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‘By abduction?’ Her chin came up, contempt shimmering along her finely shaped bones. ‘By plots and counter-plots and by removing a woman’s right to decide for herself?’
He grimaced at her very accurate description. ‘We are by nature a romantic people,’ he defended. ‘We love drama and poetry and tragic tales of star-crossed lovers who lose each other and travel the caverns of hell in their quest to find their way back together again.’
He saw the tears. He had said too much. Reaching out, he caught the glass just before it slipped from her nerveless fingers. ‘Our marriage is a tragedy,’ she told him thickly.
‘No,’ he denied, putting the hapless glass aside. ‘You merely insist on turning it into one.’
‘Because I hate everything you stand for!’
‘But you cannot make yourself hate the man,’ he added, undisturbed by her denunciation.
Leona began to back away because there was something seriously threatening about the sudden glow she caught in his eyes. ‘I left you, remember?’
‘Then sent me letters at regular intervals to make sure I remembered you,’ he drawled.
‘Letters to tell you I want a divorce!’ she cried.
‘The content of the letters came second to their true purpose.’ He smiled. ‘One every two weeks over the last two months. I found them most comforting.’
‘Gosh, you are so conceited it’s a wonder you didn’t marry yourself!’
‘Such insults.’ He sighed.
‘Will you stop stalking me as if I am a hunted animal?’ she cried.
‘Stop backing away like one.’
‘I do not want to stay married to you.’ She stated it bluntly.
‘And I am not prepared to let you go. There,’ he said. ‘We have reached another impasse. Which one of us is going to win the higher ground this time, do you think?’
Looking at him standing there, arrogant and proud yet so much her kind of man that he made her legs go weak, Leona knew exactly which one of them possessed the higher ground. Which was also why she had to keep him at arm’s length at all costs. He could fell her in seconds, because he was right; she didn’t hate him, she adored him. And that scared her so much that when his hand came up, long fingertips brushing gently across her trembling mouth, she almost fainted on the sensation that shot from her lips to toe tips.
She pulled right away. His eyebrow arched. It mocked and challenged as he responded by curling the hand around her nape.
‘Stop it,’ she said, and lifted up her hand to use it as a brace against his chest.
Beneath dark blue cotton she discovered a silk-smooth, hard-packed body pulsing with heat and an all-too-familiar masculine potency. Her mouth went dry; she tried to breathe and found that she couldn’t. Helplessly she lifted her eyes up to meet with his.
‘Seeing me now, hmm?’ he softly taunted. ‘Seeing this man with these eyes you like to drown in, and this nose you like to call dreadful but usually have trouble from stopping your fingers from stroking? And let us not forget this mouth you so like to feel crushed hotly against your own delightful mouth.’
‘Don’t you dare!’ she protested, seeing what was coming and already beginning to shake all over at the terrifying prospect of him finding out what a weak-willed coward she was.
‘Why not?’ he countered, offering her one of his lazily sensual, knowing smiles that said he knew better than she did what she really wanted—and he began to lower his dark head.
‘Tell me first.’ Sheer desperation made her fly into impulsive speech. ‘If I am here on this beautiful yacht that belongs to you—is there another yacht just like it out there somewhere where your second wife awaits her turn?’
In the sudden suffocating silence that fell between them Leona found herself holding her breath as she watched his face pale to a frightening stillness. For this was provocation of the worst kind to an Arab and her heart began pounding madly because she just didn’t know how he was going to respond. Hassan possessed a shocking temper, though he had never unleashed it on her. But now, as she stood here with her fingers still pressed against his breastbone, she could feel the danger in him—could almost taste her own fear as she waited to see how he was going to respond.
What he did was to take a step back from her. Cold, aloof, he changed into the untouchable prince in the single blink of an ebony eyelash. ‘Are you daring to imply that I could be guilty of treating my wives unequally?’ he responded.
In the interim wave of silence that followed, Leona stared at him through eyes that had stopped seeing anything as his reply rocked the very axis she stood upon. She knew she had prompted it but she still had not expected it, and now she found she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even move as fine cracks began to appear in her defences.
‘You actually went and did it, and married again,’ she whispered, then completely shattered. Emotionally, physically, she felt herself fragment into a thousand broken pieces beneath his stone-cold, cruel gaze.
Hassan didn’t see it coming. He should have done, he knew that, but he had been too angry to see anything but his own affronted pride. So when she turned and ran he didn’t expect it. By the time he had pulled his wits together enough to go after her Leona was already flying through the door on a flood of tears.
The tears blinded what was ahead of her, the abaya having prevented her from taking stock of her surroundings as they’d arrived. Hassan heard Rafiq call out a warning, reached the door as Leona’s cry curdled the very air surrounding them and she began to fall.
What he had managed to prevent by the skin of his teeth only a half-hour before now replayed itself before his helpless eyes. Only it was not the dark waters of the Mediterranean she fell into but the sea of cream carpet that ran from room to room and down a wide flight of three shallow stairs that led down into the yacht’s main foyer.
CHAPTER THREE
CURSING and swearing in seething silence, Hassan prowled three sides of the bed like a caged tiger while the yacht’s Spanish medic checked her over.
‘No bones broken, as far as I can tell,’ the man said. ‘No obvious blow to the head.’
‘Then why is she unconscious?’ he growled out furiously.
‘Shock—winded,’ the medic suggested, gently laying aside a frighteningly limp hand. ‘It has only been a few minutes, sir.’
But a few minutes was a lifetime when you felt so guilty you wished it was yourself lying there, Hassan thought harshly.
‘A cool compress would be a help—’
A cool compress. ‘Rafiq.’ The click of his fingers meant the job would be done.
The sharp sound made Leona flinch. On a single, lithe leap Hassan was suddenly stretched out across the bed and leaning over her. The medic drew back; Rafiq paused in his step.
‘Open your eyes.’ Hassan turned her face towards him with a decidedly unsteady hand.
Her eyes fluttered open to stare up at him blankly. ‘What happened?’ she mumbled.
‘You fell down some stairs,’ he gritted. ‘Now tell me where you hurt.’
A frown began to pucker her smooth brow as she tried to remember.
‘Concentrate,’ he rasped, diverting her mind away from what had happened. ‘Do you hurt anywhere?’
She closed her eyes again, and he watched her make a mental inventory of herself then give a small shake of her head. ‘I think I’m okay.’ She opened her eyes again, looked directly into his, saw his concern, his anguish, the burning fires of guilt—and then she remembered why she’d fallen.
Aching tears welled up again. From coldly plunging his imaginary knife into her breast, he now felt it enter his own. ‘You really went and did it,’ she whispered.
‘No, I did not,’ he denied. ‘Get out,’ he told their two witnesses.
The room emptied like water down a drain, leaving them alone again, confronting each other again. It was dangerous. He wanted to kiss her so badly he could hardly breathe. She was his. He was hers! They should not be in this warring situation!
‘No—remain still!’ he commanded when she attempted to move. ‘Don’t even breathe unless you have to do so! Why are females so stupid?’ he bit out like a curse. ‘You insult me with your suspicions. You goad me into a response, and when it is not the one you want to hear you slay me with your pain!’
‘I didn’t mean to fall down the stairs,’ she pointed out.
‘I wasn’t talking about the fall!’ he bit out, then glared down into her confused, hurt, vulnerable eyes for a split second longer. ‘Oh, Allah give me strength,’ he gritted, and gave in to himself and took her trembling mouth by storm.
If he had kissed her in any other way Leona would have fought him with her very last breath. But she liked the storm; she needed the storm so she could allow herself to be swept away. Plus he was trembling, and she liked that too. Liked to know that she still had the power to reduce the prince in him to this vulnerable mass of smashed emotion.
And she’d missed him. She’d missed feeling his length lying alongside her length, had missed the weight of his thighs pressing down on her own. She’d missed his kiss, hungry, urgent, insistent…wanting. Like a banquet after a year of long, hard fasting, she fed greedily on every deep, dark, sensual delight. Lips, teeth, tongue, taste. She reached for his chest, felt the strong beat of his heart as she glided her palms beneath the fabric of his top robe where only the thin cotton of his tunic came between them and tightly muscled, satin-smooth flesh. When she reached his shoulders her fingers curled themselves into tightly padded muscle then stayed there, inviting him to take what he liked.
He took her breasts, stroking and shaping before moving on to follow the slender curve of her body. Long fingers claimed her hips, then drew her against the force of his. Fire bloomed in her belly, for this was her man, the love of her life. She would never, ever, find herself another. What he touched belonged to him. What he desired he could have.
What he did was bring a cruelly abrupt end to it by rising in a single fluid movement to land on his feet beside the bed, leaving her to flounder on the hard rocks of rejection while he stood there with his back to her, fighting a savage battle with himself.
‘Why?’ she breathed in thick confusion.
‘We are not animals,’ he ground back. ‘We have issues to deal with that must preclude the hungry coupling at which we already know we both excel.’
It served as a dash of water in her face; and he certainly possessed good aim, Leona noted as she came back to reality with a shivering gasp. ‘What issues?’ she challenged cynically. ‘The issue of what we have left besides the excellent sex?’
He didn’t answer. Instead he made one of her eyebrows arch as he snatched up her spritzer and grimly downed the lot. There was a man at war with himself as well as with her, Leona realised, knowing Hassan hardly ever touched alcohol, and only then when he was under real stress.
Sitting up, she was aware of a few aches and bruises as she gingerly slid her feet to the floor. ‘I want to go home,’ she announced.
‘This is home,’ he replied. ‘For the next few weeks, anyway.’
Few weeks? Coming just as gingerly to her feet, Leona stared at his rigid back—which was just another sign that Hassan was not functioning to his usual standards, because no Arab worthy of the race would deliberately set his back to anyone. It was an insult of the worst kind.
Though she had seen his back a lot during those few months before she’d eventually left him, Leona recalled with a familiar sinking feeling inside. Not because he had wished to insult her, she acknowledged, but because he had refused to face what they had both known was happening to their marriage. In the end, she had taken the initiative away from him.
‘Where are my shoes?’
The surprisingly neutral question managed to bring him swinging round to glance at her feet. ‘Rafiq has them.’
Dear Rafiq, Leona thought wryly, Hassan’s ever-loyal partner in crime. Rafiq was an Al-Qadim. A man who had attended the same schools, the same universities, the same everything as Hassan had done. Equals in many ways, prince and lowly servant in others. It was a complicated relationship that wound around the status of birth and the ranks of power.
‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to ask him to give them back to me.’ Even she knew you didn’t command Rafiq to do anything. He was a law unto himself—and Hassan. Rafiq was a maverick. A man of the desert, yet not born of the desert; fiercely proud, fiercely protective of his right to be master of his own decisions.
‘For what purpose?’
Leona’s chin came up, recognising the challenge in his tone. She offered him a cool, clear look. ‘I am not staying here, Hassan,’ she told him flatly. ‘Even if I have to book into a hotel in San Estéban to protect your dignity, I am leaving this boat now, tonight.’
His expression grew curious, a slight smile touched his mouth. ‘Strong swimmer, are you?’ he questioned lazily.
It took a few moments for his taunt to truly sink in, then she was moving, darting across the room and winding her way between the two strategically placed chairs and the accompanying table to reach for the curtains. Beyond the glass, all she could see was inky darkness. Maybe she was on the seaward side of the boat, she told herself in an effort to calm the sudden sting of alarm that slid down her spine.
Hassan quickly disabused her of that frail hope. ‘We left San Estéban minutes after we boarded.’
It was only then that she felt it: just the softest hint of a vibration beneath the soles of her feet that told of smooth and silently running engines. This truly was an abduction, she finally accepted, and turned slowly back round to face him.
‘Why?’ she breathed.
It was like a replay of what had already gone before, only this time it was serious—more serious than Leona had even begun to imagine. For she knew this man—knew he was not given to flights of impulse just for the hell of it. Everything he did had to have a reason, and was always preceded by meticulous planning which took time he would not waste, and effort he would not move unless he felt he absolutely had to do.
Hassan’s small sigh conveyed that he too knew that this was where the prevarication ended. ‘There are problems at home,’ he informed her soberly. ‘My father’s health is failing.’
His father…Anger swiftly converted itself into anxious concern for her father-in-law. Sheikh Khalifa had been frail in health for as long as she had known him. Hassan doted on him and devoted most of his energy to relieving his father of the burdens of rule, making sure he had the best medical attention available and refusing to believe that one day his father would not be there. So, if Hassan was using words like ‘failing’, then the old man’s health must indeed be grave.
‘What happened?’ She began to walk towards him. ‘I thought the last treatment was—’
‘Your interest is a little too late in coming,’ Hassan cut in, and with a flick of a hand halted her steps. ‘For I don’t recall you showing any concern about what it would do to his health when you left a year ago.’
That wasn’t fair, and Leona blinked as his words pricked a tender part of her. Sheikh Khalifa was a good man—a kind man. They had become strong, close friends while she had lived at the palace. ‘He understood why I felt I needed to leave,’ she responded painfully.
You think so? Hassan’s cynical expression derided. ‘Well, I did not,’ he said out loud. ‘But, since you decided it was the right thing for you to do, I now have a serious problem on my hands. For I am, in effect, deemed weak for allowing my wife to walk away from me, and my critics are making rumbling noises about the stability of the country if I do not display some leadership.’
‘So you decided to show that leadership by abducting me, then dragging me back to Rahman?’ Her thick laugh poured scorn over that suggestion, because they both knew taking her back home had to be the worst thing Hassan could possibly do to prove that particular point.
‘You would prefer that I take this second wife who makes you flee in pain when the subject appears in front of you?’
‘She is what you need, not me.’ It almost choked her to say the words. But they were dealing with the truth here, painful though that truth may be. And the truth was that she was no longer the right wife for the heir to a sheikhdom.
‘I have the wife I want,’ he answered grimly.
‘But not the wife you need, Hassan!’ she countered wretchedly.
His eyes flicked up to clash with her eyes. ‘Is that your way of telling me that you no longer love me?’ he challenged.
Oh, dear God. Lifting a trembling hand up to cover her eyes, Leona gave a shake of her head in refusal to answer. Without warning Hassan was suddenly moving at speed down the length of the room.
‘Answer me!’ he insisted when he came to a stop in front of her.
Swallowing on a lump of tears, Leona turned her face away. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.
His sudden grip on her hand dragged it from her eyes. ‘To my face,’ he instructed, ‘You will tell me this to my face!’
Her head whipped up, tear darkened eyes fixing painfully on burning black. ‘Don’t—’ she pleaded.
But he was not going to give in. He was pale and he was hurt and he was furiously angry. ‘I want to hear you state that you feel no love for me,’ he persisted. ‘I want you to tell that wicked lie to my face. And then I want to hear you beg forgiveness when I prove to you otherwise! Do you understand, Leona?’
‘All right! So, I love you! Does that make it all okay?’ she cried out. ‘I love you but I will not stay married to you! I will not watch you ruin your life because of me!’
There—it was out. The bitter truth. On voicing it, she broke free and reeled away, hurting so much it was almost impossible to breathe. ‘And your life?’ he persisted relentlessly. ‘What happens to it while you play the sacrificial lamb for mine?’
‘I’ll get by,’ she said, trying to walk on legs that were shaking so badly she wasn’t sure if she was going to fall down.
‘You’ll marry again?’
She shuddered and didn’t reply.
‘Take lovers in an attempt to supplant me?’
Harsh and cruel though he sounded, she could hear his anguish. ‘I need no one,’ she whispered.
‘Then you mean to spend the rest of your life watching me produce progeny with this second wife I am to take?’
‘Oh, dear heaven.’ She swung around. ‘What are you trying to do to me?’ she choked out tormentedly.
‘Make you see,’ he gritted. ‘Make you open your eyes and see what it is you are condemning us both to.’
‘But I’m not condemning you to anything! I am giving you my blessing to do what you want with your life!’
If she’d offered to give him a whole harem he could not have been more infuriated. His face became a map of hard angles. ‘Then I will take what I want!’ It was a declaration of intent that propelled him across the space between them. Before Leona knew what was coming she was locked in his arms and being lifted until their eyes were level. Startled green irises locked with burning black passion. He gave her one small second to read their message before he was kissing her furiously. Shocked out of one kind of torment, she found herself flung into the middle of another—because once again she had no will to fight. She even released a protesting groan when her feet found solid ground again and he broke the urgent kiss.
Her lips felt hot, and pulsed with such a telling fullness that she had to lick them to try and cool them down. His breath left his body on a hiss that brought her eyes flickering dazedly up to his. Thick dark lashes rested over ebony eyes that were fixed on the moist pink tip of her tongue. A slither of excitement skittered right down the front of her. Her breasts grew tight, her abdomen warming at the prospect of what all of this meant.
Making love. Feeling him deep inside her. No excuses, no drawing back this time. She only had to look at Hassan to know this was it. He was about to stake his claim on what belonged to him.
‘You will regret this later,’ she warned unsteadily, because she knew how his passions and his conscience did not always walk in tandem—especially not where she was concerned.
‘Are you denying me?’ he threw back in a voice that said he was interested in the answer, but only out of curiosity.
Well, Leona asked herself, are you?
The answer was no, she was not denying him anything he wanted to take from her tonight. Tomorrow was another day, another war, another set of agonising conflicts. Reaching up, she touched a gentle finger to his mouth, drew its shape, softened the tension out of it, then sighed, went up on tiptoe and gently joined their mouths.
His hands found the slender frame of her hips and drew her against him; her hands lifted higher to link around his neck so her fingers could slide sensually into his silk dark hair. It was an embrace that sank them into a long deep loving. Her dress fell away, slithering down her body on a pleasurable whisper of silk against flesh. Beneath she wore a dark gold lace bra, matching high-leg briefs and lace-topped stockings. Hassan discovered all of this with the sensual stroke of long fingers. He knew each pleasure point, the quality of each little gasp she breathed into his mouth. When her bra fell away, she sighed and pressed herself against him; when his fingers slid beneath the briefs to cup her bottom she allowed him to ease her into closer contact. They knew each other, loved each other—cared so very deeply about each other. Fight they might do—often. They might have insurmountable problems. But nothing took away the love and caring. It was there, as much part of them as the life-giving oxygen they took into their lungs.
‘You want me,’ he declared.
‘I’ve always wanted you,’ she sadly replied.
‘I am your other half.’
And I am your broken one, Leona thought, releasing an achingly melancholy sigh.
Maybe he knew what she was thinking, because his mouth took burning possession that gave no more room to think at all. It came as an unwelcome break when he lowered her down onto the bed then straightened, taking her briefs with him. Her love-flooded eyes watched his eyes roam over her. He was no longer being driven by his inner devils, she realised as she watched him removing his own clothing. Her compliance had neutralised the compelling need to stake his claim.
So she watched him follow her every movement as she made a sensual love-play out of removing her stockings from her long slender legs. His dark robe landed on the floor on top of her clothing; the tunic eventually went the same way. Beneath waited a desert-bronzed silk-smooth torso, with a muscled structure that set her green eyes glowing with pleasure and made her fingers itch to touch. Those muscles rippled and flexed as he reached down to grasp the only piece of clothing he had left to remove. The black shorts trailed away from a sexual force that set her feminine counterpart pulsing with anticipation.
He knew what was happening, smiled a half-smile, then came to lean over her, lowering his raven head to place a kiss there that was really a claim of ownership. She breathed out a shivering breath of pleasure and he was there to claim that also. Then she had all of him covering her. It was the sweetest feeling she had ever experienced. He was her Arabian lover. The man she had seen across a crowded room long years ago. And she had never seen another man clearly since.
He seduced her mouth, he seduced her body, he seduced her into seducing him. When it all became too much without deeper contact, he eased himself between her thighs and slowly joined them.
Her responsive groan made him pause. ‘What?’ he questioned anxiously.
‘I’ve missed you so much.’ She sighed the words out helplessly.
It was a catalyst that sent him toppling. He staked his claim on those few emotive words with every driving thrust. She died a little. It was strange how she did that, she found herself thinking as the pleasure began to run like liquid fire. They came as one, within the grip of hard, gasping shudders and afterwards lay still, locked together, as their bodies went through the pleasurable throes of settling back down again.