applied to it. His interest lay only in the telephone number printed beneath the business logo. With an expression that said he resented having his hand forced like this, he took a brief glance at his watch, then was lifting up the telephone, fairly sure that his wife’s lawyer would be in his London office at this time of the day.

The ensuing conversation was not a pleasant one, and the following conversation with his father-in-law even less so. He had just replaced the receiver and was frowning darkly over what Victor Frayne had said to him, when another knock sounded at the door. Hard eyes lanced towards it as the door swung open and Rafiq stepped into the room.

Though he was dressed in much the same clothes as Faysal was wearing, there the similarity between the two men ended. For where Faysal was short and thin and annoyingly effacing, Rafiq was a giant of a man who rarely kowtowed to anyone. Hassan warranted only a polite nod of the head, yet he knew Rafiq would willingly die for him if he was called upon to do so.

‘Come in, shut the door, then tell me how you would feel about committing a minor piece of treason?’ Hassan smoothly intoned.

Below the white gutrah a pair of dark eyes glinted. ‘Sheikh Abdul?’ Rafiq questioned hopefully.

‘Unfortunately, no.’ Hassan gave a half smile. ‘I was in fact referring to my lovely wife, Leona…’

Dressed for the evening in a beaded slip-dress made of gold silk chiffon, Leona stepped into a pair of matching beaded mules then turned to look at herself in the mirror.

Her smooth russet hair had been caught up in a twist, and diamonds sparkled at her ears and throat. Overall, she supposed she looked okay, she decided, giving the thin straps at her shoulders a gentle tug so the dress settled comfortably over her slender frame. But the weight she had lost during the last year was most definitely showing, and she could have chosen a better colour to offset the unnatural paleness of her skin.

Too late to change, though, she thought with a dismissive shrug as she turned away from her reflection. Ethan was already waiting for her outside on the terrace. And, anyway, she wasn’t out to impress anyone. She was merely playing stand-in for her father who had been delayed in London due to some urgent business with the family lawyer, which had left her and her father’s business partner, Ethan, the only ones here to represent Hayes-Frayne at tonight’s promotional dinner.

She grimaced as she caught up a matching black silk shawl and made for her bedroom door. In truth, she would rather not be going out at all tonight having only arrived back from San Estéban an hour ago. It had been a long day, and she had spent most of it melting in a Spanish heatwave because the air-conditioning system had not been working in the villa she had been attempting to make ready for viewing. So a long soak in a warm bath and an early night would have been her idea of heaven tonight, she thought wryly, as she went down the stairs to join Ethan.

He was half sitting on the terrace rail with a glass in his hand, watching the sun go down, but his head turned at her first step, and his mouth broke into an appreciative smile.

‘Ravishing,’ he murmured, sliding his lean frame upright.

‘Thank you,’ she replied. ‘You don’t look so bad yourself.’

His wry nod accepted the compliment and his grey eyes sparkled with lazy humour. Dressed in a black dinner suit and bow tie, he was a tall, dark, very attractive man with an easy smile and a famous eye for the ladies. Women adored him and he adored them but, thankfully, that mutual adoration had never raised its ugly head between the two of them.

Leona liked Ethan. She felt comfortable being with him. He was the Hayes in Hayes-Frayne, architects. Give Ethan a blank piece of paper and he would create a fifty-storey skyscraper or a whole resort complete with sports clubs, shopping malls and, of course, holiday villas to die for, as with this new resort in San Estéban.

‘Drink?’ he suggested, already stepping towards the well stocked drinks trolley.

But Leona gave a shake of her head. ‘Better not, if you want me to stay awake beyond ten o’clock,’ she refused.

‘That late? Next you’ll be begging me to take you on to an all-night disco after the party.’ He was mocking the fact that she was usually safely tucked up in bed by nine o’clock.

‘Do you disco?’ she asked him curiously.

‘Not if I can help it,’ he replied, discarding his own glass to come and take the shawl from her hand so he could drape it across her shoulders. ‘The best I can offer in the name of dance is a soft shoe shuffle to something very slow, preferably in a darkened room, so that I don’t damage my ego by revealing just how bad a shuffler I am.’

‘You’re such a liar.’ Leona smiled. ‘I’ve seen you dance a mean jive, once or twice.’

Ethan pulled a face at the reminder. ‘Now you’ve really made me feel my age,’ he complained. ‘Next you’ll be asking me what it was like to rock in the sixties.’

‘You’re not that old.’ She was still smiling.

‘Born in the mid-sixties,’ he announced. ‘To a free-loving mother who bopped with the best of them.’

‘That makes you about the same age as Hass…’

And that was the point where everything died: the light banter, the laughter, the tail end of Hassan’s name. Silence fell. Ethan’s teasing grey eyes turned very sombre. He knew, of course, how painful this last year had been for her. No one mentioned Hassan’s name in her presence, so to hear herself almost say it out loud caused tension to erupt between the both of them.

‘It isn’t too late to stop this craziness, you know,’ Ethan murmured gently.

Her response was to drag in a deep breath and step right away from him. ‘I don’t want to stop it,’ she quietly replied.

‘Your heart does.’

‘My heart is not making the decisions here.’

‘Maybe you should let it.’

‘Maybe you should mind your own business!’

Spinning on her slender heels Leona walked away from him to go and stand at the terrace rail, leaving Ethan behind wearing a rueful expression at the severity with which she had just slapped him down.

Out there at sea, the dying sun was throwing up slender fingers of fire into a spectacular vermilion sky. Down the hill below the villa, San Estéban was beginning to twinkle as it came into its own at the exit of the sun. And in between the town and the sun the ocean spread like satin with its brand-new purpose-built harbour already packed with smart sailing crafts of all shapes and sizes.

Up here on the hillside everything was so quiet and still even the cicadas had stopped calling. Leona wished that she could have some of that stillness, put her trembling emotions back where they belonged, under wraps, out of reach from pain and heartache.

Would these vulnerable feelings ever be that far out of reach? she then asked herself, and wasn’t surprised to have a heavy sigh whisper from her. The beaded chiffon shawl slipped from her shoulders, prompting Ethan to come and gently lift it back in place again.

‘Sorry,’ he murmured. ‘It wasn’t my intention to upset you.’

I do it to myself, Leona thought bleakly. ‘I just can’t bear to talk about it,’ she replied in what was a very rare glimpse at how badly she was hurting.

‘Maybe you need to talk,’ Ethan suggested.

But she just shook her head, as she consistently had done since she had arrived at her father’s London house a year ago, looking emotionally shattered and announcing that her five-year marriage to Sheikh Hassan ben Khalifa Al-Qadim was over. Victor Frayne had tried every which way he could think of to find out what had happened. He’d even travelled out to Rahman to demand answers from Hassan, only to meet the same solid wall of silence he’d come up against with his daughter. The one thing Victor could say with any certainty was that Hassan was faring no better than Leona, though his dauntingly aloof son-in-law was more adept at hiding his emotions than Leona was. ‘She sits here in London, he sits in Rahman. They don’t talk to each other, never mind to anyone else! Yet you can feel the vibrations bouncing from one to the other across the thousands of miles separating them as if they are communicating by some unique telepathy that runs on pure pain! It’s dreadful,’ Victor had confided to Ethan. ‘Something has to give some time.’

Eventually, it had done. Two months ago Leona had walked unannounced into the office of her family lawyer and had instructed him to begin divorce proceedings, on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. What had prompted her to pick that particular day in that particular month of a very long year no one understood, and Leona herself wasn’t prepared to enlighten anyone. But there wasn’t a person who knew her who didn’t believe it was an action that had caused a trigger reaction, when a week later she had fallen foul of a virulent flu bug that had kept her housebound and bedridden for weeks afterwards.

But when she had recovered, at least she’d come back ready to face the world again. She had agreed to come here to San Estéban, for instance, and utilise her design skills on the completed villas.

She looked better for it too. Still too pale, maybe, but overall she’d begun to live a more normal day to day existence.

Ethan had no wish to send her back into hiding now she had come out of it, so he turned her to face him and pressed a light kiss to her brow. ‘Come on,’ he said briskly. ‘Let’s go and party!’

Finding her smile again, Leona nodded her agreement and tried to appear as though she was looking forward to the evening. As they began to walk back across the terrace she felt a fine tingling at the back of her neck which instinctively warned her that someone was observing them.

The suspicion made her pause and turn to cast a frowning glance over their surroundings. She could see nothing untoward, but wasn’t surprised by that. During the years she had lived in an Arab sheikhdom, married to a powerful and very wealthy man, she had grown used to being kept under constant, if very discreet, surveillance.

But that surveillance had been put in place for her own protection. This felt different—sinister. She even shivered.

‘Something wrong?’ Ethan questioned.

Leona shook her head and began walking again, but her frown stayed in place, because it wasn’t the first time she’d experienced the sensation today. The same thing had happened as she’d left the resort site this afternoon, only she’d dismissed it then as her just being silly. She had always suspected that Hassan still kept an eye on her from a distance.

A car and driver had been hired for the evening, and both were waiting in the courtyard for them as they left the house. Having made sure she was comfortably settled, Ethan closed the side door and strode around the car to climb in beside her. As a man she had known for most of her adult life, Ethan was like a very fond cousin whose lean dark sophistication and reputed rakish life made her smile, rather than her heart flutter as other women would do in his company.

He’d never married. ‘Never wanted to,’ he’d told her once. ‘Marriage diverts your energy away from your ambition, and I haven’t met the woman for whom I’m prepared to let that happen.’

When she’d told Hassan what Ethan had said, she’d expected him to say something teasing like, May Allah help him when he does, for I know the feeling! But instead he’d looked quite sombre and had said nothing at all. At the time, she’d thought he’d been like that because he’d still been harbouring jealous suspicions about Ethan’s feelings for her. It had been a long time before she’d come to understand that the look had had nothing at all to do with Ethan.

‘The Petronades yacht looks pretty impressive.’ Ethan’s smooth deep voice broke into her thoughts. ‘I watched it sail into the harbour tonight while I was waiting for you on the terrace.’

Leandros Petronades was the main investor in San Estéban. He was hosting the party tonight for very exclusive guests whom he had seduced into taking a tour of the new resort, with an invitation to arrive in style on his yacht and enjoy its many luxurious facilities.

‘At a guess, I would say it has to be the biggest in the harbour, considering its capacity to sleep so many people,’ Leona smiled.

‘Actually no, it wasn’t,’ Ethan replied with a frown. ‘There’s another yacht tied up that has to be twice the size.’

‘The commercial kind?’ Leona suggested, aware that the resort was fast becoming the fashionable place to visit.

‘Not big enough.’ Ethan shook his head. ‘It’s more likely to belong to one of Petronades’ rich cronies. Another heavy investor in the resort, maybe.’

There were enough of them, Leona acknowledged. From being a sleepy little fishing port a few years ago, with the help of some really heavyweight investors San Estéban had grown into a large, custom-built holiday resort, which now sprawled in low-rise, Moorish elegance over the hills surrounding the bay.

So why Hassan’s name slid back into her head Leona had no idea. Because Hassan didn’t even own a yacht, nor had he ever invested in any of her father’s projects, as far as she knew.

Irritated with herself, she turned her attention to what was happening outside the car. On the beach waterfront people strolled, enjoying the light breeze coming off the water.

It was a long time since she could remember strolling anywhere herself with such freedom. Marrying an Arab had brought with it certain restrictions on her freedom, which were not all due to the necessity of conforming to expectations regarding women. Hassan occupied the august position of being the eldest son and heir to the small but oil-rich Gulf state of Rahman. As his wife, Leona had become a member of Rahman’s exclusive hierarchy, which in turn made everything she said or did someone else’s property. So she’d learned very quickly to temper her words, to think twice before she went anywhere, especially alone. Strolling just for the sake of just doing it would have been picked upon and dissected for no other reason than interest’s sake, so she had learned not to do it.

This last year she hadn’t gone out much because to be seen out had drawn too much speculation as to why she was in London and alone. In Rahman she was known as Sheikh Hassan’s pretty English Sheikha. In London she was known as the woman who gave up every freedom to marry her Arabian prince.

A curiosity in other words. Curiosities were blatantly stared at, and she didn’t want to offend Arab sensibilities by having her failed marriage speculated upon in the British press, so she’d lived a quiet life.

It was a thought that made Leona smile now, because her life in Rahman had been far less quiet than it had become once she’d returned to London.

The car had almost reached the end of the street where the new harbour was situated. There were several large yachts moored up—and Leandros Petronades’ elegant white-hulled boat was easy to recognise because it was lit up like a showboat for the party. Yet it was the yacht moored next to it that caught her attention. It was huge, as Ethan had said—twice the length and twice the height of its neighbour. It was also shrouded in complete darkness. With its dark-painted hull, it looked as if it was crouching there like a large sleek cat, waiting to leap on its next victim.

The car turned and began driving along the top of the harbour wall taking them towards a pair of wrought iron gates, which cordoned off the area where the two yachts were tied.

Climbing out of the car, Leona stood looking round while she waited for Ethan to join her. It was even darker here than she had expected it to be, and she felt a distinct chill shiver down her spine when she realised they were going to have to pass the unlit boat to reach the other.

Ethan’s hand found her arm. As they walked towards the gates, their car was already turning round to go back the way it had come. The guard manning the gates merely nodded his dark head and let them by without a murmur, then disappeared into the shadows.

‘Conscientious chap,’ Ethan said dryly.

Leona didn’t answer. She was too busy having to fight a sudden attack of nerves that set butterflies fluttering inside her stomach. Okay, she tried to reason, so she hadn’t put herself in the social arena much recently, therefore it was natural that she should suffer an attack of nerves tonight.

Yet some other part of her brain was trying to insist that her attack of nerves had nothing to do with the party. It was so dark and so quiet here that even their footsteps seemed to echo with a sinister ring.

Sinister? Picking up on the word, she questioned it impatiently. What was the matter with her? Why was everything sinister all of a sudden? It was a hot night—a beautiful night—she was twenty-nine years old, and about to do what most twenty-nine-year-olds did: party when they got the chance!

‘Quite something, hmm?’ Ethan remarked as they walked into the shadow of the larger yacht.

But Leona didn’t want to look. Despite the tough talking-to she had just given herself, the yacht bothered her. The whole situation was beginning to worry her. She could feel her heart pumping unevenly against her breast, and just about every nerve-end she possessed was suddenly on full alert for no other reason than—

It was then that she heard it—nothing more than a whispering sound in the shadows, but it was enough to make her go perfectly still. So did Ethan. Almost at the same moment the darkness itself seemed to take on a life of its own by shifting and swaying before her eyes.

The tingling sensation on the back of her neck returned with a vengeance. ‘Ethan,’ she said jerkily. ‘I don’t think I like this.’

‘No,’ he answered tersely. ‘Neither do I.’

That was the moment when they saw them, first one dark shape, then another, and another, emerging from the shadows until they turned themselves into Arabs wearing dark robes, with darkly sober expressions.

‘Oh, dear God,’ she breathed. ‘What’s happening?’

But she already knew the answer. It was a fear she’d had to live with from the day she’d married Hassan. She was British. She had married an Arab who was a very powerful man. The dual publicity her disappearance could generate was in itself worth its weight in gold to political fanatics wanting to make a point.

Something she should have remembered earlier, then the word ‘sinister’ would have made a lot more sense, she realised, as Ethan’s arm pressed her hard up against him.

Further down the harbour wall the lights from the Petronades boat were swinging gently. Here, beneath the shadow of the other, the ring of men was steadily closing in. Her heart began to pound like a hammer drill. Ethan couldn’t hold her any closer if he tried, and she could almost taste his tension. He, too, knew exactly what was going to happen.

‘Keep calm,’ he gritted down at her. ‘When I give the word, lose your shoes and run.’

He was going to make a lunge for them and try to break the ring so she could have a small chance to escape. ‘No,’ she protested, and clutched tightly at his jacket sleeve. ‘Don’t do it. They might hurt you if you do!’

‘Just go, Leona!’ he ground back at her, then, with no more warning than that, he was pulling away, and almost in the same movement he threw himself at the two men closest to him.

It was then that all hell broke loose. While Leona stood there frozen in horror watching all three men topple to the ground in a huddle, the rest of the ring leapt into action. Fear for her life sent a surge of adrenaline rushing through her blood. Dry-mouthed, stark-eyed, she was just about to do as Ethan had told her and run, when she heard a hard voice rasp out a command in Arabic. In a state of raw panic she swung round in its direction, expecting someone to be almost upon her, only to find to her confusion that the ring of men had completely bypassed her, leaving her standing here alone with only one other man.

It was at that point that she truly stopped functioning—heart, lungs, her ability to hear what was happening to Ethan—all connections to her brain simply closed down to leave only her eyes in full, wretched focus.

Tall and dark, whip-cord lean, he possessed an aura about him that warned of great physical power lurking beneath the dark robes he was wearing. His skin was the colour of sunripened olives, his eyes as black as a midnight sky, and his mouth she saw was thin, straight and utterly unsmiling.

‘Hassan.’ She breathed his name into the darkness.

The curt bow he offered her came directly from an excess of noble arrogance built into his ancient genes. ‘As you see,’ Sheikh Hassan smoothly confirmed.




CHAPTER TWO


A BUBBLE of hysteria ballooned in her throat. ‘But—why?’ she choked in strangled confusion.

Hassan was not given the opportunity to answer before another fracas broke out somewhere behind her. Ethan ground her name out. It was followed by some thuds and scuffles. As she turned on a protesting gasp to go to him, someone else spoke with a grating urgency and Hassan caught her wrist, long brown fingers closing round fleshless skin and bone, to hold her firmly in place.

‘Call them off!’ she cried out shrilly.

‘Be silent,’ he returned in a voice like ice.

It shocked her, really shocked her, because never in their years together had he ever used that tone on her. Turning her head, she stared at him in pained astonishment, but Hassan wasn’t even looking at her. His attention was fixed on a spot near the gates. With a snap of his fingers his men began scattering like bats on the wing, taking a frighteningly silent Ethan with them.

‘Where are they going with him?’ Leona demanded anxiously.

Hassan didn’t answer. Another man came to stand directly behind her and, glancing up, she found herself gazing into yet another familiar face.

‘Rafiq,’ she murmured, but that was all she managed to say before Hassan was reclaiming her attention by snaking an arm around her waist and pulling her towards him. Her breasts made contact with solid muscle; her thighs suddenly burned like fire as they felt the unyielding power in his. Her eyes leapt up to clash with his eyes. It was like tumbling into oblivion. He looked so very angry, yet so very—

‘Shh,’ he cautioned. ‘It is absolutely imperative that you do exactly as I say. For there is a car coming down the causeway and we cannot afford to have any witnesses.’

‘Witnesses to what?’ she asked in bewilderment.

There was a pause, a smile that was not quite a smile because it was too cold, too calculating, too—

‘Your abduction,’ he smoothly informed her.

Standing there in his arms, feeling trapped by a word that sounded totally alien falling from those lips she’d thought she knew so well, Leona released a constricted gasp then was totally silenced.

Car headlights suddenly swung in their direction. Rafiq moved and the next thing that she knew a shroud of black muslin was being thrown over her head. For a split second she couldn’t believe what was actually happening! Then Hassan released his grasp so the muslin could unfurl right down to her ankles: she was being shrouded in an abaya.

Never had she ever been forced to wear such a garment! ‘Oh, how could you?’ she wrenched out, already trying to drag the abaya off again.

Strong arms firmly subdued her efforts. ‘Now, you have two choices here, my darling.’ Hassan’s grim voice sounded close to her ear. ‘You can either come quietly, of your own volition, or Rafiq and I will ensure that you do so—understand?’

Understand? Oh, yes, Leona thought painfully, she understood fully that she was being recovered like a lost piece of property! ‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ she breathed thickly.

His response was to wedge her between himself and Rafiq and then begin hustling her quickly forward. Feeling hot, trapped and blinded by the abaya, she had no idea where they were taking her.

Her frightened gasp brought Hassan’s hand to cup her elbow. ‘Be calm,’ he said quietly. ‘I am here.’

His reassurance was no assurance to Leona as he began urging her to walk ahead of him. The ground beneath her feet gave way to something much less substantial. Through the thin soles of her shoes she could feel a ridged metal surface, and received a cold sense of some dark space yawning beneath it.

‘What is this?’ she questioned shakily.

‘The gangway to my yacht,’ Hassan replied.

His yacht, she repeated, and thought of the huge dark vessel squatting in the darkness. ‘New toy, Hassan?’ she hit out deridingly.

‘I knew you would be enchanted,’ he returned. ‘Watch your step!’ he cautioned sharply when the open toe of her flimsy shoe caught on one of the metal ridges.

But she couldn’t watch her step because the wretched abaya was in the way! So she tripped, tried to right herself, felt the slender heel of her shoe twist out from beneath her. Instinct made her put out a hand in a bid to save herself. But once again the abaya was in the way and, as she tried to grapple with it, the long loose veil of muslin tangled around her ankles and she lurched drunkenly forward. The sheer impetus of the lurch lost Hassan his guiding grip on her arm. As the sound of her own stifled cry mingled with the roughness of his, Leona knew she hadn’t a hope of saving herself. In the few split seconds it all took to happen, she had a horrible vision of deep dark water between the boat and the harbour wall waiting to suck her down, with the wretched abaya acting as her burial shroud.

Then hard hands were gripping her waist and roughly righting her; next she was being scooped up and crushed hard against a familiar chest. She curled into that chest like a vulnerable child and began shaking all over while she listened to Hassan cursing and swearing beneath his breath as he carried her, and Rafiq answering with soothing tones from somewhere ahead.

Onto the yacht, across the deck, Leona could hear doors being flung wide as they approached. By the time Hassan decided that it was safe to set her down on her own feet again, reaction was beginning to set in.

Shock and fright changed to a blistering fury the moment her feet hit the floor. Breaking free, she spun away from him, then began dragging the abaya off over her head with angry, shaking fingers. Light replaced darkness, sweet cool air replaced suffocating heat. Tossing the garment to the floor, she swung round to face her two abductors with her green eyes flashing and the rest of her shimmering with an incandescent rage.

Both Hassan and Rafiq stood framed by a glossy wood doorway, studying her with differing expressions. Both wore long black tunics beneath dark blue cloaks cinched in at the waist with wide black sashes. Dark blue gutrahs framed their lean dark faces. One neatly bearded, the other clean-shaven and sleek. Both held themselves with an indolent arrogance that was a challenge as they waited to receive her first furious volley.

Her heart flipped over and tumbled to her stomach, her feeling of an impossible-to-fight admiration for these two people, only helping to infuriate her all the more. For who were they—what were they—that they believed they had the right to treat her like this?

She began to walk towards them. Her hair had escaped from its twist and was now tumbling like fire over her shoulders, and somewhere along the way she had lost her shawl and shoes. Without the help of her shoes, the two men towered over her, indomitable and proud, dark brown eyes offering no hint of apology.

Her gaze fixed itself somewhere between them, her hands closed into two tightly clenched fists at her side. The air actually stung with an electric charge of anticipation. ‘I demand to see Ethan,’ she stated very coldly.

It was clearly the last thing either was expecting her to say. Rafiq stiffened infinitesimally, Hassan looked as if she could not have insulted him more if she’d tried.

His eyes narrowed, his mouth grew thin, his handsome sleek features hardened into polished rock. Beneath the dark robes, Leona saw his wide chest expand and remain that way as, with a sharp flick of a hand, he sent Rafiq sweeping out of the room.

As the door closed them in, the sudden silence stifled almost as much as the abaya had done. Neither moved, neither spoke for the space of thirty long heart-throbbing seconds, while Hassan stared coldly down at her and she stared at some obscure point near his right shoulder.

Years of loving this one man, she was thinking painfully. Five years of living the dream in a marriage she had believed was so solid that nothing could ever tear it apart. Now she couldn’t even bring herself to focus on his face properly in case the feelings she now kept deeply suppressed inside her came surging to the surface and spilled out on a wave of broken-hearted misery. For their marriage was over. They both knew it was over. He should not have done this to her. It hurt so badly that he could treat her this way that she didn’t think she was ever going to forgive him for it.

Hassan broke the silence by releasing the breath he had been holding onto. ‘In the interests of harmony, I suggest you restrain from mentioning Ethan Hayes in my presence,’ he advised, then simply stepped right past her to walk across the room to a polished wood counter which ran the full length of one wall.

As she followed the long, lean, subtle movement of his body through desperately loving eyes, fresh fury leapt up to save her again. ‘But who else would I ask about when I’ve just watched your men beat him up and drag him away?’ she threw after him.

‘They did not beat him up.’ Flicking open a cupboard door, he revealed a fridge stocked with every conceivable form of liquid refreshment.

‘They fell on him like a flock of hooligans!’

‘They subdued his enthusiasm for a fight.’

‘He was defending me!’

‘That is my prerogative.’

Her choked laugh at that announcement dropped scorn all over it. ‘Sometimes your arrogance stuns even me!’ she informed him scathingly.

The fridge door shut with a thud. ‘And your foolish refusal to accept wise advice when it is offered to you stuns me!’

Twisting round, Hassan was suddenly revealing an anger that easily matched her own. His eyes were black, his expression harsh, his mouth snapped into a grim line. In his hand he held a bottle of mineral water which he slammed down on the cabinet top, then he began striding towards her, big and hard and threatening.

‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you,’ she burst out bewilderedly. ‘Why am I under attack when I haven’t done anything?’

‘You dare to ask that, when this is the first time we have looked upon each other in a year—yet all you can think about is Ethan Hayes?’

‘Ethan isn’t your enemy,’ she persisted stubbornly.

‘No.’ Thinly said. Then something happened within his eyes that set her heart shuddering. He came to a stop a bare foot away from her. ‘But he is most definitely yours,’ he said.

She didn’t want him this close and took a step back. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she denied.

He closed the gap again. ‘A married woman openly living with a man who is not her husband carries a heavy penalty in Rahman.’

‘Are you daring to suggest that Ethan and I sleep together?’ Her eyes went wide with utter affront.

‘Do you?’

The question was like a slap to the face. ‘No we do not!’

‘Prove it,’ he challenged.

Surprise had her falling back another step. ‘But you know Ethan and I don’t have that kind of relationship,’ she insisted.

‘And, I repeat,’ he said, ‘prove it.’

Nerve-ends began to fray when she realised he was being serious. ‘I can’t,’ she admitted, then went quite pale when she felt forced to add, ‘But you know I wouldn’t sleep with him, Hassan. You know it,’ she emphasised with a painfully thickening tone which placed a different kind of darkness in his eyes.

It came from understanding and pity. And she hated him for that also! Hated and loved and hurt with a power that was worse than any other torture he could inflict.

‘Then explain to me, please,’ he persisted nonetheless, ‘when you openly live beneath the same roof as he does, how I convince my people of this certainty you believe I have in your fidelity?’

‘But Ethan and I haven’t spent one night alone together in the villa,’ she protested. ‘My father has always been there with us until he was delayed in London today!’

‘Quite.’ Hassan nodded. ‘Now you understand why you have been snatched from the brink of committing the ultimate sin in the eyes of our people. There,’ he said with a dismissive flick of the hand. ‘I am your saviour, as is my prerogative.’

With that, and having neatly tied the whole thing off to his own satisfaction, he turned and walked away—Leaving Leona to flounder in his smooth, slick logic and with no ready argument to offer.

‘I don’t believe you are real sometimes,’ she sent shakily after him. ‘Did it never occur to you that I didn’t want snatching from the brink?’

Sarcasm abounding, Hassan merely pulled the gutrah from his head and tossed it aside, then returned to the bottle of water. ‘It was time,’ he said, swinging the fridge door open again. ‘You have had long enough to sulk.’

‘I wasn’t sulking!’

‘Whatever,’ he dismissed with a shrug, then chose a bottle of white wine and closed the door. ‘It was time to bring the impasse to an end.’

Impasse, Leona repeated. He believed their failed marriage was merely stuck in an impasse. ‘I’m not coming back to you,’ she declared, then turned away to pretend to take an interest in her surroundings, knowing that his grim silence was denying her the right to choose.

They were enclosed in what she could only presume was a private stateroom furnished in subtle shades of cream faced with richly polished rosewood. It was all so beautifully designed that it was almost impossible to see the many doors built into the walls except for the wood-framed doors they had entered through. And it was the huge deep-sprung divan taking pride of place against a silk-lined wall, that told her exactly what the room’s function was.

Although the bed was not what truly captured her attention, but the pair of big easy chairs standing in front of a low table by a set of closed cream velvet curtains. As her heart gave a painful twist in recognition, she sent a hand drifting up to her eyes. Oh, Hassan, she thought despairingly, don’t do this to me…

She had seen the chairs, Hassan noted, studying the way she was standing there looking like an exquisitely fragile, perfectly tooled art-deco sculpture in her slender gown of gold. And he didn’t know whether to tell her so or simply weep at how utterly bereft she looked.

In the end he chose a third option and took a rare sip at the white wine spritzer he had just prepared for her. The forbidden alcohol content in the drink might be diluted but he felt it hit his stomach and almost instantly enter his bloodstream with an injection of much appreciated fire.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ he announced, and watched her chin come up, watched her wonderful hair slide down her slender back and her hand drop slowly to her side while she took a steadying breath before she could bring herself to turn and face him.

‘I’ve been ill—with the flu,’ she answered flatly.

‘That was weeks ago,’ he dismissed, uncaring that he was revealing to her just how close an eye he had been keeping on her from a distance. The fact that she showed no surprise told him that she had guessed as much anyway. ‘After a virus such as influenza the weight recovery is usually swift.’

‘And you would know, of course,’ she drawled, mocking the fact that he had not suffered a day’s illness in his entire life.

‘I know you,’ he countered, ‘and your propensity for slipping into a decline when you are unhappy…’

‘I was ill, not unhappy.’

‘You missed me. I missed you. Why try to deny it?’

‘May I have one of those?’ Indicating towards the drink he held in his hand was her way of telling him she was going to ignore those kind of comments.

‘It is yours,’ he explained, and offered the glass out to her.

She looked at the glass, long dusky lashes flickering over her beautiful green eyes when she realised he was going to make her come and get the drink. Would she do it? he wondered curiously. Would she allow herself to come this close, when they both knew she would much rather turn and run?

But his beautiful wife had never been a coward. No matter how she might be feeling inside, he had never known her to run from a challenge. Even when she had left him last year she had done so with courage, not cowardice. And she did not let him down now as her silk stockinged feet began to tread the cream carpet until she was in reach of the glass.

‘Thank you.’ The wine spritzer was taken from him and lifted to her mouth. She sipped without knowing she had been offered the glass so she would place her lips where his lips had been.

Her pale throat moved as she swallowed; her lips came away from the glass wearing a seductively alluring wine glossed bloom. He watched her smother a sigh, watched her look anywhere but directly at him, was aware that she had not looked him in the face since removing the abaya, just as she had stopped looking at him weeks before she left Rahman. And he had to suppress his own sigh as he felt muscles tighten all over his body in his desire to reach out, draw her close and make her look at him!

But this was not the time to play the demanding husband. She would reject him as she had rejected him many times a year ago. What hurt him the most about remembering those bleak interludes was not his own angry frustration but the grim knowledge that it had been herself she had been denying.

‘Was the Petronades yacht party an elaborate set-up?’ she asked suddenly.

A brief smile stretched his mouth, and it was a very selfmocking smile because he had truly believed she was as concentrated on his close physical presence as he was on hers. But, no. As always, Leona’s mind worked in ways that continually managed to surprise him.

‘The party was genuine.’ He answered the question. ‘Your father’s sudden inability to get here in time to attend it was not.’

At least his honesty almost earned him a direct glance of frowning puzzlement before she managed to divert it to his right ear. ‘But you’ve just finished telling me that I was snatched because my father was—’

‘I know,’ he cut in, not needing to hear her explain what he already knew—which was that this whole thing had been very carefully set up and co-ordinated with her father’s assistance. ‘There are many reasons why you are standing here with me right now, my darling,’ he murmured gently. ‘Most of which can wait for another time to go into.’

The my darling sent her back a defensive step. The realisation that her own father had plotted against her darkened her lovely eyes. ‘Tell me now,’ she insisted.

But Hassan just shook his head. ‘Now is for me,’ he informed her softly. ‘Now is my moment to bask in the fact that you are back where you belong.’

It was really a bit of bad timing that her feet should use that particular moment to tread on the discarded abaya, he supposed, watching as she looked down, saw, then grew angry all over again.

‘By abduction?’ Her chin came up, contempt shimmering along her finely shaped bones. ‘By plots and counter-plots and by removing a woman’s right to decide for herself?’

He grimaced at her very accurate description. ‘We are by nature a romantic people,’ he defended. ‘We love drama and poetry and tragic tales of star-crossed lovers who lose each other and travel the caverns of hell in their quest to find their way back together again.’

He saw the tears. He had said too much. Reaching out, he caught the glass just before it slipped from her nerveless fingers. ‘Our marriage is a tragedy,’ she told him thickly.

‘No,’ he denied, putting the hapless glass aside. ‘You merely insist on turning it into one.’

‘Because I hate everything you stand for!’

‘But you cannot make yourself hate the man,’ he added, undisturbed by her denunciation.

Leona began to back away because there was something seriously threatening about the sudden glow she caught in his eyes. ‘I left you, remember?’

‘Then sent me letters at regular intervals to make sure I remembered you,’ he drawled.

‘Letters to tell you I want a divorce!’ she cried.

‘The content of the letters came second to their true purpose.’ He smiled. ‘One every two weeks over the last two months. I found them most comforting.’

‘Gosh, you are so conceited it’s a wonder you didn’t marry yourself!’

‘Such insults.’ He sighed.

‘Will you stop stalking me as if I am a hunted animal?’ she cried.

‘Stop backing away like one.’

‘I do not want to stay married to you.’ She stated it bluntly.

‘And I am not prepared to let you go. There,’ he said. ‘We have reached another impasse. Which one of us is going to win the higher ground this time, do you think?’

Looking at him standing there, arrogant and proud yet so much her kind of man that he made her legs go weak, Leona knew exactly which one of them possessed the higher ground. Which was also why she had to keep him at arm’s length at all costs. He could fell her in seconds, because he was right; she didn’t hate him, she adored him. And that scared her so much that when his hand came up, long fingertips brushing gently across her trembling mouth, she almost fainted on the sensation that shot from her lips to toe tips.

She pulled right away. His eyebrow arched. It mocked and challenged as he responded by curling the hand around her nape.

‘Stop it,’ she said, and lifted up her hand to use it as a brace against his chest.

Beneath dark blue cotton she discovered a silk-smooth, hard-packed body pulsing with heat and an all-too-familiar masculine potency. Her mouth went dry; she tried to breathe and found that she couldn’t. Helplessly she lifted her eyes up to meet with his.

‘Seeing me now, hmm?’ he softly taunted. ‘Seeing this man with these eyes you like to drown in, and this nose you like to call dreadful but usually have trouble from stopping your fingers from stroking? And let us not forget this mouth you so like to feel crushed hotly against your own delightful mouth.’

‘Don’t you dare!’ she protested, seeing what was coming and already beginning to shake all over at the terrifying prospect of him finding out what a weak-willed coward she was.

‘Why not?’ he countered, offering her one of his lazily sensual, knowing smiles that said he knew better than she did what she really wanted—and he began to lower his dark head.

‘Tell me first.’ Sheer desperation made her fly into impulsive speech. ‘If I am here on this beautiful yacht that belongs to you—is there another yacht just like it out there somewhere where your second wife awaits her turn?’

In the sudden suffocating silence that fell between them Leona found herself holding her breath as she watched his face pale to a frightening stillness. For this was provocation of the worst kind to an Arab and her heart began pounding madly because she just didn’t know how he was going to respond. Hassan possessed a shocking temper, though he had never unleashed it on her. But now, as she stood here with her fingers still pressed against his breastbone, she could feel the danger in him—could almost taste her own fear as she waited to see how he was going to respond.

What he did was to take a step back from her. Cold, aloof, he changed into the untouchable prince in the single blink of an ebony eyelash. ‘Are you daring to imply that I could be guilty of treating my wives unequally?’ he responded.

In the interim wave of silence that followed, Leona stared at him through eyes that had stopped seeing anything as his reply rocked the very axis she stood upon. She knew she had prompted it but she still had not expected it, and now she found she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even move as fine cracks began to appear in her defences.

‘You actually went and did it, and married again,’ she whispered, then completely shattered. Emotionally, physically, she felt herself fragment into a thousand broken pieces beneath his stone-cold, cruel gaze.

Hassan didn’t see it coming. He should have done, he knew that, but he had been too angry to see anything but his own affronted pride. So when she turned and ran he didn’t expect it. By the time he had pulled his wits together enough to go after her Leona was already flying through the door on a flood of tears.

The tears blinded what was ahead of her, the abaya having prevented her from taking stock of her surroundings as they’d arrived. Hassan heard Rafiq call out a warning, reached the door as Leona’s cry curdled the very air surrounding them and she began to fall.

What he had managed to prevent by the skin of his teeth only a half-hour before now replayed itself before his helpless eyes. Only it was not the dark waters of the Mediterranean she fell into but the sea of cream carpet that ran from room to room and down a wide flight of three shallow stairs that led down into the yacht’s main foyer.




CHAPTER THREE


CURSING and swearing in seething silence, Hassan prowled three sides of the bed like a caged tiger while the yacht’s Spanish medic checked her over.

‘No bones broken, as far as I can tell,’ the man said. ‘No obvious blow to the head.’

‘Then why is she unconscious?’ he growled out furiously.

‘Shock—winded,’ the medic suggested, gently laying aside a frighteningly limp hand. ‘It has only been a few minutes, sir.’

But a few minutes was a lifetime when you felt so guilty you wished it was yourself lying there, Hassan thought harshly.

‘A cool compress would be a help—’

A cool compress. ‘Rafiq.’ The click of his fingers meant the job would be done.

The sharp sound made Leona flinch. On a single, lithe leap Hassan was suddenly stretched out across the bed and leaning over her. The medic drew back; Rafiq paused in his step.

‘Open your eyes.’ Hassan turned her face towards him with a decidedly unsteady hand.

Her eyes fluttered open to stare up at him blankly. ‘What happened?’ she mumbled.

‘You fell down some stairs,’ he gritted. ‘Now tell me where you hurt.’

A frown began to pucker her smooth brow as she tried to remember.

‘Concentrate,’ he rasped, diverting her mind away from what had happened. ‘Do you hurt anywhere?’

She closed her eyes again, and he watched her make a mental inventory of herself then give a small shake of her head. ‘I think I’m okay.’ She opened her eyes again, looked directly into his, saw his concern, his anguish, the burning fires of guilt—and then she remembered why she’d fallen.

Aching tears welled up again. From coldly plunging his imaginary knife into her breast, he now felt it enter his own. ‘You really went and did it,’ she whispered.

‘No, I did not,’ he denied. ‘Get out,’ he told their two witnesses.

The room emptied like water down a drain, leaving them alone again, confronting each other again. It was dangerous. He wanted to kiss her so badly he could hardly breathe. She was his. He was hers! They should not be in this warring situation!

‘No—remain still!’ he commanded when she attempted to move. ‘Don’t even breathe unless you have to do so! Why are females so stupid?’ he bit out like a curse. ‘You insult me with your suspicions. You goad me into a response, and when it is not the one you want to hear you slay me with your pain!’

‘I didn’t mean to fall down the stairs,’ she pointed out.

‘I wasn’t talking about the fall!’ he bit out, then glared down into her confused, hurt, vulnerable eyes for a split second longer. ‘Oh, Allah give me strength,’ he gritted, and gave in to himself and took her trembling mouth by storm.

If he had kissed her in any other way Leona would have fought him with her very last breath. But she liked the storm; she needed the storm so she could allow herself to be swept away. Plus he was trembling, and she liked that too. Liked to know that she still had the power to reduce the prince in him to this vulnerable mass of smashed emotion.

And she’d missed him. She’d missed feeling his length lying alongside her length, had missed the weight of his thighs pressing down on her own. She’d missed his kiss, hungry, urgent, insistent…wanting. Like a banquet after a year of long, hard fasting, she fed greedily on every deep, dark, sensual delight. Lips, teeth, tongue, taste. She reached for his chest, felt the strong beat of his heart as she glided her palms beneath the fabric of his top robe where only the thin cotton of his tunic came between them and tightly muscled, satin-smooth flesh. When she reached his shoulders her fingers curled themselves into tightly padded muscle then stayed there, inviting him to take what he liked.

He took her breasts, stroking and shaping before moving on to follow the slender curve of her body. Long fingers claimed her hips, then drew her against the force of his. Fire bloomed in her belly, for this was her man, the love of her life. She would never, ever, find herself another. What he touched belonged to him. What he desired he could have.

What he did was bring a cruelly abrupt end to it by rising in a single fluid movement to land on his feet beside the bed, leaving her to flounder on the hard rocks of rejection while he stood there with his back to her, fighting a savage battle with himself.

‘Why?’ she breathed in thick confusion.

‘We are not animals,’ he ground back. ‘We have issues to deal with that must preclude the hungry coupling at which we already know we both excel.’

It served as a dash of water in her face; and he certainly possessed good aim, Leona noted as she came back to reality with a shivering gasp. ‘What issues?’ she challenged cynically. ‘The issue of what we have left besides the excellent sex?’

He didn’t answer. Instead he made one of her eyebrows arch as he snatched up her spritzer and grimly downed the lot. There was a man at war with himself as well as with her, Leona realised, knowing Hassan hardly ever touched alcohol, and only then when he was under real stress.

Sitting up, she was aware of a few aches and bruises as she gingerly slid her feet to the floor. ‘I want to go home,’ she announced.

‘This is home,’ he replied. ‘For the next few weeks, anyway.’

Few weeks? Coming just as gingerly to her feet, Leona stared at his rigid back—which was just another sign that Hassan was not functioning to his usual standards, because no Arab worthy of the race would deliberately set his back to anyone. It was an insult of the worst kind.

Though she had seen his back a lot during those few months before she’d eventually left him, Leona recalled with a familiar sinking feeling inside. Not because he had wished to insult her, she acknowledged, but because he had refused to face what they had both known was happening to their marriage. In the end, she had taken the initiative away from him.

‘Where are my shoes?’

The surprisingly neutral question managed to bring him swinging round to glance at her feet. ‘Rafiq has them.’

Dear Rafiq, Leona thought wryly, Hassan’s ever-loyal partner in crime. Rafiq was an Al-Qadim. A man who had attended the same schools, the same universities, the same everything as Hassan had done. Equals in many ways, prince and lowly servant in others. It was a complicated relationship that wound around the status of birth and the ranks of power.

‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to ask him to give them back to me.’ Even she knew you didn’t command Rafiq to do anything. He was a law unto himself—and Hassan. Rafiq was a maverick. A man of the desert, yet not born of the desert; fiercely proud, fiercely protective of his right to be master of his own decisions.

‘For what purpose?’

Leona’s chin came up, recognising the challenge in his tone. She offered him a cool, clear look. ‘I am not staying here, Hassan,’ she told him flatly. ‘Even if I have to book into a hotel in San Estéban to protect your dignity, I am leaving this boat now, tonight.’

His expression grew curious, a slight smile touched his mouth. ‘Strong swimmer, are you?’ he questioned lazily.

It took a few moments for his taunt to truly sink in, then she was moving, darting across the room and winding her way between the two strategically placed chairs and the accompanying table to reach for the curtains. Beyond the glass, all she could see was inky darkness. Maybe she was on the seaward side of the boat, she told herself in an effort to calm the sudden sting of alarm that slid down her spine.

Hassan quickly disabused her of that frail hope. ‘We left San Estéban minutes after we boarded.’

It was only then that she felt it: just the softest hint of a vibration beneath the soles of her feet that told of smooth and silently running engines. This truly was an abduction, she finally accepted, and turned slowly back round to face him.

‘Why?’ she breathed.

It was like a replay of what had already gone before, only this time it was serious—more serious than Leona had even begun to imagine. For she knew this man—knew he was not given to flights of impulse just for the hell of it. Everything he did had to have a reason, and was always preceded by meticulous planning which took time he would not waste, and effort he would not move unless he felt he absolutely had to do.

Hassan’s small sigh conveyed that he too knew that this was where the prevarication ended. ‘There are problems at home,’ he informed her soberly. ‘My father’s health is failing.’

His father…Anger swiftly converted itself into anxious concern for her father-in-law. Sheikh Khalifa had been frail in health for as long as she had known him. Hassan doted on him and devoted most of his energy to relieving his father of the burdens of rule, making sure he had the best medical attention available and refusing to believe that one day his father would not be there. So, if Hassan was using words like ‘failing’, then the old man’s health must indeed be grave.

‘What happened?’ She began to walk towards him. ‘I thought the last treatment was—’

‘Your interest is a little too late in coming,’ Hassan cut in, and with a flick of a hand halted her steps. ‘For I don’t recall you showing any concern about what it would do to his health when you left a year ago.’

That wasn’t fair, and Leona blinked as his words pricked a tender part of her. Sheikh Khalifa was a good man—a kind man. They had become strong, close friends while she had lived at the palace. ‘He understood why I felt I needed to leave,’ she responded painfully.

You think so? Hassan’s cynical expression derided. ‘Well, I did not,’ he said out loud. ‘But, since you decided it was the right thing for you to do, I now have a serious problem on my hands. For I am, in effect, deemed weak for allowing my wife to walk away from me, and my critics are making rumbling noises about the stability of the country if I do not display some leadership.’

‘So you decided to show that leadership by abducting me, then dragging me back to Rahman?’ Her thick laugh poured scorn over that suggestion, because they both knew taking her back home had to be the worst thing Hassan could possibly do to prove that particular point.

‘You would prefer that I take this second wife who makes you flee in pain when the subject appears in front of you?’

‘She is what you need, not me.’ It almost choked her to say the words. But they were dealing with the truth here, painful though that truth may be. And the truth was that she was no longer the right wife for the heir to a sheikhdom.

‘I have the wife I want,’ he answered grimly.

‘But not the wife you need, Hassan!’ she countered wretchedly.

His eyes flicked up to clash with her eyes. ‘Is that your way of telling me that you no longer love me?’ he challenged.

Oh, dear God. Lifting a trembling hand up to cover her eyes, Leona gave a shake of her head in refusal to answer. Without warning Hassan was suddenly moving at speed down the length of the room.

‘Answer me!’ he insisted when he came to a stop in front of her.

Swallowing on a lump of tears, Leona turned her face away. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

His sudden grip on her hand dragged it from her eyes. ‘To my face,’ he instructed, ‘You will tell me this to my face!’

Her head whipped up, tear darkened eyes fixing painfully on burning black. ‘Don’t—’ she pleaded.

But he was not going to give in. He was pale and he was hurt and he was furiously angry. ‘I want to hear you state that you feel no love for me,’ he persisted. ‘I want you to tell that wicked lie to my face. And then I want to hear you beg forgiveness when I prove to you otherwise! Do you understand, Leona?’

‘All right! So, I love you! Does that make it all okay?’ she cried out. ‘I love you but I will not stay married to you! I will not watch you ruin your life because of me!’

There—it was out. The bitter truth. On voicing it, she broke free and reeled away, hurting so much it was almost impossible to breathe. ‘And your life?’ he persisted relentlessly. ‘What happens to it while you play the sacrificial lamb for mine?’

‘I’ll get by,’ she said, trying to walk on legs that were shaking so badly she wasn’t sure if she was going to fall down.

‘You’ll marry again?’

She shuddered and didn’t reply.

‘Take lovers in an attempt to supplant me?’

Harsh and cruel though he sounded, she could hear his anguish. ‘I need no one,’ she whispered.

‘Then you mean to spend the rest of your life watching me produce progeny with this second wife I am to take?’

‘Oh, dear heaven.’ She swung around. ‘What are you trying to do to me?’ she choked out tormentedly.

‘Make you see,’ he gritted. ‘Make you open your eyes and see what it is you are condemning us both to.’

‘But I’m not condemning you to anything! I am giving you my blessing to do what you want with your life!’

If she’d offered to give him a whole harem he could not have been more infuriated. His face became a map of hard angles. ‘Then I will take what I want!’ It was a declaration of intent that propelled him across the space between them. Before Leona knew what was coming she was locked in his arms and being lifted until their eyes were level. Startled green irises locked with burning black passion. He gave her one small second to read their message before he was kissing her furiously. Shocked out of one kind of torment, she found herself flung into the middle of another—because once again she had no will to fight. She even released a protesting groan when her feet found solid ground again and he broke the urgent kiss.

Her lips felt hot, and pulsed with such a telling fullness that she had to lick them to try and cool them down. His breath left his body on a hiss that brought her eyes flickering dazedly up to his. Thick dark lashes rested over ebony eyes that were fixed on the moist pink tip of her tongue. A slither of excitement skittered right down the front of her. Her breasts grew tight, her abdomen warming at the prospect of what all of this meant.

Making love. Feeling him deep inside her. No excuses, no drawing back this time. She only had to look at Hassan to know this was it. He was about to stake his claim on what belonged to him.

‘You will regret this later,’ she warned unsteadily, because she knew how his passions and his conscience did not always walk in tandem—especially not where she was concerned.

‘Are you denying me?’ he threw back in a voice that said he was interested in the answer, but only out of curiosity.

Well, Leona asked herself, are you?

The answer was no, she was not denying him anything he wanted to take from her tonight. Tomorrow was another day, another war, another set of agonising conflicts. Reaching up, she touched a gentle finger to his mouth, drew its shape, softened the tension out of it, then sighed, went up on tiptoe and gently joined their mouths.

His hands found the slender frame of her hips and drew her against him; her hands lifted higher to link around his neck so her fingers could slide sensually into his silk dark hair. It was an embrace that sank them into a long deep loving. Her dress fell away, slithering down her body on a pleasurable whisper of silk against flesh. Beneath she wore a dark gold lace bra, matching high-leg briefs and lace-topped stockings. Hassan discovered all of this with the sensual stroke of long fingers. He knew each pleasure point, the quality of each little gasp she breathed into his mouth. When her bra fell away, she sighed and pressed herself against him; when his fingers slid beneath the briefs to cup her bottom she allowed him to ease her into closer contact. They knew each other, loved each other—cared so very deeply about each other. Fight they might do—often. They might have insurmountable problems. But nothing took away the love and caring. It was there, as much part of them as the life-giving oxygen they took into their lungs.

‘You want me,’ he declared.

‘I’ve always wanted you,’ she sadly replied.

‘I am your other half.’

And I am your broken one, Leona thought, releasing an achingly melancholy sigh.

Maybe he knew what she was thinking, because his mouth took burning possession that gave no more room to think at all. It came as an unwelcome break when he lowered her down onto the bed then straightened, taking her briefs with him. Her love-flooded eyes watched his eyes roam over her. He was no longer being driven by his inner devils, she realised as she watched him removing his own clothing. Her compliance had neutralised the compelling need to stake his claim.

So she watched him follow her every movement as she made a sensual love-play out of removing her stockings from her long slender legs. His dark robe landed on the floor on top of her clothing; the tunic eventually went the same way. Beneath waited a desert-bronzed silk-smooth torso, with a muscled structure that set her green eyes glowing with pleasure and made her fingers itch to touch. Those muscles rippled and flexed as he reached down to grasp the only piece of clothing he had left to remove. The black shorts trailed away from a sexual force that set her feminine counterpart pulsing with anticipation.

He knew what was happening, smiled a half-smile, then came to lean over her, lowering his raven head to place a kiss there that was really a claim of ownership. She breathed out a shivering breath of pleasure and he was there to claim that also. Then she had all of him covering her. It was the sweetest feeling she had ever experienced. He was her Arabian lover. The man she had seen across a crowded room long years ago. And she had never seen another man clearly since.

He seduced her mouth, he seduced her body, he seduced her into seducing him. When it all became too much without deeper contact, he eased himself between her thighs and slowly joined them.

Her responsive groan made him pause. ‘What?’ he questioned anxiously.

‘I’ve missed you so much.’ She sighed the words out helplessly.

It was a catalyst that sent him toppling. He staked his claim on those few emotive words with every driving thrust. She died a little. It was strange how she did that, she found herself thinking as the pleasure began to run like liquid fire. They came as one, within the grip of hard, gasping shudders and afterwards lay still, locked together, as their bodies went through the pleasurable throes of settling back down again.

Then nothing moved, not their bodies nor even their quiet breathing. The silence came—pure, numbing, unbreakable silence.

Why?

Because it had all been so beautiful but also so very empty. And nothing was ever going to change that.

Hassan moved first, levering himself away to land on his feet by the bed. He didn’t even spare her a glance as he walked away. Sensational naked, smooth and sleek, he touched a finger to the wall and a cleverly concealed door sprung open. As he stepped through it Leona caught a glimpse of white tiling and realised it was a bathroom. Then the door closed, shutting him in and her completely out.

Closing her eyes, she lifted an arm up to cover them, and pressed her lips together to stop them from trembling on the tears she was having to fight. For this was not a new situation she was dealing with here. It had happened before—often—and was just one of the many reasons why she had left him in the end. The pain had been too great to go on taking it time after time. His pain, her pain—she had never been able to distinguish where one ended and the other began. The only difference here tonight was that she’d somehow managed to let herself forget that, until this cold, solitary moment.

Hassan stood beneath the pulsing jet of the power shower and wanted to hit something so badly that he had to brace his hands against the tiles and lock every muscle to keep the murderous feeling in. His body was replete but his heart was grinding against his ribcage with a frustration that nothing could cure.

Silence. He hated that silence. He hated knowing he had nothing worth saying with which to fill it in. And he still had to go back in there and face it. Face the dragging sense of his own helplessness and—worse—he had to face hers.

His wife. His woman. The other half of him. Head lowered so the water sluiced onto his shoulders and down his back, he tried to predict what her next move was going to be, and came up with only one grim answer. She was not going to stay. He could bully her as much as he liked, but in the end she was still going to walk away from him unless he could come up with something important enough to make her stay.

Maybe he should have used more of his father’s illness, he told himself. A man she loved, a man she’d used to spend hours of every day with, talking, playing board games or just quietly reading to him when he was too weak to enjoy anything else.

But his father had not been enough to make her want to stay the last time. The old fool had given her his blessing, had missed her terribly, yet even on the day he’d gone to see him before he left the palace he had still maintained that Leona had had to do what she’d believed was right.

So who was in the wrong here? Him for wanting to spend his life with one particular woman, or Leona for wanting to do what was right?

He hated that phrase, doing what was right. It reeked of duty at the expense of everything: duty to his family, duty to his country, duty to produce the next Al-Qadim son and heir.

Well, I don’t need a son. I don’t need a second wife to produce one for me like some specially selected brood mare! I need a beautiful red-haired creature who makes my heart ache each time I look at her. I don’t need to see that glazed look of emptiness she wears after we make love!

On a sigh he turned round, swapped braced hands for braced shoulders against the shower wall. The water hit his face and stopped him breathing. He didn’t care if he never breathed again—until instinct took over from grim stubbornness and forced him to move again.

Coming out of the bathroom a few minutes later, he had to scan the room before he spotted her sitting curled up in one of the chairs. She had opened the curtains and was just sitting there staring out, with her wonderful hair gleaming hot against the pale damask upholstery. She had wrapped herself in a swathe of white and a glance at the tumbled bed told him she had dragged free the sheet of Egyptian cotton to wear.

His gaze dropped to the floor by the bed, where their clothes still lay in an intimate huddle that was a lot more honest than the two of them were with each other.

‘Find out how Ethan is.’

The sound of her voice brought his attention back to her. She hadn’t moved, had not turned to look at him, and the demand spoke volumes as to what was really being said. Barter and exchange. She had given him more of herself than she had intended to do; now she wanted something back by return.

Without a word he crossed to the internal telephone and found out what she wanted to know, ordered some food to be sent in to them, then strode across the room to sit down in the chair next to hers. ‘He caught an accidental blow to the jaw which knocked him out for a minute or two, but he is fine now,’ he assured her. ‘And is dining with Rafiq as we speak.’

‘So he wasn’t part of this great plan of abduction you plotted with my father.’ It wasn’t a question, it was a sign of relief.

‘I am devious and underhand on occasion but not quite that devious and underhand,’ he countered dryly.

Her chin was resting on her bent knees, but she turned her head to look at him through dark, dark eyes. Her hair flowed across her white-swathed shoulders, and her soft mouth looked vulnerable enough to conquer in one smooth swoop. His body quickened, temptation clawing across flesh hidden beneath his short robe of sand-coloured silk.

‘Convincing my own father to plot against me wasn’t devious or underhand?’ she questioned.

‘He was relieved I was ready to break the deadlock,’ he informed her. ‘He wished me well, then offered me all the help he could give.’

Her lack of comment was one in itself. Her following sigh punctuated it. She was seeing betrayal from her own father, but it just was not true. ‘You knew he worried about you,’ he inserted huskily. ‘Yet you didn’t tell him why you left me, did you?’

The remark lost him contact with her eyes as she turned them frontward again, and the way she stared out into the inky blackness beyond the window closed up his throat, because he knew what she was really seeing as she looked out there.

‘Coming to terms with being a failure is not something I wanted to share with anyone,’ she murmured dully.

‘You are not a failure,’ he denied.

‘I am infertile!’ She flashed out the one word neither of them wanted to hear.

It launched Hassan to his feet on a surge of anger. ‘You are not infertile!’ he ground out harshly. ‘That is not what the doctors said, and you know it is not!’

‘Will you stop hiding from it?’ she cried, scrambling to her feet to stand facing him, with her face as white as the sheet she clutched around her and her eyes as black as the darkness outside. ‘I have one defunct ovary and the other one ovulates only when it feels like it!’ She spelt it out for him.

‘Which does not add up to infertility,’ he countered forcefully.

‘After all of these years of nothing, you can still bring yourself to say that?’

She was staring up at him as if he was deliberately trying to hurt her. And, because he had no answer to that final charge, he had to ask himself if that had been his subconscious intention. The last year had been hell to live through and the year preceding only marginally better. Married life had become a place in which they’d walked with the darkness of disappointment shadowing their past and future. In the end, Leona had not been able to take it any more so she’d left him. If she wanted to know what failure really felt like then she should have trodden in his shoes as he’d battled with his own failure to relieve this woman he loved of the heavy burden she was forced to carry.

‘We will try other methods of conception,’ he stated grimly.

If it was possible her face went even whiter. ‘My eggs harvested like grains of wheat and your son conceived in a test tube? Your people would never forgive me for putting you through such an indignity, and those who keep the Al-Qadim family in power will view the whole process with deep suspicion.’

Her voice had begun to wobble. His own throat closed on the need to swallow, because she was right, though he did not want her to be. For she was talking about the old ones, those tribal leaders of the desert who really maintained the balance of power in Rahman. They lived by the old ways and regarded anything remotely modern as necessary evil to be embraced only if all other sources had been exhausted. Hassan had taken a big risk when he’d married a western woman. The old ones had surprised him by deciding to see his decision to do so as a sign of strength. But that had been the only concession they had offered him with regard to his choice of wife. For why go to such extremes to father a son he could conceive as easily by taking a second wife?

Which was why this subject had always been so sensitive, and why Leona suddenly shook her head and said, ‘Oh, why did you have to bring me back here?’ Then she turned and walked quickly away from him, making unerringly for the bathroom he had so recently used for the same purpose—to be alone with her pain.




CHAPTER FOUR


TWO hours, Leona noticed, as she removed her slender gold watch from her wrist with badly trembling fingers and laid it on the marble surface along with the diamonds from her ears and throat. Two hours together and already they were tearing each other to pieces.

On a sigh she swivelled round to sink down onto the toilet seat and stare dully at her surroundings. White. Everything was white. White-tiled walls and floor, white ceramics—even the sheet she had discarded lay in a soft white heap on the floor. The room needed a bit of colour to add some—

She stopped herself right there, closing her eyes on the knowledge that she had slipped into professional mode and knowing she had done it to escape from what she should really be thinking about.

This situation, this mad, foolish, heart-flaying situation, which was also so bitter-sweet and special. She didn’t know whether to laugh at Hassan’s outrageous method of bringing them together, or sob at the unnecessary agony he was causing the both of them.

In the end she did both, released a laugh that turned into a sob and buried the sound in her hands. Each look, each touch, was an act of love that bound them together. Each word, each thought, was an act of pain that tore them apart at the seams.

Then she remembered his face when he had made the ultimate sacrifice. Chin up, face carved, mouth so flat it was hardly a mouth any more. When the man had had to turn himself into a prince before he could utter the words, ‘We will try other methods of conception,’ she had known they had nothing left to fight for.

What was she supposed to have done? Made the reciprocal sacrifice to their love and offered to remain his first wife while he took a second? She just could not do it, could not live with the agony of knowing that when he wasn’t in her bed he would be lying in another. The very idea was enough to set her insides curling up in pained dismay while her covered eyes caught nightmare visions of him trying to be fair, trying to pretend it wasn’t really happening, that he wasn’t over the moon when the new wife conceived his first child. How long after that before his love began to shift from her to this other woman with whom he could relax—enjoy her without feeling pain every time he looked at her?

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Stop it.’ She began to shiver. It just wasn’t even an option, so she must stop thinking about it! He knew that—he knew it! It was why he had taunted her with the suggestion earlier. He had been angry and had gone for the jugular and had enjoyed watching her die in front of him! It had always been like this: exploding flashes of anger and frustration, followed by wild leaps into sensual forgetfulness, followed by the low-of-low moments when neither could even look at the other because the empty truth was always still waiting there for them to re-emerge.

Empty.

On a groan she stood up, and groaned again as tiny muscles all over her body protested at being forced into movement. The fall, the lovemaking, or just the sheer stress of it all? she wondered, then wearily supposed it was a combination of all three.

So why do it? Why put them both back into a situation they had played so many times before it was wretched? Or was that it? she then thought on a sudden chill that shot down her backbone. Had he needed to play out the scene this one last time before he could finally accept that their marriage was over?

Sick. She felt sick. On trembling legs she headed quickly for the shower cubicle and switched the jet on so water sluiced over her body. Duty. It was all down to duty. His duty to produce an heir, her duty to let him. With any other man the love would be enough; those other methods of conception would be made bearable by the strength of that love. But she’d fallen in love with a prince not a man. And the prince had fallen in love with a barren woman.

Barren. How ugly that word was. How cold and bitter and horribly cheap. For there was nothing barren about the way she was feeling, nor did those feelings come cheap. They cost her a part of herself each time she experienced them. Like now, as they ate away at her insides until it was all she could do to slide down into a pathetic huddle in the corner of the shower cubicle and wait for it all to recede.

Where was she? What was she doing in there? She had been shut inside the bathroom for half an hour, and with a glance at his watch, Hassan continued to pace the floor on the vow that if she didn’t come out in two minutes he was going in there after her.

None of this—none of it—was going the way he had planned it. How had he managed to trick himself into diluting just how deep their emotions ran, how painful the whole thing was going to be? He hit his brow with the palm of his hand, then uttered a few choice curses at his arrogant belief that all he’d needed to do was hook her up and haul her back in for the rest to fall into place around them.

All he’d wanted to do was make sure she was safe, back here where she belonged, no matter what the problems. So instead he’d scared the life out of her, almost lost her to the depths of the ocean, fought like the devil over issues that were so old they did not need raking over! He’d even lied to score points, had watched her run in a flood of tears, watched her fly through the air down a set of stairs he now wished had never been put there. Shocked, winded and dazed by the whole crazy situation, he had then committed his worst sin and had ravished her. Now she had locked herself away behind a bathroom door because she could not deal with him daring to make an offer they both knew was not, and never had been, a real option!

What was left? Did he unsheath his ceremonial scabbard and offer to finish them both off like two tragic lovers?

Oh, may Allah forgive him, he prayed as his blood ran cold and he leapt towards the bathroom door. She wouldn’t. She was made of stronger stuff, he told himself as he lifted a clenched fist to bang on the door just as it came open.

She was wearing only a towel and her hair was wet, slicked to her beautiful head like a ruby satin veil. Momentarily shocked by the unexpected face-to-face confrontation, they both just stared at each other. Then he bit out, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

He had no answer to offer that did not sound insane, so he took another way out and reached for her, pulled her into his arms and kissed her—hard. By the time he let her up for air again she was breathless.

‘Hassan—’

‘No,’ he interrupted. ‘We have talked enough for one night.’

Turning away, he went over to the bed to retrieve the pearl-white silk robe he had laid out ready for her. During her absence the room had been returned to its natural neatness, at his instruction, and a table had been laid for dinner in the centre, with the food waiting for them on a heated trolley standing beside it.

He saw her eyes taking all of this in as he walked back to where she was standing. She also noticed that the lights had been turned down and candles had been lit on the table. She was no fool; she knew he had set the scene with a second seduction in mind and he didn’t bother to deny it.

‘Here,’ he said, and opened the robe up between his hands, inviting her to slip into it.

There was a pause where she kept her eyes hidden beneath the sweep of her dusky lashes. She was trying to decide how to deal with this and he waited in silence, more than willing to let the decision be hers after having spent the previous few minutes listing every other wrong move he had made until now.

‘Just for tonight,’ she said, and lifted those lashes to show him the firmness of that decision. ‘Tomorrow you take me back to San Estéban.’

His mouth flexed as the urge to say, Never, throbbed on the end of his tongue. ‘Tomorrow we—talk about it,’ he offered as his only compromise, though he knew it was no compromise at all and wondered if she knew it too.

He suspected she did, suspected she knew he had not gone to all of this trouble just to snatch a single night with her. But those wonderful lashes fluttered down again. Her soft mouth, still pulsing from his kiss, closed over words she decided not to say, and with only a nod of her head she lost the towel, stepped forward and turned to allow him to help feed her arms into the kimono-type sleeves of the robe.

It was a concession he knew he did not deserve. A concession he wanted to repay with a kiss of another kind, where bodies met and senses took over. Instead, he turned her to face him, smoothed his fingers down the robe’s silken border from slender shoulders to narrow waist, then reached for the belt and tied it for her.

His gentle ministrations brought a reluctant smile to her lips. ‘The calm before the storm,’ she likened dryly.

‘Better this than what I really want to do,’ he very ruefully replied.

‘You mean this?’ she asked, and lifted her eyes to his to let him see what was running through her head, then reached up and kissed him, before drawing away again with a very mocking smile.

As she turned to walk towards the food trolley she managed to trail her fingers over that part of him that was already so hard it was almost an embarrassment. The little vixen. He released a soft laugh. She might appear subdued on the surface, but underneath she still possessed enough spirit to play the tease.

They ate poached salmon on a bed of spinach, and beef stroganoff laden with cream. Hassan kept her glass filled with the crisp dry white wine she liked, while he drank sparkling water. As the wine helped mellow her mood some more, Leona managed to completely convince herself that all she wanted was this one wonderful night and she was prepared to live on it for ever. By the time the meal was finished and he suggested a walk on the deck, she was happy to go with him.

Outside the air was warm and as silken as the darkness that surrounded them. Both in bare feet, dressed only in their robes, they strolled along the deck and could have been the only two people on board it was so quiet and deserted.

‘Rafiq is entertaining Ethan—up there,’ Hassan explained when she asked where everyone else was. Following his gaze, Leona could see lights were burning in the windows of the deck above.

‘Should we be joining them?’

‘I don’t think they would appreciate the interruption,’ he drawled. ‘They have a poker game planned with several members of the crew, and our presence would dampen their—enthusiasm.’

Which was really him saying he didn’t want to share her with anyone. ‘You have an answer for everything, don’t you?’ she murmured.

‘I try.’ He smiled.

It was a slaying smile that sent the heat of anticipation burning between the cradle of her hip-bones, forcing her to look away so he wouldn’t see just how susceptible she was even to his smile. Going to lean against the yacht’s rail, she looked down to watch the white horses chase along the dark blue hull of the boat. They were moving at speed, slicing through the water on slick silent power that made her wonder how far they were away from San Estéban by now.

She didn’t ask, though, because it was the kind of question that could start a war. ‘This is one very impressive toy, even for an oil-rich sheikh,’ she remarked.

‘One hundred and ninety feet in length,’ he announced, and came to lean beside her with his back against the rail. ‘Twenty-nine feet across the beam.’ His arm slid around her waist and twisted her to stand in front of him so she could follow his hand as he pointed. ‘The top deck belongs mainly to the control room, where my very efficient captain keeps a smoothly running ship,’ he said. ‘The next down belongs to the sun deck and main reception salons designed to suitably luxurious standards for entertaining purposes. We stand upon what is known as the shade deck, it being cast mostly in the shade of the deck above,’ he continued, so smoothly that she laughed because she knew he was really mocking the whole sumptuous thing. ‘One half is reserved for our own personal use, with our private staterooms, my private offices etcetera,’ he explained, ‘while the other half is split equally between outer sun deck, outer shade deck, plus some less formal living space.’

‘Gosh, you’re so lucky to be this rich.’ She sighed.

‘And I haven’t yet finished this glorious tour,’ he replied. ‘For below our feet lies the cabin deck, complete with six private suites easily fit for the occupation of kings. Then there is the engine room and crew’s quarters below that. We can also offer a plunge pool, gymnasium and an assortment of nautical toys to make our weary lot a happier one.’

‘Does it have a name, this sheikh’s floating palace?’ she enquired laughingly.

‘Mmm. Sexy Lady,’ he growled, and lowered his head so he could bury his teeth in the side of her neck where it met her shoulder.

‘You’re joking!’ she accused, turning round in his arms to stare at him.

‘Okay.’ He shrugged. ‘I am joking.’

‘Then what is she called?’ she demanded, as her heart skipped a beat then stopped altogether because he looked so wonderful standing here with his lean dark features relaxed and smiling naturally for the first time. She loved him quite desperately—how could she not? He was her—

The laughter suddenly died on her lips, his expression telling her something she didn’t want to believe. ‘No,’ she breathed in denial. He couldn’t have done—he wouldn’t…

‘Why not?’ he challenged softly.

‘Not in this case!’ she snapped at him, not knowing quite what it was that was upsetting her. But upset she was; her eyes felt too hot, her chest too tight, and she had a horrible feeling she was about to weep all over his big hard beautiful chest!

‘It is traditional to name a boat after your most cherished loved-one,’ he pointed out. ‘And why am I defending myself when I could not have paid you a better compliment than this?’

‘Because…’ she began shakily.

‘You don’t like it,’ he finished for her.

‘No!’ she confirmed, then almost instantly changed her mind and said. ‘Yes, I like it! But you shouldn’t have! Y-you—’

His mouth crushed the rest of her protest into absolute oblivion, which was where it belonged anyway, because she didn’t know what she was saying, only that a warm sweet wave of love was crashing over her and it was so dangerously seductive that—

She fell into it. She just let the wave close over her head and let him drown her in the heat of his passion, the power of his arms and the hunger of his kiss.

‘Bed?’ he suggested against her clinging mouth.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, then fed her fingers into his hair and her tongue between his ready lips. A groan broke low in his throat; it was husky and gorgeous; she tasted it greedily. A hand that knew her so very well curved over her thighs, slid up beneath her wrap, then cupped her bottom so he could bring her into closer contact with his desire. It was all very hot and very hungry. With a flick of a few scraps of silk they could be making love right here against the yacht’s rail and in front of however many unseen eyes that happened to be glancing this way.

Hassan must have been thinking similarly because he suddenly put her from him. ‘Bed,’ he repeated, two dark streaks of colour accentuating his cheekbones and the fevered glitter in his eyes. ‘Can you walk, or do I carry you?’

‘I can run,’ she informed him candidly, and grabbed hold of his hand, then turned to stride off on long slender legs with his husky laugh following as she pulled him behind her.

Back in their stateroom, now magically cleared of all evidence that they had eaten, they parted at the end of the bed, one stepping to one side of it, one to the other. Eyes locking in a needle-sharp, sensual love game, they disrobed together, climbed into the bed together and came together.

Hot, slow and deep, they made love into the night and didn’t have to worry about empty spaces in between because one loving simply merged into another until—finally—they slept in each other’s arms, legs entwined and faces so close on the pillows that the sleep was almost a long kiss in itself.

Leona came awake to find the place beside her in the bed empty and felt disappointment tug at her insides. For a while she just lay there, watching the sunlight seeping in through the window slowly creep towards her across the room, and tried not to let her mind open up to what it was bringing with it.

After a night built on fantasy had to come reality, not warm, like the sun, but cold, like the shadow she could already feel descending upon her even as she tried to hold it back for a little while longer.

A sound caught her attention. Moving her head just a little, she watched Hassan walk out of the bathroom wearing only a towel, his sun-brown skin fashioned to look almost like skillfully tanned leather. For such a dark man he was surprisingly free of body hair, which meant she could watch unhindered each beautifully toned muscle as he strode across to one of the concealed doors in the wall and sprung it open at a touch to reveal a wardrobe to provide for the man who had everything. A drawer was opened and he selected a pair of white cotton undershorts, dropped the towel to give her a glimpse of lean tight buttocks before he pulled the shorts on. A pair of stone-washed outer shorts followed. Zipped and buttoned, they rested low on a waist that did not know the meaning of spare flesh to spoil his sleek appearance. A casual shirt came next, made of such fine white Indian cotton she could still see the outline of his body through it.

‘I can feel you watching me,’ he remarked without turning.

‘I like to look at you,’ Leona replied. And she did; rightly or wrongly in their present situation, he was a man to watch whatever he was doing, even fastening buttons as he was doing now.

Shirt cuffs left open, he turned to walk towards the bed. The closer he came the faster her heart decided to beat. ‘I like to look at you, too,’ he murmured, bracing his hands on either side of head so he could lean down and kiss her.

He smelt clean and fresh and his face wore the smooth sheen of a wet razor shave. Her lips clung to his, because she was still pretending, and her arms reached up so she could clasp them round the back of his neck. ‘Come back to bed with me,’ she invited.

‘So that you can ravish me? No way,’ he refused. ‘As the wise ones will tell you, my darling, too much of a good thing is bad for you.’

He kissed her again to soften the refusal, and his mouth was smiling as he straightened away, but as his hands reached up to gently remove her hands she saw the toughening happening behind his eyes. Hassan had already made contact with reality, she realised.

With that he turned away and strode back to the wall to spring open another set of doors which revealed clothes for the woman who wanted for nothing—except her man. And already she felt as if he had moved right out of her reach.

‘Get up and get dressed,’ he instructed as he walked towards the door. ‘Breakfast will be served on the sun deck in fifteen minutes.’

As she watched him reach for the door handle the shadow of reality sank that bit deeper into her skin. ‘Nothing has changed, Hassan,’ she told him quietly. ‘When I leave this room I won’t be coming back to it again.’

He paused, but he did not turn to glance back at her. ‘Everything has changed,’ he countered grimly. ‘You are back where you belong. This room is only part of that.’ Then he was gone, giving her no chance to argue.

Leona returned to watching the sun inch its way across the cream carpet for a while. Then, on a sigh, she slid out of the bed and went to get herself ready to face the next round of argument.

In another room not that far away Hassan was facing up to a different opponent. Ethan Hayes was standing there in the clothes he had arrived in minus the bow tie, and he was angry. In truth Hassan didn’t blame him. He was wearing a bruise on his jaw that would appal Leona if she saw it, and he had a thick head through being encouraged to imbibe too much alcohol the night before.

‘What made you pull such a crazy stunt?’ he was demanding.

Since Hassan had been asking himself the same thing, he now found himself short of an adequate answer. ‘I apologise for my men,’ he said. ‘Their…enthusiasm for the task got the better of them, I am afraid.’

‘You can say that again.’ Ethan touched his bruised jaw. ‘I was out for the count for ten minutes! The next thing I know I am stuck on a yacht I don’t want to be on, and Leona is nowhere to be seen!’

‘She’s worried about you, too, if that is any consolation.’

‘No, it damn well isn’t,’ Ethan said toughly. ‘What the hell was wrong with making contact by conventional methods? You scared the life out of her, not to mention the life out of me.’

‘I know, and I apologise again.’ Not being a man born to be conciliatory, being forced to be so now was beginning to grate, and his next cool remark reflected that. ‘Let it be said that you will be generously compensated for the…disruption.’

Ethan Hayes stiffened in violent offence. ‘I don’t want compensation,’ he snapped. ‘I want to see for myself that Leona is okay!’

‘Are you daring to imply that I could harm my wife?’

‘I don’t know, do I?’ Ethan returned in a tone deliberately aimed to provoke. ‘Overenthusiasm can be infectious.’

Neither man liked the other, though it was very rare that either came out from behind their polite masks to reveal it. But, as the sparks began to fly between the two of them, this meeting was at risk of being one of those times. Leona might prefer to believe that Ethan Hayes was not in love with her. But, as a man very intimate with the symptoms, Hassan knew otherwise. The passion with which he spoke her name, the burn that appeared in his eyes, and the inherent desire to protect her from harm all made Ethan Hayes’ feelings plain. And, as far as Hassan was concerned, the handsome Englishman’s only saving grace was the deep sense of honour that made him respect the wedding ring Leona wore.

But knowing this did not mean that Hassan could dismiss the other man’s ability to turn her towards him if he really set his mind to it. He had the build and the looks to turn any woman’s head.

Was he really afraid of that happening? he then asked himself, and was disturbed to realise that, yes, he was afraid. Always had been, always would be, he admitted, as he fought to maintain his polite mask because, at this juncture, he needed Ethan Hayes’ cooperation if he was going to get him off this boat before Leona could reach him.

So, on a sigh which announced his withdrawal from the threatening confrontation, he said grimly, ‘Time is of the essence,’ and went on to explain to the other man just enough of the truth to grab his concern.

‘A plot to get rid of her?’ Ethan was shocked and Hassan could not blame him for being so.

‘A plot to use her as a lever to make me concede to certain issues they desire from me,’ he amended. ‘I am still holding onto the belief that they did not want to turn this into an international incident by harming her in any way.’

‘Just snatching her could do it,’ Ethan pointed out.

‘Only if it became public property,’ Hassan responded. ‘They would be betting on Victor and myself holding our silence out of fear for Leona’s safety.’

‘Does she know?’ Ethan asked.

‘Not yet,’ Hassan confessed. ‘And not at all if I can possibly get away with it.’

‘So why does she think she’s here?’

‘Why do you think?’ Hassan countered, and gained some enjoyment out of watching Ethan stiffen as he absorbed the full masculine depth of his meaning. ‘As long as she remains under my protection no one can touch her.’

Ethan’s response took him by surprise because he dared to laugh. ‘You’ve no chance, Hassan,’ he waged. ‘Leona will fight you to the edge and back before she will just sit down and do what you want her to do simply because you’ve decided that is how it must be.’

‘Which is why I need your support in this,’ Hassan replied. ‘I need you to leave this boat before she can have an opportunity to use your departure as an excuse to jump ship with you.’

He got it. In the end, and after a bit more wrangling, he watched Ethan Hayes turn to the door on a reluctant agreement to go. And, oddly, Hassan admired him for trusting him enough to do this, bearing in mind the year that had gone before.

‘Don’t hurt her again.’ Almost as if he could read his thoughts, Ethan issued that gruff warning right on cue.

‘My wife’s well-being is and always has been of paramount importance to me,’ Hassan responded in a decidedly cooler tone.

Ethan turned, looked him directly in the eye, and for once the truth was placed in the open. ‘You hurt her a year ago. A man gets only one chance at doing that.’

The kid gloves came off. Hassan’s eyes began to glint. ‘Take a small piece of advice,’ he urged, ‘and do not presume to understand a marital relationship until you have tried it for yourself.’

‘I know a broken-hearted woman when I see one,’ Ethan persisted.

‘And has she been any less broken-hearted in the year we have been apart?’

Game, set and match, Hassan recognised, as the other man conceded that final point to him, and with just a nod of his head Ethan went out of the door and into the capable hands of the waiting Rafiq.

At about the same time that Rafiq was escorting Ethan to the waiting launch presently tied up against the side of the yacht, Leona was slipping her arms into the sleeves of a white linen jacket that matched the white linen trousers she had chosen to wear. Beneath the jacket she wore a pale green sun top, and she had contained her hair in a simple pony-tail tied up with a green silk scarf. As she turned towards the door she decided that if she managed to ignore the throbbing ache happening inside her then she was as ready as she ever could be for the battle she knew was to come with Hassan.

Stepping out of the stateroom, the first person she saw was a bearded man dressed in a long white tunic and the usual white gutrah on his head.

‘Faysal!’ Her surprise was clear, her smile warm. Faysal responded by pressing his palms together and dipping into the kind of low bow that irritated Hassan but didn’t bother Leona at all simply because she ignored it. ‘I didn’t know you were here on the boat. Are you well?’ she enquired as she walked towards him.

‘I am very well, my lady,’ he confirmed, but beneath the beard she had a suspicion he was blushing uncomfortably at the informal intimacy she was showing him.

‘And your wife?’ she asked gently.

‘Oh, she is very well,’ he confirmed with a distinct softening in his formal tone. ‘The—er—problem she suffered has gone completely. We are most grateful to you for taking the trouble to ensure she was treated by the best people.’

‘I didn’t do anything but point her in the right direction, Faysal.’ Leona smiled. ‘I am only grateful that she felt she could confide in me.’

‘You saved her life.’

‘Many people saved her life.’ Daring his affront, she crossed the invisible line Arab males drew between themselves and females and reached out to press her hands against the backs of his hands. ‘But you and I were good conspirators, hmm, Faysal?’

‘Indisputably, my lady.’ His mouth almost cracked into a smile but he was too stressed at having her hands on his, and in the end she relented and moved away.

‘If you would come this way…’ he bowed ‘…I am to escort you to my lord Hassan.’

Ah, my lord Hassan, Leona thought, and felt her lighter mood drop again as Faysal indicated that she precede him down the steps she had taken a tumble on the night before. On the other side of the foyer was a staircase which Leona presumed led up to the deck above.

With Faysal tracking two steps behind her, she made her way up and into the sunlight flooding the upper deck, where she paused to take a look around. The sky was a pure, uninterrupted blue and the sea the colour of turquoise. The sun was already hot on her face and she had to shade her eyes against the way it was reflecting so brightly off the white paintwork of the boat.

‘You managed to make Faysal blush, I see,’ a deep voice drawled lazily.

Turning about, she found that Faysal had already melted away, as was his habit, and that Hassan was sitting at a table laid for breakfast beneath the shade of a huge white canvas awning, studying her through slightly mocking eyes. Her heart tried to leap in her breast but she refused to let it. ‘There is a real human being hiding behind all of that strict protocol, if you would only look and see him.’

‘The protocol is not my invention. It took generations of family tradition to make Faysal the man he is today.’

‘He worships you like a god.’

‘And you as his angel of mercy.’

‘At least he felt I was approachable enough that he could bring his concerns to me.’

‘After I had gently suggested it was what he should do.’

‘Oh,’ she said; she hadn’t realised that.

‘Come out of the sun before you burn.’

It was hot, and he was right, but Leona felt safer keeping her distance. She had things to say, and she began with the one subject guaranteed to alter his mellow mood into something else entirely. ‘I was hoping that Ethan would be here with you,’ she said. ‘Since he isn’t, I think I will go and look for him.’

Like a sign from Allah that today was not going to be a good day, at that moment the launch powered up and slipped its ties to the yacht.

Attention distracted, Leona glanced over the side, then went perfectly still.

Hassan knew what she was seeing even before he got up to go and join her. Sure enough, there was Ethan standing on the back of the launch. As the small boat began to pick up speed he glanced up, saw them and waved a farewell.

‘Wave back, my darling,’ he urged smoothly. ‘The man will appreciate the assurance that all is well.’

‘You rat,’ she whispered.

‘Of the desert,’ he dryly replied, then compounded his sins by bringing an arm to rest across her stiff shoulders and lifting his other to wave.

Leona waved also, he admired her for that because it showed that, despite how angry she was feeling, she was—as always—keeping true to her unfailing loyalty to him.

In the eyes of other people, anyway. He extended that statement as the two of them stood watching Ethan and his passage away from them decrease in size, until the launch was nothing more than an occasional glint amongst many on the ocean. By then Leona was staring beyond the glint, checking the horizon for a glimpse of land that was not there. She was also gripping the rail in front of them with fingers like talons and wishing they were around his throat, he was sure.

‘Try to think of it this way,’ he suggested. ‘I have saved us the trouble of yet another argument.’




CHAPTER FIVE


‘WE HAVE to put into port some time,’ Leona said coldly. She twisted out from beneath his resting arm then began walking stiffly towards the stairs, so very angry with him that she was quite prepared to lock herself in the stateroom until they did exactly that.

Behind the rigid set of her spine, she heard Hassan release a heavy sigh. ‘Come back here,’ he instructed. ‘I was joking. I know we need to talk.’

But this was no joke, and they both knew it. He was just a ruthless, self-motivated monster, and as far as she was concerned, she had nothing left to—Her thoughts stopped dead. So did her feet when she found her way blocked by a giant of a man with a neat beard and the hawklike features of a desert warrior.

‘Well, just look what we have here,’ she drawled at this newly arrived target for her anger. ‘If it isn’t my lord sheikh’s fellow conspirator in crime.’

Rafiq had opened his mouth to offer her a greeting, but her tone made him change his mind and instead he dipped into the kind of bow that would have even impressed Faysal, but only managed to sharpen Leona’s tongue.

‘Don’t you dare efface yourself to me when we both know you don’t respect me at all,’ she sliced at him.

‘You are mistaken,’ he replied. ‘I respect you most deeply.’

‘Even while you throw an abaya over my head?’

‘The abaya was an unfortunate necessity,’ he explained, ‘For you sparkled so brilliantly that you placed us in risk of discovery from the car headlights. Though please accept my apologies if my actions offended you.’

He thought he could mollify her with an apology? ‘Do you know what you need, Rafiq Al-Qadim?’ she responded. ‘You need someone to find you a wife—a real harridan who will make your life such a misery that you won’t have time to meddle in mine!’

‘You are angry, and rightly so,’ he conceded, but his eyes had begun to glint at the very idea of anyone meddling with his life. ‘My remorse for the incident with the abaya is all yours. Please be assured that if you had toppled into the ocean I would have arrived there ahead of you.’

‘But not before me, I think,’ another voice intruded. It was very satisfying to hear the impatience in Hassan’s tone. He was not a man who liked to be upstaged in any way, which was what Leona had allowed Rafiq to do. ‘Leona, come out of the sun,’ he instructed. ‘Allowing yourself to burn because you are angry is the fool’s choice.’

Leona didn’t move but Rafiq did. In two strides he was standing right beside her and quite effectively blocking her off from the sun with his impressive shadow.

Which only helped to irritate Hassan all the more. ‘Your reason for being up here had better be a good one, Rafiq,’ he said grimly.

‘Most assuredly,’ the other man replied. ‘Sheikh Abdul begs an urgent word with you.’

Hassan’s smile was thin. ‘Worried, is he?’

‘Protecting his back,’ Rafiq assessed.

‘Sheikh Abdul can wait until I have eaten my breakfast.’ Levering himself away from the yacht’s rail, he walked back to the breakfast table. ‘Leona, if you are not over here by the time Rafiq leaves you will not like the consequences.’

‘Threats now?’ she threw at him.

‘Tell the sheikh I will speak to him later,’ he said, ignoring her remark to speak to Rafiq.

Rafiq hesitated, stuck between two loyalties and clearly unsure which one to heed. He preferred to stay by Leona’s side until she decided to leave the sun, but he also needed to deliver Hassan’s message; so a silence dropped and tension rose. Hassan picked up the coffee pot and poured himself a cup while he waited. He was testing the faith of a man who had only ever given him his absolute loyalty, and that surprised and dismayed Leona because, tough and cold though she knew Hassan could be on occasion, she had never known him to challenge Rafiq in this way.

In the end she took the pressure off by stepping beneath the shade of the awning. Rafiq bowed and left. Hassan sent her a brief smile. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You didn’t have to challenge him like that,’ she admonished. ‘It was an unfair use of your authority.’

‘Perhaps,’ he conceded. ‘But it served its purpose.’

‘The purpose of reminding him of his station in life?’

‘No, the purpose of making you remember yours.’ He threw her a hard glance. ‘We both wield power in our way, Leona. You have just demonstrated your own by giving Rafiq the freedom to leave with his pride intact.’

He was right, though she didn’t like being forced to realise it.

‘You can be so cruel sometimes.’ She released the words on a sigh. To her surprise Hassan countered it with a laugh.

‘You call me cruel when you have just threatened him with a wife? He has a woman,’ he confided, coming to stand right behind her. ‘A black-haired, ruby-eyed, golden-skinned Spaniard.’ Reaching round with his hands, he slipped free the single button holding her jacket shut, then began to remove the garment. ‘She dances the flamenco and famously turns up men’s temperature gauges with her delectably seductive style.’ His lips brushed the slender curve of her newly exposed shoulder. ‘But Rafiq assures me that nothing compares to what she unleashes when she dances only for him.’

‘You’ve seen her dance?’ Before she could stop herself, Leona had turned her head and given him just what he had been aiming for, she realised, too late to hide the jealous green glow in her eyes.

A sleek dark brow arched, dark eyes taunting her with his answer. ‘You like to believe you can set me free but you are really so possessive of me that I can feel the chains tightening, not slackening.’

‘And you are so conceited.’ She tried to draw back the green eyed monster.

‘Because I like the chains?’ he quizzed, and further disarmed her.

It wasn’t fair, Leona decided; he could seduce her into a mess of confusion in seconds: Ethan, the launch, her sense of righteous indignation at the way she was being manipulated at just about every turn; she was in real danger of becoming lost in the power he had over her. She tried to break free from it. From her chains, she recognised.

‘I prefer tea to coffee,’ she murmured, aiming her concentration at the only neutral thing she could find, which was the table set for breakfast.

The warm sound of his laughter was in recognition of her diversion tactics. Then suddenly he wasn’t laughing, he was releasing a gasp of horror. ‘You are bruised!’ he claimed, sending her gaze flittering to the slight discolouring to her right shoulder that she had noticed herself in the shower earlier.

‘It’s nothing.’ She tried to dismiss it.

But Hassan was already turning her round and his black eyes were hard as they began flashing over every other exposed piece of flesh he could see. ‘Me, or the fall?’ he demanded harshly.

‘The fall, of course.’ She frowned, because she couldn’t remember a single time in all the years they had been together that Hassan had ever marked her, either in passion or anger, yet he had gone so pale she might have accused him of beating her.

‘Any more?’ he asked tensely.

‘Just my right hip, a little,’ she said, holding her tongue about the sore spot at the side of her head, because she could see he wasn’t up to dealing with that information. ‘—Hassan, will you stop it?’ she said gasping when he dropped down in front of her and began to unfasten her white trousers. ‘It isn’t that bad!’

He wasn’t listening. The trousers dropped, his fingers were already gently lifting the plain white cotton of her panty line out of the way so he could inspect for himself. ‘I am at your feet,’ he said in pained apology.

‘I can see that,’ she replied with a tremor in her voice that had more to do with shock than the humour she’d tried to inject into it. His response was so unnecessary and so very enthralling. ‘Just get up now and let me dress,’ she pleaded. ‘Someone might come, for goodness’ sake!’

‘Not if they value their necks,’ he replied, but at least he began to slide her trousers back over her slender hip-bones.

It had to be the worst bit of timing that Faysal should choose that moment to make one of his silent appearances. Leona was covered—just—but it did not take much imagination for her to know what Faysal must believe he was interrupting. The colour that flooded her cheeks must have aided that impression. Hassan went one further and rose up like a cobra.

‘This intrusion had better be worth losing your head for!’ he hissed.

For a few awful seconds Leona thought the poor man was going to prostrate himself in an agony of anguish. He made do with a bow to beat all bows. ‘My sincerest apologies,’ he begged. ‘Your most honourable father, Sheikh Khalifa, desires immediate words with you, sir.’

Anyone else and Hassan would have carried out his threat, Leona was sure. Instead his mouth snapped shut, his hands took hold of her and dumped her rudely into a chair.

‘Faysal, my wife requires tea.’ He shot Leona’s own diversion at the other man. Glad of the excuse to go, Faysal almost ran. To Leona he said, ‘Eat,’ but he wasn’t making eye contact, and the two streaks of colour he was wearing on his cheekbones almost made her grin because it was so rare that anyone saw Sheikh Hassan Al-Qadim disconcerted.

‘You dare,’ he growled, swooping down and kissing her twitching mouth, then he left quickly with the promise to return in moments.

But moments stretched into minutes. She ate one of the freshly baked rolls a white liveried steward had brought with a pot of tea, then drank the tea—and still Hassan did not return.

Eventually Rafiq appeared with another formal bow and Hassan’s apologies. He was engaged in matters of state.

Matters of state she understood having lived before with Hassan disappearing for hours upon end to deal with them.

‘Would you mind if I joined you?’ Rafiq then requested.

‘Orders of state?’ she quizzed him dryly.

His half-smile gave her an answer. Her half-smile accompanied her indication to an empty chair. She watched him sit, watched him hunt around for something neutral to say that was not likely to cause another argument. There was no such thing, Leona knew that, so she decided to help him out.

‘Tell me about your Spanish mistress,’ she invited.

It was the perfect strike back for sins committed against her. Rafiq released a sigh and dragged the gutrah from his head, then tossed it aside. This was a familiar gesture for a man of the Al-Qadim household to use. It could convey many things: weariness, anger, contempt or, as in this case, a relayed throwing in of the towel. ‘He lacks conscience,’ he complained.

‘Yet you continue to love him unreservedly, Rafiq, son of Khalifa Al-Qadim,’ she quietly replied.

An eyebrow arched. Sometimes, in a certain light, he looked so like Hassan that they could have been twins. But they were not. ‘Bastard son,’ Rafiq corrected in that proud way of his. ‘And you continue to love him yourself, so we had best not throw those particular stones,’ he advised.

Rafiq had been born out of wedlock to Sheikh Khalifa’s beautiful French mistress, who’d died giving birth to him. The fact that Hassan had only been six months old himself at the time of Rafiq’s birth should have made the two half-brothers bitter enemies as they grew up together, one certain of his high place in life, the other just as certain of what would never be his. Yet in truth the two men could not have been closer if they’d shared the same mother. As grown men they had formed a united force behind which their ailing father rested secure in the knowledge that no one would challenge his power while his sons were there to stop them. When Leona came along, she too had been placed within this ring of protection.

Strange, she mused, how she had always been surrounded by strong men for most of her life: her father, Ethan, Rafiq and Hassan; even Sheikh Khalifa, ill though he now was, had always been one of her faithful champions.

‘Convince him to let me go,’ she requested quietly.

Ebony eyes darkened. ‘He had missed you.’

So did green. ‘Convince him,’ she persisted.

‘He was lonely without you.’

This time she had to swallow across the lump those words helped to form in her throat before she could say, ‘Please.’

Rafiq leaned across the table, picked up one of her hands and gave it a squeeze. ‘Subject over,’ he announced very gently.

And it was. Leona could see that. It didn’t so much hurt to be stonewalled like this but rather brought it more firmly home to her just how serious Hassan was.

Coming to his feet, Rafiq pulled her up with him. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘For a tour of the boat in the hopes that the diversion will restrain your desire to weaken my defences.’

‘Huh,’ she said, for the day had not arrived when anyone could weaken Rafiq in any way involving his beloved brother. But she did not argue the point about needing a diversion.

He turned to collect his gutrah. The moment it went back on his head, the other Rafiq reappeared, the proud and remote man. ‘If you would be so good as to precede me, my lady. We will collect a hat from your stateroom before we begin…’

Several hours later she was lying on one of the sun loungers on the shade deck, having given in to the heat and changed into a black and white patterned bikini teamed with a cool white muslin shirt. She had been shown almost every room the beautiful yacht possessed, and been formally introduced to Captain Tariq Al-Bahir, the only other Arab as far as she could tell in a twenty-strong crew of Spaniards. This had puzzled her enough to question it. But ‘Expediency,’ had been the only answer Rafiq would offer before it became another closed subject.

Since then she had eaten lunch with Rafiq and Faysal, and had been forced, because of Faysal’s presence, to keep a lid on any other searching questions that might be burning in her head, which had been Rafiq’s reason for including the other man, she was sure. And not once since he’d left her at the breakfast table had she laid eyes on Hassan—though she knew exactly where he was. Left alone to lie in the softer heat of the late afternoon, she was free to imagine him in what would be a custom built office, dealing with matters of state.

By phone, by fax, by internet—her mouth moved on a small smile. Hyped up, pumped up and doing what he loved to do most and in the interim forgetting the time and forgetting her! At other times she would have already been in there reminding him that there was a life other than matters of state. Closing her eyes, she could see his expression: the impatient glance at her interruption; the blank look that followed when she informed him of the time; the complaining sigh when she would insist on him stopping to share a cup of coffee or tea with her; and the way he would eventually surrender by reaching for her hand, then relaxing with a contented sigh…

In two stuffed chairs facing the window in his palace office—just like the two stuffed chairs strategically placed in the yacht’s stateroom. Her heart gave a pinch; she tried to ignore what it was begging her to do.

Hassan was thinking along similar lines as he lay on the lounger next to hers. She was asleep. She didn’t even know he was here. And not once in all the hours he had been locked away in his office had she come to interrupt.

Had he really expected her to? he asked himself. The answer that came back forced him to smother a hovering sigh because he didn’t want to make a noise and waken her. They still had things to discuss, and the longer he put off the evil moment the better, as far as he was concerned, because he was going to get tough and she was not going to like it.

Another smothered sigh had him closing his eyes as he reflected back over the last few hours in which he had come as close as he had ever done to causing a split between the heads of the different families which together formed the Arabian state of Rahman.

Dynastic politics, he named it grimly. Al-Qadim and Al-Mukhtar against Al-Mahmud and Al-Yasin, with his right to decide for himself becoming lost in the tug of war. In the end he had been forced into a compromise that was no compromise at all—though he had since tried to turn it into one with the help of an old friend.

Leona released the sigh he had been struggling to suppress, and Hassan opened his eyes in time to see her yawn and stretch sinuously. Long and slender, sensationally curved yet exquisitely sleek. The colour of her hair, the smoothness of her lovely skin, the perfectly proportioned contours of her beautiful face. The eyes he could not see, the small straight nose that he could, the mouth he could feel against his mouth merely by looking at it. And—

Be done with it, he thought suddenly, and was on his feet and bending to scoop her into his arms.

She awoke with a start, saw it was him and sent him a sleepy frown. ‘What are you doing?’ she protested. ‘I was comfortable there—’

‘I know,’ he replied. ‘But I wish to be comfortable too, and I was not.’

He was already striding through the boat with a frown that was far darker than hers. Across the foyer, up the three shallow steps. ‘Open the door,’ he commanded and was surprised when she reached down and did so without argument. He closed it with the help of a foot, saw her glance warily towards the bed. But it was to the two chairs that he took her, set her down in one of them, then lowered himself into the other with that sigh he had been holding back for so long.

‘I suppose you have a good reason for moving me here,’ she prompted after a moment.

‘Yes,’ he confirmed, and turned to look into those slumber darkened green eyes that tried so hard to hide her feelings from him but never ever quite managed to succeed. The wall of his chest contracted as he prepared himself for what he was about to say. ‘You have been right all along.’ He began with a confession. ‘I am being pressured to take another wife…’

She should have expected it, Leona told herself as all hint of sleepy softness left her and her insides began to shake. She had always known it, so why was she feeling as if he had just reached out with a hand and strangled her heart? It was difficult to speak—almost impossible to speak—but she managed the burning question. ‘Have you agreed?’

‘No,’ he firmly denied. ‘Which is why you are here with me now—and more to the point, why you have to stay.’

Looking into his eyes, Leona could see that he was not looking forward to what he was going to say. She was right.

‘A plot was conceived to have you abducted,’ he told her huskily, ‘the intention being to use your capture as a weapon with which to force my hand. When I discovered this I decided to foil their intentions by abducting you for myself.’

‘Who?’ she whispered, but had a horrible feeling she already knew the answer.

‘Did the plotting? We are still trying to get that confirmed,’ he said. ‘But whoever it was they had their people watching your villa last night, waiting for Ethan and your father to leave for the party on the Petronades yacht. Once they had assured themselves that you were alone they meant to come in and take you.’

‘Just like that,’ she said shakily, and looked away from him as so many things began to fall into place. ‘I felt their eyes on me,’ she murmured. ‘I knew they were there.’

‘I suspected that you would do,’ Hassan quietly commended. ‘It is the kind of training we instilled into you that you never forget.’

‘But this was different.’ She got up, wrapped her arms around her body. ‘I knew it felt different. I should have heeded that!’

‘No—don’t get upset.’ Following suit, Hassan stood up and reached for her. She was as pale as a ghost and shaking like a leaf. ‘My people were also there watching over you,’ he assured. ‘The car driver was my man, as was the man at the gate. I had people watching their people. There was not a single moment when you were not perfectly safe.’

‘But to dislike me so much that they should want to take me!’ Hurt beyond belief by that knowledge, Leona pushed him away, unwilling to accept his comfort. It had been hard enough to come to terms with it, when she’d believed he had snatched her back for his own purposes. But to discover now that he had done it because there was a plot against her was just too much to take. ‘What is it with you people that you can’t behave in a normal, rational manner?’ she threw at him, eyes bright, hurt and accusing. ‘You should have phoned me not my father!’ she cried. ‘You should have agreed to a divorce in the first place, then none of this would have happened at all!’

The you people sent Hassan’s spine erect; the mention of divorce hardened his face. ‘You are one of my people,’ he reminded her curtly.

‘No, I am not!’ she denied with an angry shake of her head. ‘I am just an ordinary person who had the misfortune to fall in love with the extraordinary!’

‘At least you are not going back to denying you love this extraordinary person,’ he noted arrogantly. ‘And stop glaring at me like that!’ he snapped. ‘I am not your enemy!’

‘Yes, you are!’ Oh, why had she ever set eyes on this man? It would have been so much easier to have lived her life without ever having known him! ‘So what happens now?’ she demanded. ‘Where do we go from here? Do I spend the rest of my days hiding from dark strangers just because you are too stubborn to let me go?’

‘Of course not.’ He was standing there frowning impatiently. ‘Stop trying to build this into more than it actually is—’

More? ‘Don’t you think it is enough to know that I wasn’t safe to be walking the streets in San Estéban? That my life and my basic human rights can be reduced to being worth nothing more than a mere pawn in some wretched person’s power game?’

‘I am sorry it has to come to this—’

Well, that just wasn’t good enough! ‘But you are no better yourself!’ she threw at him angrily. ‘Up to now you’ve used abduction, seduction and now you’ve moved onto intimidation to bring the wayward wife into line.’ She listed. ‘Should I be looking for the hidden cameras you are using so that you can show all of Rahman what a strong man you can be? Do I need to smile now?’ she asked, watching his face grow darker with the sarcasm she tossed at him—and she just didn’t care! ‘Which way?’ she goaded. ‘Do I need to let Rafiq shroud me in an abaya again and even go as far as to abase myself at your exalted feet just to save your wretched face?’

‘Say any more and you are likely to regret it,’ he warned very grimly.

‘I regret knowing you already!’ Her eyes flashed, her body shook and her anger sparkled in the very air surrounding her. ‘Next I suppose you will have me thrown into prison until I learn to behave myself!’

‘This is it—’ he responded, spreading his arms out wide in what was an outright provocation. ‘Your prison. Now stop shouting at me like some undignified fishwife,’ he snapped. ‘We need to—’

‘I want my life back without you in it!’ Leona cut loudly across him.

What she got was the prince. The face, the eyes, his mood and his manner changed with the single blink of his long dark eyelashes. When his shoulders flexed it was like a dangerous animal slowly raising its hackles, and the fine hairs on her body suddenly became magnetised as she watched the metamorphosis take place. Her breathing snagged; her throat grew tight. He was standing perhaps three yards away from her but she could suddenly feel his presence as deeply as if he was a disturbing inch away.

‘You want to live your life without me, then you may do so,’ he announced. ‘I will let you go, give you your divorce. There, it is done. Inshallah.’ With a flick of the hand he strode across the room and calmly ordered tea!

It was retaliation at its most ruthless and it left her standing there utterly frozen with dismay. Inshallah. She couldn’t even wince at what that single word represented. The will of Allah. Acceptance. A decision. The end. Hassan was agreeing to let her go and she could neither move nor breathe as the full power of that decree made its stunning impact.

She had not deserved that, Hassan was thinking impatiently as he stood glaring down at the telephone. She had been shocked, angry, hurt. Who would not be when they discovered that people they cared about, people they had tried to put before themselves, had been plotting to use them ruthlessly in a nasty game called politics? She had every right to vent her feelings—he had expected it! It was the reason why he had found them privacy before telling her the truth!

Or part of the truth, he then amended, all too grimly aware that there was yet more to come. But the rest was going to have to wait for a calmer time, for this moment might be silent but it certainly was not calm, because—

Damn it, despite the sensible lecture he was angry! There was not another person on this planet who dared to speak to him as she had just done, and the hell if he was going to apologise for responding to that!

He flicked a glance at her. She hadn’t moved. If she was even breathing he could see no evidence of it. Her hair was untidy. Long silken tendrils had escaped from the band she’d had it tied up in all day and were now caressing her nape, framing her stark white profile to add a vulnerability to her beauty that wrenched hard on his heart-strings. Her feet were bare, as were her slender arms and long slender legs. And she was emulating a statue again, only this time instead of art-deco she portrayed the discarded waif.

He liked the waif. His body quickened; another prohibited sigh tightened his chest. Curiosity replaced anger, though pride held his arrogant refusal to be the first one to retract his words firmly in place. She moved him like no other woman. She always had done. Angry or sad, hot with searing passion or frozen like ice as she was now.

Inshallah. It was Allah’s will that he loved this woman above all others. Let her go? Not while he had enough breath in his body to fight to hold onto what was his! Though he wished he could see evidence that there was breath inside hers.

He picked up an ornament, measured the weight of the beautifully sculpted smooth sandstone camel then put it back down again to pick up another one of a falcon preparing to take off on the wing. And all the time the silence throbbed like a living pulse in the air all around them.

Say something—talk to me, he willed silently. Show me that my woman is still alive in there, he wanted to say. But that pride again was insisting he would not be the one to break the stunning deadlock they were now gripped in.

The light tap at the door meant the ordered tea he didn’t even want had arrived. It was a relief to have something to do. She didn’t move as he went to open the door, still hadn’t moved when he closed it again on the steward he’d left firmly outside. Carrying the tray to the low table, he put it down, then turned to look at her. She still hadn’t moved.

Inshallah, he thought again, and gave up the battle. Walking over to her, he placed a hand against her pale cheek, stroked his thumb along the length of her smooth throat then settled it beneath her chin so he could lift her face up that small inch it required to make her look at him.

Eyes of a lush dark vulnerable green gazed into sombre night-dark brown. Her soft mouth parted; at last she took a breath he could hear and see. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she whispered helplessly.

His legs went hollow. He understood. It was the way it had always been with them. ‘If true love could be made to order, we would still be standing here,’ he told her gravely.

At which point the ice melted, the gates opened and in a single painfully hopeless move she coiled her arms around his neck, buried her face into his chest and began to weep.

So what do you do with a woman who breaks her heart for you? You take her to bed. You wrap her in yourself. You make love to her until it is the only thing that matters any more. Afterwards, you face reality again. Afterwards you pick up from where you should never have let things go astray.

The tea stewed in the pot. Evening settled slowly over the room with a display of sunset colours that changed with each deepening stage of their sensual journey. Afterwards, he carried her into the shower and kept reality at bay by loving her there. Then they washed each other, dried each other, touched and kissed and spoke no words that could risk intrusion for as long as they possibly could.

It was Leona who eventually approached reality. ‘What now?’ she asked him.

‘We sail the ocean on our self-made island, and keep the rest of the world out,’ he answered huskily.

‘For how long?’

‘As long as we possibly can.’ He didn’t have the heart to tell her he knew exactly how long. The rest would wait, he told himself.

It was a huge tactical error, though he did not know that yet. For he had not retracted what he had decreed in a moment of anger. And, although Leona might appear to have set the words aside, she had not forgotten them. Nor had she forgotten the reason she was here at all: there were people out there who wanted to harm her.

But for now they pretended that everything was wonderful. Like a second honeymoon in fact—if an unusual one with Rafiq and Faysal along for company. They laughed a lot and played like any other set of holidaymakers would. Matters of state took a back seat to other more pleasurable pursuits. They windsurfed off the Greek islands, snorkelled over shipwrecks, jet-skied in parts of the Mediterranean that were so empty of other human life that they could have had the sea to themselves.

One week slid stealthily into a second week Leona regained the weight she had lost during the empty months without Hassan, and her skin took on a healthy golden hue. When matters of state refused to be completely ignored, Rafiq was always on hand to help keep up the pretence that everything was suddenly and miraculously okay.

Then it came. One heat-misted afternoon when Hassan was locked away in his office, and Faysal, Leona and Rafiq were lazing on the shade deck sipping tall cool drinks and reading a book each. She happened to glance up and received the shock of her life when she saw that they were sailing so close to land it felt as if she could almost reach out and touch it.

‘Oh, good grief,’ Getting up she went to stand by the rail. ‘Where are we, Rafiq?’

‘At the end of our time here alone together,’ a very different voice replied.




CHAPTER SIX


LEONA turned to find Hassan was standing not far away and Rafiq was in the process of rising to his feet. One man was looking at her; the other one was making sure that he didn’t. Hassan’s words shimmered in the air separating them and Rafiq’s murmured, ‘Excuse me, I will leave you to it,’ was as revealing as the speed with which he left.

The silence that followed his departure pulsed with the flurried pace of her heartbeat while Leona waited for Hassan to clarify what he had just said.

He was still in the same casual shorts and shirt he had been wearing when she had last seen him, she noticed. But there, the similarity between this man and the man who had kissed the top of her head and strolled away to answer Faysal’s call to work a short hour ago ended. For there was a tension about him that was almost palpable, and in his hand he held a gold fountain pen which offered up an image of him getting up from his desk to come back here at such speed that he hadn’t even had time to drop the pen.

‘We arrived here sooner than I had anticipated,’ he said, confirming her last thought.

‘It would be helpful for me to know where here is,’ she replied in a voice laden with the weight of whatever it was that was about to come at her.

And come it did. ‘Port Said,’ he provided, saw her startled response of recognition and lowered his eyes on an acknowledging grimace that more or less said the rest.

Port Said lay at the mouth of the Suez Canal, which linked the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. If they were coming into the port, then there could only be one reason for it: Hassan was ready to go home and their self-made, sea-borne paradise was about to disintegrate.

He had noticed the pen in his hand and went to drop it on the lounger next to the book she had left there. Then he walked over to the long white table at which they had eaten most of their evening meals over the last two weeks. Pulling out a chair, he sat down, released a sigh, then put up a hand to rub the back of his neck as if he was trying to iron out a crick.

When he removed it again he stretched the hand out towards her. ‘Join me,’ he invited.

Leona shook her head and instead found her arms crossing tightly beneath the thrust of her breasts. ‘Tell me first,’ she insisted.

‘Don’t be difficult,’ he censured. ‘I want you here, within touching distance when I explain.’

But she didn’t want to be within touching distance when he said what she knew he had to say. ‘You are about to go home, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he confirmed.

It was all right challenging someone to tell you the truth when you did not mind the answer, but when you did mind it—‘So this is it,’ she stated, finding a short laugh from somewhere that was not really a laugh at all. ‘Holiday over…’

Out there the sun glistened on the blue water, casting a shimmering haze over the nearing land. It was hot but she was cold. It was bright but she was standing in darkness. The end, she thought. The finish.

‘So, how are you going to play it?’ she asked him. ‘Do you drop me off on the quay in the clothes I arrived in and wave a poignant farewell as you sail away. Or have I earned my passage back to San Estéban?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Hassan frowned. ‘You are my wife, yet you speak about yourself as a mistress.’

Which was basically how she had been behaving over the last two weeks, Leona admitted to herself. ‘Inshallah,’ she murmured.

The small sarcasm brought him back to his feet. As he strode towards her she felt her body quicken, felt her breasts grow tight and despised herself for being so weak of the flesh that she could be aroused by a man who was about to carry out his promise to free her. But six feet two inches of pedigree male to her five feet seven was such a lot to ignore when she added physical power into the equation, then included mental power and sexual power. It really was no wonder she was such a weakling where he was concerned.

And it didn’t stop there, because he came to brace his hands on the rail either side of her, then pushed his dark face close up to hers. Now she could feel the heat of him, feel his scented breath on her face. She even responded to the ever-present sexual glow in his eyes though it had no right to be there—in either of them.

‘A mistress knows when to keep her beautiful mouth shut and just listen. A wife does her husband the honour of hearing him out before she makes wildly inaccurate claims,’ he said.

‘You’ve just told me that our time here is over,’ she reminded him with a small tense shrug of one slender shoulder. ‘What else is there left for you to say?’

‘What I said,’ he corrected, ‘was that our time here alone was over.’

The difference made her frown. Hassan used the moment to shift his stance, grasp both of her hands and pry them away from the death grip they had on her arms. Her fingers left marks where they had been clinging. He frowned at the marks and sighed at her pathetically defiant face. Then, dropping one of her hands, he turned and pulled her over to the table, urged her down into the chair he had just vacated and, still without letting go of her other hand, pulled out a second chair upon which he sat down himself.

He drew the chair so close to her own that he had to spread his thighs wide enough to enclose hers. It was a very effective way to trap his audience, especially when he leaned forward and said, ‘Now, listen, because this is important and I will not have you diverting me by tossing up insignificant comments.’

It was automatic that she should open her mouth to question that remark. It was predictable, she supposed, that Hassan should stop her by placing his free hand across her parted lips. ‘Shh,’ he commanded, ‘for I refuse to be distracted yet again because the anguish shows in your eyes each time we reach this moment, and your words are only weapons you use to try and hide that from me.’

‘Omniscient’ was the word that came to mind to describe him, she thought, as her eyes told him she would be quiet. His hand slid away from her face, leaving its warm imprint on her skin. He smiled a brief smile at her acquiescence, then went so very serious that she found herself holding onto her breath.

‘You know,’ he began, ‘that above all things my father has always been your strongest ally, and it is for him that I am about to speak…’

The moment he mentioned Sheikh Khalifa her expressive eyes clouded with concern.

‘As his health fails, the more he worries about the future of Rahman,’ he explained. ‘He frets about everything. You, me, what I will do if the pressures currently being brought to bear upon me force me to make a decision which could change the rule of Rahman.’

‘You mean you have actually considered giving up your right to succession?’ Leona gasped out in surprise.

‘It is an option,’ he confessed. ‘And one which became more appealing after I uncovered the plot involving you, which was aimed to make me do as other people wish,’ he added cynically. ‘But for my father’s sake I assured him that I am not about to walk away from my duty. So he decided to fret about my happiness if I am forced to sacrifice you for the sake of harmony, which places me in a frustrating nowin situation where his peace of mind is concerned.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured.

‘I don’t want your sympathy, I want your help,’ he stated with a shortness that told her how much he disliked having to ask. ‘He loves you, Leona, you know that. He has missed you badly since you left Rahman.’

‘I didn’t completely desert him, Hassan.’ She felt pushed into defending herself. ‘I’ve spoken to him every day via the internet.’ Even here on the yacht she had been using Faysal’s computer each morning to access her e-mail. ‘I even read the same books he is reading so that we can discuss them together. I—’

‘I know,’ Hassan cut in with a wry smile. ‘What you say to him he relays to me, so I am fully aware that I am a bully and a tyrant, a man without principle and most definitely my father’s son.’

‘I said those things to tease a laugh out of him,’ she defended.

‘I know this too,’ he assured her. ‘But he likes to make me smile with him.’ Reaching up, he stroked a finger along the flush of discomfort that had mounted her cheeks. ‘And let me face it,’ he added, removing the finger, ‘your communication with him was far sweeter than your communication with me.’

He was referring to the letters he’d received from her lawyer. ‘It was over between us. You should have left it like that.’

‘It is not over between us, and I cannot leave it like that.’

‘Your father—’

‘Needs you,’ he grimly inserted. ‘I need you to help me ease his most pressing concerns. So I am asking you for a full and open reconciliation of our marriage—for my father’s sake if not for yours and mine.’

Leona wasn’t a fool. She knew what he was not saying here. ‘For how long?’

He offered a shrug. ‘How long is a piece of string?’ he posed whimsically. Then, because he could see that the answer was not enough, he dropped the whimsy, sat right back in his seat and told her curtly, ‘The doctors give him two months—three at most. In that period we have been warned to expect a rapid deterioration as the end draws near. So I ask you to do this one thing for him and help to make his passage out of this world a gentle one…’

Oh, dear heaven, she thought, putting a hand up to her eyes as the full weight of what he was asking settled over her. How could she refuse? She didn’t even want to refuse. She loved that old man as much as she loved her own father. But there were other issues here which had not been aired yet, and it was those that kept her agreement locked inside.

‘The other wife they want for you,’ she prompted, ‘am I to appear to accept her imminent arrival also?’

His expression darkened. ‘Do me the honour of allowing me some sensitivity,’ he came back. ‘I have no wish to sacrifice your face for my own face. And I find it offensive that you could suspect that I would do.’

Which was very fine and noble of him but—‘She is still there, hovering in the shadows, Hassan,’ Leona said heavily. She could even put a name to the woman, though he probably didn’t know that she could. ‘And taking me back to Rahman does not solve your problems with the other family leaders unless you take that other wife.’

‘The old ones and I have come to an agreement,’ he informed her. ‘In respect for my father, they will let the matter ride while he is still alive.’

‘Then what?’

‘I will deal with them when I have to, but for the next few months anyway, my father’s peace of mind must come first.’

And so, he was therefore saying, should it for her. ‘Will you do this?’

The outright challenge. ‘Did you really think that I would not?’ She sighed, standing up and pushing her chair away so that she could step around him.

‘You’re angry.’ His eyes narrowed on her sparkling eyes and set expression.

Anger didn’t nearly cover what she was really feeling. ‘In principle I agree to play the doting wife again,’ she said. ‘But in fact I am now going to go away and sulk as you like to call it. Because no matter how well you wrap it all up in words of concern, Hassan, you are as guilty for using me in much the same way my foiled abductors intended to use me, and that makes you no better than them, does it?’

With that she turned and walked away, and Hassan allowed her to, because he knew she was speaking the truth so had nothing he could offer in his own defence.

Within seconds Rafiq appeared with a question written into the hard lines of his face.

‘Don’t ask,’ he advised heavily. ‘And she does not even know the half of it yet.’

‘Which half does she not know,’ Rafiq asked anyway.

‘What comes next,’ Hassan replied, watching his half-brother’s eyes slide over his left shoulder. He spun to see what he was looking at, then began cursing when he saw how close they were to reaching their reserved berth in Port Said. ‘How long?’ he demanded.

‘You have approximately one hour before the first guests begin to arrive.’

A small hour to talk, to soothe, to plead yet again for more charity from a woman who had given enough as it was. ‘You had better prepare yourself to take my place, Rafiq,’ he gritted. ‘Because, at this precise moment, I am seriously considering jumping ship with my wife and forgetting I possess a single drop of Al-Qadim blood.’

‘Our father may not appreciate such a decision,’ Rafiq commented dryly.

‘That reminder,’ Hassan turned to snap, ‘was not necessary.’

‘I was merely covering for myself,’ his half brother defended. ‘For I have no wish to walk in your shoes, my lord Sheikh.’

About to go after Leona, Hassan paused. ‘What do you wish for?’ he questioned curiously.

‘Ah.’ Rafiq sighed. ‘At this precise moment I wish for midnight, when I should be with my woman in a hotel room in Port Said. For tonight she flies in to dance for visiting royalty by special request. But later she will dance only for me and I will worship at her feet. Then I will worship other parts of her until dawn, after which I will reluctantly return here, to your exalted service, my lord sheikh,’ he concluded with a mocking bow.

Despite the weight of his mood, Hassan could not resist a smile. ‘You should change your plans and bring her to dinner,’ he suggested. ‘The sheer sensation she would cause would be a diversion I would truly appreciate.’

‘But would Leona?’ Rafiq pondered.

Instantly all humour died from Hassan’s face. ‘Leona,’ he predicted. ‘is in no frame of mind to appreciate anything.’

And on that grim reminder, he went off to find his woman, while half wishing that he was the one treading in Rafiq’s shoes.

He found her without difficulty, shut behind the bathroom door and hiding in the steam being produced by the shower. The fact that she had not bothered to lock the door spoke volumes as to her mood. Hassan could visualise the angry way she would have walked in here, throwing the door shut behind her then taking the rest of her anger out on the heap of clothes he could see tossed onto the floor.

So what did he do now? Go back to the bedroom and wait for her to reappear, or did he throw caution to the wind, strip off and just brave her fiery den?

It was not really a question since he was already taking off his clothes. For this was no time to be feeble. Leona had agreed in principle, so now she was about to learn the consequences of that. With a firming of his mouth he opened the shower-cubicle door, stepped inside and closed it again.

She was standing just out of reach of the shower jets with her head tipped back as she massaged shampoo into her hair. Streams of foaming bubbles were sliding over wet gold skin, collecting around the tips of her tilted breasts and snaking through the delightful valley in between to pool in the perfect oval of her navel, before spilling out to continue their way towards the chestnut cluster marking the apex with her slender thighs.

His body awoke; he allowed himself a rueful smile at how little it took to make him want this beautiful creature. Then she realised he was there and opened her eyes, risking soap burn so that she could kill him with a look.

‘What do you want now?’ she demanded.

Since the answer to that question was indubitably obvious, he didn’t bother with a reply. Instead he reached for the container of foaming body soap, pumped a generous amount into the palm of his hand and began applying it to her skin. Her hands dropped from her hair and pressed hard against his chest in an effort to push him away.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and calmly pumped some soap onto his own chest as if it was a foregone conclusion that she would wash him. ‘Sharing can turn the simplest of chores into the best of pleasures, do you not think?’

The green light in her eyes took on a distinctly threatening gleam. ‘I think you’re arrogant and hateful and I want you to get out of here,’ she coldly informed him.

‘Close your eyes,’ he advised. ‘The shampoo is about to reach them.’

Then, even as she lifted a hand to swipe the bubbles away, he reached up and directed the shower head at her so that the steamy spray hit her full in the face. While gasping at the shock, he made his next move, turned the spray away and replaced it with his mouth.

For a sweet, single moment he allowed himself to believe he’d made the easy conquest. It usually worked. On any other occasion it would have worked as a tasty starter to other ways of forgetfulness. But this time he received a sharp dig in the ribs for his optimism, and a set of teeth closed threateningly on his bottom lip until he eased the pressure and lifted his head. Her eyes spat fire and brimstone at him. He arched an eyebrow and glided a defiant hand down to the silken warmth of her abdomen.

‘You are treading on dangerous ground, Sheikh,’ she warned him.

‘I am?’

She ignored the message in his tone. ‘I have nothing I want to say to you. So why don’t you leave me alone?’

‘But I was not offering to talk,’ he explained, and boldly slid the hand lower.

‘You are not doing that either!’ Squirming away like a slippery snake, she ended up pressed against the corner of the cubicle, eyes like green lasers trying their best to obliterate him. One arm was covering her breasts, the other hand was protecting other parts. She looked like some sweet, cowering virgin, but he was not fooled by the vision. This beautiful wife of his possessed a temper that could erupt without warning. At the moment it was merely simmering.

‘Okay.’ With an ease that threw her into frowning confusion, he conceded the battle to her, pumped more soap onto his chest and began to wash while trying to ignore the obvious fact that a certain part of him was as hard as a rock and begging he do something about it. ‘We did not really have time, anyway. Our guests arrive in less than an hour…’

‘Guests?’ she looked up sharply. ‘What guests?’

‘The guests we are about to transport to Rahman to attend the anniversary of my father’s thirtieth year of rule, which will take place in ten days’ time,’ he replied while calmly sluicing the soap from his body as if he had not dropped yet another bomb at her feet. ‘Here.’ He frowned. ‘Wash the shampoo from your hair before you really do hurt your eyes.’ And he stepped back to allow her access to the spray.

Leona didn’t move; she didn’t even notice that he had. She was too busy suffering from one shock too many. ‘How long have you known you were taking on guests?’

‘A while.’ Reaching up to unhook the shower head from the wall, he then pulled her towards him to began rinsing the shampoo from her hair for himself.

‘But you didn’t feel fit to tell me before now?’

‘I did not feel fit to do anything but enjoy being with you.’ Pushing up her chin, he sent the slick, clean pelt of her hair sliding down her spine with the help of the shower jet. ‘Why?’ He asked a question of his own. ‘Would knowing have had any bearing on your decision to come back to Rahman with me?’

Would it? Leona asked herself, when really she did not need to, because she knew her answer would have been the same. He was rinsing the rest of her now and she just stood there and let him do it. Only a few minutes ago his smallest touch had infused her with that need to feel him deep inside her, now she could not remember what the need felt like. As she waited for him to finish administering to her wooden form, she noticed that his passion had died too.

‘I suppose I had better know if there is anything else you haven’t bothered to tell me,’ she murmured eventually.

His pause before speaking could have been a hesitation over his answer, or it could have been a simple pause while he switched off the shower. ‘Just the names of our guests,’ he said. ‘And that can wait until we have dealt with the more urgent task of drying ourselves and getting dressed.’

With that he opened the shower door and stepped out to collect a towel, which he folded around her before offering her another one for her hair. For himself he reached for a towelling bathrobe, pulled it on and headed for the door.

‘Hassan…’ she made him pause ‘…the rest of this trip and your father’s celebration party—am I being put on public show for a specific purpose?’

‘Some people need to be shown that I will not be coerced in any way,’ he answered without turning. ‘And my father wants you there. This will be his last anniversary. I will deny him nothing.’

At Hassan’s request, she was wearing a calf-length white silk tunic studded with pearl-white sequins that shimmered when she moved. In accordance with Arabian tradition, the tunic had a high neckline, long sleeves and a pair of matching slender silk trousers that covered her legs. On her head she had draped a length of fine silk, and beneath it her hair had been carefully pleated into a glossy, smooth coronet. Her make-up was so understated you could barely tell it was there except for the flick of black mascara highlighting the length of her eyelashes and the hint of a gloss to her soft pink mouth.

Beside her stood the Prince. Dressed in a white silk tunic and gold silk top robe, on his head he wore a white gutrah ringed by three circles of gold. To her other side and one short pace behind stood Rafiq, dressed almost exactly the same as his brother only without the bands of gold. And as they waited in the boat’s foyer, Leona was in no doubt that the way they were presented was aimed to make a specific statement.

Sheikh Hassan ben Khalifa Al-Qadim and his wife the Sheikha Leona Al-Qadim—bestowed upon her at her request, for the woman of Arabia traditionally kept their father’s name—were ready to formally receive guests, whether those guests were friends or foes.

Rafiq was their guardian, their protector, their most respected brother and trusted friend. He possessed his own title, though he had never been known to use it. He possessed the right to wear the gold bands of high office, but no one had ever seen them circling his head. His power rode on the back of his indifference to anything that did not interest him. His threat lay in the famed knowledge that he would lay down his life for these two people standing in front of him, plus the father he loved without question.

His presence here, therefore, made its own loud statement; come in friendship and be at peace; come in conflict and beware.

Why? Because the first person to tread the gangway onto the yacht was Sheikh Abdul Al-Yasin and his wife, Zafina. Hassan and Rafiq knew that Sheikh Abdul was behind the plot to abduct Leona, but the sheikh did not know the brothers knew. Which was why he felt safe in taking the bait handed out for this trip—namely a meeting of the chiefs during a cruise on the Red Sea, in which his aim was to beat Hassan into submission about this second wife he was being so stubborn in refusing.

What none of them knew was that Leona suspected it was Sheikh Abdul who had planned her abduction. Because she knew about Nadira, his beautiful daughter, who had been held up to her many times as the one chosen to take that coveted place in Sheikh Hassan’s life as his second wife.

‘Ah—Hassan!’ The two men greeted and shook hands pleasantly enough. ‘You will be pleased to know that I left your father in better sorts than of late. I saw him this morning before I caught my flight to Cairo.’

‘I must thank you for keeping him company while we have been away,’ Hassan replied.

‘No thanks—no thanks.’ Sheikh Abdul refused them. ‘It was my privilege—Leona…’ He turned towards her next, though offered no physical contact as was the Arab way. He bowed instead. ‘You have been away too long. It is good to see you here.’

‘Thank you.’ She found a smile, wished she dared search for the comfort of Hassan’s hand, but such shows of weakness would be pounced upon and dissected when she was not there to hear it happen.

‘Rafiq.’ His nodded greeting was distinctly wary. ‘You made a killing with your stock in Schuler-Kleef, I see.’

‘My advice is usually sound, sir,’ Rafiq replied respectfully. ‘I take it you did not buy some for yourself?’

‘I forgot.’

Through all of this, Sheikh Abdul’s wife, Zafina, stood back in total silence, neither stepping forward to follow the line of introduction nor attempting to remind her husband of her presence. It was such a quiescent stance, one that Leona had grown used to from the women of Rahman when they were out in the company of their men.

But it was a quiescence that usually only lasted as long as it took them to be alone with the other women. Then the real personalities shot out to take you by surprise. Some were soft and kind, some cold and remote, some alive with fun. Zafina was a woman who knew how to wield her power from within the female ranks and had no hesitation in doing so if it furthered her own particular cause. It was due to her clever machinations that her son had married another sheikh’s most favoured daughter.

She’d had Hassan marked for her daughter, Nadira, from the day the child had been born. Therefore, in her eyes, she had every reason to dislike Leona. And, tranquil though she might appear right now, Leona could feel resentment flowing towards her in waves.

‘Zafina.’ She stepped forward, deciding to take the polite stand. ‘You are well, I trust? Thank you for taking time out of your busy life to join us here.’

‘The pleasure is all mine, Sheikha,’ the older woman replied. But then her husband was listening and so was the coveted Sheikh Hassan. ‘You have lost weight, I think. But Sheikh Khalifa tells me you have been sick?’

Someone had told her at any rate, but Leona suspected it was not Hassan’s father. Thankfully other guests began to arrive. Sheikh Jibril Al-Mahmud and his timid wife, Medina, who looked to her husband before she dared so much as breathe.

Sheikh Imran Al-Mukhtar and his youngest son, Samir, arrived next. Like a light at the end of a tunnel, Samir put the first genuine smile on everyone’s face because he broke right through every stiff convention being performed in the yacht’s foyer, and headed directly for Leona. ‘My princess!’ he greeted, picked her up in his arms then swung her around.

‘Put her down,’ his father censured. ‘Rafiq has that glint in his eye.’

‘Not Hassan?’ Samir questioned quizzically.

‘Hassan knows what belongs to him, Rafiq is merely overprotective. And everyone else simply disapproves of your loose ways.’

And there it was, tied up in one neat comment, Hassan noted as he watched Leona laugh down into Samir’s handsome young face. Al-Qadim and Al-Mukhtar set apart from Al-Mahmud and Al-Yasin. It promised to be an interesting trip. For the first time in two weeks they used the formal dining room on the deck above. White-liveried stewards served them through many courses, and the conversation around the table was pleasant and light, mainly due to Samir, who refused to allow the other men to sink into serious discussion, and even the other women unbent beneath his boyish charm.

But Leona was quiet. From his end of the table Hassan watched her speak when spoken to, smiling in all the right places. He watched her play the perfect hostess in that easy, unassuming way he remembered well, where everyone’s needs were predicted and met before they knew they were missing something. But occasionally, when she thought no one was attending her, he watched the corners of her mouth droop with short releases of the tension she was experiencing.

Sad. Her eyes were sad. He had hurt her with his dripping-tap method of feeding information to her. Now here she sat, having to pretend everything was perfect between them, when really she wanted to kill him for waiting until the last minute to spring all of this.

His heart clenched when he caught sight of her impulsive grin as she teasingly cuffed Samir for saying something outrageous. She had not laughed with him like that since the first night they’d been together again. No matter how much she had smiled, played, teased—loved him—during the last two weeks, he had been aware of an inner reserve that told him he no longer had all of her. Her spirit was missing, he named it grimly. It had been locked away out of his reach.

I love you, he wanted to tell her. But loving did not mean much to a woman who felt that she was trapped between a rock and a hard place.

A silence suddenly reigned. It woke him up from his own thoughts to notice that Leona was staring down at the plate in front of her and Samir had frozen in dismay. What had he missed? What had been said? Muscles began tightening all over him. Rafiq was looking at him for guidance. His skin began to crawl with the horrible knowledge that he had just missed something supremely important, and he could not think of a single thing to say!

His half-brother took the initiative by coming to his feet. ‘Leona, you will understand if I beg to leave you now,’ he petitioned as smooth as silk, while Hassan, who knew him better than anyone, could see him almost pulsing with rage.

Leona’s head came up as, with a flickering blink of her lashes, she made the mammoth effort to pull herself together. ‘Oh, yes, of course, Rafiq,’ she replied, having absolutely no idea, Hassan was sure, why Rafiq was excusing himself halfway through dinner, and at this precise moment she didn’t care. It was a diversion. She needed the diversion. It should have been himself who provided it.

‘I need a word before you leave,’ he said to Rafiq, and got to his feet. ‘Samir, do the honours and replenish my wife’s glass with wine.’

The poor young man almost leapt at the wine bottle, relieved to have something to do. As Rafiq walked past Hassan, with a face like fury, Hassan saw Leona reach out and gently touch Samir’s hand, as if to assure him that everything was all right.

‘What did I miss in there?’ he rapped out at Rafiq as soon as they were out of earshot.

‘If I did not like Samir I would strangle him,’ Rafiq responded harshly. ‘Leona asked him how his mother was. He went into a long and humorous story about her sitting in wait for his sister to give birth. Leona dealt with that. She even laughed in all the right places. But then the fool had to suggest it was time that she produced your son and heir.’

‘He cannot have known what he was saying,’ Hassan said angrily.

‘It was not the question which threw Leona, it was the resounding silence that followed it and the bleak expression upon your face! Where were you, man?’ Rafiq wanted to know. It was so rare that he used that tone with Hassan, that the censure in it carried twice the weight.

‘My mind had drifted for a few seconds,’ he answered tensely.

‘And the expression?’

‘Part of the drift,’ he admitted heavily.

‘You were supposed to be on the alert at all times for attacks of this kind.’ Rafiq was not impressed. ‘It was risk enough to bring onto this boat the man who wishes her ill, without you allowing your mind to drift.’

‘Stop spitting words at my neck and go to your dancer,’ Hassan snapped back impatiently. ‘You know as well as I do that neither Abdul or Jibril would dare to try anything when they are here for the specific purpose of talking me round!’

It’s okay, Leona was telling herself. I can deal with it. I’ve always known that deep inside he cared more than he ever let me see. So, he had been caught by surprise and showed the truth to everyone. I was caught by surprise and showed it myself.

‘Samir,’ she murmured gently. ‘If you pour me any more wine I will be sozzled and fall over when I have to stand up.’

‘Hassan wants your glass kept full.’ He grimly kept on pouring.

‘Hassan was attempting to fill an empty gap in the conversation, not put me under the table,’ she dryly pointed out.

Samir sat back with a sigh. ‘I want to die a thousands deaths,’ he heavily confessed.

Hassan arrived back at the table. Leona felt his glance sear a pointed message at her down the table’s length. She refused to catch his eye, and smiled and smiled until her jaw ached.

After that, the rest of the dinner passed off without further incident. But by the time the ladies left the men alone and removed to the adjoining salon Leona was in no mood for a knife-stabbing session. So she was actually relieved that Medina and Zafina chose to stab at her indirectly by discussing Zafina’s daughter, Nadira, whose beauty, it seemed, had multiplied during the last year. And as for her grace and quiet gentle ways—she was going to make some lucky man the perfect wife one day.

At least they didn’t prose on about how wonderful she was with children, Leona thought dryly, as the conversation was halted when Hassan brought the men through within minutes of the ladies leaving them.

The evening dragged on. She thought about the other days and nights still to come and wondered if she was going to get through them all in one piece. Eventually the other two women decided they were ready to retire. A maid was called and within minutes of them leaving Leona was happy to follow suit. As she stepped outside, Hassan joined her. It was the first time he had managed to get her alone since the incident at the dinner table.

‘I am at your feet,’ he murmured contritely. ‘I was miles away and had no idea what had taken place until Rafiq explained it to me.’

She didn’t believe him, but it was nice of him to try the cover-up, she supposed. ‘Samir wins hands down on apologies,’ she came back. ‘He wants to die a thousands deaths.’

With that she walked away, shaking inside and not really sure why she was. She got ready for bed and crawled between the cool cotton sheets, sighed, punched the pillow, then attempted to fall asleep. She must have managed it, because the next thing she knew a warm body was curling itself in behind her.

‘I don’t recall our new deal involving having to share a bed,’ she said coldly.

‘I don’t recall offering to sleep elsewhere,’ Hassan coolly returned. ‘So go back to sleep.’ The arm he folded around her aimed to trap. ‘And, since I am as exhausted as you are, you did not need the silk pyjamas to keep my lecherous desires at bay…’

‘I really hate you sometimes.’ She wanted the last word.

‘Whereas I will love you with my dying breath. And when they lay us in our final resting place in our crypt of gold it will be like this, with the scent of your beautiful hair against my face and my hand covering your lying little heart. There,’ he concluded, ‘is that flowery enough to beat Samir’s one thousand deaths?’

Despite not wanting to, she giggled. It was her biggest mistake. The exhausted man became an invigorated man. His lecherous desires took precedence.

Did she try to stop him? No, she did not. Did she even want to? No, again. Did he know all of that before he started removing the pyjamas?’ Of course he did. And there was something needle-piercingly poignant in this man losing touch with everything but this kind of loving as he came inside her, cupped her face with his hands and held her gaze with his own, as he drove them towards that other resting place.




CHAPTER SEVEN


MORNING came too soon, to Leona’s regret. Although here, shut inside this room and wrapped in the relative sanctuary of Hassan’s arms, she could let herself pretend for a little while longer that everything was perfect.

He was perfect, she observed tenderly as she studied the lean smooth lines of his dark golden face. He slept quietly—he always had done—lips parted slightly, black lashes lying still against the silken line of his cheekbones. Her heart began to squeeze and her stomach muscles joined in. This deep-rooted attraction he had always inspired in her had never diminished no matter what else had come in between.

She released a sigh that feathered his face and made his nose twitch. And it was such a nose, she thought with a smile, irresistibly reaching up to run a fingertip down its long silken length.

‘Life can have its perfect moments,’ a sleepy voice drawled.

Since she had been thinking much the same herself, Leona moved that bit closer so she could brush a kiss on his mouth.

Eyelashes drifted upward, revealing ebony irises packed with love. ‘Does the kiss mean you have forgiven me for dropping all of this on you?’

‘Shh,’ she whispered, ‘or you will spoil it.’

‘Kiss me again, then,’ he insisted. So she did. Why not? she asked herself. This was her man. Rightly or wrongly he was most definitely hers here and now.

It was a shame the ring of the telephone beside the bed had to intrude, or one thing would have led to another before they should have needed to face reality again. As it was, Hassan released a sigh and reached out to hook up the receiver. A few seconds later he was replacing it again and reaching out to touch her kiss-warmed mouth with a look of regret.

‘Duty calls,’ he murmured.

Ah, duty, Leona thought, and flopped heavily onto her back. Perfect moment over, pretence all gone. Stripped clean to his smooth dark golden skin, it was the prince who rose up from the bed and without saying another word disappeared into the bathroom.

He came out again ten minutes later, wrapped in fluffy white cotton and looking as handsome as sin. Wishing his pull wasn’t as strong on her senses, she got up with a definite reluctance to face the day mirrored on her face, pulled on her wrap and went to take her turn in the bathroom.

But Hassan stopped her as she walked past him, his hand gently cupping her chin. He smelt of soap and minted toothpaste as he bent to kiss her cheek. ‘Fifteen minutes, on the sun deck,’ he instructed as he straightened again. ‘For breakfast with an added surprise.’

The ‘added surprise’ made Leona frown. ‘You promised me you had no more surprises waiting to jump out at me,’ she protested.

‘But this one does not count,’ he said with a distinctly worrying gleam in his eye. ‘So hurry up, wear something deliciously stylish that will wow everyone, and prepare yourself to fall on my neck.’

‘Fall on his neck,’ Leona muttered to herself as she showered. She had developed a distinct aversion to surprises since arriving on this wretched boat so she was more likely to strangle him.

In a pale blue sundress made of a cool cotton, and with her red hair floating loose about her shoulders—because she felt like wearing it as a banner, which made a statement about…something, though she wasn’t absolutely sure what—Leona walked out onto the sun deck to find Rafiq there but no Hassan.

He looked up, smiled, then stood to pull out a chair for her. He was back in what she called his off-duty clothes, loose-fitting black chinos and a white V-neck tee shirt that did things to his muscled shape no one saw when he was covered in Arab robes.

‘Was your mother an Amazon, by any chance?’ she enquired caustically, because his father was a fine boned little man and Rafiq had to have got his size from someone.

The waspishness in her tone earned her a sharp glance. ‘Did you climb out of bed on the wrong side, by any chance?’ he threw back.

‘I hate surprises,’ she announced as she sat down.

‘Ah,’ Rafiq murmured. ‘So you have decided to take it out on me because I am unlikely to retaliate.’

He was right, and she knew it, which didn’t help this terrible, restless tension she was suffering from. ‘Where is Hassan?’ She strove for a nicer tone and managed to half succeed. ‘He said he would be here.’

‘The pilot who will guide us through the Suez Canal has arrived,’ Rafiq explained. ‘It is an expected courtesy for Hassan to greet him personally.’

Glancing outwards, Leona saw Port Said sprawling out in front of them like a vast industrial estate. It was not the prettiest of views to have with your breakfast, even though they seemed to have got the best of the berths, moored way off to one side in a separate harbour that looked as if it was reserved for the luxury private crafts.

‘And the rest of our guests?’ she enquired next, aware that she probably should have asked about them first.

‘Either still asleep or breakfasting in their suites.’

Mentioning sleep had a knock-on effect on him, and in the next moment Rafiq was stifling a yawn. It was only then that Leona recalled his slick retreat from the fray the evening before.

‘Up all night?’ The spike was back in her voice.

He didn’t reply, but the rueful way his mouth tilted suddenly made her think of Spanish dancers. ‘I hope she was good.’ She took a tart stab in the dark.

‘Delightful.’ He smiled. It was yet another blow to her fragile ego that her one solid ally had deserted her last night for another woman. ‘Here,’ he said gently, and began to pour her out a cup of tea. ‘Maybe this will help soothe your acid little tongue.’

Something needed to, Leona silently admitted as she picked up the cup. She had never felt so uptight and anxious, and it all was down to Hassan and surprises she did not want and people she did not want to be with and a marriage she did not—

The slightly sweet scent of Earl Grey suddenly turned her stomach. She must have gone pale because Rafiq began frowning. ‘What is the matter?’ he demanded.

‘I think the milk must be off,’ she explained, hastily putting the cup back on its saucer then pushing it away.

The sickly sensation left her almost as suddenly as it had hit. Problem solved in her mind, she wasn’t convinced when Rafiq picked up the jug to sniff at the milk and announced, ‘It seems fine to me.’

But he rose anyway and went to replace the milk with fresh from the cartons kept in the refrigerator situated just inside the salon. Then Hassan appeared and the incident was forgotten because, after dropping a kiss on her forehead, he went to pull out the chair next to Rafiq, who was just returning to the table with the fresh jug of milk. For a moment Leona was held captivated by how much alike the two men were. Even their clothes were similar, only Hassan wore beige chinos and a black tee shirt.

Men of beauty no matter what clothes they were wore, she mused a trifle breathlessly, knowing that she would be hard put to it to find two more perfect specimens. So why do I love them both so differently? she asked herself as she watched them sit down. Life would certainly have been a whole lot simpler if she’d fallen in love with Rafiq instead of Hassan. No strict calls to duty, no sheikhdom to rule, no onus to produce the next son and heir to his vast power and untold fortune.

But she loved Rafiq as a brother, not as a lover—just as he loved her as a sister. Plus, he had his mysterious dancer, she added wryly, as she poured herself another cup of tea in a clean cup, then reached for a slice of toast.

‘You look pale. What’s wrong?’ Glancing up, she found Hassan’s eyes were narrowed on her profile.

‘She hates surprises.’ Rafiq offered a reply.

‘Ah. So I am out of favour,’ Hassan drawled. ‘Like the milk and the butter…’ he added with the sharp eyes that should have been gold, like a falcon’s, not a bottomless black that made her feel as if she could sink right into them and never have to come back out again.

‘The milk was off, it turned my stomach, so I decided not to risk it or the butter,’ she said, explaining the reason why she was sipping clear tea and nibbling on a piece of dry toast.

Keeping dairy produce fresh was an occupational hazard in hot climates, so Hassan didn’t bother to question her answer—though Leona did a moment later when a pot of fresh coffee arrived for Hassan and the aroma sent her stomach dipping all over again.

Hassan saw the way she pushed her plate away and sat back in the chair with the paleness more pronounced, and had to ask himself if her pallor was more to do with anxiety than a problem with the milk. Maybe he should not be teasing her like this. Maybe no surprise, no matter how pleasant was going to merit putting her through yet more stress. He glanced at his watch. Ten more minutes. Was it worth him hanging on that long?

‘You look stunning,’ he murmured.

She turned her head, her wonderful hair floating out around her sun-kissed shoulders and the perfect heart-shape of her face. Her eyes were like emeralds, to match the one she wore on her finger, glowing with a passion she could never quite subdue no matter how low she was feeling. Kiss me, her small, soft, slightly sulky mouth seemed to say.

‘I am de trop.’ Rafiq broke through the moment and rose to his feet. ‘I will go and awaken Samir and drag him to the gym for an hour before I allow him breakfast.’

Neither bothered to answer even if they heard him, which Rafiq seriously doubted as he went to leave. Then a sound beyond the canvas awning caught his attention, diverting him towards the rail. A car was coming down the concrete quay towards them, its long black sleekly expensive lines giving him a good idea as to who was inside it.

This time he made sure he commanded attention by lightly touching Hassan’s shoulder. ‘Your surprise is arriving,’ he told him, then left as Hassan stirred himself and Leona blinked herself back from wherever she had gone to.

Getting up, Hassan went to capture one of her hands and urged her out of her chair. ‘Come,’ he said, and keeping hold of her hand walked them down the stairs, across the foyer, out onto the shade deck and to the rail beside the gangway, just in time to watch a beautiful creature with pale blonde hair step out of the car and onto the quayside.

Beside him he felt Leona’s breath catch on a gasp, felt the pulse in her wrist begin to race. ‘Evie,’ she whispered. ‘And Raschid,’ she added as Sheikh Raschid Al-Kadah uncoiled his long lean body out of the car.

‘They’re sailing with us?’ Now her eyes were shining with true pleasure, Hassan noted with deep satisfaction. Now she was looking at him as if he was the most wonderful guy in the world, instead of the most painful to be around.

‘Will their presence make your miserable lot easier to bear?’

Her reply was swift and uninhibited. She fell upon him with a kiss he would have given half of his wealth for. Though it did not need wealth, only the appearance of her closest friend and conspirator against these—arrogant Arabian men, as she and Evie liked to call Raschid and himself.

‘After six years, I would have expected the unrestrained passion to have cooled a little,’ a deep smooth, virtually accent-free voice mocked lazily.

‘Says the man with his son clutched in one arm and his daughter cradled in the other,’ mocked a lighter, drier voice.

Son and daughter. Hassan stiffened in shock, for he had not expected the Al-Kadahs to bring along their children on this cruise. Leona, on the other hand, was pulling away from him, turning away from him—hiding away from him? Had his pleasant surprise turned into yet another disaster? He turned to see what she was seeing and felt his chest tighten so fiercely it felt as if it was snapping in two. For there stood Raschid, as proud as any man could be, with his small son balanced on his arm while the beautiful Evie was in the process of gently relieving him of his small pink three-month-old daughter.

They began walking up the gangway towards them, and it was his worst nightmare unfolding before his very eyes, because there were tears in Leona’s as she went to meet them. Real tears—bright tears when she looked down at the baby then up at Evangeline Al-Kadah before, with aching description, she simply took the other woman in her arms and held her.

Raschid was watching them, smiling, relaxed while he waited a few steps down the gangway for them to give him room to board the boat. He saw nothing painful in Leona’s greeting, nor the way she broke away to gently touch a finger to the baby girl’s petal soft cheek.

‘I didn’t know,’ she was saying softly to Evie. ‘Last time I saw you, you weren’t even pregnant!’

‘A lot can happen in a year,’ Raschid put in dryly, bringing Leona’s attention his way.

The tableau shifted. Evie moved to one side to allow her husband to step onto the deck so he could put his son to the ground, leaving his arms free to greet Leona properly. ‘And aren’t you just as proud as a peacock?’ She laughed, defying the Arab male-female don’t-touch convention by going straight into Raschid’s arms.

What was wrong with Hassan? Leona wondered, realising that he hadn’t moved a single muscle to come and greet their latest guests. She caught his eye over one of Raschid’s broad shoulders, sent him a frowning look that told him to pull himself together. By the time he was greeting Evie Leona was squatting down to say hello to the little boy who now clutched his mother’s skirt for safety. Dark like his father; golden-eyed like his father. The fates had been kind to these two people by allowing them to produce a son in Raschid’s image and a daughter who already looked as if she was going to be a mirror of her mother.

‘Hello, Hashim.’ She smiled gently. They had met before but she was sure the small boy would not remember. ‘Does that thumb taste very nice?’

He nodded gravely and stuck the thumb just that quarter inch further between sweetly pouting lips.

‘My name is Leona,’ she told him. ‘Do you think we can be friends?’

‘Red,’ he said around the thumb, looking at her hair. ‘Sun-shine.’

‘Thank you.’ She laughed. ‘I see you are going to be a dreadful flirt, like your papa.’

Mentioning his papa sent the toddler over to Raschid, where he begged to be picked up again. Raschid swung him up without pausing in his conversation with Hassan, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to have his son on his arm.

Tears hit again. Leona blinked them away. Hassan gave a tense shift of one shoulder and in the next moment his arm was resting across her shoulders. He was smiling at Evie, at her baby, at Raschid. But when Leona noticed that he was not allowing himself to so much as glance at Raschid’s son it finally hit her what was the matter with him. Hassan could not bear to look at what Raschid had, that which he most coveted.

Her heart dropped to her stomach to make her feel sick again. The two men had been good friends since—for ever. Their countries lay side by side. And they shared so many similarities in their lives that Leona would have wagered ev-erything that nothing could drive a wedge between their friendship.

But a desire for what one had that the other did not, in the shape of a boy-child, could do it, she realised, and had to move away from Hassan because she just couldn’t bear to be near him and feel that need pulsing in him.

‘May I?’ she requested of Evie, holding out her arms for the baby.

Evie didn’t hesitate in handing the baby over. Soft and light and so very fragile. It was like cradling an angel. ‘How old is she?’ she asked.

‘Three months,’ Evie supplied. ‘As quiet as a mouse, as sweet as honey—and called Yamila Lucinda after her two grandmothers, but we call her Lucy because it’s cute.’

At the sound of her mother’s voice, Lucy opened her eyes to reveal two perfect amethysts the same as Evie’s, and Leona found herself swallowing tears again.

You’re so lucky, she wanted to say, but remarks like that were a potential minefield for someone in her situation. So she contented herself with lifting the baby up so she could feel her soft cheek against her own and hoped that no one noticed the small prick of tears she had to blink away.

A minute later and other guests began appearing on the shade deck to find out who else had joined them. Sheikh Raschid earned himself looks of wary surprise from some. From all he was awarded the respect accorded to a man who held absolute rule in his own Gulf state of Behran. His children brought down other barriers; the fact that Evie had achieved what Leona had not, in the shape of her small son, earned her warm smiles instead of stiffly polite ones that conveyed disapproval. Still, most of the tension from the evening before melted away in the face of the newcomers, and Leona was deeply grateful to them for succeeding in neutralising the situation.

When it was decided that they would move up to the sun deck, with its adjoining salon, to take refreshment and talk in comfort, Leona quickly shifted herself into hostess mode and led the way upstairs with her small bundle in her arms and her husband walking at her shoulder.

He didn’t speak, and she could sense the same mood about him he had donned when he’d come face to face with Raschid and his son. It hurt. Though she strove not to show it. But his manner made such a mockery out of everything else he had said and done.

They arrived on the upper deck as the yacht slipped smoothly from its moorings and began making its way towards the mouth of the Suez Canal. Medina Al-Mahmud suddenly appeared in front of Leona and politely begged to hold the baby. She was a small, slight woman with nervous eyes and a defensive manner, but as Leona placed the little girl in her arms Medina sent her a sympathetic look which almost broke her composure in two.

She did not want people’s pity. Oh, how she had come to hate it during her last year in Rahman when the rumours about her had begun flying. With a desperate need of something else to do other than stand here feeling utterly useless, she walked into the salon to pick up the internal phone and order refreshments.

It was really very bad timing for Hassan to follow her. ‘I must offer you my deepest apologies,’ he announced so stiffly it was almost an insult. ‘When I arranged this surprise for you I did not expect the Al-Kadahs to bring their children with them.’

She was appalled to realise that even Hassan believed her an object of such pity. ‘Oh, stop being so ultra-sensitive,’ she snapped. ‘Do you really believe that I could resent them their beautiful children because I cannot have them for myself?’

‘Don’t say that!’ he snapped back. ‘It is not true, though you drive me insane by insisting it is so!’

‘And you stop burying your head in the sand, Hassan,’ she returned. ‘Because we both know that you know it is you who lies to yourself!’

With that she stalked off, leaving him to simmer in his own frustration while she went to check that the accommodation could stretch to two more guests than they had expected. Faysal already had the matter in hand, she discovered, finding several people hurriedly making ready a pair of adjoining suites, while others unpacked enough equipment, brought by the Al-Kadahs, to keep an army of young children content.

On her way back upstairs she met Rafiq and Samir. Rafiq studied her narrowly, his shrewd gaze not missing the continuing paleness in her face. He was probably questioning whether one sniff at suspect milk could upset her stomach for so long when in actual fact it had never been the milk, she had come to realise, but sheer anxiety and stress.

Samir, on the other hand, noticed nothing but a target for his wit. By the time the three of them had joined the others, Samir had her laughing over a heavily embroidered description of himself being put through the agonies of hell in the gym by a man so fit it was a sin.

After that she played the circulating hostess to the hilt and even endured a whole ten minutes sitting with Zafina listening to her extol the virtues of her daughter, Nadira. Then Evie rescued her by quietly asking if she would show her to their room, because the baby needed changing.

With Hashim deciding to come with them, they went down to the now beautifully prepared twin cabins and a dark-eyed little nurse Evie had brought with them appeared, to take the children into the other room. The moment the two women were alone Evie swung round on Leona and said, ‘Right, let’s hear it. Why did Hassan virtually beg and bribe us to come along on this trip?’

At which point; Leona simply broke down and wept out the whole sorry story. By the time she had hiccuped to a finish they were curled up on the bed and Evie was gently stroking her hair.

‘I think you are here to make me feel better.’ She finally answered Evie’s original question. ‘Because anyone with eyes can see that the Al-Mahmuds and the Al-Yasins wish me on another planet entirely. Hassan doesn’t know that I’ve always known that Nadira Al-Yasin is the people’s preferred wife for him.’

‘I’ve been there. I know the feeling,’ Evie murmured understandingly. ‘I suppose she’s beautiful, biddable and loves children.’

Leona nodded on a muffled sob. ‘I’ve met her once or twice. She’s quite sweet,’ she reluctantly confessed.

‘Just right for Hassan, I suppose.’

‘Yes,’

‘And, of course, you are not.’

Leona shook her head.

‘So why are you here, then?’ Evie challenged.

‘You tell me,’ she suggested, finding strength in anger and pulling herself into a sitting position on the bed. ‘Because I don’t know! Hassan says I am here for this reason, then he changes it to another. He is stubborn and devious and an absolute expert at plucking at my heart strings! His father is ill and I adore that old man so he uses him to keep me dancing to his secret tune!’

‘Raschid’s father died in his arms while I held Raschid in my arms,’ Evie told her sadly. ‘Wretched though it was, I would not have been anywhere else. He needed me. Hassan needs you too.’

‘Oh, don’t defend him,’ Leona protested, ‘It makes me feel mean, yet I know I would have gone to his father like a shot with just that request. I didn’t need all of this other stuff to make me do it.’

‘But maybe Hassan needed this other stuff to let him make you do it.’

‘I’m going to sit you at the dinner table between Mrs Yasin and Mrs Mahmud tonight if you don’t stop trying to be reasonable,’ Leona said warningly.

‘Okay, you’ve made your point,’ Evie conceded. ‘You need a loyal champion, not a wise one.’ Then, with a complete change of manner, ‘So get yourself into the bathroom and tidy yourself up before we go and fight the old dragons together.’

Leona began to smile. ‘Now you’re talking,’ she enthused, and, stretching out a long leg, she rose from the bed a different person than the one who’d slumped down on it minutes ago. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Evie,’ she murmured huskily.

It was a remark she could have repeated a hundred times over during the following days when everyone did try to appear content to simply enjoy the cruise with no underlying disputes to spoil it.

But in truth many undercurrents were at work. In the complicated way of Arab politics, there was no natural right to succession in Rahman. First among equals was the Arab way of describing a collective of tribe leaders amongst which one is considered the most authoritative. The next leader did not necessarily have to be the son of the one preceding him, but choice became an open issue on which all heads of the family must agree.

In truth everyone knew that Hassan was the only sensible man for the job simply because he had been handling the modern thrusts of power so successfully for the last five years as his father’s health had begun to fail. No one wanted to tip the balance. As it stood, the other families had lived well and prospered under Al-Qadim rule. Rahman was a respected country in Arabia. Landlocked though it was, the oil beneath its desert was rich and in plenty, and within its borders were some of the most important oases that other, more favourably placed countries, did not enjoy.

But just as the sands shifted, so did opinions. Al-Mahmud and Al-Yasin might have lived well and prospered under thirty years of Al-Qadim rule, but they had disapproved of Hassan’s choice of wife from the beginning. Though they could not fault the dedication Hassan’s wife had applied to her role, nor ignore the respect she had earned from the Rahman people, she was frail of body. She had produced no sons in five years of marriage, and then had made Hassan appear weak to his peers when she’d walked away from him of her own volition. Divorce should have followed swiftly. Hassan had refused to discuss it as an option. Therefore, a second wife should have been chosen. Hassan’s refusal to pander to what he called the ways of the old guard had incensed many. Not least Sheikh Abdul Al-Yasin who had not stopped smarting from the insult he’d received when Hassan had not chosen his daughter, Nadira, who had been primed from birth to take the role.

With Hassan’s father’s health failing fast, Sheikh Abdul had seen an opportunity to redress this insult. All it required was for Hassan to agree to take on a second wife in order to maintain the delicate balance between families. It was that simple. Everyone except Hassan agreed that his marriage to Nadira Al-Yasin would form an alliance that would solve everyone’s problems. Hassan could keep his first wife. No one was asking him to discard this beautiful but barren woman. But his first son would come from the womb of Nadira Al-Yasin, which was all that really mattered.

The alternatives? Sheikh Jibril Al-Mahmud had a son who could be considered worthy of taking up the mantle Hassan’s father would leave vacant. And no one could afford to ignore Sheikh Imran Al-Mukhtar and his son, Samir. Samir might be too young to take on the mantle of power but his father was not.

This, however only dealt with the male perspective. As the sheikhs fought their war with words on each other during long discussions, ensconced in one of the staterooms, the women were waging a similar war for their own reasons. Zafina Al-Yasin wanted Leona out and her daughter, Nadira, in. Since Hassan was not allowing this, then she would settle for her daughter taking second place. For the power lay in the sons born in a marriage, not the wives. So critical remarks were dropped at every opportunity to whittle away at Leona’s composure and a self-esteem that was already fragile due to her inability to give Hassan what he needed most in this world.

In the middle of it all stood Sheikh Raschid and his wife, Evie offering positive proof that west could successfully join with east. For Behran had gone from strength to strength since their marriage and was fast becoming one of the most influential States in Arabia. But they had a son. It was the cog on which everything else rotated.

It took two days to navigate the Suez Canal, and would take another five to cross the Red Sea to the city of Jeddah on the coast of Saudi Arabia. By the time they had reached the end of the Canal, battle lines had been clearly marked for those times when the war of words would rage or a truce would be called. Mornings were truce times, when everyone more or less did their own thing and the company could even be called pleasant.

In the afternoons most people took a siesta, unless Samir grew restless and chivvied the others towards more enjoyable pursuits.

‘Just look at them,’ Evie murmured indulgently one afternoon as they stood watching Samir, Rafiq, Raschid and Hassan jet-skiing the ocean like reckless idiots, criss-crossing each other’s wash with a daring that sometimes caught the breath. ‘They’re like little boys with exciting new toys.’

They came back to the boat, refreshed, relaxed—and ready to begin the first wave of strikes when the men gathered to drink coffee in one of the staterooms while the women occupied another.

Dinner called a second truce. After dinner, when another split of the sexes occurred, hostilities would resume until someone decided to call it a day and went to bed.

Bed was a place you could neither describe as a place of war nor truce. It gave you a sanctuary in which you had the chance to vent all of the things you had spent the day suppressing. But when the person in the bed with you saw you as much the enemy as every one else did, then you were in deep trouble. As Hassan acknowledged every time he slid into bed beside Leona and received the cold shoulder if he so much as attempted to touch her or speak.

She was angry with him for many reasons, but angriest most for some obscure point he had not managed to expose. He was aware that this situation was difficult, that she would rather be anywhere else other than trapped on this yacht right now. He knew she was unhappy, that she was only just managing to hide that from everyone else. That she was eating little and looking contradictorily pale when in truth her skin was taking on a deeper golden hue with every passing day. He knew that Zafina and Medina used any opportunity presented to them to compare her situation unfavourably with Evie’s. And he wished Raschid had shown some sensitivity to that prospect when he’d made the decision to bring his children along!

The children were a point of conflict he could not seem to deal with. This evening, for instance, when Raschid had brought his son into the salon to say goodnight to everyone, Hashim had run the length of the room with his arms open wide in demand for a hug from Leona. She had lifted him up in her arms and received all of his warm kisses to her face with smiles of pleasure while inside, Hassan knew, the ache of empty wishes must be torture for her.

When she hurt, he hurt. When he had no remedy to ease that pain, he had to turn away from its source or risk revealing to her the emptiness of helplessness he suffered whenever he saw her hugging a son that was not their own.

But in trying to protect Leona from himself he had forgotten the other pairs of eyes watching him. The Al-Mahmuds and the Al-Yasins had seen, read and drawn their own conclusions.

‘A sad sight, is it not?’ Abdul had dared to say.

Leona had heard him, had known what he’d been referring to, and had been shunning Hassan ever since.

‘Talk to me, for Allah’s sake.’ He sighed into the darkness.

‘Find another bed to sleep in.’

Well, they were words, he supposed, then sighed again, took the bull by the horns and pushed himself up to lean over her, then tugged her round to face him. ‘What is it that you want from me?’ he demanded. ‘I am trying my best to make this work for us!’

Her eyes flicked open; it was like gazing into pools of broken ice. ‘Why go to all this trouble when I am still going to leave you flat the first moment I know I can do it without hurting your father?’

‘Why?’ he challenged.

‘We’ve already been through the whys a hundred times! They haven’t changed just because you have decided to play the warlord and win the battle against your rotten underlings without giving an inch to anyone!’

‘Warlord?’ His brow arched. ‘How very pagan.’ He made sure she knew he liked the sound of that title in a very physical way.

‘Oh, get off me,’ she snapped, gave a push and rolled free of him, coming to her feet by the bed. Her hair floated everywhere, and the cream silk pyjamas shimmied over her slender figure as she walked down the room and dumped herself into one of the chairs, then dared to curl up in it as if he would allow her to sleep there!

‘Come back here, Leona,’ he commanded wearily.

‘I regret ever agreeing to be here,’ she answered huskily.

Husky meant tears. Tears made him want to curse for making a joke of what they had been talking about when any fool would have known it was no time for jokes! On yet another sigh he got out of the bed, then trod in her footsteps and went to squat down in front of her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘that this situation is so difficult for you. But my father insisted that the family heads must talk to each other. I have no will to refuse him because in truth his reasons are wise. You know I have no automatic right to succession. I must win the support of the other family leaders.’

‘Stop being so stubborn and just let me go and you would not have to win over anyone,’ she pointed out.

‘You know…’ he grimaced ‘…I think you are wrong there. I think that underneath all the posturing they want me to fight this battle and win, to prove the strength of my resolve.’

She brushed a tear off her cheek. Hassan had wanted to do it for her, but instinct was warning him not to. ‘Tonight Zafina asked me outright if I had any idea of the life I was condemning you to if I held onto a marriage destined to have no children.’

His eyes flashed with raw anger, his lips pressing together on an urge to spit out words that would make neither of them feel any better. But he made a mental note that from tomorrow Leona went nowhere without himself or Rafiq within hearing.

‘And I saw your face, Hassan,’ she went on unsteadily. ‘I heard what Abdul said to you and I know why he said it. So why are you being so stubborn about something we both know is—’

He shut her up in the most effective way he knew. Mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, words lost in the heat of a much more productive form of communication. She fought him for a few brief seconds, then lost the battle when her flailing fingers made contact with his naked flesh.

He had no clothes on, she had too many, but flesh-warmed silk against naked skin achieved a sensual quality he found very pleasurable as he lifted her up and settled her legs around his hips.

‘You are such an ostrich,’ she threw into his face as he carried her back to bed. ‘How long do you think you can go on ignoring what—!’

He used the same method to shut her up again. By then he was standing by the bed with her fingernails digging into his shoulders, her hair surrounding him and her long legs clinging to his waist with no indication that they were going to let go. If he tried for a horizontal position he would risk hurting her while she held him like this.

So—who needed a bed? he thought with a shrug as his fingers found the elastic waistband to her pyjama bottoms and pushed the silk far enough down her thighs to gain him access to what he wanted the most. She groaned as he eased himself into her, and the kiss deepened into something else.

Fevered was what it was. Fevered and hot and a challenge to how long he could maintain his balance as he stood there with his hands spanning her slender buttocks, squeezing to increase the frictional pleasure, and no way—no way—would he have believed three nights without doing this could leave him so hungry. Twelve months without doing this had not affected him as badly.

‘You’re shaking.’

She’d noticed. He wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t just shaking, he was out of control, and he could no longer maintain this position without losing his dignity as well as his mind. So he lowered her to the bed with as much care as he could muster, pushed her hair from her face and stared blackly into her eyes.

‘You tell me how I deny myself this above all things?’ he demanded. ‘You, only you, can do this to me. It is only you I want to do it with.’

The words were spoken between fierce kisses, between possessive thrusts from his hips. Leona touched his face, touched his mouth, touched his eyes with her eyes. ‘I’m so very sorry,’ she whispered tragically.

It was enough to drive an already driven man insane. He withdrew, got up, swung away and strode into the bathroom, slammed shut the door then turned to slam the flat of his palm against the nearest wall. Empty silences after the loving he had learned to deal with, but tragic apologies in the middle were one large step too far!

Why had she said it? She hadn’t meant to say it! It was just one of those painful little things that had slipped out because she had seen he was hurting, and the look had reminded her of the look he had tried to hide from her when she had been cuddling Hashim.

Oh, what were they doing to each other? Leona asked herself wretchedly. And scrambled to her feet as the sickness she had been struggling with for days now came back with a vengeance, leaving her with no choice but to make a run for the bathroom with the hope that he hadn’t locked the door.

With one hand over her mouth and the other trying to recover her slipping pyjama bottoms, she reached the door just as it flew open to reveal a completely different Hassan than the one who had stormed in there only seconds ago.

‘You may have your wish,’ he informed her coldly. ‘As soon as it is safe for me to do so, I will arrange a divorce. Now I want nothing more to do with you.’

With that he walked away, having no idea that her only response was to finish what she had been intending to do and make it to the toilet bowl before she was sick.




CHAPTER EIGHT


LEONA was asleep when Hassan let himself back into the room the next morning. She was still asleep when, showered and dressed, he left the room again half an hour later, and in a way he was glad.

He had spent the night stretched out on a lounger on the shade deck, alternating between feeling angry enough to stand by every word he had spoken and wanting to go back and retract what he had left hanging in the air.

And even now, hours later, he was not ready to choose which way he was going to go. He’d had enough of people tugging on his heartstrings; he’d had enough of playing these stupid power games.

He met Rafiq on his way up to the sun deck. ‘Set up a meeting,’ he said. ‘Ten o’clock in my private office. We are going for broke.’

Rafiq sent him one of his steady looks, went to say something, changed his mind, and merely nodded his head.

Samir was already at the breakfast table, packing food away at a pace that made Hassan feel slightly sick—a combination of no sleep and one too many arguments, he told himself grimly.

Leona still hadn’t put in an appearance by the time everyone else had joined them and finished their breakfast. Motioning the steward over, he instructed him to ring the suite.

‘I’ll go,’ Evie offered, and got up, leaving her children to Raschid’s capable care.

And he was capable. In fact it irritated Hassan how capable his friend was at taking care of his two children. How did he run a Gulf state the size of Behran and find time to learn how to deal with babies?

The sun was hot, the sky was blue and here he was, he acknowledged, sitting here feeling like a grey day in London.

‘Hassan…’

‘Hmm?’ Glancing up, he realised that Sheikh Imran had been talking to him and he hadn’t heard a single word that he had said.

‘Rafiq tells us you have called a meeting for ten o’clock’

‘Yes.’ He glanced at his watch, frowned and stood up. ‘If you will excuse me, this is the time I call my father.’

To reach his office required him to pass by his suite door. It was closed. He hesitated, wondering whether or not to go in and at least try to make his peace. But Evie was in there, he remembered, and walked on, grimly glad of the excuse not to have to face that particular problem just now. For he had bigger fish to fry this morning.

Faysal was already in the office. ‘Get my father on the phone for me, Faysal,’ he instructed. ‘Then set the other room up ready for a meeting.’

‘It is to be today, sir?’ Faysal questioned in surprise.

‘Yes, today. In half an hour. My father, Faysal,’ he prompted before the other man could say any more. He glanced at his watch again as Faysal picked up the telephone. Had Leona stayed in their suite because she didn’t want to come face to face with him?

But Leona had not stayed in their suite because she was sulking, as Hassan so liked to call it. She was ill, and didn’t want anyone to know.

‘Don’t you dare tell anyone,’ she warned Evie. ‘I’ll be all right in a bit. It just keeps happening, and then it goes away again.’

‘How long?’ Evie looked worried.

‘A few days.’ Leona shrugged. ‘I don’t think I’ve got anything your children might catch, Evie,’ she then anxiously assured her. ‘I’m just—stressed out, that’s all.’

‘Stressed out.’ Evie was looking at her oddly.

‘It’s playing havoc with my stomach.’ Leona nodded and took another sip of the bottled water Evie had opened for her. ‘Who would not be feeling sick if they were stuck on this boat with a load of people they liked as little as those people liked them? You and your family excluded, of course,’ she then added belatedly.

‘Oh, of course.’ Evie nodded and sat down on the edge of the bed, a bed with one half that had not been slept in. Hassan had not come back last night, and Leona was glad that he hadn’t.

‘I hate men,’ she announced huskily.

‘You mean you hate one man in particular.’

‘I’ll be glad when this is over and he just lets me go.’

‘Do you really think that is likely?’ Evie mocked. ‘Hassan is an Arab and they give up on nothing. Arrogant, possessive, stubborn, selfish and sweet,’ she listed ruefully. ‘It is the moments of sweetness that are their saving grace, I find.’

‘You’re lucky, you’ve got a nice one.’

‘He wasn’t nice at all on the day I sent him packing,’ Evie recalled. ‘In fact it was the worst moment of my life when he turned to leave with absolutely no protest. I knew it was the end. I’d seen it carved into his face like words set in stone…’

‘I know,’ Leona whispered miserably. ‘I’ve seen the look myself…’

Evie had seen the same look on Hassan’s face at the breakfast table. ‘Oh, Leona.’ She sighed. ‘The two of you have got to stop beating each other up like this. You love each other. Can’t that be enough?’

Raschid was not in agreement with Hassan’s timing. ‘Think about this,’ he urged. ‘We have too much time before we reach dry land. Time for them to fester on their disappointment.’

‘I need this settled,’ Hassan grimly insisted. ‘Leona is a mess. The longer I let the situation ride the more hesitant I appear. Both Abdul and Zafina Al-Yasin are becoming so over-confident that they think they may say what they please. My father agrees. It shall be done with today. Inshallah,’ he concluded.

‘Inshallah, indeed,’ Raschid murmured ruefully, and went away to prepare what he had been brought here specifically to say.

An hour later Evie was with her children, Medina and Zafina were seated quietly in one of the salons sipping coffee while they awaited the outcome of the meeting taking place on the deck below, and Leona and Samir were kitting up to go jet-skiing when Sheikh Raschid Al-Kadah decided it was time for him to speak.

‘I have listened to your arguments with great interest and some growing concern,’ he smoothly began. ‘Some of you seem to be suggesting that Hassan should make a choice between his country and his western wife. I find this a most disturbing concept—not only because I have a western wife myself, but because forward-thinking Arabs might be setting such outmoded boundaries upon their leaders for the sake of what?’

‘The blood line,’ Abdul said instantly.

Some of the others shifted uncomfortably. Raschid looked into the face of each and every one of them and challenged them to agree with Sheikh Abdul. It would be an insult to himself, his wife and children if they did so. None did.

‘The blood line was at risk six years ago, Abdul.’ He smoothly directed his answer at the man who had dared to offer such a dangerous reason. ‘When Hassan married, his wife was accepted by you all. What has changed?’

‘You misunderstand, Raschid,’ Jibril Al-Mahmud quickly inserted, eager to soothe the ruffled feathers of the other man. ‘My apologies, Hassan, for feeling pressed to say this.’ He bowed. ‘But it is well known throughout Rahman that your most respected wife cannot bear a child.’

‘This is untrue, but please continue with your hypothesis,’ Hassan invited calmly.

Flustered, Jibril looked back at Raschid. ‘Even in your country a man is allowed, if not expected, to take a second wife if the first is—struggling to give him sons,’ he pointed out. ‘We beg Hassan only take a second wife to secure the family line.’ Wisely, he omitted the word ‘blood’.

‘Hassan?’ Raschid looked to him for an answer.

Hassan shook his head. ‘I have the only wife I need,’ he declared.

‘And if Allah decides to deny you sons, what then?’

‘Then control passes on to my successor. I do not see the problem.’

‘The problem is that your stance makes a mockery of ev-erything we stand for as Arabs,’ Abdul said impatiently. ‘You have a duty to secure the continuance of the Al-Qadim name. Your father agrees. The old ones agree. I find it insupportable that you continue to insist on giving back nothing for the honour of being your father’s son!’

‘I give back my right to succession,’ Hassan countered. ‘I am prepared to step down and let one or other of you here take my place. There,’ he concluded with a flick of the hand, ‘it is done. You may now move on to discuss my father’s successor without me…’

‘One moment, Hassan…’ It was Raschid who stopped him from rising. Worked in and timed to reach this point in proceedings, he said, ‘I have some objections to put forward against your decision.’

Hassan returned to his seat. Raschid nodded his gratitude for this, then addressed the table as a whole. ‘Rahman’s land borders my land. Your oil pipeline runs beneath Behran soil and mixes with my oil in our co-owned holding tanks when it reaches the Gulf. And the old ones criss-cross our borders from oasis to oasis with a freedom laid down in a treaty drawn up and signed by Al-Kadah and Al-Qadim thirty years ago. So tell me,’ he begged, ‘with whom am I expected to renegotiate this treaty when an Al-Qadim is no longer in a position to honour his side of our bargain?’

It was an attack on all fronts. For Rahman was landlocked. It needed Behran to get its oil to the tankers that moored up at its vast terminals. The treaty was old and the tariffs laid down in it had not been changed in those thirty years Raschid had mentioned. Borders were mere lines on maps the old ones were free to ignore as they roamed the desert with their camel trains.





Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Получить полную версию книги.


Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/michelle-reid/hot-blooded-husbands-the-sheikh-s-chosen-wife/) на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.