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  The Sheikh stared at him. ‘Would you like to meet him? We could send Miss Cottingham to Naples, to persuade him to come to Kharastan.’

  Xavier’s fingers curled into two tight fists and his face darkened as he looked at Malik and Laura.

  ‘Leave us!’ he commanded them all. ‘Please leave me alone with the Sheikh, my father.’

  It was, Laura noted, the first time Xavier had acknowledged the relationship aloud. She also noted Malik’s questioning glance at the Sheikh, but the old man nodded, so he rose to his feet and so did Laura, before she followed him out.

  As she went back to her room, she did feel like an outsider, and strangely overcome—by all that she had seen and learnt, by the sense that an opportunity lay ahead for her to go on another great adventure to bring back son number two. But the feeling which most overwhelmed her was one of immense sadness.

  Because you have to say goodbye to the man who has ensnared your heart? Is that why you’ll even consider going to Italy, to deal with the half-brother, knowing that it will somehow keep you in Xavier’s life? Is that what you want?

  She had finished packing and was standing by the window, watching one of the guards on horseback as he clip-clopped his way around the grounds, when she heard footsteps behind her. She turned round to see Xavier standing there.

  His face was like stone—cold and unyielding. Yet his eyes glittered suspiciously bright, and Laura was more surprised by that than by anything. Had Xavier actually shed tears?

  ‘What did you say to him?’ she questioned huskily.

  He looked at her and his eyes cleared—as if he were just emerging from a forest into a bright open space, but as if the shadows of that dark place he had visited would never quite leave him.

  ‘We said things which shall forever remain between father and son,’ he said gravely.

  She saw the pain in his eyes and heard the dignity in his voice, and in that single moment her heart turned over and she knew that she loved him. She knew too that it was a non-starter—but as long as she could hold onto that fact then she’d be okay. Because what had Xavier once said to her? Regret wasn’t part of his agenda? Well, it wouldn’t be part of hers, either.

  Let him go, she told herself. Don’t be like the blonde who flounced out of his office the first time you met him. There are streams of women like her in his past, and no doubt streams of them waiting in his future. So replicate his dignity as you say goodbye.

  ‘You’ll stay here?’ she asked.

  ‘For a while. Laura—’

  Her head jerked up, her eyes wide. ‘What?’ she questioned breathlessly.

  ‘You won’t take the job of going to find Giovanni, will you?’

  The hope in her heart sank like a stone in a muddy pond, gone without trace. ‘Is that a request or an order, Xavier?’

  There was a heartbeat of a pause. ‘It can be either,’ he said steadily.

  ‘You’re forbidding it—even though the Sheikh himself asked me?’

  ‘I can override that request if it does not please me,’ he said stubbornly.

  ‘If it does not please me?’ she choked. ‘What’s the matter, Xavier? Do you think I’ll end up in bed with your half-brother?’

  ‘Stop it!’ he snapped, as unwanted erotic images swam darkly into his mind. That kind of turmoil was the last thing he needed at the moment. ‘Very well! Take the damned job if you wish to!’

  ‘Thank you—I will!’

  ‘You will?’

  ‘I’ll give it some thought.’

  He scowled. ‘Have you finished packing? Because I’m going to take you to the airport.’

  And witness her breaking down into tears? His angry words washed over her and brought Laura to her senses. What of her hard-won self-respect and the dignity with which she wished to be remembered?

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks, Xavier,’ she said quietly. ‘I’d prefer it if one of the drivers took me. And now, if you wouldn’t mind leaving, I have a plane to catch and I need to change first.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LAURA arrived home in Dolchester and couldn’t quite shake off a feeling of disorientation which didn’t feel like jet-lag.

  It wasn’t just the fact that it was raining—a soft summer rain which washed all the dust off the flowers—because the rain felt quite soothing after the heat of the desert. Or the fact that the boiler had stopped working and she had no water for a bath.

  It was…

  Xavier.

  Of course it was Xavier.

  But, in a funny way, being back in the little market town helped. Just looking around at it and contrasting it with what she had left behind in Kharastan was enough to help her try to see things clearly. What was the point of shedding tears for something so unobtainable as the Sheikh’s son?

  Even if he hadn’t been half-royal he was still totally wrong for her. And as the familiar surroundings re-established themselves on Laura’s consciousness they made a mockery of her heart’s desire.

  Could she ever really imagine Xavier here? Stooping his tall body to get in the front door, knocking his dark head on one of the beams which hung so low in the sitting room? Or perhaps going down to the local pub with her and ordering a pint of lager? Maybe even braving the local shops, where you had to be prepared to divulge your life history if you wanted to purchase so much as a bunch of bananas?

  Of course she could switch it around the other way. Laura in Paris! Laura sticking out like a sore thumb as she marched up the smart Avenue Georges V, or dined in the top-rate restaurants which Xavier no doubt frequented all the time. Laura with her schoolgirl French, trying to make herself understood in the boulangerie.

  She had put all her Kharastan clothes in a wardrobe in the spare bedroom, because they seemed all wrong here. Until some enterprising soul opened one of those Middle-Eastern restaurants which were taking London by storm she could hardly wear them—could hardly walk into the local bank with embroidered jade-green silk brushing the floor, could she?

  On the plus side, she had bought Josh out with her generous settlement from Kharastan, and Laura wouldn’t have been human if that hadn’t given her satisfaction. He had boasted of sleeping with one of the barmaids at the Black Dog pub, but as soon as Laura had shown a bit of financial clout he’d seemed to find her desirable.

  ‘Get off, Josh!’ she had said, when he’d made an unexpected lunge at her just after he had signed the papers transferring the cottage into her name. ‘I’m just not interested any more.’

  ‘What’s got into you?’ he’d sneered.

  Laura had resisted the urge to tell him that a real man had made her realise just what she’d been missing for so long, because she was more mature than that. Xavier was her own special secret.

  And you know that Josh will mock you if he finds out that it’s over!

  But she’d blocked that thought and closed the door behind Josh once and for all. She wasn’t going to think negatively. Seeing Zahir nearing the end of his life had made her realise how precious time was, and she was going to treasure every second of it. She couldn’t have Xavier, no—but that did not mean she was going to waste her life crying pointless tears about him. She would treasure the memories—put them in the back of her mind to be brought out on rainy days and Sundays.

  It was night-times she found most difficult—that was when the stupid yearnings became hardest to push away. Like wishing she had been his lover for the whole time they’d been there—because what had she gained by resisting him, other than pride and an aching sense of what she had missed? And pride made a lonely bedfellow.

  Laura told herself that it was natural to cry, and cathartic, too—even if some nights she had to bury her face in the pillow so that she wouldn’t have to listen to the sound of her own broken sobs echoing round the room.

  She had been back a month, and had just about accepted that she wasn’t going to hear any more from Kharastan after writing to Malik declining the offer to go to Naples, saying that she really could not
take any more time off work. It was a sunny Saturday morning, and she paused in the act of ladling strawberry jam onto a slice of toast as she heard a loud knock at the door.

  The postman? she wondered as she opened it—and froze when she saw the man on her doorstep, dark and golden, glowing and vibrant, and looking just too good to be true against the backdrop of her tiny front garden.

  Laura clutched the door-handle and stared at him, as if he might be a figment of her aching imagination and might suddenly just disappear. Yet after their last fraught meeting surely she should have felt anger, or indignation? So why was she experiencing a wild, fluttering kind of joy—tempered only by uncertainty?

  ‘Xavier!’ She almost put her hand out—as if to see if it was an apparition. ‘Is it really you?’ she whispered.

  ‘You think I have a double?’

  God, no. They’d broken the mould when they made him. ‘What…?’ She swallowed. For heaven’s sake, Laura—just pull yourself together. ‘What are you doing here?’

  His lips curved into a quizzical smile. ‘English hospitality leaves much to be desired,’ he murmured. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. Come in. Mind your—Oh, Xavier! Have you hurt your head?’

  ‘Non,’ he murmured, rubbing it with a grimace and wondering if England had once been populated by a race of pygmies.

  Laura smoothed her hands down over her hair, which was hanging loose to her waist, and wished that someone could wave a magic wand and transform her. She wore a pair of old jeans, a T-shirt she’d had since college which said Lawyers Do It In Briefs!, and not a scrap of make-up on her face.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’ she demanded. ‘At least I could have dressed up.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to dress up. I like the way you look,’ he said slowly, as his eyes drank her in. ‘You look…different.’

  He looked different, too—Laura realised. In black jeans which emphasised the long, muscular thrust of his thighs and a dark leather jacket. And he was taking the jacket off without being asked, she thought, as a wave of dizziness washed over her. Did that mean he was staying? Well, he hadn’t come all the way from Kharastan—or even Paris—just to turn around and go back again! But staying for how long? And did she have the guts to ask him what he was here for?

  ‘Would you like coffee?’ she babbled frantically. ‘It’s not real coffee, because I only buy that when I’m having a dinner party.’

  ‘Not real coffee?’ he asked, genuinely perplexed for a moment. ‘You mean it’s…pretend?’

  ‘It’s instant.’ Now he would see for himself how the real Laura Cottingham was—nothing but an unsophisticated small-town lawyer, who wore unsophisticated small-town clothes and drank instant coffee from a jar most of the time!

  Xavier shook his head slightly. This wasn’t going as he had planned, and for the first time in his life he felt the shimmer of doubt.

  The air was very still for a moment as he looked at her.

  ‘You didn’t take the job?’

  She shrugged. Had she really entertained the notion for more than a nano-second that she would track down Xavier’s half-brother? ‘No, I decided it wasn’t really such a good idea.’

  In that they were in perfect accord. Xavier expelled a long breath of relief, but he was still no closer to obtaining his heart’s desire.

  ‘Would you like to come to Paris instead?’

  Laura’s heart missed another beat. ‘Paris?’ she repeated cautiously. ‘What for?’

  Their eyes met.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. Ask him. ‘Why are you here, Xavier?’

  ‘Because something has happened to me—something that you have done to me,’ he said. ‘Something I cannot reverse, although in truth I have tried—mais oui, I have tried! I thought the confusion in my head was because I’d discovered my father—but soon I saw that this was not so.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense.’

  ‘You think I don’t know this?’ He shook his head as if he were clearing his thoughts—or marvelling that he should have them in the first place. ‘I realised that the things you said to me were true—that I cared more for things than I did about people. And I don’t want to live that way any more. You made me look at things differently, Laura,’ he continued, when still she said nothing. ‘You made me want more of what I had with you—something I’d spent my whole life running away from.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  There was a pause. ‘Emotion,’ he said eventually. ‘Oui.’ And, seeing her look of amazement, he shrugged and gave her a look which was the closest Xavier de Maistre had ever come to being helpless.

  ‘I kept remembering your face,’ he said, in a voice which was almost dreamy. ‘When something happened which amused or angered me I found myself wanting to tell you. I would lie in bed at night, reliving the moments I had with you—both erotic and tender moments, and not nearly enough of them.’

  His eyes were intensely black as he stared at her, the blackest she had ever seen them.

  ‘It’s driving me crazy. You’re driving me crazy.’ He swallowed. ‘I’ve missed you, Laura.’

  Her heart lurched with excitement, hope, fear. ‘Missed? Past tense?’

  ‘Always the lawyer’s precison with words,’ he mocked. ‘Okay, I miss you. I miss you,’ he repeated, slowly and deliberately. ‘How’s that?’

  Laura could feel the swirl of uncertainty, and she was afraid that he would see her terrible need, her desire—all the things which made her feel vulnerable around him—and be turned off by them. Was she grown-up enough to handle an affair, which was presumably what he was offering?

  ‘I want to be with you,’ he continued, and then his face became dark with passion, intent with something else. ‘Je t’aime,’ he said softly, and then added, ‘I love you.’

  Laura knew what it meant—everyone who had ever learnt French at school knew what it meant. And if someone had asked her what she wanted most in the world, then Xavier had just given it to her in those three words. But she was frightened. Terrified, in fact. She was like a unsure skater who had been told it was safe to go on the ice—yet some instinct of self-preservation made her want to test how solid it was.

  ‘How many other women have you said that to?’

  ‘None. Only you.’

  ‘We haven’t known each other for very long.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘And we’ve never been together in normal circumstances.’

  ‘I know that, too.’

  ‘Well, what if it won’t work?’ she said desperately.

  For the first time he touched her—reaching out to brush away a stray lock of hair which had fallen onto her pale cheek. ‘What if? What if?’ he murmured softly. ‘Why don’t you come to Paris and we’ll make sure it works? Together.’

  The Laura of a few months ago would have baulked at the suggestion of throwing caution to the wind and taking a step into the unknown. But that had been before Kharastan—an experience which had affected her profoundly and for which, ultimately, she had the cheating Josh to thank. And Xavier too, of course. In Kharastan he had wanted her on his terms, but she had resisted going for the easy fix. She had grown a new self-respect—and was no longer victim or coward.

  She stared at him and then pointed to her old clothes, her gesture taking in the sweet little cottage room, which was a million light years away from his sophisticated urban style.

  ‘But this is the real me,’ she said. ‘That expensively clad woman you met doesn’t exist.’

  He laughed softly as he shook his dark head, and his fingertips traced her eyelids, her nose, her lips, and then came to rest at last over her pounding heart.

  ‘No,’ he demurred. ‘This is the real you. The woman who has touched my heart and body and soul. The woman who made me look at myself, who made me think things I sometimes cared not to think. The woman who haunts my waking and sleep
ing hours and the woman I long to kiss once more.’

  ‘Then kiss me,’ she breathed.

  He took her into his arms and groaned as he brushed his mouth over hers.

  ‘Where’s the bedroom?’ he growled, after a few frantic moments.

  ‘You won’t need a route map,’ she gasped. ‘There’s only two, and it’s upstairs. Come with me.’

  He had to dip his head again to enter the miniature bedroom with a bed which was a little small for his taste, but he laid her down on it, pulling off her underwear, throwing it aside with the rest of his own clothes with none of his usual teasing restraint, uncaring. In fact, uncaring of anything other than the urgent need to join with her completely.

  It was only a brief interlude of sanity which reminded him to protect himself—and that near-slip dazed him, too, for it was always at the very top of his agenda.

  Laura sobbed as he entered her, and he licked her tears away with his tongue as he slicked in and out of her. She whimpered with pleasure, wanting to hold onto it—to cherish the feeling and the movement and the moment—but she was fighting a losing battle.

  ‘Oh, Xavier!’ she cried, and tightened her arms around him as if she would never let him go.

  He had known it was about to happen—had observed it from the rosy flowering at her breasts—and he knew he wanted to be with her, the same journey at the same time, leading to the same place. He had never had simultaneous orgasm before—the icy control at the very core of his being had never wanted to make himself quite that powerless—but this time he craved it with a hunger which overwhelmed him.

  Xavier let go, letting his orgasm take him up, and he followed it—swooping upwards just like the falcon who chased the lure. For a moment he felt at one with her—just as the sound of the wind seemed part of the desert itself—which was part of him.

  Never had his peak lasted for so long, and never had the sweet spasms taken so long to subside—so that for a moment he felt as though he had wandered into some unknown place of such enchanting beauty that it could not possibly exist. A place a little like Kharastan? Yes!