The Sheikh's Baby Omnibus (24 page)

Vere’s hands tightened on the steering wheel of the
four-by-four, and then, with an abruptness that made Sam’s body recoil against
the sudden acceleration of the vehicle, he drove towards their camp.

CHAPTER SIX

C
OMFORTABLY
settled in the privacy of
her own tent, Sam reflected that whilst it had disconcerted her at first to
discover that the two of them were to be the only occupants of the
well-organised camp, there were also certain benefits to be found. Its quiet
solitude after the busy hum of the main camp was blissful, Sam thought, at least
to someone like her, who valued her privacy.

Here, she knew that she was unlikely to be disturbed by a
fellow worker wanting company. Deep down inside Sam knew that she felt slightly
cheated and disappointed by the everyday activities of the main camp. But she
knew it was silly and almost childish of her to have imagined that she would be
experiencing true life in the desert, as lived by its nomads, and she had to
admit she welcomed the camp’s modern comforts.

The Prince had left her with the curt instruction that he
expected her to be ready at first light to drive out with him to the place where
she claimed the course of the river had been altered, which meant that she ought
now to be in bed and asleep, ready for an early start, instead of sitting
cross-legged on a cushion on the carpeted floor of her tent, wearing the thin
cotton robe she had put on after her shower, her computer switched on in front
of her.

Ostensibly she was checking her facts with regard to the
original course of the river and answering her e-mails, but she hadn’t been able
to resist the temptation to bring up the now familiar details of Dhurahn and its
ruling family from her previous searches.

It wasn’t really the foolish self-indulgence of a woman
helplessly caught in the invisible web of one man’s sexual aura that was driving
her, she assured herself. Naturally she was curious about the background of a
man who was behaving towards her with the kind of arrogance the Prince was.

Her breath caught in her throat as she suddenly found a new
site, her whole attention focused on the screen as she learned from it what she
had not realised before. Namely that he, the Ruler of Dhurahn, Prince Vereham al
a’ Karim bin Hakar, was the elder of a pair of twins. There were two of them?
Surely it wasn’t possible that the world could accommodate two such men, never
mind one small country.

The site gave a few more details about them, including the
information that their Bedouin ancestry was mixed with the French and Irish
genes of their grandmother and their mother.

She frowned slightly as she read these facts. How did a man who
obviously had such a strong commitment to his Arab heritage deal with such a
potentially turbulent mixture of cultures within himself? Did it make him resent
the cultural diversity within him or embrace it? Was he at war with that
inheritance or at peace with it? And what kind of woman would most appeal to a
man so complex?

He would father beautiful children.

A slow, hot ache slid through her body—a need that was surely
elemental and universal, the need of a woman to bear the child of a man. Not any
man, but
the
man.

Panic and denial shot through her. Now look what she had done!
The computer, like a modern magical vessel of legend, had released genii in the
shape of knowledge conjured up by her own thoughts, and it was too powerful for
her to control.

Motherhood was something she had hoped to look forward to when
eventually she met the man with whom she wanted to share her life, but it had
certainly never dominated her thoughts or been a desire that drove her. Yet here
she was thinking in terms of having
his
child,
feeling her womb tighten with longing for that child and for him. What did that
tell her?

Sam sat back from the computer, feeling slightly sick as the
reality of exactly what it did mean was forced on her. There was only one reason
she could ever want to conceive a specific man’s child as powerfully as she did
this man’s.

She wanted his child because she had fallen head over heels in
love with him. She started to panic. No. That wasn’t possible. It
shouldn’t
be possible. But somehow it certainly
was.

This was crazy. It just wasn’t logical to fall in love with
someone on the strength of a single look followed by a single kiss—especially
when that someone had made it clear that he had felt nothing for her other than
dislike and contempt.

Crazy or not, it was what had happened to her, so she’d better
get used to it and then work on some way of dealing with it.

Like what? Running away? Lying to herself and telling herself
that she’d got it wrong, that she didn’t really love him at all?

Why had this happened to her? She just wasn’t the type. She was
sensible, practical, she’d never believed in falling in love at first sight.
She’d believed that love was something that should grow slowly and cautiously,
as two people got to know one another. Love meant liking a person, respecting
them and sharing goals with them. It meant... ..

It meant that she had known nothing about love at all, and now
that she did she wished desperately that she hadn’t found out.

It was gone
midnight. Vere looked up
from the maps he had been studying, forwarded to him in an e-mail attachment by
Drax. The earlier dated map was the original one, drawn in the days when, after
the end of the First World War the Ottoman Empire had originally been carved up.
The map had been handed to his great-grandfather at the same time as he had been
stealing the heart of another British diplomat’s daughter. It showed the
boundaries between all the Arab states, including their own. It also showed the
original course of the Dhurahni River. Alongside it Vere had placed the second
map, dated only a matter of months later, showing exactly the same boundaries
but with the river diverted to a new course. In both maps the course of the
river was well within their own border.

However, the Emir, being the wily manipulator that he was,
would, Vere knew, use this alteration from the original to stir up trouble for
them if he could, by hinting that if one supposedly innocent change had been
made, and never revealed, what was to stop another, less innocent change being
made and kept hidden.

How much had he paid Sam McLellan? However much it had been,
the Emir would no doubt think he had got a real bargain. Vere had few doubts
that initially all the Emir had hoped for at the very best would be to bribe the
cartographer into dropping hints that the original borders had been tampered
with. That would have been easy enough for her to do, given the changes that so
many years of shifting desert sands had had on the landscape. But with the right
kind of spin on it any change could quite easily be promoted as suspicious and
underhand. Even if the allegation was retracted at a later date, the damage
would have been done and Dhurahn’s own reputation tarnished.

This matter of the change in course of the river put a whole
new complexion on everything, and would add far more weight to any claim the
Emir chose to make.

It would be easy enough for them to offer Sam more than the
Emir had paid her, to ‘forget’ what she had discovered, but he and Drax had
talked it over and they were both agreed that this was something they did not
want to do. For one thing it ultimately weakened their truthful claim that the
course of the river had had no effect whatsoever on their boundaries, and for
another that was not the way they wanted to run their country.

Vere stood up and walked to the exit to his tent, stepping
through it to breathe in the cool freshness of the night air. He stopped when he
saw that there was a light on in Sam’s tent.

What was she doing? Surely she ought to be asleep? He had
already told her they had an early start in the morning. Could she have gone to
bed and left her lamp on? Old habits died hard, and Vere and Drax’s father had
taught them when they were very young about the dangers of unattended oil lamps
left in tents. Even though logically there was no need for him to be concerned,
since a small generator was providing them with electricity, Vere was soon
striding over to Sam’s tent and flicking back the flap.

Once he had done so, the sight of Sam seated with her back to
him, staring into a computer screen, had him walking towards her.

This time Sam
was oblivious to his
presence. She was staring at the screen without really seeing it as she battled
against the reality being forced on her. She couldn’t love him. It was—

The shadow falling across her computer screen made her react
immediately and instinctively, turning round in alarm. The colour left her face
and then returned in a surge of guilty heat as she tried to reach for her mouse
to close the open window before showing what she had been viewing.

Vere was too quick for her, though, reaching out to stop her,
his fingers curling round her wrist, the cool white crispness of his sleeve
brushing against her. She saw that he had removed the plain white headdress he
wore, secured by a black plaited rope, and that his hair beneath it was thick
and dark, clean with health, and cut close into his neck at the back. She had an
absurd longing to reach out and trace the line where it was cut so neatly
against the strong muscles of his neck, and then to trace kisses along his
collarbone whilst...

Frantically she wrenched her thoughts away from the sensual
images forming inside her head and tried to focus instead on the grimness of the
tight line around his mouth, rather than the shape of his mouth itself as he
studied the information on her screen.

Sam’s face burned as she realised that she had actually
highlighted his own name.

‘Why?’ he demanded, after giving the screen a comprehensive
look.

Sam understood perfectly well what he was asking her.

‘I wanted to...to know now more about you...to understand why
you are behaving towards me in the way that you are,’ she answered him bravely.
‘I didn’t even know your full name.’

He looked back at the screen, indicating where she had
highlighted his name and title.

‘And you believe you have found it there?’

Sam was confused.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Those are my formal names. Vere is the name those closest to
me know me by. It was my mother’s choice—’ Vere stopped sharply.

What was he doing? What had got into him? Why was he letting
himself imagine how her lips might form the shortened version of his name, how
her tongue-tip might taste, how it might sigh against his skin in a soft sound
of pleasure.

‘Vere,’ Sam said, gasping a little when he released her wrist
and then took the mouse from her to close down the site so fiercely that she
started to overbalance.

As she struggled to stop herself from falling Vere moved
faster, grasping her upper arms and hauling her to her feet. He was breathing
rapidly, his fingers biting into her flesh. Sam thought that he might have
cursed her under his breath, but she couldn’t hear anything above the frantic
pounding of her own heartbeat. She could smell the heat of his flesh and of
their shared tension. It closed in around them, an invisible net of arousal and
need meshing so tightly together that it was impossible to break free.

‘No...’ Sam heard the sound her lips had framed, but it was
more a low moan of longing than any kind of denial, and the hands she had lifted
to his chest weren’t pushing him away.

‘A thousand curses on you for doing this, and on me for wanting
it,’ Vere whispered harshly against her mouth, as she opened it for him with the
inbuilt sensual knowledge of a woman who loved a man whose pride could only be
humbled by his own need.

Feverishly their lips met and parted, only to meet again and
again, until they were pressed body to body. Somehow Sam realised she had
managed to open the buttons securing the front of his
kandora
, and her palms were now pressed flat against his chest. Her
own robe had slipped from one shoulder, revealing the silky gleam of her pale
skin and the curve of her breast, and the fabric was only kept from sliding down
further because Vere’s hand was on her, shaping the soft female texture of her
flesh.

Her sensory receptors had gone into overload, her body a
melting, swirling, frenzied mass of longing. A hundred thousand separate and
acutely intense sensations filled her.

Now she could fulfil that earlier urge to touch her fingertips
to his skin in awed delight and wonder. She pressed them against his collarbone.
His flesh felt warm and sleek, the bone beneath it hard and solid, and her gaze
fastened on the spasmodic pulse jerking against the flesh just beneath his jaw.
Tenderly she kissed it, lost in her own loving pleasure before being flung
tumultuously into sharp, agonised passion when he responded in kind, kissing her
throat and then her shoulder. A swift shudder of pleasure flowed through her at
the touch of his hand freeing her breast from its covering, followed by another
that racked her more visibly when his palm took the weight of it and the pad of
his thumb rubbed erotically over her eagerly swollen nipple.

By the time they kissed their way to her bed both of them were
naked, and Sam’s body was so erotically charged by the touch of Vere’s hands
that she was already engulfed by fierce shivers of pleasure.

The lamp was still on, casting its illumination over their
bodies, causing Sam to suck in her breath when the movement Vere made to lift
her away from himself and onto the bed revealed in clear detail every strongly
muscled line of him to her. His flesh was warmly golden, and his chest was sleek
with fine dark hair that made an erotic pathway down his body, drawing her eager
gaze to the stiff thickness of his erection.

Was love always like this? she wondered dizzily. Did every
woman who fell in love feel this mixture of tenderness and awe, this desire to
see and touch and taste this male uniqueness? To feel this surge of need to know
that no other woman would ever share his intimacy?