About the Authors

MAISEY YATES knew she wanted to be a writer even before she knew what it was she wanted to write. It wasn’t until she was pregnant with her second child that she found her very first Mills & Boon book in a local thrift store – by the time she’d reached the happily ever after, she had fallen in love. Maisey lives with her supportive, handsome, wonderful, diaper-changing husband and three small children, across the street from her parents and the home she grew up in, in the wilds of southern Oregon.

PENNY JORDAN, one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors, sadly passed away on December 31st, 2011. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over 100 million books around the world. Penny wrote a total of 187 novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour and Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the New York Times bestseller list. Loved for her distinctive voice, she was successful in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, “Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters.” It is perhaps this gift for sympathetic characterization that helps to explain her enduring appeal.

SHARON KENDRICK started story-telling at the age of eleven and has never really stopped. She likes to write fast-paced, feel-good romances with heroes who are so sexy they’ll make your toes curl! Born in west London, she now lives in the beautiful city of Winchester – where she can see the cathedral from her window (but only if she stands on tip-toe). Visit Sharon at www.sharonkendrick.com.

Scandals of the Crown

The Life She Left Behind

Maisey Yates

The Price of Royal Duty

Penny Jordan

The Sheikh’s Heir

Sharon Kendrick

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08335-5

SCANDALS OF THE CROWN

The Life She Left Behind © 2012 Harlequin Books S.A The Price of Royal Duty © 2012 Harlequin Books S.A The Sheikh’s Heir © 2012 Harlequin Books S.A

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Title Page

Copyright

The Life She Left Behind

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

The Price of Royal Duty

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

The Sheikh’s Heir

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

About the Publisher

The Life She Left Behind

Maisey Yates

Chapter One

It had finally happened. Sheikh Taj Ahmad, ruler of Rahat, had lost his mind completely. She was there, standing in the shadows on the otherwise vacant balcony that extended over the back portion of the ballroom. In an instant all the well-dressed, beautiful women that surrounded him faded away. He could see nothing but Angelina Carpenter.

So many times she had featured in his dreams, and yet, she had never quite looked like this. Hair pulled back into a ponytail, skinny jeans hugging her curves. This was a formal event, the engagement party for Prince Alessandro Santina. And famed oil heiress Angelina Carpenter was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

The entire party had possessed an air of the surreal from the moment it had started. The presence of the loud, tacky Jackson family, the prince’s future in-laws, with their penchant for drama had turned the royal setting on its head from the beginning.

The tension was only heightened by the attendance of Alessandro’s ex-fiancée, who looked beautiful and brittle, ready to crack at any moment.

But none of that mattered now. He couldn’t see it anymore. He could hardly remember the reason he’d come tonight. There was nothing but Angelina now.

She turned her head, her eyes clashing with his, in spite of the distance and every person between them. She froze, up in her hiding place there on the balcony, her beautiful lips parting.

He could see her intake of breath, see her hold it, and he held his in answer. Or possibly because breathing had simply become too difficult.

“Taj,” the woman to his right, the one who had been attempting to climb him all evening, purred his name, her fingers curving into his bicep, “would you go and fetch me a drink?”

He turned to look at her, breaking the spell Angelina had held him under. The room came back, conversation rising in volume. His unwanted companion’s red lips were pursed into a pout. His stomach clenched. With annoyance, not desire.

“I do not fetch,” he said, breaking out of the woman’s grasp, redirecting his attention to the balcony.

Angelina was gone.

Had she really been an illusion? A dream? A waking one this time, sent to tempt and torment him with the memory of what he could not have?

It wasn’t possible. Angelina, in his dreams, was always the polished heiress. Never undone, not even in his more erotic dreams, when he pictured holding her in his arms, their naked limbs entwined. Even then she was the soul of high-gloss perfection.

This woman, with her strawberry hair pulled back into something as juvenile and unsophisticated as a ponytail, was not the Angelina of his fantasies.

That could only mean she was real.

Cold pin pricks dotted over his back, a clammy sweat on his forehead, as he wove through the ballroom, headed to the back doors. Unless there were secret passageways in the Santina palace, and it was possible, she would have to pass by the ballroom when she went down the stairs.

He moved quickly through the crowd, paying no attention to the people who tried to greet him. He hardly heard them, hardly understood them. The low din of conversation and the strains of music simply faded.

He pushed the doors open and cursed when he saw the empty corridor. Perhaps it had been an illusion. Another round of torture at the hands of Angelina Carpenter. Three years since he’d seen her and still she tormented him.

He heard a sound to his left and he followed it, feeling a fool on an even more foolish errand. But he could not stop himself. Not now.

His heart thundered and he rounded the corner and into another stretch of hallway, just in time to see long strawberry hair disappearing around the next corner.

And he ran.

It couldn’t be him. No, it very well could be him, and that was the problem. The very scary, very bad, very heart pounding-hand-shaking problem.

Angelina leaned against the wall in the vacant corridor and closed her eyes, tried to catch her breath. Taj.

Flashes. Pictures. The happiest moments of her life flashed behind her eyes. Taj when she’d met him for the first time, his warm smile. His attempt at wearing a cowboy hat and adapting to the Western style of horseback riding. And the evening they’d spent in the main barn at her father’s ranch, the night she’d fallen in love with him.

She fought hard against the pain that was threatening to overwhelm her. So much of her life, of what had happened in the past three years, was tied to Taj. All of it, really. Because without Taj, without her father’s deception, she never would have run away from Texas. Never would have ended up in Italy, taking care of Princess Carlotta’s son, Luca.

Without Taj, she would never have known what it felt like to love someone, and find out how much it hurt when they didn’t love you back.

A muttered curse in Arabic brought her head up, and her gaze collided with Taj’s coal colored eyes. He looked the same. Dark and commanding. His black hair cropped short, no sign of the slight curl at his neck that she’d loved to twirl around her fingers.

It was the same Taj, yet different somehow. Leaner. Harder.

The impact he had on her hadn’t changed, either. Her heart was pounding, her body shaking, a surge of adrenaline making her blood run hotter, faster.

He was the man who haunted her dreams. The reason she woke up in a cold sweat, aching and unsatisfied. The reason no man had appealed to her in the least since she’d left home.

He exhaled a breath and for the first time since spotting him from the balcony, she drew breath in.

“It is you.” He sounded like a man addressing a ghost. He looked about like that, too.

She tried to smile. “And it’s you.”

“I was invited to help celebrate this occasion. What escapes me is why you’re here. No one has heard from you in three years.”

“How do you…how do you know that?”

“I keep in touch,” he said, his voice cold as stone and just as hard.

She bet he did. Her father had one of the things that Sheikh Taj prized above all else. Oil. Their money was slick with it, and they had been ready to make an alliance. She imagined they had made it, even without her as the glue to hold it together.

Without her as the sacrificial virgin.

“You and my father always did have a lot in common,” she said, her tone sharp and lofty. Rich, considering she was standing in front of him in jeans and a ratty ponytail while he was in a custom made suit.

“Not as much as you might think,” he said.

“I don’t have time to wonder what that means. I have to get back.”

“To?”

“Luca. He’s asleep he…”

“You have a lover with you?” he asked, his voice going cold.

She laughed in spite of the situation. “Luca is a child.”

He jerked back as though she’d hit him. “Your child?”

“Princess Carlotta’s child. I’m his nanny.”

A muscle in his jaw jumped. “You traded your life, your future, as my queen to be a nanny?”

“No. I traded being your queen for some self-respect.”

She turned and walked away from him, her entire body shaking, regret threatening to climb up from her chest and strangle her.

Chapter Two

She closed the door to her room behind her and leaned against the doorway. She’d lied to escape from him, but hey, who could blame her?

Luca was sleeping in his own room, and he didn’t require her care at night. That was one reason she’d felt confident enough to sneak down to the engagement party. To catch a glimpse of the life she no longer lived. Glittering royals, an undercurrent of drama beneath the smooth, refined setting. It was all so familiar.

That had been her three years ago, down among the people with her formal gown and fake smile. An heiress with a comfortable, wealthy life stretching in front of her. But she’d told Taj the truth. She’d traded all that for self-respect. For a chance to control her own life and find out what she could be other than a pawn.

A hard knock vibrated the door behind her and she turned sharply, her hand over her mouth. He’d followed her. She shouldn’t be surprised.

The worst thing was, she wanted to open the door. Her hand was already on the knob. Just like three years ago, what she truly wanted, was to be with him.

But then, she hadn’t wanted marriage without love. And Taj hadn’t loved her. He’d wanted to acquire her, along with a significant merger with her father’s oil company.

Of course, she hadn’t known that. She’d thought the young, Arabic leader had been smitten with her. That he’d looked at her and seen something special. That he’d been as crazy about her as she’d been about him. She’d been so young then. So naive. Love had seemed an easy, wondrous find. It had seemed the be-all and end-all.

She’d learned since that that wasn’t true.

If love was so powerful, so important, then the moment her love for Taj had died, all of her thoughts of him would have dissolved and blown away like desert sand. They hadn’t. He still plagued her sleep. He was still the man her body desired.

The absence of love hadn’t changed that. It was a sobering realization, just how much Taj still mattered. How much power he still possessed. That he could make her run. She gritted her teeth. No. She didn’t run. At least, she wouldn’t run now. Wouldn’t give him that satisfaction, that level of importance.

She took a breath and her hand turned the door handle before she’d fully processed the action, and she found herself staring into Taj’s obsidian eyes.

“Don’t run from me again,” he bit out.

“Again? Don’t flatter yourself. I was never running from you. I was running to independence. I’m not a frightened child. I don’t run from things.” She crossed her arms beneath her chest.

“Liar. In the hall just now, you were very much running from me. From the attraction that still exists between us.”

“Attraction? Have you been drinking tonight?”

“I don’t drink. You know that. And yes, attraction. It has always been there, or have you forgotten the night we spent in your father’s barn?”

“You make it sound like we…” His gaze dropped to her lips. “We kissed. That’s all.” And they’d cuddled up together, looking at the night sky through a hole in the roof, her hand on his chest, her mouth spilling out all of her stupid dreams for the future. Dreams she’d believed he’d shared in. But while she’d been counting stars, he’d been counting money. The money he would make when he married her.

“There are simple kisses, Angelina, and then there are the kinds of kisses we shared that night. And they are not the same thing.”

No, they weren’t. But the only reason they’d been different was because she’d been barely twenty and had fancied herself in love. They’d felt new and precious, and more exciting than anything else ever had.

“We just kissed, Taj.”

“And if we kissed again? You think you would feel…?”

“Nothing,” she whispered. “I would feel nothing.”

He leaned in and her breath caught. She didn’t back away from him. She couldn’t. “Is that so? You have not thought of me since you left? Not once?”

Always. “No.”

“You lie again,” he said, his voice rough, his eyes glittering in challenge.

If he was trying to intimidate her, it wouldn’t work. Her eyes were open now, to the world, to the people around her. People she’d thought loved her.

She was not a child anymore. And she would not act like one. Wouldn’t allow him to walk into her life and devastate it or think even for a moment that he could. She wouldn’t allow him to have all the control. No. She had control now. She had power.

She put her hands on his face, his stubble rough beneath her palms. Leaning in, she pressed her lips to his. They were hot and hard, immobile. Her stomach tightened, a fierce rush of need flowing through her, the kind of need she hadn’t felt since the last time Taj had held her in his arms.

He didn’t move and she angled her head, sliding her tongue against the seam of his lips. That was when he moved, like a man breaking free from chains. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him, deepening the kiss, his tongue moving against hers.

She could feel his heart beneath her hands, raging hard, out of control. Every bit as out of control as she felt.

He took a step and she took a step back, then he took another and she followed. He released her for a moment to shut the door hard behind him, the sound jarring her back to reality.

“What are you doing?”

“You started it, Angel, shouldn’t you have the answer?” he asked.

“I don’t…” Her pulse thundered in her head and she tried to form a coherent sentence. She had meant to show him she had command now. That she wasn’t so easily manipulated. But all of those intentions had been knocked right out of her the moment their lips had touched.

She couldn’t prove a point, not while she was so utterly lost in sensation.

He took a step toward her, his expression changing, softening. He put his hand on her cheek. “You are real. You must be.”

“I…of course I am.”

“You never said goodbye to me when you left.”

“I was angry at you.”

The corners of his lips turned down. When he made that face, it was easy to imagine him as a sulky, spoiled child. Nothing about that should be endearing, and yet, she found it was. “I surmised as much. I never did find out why.”

“You don’t know?”

He shook his head. “I assumed perhaps you had found a better prospect, and yet here you are, a nanny, so I’m certain now that isn’t the case.”

She laughed. “I did find a better prospect. Independence. Life beyond being your accessory. When I found out my father was promising you my hand in order to cement the merger I…I couldn’t stay. I’m not a thing, Taj, and I refused to be traded like I was.”

“Angelina…”

“Is this the part where you tell me I misunderstood? That you weren’t really going to do it? That you had other motives?” She’d wondered over the years. Wondered if she’d been too quick to run. If she should have stayed and talked to him.

Waiting for the words now was tantamount to torture.

“No. I’m not going to say that. Because I was using you to get the merger. Though, I confess I thought you were complicit in the arrangement.”

Only because she’d imagined she’d meant something to him. That when he’d kissed her, there had been feeling in it.

“I wasn’t.”

“And now what, Angelina? Do I leave you here? Do we never see each other again?”

The idea of Taj turning and walking away, the thought of never seeing him again, made her heart ache. More than that, it reminded her of the ache that had existed since she’d lost him the first time.

He was the man she’d never been able to forget. The one demon from her past left unexorcised. What would it take? What would it take to rid her body of her desire for him? To squeeze those deeply held feelings from her heart? To erase him from her mind.

Her body burned from the kiss. Her heart burned from looking at him.

She hated it. She hated how much he controlled her. Whether he was standing in front of her, or in another country entirely, the man held too much power. It had to end.

He turned away, and her stomach jolted. Leaving, separation, that wouldn’t work. It wasn’t enough. She knew it. And she was desperate. Desperate to make it go away. Her desire for him was beneath her skin, in her blood.

There was only one way she could think of to bleed herself of it, to pour it out of her.

“Don’t go,” she said.

He stopped, his shoulders going ridged. “What?”

It wasn’t too late to go back. To stop herself from touching him. From confirming what she was certain he suspected. But she didn’t want to. She had run from him, from her feelings, her heartbreak, all those years ago. But she hadn’t escaped it. It had clung to her, wrapped itself around her heart like a clinging vine.

Distance hadn’t killed it. But he was here now. Maybe if she could have him, just once, she could draw a line through that part of her life and call it done.

She took a deep breath, ignoring the trembling in her fingers as she reached out to put her hand on his shoulder. “Stay. Stay with me tonight.”

Chapter Three

Taj’s original theory, the one in which Angelina was a mirage, was starting to seem likely again. She had felt real beneath his hands, beneath his lips. Her unsteady fingers felt real on his back, but the words she’d just spoken made it all seem like a fantasy.

He turned to face her, his heart raging, his blood hot. “What did you say?”

She bit one of her lips, swollen from his earlier attention. “Stay. I want you to stay.”

“And count stars?” he asked, his tone sardonic, his stomach tight with the memory.

She snorted a breath and shook her head, her strawberry colored ponytail swinging with the motion. “No. I’m not a girl who thinks she’s in love anymore. I’m a woman. I got everything I could ask for from my relationship with you. Heartbreak. Betrayal. And yet I never got the one thing that might have made it all worth it.”

“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.”

“Tea, yes, a meet-the-press moment, no.”

“Our engagement must be announced.”

She wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to keep from falling apart. “I haven’t even been here for twenty-four hours.”

“We’ll need to marry before it becomes obvious you’re pregnant.”

“I forgot you’re traditional around here.”

“Show me the royal family that disregards such traditions completely. Have they disregarded them in Santina?”

Angelina thought of Princess Carlotta, of the shame the press had put her through for having a child out of wedlock. Even now, years after the fact, it marked her. Marked her entire existence, and the existence of her son. “No.”

“Then do not play like Rahat is such an anomaly. We have traditions to uphold, certain expectations we must meet. You will become accustomed to it.”

“I’m not sure I can,” she said, her voice hardly achieving the volume of a whisper.

When he responded, his tone was surprisingly gentle. “What other option is there, Angelina?”

She could leave. She could go into hiding. Hope that he never found her. She could take her child away from his father; she could steal her child’s birthright. Deny it the chance to be royalty, the first born of a king.

Yes, she could do that. But it would be wrong. It would be selfish. If Taj were a bad man, if he were incapable of being a good father, of loving their child, then maybe it would be excusable. But the fact was, he was just as likely to be a good parent as she was.

The look on his face after dinner last night, when his eyes had fallen to his stomach, had nearly brought her to her knees. There had been tenderness there, a longing that had made her chest ache in response.

No, she could not take Taj’s child from him. She couldn’t take her baby from his father.

And that meant, no matter how much it sucked for her, she had to stick it out.

She met Taj’s eyes and her heart tripped and fell over itself. There were certain things that wouldn’t be a hardship. Being with Taj…it had been incredible. Unlike anything she’d ever experienced before.

He had been as amazing as she’d imagined. No, even more amazing.

But she was afraid of what he made her feel, too. Afraid of getting involved with him again. Afraid of loving him again.

He was arrogant and entitled, with strong and proud tendencies when he was angry. Loving him should take effort. Yet, she found it was a lot harder to stop herself from loving him. And that was just stupid.

“There is no other option,” she said.

“You knew that from the beginning.”

She nodded. “Yes. I did.” From the moment she’d seen the positive test, she’d known. It was either hide the truth from him forever, or embrace life as his queen. “But…where did these dresses come from?” If she really was going to be his wife she would take a stand here at least. She wasn’t wearing cast-off gowns from cast-off women.

His face hardened, for a moment he looked like he’d been carved from stone. “They have been here. Just as this room has been here. Awaiting its queen.”

“What?”

“They are yours. I had them prepared when you accepted my proposal.”

“And you…kept them?”

He tilted his chin upward, the gesture making him look haughty. Defiant. “I was to marry one day with or without you. Clothes are altered easily enough, why should I replace them.”

“Why indeed?” she struck back. “If the woman in question does not matter, if she’s only part and parcel to a business agreement then why does it matter what she might want? Who she is?”

“It matters,” he said, his voice rough.

She took a step back, her stomach curling in. “Oh. I…I…”

He appraised her for a moment, his dark eyes searching. “It will not be so bad to be my wife, will it?”

She didn’t know what to say. Words stuck in her throat. Words in denial and in agreement.

His expression hardened. “Well then, let us prepare to speak to the media.”

She had a feeling she’d done the wrong thing. But she could not find the words to placate him. Because they would be a lie.

It would be hard to be married to him. Hard to guard her heart against feelings she didn’t want but wasn’t certain she could deny.

“You were exquisite,” Taj said as he closed the limo door and encased them in the air-conditioning.

“I hardly spoke.” She felt horrible. Her head was pounding, and she was still shaking from having to sit there in front of so many people.

“And in Rahat, that will be considered a bonus.”

“Oh, I do hope you’re joking,” she said, treating him to her deadliest glare. In addition to the headache, she was hot, starving and in no mood to take garbage off anyone. Least of all Taj.

He shrugged, as if shaking off her anger. “I was. Sort of. But the way the more traditional citizens of my country think is not necessarily the way I think.”

“And how do you think, Sheikh Taj Ahmad, because I think I’m entitled to know that seeing as I’m about to leg-shackle myself to you for the rest of our lives.”

Something flashed in his dark eyes. Amusement mixed with something deeper. Deadlier. “A leg shackle doesn’t do anything for me fantasy-wise. Handcuffs, perhaps.”

“I am in no mood,” she said, keeping her sharp glare trained on him.

“My apologies,” he said, his voice stiff. “I expect a wife to meet my needs. To provide me with heirs.”

“What?” she asked, leaning forward in her seat. “Meet your needs? What does that mean?”

“I expect for her to share my bed, to accompany me to events, to have my children. That’s straightforward enough.”

“That’s…sexist enough,” she said.

“How? It has nothing to do with you being a woman, and everything to do with being the wife of a sheikh. I have particular duties as ruler, and you have particular duties as the spouse of a ruler.”

“So if I was sheikh…”

“You very likely wouldn’t be called sheikh.”

She let out an exasperated breath. “Fine. If I were sheikha,” she said, drawing out the syllables, “then you would be expected to fulfill my sexual needs and hang on my arm at events?”

“That sounds fair,” he said, a frown marring his features. “I take it you are not thrilled with my expectations?”

“Does it matter?” she asked, feeling panic start to rise in her breast. “Does any of it matter? I’m stuck. You have the power here. You and I both know that.”

“I am not a tyrant, neither am I a dictator. I get no pleasure from beating you into submission. What do you expect from a husband?”

Love. If there was love, so many other things could be forgiven. But without it…what was there? “I…I would like to be considered as a person, not an ornament. I don’t want my life to begin and end with my husband’s needs. I want him to consider mine. I want a husband who will love his children and take an interest in them.” A husband who loves me.

His brows were drawn together, his expression contemplative. “It is not how things are done.”

“What isn’t?”

“There are…certain things expected of the Sheikh of Rahat, things I learned as a child and…they did not include caring for children or…many of the other things you mentioned. My duty is to my people.”

“But if you can’t love the people in your household, how can you expect to care for those you rule?”

“Ruling requires distance and a firm hand.”

Something inside her deflated and sank down to her toes. “It’s the love that you have trouble with.”

“I did not learn it.”

The way he said it, so authoritative and so final, told her he never intended to try.

Chapter Seven

Angelina pulled her thin robe more tightly around herself and stepped out into the gardens, the cobblestones, cooled by the night air, felt good on her feet. Calming. Soothing.

She followed one of the paths that led into the center of the lavishly kept landscape, her thoughts turning over that afternoon’s conversation with Taj. Taj didn’t know how to love. He hadn’t learned how.

A shame since she loved him.

She was certain of that now. That she loved him. That she had loved for him for years, and that no matter how bad their first parting had been, the good memories would always be stronger.

“What brings you out here?”

Angelina whirled around to find the voice in the darkness and nearly ran into Taj. “What are you doing out here?”

“I asked first. Come now, I am sheikh and I am accustomed to being answered.” He said it with no irony. Nothing but the absolute certainty of a man who only knew how to get his way.

She shifted her weight to one leg and put her hand on her hip. “You’ll have to be disappointed then, sugar.”

He narrowed his eyes, clearly annoyed. Good. “Then I’ll settle for giving you my reasons. I couldn’t sleep.”

She shrugged. “Oh, funny. I could. That’s why I’m out here. You’re just seeing my astral projection. I’m sound asleep in the house.”

“You have such a mouth on you,” he said. “I am not complaining. I’ve benefitted hugely from your use of that mouth.”

It was her turn to be annoyed. “A gentleman wouldn’t bring such things up.”

“I’m not a gentleman,” he said, his tone rough.

“Ah…no of course not. You’re a sheikh.”

“Sit,” he said, gesturing to the fountain.

She crossed her arms and tilted her head. “Come on now, Taj, you should know me better than that.”

He kept his dark eyes trained on her, his face shadowed in the dim light of the garden. He moved to the edge of the fountain and sat down, then touched the place beside him. “Please, sit with me.”

The change was so abrupt, so unlike him, that it made her chest feel tight. It made her feel like maybe he did know her. Like he might at least try to be the right man for her, instead of just asking her to be the right woman for him.

She turned and sat down beside him, her hands in her lap. “What is it, Taj?”

“I might ask you the same question since you’re wandering the gardens at night.”

“And so are you.”

“I thought…” He frowned. “I was certain I heard you, but I know that isn’t possible. My rooms are on the other end of the palace. But…I was certain I did.” His brow was furrowed, his forehead lined with concentration.

His admission made her stomach tighten, made her chest feel full. “I’m all right, I just…”

“You aren’t,” he said, turning and cupping her cheek, his thumb sliding lightly over her cheekbone, the movement sending a shiver through her body.

“I will be,” she said, not sure if that was the truth or not. “Your family has ruled Rahat for…for generations, right?”

“A thousand years.”

“You believe in…in fate and destiny, I’ll bet.” She looked down at her hands, still folded in her lap.

“Yes.”

“So tell me, did I ever have a chance of escaping this?” She looked up, around the courtyard. “Or was I always meant to be Queen of Rahat, the mother of your heirs, no matter what? Is our fate written in stone or do we have…do we have any control?”

He frowned. “Angelina…” He looked away from her, appearing to change tactic. “We both had a choice that night in Santina. We chose to follow our desire.”

He touched her again, his fingers sifting through her hair. And she could feel the unsteadiness in his hand. “But did we have a choice in that?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

He slid his hand down to her face and she looked at him. She saw heat in his eyes, lust, but there was something deeper. A longing that went further than the need for physical satisfaction. She knew that longing. It went so deep, felt so essential, it was painful. She wondered if he truly felt it. For her, as she did for him.

“There is always a choice, Angel,” he said, leaning in, firm, hot lips touching hers, shocking in the cool night air. “What choice will you make now?”

“I…” Her lower lip trembled and she caught it between her teeth, the tremor working its way through her body. She released her lip. “I choose you,” she said.

His breath rushed from his body, a low growl behind it. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him. He kissed her and she nearly sighed with relief. It had been too long.

Everything. All of it had gone on far too long. Taj was the only man she’d ever loved. Being away from him had been like functioning with a piece of herself missing. She’d done it, she’d done what she had to do to try to be strong. But she would be lying if she didn’t admit to herself that being in his arms felt so much better than keeping her pride ever had.

And that was frightening.

“Wait,” she said, pulling away from him, her heart thundering. Pride would have a place here, and she would see it had a victory.

“What?” he asked, pressing his forehead against hers, his breath sporadic.

“How do you see me?”

“What does that mean, Angel?”

“What am I to you? Am I the woman you are chained to? Am I the woman who got away that you seized the chance to capture again? A salve for your wounded ego?” She put her hands on either side of his face. “What am I to you?”

He hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation, she saw the man she’d known first. The man who had romanced her in Texas, rather than the autocratic ruler. “You are…the woman who has haunted my dreams these past years. When I saw you at Alessandro’s engagement party I thought you were a mirage. I didn’t trust myself. I had seen you too many times before, only to get close and discover it wasn’t really you. You are my most hated delusion and my deepest desire.” The words sounded pulled from him, as though each one carried a heavy weight. A high price. “Does that answer your question?”

She felt a tear slide down her cheek and she brushed it away. “I…I imagined you never thought about me again after I left.”

He laughed, a short, bitter sound. “There was a time when I thought of little else.”

“That surprises me.”

“Why? Did you forget?”

She didn’t want to give him honesty, but there was no way around it. Not when his words were so naked and raw, so obviously true. “Of course I didn’t forget. I uprooted my whole life. I left my country. The money, the lifestyle I was used to having, to try to escape the situation I found myself in.”

“To escape me.”

“To escape marrying a man who saw me as nothing more than a possession. To escape a father who saw me as a bargaining chip. To find out who I was away from the manipulation of others. Don’t flatter yourself by making it so personal.”

He tightened his hold on her, his gaze intense. “You think it’s not?”

She shook her head.

“You are a liar,” he said, leaning in, his lips skimming her cheek. “I think the things you feel toward me are very personal.”

Why did he do this to her? Why did she have such a hard time resisting him? She didn’t even want to resist. She tilted her head and kissed him, her eyes closed tight. She pulled her head back, her breathing shallow.

“What am I to you, Angelina Carpenter?” he asked, tracing the line of her lips with his finger.

“You are—” she cleared her throat and tried to disguise the quiver in her voice “—you are a mystery to me, as is my attraction to you. That’s why I keep coming back to fate.”

For a moment, he looked stunned. Then in one fluid movement he picked her up from her position on the fountain and stood, striding across the courtyard. She looped her arms around his neck and held on.

“That’s a good enough answer for me,” he said, stopping in front of a divan that was shrouded in palms. He set her down on the velvet surface and pulled his shirt over his head, coming to sit down beside her. “Is it enough for you?”

She nodded, unsure she could make her voice work.

“Good,” he whispered, lowering his head and kissing her.

She slid her hands to his chest, reveled in the feeling of his muscles beneath her palms. He was everything she’d ever fantasized about. He was…Taj. And even though so much of what she wanted from him was going unmet, she knew that for now, for this moment, she would give everything.

One moment to lay herself bare, in a physical sense, to hold nothing back, before she retreated behind her emotional protection. She couldn’t love him for their whole marriage, not without his love. It would destroy her.

But she would do it right now. Unreservedly.

While his guard was down. While he was unprotected, too.

He pulled off her robe, then her flimsy top. The cold air hit her bare breasts and she gasped. Taj laughed and bent his head, drawing a tightened nipple into his mouth. She clutched his shoulders, his name on her lips, her body on fire with need for him. All of him.

She pushed her pants down her thighs and kicked them off while Taj worked to free himself of his own clothes. When his skin pressed against hers, she sighed in relief. How did he feel so essential? How did being with him make her feel like something that had been missing all her life was present in a profound way?

He lowered his head and kissed her neck as he settled between her thighs, sliding into her slowly. A short sigh of pleasure escaped her lips and he caught it with his, the kiss deep and sensual, working with his thrusts.

She kept her eyes open, locked with his as she rocked against him, driving them both higher until they reached the peak together. He held her against him, his heart thundering, his skin slicked with sweat.

She felt empowered by it. By the fact that she’d affected him. By the fact that she wasn’t in it alone. She’d wondered if it had all been in her head. For so long she’d wondered that. If she’d been the only one who’d felt anything. If he’d had to close his eyes and think of Rahat when he kissed her back in Texas.

But she knew now, knew it with even greater certainty than she had that night in Santina. She knew that while he might not love her, he desired her. That it was the kind of desire that went beyond simple lust and set out to drive a person crazy.

She knew, because she felt it, too. Because she recognized that what she felt lived in him, too.

She could hold on to that. She could forget about the love thing and pretend that lust was all that mattered. She closed her eyes tight and tried to cling to the lie.

Chapter Eight

“The wedding will take place in two weeks.” Taj walked into Angelina’s quarters and a hard slug of arousal hit him in the gut.

They’d stayed out in the garden until the sky had started turning pink at the horizon line, bleeding up into the inky blackness, washing it clean. He’d held her until he was certain they would be missed, and possibly discovered, naked on the divan, covered only in her robe.

Then he’d sent her back to her room, and he’d gone back to his. And his body had burned. He’d ended up in an ice cold shower, gritting his teeth as the water hit his skin like a thousand needles and his erection ached, finding absolutely no relief.

He’d ended up shivering and horny.

What was it about her? How was it she’d managed to burrow her way under his skin all those years ago? It was as though she lived in him. A strange thought. A foolish thought, and yet it seemed the only explanation for what he felt when he was around her.

Angelina looked at him, her lush lips shaped into a perfect O. “What? Why so soon?”

He looked pointedly at her stomach.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I won’t start showing for a while. I mean, I knew you wanted to marry quickly but…two weeks? In the States I would have a hard time getting a wedding cake on two weeks’ notice!”

“You underestimate the power of money.”

“No. I don’t. Trust me. My family is practically made of money.”

“Then you underestimate the power of the sheikh of Rahat. I will have my staff see to the wedding feast. The ceremony will be held here at the palace. Small by royal standards but it cannot be helped.”

Her smooth brow crinkled as she drew her eyebrows together. “Oh, yes. It can’t be helped because I’m disgraced. Can’t have people thinking I’m pregnant, it would reflect badly on me. Not on you, of course, but then, isn’t that the way of it?”

Anger curled his stomach. Anger at whom…Angelina, his country and its traditions, or himself, he wasn’t sure. Possibly all three. “If you had married me three years ago you could have had the finest wedding imaginable,” he said through clenched teeth. “A parade through the city. A handmade wedding gown. Thousands of attendants ready to pay homage to the new queen.”

If she had married him three years ago he would have spared so many sleepless nights, so much longing.

At least he had her now. She would have to stay with him. She would be his wife and the mother of his child. She could not leave him now. That brought a slight sense of a relief, took away some of the pressure in his chest.

“Oh, yes, that’s what I need, Taj. A bigger wedding. That’s the problem. It simply won’t be grand enough if I’m not brought into the church on…on…camel back.” She stood, her pale cheeks flushing a dark rose. “How did you know that was the most essential thing to me? I should have married you three years ago, if not for the wedding, so my wardrobe would be more current.”

He stepped back, the heat in his stomach spreading now, a blaze of anger streaking along his veins. “Is that what you want? More gowns? I will give them to you. I can give you anything. Everything. I am Sheikh. I can provide you with things no other man can.”

“Oh, is that so,” she said, hands on her shapely hips. “Well, I believe that, sugar, I do. But there are men who could provide me with things you will never be able to give me.”

“I think not,” he said, striding forward and wrapping his arms around her, pulling her against him. Her eyes widened and he gentled his hold, his heart hammering. “I think not,” he said again, his voice softer.

He moved his thumb over her bottom lip and a shiver of desire racked his body. “The need I feel for you is as much a part of me as my blood,” he said. “And I am certain you feel the same.”

She pulled back. “That’s sex. So maybe we have good sex, and maybe we both want more of it. But sex isn’t everything.”

“You say that, but you are wrong. You have some…misconstrued idea that marriage is about love, I imagine. A modern concept that I have no patience for. Suitability, chemistry, that is what matters. Not some vague idea of a feeling that has no guarantee of existing let alone lasting. This,” he said, putting his hand on her chest, feeling her heart beating rapidly beneath his palm, “this is real. What I make you feel.”

“Go away, Taj.”

Dismissed. No one dismissed him. No one left him. And Angelina seemed to do both of those things freely.

“For now,” he said, taking a step back, ignoring the ugly twisting in his chest that was threatening to cut off his air supply. “But remember this, Angelina. You are pregnant with my heir, and you will be my wife. There is no running from this.”

He said it as much to remind him as her. She couldn’t leave him. Not now.

A good thing. Because if she did…he did not know how he would live with himself.

Chapter Nine

“She is getting sicker, Sheikh.” Hana, one of the maids trusted with Angelina’s care, stood before him, wringing her hands. “She is not keeping any food down. Not all day.”

“Do you think she needs a doctor?” he asked.

Hana shrugged. “The doctor has been. He says as long as she does not lose too much weight…he says her sickness is normal. Bad, but to be expected.”

Hana was one of the few on staff who was aware of the fact that Angelina was pregnant, but as she was attending her, Taj had felt it important.

“There is nothing that can be done?”

“She was given medication for motion sickness, which helps some women. Though she’s reluctant to take it. It makes her nervous.”

“Stubborn woman,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “Is she asleep now?”

“Yes.”

“I will go to her. Keep everyone away from her end of the palace. I do not want her disturbed. Today, she is in my care.”

He stalked across the palace, his footsteps echoing on the marble floor, staff scurrying aside when they saw him coming.

His heart was pounding heavily by the time he reached the entrance to her quarters. He moved through her rooms, the elegant seating area, her sunroom, to her sleeping chamber. He paused at the door, a strange unease filling him.

He’d never cared for anyone in his life. Not on a personal level. On a grand scale, he cared for his people. But he sent others to do his bidding. He signed papers, he waved from vehicles. It was his administrative staff who assigned the execution of tasks.

He was aware, for the first time, of how different ordering care and giving it were.

He pushed the gilded door open and saw Angelina. She was in bed, the covers drawn up beneath her chin, her hair damp, sticking to her forehead.

“You are too hot,” he said, striding across the room, sitting on the edge of the bed and putting his hand on her forehead.

She stirred, opened her eyes, the expression in them confused and sleepy. “I…I’m not. I just…I threw up again and it makes me sweaty. What are you doing here?”

A good question. He felt completely and totally out of his depth. A foreign experience. “I heard you were unwell.”

“I’m morning sick,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“It is three in the afternoon.”

“Morning sickness isn’t always confined to morning, I’ve discovered. But other than feeling like death warmed over, the doctor says I’m fine. The baby is fine.”

“You do not look fine,” he said. “You look like a ghost.”

“I’m not one, though. Promise.” She put her hand on his cheek, his skin warm against his.

“What do you need?”

“What?”

He stood. “What do you need? I will order…I will get it for you.” He didn’t know why, but it seemed important. There were other things he had planned on doing today, but this seemed essential. It seemed like the most essential thing he could do with his time.

“I don’t…I don’t know. I…”

He looked around the room and saw a bowl sitting on the vanity with a white washcloth draped over the side. The bowl was filled with water. He touched his fingers to the surface and found it cold.

“One moment,” he said. He went into her opulent bathroom and refilled the bowl with warm water, bringing it back into her room.

He dipped the cloth in the water, wringing out the excess before returning to her bed.

He pushed her damp hair from her forehead, resting his palm against her skin for a moment before replacing it with the cloth.

She sighed, her eyes meeting his. “Thank you. I felt disgusting.”

“Did you?”

“Sweaty.” She arched slightly. “My shirt is sticking to me.”

He frowned. “Do you need a bath?”

“I wanted one. I was afraid I would pass out.”

He hesitated to ask the next question, because intimacy between them, even the basest intimacy of greeting one another in the corridors, had been cut off since their argument two days earlier. But he had to ask. “Can I stay with you? Can…can I help you?”

“I…yes.”

Angelina watched Taj disappear into the bathroom. She had no idea what had caused his sudden desire to take care of her. Concern for her? For the baby?

Of course he was worried about the baby. It was his heir.

She bit the inside of her cheek. That wasn’t really a fair thought. Taj wasn’t a terrible person, and he’d never acted cold and detached in regards to the baby. It was her he seemed to feel nothing for.

Well, nothing beyond lust and possession. He wanted her, but that wasn’t the same as caring. A man could want riches, but it came from greed. From the need to possess. Not from caring.

She was nothing more than an acquisition to him. Like a new car. A lucrative business deal.

He returned a moment later. He had taken his shirt off, his muscular torso bare and beautiful to her, even in her current state. He bent and scooped her from the bed. She looped her arms around his neck and allowed him to carry her into the bathroom, where he set her gently in front of the newly filled tub.

“Do you need help?” he asked.

“With…with my clothes?” Her heart beat unevenly. “No.”

He turned his back, the muscles shifting, enticing. Somehow, her appreciation of his body transcending her nausea. Almost.

She wobbled slightly as she stepped out of her pajama pants then pulled her top over her head. She got into the tub, the water coming over her breasts, the bubbles helping preserve her modesty. As if she really cared. As if Taj hadn’t already seen it all.

“I’m in,” she said.

He turned, the tension in his body obvious, his jaw tight. He knelt down on the floor beside the tub and she rested her head against the back of the tub. She felt Taj’s hand on her neck, his strong fingers slowly kneading away the ache in her muscles. She hadn’t realized how tense she’d gotten.

But then, heartbreak and constant vomiting could do that to a girl.

He put his other hand on her shoulder, working at the knots there. She released a breath, trying to ignore the other kind of tension that was flooding through her while the muscle tension receded.

This was what she craved from him. This caring. This touch that went beyond a need for sex and satisfaction. A touch that gave.

She wanted to stay with him like this forever. And she also wished he’d never shown her this part of himself. Never shown her this fleeting glimpse of how it could be if he loved her.

If only things could be different.

She closed her eyes, and felt a tear roll down her cheek. “I wish things were different.”

Chapter Ten

I wish things were different.

Her words echoed in him. Mocked him. Tore at his insides. He replayed them over and over as he helped her from the tub, drying her, trying to keep his body disinterested, as he carried her to bed and tucked her back in.

As he walked out into her sitting room and collapsed onto the sofa, his hands were shaking as he forked his fingers through his hair.

She was unhappy. He had known it. Had seen the unease in her from the moment she’d arrived in Rahat and he had not cared. Because he had her. That was all that had mattered to him. That she couldn’t leave him again. That he would be able to keep her.

Keep her? As if she was an exotic pet or a rare collectible? His stomach rebelled at the thought.

She was a woman. The only person he had ever…

It hit him then, like a punch to his jaw.

He loved her. She was the only person he had ever loved. He had, from the moment he’d met her. And what had he done? He had set out to buy her, like an item. Like anything else he hoped to acquire in his life. Because currency, power, that was what he understood, not feelings.

Three years later he understood. Why he had not wanted another woman since he’d met Angelina. Why it had felt so essential to hold her to him when he’d finally found her again.

But at what cost? He had only thought of himself. Had only thought of what it meant to him to have her.

How had he not realized it was a prison sentence to her?

He would rather go through life alone than subject her to it. Than to force her to be with him when she had no desire to be his wife.

She never had.

Fate. She had blamed fate for forcing them together when he had been the one forcing things all along.

She wanted things to be different. And they would be.

“Taj?” Angelina crept out of her darkened bedroom and into her sitting area. Taj was sitting on her couch, still shirtless, the lights off. He appeared oblivious to the fact that the sun had gone down. He was just sitting, looking at his hands.

“Taj,” she said again, moving to sit beside him. “Is everything all right?”

He looked at her, his face lost in shadow. “You are here, and you are safe. How could anything be wrong?”

There was something off about his tone. Something dark in his voice. Gritty.

“I just thought…”

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I’m fine. Better. Actually I feel ready to eat, which is a first for a few days. Either the hormone induced nausea is over, or it’s the eye of the storm.”

“I hope it’s over,” he said, his tone still flat.

“What’s wrong?”

“You asked me, Angelina, if fate had forced us together.”

“I…I remember that.” She wanted to touch him, but something stopped her.

His gaze was distant. “I have the answer now. There is no such thing as fate. Only sheikhs who think they are God. I will not play at a profession so far above myself. Not anymore.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“We will not marry.”

Angelina felt like the floor tilted sideways. “What?”

“You ask far too many questions,” he said, standing. “I have made myself, my wishes, very clear. We will not marry at the end of the week. We will not marry.”

“And…where will I go?” she asked, not caring about his anti-question mandate. Because she had questions. Lots and lots of questions. And giving voice to them, needing the answers to them, was the only thing keeping her heart from splintering. “What about our child?”

“I will see our child. I will support our child in every way possible. But I am not holding you here.”

“What changed?”

“I cannot lock us in a situation that would be unendurable for us both.” He turned his back on her, and she felt a sharp stab hit her in the chest. “You may stay here in the palace as long as it suits you. I will not have you move under the present circumstances. It is your choice where you go when you feel able to leave. If you choose to stay in Rahat, a home will be provided for you.”

“And if I choose to leave the country?” she asked, ice coating her words, her body, her heart, offering protection. Shock providing insulation against the pain.

“Visitation will need to be arranged,” he said, his eyes black holes in the darkness of the room. “I will be there when my child is born, make no mistake. You will not shut me out.”

She felt like she was breaking inside. Slowly cracking apart.

But she wouldn’t beg. She wouldn’t show him. Already, she loved him while he felt…what did he feel? He had been so kind earlier and now this. Now he could cast her off as quickly as he’d brought her into his world.

Already he had too much power. She wouldn’t let him know it.

“I promise, Taj.” She tilted her chin up, called on every bit of strength inside of her and used it. “If you want to see our child, anytime, day or night, you will be able to. I will never keep them from you.”

“Good.”

“Can you please go?”

He nodded once. “I’m on my way out.”

He walked out of the sitting room and she heard the double doors to her segment of rooms close behind him.

Only then did she allow tears to fall.

Chapter Eleven

On the day that would have been her wedding day Angelina took one last look at her suite of rooms in the Rahatan palace, and closed the double doors behind her.

She didn’t know where she would go. She’d given up her house in Italy to follow Princess Carlotta to her new home in Santa Christobel, and she’d given up her position there to come and marry Taj.

She could go back to Texas. That thought only brought intense regret.

She looked out the window at the sun-washed desert and wondered if she would ever feel home anywhere else. Anywhere besides this place that had seemed an alien planet when she’d first arrived.

She moved through the corridor and tried to ignore the way the staff moved around her. The way they ignored her presence. She supposed she was written off now. Cast off by their sheikh, cast off by them.

Taj. Oh, Taj.

Her heart bled his name with each beat.

It was hot outside. It was always hot there. She should be glad to leave the miserable heat. She would be happier if she had any idea of where she would end up. Anywhere beyond the lovely, modern hotel in the center of the capital city.

That was her next stop. It would do for now.

She closed her eyes and looked to the sun, letting it warm her face. She ignored the limousine that had pulled up to the front of the palace courtyard, waiting for her. Waiting to take her away.

“Angel?”

She turned sharply, her eyes opening. “Taj?”

He was standing at the entrance to the gardens. She hadn’t seen him in the days since he’d broken things off with her. She’d assumed he’d gone to one of his other homes. It was what she’d been told.

“I didn’t think you were here.”

“I wasn’t,” he said, his voice rough. “I was trying to keep away until you’d left.”

“Am I so repulsive to you?” she asked, her voice crisp, masking the wound his words left in her heart.

He closed the distance between them, his strides long and fast. “Are you repulsive to me?” he asked, his expression stark. Open. “You can’t ask me that? Do you realize that for the three years since I first met you I have wanted no one else? That I’ve had no lovers because the memory of your kiss was enough to keep me from being aroused by any other woman?”

“Lust.” The word came out a whisper. She couldn’t believe it. That he hadn’t wanted anyone else. That he hadn’t had anyone else. It didn’t seem possible. “Lust is all that is. It isn’t enough.”

“Lust is cheap, Angel. If it were lust I could have satisfied it with any number of women in any number of ways. That’s not what it is.”

“Then why are you making me go?” she asked, her voice breaking, her pride forgotten for the moment.

“Because I will not hold you prisoner. I will not bend your will to fit with mine. I will not make you miserable to ensure my own happiness. Not anymore.”

“I…I don’t understand.”

“I saw you, in your father’s home, so beautiful. So perfect. And I wanted you. I sought out to buy you like I would anything else I coveted. Because nothing in my life had ever been denied me. I simply asked, or wrote a check, and it was mine. I thought you would be no different. But you left me. And I thought I would forget. But I couldn’t. When I saw you again, standing in the balcony at the palace in Santina, I thought only of satisfying my desire for you. Of having you. Possessing you. Exactly like the first time.”

Angelina crossed her arms beneath her breasts, tightening her hold on herself. She would stand upright. She would not dissolve. “And now what? You’ve decided you want to return me?”

“Then I had you. And you left,” he said, continuing as if she hadn’t spoken. “I swore I wouldn’t chase you. I swore to forget you. Still I could not. And when you told me you were having my baby…the chance at last to tie you to me forever. To bring peace to my world. I was happy. Happy because you could not leave me. Because this time you had to stay.”

He shook his head, a sudden flash of disgust curling his lip. “But something changed. I found myself wanting to give to you. And as I did, I realized how much your happiness meant. How much more it meant than my own. How could I be happy when you were so miserable? How could I hold you prisoner and call you mine?”

“But…but… Does my father have anything to do with this…has he?”

“Nothing,” he said, his voice fierce. “I rejected his offer of a partnership after I lost you. It was I who rejected it, not him. Because I couldn’t face having a connection to you without having you.”

“You said you kept in touch.”

His expression turned bleak. “I called sometimes. To see if there had been word of you.”

“You did?”

“I love you,” he said. “I love you more than I love myself, and I don’t think I have ever felt that way. I’m certain I haven’t. I want…I want your happiness so much more than I want my own. So you must promise me, Angelina, that you will be happy. And then I will let you go with a smile.”

Angelina’s breath caught, her hands shaking. “You…love me?”

“Yes,” he said.

She shook her head, tears stinging her eyes. “I…I can’t do what you asked just now. I can’t go and be happy.”

“What do you need?” he asked, his eyes shining. “What do you need and I will give it to you.”

“You,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face. “I need you.”

One of his arms curved around her waist and he lowered his head, pressing his forehead against her shoulder. “Why did you wish so badly for things to be different, then?”

“Because you didn’t love me. I wanted your love and knowing I couldn’t have that…that’s why I was sad.”

He raised his head, his eyes meeting hers. “I did love you. I didn’t know what to call it. And I did not love you in the right way. I know with certainty that I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you. But now I’m ready to love you right.”

“What changed?” she asked.

“I did. I think it’s because of you. No, I know it is. You have changed me. You have humbled me. And I needed it, badly.”

“I love you, Taj. I loved you then. But I couldn’t stand the thought of marrying you just because you wanted to strengthen your nation’s economy. I wanted to be more to you than that.”

“You are,” he said. “Though I could not have said it then. I was foolish.”

“Maybe we both were.”

“Maybe we will be again,” he said.

“But we love each other. And that’s why we’ll stay together.”

“You’ll stay with me then? Be my wife?”

“Yes,” she said, pressing a kiss to his lips, her heart swelling with emotion, tears sliding down her cheeks.

He kissed her deeper, tightening his hold on her.

“I’ll get a procession of camels, right, sugar?” she whispered, nipping his earlobe.

He chuckled. “Nothing is too grand for you.”

“On second thought, I don’t need the camels.”

“You don’t?”

She shook her head, raised her hand and traced a line of moisture on his cheek. “No. I only need you.”

* * *

The Price of Royal Duty

Penny Jordan

CHAPTER ONE

‘ASH.’ Sophia Santina, youngest daughter of the King and Queen of the island of Santina, breathed the name silently to herself, almost reverentially. Just the feel of the nearly silent breath that whispered his name and caressed her throat was enough to raise erotic pinpricks of desire within her flesh. Ash. How the whispering of his name was enough to unleash within her an aching echo of the tumultuous teenage desires he had once aroused in her. The very air was electric with the reckless sensual excitement that wantonly flooded her, even though she had sworn she would not, positively not, allow herself to experience it.

She had known, of course, that he had been invited to her eldest brother’s engagement party here at the castle that was their family home, but knowing that and actually seeing him with that strikingly sensual maleness of his that she remembered so well were two very different things.

She would have recognised him anywhere, just as she had done now merely from her brief glimpse of the back view of him as he walked into the ballroom and then turned to refuse a glass of champagne. Just the turn of his head, just the thick dark sheen of his hair and the way it curled into the nape of his neck, was enough to conjure up old memories. Memories of longing recklessly for the right to bury her fingers in its softness, curl them around its strands and then urge his mouth down to her own. A shudder of sensual awareness jolted through her. Some things never changed. A certain kind of need, a certain kind of desire, a certain kind of love.

First love? Surely only a fool believed that first love was an only love, and she prided herself on not being that. No, Ash had killed that tremulous, tender love when he had rejected her, telling her that she was a child still who was putting herself in danger by offering herself to a man of his age, that she was fortunate that his own sense of honour and the repugnance he felt at the very thought of taking what she offered meant that she was protected from him taking advantage of her naivety. Telling her that even if she had been older he would not have wanted her because he was wholly committed to someone else.

She had promised herself then that in future her love would only be given to a man who was worthy of it and who valued it and her. A man who loved her as much as she did him. And because of that promise to herself, she needed Ash’s help now, no matter how much her pride reacted angrily against that need.

Putting down her virtually untouched drink, she started to walk towards him.

Standing in the packed ballroom in the castle on the Mediterranean island of Santina, the official residence and home of the royal family of Santina, Ashok Achari, Maharaja of Nailpur, frowned as his grim, obsidian gaze swept the scene in front of him. Beyond the open doors to the stunningly elegant ballroom with its crystal chandeliers and antique mirrors stood footmen wearing the livery of the royal family. An impressive dress-uniformed group of the king’s own personal guard had been standing motionless in front of the castle in honour of the occasion and the guests. As a fellow royal, Ash had seen them salute him as the limousine that had picked him up from the airport had swept up to the main entrance. It was plain that no expense was being spared to celebrate the engagement of the king’s eldest son and heir.

His fellow guests milled around him, and laughter and the sound of conversation filled the air.

Ash had gone to school with the groom-to-be, Alex, and they were still close friends. Even so, he hadn’t wanted to attend this engagement party as he had more pressing matters to deal with at home, but duty was important to Ash—far more so than any personal desires—and duty had compelled him to accept.

He had, though, ordered his pilot to have his private jet standing ready to fly him back to Mumbai where he had an important business meeting in the morning.

A sixth sense had him turning round just as an exquisitely beautiful petite brunette came hurrying towards him.

Sophia.

A woman now, not the girl she had been the last time he had seen her in person. Where he had remembered a girl trembling on the brink of womanhood, innocent and eager, in need of protection from herself, he was now being confronted by a woman who clearly knew all about her sexuality and its power and how to both use it and take pleasure from it. That his body had recorded and registered that information in the time it had taken him to exhale and breathe again pointed to a weakness within himself of which he had previously been unaware.

The shock of his instant male awareness of Sophia as a woman had caught him totally off guard and Ash did not like that. That kind of thing was not something he permitted himself to do. It smacked too much of a hidden repressed need and Ash did not allow himself to have hidden repressed needs—needs that could make him vulnerable. Besides, the very idea of him being vulnerable to Sophia was laughable. She wasn’t his type. No? So why then was his body reacting to her as though it had never seen a woman before?

A momentary lapse. He was a man, she was a woman, and his bed had been empty since he had dismissed his last mistress. If he was aroused by the sight of Sophia then it was probably completely natural. After all, from the luxuriant tumble of long, dark brown waves via the stunning beauty of her delicately shaped face with its dark eyes and soft full lips to the voluptuous curves of her sensationally sensually shaped body, Sophia Santina was an instant, irresistible magnet for male attention—and his own body was reacting just like any other heterosexual man’s would. Wasn’t it?

Yes. He would be a fool if he allowed that reaction more importance than it merited. To be caught off guard by a surge of physical desire so strong that he was glad of the packed floor of the ballroom and the darkness of his dinner suit to conceal the evidence of his reaction to her was an alien experience for him and added aggravation to what he was already experiencing. He had no desire whatsoever to be aroused by any woman right now, never mind Sophia Santina.

But he couldn’t deny the fact that he was. Not with that arousal already straining at the expensive fabric of his suit, despite the ferocity of the mental control with which he was attempting to prevent it.

She was still coming towards him and in another handful of seconds she would be flinging herself into his arms, just as she had done as a young girl. And if she did that … His body beat out a raw demanding pulsing clarion call of lust. Ash cursed inwardly. He was a man who prided himself on his control of his appetites, especially when it came to sex.

It meant nothing that Sophia was sexually desirable and—if one believed the gossip press—sexually available, as well, should a man chance to catch her attention. Desiring her wasn’t on his agenda for where he planned to take his life and it never would be.

Apart from anything else, as he had already reminded himself, Sophia simply wasn’t his type. Following the death of his wife, the women with whom he had shared his bed had all been elegant long-limbed women skilled in the arts of sexual pleasure, with cool logical minds in whose lives emotions did not play a part. Women who, when the game ended, gracefully accepted the generous gift he gave them and left his bed as discreetly as they had entered it.

Sophia was not like that. Sophia, as he well knew from watching her grow up, was an intense melding of passionate emotions. A man who took her to bed would need … His body reacted again, causing him to have to shift his weight from one leg to the other in an attempt to ensure that that reaction was disguised. There was no question of him taking Sophia to his bed. Not now, not ever.

‘Ash,’ Sophia said again, automatically stepping forward to embrace him, her eyes widening when he immediately encircled her wrist with his right hand to fend her off while stepping back from her in rejection.

How could she have been so stupid? There was, after all, a history of rejection between them, or rather of Ash rejecting her, and now she had put herself on the back foot by allowing him to feel that he needed to push her away. In her anxiety to plead for his help she had acted foolishly. She must be more mentally alert, she warned herself.

Yes, an inner voice argued defensively, but all she had been doing was greeting him as she would greet anyone she knew well, not coming on to him. She opened her mouth ready to make a feisty protest and berate him for misinterpreting her gesture and then closed it again, as she controlled her emotions. This was not the time to antagonise him, no matter how strongly she felt that she was being misjudged. And now that she was so close to him, she could see what she hadn’t seen before: the change in him that was clearly written in the steely uncompromising coldness of his expression.

Against her will, sadness locked her throat. The Ash she remembered had been a warm, outgoing young man who had laughed a lot and enjoyed life. What had happened to change him and turn him into the cynical, almost-brooding man in front of her now? Did she really need to ask herself that? He had lost his wife, a wife whom he had loved.

Her sadness grew, compassion for the Ash she remembered filling her. That Ash had been a young man whose innate kindness—especially to the young sister of a school friend on those holiday visits he had made to the island—had made that girl feel for the first time in her life that someone understood her, and valued her. His kindness and his understanding had meant so much to her, and it was her memory of those things that had brought her to his side now and not the abrupt sea change in their relationship as she had turned from a girl to a woman, and his rejection of her because of it.

Those qualities though had been stripped from the man in front of her now, Sophia recognised with a sudden painful jolt of her heart into her ribs. This Ash possessed a dark and brooding air that she didn’t remember, along with a cold remoteness, as though somehow a dark cloud had darkened the warmth of the personality of the young man she remembered.

Something deep within her ached for what he had been. Immediately, Sophia clamped down on that feeling. She must not allow herself to be vulnerable to him emotionally. She must not feel anything for him. Not even when she had once patterned her ideal of what she thought desirable in a man on Ash himself? That had been a foolish mistake and one for which she had paid through the heartbreak that only the young and idealistic can know. The reality was that right now she should be feeling glad that he had changed and that there was therefore no danger of her being foolish enough to …

To what? To still feel something for him?

That was impossible.

But what if her responsiveness to him both physically and emotionally was burned into her DNA? Burned into it? Sophia winced. Burned was the correct word and she still had the scars to prove that. But those scars protected her now. She would never make the same mistake again. She was immune to Ash now and she intended to remain immune. She wasn’t sixteen any more, after all.

Before, she had been filled with a young, romantic teenager’s need to taste the apple the serpent had offered to Eve, and she had turned to Ash to help her assuage that need. That had been a terrible mistake for which she had paid in tears of shame and anguish.

Now she had to think past that, to that innocent time when she had merely seen Ash as her saviour, the one person she could turn to, to help her, the person who had, after all, saved her very life on more than one occasion. It was that Ash she desperately wanted to talk to right now, the words she would use to elicit the help she needed from him honed and practised. Now though she was beginning to recognise that somehow she couldn’t just simply turn back and open the gate into the garden of innocence whose pathways Ash had walked with her when she had been a child.

She must not give up hope. She could not, Sophia reminded herself. But she must be careful. Careful and aware of what she needed to achieve for her own survival. This was just one meeting. One ordeal she had to go through to gain something she desperately needed. After tonight she would never have to see Ash again and she would be safe, from her own past and from the future her father planned for her.

She took a deep breath, and informed him with cool self-control, ‘You can let go of me now, Ash. I promise you I won’t touch you.’

Not touch him. Little did she know that his body, his flesh, his manhood, was screaming out to be touched by her. Inside his head, to his own self-disgust and anger, Ash could all too easily mentally visualise—right here, right now, in this packed and very public place—the need his flesh felt for him to place her hand over the hard aching pulse of his sex. No wonder she had the reputation she did if this was the effect she could have on his body. On his body, but not on him. That could not be permitted. Abruptly he released her wrist.

The very speed with which Ash released her proved to Sophia what her heart had already told her, namely that as far as he was concerned any physical contact between them was as taboo now as it had been when she had been sixteen.

And yet, as she had just reminded herself, Ash had once been kind to her. Very kind, indeed. The truth was that he had been her hero, her one place of safety and comfort.

Perhaps that was why, despite the dismissal and that brooding air of withdrawal about him, somehow, instinctively, if foolishly, she still felt as though Ash was the one person in her world to whom she could turn for help, should she need it. Or perhaps it was because she was desperate and there was no one else. And right now she certainly needed help. And needed it very much, indeed.

However, his grim manner had put a barrier between them so that now she was forced to recognise how misplaced her confidence in his kindness had been. And how much the change she could see in him complicated a plan which had seemed so simple when she had lain alone in her bed helplessly searching for a way to escape her fate.

She could easily have told the old Ash, the Ash she remembered, what the problem was and just as easily have begged him to play the role she needed him to for the course of this evening. But this Ash, who looked at her with a gaze that held no affection for their shared past, but which instead seemed to look broodingly into a past that excluded her, diminished the hope she had brought with her to tonight’s party.

But he had helped her in the past, she reminded herself. And not just helped her. He had saved her from death—not just once but twice. As she needed him to save her again now from another kind of death. The death that came from being sacrificed in a marriage to a man she had never met but whose reputation told her that he was everything she could never want in a husband.

Somehow she must find a way of breaking through the barriers between them, because without Ash’s understanding, without his aid, her plan simply could not succeed.

And if he rejected her—again?

She must not think of that. She must be honest with him. She must beg him for his help. Taking another deep breath, she began, ‘Ash, there’s something I want to ask you.’

‘If it’s which of your current string of young men you should take to your bed next then I’m afraid I don’t give that kind of advice. And anyway, you seem very skilled at picking the one that will gain you the most print inches and the largest photographs in the world’s celebrity press.’

It was an emotionally brutal rebuttal and rejection, and that hurt. She knew she had her detractors but somehow she had not been prepared for Ash to be one of them. Because she wanted him to remember her as the innocent girl he had protected?

What if she did? It was only because she needed him to remember that relationship. As for that sharp stinging pain his words had brought her, that was nothing. She was not going to allow it any power. Even so, she couldn’t stop herself from defending her actions. ‘So I go public with my … relationships and you keep yours private.’ She gave a small shrug, intending it to be dismissive.

‘Which of us, I wonder, would an unbiased bystander consider to be the more honest?’

She had her own reasons for not just allowing but positively encouraging the world at large to think of her as a young woman who relished her hedonistically sexual lifestyle and who indeed revelled in it. After all, wasn’t the best way to disguise and protect something precious to camouflage it, to hide it from view in plain sight?

Sophia daring to call his morals into question was something Ash’s pride could not tolerate, especially when … Especially when, what? Especially when he had once taken on the responsibility of protecting her from the consequences of her emerging sexual needs because of those morals? Or especially when he was already having to deal with the private fallout he was facing inside himself from his still-active, and very much unwanted, physical sexual reaction to her?

His voice as hard and unforgiving as his expression, he told her curtly, ‘But I’m afraid that such discussions aren’t of any appeal to me, Sophia, no matter how much idle chatter and currency they might find amongst your friends. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go and thank your parents for this evening, as I have to be back in Mumbai tomorrow morning, and I’m flying out just after midnight.’

He was leaving so soon? That was something else she hadn’t expected or prepared herself for. The window of opportunity that was her planned escape was closing down by the minute. Panic had started to build up inside her, a panic that had her blurting out emotionally, ‘Ash, once you were different, kinder. Kind to me … my saviour … You saved my life.’ Only desperation could be making her behave like this, betray herself like this. ‘I know from the charities in which you are involved and the help you give to your people how philanthropic and good you are to those in need. Right now, Ash, I need …’ She stopped, her breath locking in her throat. ‘I’ve never been able to say to you how sorry I was about the death of your wife. I know how much she and your marriage meant to you.’

He was withdrawing from her, she could sense it, almost feel it in the chilling of the air between them. She had learned young how to judge other people’s emotions and to be wary of antagonising them. She shouldn’t have mentioned his late wife. So why had she? No reason. She had just wanted …

There was a flicker of something in those dark eyes, a tightening of the flesh that clung with such powerful sensuality to the bone structure of regal facial features with a lineage that went back across the centuries to a time when his warrior ancestors had roamed and ruled the desert plains of India. She knew she had angered him.

He was angry with her. For what? Mentioning his wife? Sophia knew how much he had loved the Indian princess he had married but it was several years now since her death and she was sure his bed hadn’t remained empty during those years. Bedding someone was one thing, but as Sophia knew, loving them was another thing entirely.

However, if he thought he was going to frighten her off with his forbidding manner towards her, he was wrong. He no doubt remembered her as the young girl who was very easily hurt by any hint that she might have offended the man she hero-worshipped so intensely, but she wasn’t that young girl any more, and when it came to being hurt and surviving that hurt … well, she could easily lay claim to having qualified for a master’s degree in that particular emotional journey.

Ash could feel the tension invading his body. Sophia had dared to mention his marriage. He allowed no one to do that. It was a taboo subject.

‘I do not discuss either my late wife or our marriage with anyone.’

The words delivered in a harsh blistering tone only confirmed what Sophia already felt she knew, and that was how much Ash still loved his dead wife.

She must not think about that, though. She must think instead about her own need for his help.

From the minute she had learned he was coming to the engagement party, she had seen him as her salvation and her only hope of rescue from a situation she simply could not bear. She must not falter now, no matter how vulnerable she felt inside.

Sophia had gone silent. Ash turned to look at her. She was trying to appear confident but he could see the apprehension beneath. It was a protective device she had often employed as a child. A child who as the youngest of the family, and a girl, was often overlooked. Somehow against his will, he found his anger receding.

Ash’s penetrating gaze was assessing her with hawklike scrutiny, Sophia recognised, and yet there was something in his expression that had softened, as though the bones of his face had subtly moved so that she could see again the Ash whose memory she cherished, beneath the harshness that time had overlaid on those bones—something that resurrected her desperate hope.

There was no time to waste, she decided. She must be brave and strong, and trust in her own judgement, her own belief in him.

‘My father wants to marry me to off to some Spanish prince he’s found.’

What was that sensation that uncurled inside him and attacked with the deadly speed of a poisonous snake, causing his heart to lurch inside his chest? Nothing. Nothing at all.

‘So your father wishes to arrange a dynastic and diplomatic marriage for you.’

Ash shrugged dismissively, but Sophia stopped him. ‘It would be a forced marriage, and I would be the one forced into it.’

Her words might have been those of the passionate, emotional, sensitive young girl he remembered. How fierce she had been then in her defence of people’s personal freedoms, her conviction that everyone had the right to dictate the pathway of their own lives. It was no real wonder given how often she and her father had clashed, as they were obviously doing now.

‘Don’t you think you’re being a tad dramatic?’ he asked her in a wry voice. ‘You aren’t a naive girl any more, Sophia. Royalty marries royalty, that is the way of our kind. Marriages are arranged, heirs conceived and born, and that is how we fulfil our duty to our forebears and our people.’

This was not how she had imagined he would react when she had lain sleepless at night, longing for his arrival, aching for his help, needing his support.

‘I’m not being dramatic,’ she defended herself. ‘Surely I should have some rights as a person, a human being, some say in my own fate, instead of having my future decided for me by my father?’

‘I’m sure he only has your best interests at heart.’

Ash just did not want to get involved in this. Why should he? He was a busy man about to enter the final negotiations on a contract, the success of which would secure the future of his people for generations to come.

‘No. No,’ she denied immediately. ‘He doesn’t have my best interests at heart. All he is interested in is securing a royal marriage for a daughter of the house of Santina. He told me that himself when I begged him to reconsider, that he had had to promise this Spanish prince that I would be an obedient and dutiful wife, a wife who would not try to interfere in his own preferred lifestyle of bed hopping amongst his many mistresses.

‘When I told him that I didn’t want to marry this prince, he said that I was ungrateful and ignoring my royal duty. He said that I would grow accustomed to my husband. Accustomed. To endure marriage to a man who has simply agreed to marry me because he wants an heir, and to whom my father has virtually auctioned me off in exchange for a royal alliance. How could that ever be having my best interests at heart?’

‘I should have thought such a marriage would suit you, Sophia. After all, it’s well documented that your own chosen lifestyle involves something very similar, when it comes to bed hopping.’

A body blow indeed and one that drove the blood from Sophia’s face and doubled the pain in her heart. It shouldn’t matter what Ash thought of her. That was not part of her plan. But still his denunciation of her hurt and it wasn’t one she could defend herself against. Not without telling him far more than she wanted him to know.

‘Then you thought wrong,’ was all she could permit herself to say. ‘That is not the kind of marriage I want. I can’t bear the thought of this marriage.’ Her panic and fear was there in her voice; even she could hear it herself, so how much more obvious must it be to Ash?

She must try to stay calm. Not even to Ash could she truly explain the distaste, the loathing, the fear, she had of being forced by law to give herself in a marriage bed in the most intimate way possible when … No, that was one secret that she must keep no matter what, just as she had already kept it for so long.

Not even to Ash? Definitely not to Ash. Now she was letting her emotions get muddled instead of focusing on the practicalities of her situation.

Steadying her breathing she told Ash as calmly as she could, ‘When I marry I want to know and respect my husband and our marriage. I want to love him and be loved by him. I want us to bring our children up in the safe secure circle of that love.’ That, after all, was the truth.

And it was a truth that Ash heard and couldn’t refute. He frowned. Against his will he was forced to acknowledge that there was something in her voice that touched old nerves, revived old memories. Revived them? Since when had they really needed reviving? He had never forgotten, could never forget.

‘Please, Ash, I’m begging you for your help.’

CHAPTER TWO

THOSE words—the same words with which she had cried out to him once before—sliced through his self-control, cutting the cords that held fast the doors to the past.

Once before Sophia had begged him for something.

She’d been just past her sixteenth birthday the last time he’d seen her. He could still remember the shock he had felt at seeing her all grown-up. One minute—or so it had seemed—she had been a child, but somehow six months later she had been trembling on the brink of what would become her woman hood, a girl still for all her burgeoning physical maturity, a girl with tears tracking down her cheeks, her huge dark brown eyes drowning in tears. Then she had still been an innocent: naive, unknowing, virginal and vulnerable. He had been determined that it would not be through him that any of those things were taken from her, no matter how hard she begged him to do so.

What had happened to her during those intervening years to turn her into the wanton sensualist she was now? Why should he care? The sixteen-year-old towards whom he had felt so protective belonged to another life, another Ash.

Even then she’d been sensationally beautiful, with everything about her already hinting at the sensuality to come. Then she had had the promise of a sweet, almost ready-to-ripen peach, yet still a girl compared to his adult-male maturity, and his natural sense of responsibility and moral probity had naturally reacted to that. He had known that he had a duty towards her to protect her not just from herself but from that shock of awareness within himself of the fact that she was becoming a desirable woman.

Ash discovered that there was suddenly a sour taste in his mouth. For himself. For that brief ripping through his moral code, caused by the shocking sexual awareness he’d had of her when he had seen the change in her. Desires he never should have had for that girl given the protective role he had previously played in her life and the fact that he had been about to be married.

Desires he still had for her? He swallowed hard against that question. She was a woman, and available. He was a man, but he could not allow himself to want her. He would not allow it. After all, he had nothing left within him to give to a woman like Sophia, who so obviously brought emotional passion to her relationships along with her sexual desire. A grim wryness filled him. So he was back in his old role towards her, was he, protecting her from his own desire?

‘Ash, please.’ The panic in Sophia’s voice made Ash frown. Twice before he had heard her say his name in that same tone of mingled fear and need and now somehow his body reacted to that memory, instinctively halting him in his tracks.

‘Sophia …’

‘Please, Ash. I need you. There isn’t anyone else I can turn to.’

‘No? What about one of those young men who share your bed?’ His challenge was harsh and acerbic.

This was getting dangerous, Sophia recognised. The conversation was going now in a direction she most certainly did not want.

‘That’s just sex. What I need from you is help.’

Just sex? Ash could almost taste the ferocity of the atavistic emotions surging through him.

Across the years that separated him from those other occasions inside his head he could see the sixteen-year-old she had been, pleading with him for something it was impossible for him to give her. He could almost smell the hot summer fragrance of the small grassy bank on which they’d been sitting. Inside his head he could see a clear image of her in her thin cotton dress. It had shown quite clearly the perfect shape of her high rounded breasts with their eager thrusting nipples pushing against the fabric, just as she had pushed against his chest with small fists when she had begged him to take her and show her what it was to be a woman—and the icy cold shock to his system it had given him to realise that his awareness of her was darkened by the sexual desire. He had wanted to walk away from her there and then, to put an end to the danger he could sense, but before he could do anything she had continued emotionally, ‘I’m the only girl in my class who’s still a virgin, and I hate it. The other girls laugh at me because of it. They say that I’m a baby and …’

He could still remember the duality of the feelings her confession had brought him. Firstly, a desire to protect her and defend her, but beneath that, shockingly and shamefully, a slow awareness of the sweet pleasure there would be for the man to whom she would ultimately give herself for the first time. He had reminded himself that he was too old for her, and that she was too young for him. To even think about doing as she asked would be an abuse of their relationship that could never be allowed, but still there had been, inside his head, that treacherous thought that were she two years or so older and he two years or more younger … He would what? Bed her and then leave her—dishonour her—for the marriage that had been arranged for him since childhood? Never.

And so he had put temptation aside and told her as though it was no concern to him, ‘I’m sure there are any number of boys your own age who would be delighted to relieve you of your virginity.’

‘I don’t want it to be them, I want it to be you,’ she insisted, her eyes dark and stormy with the heat of her need.

Only he knew how tempted he’d been to wish away some of the years that separated them and to give in and take her. Just the smell of her sun-warmed skin had sent him half maddened with aching, longing to lie her down and lick and kiss his way over every inch of her delectable, hotly eager body until he reached those dark flaunting nipples. Inside his head he had already been suckling on them, drawing cries of tormented delight from her whilst his hand covered the wet heat of her sex and his fingers teased an open eager passage.

The secret betrayal of his thoughts and his body had felt to him as much of a betrayal of his duty to protect her as it was of the duty that lay on him towards his future bride and their marriage.

He had been angry. With himself more than with Sophia but it had been on her he had vented his anger, telling her savagely, ‘It can’t be me. You already know that, Sophia. I’m engaged to be married.’

‘An arranged marriage,’ she had reminded him. ‘Not a love match.’

Something in the truth of her words had turned a knife in his heart as sharp and destructive as one of the fine jewelled daggers favoured by his ancestors, cruelly sharp knives that could rip out the heart of a man and still leave that heart beating and the man breathing. For a while.

‘My marriage is my concern, and as for it not being a love match, it will be my duty and my pleasure to learn to love my wife and to teach her to love me. My very great pleasure.’

His words had been cruel. He had seen that in the look in her eyes. He had taken a step towards her, Ash remembered, and then he had stopped as she dashed away the tears she hadn’t been able to control. A child’s tears, and if he had been cruel then it had been to protect that child.

And now as then, Ash wanted to turn and walk away from her, but somehow he couldn’t, just as he couldn’t drag his gaze from her or stop his body reacting to her. His own weakness lashed at him, biting deep into his pride. But still he looked, still he let his senses fill with the pleasure of her.

Her dark curls caressed the bare shoulders revealed by her figure-hugging goddess-style amber-gold silk dress with its diamante waistband, her velvet-soft eyes sparkling, her lips warm and invitingly parted. They would taste of sensuality and promise, and her low-cut gown would be no barrier to the man who was determined to enjoy exploring the soft warmth of her naked breasts. But that man would never be him. Sophia was the sister of one of his closest friends; she was passionate and emotional. To bed her would bring complications into his life that he didn’t want. And why would he need to bed her when he had so many other willing women to choose from who understood that sex was all he required from them? Sex and nothing more.

Oblivious to the turmoil of Ash’s most private thoughts, Sophia looked over at the table where her parents were seated with some of their guests. As always it was her father who was commanding everyone’s attention whilst her mother looked on, her blonde head inclined towards him, her whole manner one of calm, controlled formality. Just as her father demanded. Just as the husband he had chosen for her would demand of her. She was not her mother. Her own nature was far more turbulent and intense. Still focusing on the table, she told Ash with fierce desperation, ‘My father thinks he can argue me into giving way. But I won’t.’

Ash could hear the desperation in her voice. Against his will he found himself thinking that she reminded him of a beautiful butterfly beating her wings against the iron bars of a cage that imprisoned her, her desperate attempt to find freedom destined only to leave her crushed and broken. Unexpectedly, for all the gossip about her hedonistic lifestyle, there was still an innocence and vulnerability about her. Against his better judgement he realised that he felt sorry for her, but he knew her father and he knew that King Eduardo would not give up his plans easily. He was as traditional and old-fashioned a father as he was a king, ruling his family and his country with the firm belief that they were his to command and control and that their duty was to obey him in all things. He did feel sorry for her, he allowed himself to acknowledge. Yes, but it was not his business and there was nothing he could do, other than offer her a reminder of the reality of what being royal meant.

‘As your father’s daughter you must always have known that ultimately he would arrange a marriage for you to someone he considers to be suitable?’

Just for a minute Sophia was tempted to drop her guard and admit to him that the kind of marriage of which she had always dreamed and for which she had always yearned was one based on mutual love, not dynastic necessity. But she knew that if she did that she might easily betray to him what she did not want him to know. She had her pride after all, and she certainly wasn’t going to have him feeling sorry for her because she wanted …

What? Love from the one man she knew would never give it to her? No. She might have wanted that once as a foolish sixteen-year-old but she did not want Ash now.

But she did want to marry a man she was in love with, a man who loved her back, and she was prepared to wait until she found it.

Only when she stood before her chosen bridegroom, ready to give herself to him in the sacred intimacy of marriage, would she finally be free of the scorching pain of Ash’s rejection.

But as yet she had not found that man or that love, and it certainly wasn’t for a lack of trying.

Watching her, he saw a bleakness in her eyes, and Ash felt himself filled with an unexpected compassion for her. She had been such a sweet child, so loving and giving, so sweet in her hero-worship of him. She had looked up to him as though he was a god. Childish adoration from a girl who had desperately wanted her father’s love and been denied it, that was all. He was not a god and she was no longer a child. He owed her nothing. Right?

She was not a child any more, he reminded himself. She had stopped being a child to him that fateful afternoon when she had begged him to take her virginity.

Who was the man who had taken it and her? Could she even remember his name? Given what the gossip columns had to say about her, Ash doubted it.

Sophia swallowed, knowing that she had to make one last attempt to secure his help. ‘Ash, all I want from you, all I want you to do, is behave towards me tonight as though you want me—not just to share your bed, but potentially as the wife everyone knows you must ultimately take in order to give Nailpur an heir. You are such a matrimonial prize that my father is bound to drop the Spanish prince if he thinks that there is any chance he can marry me to you. You have everything my father admires—royal blood, status and wealth.’

For once Ash was lost for words. When Sophia had said that she needed his help it had never occurred to him that she meant she wanted help of that nature for the kind of plan she had just outlined to him. She had a shrewd brain, he acknowledged. She was completely right in her assessment of her father.

‘Ash. I need you to rescue me and be my prince in shining armour just like you used to rescue me when I was little,’ Sophia continued in a voice made husky with impassioned need. ‘Do you remember that time I nearly drowned when I followed you, Alex and Hassan along that rocky cliff face?’

Against his will Ash could feel the tug her words were having on his heartstrings. ‘That was a long time ago,’ was all he permitted himself to say.

‘I still remember it,’ Sophia told him softly. ‘I was nine years old, and when I slipped into that deep pool you jumped in and rescued me. Alex laughed at me but you carried me back to safety. You made me feel safe and protected.’ Yes, he had then, she thought, but later … later he had hurt her so badly that even now … No. She mustn’t think about that tonight. She must only think of her plan, the plan she had been working on from the minute she had learned that Ash was coming to the engagement party and she had seen a possible way out of the trap that was closing round her.

Ash frowned. There it was again, that echo of vulnerability in her voice, that admission that was like a private memory, a private awareness shared only between the two of them, as though he was the only one she could allow to see beneath her shell.

Sophia let some of her pent-up breath ease out of her lungs, the release unwittingly causing her breasts to swell softly over the top of her gown.

They were fuller than they had been when she was sixteen, and even more tempting in their allure, Ash recognised, irritated with himself that he should be so aware of them. His memory supplied him with an intimate mental image of the dark crowning of her nipples, erect and hard, pushing against the fabric of the dress she had been wearing, showing him how much she desired him. That had been then, Ash reminded himself, and now he was old enough and cynical enough to know one woman’s body was much like another, and that physical desire once slaked soon evaporated, leaving him bored with the woman he had previously wanted.

Imploringly, Sophia reached out and placed her hand on Ash’s arm. Immediately his body reacted.

In an attempt to distract himself he tried to focus on her hand and not his own feelings. He looked down at where Sophia’s small hand lay against the sleeve of his expensively tailored, dark coloured Italian linen suit. Her nails were buffed to a natural sheen, and against his will his mind recorded for him the way he would feel if she were to rake those nails against his back in the intensity of her ecstasy. Sweat dampened his chest beneath his shirt from the heat pounding through his body.

‘Our father is allowing Alex to choose his own bride, so why should I have to submit to having my husband chosen for me?’ Her brother’s engagement had come as a complete surprise to her, and to Carlotta, the sibling to whom she was the closest. ‘You loved Nasreen. Why shouldn’t I be loved and love in return within my own marriage?’

The passion with which she spoke confirmed what he had already told himself about the emotional intensity she would bring to her sexual relationships. Such emotions had no place in his life any more, and he was determined that they never would. And if he could have her without those emotions? If they could enjoy each other now as the sexually experienced adults they both were? The rush of fierce male urgency that surged though his body gave him its own answer. But then there had never been any doubt about his awareness of her as a woman from the minute he had turned round tonight and seen her coming towards him.

In fact, if he was honest, Ash couldn’t remember ever before having such an immediate and insistent ache of hunger for a woman to the extent that it came between him and the cool logic of the business affairs to which he gave priority these days.

He had to distance himself from her.

‘My marriage is my business,’ he told her curtly, as he fought against his reaction to the thought of taking her to bed.

She had done it again, Sophia recognised. She had trespassed into a private place where she was not welcome. Because he still loved Nasreen?

That pain she could feel in the region of her heart was simply caused by the fact that if her father succeeded in marrying her off to this prince, she would never know what it felt like to be loved in that way. It wasn’t for any other reason—such as her wishing that it was Ash who loved her. Certainly not. She wasn’t sixteen any more. And neither was she going to let the subject drop. To her family she was the rebellious ‘difficult’ one, the one who was always challenging the status quo and pushing their father, the one who bit harder than anyone else. That was her reputation and she wasn’t going to abandon it now just because Ash was looking at her in that forbidding, icily cold way.

Nasreen. Ash wished that Sophia hadn’t mentioned her name, but she had.

He had vowed that he would love the bride who had been chosen for him, and that their marriage would be one of mutual, total faithfulness to each other. Loving the woman who had been promised to him in marriage from childhood had been a matter of great pride and honour to him, and a duty that he had taken seriously.

Orphaned as a young boy, he’d been brought up by an elderly nurse, whose stories about the great love affair between his great-grandfather and his English bride had built a responsibility within him to love and cherish the young maharani who would one day be his bride. Love mattered more than anything else, his nurse had told him. He must love his bride and she would love him back, with that love making up for the loneliness he had known as an orphan. After listening to his nurse he had believed when he married he would love his bride as completely and faithfully as his famous warrior ancestor had loved his.

Had that belief sprung from arrogance or naivety? He didn’t know. His mouth twisted in a grim expression of bitter self-contempt.

He only knew that the harsh reality of his marriage and the death of his wife—a death for which he believed that, in part at least, he had to carry a burden of blame—meant that he would never, ever again allow emotion into any intimate relationship he had with a woman. Never again would he mix sex and love. Never. Sex was a pleasure and a need, but it was just sex. He could allow himself to want a woman but he could not allow himself to love her.

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