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“You want sex,” he said, going for direct. Because if direct didn’t frighten her, then he wouldn’t question her bold proposition.
Her chin tilted up a fraction, her expression hard. “Yes.”
“Sweet, romantic, Angelina who wanted to wait until our wedding night? Who told me just now she ran because she did not want any sort of arranged marriage?” His words were harsher than he intended, much harsher. But he could hardly breathe. His chest was tight, his muscles so tense they were shaking.
He had been waiting for this moment, for her, for what seemed like an eternity. And she was here now, wanting him. He was afraid that if he moved she would vanish into smoke.
“I might have been those things at one time but I’ve grown up. A lot,” she said, her tone hard. Sad. “And I understand that we can’t have everything we want in life. But I can have something I want. I can have you.”
“You want me?” He needed to hear her say it, and that need was a weakness he didn’t want to stop and examine.
“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have asked you to stay.”
“Why now?”
“You aren’t the only one here capable of capitalizing on an opportunity,” she said.
He stopped then and looked at her more closely. She had been so young when he’d first met her. And while three years hadn’t changed much in terms of physical age, she was different now. Gone was that magical glitter in her green eyes, that sweet and easy smile. She looked tired. She looked hard.
She looked like a woman who had seen too much, rather than one just starting out into the world.
Had he caused that? Or had something happened to her after she’d left Texas? He didn’t like to think it had been either of those things.
Back then he had been doing just what she’d said: capitalizing on an opportunity. But he had liked her. He had treated her well. He’d certainly never meant to hurt her.
He had paid, though; he had paid dividends since she’d walked out of his life. In ways he could not begin to explain.
Just one of the many things affected had been his sex drive. He’d had no desire for a woman, for sex at all, since she’d left. And now that she was here, that had changed. It had changed drastically.
Desire didn’t feel like he remembered. Had it always made him feel like he was standing on the edge of a cliff? Had it always stolen his breath and made his body tremble? He didn’t think it had. But it was now. He felt perilously close to losing his balance. To losing himself.
“Then that is what I am to you,” he said, “an opportunity?”
“An opportunity was all I was to you, sugar.” She’d called him that back in Texas. It had sounded sweet then. An endearment. Silly but it had done something to him. Now it seemed more of an insult.
“I am not interested in banter, or arguments,” he said. “If you want me, come here and show me.”
It was not his way to have a woman make the first move. It never had been. But he had to give the power to Angelina now, mostly because he stood powerless before her. What had happened in the space of the past half hour?
Taj Ahmad, Sheikh of Rahat, ruler of many, transfixed, controlled, by a woman.
But the revelation didn’t bring the power to prevent it. He had no strength to stop what was unfolding. And no desire to stop it, either.
She took a step toward him, her eyes darkening, the emotion in them unknowable to him. And for once, he was grateful to be ignorant of something.
“This time,” she said, “you have to kiss me.”
If he did, he would be the one laying down his hand. The one giving in. He did not give in. It wasn’t in him.
At the moment, his body seemed to disagree. Because he was moving to her. And then he took her in his arms. He relished the feeling for a moment, the sensation of having her breasts pressed against his chest, of her softness. Her strength.
It was little wonder no woman had managed to appeal to him since Angelina. She was like no other woman, and his desire for her had remained piqued but unsatisfied since he’d met her.
He needed satisfaction. He needed to have her. In his arms. In his bed, or her bed, so that he could move on.
Resisting wasn’t an option. It wasn’t a possibility.
He was lost, in her kiss, her touch. He pushed his hand beneath her shirt and felt her smooth, creamy skin. He pulled his hand away, as though he’d been burned. He felt like he had been. Down to his soul. He couldn’t explain it. Didn’t want to.
Not when she was arching against him, whispering words of encouragement, her hands moving over his back.
He looked at her face and saw her eyes, closed tight, as though she was afraid to open them.
“Look at me,” he growled. Her eyes opened wide. “I would have you know who you’re with.”
She looked confused. Dazed. “How could you be anyone else?”
With a groan, he claimed her lips again, walking her back to the opulent bed that was in the corner. He laid her down on the soft duvet, and peeled her shirt over her head, revealing snow-white breasts barely covered by a thin web of a lace that was trying to pass for a bra.
His hand shook as he traced the line of the bra with his fingertip. Had a woman ever made him shake before? He did not think so.
For a moment, he feared it would it be over too quickly. A fear he had never experienced in his life. But three years without sex was a long time. And now that he was breaking his fast, it was with the object of his fantasies.
She worked at removing his clothes, while she divested him of his. When his skin finally met hers, he exhaled a breath. One he thought he might have been holding since she walked out of his life.
It was like everything fit. Finally.
He lavished attention on her strawberry tipped breasts, her sighs of pleasure and the feel of her arching against him almost more than he could handle. He gritted his teeth and tried to call on all of his focus. Focus, single-mindedness, he was renowned for those things. Trained up to be a leader, a man with the power to rule a nation.
And yet, with her, he found he did not have the control of a king. He barely had the control of a teenage boy faced with a naked woman for the first time.
She parted her thighs and he settled between them. He paused for a moment and looked down at her face. Her eyes were on him, open, as he had commanded. She put her hands on his face and stroked him lightly. A shudder moved through him, and he realized that he was not the one in control.
Not in the least.
“Please,” she whispered against his lips.
He pressed against the entrance of her body, easing in slowly. Her face tensed, a small sound of pain, deep in her throat, stopping him short.
She shook her head. “It’s okay.” She slid her hands down to his buttocks and urged him on.
Being inside her, fully inside her, was more than he had fantasized about. It went beyond any experience, real or imagined.
She moved against him, meeting his thrusts, pressing kisses to his neck, pushing him higher, faster. But he needed to ensure that she found her pleasure. He had to. Somehow that directive pierced through the fog of his arousal.
He wrapped his fingers around her thigh and draped his over hers, opening her to him. Then he placed his other hand at her breast, teasing her nipple, drawing it tighter. A short sound of pleasure escaped her lips and he continued on, teasing her, tormenting her. Teasing and tormenting himself.
Then she froze beneath him, arching into him, her internal muscles tightening around him as she embraced her orgasm.
He released his control, his blood roaring in his ears as he ran toward the wave that had been ebbing toward him from the moment he set eyes on Angelina in the ballroom. It overwhelmed him, swallowing him, his mind blank as he emptied himself into her body, his limbs shaking, his heart raging.
Afterward he lay with her. Replete. More so than he had ever been in his life.
And then he did something he had never done with a lover. He pulled her into his arms and fell asleep.
When he woke up, it was light outside. And the bed was cold. He rolled over and put his hand where Angelina should have been. Empty.
He sat up and looked around the room. His clothes were on the floor. Folded. And Angelina’s clothes were gone. Everything of hers was gone.
He pulled his pants on quickly and buckled his belt, shrugging his shirt on, buttoning it as he walked down the corridors of the palace.
Some people might have felt embarrassed doing the walk of shame through a palace. But he didn’t do embarrassment. He didn’t do uncertainty, either.
And last night had left him very certain of the fact that Angelina belonged with him.
He stopped a member of the household staff who was walking quickly through the corridor. “Do you know where Angelina Carpenter is?”
The woman gave him a hard look. “Princess Carlotta’s nanny?”
He supposed he deserved the look. As he was across the palace from where he was meant to be staying, half dressed, his hair likely standing on end. The sheikh looking for the nanny.
He did not care. “Yes.”
“I believe she left this morning. Princess Carlotta wanted her son to go back to Italy as soon as possible and Angelina naturally accompanied him.”
“Grazi,” he said through his teeth.
The woman nodded and turned away. Taj’s stomach tightened. Angelina had left. She had left him. She was gone. Again.
He knew where to find her now, of course. He could go after her. He wanted to.
Taj tightened his hand into a fist, gritting his teeth, ignoring the stabbing pain in his chest. He would not be made a fool of. Not again.
He’d had her. He’d had her virginity. And now he would go on. He would not go after her.
He ignored the sour feeling in his stomach and walked down the corridor, making his way out of the grand palace without pausing to greet anyone.
He vowed he would not think of her. Not again. Too much of his life had been wasted on Angelina Carpenter.
No more.
Chapter Four
She felt awful. More awful than usual. And she’d pretty much felt awful for the past two months, since she’d left Taj lying in her bed and packed her bags as quietly as possible. So feeling worse really was something.
At least she knew why now. Those two pink lines didn’t lie.
Misery washed through her. She’d made a mistake. A big one. And now there was nothing left to do but try to call Taj and tell him. It was her responsibility. Did sheikhs have listed phone numbers? She wasn’t certain.
She put her head in her hands for a moment, then straightened from her near-fetal position on the bed and took her phone from her nightstand. Dissolving into a puddle wasn’t happening.
The past two months hadn’t been great. She’d missed Taj. Missed him desperately. But the facts hadn’t changed. He didn’t love her. And she was perilously close to loving him again.
She’d tried to throw herself into taking care of Luca. Getting him adjusted to his new life in Santa Christobel with Carlotta and her fiancé, Rodriguez. That had helped. When they’d arrived, she’d been called on a lot while the new royal couple had been learning to deal with one another.
And Rodriguez had been scared to death of Luca at first.
But things were changing now. They needed her less and less.
And now she’d found out that she had a child who needed her even more than her little charge. Her own child. And Taj needed to know.
She let out a low whine and surfed through the contacts on her phone. She found the number for Rodriguez’s personal secretary, a number she had just in case there was an emergency and for some reason neither Rodriguez nor Carlotta could be reached.
She hit Send.
“Hi. This is Angelina.”
“Is everything all right with Luca?”
“Everything’s fine. He’s with his parents today I…I was wondering if you knew how to get a hold of the palace in Rahat.”‘
“Taj?”
Taj’s stomach tightened, his heart beating hard. It was Angelina. He knew it with certainty. Not because he recognized her voice, though he did, but because only she made his body react in the way it was reacting now. It was a near supernatural connection. One he would have scoffed at had he not felt it personally.
“Angelina?”
“Yes. I’m…I need to talk to you.”
He tightened his hold on the phone. “You are talking to me. What is it?”
“I…I shouldn’t have just left that morning. I’m sorry.”
“It isn’t as though I have wasted much time thinking about it.” A lie. He had thought of nothing else. No demons had been exorcised that night. It had not brought back his desire for other women. If anything, he was less interested than he’d been before. Angelina seemed to fill him, surround him.
Angelina Carpenter was an addiction he couldn’t seem to kick.
“I’m certain you haven’t,” she returned, her voice sounding muted. “But whether or not you’ve thought of me at all…well, that doesn’t really matter. I’m not calling to confess my undying love.”
“Of course not.” He ignored the fierce seizing in his chest.
“I’m pregnant.”
He dropped the phone. It crashed onto the marble floor and he prayed fervently that he had not lost the call as he bent to pick it back up. “You’re what?” he asked, his tone rough.
“I’m pregnant.” The silence hung thick between them, the only sound in the room the beating of his heart, his harsh intake of breath. “You’re the father, by the way. That’s why I called.”
“I know I’m the father,” he bit out. “What do you suppose I think of you?”
“It wouldn’t be an insult, I suppose. How many lovers have you had since we parted?”
“None,” he snapped.
“Oh.” She sounded shocked. Subdued.
“You must come here.”
“I figured as much. I’ll have to tell Carlotta and…and Luca.” She sounded sad about that. Sad to be coming to him? Or sad to leave her charge?
“We have to get married,” he said.
“I figured that, too.”
“You sound very calm.” It maddened him that she could be so calm. So unaffected. As though the world had not just tilted on its axis. As though she had not just agreed to marry him.
As though she was not carrying his child.
“I think there are those in the medical profession who call it shock,” she said, some of the fire he recognized returning to her tone.
“I see.” He looked out his office window, out into his lushly landscaped courtyard. It reflected nothing of the desert beyond it. None of the hot, red sand that stretched as far as any man could see in every direction. “I will send for you. Tonight.”
The heat of Texas hadn’t prepared her for the arid, invasive climate of Rahat. Stepping out of the air-conditioned car that had been sent to the airport and into the elements had been a shock. It wasn’t heat that seared her skin, it was fear that seared her skin and reached down her throat, pulling out every drop of moisture, scorching her lungs.
The sky was bleached white, the sand red, nothing green or living visible anywhere. And the only thing more forbidding than the environment was the man who seemed to rise from it. Standing in front of the gates to the castle, heat waves blurring her view of him, but not disguising who he was.
Taj was waiting for her. His arms crossed over his broad chest, his expression stoic.
She took a step away from the car and looked back at the driver, who told her in fluent English that her bags would be sent in and up to her room.
Her room. At least she would have her own room. She didn’t think she could handle the forced intimacy of sharing one with Taj. Not now.
“Salaam,” he said, moving away from the gates and coming to greet her, his strides long and certain. He looked so at home here. He looked like a part of the desert. And she had never felt more alone.
“Hello, Sheikh,” she said, inclining her head, feeling the weight of his title fully for the first time with his grand palace in the background.
She’d known he was a sheikh. That he was the ruler of a country. And yet, when she’d met him it had been in Texas. They’d made out in a barn and laughed and talked. He had seemed approachable. Accessible.
He seemed nothing of the sort now.
“Taj,” he said. He took her chin between his thumb and forefinger and tilted her face up to him. “You must call me Taj.”
“Taj,” she repeated.
“You are well?”
“As well as can be expected.”
A shadow passed over his handsome face, his eyes darkening. “Good.” He looked up at the sky, shielding his face with his hand. “Come, Angel, we need to get you in from this heat.”
She turned and followed him into the palace. It took her a few moments to realize he’d called her Angel.
Chapter Five
“Is everything up to your standards?” Taj studied Angelina’s sullen face at dinner. She looked pale. She looked unhappy. She looked like a woman about to face capital punishment rather than one who had been moved into a palace and offered a position as queen.
Although, maybe offered was the wrong word.
“Everything is lovely,” she said, his focus on her dinner plate.
“And yet you sound like a petulant child who has been denied a pony for Christmas.”
Her head snapped up, her green eyes glittering. “Do you think so?”
“I know so.”
“Quite the pronouncement. Especially coming from a man who’s never been denied anything.”
He shrugged. “It’s true, I had seven of my own Arabian horses by the time I was six. They were not considered ponies.” He studied the glass of sharbat in front of him. “But you’re wrong.”
His stomach burned as she glared at him, the green turning arctic, the corners of her lush lips curved down. “Is that so?”
“I have been denied things I’ve desired greatly,” he said, thinking of the years he’d gone without her, of the months after she’d left him. Of the feeling of arousal, relief and utter fear he’d felt when she’d called him again.
“Have you?” she said, scraping her empty plate with her fork.
“You have no idea, do you?”
“I don’t play guessing games, Sheikh, so you might as well cut to the chase.”
“Taj. You will call me Taj. And I’m not trying to play a game. Do you think I gave no thought to you over the past three years?”
She tilted her chin up. “I can hardly say.”
“I did. I thought of you every night. Every time a woman looked my direction. I thought of the one woman I truly desired. And how she had been denied to me.”
Her lips thinned, her body going stiff. “Now who sounds like the petulant child, Taj?”
He leaned back in his chair, arousal and annoyance battling each other. “I have been accused of being petulant, it’s true. But I am royal and it’s my right.”
“Indeed!” she snapped.
“Yes. Indeed. But one thing I am not and you should know this, Angel, is a child.”
Crimson color flooded her cheeks and she stood. He stood as well, anger more in play than any sense of good manners. “I can’t deal with you right now.”
She turned to go and he caught her arm. “Then when will we deal with each other?” He leaned in and caught her scent. Vanilla soap and something beneath it, something clean and unique to Angelina. “When?” he asked again, loosening his hold on her but keeping his hand on her soft skin, his thumb stroking her. “On our wedding night? When our child is born?”
She shook her head. “I…no. But not now.”
He leaned in and kissed her, a challenge. To her strength. Her defiance. To the fact that she seemed so utterly composed and distant while he felt like his desire was a living thing, burning him alive from the inside out.
She kissed him back. Her lips clinging to his, her body arching to his. Then, as suddenly as she acquiesced, she broke away, her eyes wide, her chest rising and falling on short, choppy breaths.
“I’m not in the mood for that, either,” she said.
“Your body, and your manner, would suggest otherwise, my Angel,” he said, his need threatening to strangle him.
“My body isn’t running the show. My mind is.”
“Was that true a couple of months ago?”
A false smile curved her lips. “I think we both know it wasn’t. Call it temporary insanity, sugar.” That name again. She used it to put distance between them. He would not allow it.
“With permanent consequences,” he said.
Lust leached from him as he looked down at her flat stomach. A sense of surreal awe filling him. She was carrying his baby. Their baby.
He’d thought about children, in terms of heirs and fulfilled duty. But he’d never thought about what it would really mean to create a child. To have a baby that was part of him, part of its mother. Part of Angelina.
If they had a daughter, would she have her mother’s red hair? Or would his Middle Eastern heritage dominate? He’d never given time to such thoughts before. And now he seemed to be bogged down by them.
“You’re pregnant,” he said, releasing his hold on her completely and taking a step back. It was no longer desire that was trying to strangle him.
She swallowed visibly. “Yes. That is why I’m here.”
“But…you’re having a baby.”
“That’s what pregnant means,” she said, crossing her arms beneath her breasts.
“How do you feel?”
“I’m a wreck, actually, Taj, but thank you for asking.”
He frowned. “What has wrecked you?”
“I feel like the world’s biggest idiot. I slept with a guy, that’s you, with no protection and there’s no excuse for that. None.”
“It was my responsibility. I failed. You were…you were a virgin,” he said.
“So? I didn’t live under a rock. I know how things work. I know about being responsible and I wasn’t.”
“Desire gets the best of people sometimes.” It had certainly gotten the best of him. For the past three years it had gotten the best of him.
She shook her head. “I suppose that’s true. Because there is no other explanation for it.”
She turned to walk out of the room and he felt something large, indefinable, squeezing his chest. “Do you regret it, Angelina?”
She stopped, her shoulders sagging. “I don’t know yet,” she said, her voice quiet.
He vowed right then that she would never regret it. Not if he could help it.
Chapter Six
It was only six in the morning and already the temperature was rising. The palace was cool, but stifling, the walls feeling like they were closing in on her. She doubted she would ever get used to this place. She wanted to run. She wanted to hide.
It wasn’t an option.
Taj had sent dressers to her room this morning with beautiful silk gowns in bright colors. They were cut into Western styles but bore beautiful Eastern influences. They were fit for the Queen of Rahat, one of the women said.
And they were right. But she wondered if it was the mistresses of Rahat who had worn them before. If they’d been used by other women. The idea made her skin itch. Made her feel violently possessive and jealous in a way she had no right feeling.
She’d run away from being Queen of Rahat once. Now it seemed she was trapped.
“Sheikh Taj is on his way,” the other woman said. “You are meeting the press this morning and he would like to make sure you are prepared.”
Her stomach sank, a faint impression of nausea wrapping itself around her. “You can tell him that I would rather have bamboo shoots shoved up my fingernails,” she muttered.
“Noted.”
She turned and saw Taj standing in the doorway. She froze and her two aids bent their heads and scurried out of the room.
“Did you bring bamboo, sugar?” she asked, turning her Texas drawl up a notch.
“I thought perhaps you would prefer tea,” he said, lifting a delicate china cup up to chest level. “It’s green tea, no caffeine. I thought it might be preferable to torture.”