The Sheikh's Prize (5 page)

A silk kaftan lay over a chair with a pair of simple mules beside it. Leaving her underwear with her clothes, she slid into it, wondering what she would wear the following day and where he was planning for her to sleep. There were at least two more doorways leading out of the main tent for her to investigate.

‘Are you ready to eat?’ Zahir asked.

Eyes widening, she nodded affirmation and spun to look at him. He had shed the robes and got back into jeans. Damp black hair feathered round his lean bronzed features, accentuating those smouldering amber gold eyes surrounded by dense black lashes. Her pulses gave a jump. Butterflies flocked loose in her tummy and she swallowed hard, frantic to shed her desperate physical awareness of him. It seemed so schoolgirlish and immature to react that way after all the years they had been apart and the life she had since led. She was supposed to be calm, sophisticated...in control.

‘No table and chairs, I’m afraid,’ he warned her, settling down by the flickering fire with animal grace.

‘That’s OK,’ she muttered as a servant emerged from one of the doorways bearing a tray, closely followed by another. ‘So, you have a kitchen here.’

‘A necessity when I’m entertaining.’

He had mentioned the tribal sheikhs he met up with but Saffy was already wondering how many other women he had brought out into the desert. She
knew
there had been other women. For a couple of years after the divorce and before the overthrow of his father, Zahir had made occasional appearances in glossy magazines with several different beautiful women on his arm. And those glimpses of the new and much more visible life he was leading abroad without her had cut deep like a knife and made her bleed internally. She had known that those women were sharing his bed, entangling his beautiful bronzed body with lissom limbs and giving him everything she had failed to give him. Divorce, she had learned the hard way, wasn’t an immediate cut-off point for emotions, even emotions that she had no right to feel.

Zahir watched Sapphire curl up on the sofa opposite, looking all fresh faced and scrubbed clean just the way he remembered her, the way he liked her best, for with her stunning looks she required few enhancements. Her restive fingers toyed with a strand of golden blonde hair and instantly he recalled the silken feel of it sliding against his skin and got a hard-on. He crushed the recollection before it could stray into even more erotic areas and reminded himself that she was a beautiful shell with a cash-register heart. He was not at all surprised that she had dropped the subject of the five million pounds without any acknowledgement or adequate explanation. It might be pocket change to a member of his family, but it still mattered that she had taken so much and given nothing in return.

Perched with a plate on her lap, Saffy helped herself to portions of different dishes and dug in because she was starving. While she ate she studied Zahir from below her lashes, marvelling at the superb bone structure that gave his features such strength and masculinity. From every angle he was glorious. Sitting there, his attention on his plate and quite unaware of her scrutiny, he mesmerised her. Her breasts stirred beneath the silk, the tips growing tender and swollen. She dredged her eyes back to her food, her mouth dry, her heart hammering, images from the past bombarding her. Although consummating their marriage had proved impossible, she had learned how to give him pleasure in other ways. At that thought she shifted uneasily on her seat, moist heat pooling at the heart of her. He had never understood what was wrong with her. How could he have? But he had at least
tried,
assuring her of his patience while he did everything possible to set her fears to rest. Unfortunately her fears had been in her subconscious and not something she could control, fears from a hidden source that she had repressed many years before while she was still a child. All of a sudden she simply could not comprehend why he would bring her back into his life after a marriage that had turned into a hell on earth for both of them.

‘Why on earth did you want to see me again?’ Saffy demanded abruptly.

He lifted his dark head, stunning golden eyes locking to her. ‘Few men forget their first love and you’re the one who got away...’

Regret stabbed through her and she flinched, for they had begun with love in spite of the fact that during the year of marital strife that followed they had lost it again. The plates were cleared away and coffee and cakes served. She ate to fill the emptiness inside her, the hollow that never seemed to fill. She couldn’t look at him, didn’t dare look at him again, knew the temptation was a weakness to be suppressed at every opportunity.

‘I wanted to see you again before I remarried,’ Zahir heard himself admit in brusque addition, knowing that he would never have trusted himself to see her after that event had taken place.

Her golden head flew up, heavenly blue eyes wide with shock. ‘You’re getting married again?’ she gasped, shattered at the idea although she couldn’t have explained why.

Zahir raised a winged ebony brow. ‘As yet there is no particular bride in view but there is considerable pressure on me to take a wife. Inevitably I will have to satisfy my people’s expectations.’

Some of the tension eased from her taut shoulders and she lowered her head. Of course he would be expected to marry: it went with the territory of kingship. What did it matter to her? Why should the concept bother her? It was not as though she still thought of him as her husband. In fact she was being ridiculously oversensitive and it was time to grow up and don her big-girl pants. Exhaustion engulfed her in a debilitating wave then, reminding her that she had been up since five that morning. A yawn crept up on her and she stood up smothering a yawn. ‘I’m incredibly tired...’

Zahir sprang upright and rested his hands on her shoulders to prevent her from moving away. Her mouth ran dry, her heart skipping a beat as she looked up at him, up over that full sensual mouth to the black-lashed golden eyes that wreaked havoc with her insides.

‘Tonight you’re tired.’ His deep dark voice reverberated through her very bones, the husky nuances toying with her nerves like a secret caress. ‘I won’t touch you...’

Saffy shivered at just the thought of being in bed with him again. The image caught at her and not with the sense of threat that she believed she should have felt. A lazy brown forefinger grazed the length of her delicate collarbone, smoothed a passage up her slender throat while she struggled not to fall in a limp heap at his feet because her knees were threatening to buckle. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think while he touched her, and then he brought his mouth crashing down on hers with a hungry passion that should have frightened her out of her wits, but which instead stormed through her and set her on fire. There was a primitive sense of tightening and dampness between her legs, a sudden painful pulse throbbing through the peaks of her breasts. With every plunge of his tongue she trembled, lost in the hot, electrifying darkness of overwhelming physical sensation.

‘Bed,’ Zahir muttered raggedly, stooping to haul her up bodily in his strong arms, thrusting back a door with an impatient shoulder. ‘I want you wide awake tomorrow.’

He laid her down on a big modern divan dressed in pristine white linen. When he had said, ‘bed’ in that deep thrilling tone her imagination had exploded into the stratosphere and when he released her again and moved back to the door, she frowned at him poised there in the dim light, black hair tousled by her fingers, the taste of him still on her lips, the sheer call of him to her senses overpowering. She rolled over and buried her hot face in a pillow. No, she didn’t have a stupid bone in her body. She was looking for a man—had been for years—but he was not the one, although inconveniently he still seemed to be the
only
one she actually wanted, the only one she could even imagine becoming intimate with.

Angry tears of frustration stung her eyes. After the divorce had destroyed her faith in true love and happy endings, she had licked her wounds for years, terrified of getting into another serious relationship and meeting up with the same problems. But after therapy, she had longed to lose her virginity and have sex with a lover to prove that she was fully cured and had come to terms with her past. She had simply wanted to be
normal
as other women took for granted...how could that be wrong? Or selfish? Or immoral? And she did not need to compound her mistakes by being attracted to a man who had not only hurt her very badly once but who also had plans to marry another woman.

Zahir went for a shower—a very cold one. A great well of burning hunger was consuming him but it was cooled by disturbing memories of Sapphire shaking with unmistakeable fear when he had tried to make love to her during their marriage. Even with all the sexual experience he had painstakingly acquired since then, he was wary and seriously distrustful of the physically encouraging vibes she was putting out. He had been wrong before; why shouldn’t he be wrong again? And while a faint sense of wonderment was stirring that he should actually have her in a bed again within reach, no sense of regret yet assailed him. In fact a merciless sense of all-male satisfaction was still driving him hard.

Saffy froze when she heard the door open again and rolled over, ridiculously conscious that her eyelids and her nose were probably pink from the overload of emotion and events that had brought overwrought tears to her eyes. She sat up in honest surprise to stare at Zahir, poised one step inside the door clad in only a pair of black silk boxers. Her throat closed over and she stopped breathing.

‘There is only one bed...’

‘It’s not a problem,’ Saffy responded as carelessly as she could contrive, rolling off the bed and yanking the bedspread off the mattress in almost the same movement. ‘I’ll sleep on the floor, although you
could
have taken one of the sofas.’

‘I refuse to do so and you can’t sleep on the floor.’

‘I can do whatever I want to do,’ Saffy told him, rolling herself into the spread and lying down beside the bed as well wrapped up as an Arctic explorer.

‘Except when I’m around,’ Zahir pronounced in direct challenge, snatching her up from the floor and planting her back on the divan with the strength that came so naturally to him.

‘I’m not sharing that bed with you!’ Saffy spat at him.

Zahir dealt her a derisive appraisal. ‘Even when you already know that you can certainly trust me to hear the word no?’ he queried in a very dry reminder.

Hot pink colour washed her lovely face and then receded to leave her pale and stricken. She was crushed by all that went unsaid within that aide-memoire, but equally suddenly she felt foolish making such a fuss about sharing a bed, and she squirmed out of the cloaking folds of the spread to slide below the sheet. ‘This is all your fault—you should never have brought me here!’

Zahir almost laughed. She was shouting at him again, fighting with him, and he should have been furious at her lack of respect but he wasn’t; he was too busy enjoying the novelty of being treated like an equal by a woman. Sapphire wouldn’t bat her eyelashes at him, look down in submission and offer honeyed words of feminine flattery as the other women he met did. He climbed into the bed and lay back against the pillows. With Sapphire’s mane of hair tossed all over the pillow beside his, the smell of the shampoo she used wafted into his nostrils, a familiar floral scent she had worn ever since he had known her, and that evocative aroma awakened too much that he would have preferred to forget. Slowly his lean brown hands clenched into fists, the tension in his lean powerful body extreme.

‘Well, isn’t this cosy?’ Saffy mocked, determined not to show weakness again.

‘Don’t rock the boat...’ Zahir purred softly in warning.

‘Your English has improved so much,’ Saffy remarked acidly, staring up at the boarded ceiling. ‘Was that a by-product of your promiscuity with various Western women or did you actually have to study the language?’

His even white teeth gritted. The novelty of her backchat was fast dimming in appeal and he sat up to stare down at her. ‘I was
not
promiscuous...’

Saffy stared stonily back at the lean bronzed beauty of his arresting face. ‘None of my business.’

Eyes as dark a black and cold as she had ever seen them, he swivelled away from her and turned on his side and she caught a glimpse of his back, and anything else provocative that she might have said was forgotten instantly. Without thought she thrust down the sheet to get a better look. The once-brown silken sweep of his smooth, muscular back was marred with slashed and intersecting lines of scars. Before she could think better of it, she exclaimed, ‘What on earth happened to your back?’

In an abrupt movement, Zahir flipped round to lie flat on his back again while colour crawled across his slashing cheekbones because he had forgotten to keep his shirt on. ‘Not something I want to talk about.’

‘But it looks like you were beaten...
whipped!
’ Saffy burst out, unable to stifle her horror at the thought of anyone deliberately inflicting that amount of pain on him. His back must have been shredded to leave scars that deep and extensive.

In the nerve-racking silence, which only Zahir was capable of using like a weapon he switched out the light. She could recall so many times when he had shut her out like that five years earlier, keeping his own counsel, refusing to share his thoughts or even the details of what he did or where he went when he was away from her. He wasn’t the confiding type, never had been, was very much made in the iron image of an army officer with the proverbial stiff upper lip. She compressed her lips on the questions tumbling on her tongue. Had he been caught, imprisoned and mistreated during the rebellion that had brought his father down? But surely his status as his father’s heir should have protected him on either side of the fence?

Bewildered, even wondering why she should be so curious, Saffy closed her eyes and instead pictured him lounging in his boxers by the door and finally she smiled faintly in the darkness, the more disturbing images banished. He might have acquired a few scars but he was still a vision of bronzed masculine perfection, still her fantasy male from his perfect pecs to his six-pack abdomen and powerful hair-roughened thighs. He would either be highly amused or highly offended to learn that she pictured him when she tried to look sexy in a pose.