Innocent in the Desert: The Sheikh's Impatient Virgin / The Sheikh's Convenient Virgin / The Desert Lord's Bride

‘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.

‘You’re Hassan’s lost princess.’

‘I’m not lost. I live here.’

He flashed a less than enthusiastic look around the room and said, ‘But you’re planning on moving up in the world, aren’t you, Princess?’

The rather cryptic observation brought a distracted frown to Eva’s brow … distracted because she was conscious of the background clatter as Luke slipped the latch on her front door.

‘I won’t be a minute.’ She gave an apologetic grimace and snatched up her robe from a chair.

‘I do not have a minute,’ Karim observed grimly.

His guilt climbed as he thought of his extended absence … his recollection was hazy, but one fact was inescapable: he had presumably, in some aberrant moment of unforgivable, shameful weakness, walked, or at least wandered, away from his responsibilities.

If he was not there when Amira woke he would never forgive himself.

The glance he slid her had the chill factor of an arctic front and Eva couldn’t help but contrast his present manner with the heat of his lips on her neck and the urgency in his hard, hot body as it had pressed into hers minutes earlier.

‘What time is it?’ he snapped, throwing aside the covers and vaulting with fluid grace from the bed.

Eva tried not to stare. His body stood up well to daylight scrutiny. Perfect was like that, she thought with a sigh. His eagerness to be gone was not exactly flattering to her ego, but his departure could not, she told herself, be too soon for her.

‘I don’t know.’

The honest response drew a forbidding frown.

‘Look, I won’t be a second …’ she called back as she ran to catch Luke. While she was answerable to nobody about whom she shared her bed with—up to this point no one—she felt an urgent need to put the record straight, and she really didn’t want Luke to leave with the wrong idea.

CHAPTER FIVE

KARIM walked into the minuscule sitting room, his eyes moving immediately to the face of the clock sitting on the mantle. He grimaced and felt a fresh surge of guilt when he thought of Amira waking up and him not being there.

And why wouldn’t he be there? Even with hazy recall the answer did not require hours of deep analysis—it was right there in the waking impressions that lingered in his head.

Lithe pale limbs, warm soft curves, skin like satin and a supple body curved into his.

His mouth curved into a grimace of self-contempt even as his body hardened in response to the memory. During the barren years of marriage he had turned control of his passions into an art form, but inexplicably that control had deserted him at the worst possible moment.

A muscle worked in his lean jaw emphasising the hollows beneath his strongly etched cheekbones as Karim considered what the moment of inexplicable weakness combined with the scheming of a woman was going to cost him.

The irony was he couldn’t even remember the pleasure he was about to pay so dearly for—that part of the night remained a total blank.

The same could not be said for all of the night. A brooding frown on his face, he walked to the window and glanced down at the street below. Any faint hopes he nurtured that this specific section of intact memory was not real died an instant death.

The stationary car opposite was depressingly real. He turned away and wondered how long it would take for the information his granddaughter had spent the night with Karim Al-Nasr to reach King Hassan.

Of the King’s reaction there was no similar question. While the ruler of Azharim was not a man who was averse to change, tradition and honour were two things he placed highly. Karim had offered him an insult and only one response would make that insult forgivable.

Karim closed his eyes and, his expression harsh with self-recrimination, wondered if there was a fatal flaw in his make-up.

Was he preordained to make the same mistake over and over again? Recognising the self-pity insidiously creeping into his thinking, he pushed away the thought, firm in his belief such a mindset was for men who could not accept responsibility for their own actions.

No excuses, no extenuating circumstances and no amount of extraordinary red hair changed the fact he had messed up and he would pay.

The depth of his own stupidity was still hard for him to fully grasp. He inhaled through flared nostrils and, exerting the control that had let him down the previous night, he pushed away a subject he had no time to explore right now and estimated how long it would take him to get to the hospital.

He found his jacket and retrieved the phone from the pocket, punched in a number while shrugging on his shirt. The dampness brought back the memory of rain … and walking.

Tariq picked up immediately.

Karim, his shoulder hunched to hold the phone while he buttoned his shirt, was thrown by the deep sigh of relief that reverberated down the line. His calm and ultra-composed right hand then threw him some more when Tariq proceeded to launch into a breathless emotional monologue that inexplicably involved a central theme of choked, almost tearful self-recrimination.

When he began to repeat himself Karim, bemused by the uncharacteristic overreaction, felt it time to interrupt.

‘I’m sorry I gave Security the slip, but you are hardly responsible for that, and I am no longer a child, Tariq.’ Tariq, who had known him since he was assigned bodyguard duty when Karim was ten, sometimes had to be gently reminded of this. ‘I can look after myself.’ Though after last night this was open to debate.

Far from being soothed, Tariq appeared even more agitated when he replied, ‘When the room was discovered empty we did not know where you had gone and I thought … This is my fault. I am so sorry. I did what I thought was best.’

Karim’s bemused frown deepened. ‘Best?’

‘You recall that sedation … the sleeping draft the hospital doctor prescribed …’

‘I recall throwing it away.’ Karim was not a fan of quick fixes and even less of numbed emotions. He would face what he must with all his wits about him and sleep, when it came, would be natural, not drug-induced.

‘I retrieved it.’

‘You retrieved it,’ Karim echoed, his tone neutral as the last piece of the puzzle he hadn’t known existed clicked into place in his head.

It was a very loud click! And things made more sense. Not that being drugged counted as a ‘get out of jail’ card when applied to sleeping with a royal princess of a close political ally.

‘Yes, and I put it in the tea.’

Karim exhaled. The tea … at least now he knew why he had been wandering the streets. It had not been temporary insanity brought on by stress; it had been drugs!

‘I was most afraid that you had come to some harm….’

You have no idea, old friend, Karim thought, pressing the phone to his chest. He knew it would be a mistake to speak at that moment and say something he might regret … even though it would make him feel a lot better in the short term!

The idea that anyone thought they knew what was best for him did not sit well at any time with Karim, but the knowledge that this particular piece of monumental interference was going to have dire consequences only increased his level of outrage.

If it had been anyone else but Tariq who had been watching his back since he was a child, anyone else but Tariq who clearly already was consumed with guilt …

He closed his eyes and, lifting the phone, reminded himself that it was weakness to yell at someone who was not in a position to yell back.

‘That was very resourceful of you.’

‘Of course I will formally submit my resignation and in the meantime—’

Karim, his tone brisk and impatient, cut across the stilted speech. ‘In the meantime, Tariq, you will send a car to flat11 A Church Mansions, and if you drug me again we will definitely fall out….’

There was a pause before he heard a fervent, ‘Yes, Prince Karim.’

How could he punish a man who always had his best interest at heart, a man who offered him unswerving loyalty? ‘Is Amira awake yet …?’

‘No … no … she is still asleep. Church Mansions … is that not the address of King Hassan’s gran—?’

‘Yes, it is. You, Tariq, can be the first to congratulate me, and if King Hassan tries to contact me before I return send him my compliments and tell him I will speak to him personally at the first opportunity.’

He was sliding his phone back into his pocket when the sound of voices in the hallway that had been a constant background noise stopped. Into the ensuing silence he heard a distinctive click as the door closed.

Karim sensed rather than heard her enter the room. He could feel her eyes on him but did not immediately turn his head. When he did she froze in the act of taking a step towards him, uncertainty reflected in her emerald-green eyes. For a moment her eyes held his, then her eyes and her half-outstretched hand fell in unison.

Karim turned his gaze from her burnished head, conscious as he did so of the rage and hunger so deeply entwined when he looked at her that attempting to separate the emotions was pointless.

‘Luke’s gone.’ And to her annoyance he hadn’t believed a word she’d said.

Oh, well, there was a silver lining at least. Now Luke was not going to be spreading stories about her alleged virginity—any sniggers were going to be about one-night stands, which was, as it happened, marginally less embarrassing.

Karim’s cold expression hid the anger he struggled to contain as he retrieved his jacket from the back of a chair.

‘I have somewhere I need to be. I’m late. We will discuss this situation later.’