The Sheikh's Impatient Virgin (4 page)

She scrambled hastily to her feet—at least he was in no condition to notice the scalding blush of shame that washed over her skin.

‘You wait there. I’ll get you something dry.’ Her eyes flickered to the blood on his forehead. ‘And something to put on that head.’ She cast a worried look at the blood oozing from the small but seemingly deep cut on his forehead. ‘Don’t move,’
she added sternly as she tightened the towelling robe across her heaving bosom and ran from the room, not waiting to see if her words had registered with him.

She really needed some time out to regain her equilibrium. In the bedroom she closed the door and leaned against it with her eyes closed. She lifted a hand to her head. It was shaking and her palm was clammy with nervous sweat. Maybe it was a proximity thing but she had never encountered anyone that had such a
visceral
effect on her before.

Not the best time for her dormant hormones to kick in. She had to…what…? She frowned in concentration and struggled to focus her thoughts. For a start get some clothes on. She pulled on the fresh pair of pyjamas laid out on the bed.

What she needed, she decided, picking up a tartan throw from the bed, was a number of someone to call for him. Or even an address and she could call a taxi and put him in it. Calling her grandfather’s number for advice was the very last resort. She was still shaky on royal protocol, but she was assuming it was a given that her present situation broke several rules and, though they had cut her a lot of slack and put down several of her worst faux pas to ignorance, this might be pushing it.

She ducked into her tiny en-suite shower room and snatched up a couple of towels from the linen hamper before heading back into the sitting room.

‘I’
VE
got…’ She stopped, her mouth falling open as the towel fell from her nerveless fingers.

On autopilot, she stepped over the wet shirt and jacket on the floor and whispered hoarsely,
‘Oh, God!’

Her agitated comment went unheard because her guest, his dark head cushioned against the wing-back armchair, was asleep.

Deeply asleep.

Deeply asleep and half naked, the upper half.

Thank God for small mercies!

A laugh that had more than a hint of hysteria in it left her throat as Eva ran her tongue across her dry lips. There was a naked man in her sitting room—a naked man who had a body that would have put the average Greek god to shame.

Feeling like a voyeur but unable to stop herself, Eva gazed curiously over the sleeping figure. He lay half on his side, one arm flung above his head. His build was powerful but greyhound lean, and he didn’t carry an ounce of excess flesh on his gleaming torso to conceal the perfect muscular development of his broad chest, powerful shoulders and muscle-ridged flat belly.

He had the perfectly toned body of an athlete at the height of his powers.

Eva approached, breath held. Up closer she could see that
the even bronze of his skin had a satiny gleam. It reminded her of dull gold. The light dusting of body hair on his chest terminated in a thin line that ran across his belly and, like a directional arrow, then vanished into the waistband of his trousers. His powerful chest rose and fell in time with the sound of his deep, regular breathing.

Her own breathing was less even as she willed her eyes not to follow that arrow. It was extremely fortunate—considering the effect his naked torso had on her nervous system—that he appeared to have fallen asleep
before
he got any farther than his shirt.

Eva started guiltily as he moaned in his sleep and shifted his position, causing a lot of muscle rippling that sent a lustful stab of longing through Eva’s helplessly responsive body.

Her face burning with guilt, she carefully draped the throw over him, avoiding all form of skin-to-skin contact as she pulled it up to cover his shoulders and, her eyes still on him, bent to pick up the wet clothes scattered around the room.

She did not need the hand-stitched labels to tell her they had not come off any peg. In the act of raising the silk fabric of his shirt to her face to inhale the subtle fragrance that she had noticed, she froze when she realised what she was doing.

‘You have a problem, girl!’ she told herself as she folded his clothes neatly at arm’s length and placed them over the back of a chair. She cast a last look at the sleeping figure before switching off the lights and tiptoeing, though heaven knew he seemed dead to the world, towards the door. Hand on the handle, she turned back, and by the light shining under the door from her bedroom retraced her steps and flicked on the lamp beside the sleeping figure.

This time her glance lingered. She couldn’t help herself. His face in repose exerted an almost hypnotic fascination for her from the chiselled angle of his high cheekbones to the contrasting soft sweep of his lashes. And his mouth…Swallowing, she
dragged her gaze clear of the sensually sculpted outline and expelled a shaky sigh. He really was an astonishing-looking man.

Eva had never understood the attraction herself, but they did say that power and wealth, both of which he apparently had in abundance, were aphrodisiacs—but frankly he didn’t need any assistance. If Prince Karim Al-Nasr had been born just plain Joe Bloggs and his worldly possessions only consisted of that mouth he’d collect women as a honeypot collected bees!

Eva found herself wondering about women. Was there a particular one who woke up looking at that face, maybe seeing that mouth smile? Those eyes smoulder with need? Would his marriage alter that situation?

The unsettled line of speculation sent a rush of heat through Eva’s body, but despite the hot prickle under her skin she was shivering as, feeling ridiculously like a thief in the night, which was pretty crazy considering this was her flat and he was the intruder, she crept back to her bedroom.

This time she didn’t look back.

She wasn’t exactly amazed when sleep eluded her. Her overactive brain kept replaying the strange events that had led to a man being asleep in the next room.

A man her grandfather would have liked to see her married to. Up until this point she had considered King Hassan a fairly rational man. She shook her head. The evening had not been what she had anticipated, but who could have foreseen what had actually happened?

As she lay tossing and getting hot, sticky and tangled in her pyjamas, Eva was plagued by doubts that she had done the right thing.

What if he was concussed or worse?

She could have invited a homicidal maniac into her home.

She comforted herself with the fact if he was he was in no condition to do her much harm and, to her admittedly untrained eye, his condition appeared to have more to do with sleep deprivation than anything more life threatening. His colour had
seemed healthy as he lay sleeping and he had been quite clear on the subject of medical assistance.

She wondered a little about his seeming aversion to doctors.

She shook her head impatiently. If she was going to lie in her bed, reading something into every syllable he had uttered and every expression, she was never going to sleep. The answer was probably as simple as the man had just been partying too hard.

Not that he had looked the self-indulgent type, unless that indulgence was sex, she thought, her stomach muscles quivering as an image of his face floated before her eyes. The aura of raw sensuality and power he projected did not suggest he was exactly a stranger to carnal pleasures. It was an aura that Eva was glad she had not walked into unprepared when he wasn’t in a physically weakened condition.

In the morning, after sleep, he would probably be back to his normal self, whatever his normal self was. Eva couldn’t help but be mildly curious.

She toyed with the idea of going back into the room to check on his condition, but after a sly voice in her head cast some doubt on her motivation, she decided against this action.

At some point Eva did fall into a fitful sleep. When she woke it was morning and the light was filtering through her curtains. She gave a sleepy yawn, began to stretch, then suddenly the events of the early hours came flooding back and she was fully awake.

At almost the same moment the memories surfaced she became aware of the mattress creaking gently, only she wasn’t moving. She carried on
not
moving as her heart rate picked up and she recognised the sound of someone breathing and it wasn’t her!

The sound was very close. It was…She swallowed convulsively and fought down an inappropriate desire to laugh—a normal person would have screamed. There was someone in her room. The mattress gave way…there was someone in her bed!

Hysteria a heartbeat away and not daring to move or open her eyes, Eva tried to breathe quietly as horror steadily ate into her fragile control.

Well, you can’t just lie here, woman—do something
! Heart thudding, she forced herself to open her eyes.

Oh, my God!

Even though she had been half prepared it was still a shock to her nervous system to see Prince Karim Al-Nasr, his dark head lying on the pillow beside her.

His breathing suggested he wasn’t going to wake up any time soon—her first break. All she had to do was get out of bed without him noticing—the simplest plans were always the best—and a lot of embarrassment would be spared all round.

Her racing thoughts, not racing as fast as her heart, reconstructed a probable scenario that had ended with him in her bed. Stumbling around his unfamiliar surroundings half asleep in the night the Prince had presumably stumbled his way into her bed…or rather any bed—it just happened to be hers.

Nothing personal, it wasn’t the lure of my body.
A bubble of hysteria rose in her throat as she pressed a hand to her lips. She finally had a man in her bed. Of course, he was unconscious and she hadn’t intended for him to be there, so possibly it didn’t count.

Eva, her wide eyes fixed on the sleeping man, began to surreptitiously ease herself away from the sleeping prince and towards the edge of the bed.

She was tantalisingly close to achieving her goal when the sleeping figure moaned in his sleep and shifted his position.

Dismayed, she looked down at the arm that he had thrown across her waist. A second later a heavily muscled thigh followed and she was effectively pinned to the bed.

She was reviewing her options when he reached out blindly and pulled her to him. Their bodies collided, her softer one automatically moulding itself with startling ease to his hard contours.

Shock held her momentarily immobile, then something else stopped her from pulling back.

The something had a lot to do with the intoxicating novelty of being held this intimately close to a hard male—or was it just this male in particular?

The disturbing question was for another time when her mind was not being bombarded with so many new and exciting sensations. Her nostrils flared as her senses responded, independent of her brain, hungrily to the musky male scent of his warm body.

Eva had never thought about how different the male body was from her own. She lay there now, her breath coming in short, shallow, painful gasps, thinking about it, thinking about how seductive the differences were—hard instead of soft and the solid weight of a male body. She wondered about being under that weight, feeling it press her into the mattress, and felt her temperature spike—or was that him? Eva felt sure that if she touched his skin it would burn her…not that she would, of course, because that would be wrong on too many levels to count, and, besides, not a good idea. She needed to cool down, not inflame an already dangerously inflammatory situation.

What I need is distance and plenty of it.

Eva swallowed and tried unsuccessfully to ease her leg from under his; she needed to be somewhere safe from the musky male scent of his body.

The thought was there but not the will to carry it through. Drowning in the sensual lethargy that made her feel intensely aware yet simultaneously strangely disconnected from her own body and what was happening to it, she got fatally distracted by the length of his eyelashes.

Training her gaze on this relatively safe area of his anatomy, she examined with growing fascination his eyelashes. Dark against the angle of his high cheekbones, a hank of dark glossy hair had fallen across his face.

Eva had actually lifted her hand with the intention of pushing
it back—this felt as if it were happening to someone else…but it wasn’t!

What was she doing?

Face burning with shame, she began to pull away. As she did so his grip tightened. She felt rather than heard the groan that vibrated in his chest and panicked…He was waking up!

Clumsy in her haste, her elbow connected with his ribs. She was muttering a mortified, ‘Sorry,’ while trying to slide out from under the weight of his arm when, without warning, he buried his face in her neck.

Thoughts of escape went out of the window along with common sense. Her tightly closed eyelids fluttered as she felt his mouth on her neck. Then his hand was pushing under her shirt and closing over her breast and everything inside her melted as his thumb moved across her sensitised nipple and a feral moan was dragged from somewhere deep inside her.

‘No…yes…this is…’ Eva made a token attempt to move, but only managed to get her fingers tangled in his hair.

She wanted to make love to a total stranger—
wanted
barely began to cover the driving urgency that blitzed along her nerve endings through her veins. The realisation shocked her back to reality.

What are you doing, Eva
? Whatever it was it was incredible. ‘Wake up!’

She was afraid her plea did not carry the conviction it ought, but it seemed to have some effect. He stopped nuzzling her neck and lifted his head.

Eva could never be sure in what order the next three events occurred, but his slumberous eyes opened and connected with hers.

She heard herself say stupidly, ‘I’m Eva. How’s your head, Mr…Prince?’

And Luke walked in, his eyes trained on the two takeaway coffees and a carton of croissants he was balancing.

‘I knocked, no answer. I let myself in—a peace offering. Do you know you’re late for your tutorial, Evie?’

Luke’s head lifted and his eyes opened wider than seemed physically possible as he saw the couple in the bed. His eyebrows shot to his hairline as he murmured, ‘Oops!’ And did a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn before exiting.

Eva gave an anguished groan as she sat up in bed, scarlet to the roots of her hair, and yelled after him, ‘This isn’t what it looks like, Luke!’

‘He is particularly gullible, then, your boyfriend? Or just the forgiving kind?’

Eva looked down at the man lying in the bed beside her, one arm curved over his head, the other touching the gash on his head. Gone was the air of vulnerability and vagueness of the previous evening; replacing it was a sardonic expression and a remarkably expressive and deeply unpleasant sneer.

He didn’t look forgiving; he looked like a man who held grudges.

There was a time lapse of several seconds before she realised that his eyes were trained on her gaping top.

Hating the blush that rose to the roots of her hair, Eva bunched the fabric of her top in one hand and, flinging off the duvet with the other, leapt out of bed. Her expression of indignant reproach produced a bold grin that revealed even white teeth and contained no hint of repentance for the ogling—not that she had a lot to ogle.

Not that she gave a damn how this stranger rated her breasts, because that would make her needy and mildly pathetic.

‘Last night…’ she began, struggling to look like someone who took waking up with a man in her bed in her stride, ‘…you were…’

‘Last night…’ he echoed.

Eva saw the sudden recognition flash into his eyes and watched as the sardonic amusement faded abruptly.