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  Her voice was remarkably steady as she said, ‘But I can’t marry you, Rashid. It…it wouldn’t be fair.’

  The black eyes glittered with interest. ‘Oh?’

  She swallowed, and now her voice was not so steady. ‘B-because I am no longer fit to be your wife,’ she breathed. ‘You see, I have already taken a lover before you, Rashid. I am no longer pure. And therefore I cannot marry you.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HELL broke loose.

  Rashid harshly uttered a Quadorian curse, then added a few more in English and French and Spanish to really get the message home. Then he strode over to Jenna, his face a livid picture of dark fury, and the chaperon sprang to her feet in alarm.

  ‘Excellency!’

  ‘Silence!’ he thundered autocratically, and the chaperon sat straight down again.

  His rage was so potent that he felt consumed by it, as if it had invaded his very blood—but alongside that rage came the desire to beat his fist uselessly against the wall. Jenna! His Jenna—in bed with another man! He wanted to kill him!

  ‘I want his name!’

  And then to kill her!

  ‘Well, you can’t have it!’ Jenna backed away from him, recoiling as much from the expression on his face as from his anger. And if she had thought that she had seen contempt there before, then she had been wrong. This was contempt—a contempt so blisteringly undiluted that it seemed to sizzle off him in hot and tangible waves.

  She forced her stumbling words out with difficulty. ‘R-Rashid, I realise that this means that you can’t marry me—w-won’t want to marry me—and I’m sorry if it’s ruined all your plans. But I think the best thing is if I just get straight back on the plane to America and—’

  ‘Silence!’ he thundered, cutting across her babble with the gunfire shot of his voice. He controlled his breathing with difficulty. He could never remember feeling quite so outraged before. Nor so shocked. With a supreme effort of will he banished the disturbing vision of Jenna lying naked and entangled with another from his mind. His black eyes narrowed, but the gleam that spat from them was like a searchlight. ‘Was it Brad?’ he questioned softly.

  Her eyes widened. ‘No!’ she gasped.

  He nodded. Her reaction had been too instant to be a lie. Instinct told him that. ‘Then who?’ he pursued, with deadly intent.

  She shook her head, wishing that her long hair was back to camouflage her flaming cheeks. ‘Rashid, I must go,’ she said desperately.

  ‘Not yet,’ he contradicted implacably, and traced a thoughtful forefinger along the shadowed jut of his chin.

  He did not speak for a moment, and when he did his words startled her. ‘It is inconceivable that you leave Quador without first seeing your father,’ he murmured. ‘And you really need to freshen up before you do so.’ His eyes swept over her disparagingly. ‘Don’t you?’

  Was he really letting her off so lightly? Jenna let out an inaudible sigh of relief. Maybe she had just unwittingly provided the answer to his unspoken wishes. She had let him off the hook and he could continue his playboy activities to his heart’s content—without the prospect of a jealous wife watching his every move.

  And he did have a point. She had come straight here after a long flight, directly into the heat of the Quador day. She was hot and she was sticky. Once she bathed and made herself respectable she could visit her father.

  She shuddered. Would Rashid tell him? She met the coldness of his eyes and her tongue snaked out in a vain attempt to moisten her dry lips. She saw his eyes darken in angry response. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I would like to bathe and change, and then I will be gone from your life for ever.’

  His smile was cruel. How naive she was if she thought that she could drop a bombshell like that and simply walk away from the devastation she had caused! But he merely nodded his head. ‘Very well, Jenna,’ he agreed equably. ‘Your chaperon will show you to a private set of apartments, and you will make use of them as you please.’

  Swallowing nervously, she nodded. In truth, she had not expected his anger to subside so quickly. She had thought that his pride would be offended more than anything—and didn’t it almost hurt that he now seemed to be accepting the situation with apparent calm? Maybe Rashid was more modern and more tolerant than she had imagined him to be.

  But one sneaking look at the unyielding face told her not to push her luck, and to get out of there before he changed his mind.

  He barked out an instruction and the chaperon nodded, beckoning Jenna to follow her.

  Unseeingly, she left the State Rooms and walked in the footsteps of the older woman through a maze of palace corridors, her heart pounding painfully with relief and an aching sense of regret for what could now never be. It wasn’t until she was safely inside a dim, cool bedchamber, where her one suitcase lay unopened on the bed, that her pulse began to die down to something approaching normality.

  ‘You wish that I should stay and assist you?’ asked the chaperon, but Jenna shook her head.

  She needed solitude to get her jumbled thoughts and emotions in some kind of order. She needed to compose herself and present a calm façade to her father—and she certainly couldn’t begin to do that if she had an audience. Particularly an audience with such curious eyes. She shook her head. ‘Thank you, but, no. I am used to managing on my own.’

  Once the woman had quietly closed the door behind her Jenna sank with trembling knees onto the low, wide divan on which most high-born Quadors slept, and buried her face in her hands.

  If she lived to be a hundred she would never forget that look of haunted disillusion which had fired Rashid’s face, so that for a moment he had resembled the devil himself. And she found herself remembering with poignant longing the expression of indulgent tenderness with which he’d used to look at her, so very long ago.

  But it was too late for that now. She had sealed her fate with her words, and Rashid would never forgive her. She must just pray that he would be reasonable enough never to repeat what she had told him to her dear father.

  She forced herself into action. The sooner she acted, the sooner she could be out of here. She filled the deep circular bath with water and oils scented with jasmine, and stripped off her jeans and her silky top. She threw them on the bed, together with her underwear.

  Then she opened the suitcase and pulled from it a traditional Quador outfit, her breath escaping in a shuddering sigh as she laid it carefully on the bed.

  The soft, silken robes brought back memories of happier times. In a way she had missed their filmy respectability—the long flowing tunic and the wide trousers worn beneath. A woman could feel like a real woman when concealed in the soft, sensual caress of silk.

  She bit her lip as she lowered her body into the bath and closed her eyes.

  She lay there for long, timeless moments, until lethargy began to seep into her limbs, and then she washed herself with the delicious scented soap and wrapped herself in a towel. She walked back into the bedchamber to find the room filled with an unexpected presence.

  A dark, powerful and brooding figure awaited her, and her heart very nearly stopped.

  ‘R-Rashid,’ she stumbled foolishly. ‘W-what on earth are you doing here?’ But the look in his eyes told its own story, and her heart picked up its beat again as she shrank from the ebony blaze of his eyes.

  He had come here to gather facts, or at least that was what he had convinced himself during his furious march through the palace. He had intended to do nothing more than tell her that the thought of her with another man had tainted his view of her for ever. But one sight of her curved and slender body, even the boyish haircut, had driven away reason and left him with nothing but the insistent clamouring of his senses. He was on fire with a need that consumed him.

  ‘I’ll leave why I’m here to your own imagination, Jenna,’ he said, his voice menacingly soft.

  To think that all the while he had been rejecting Chantal’s sensual invitation Jenna had been cavorting with some un
known man on the other side of the world! The rage burned so bright within him that he felt he might explode with it.

  ‘And I am sure it is a very vivid imagination these days, is it not? Has your American lover taught you much?’ Dark eyebrows were arched in arrogant and erotic query. ‘Perhaps your new-found knowledge is such that you would like to share it with me?’

  She understood his meaning instantly. ‘S-stop it!’ she gasped, but she was speaking as much to her own body as to the sexual predator who stood so tense with expectation beside the divan.

  What was happening to her?

  Because, somehow, the way that he was looking at her with a mixture of desire and contempt was igniting forbidden dreams that she had thought long-vanished.

  A cruel smile curved his delicious lips. ‘Stop what?’ he questioned, almost conversationally. ‘I’m merely elaborating on what you have just told me—giving you the opportunity to demonstrate your liberation!’ He spat the last word out as if it were poison.

  ‘I think you’d better go, Rashid,’ she said in a low voice. She dropped her gaze from his so that he wouldn’t see the hot, answering hunger in her eyes, which was making her breasts tingle so intensely that it was a sensation close to exquisite pain. ‘I’d like to get dressed now.’

  The smile became even more cruel. ‘But that would oppose the wishes of your Ruler, Jenna.’

  She lifted her eyes in horrified and excited understanding. ‘You can’t mean—’

  ‘Oh, but I can. I do not wish to see you dressed. On the contrary—your naked body is all I desire. I want you, Jenna—and I want you now. For too long I have played the assiduous gentleman around you. Fool! When all the time…’

  He began to move towards her, and it was so close to all her illicit half-forgotten fantasies that she was frozen there, like a statue waiting to be brought to life by the man she had always desired more than any other.

  He was nothing but a breath away now, all dark and golden stealth, muskily rapacious. ‘If I had but known…’ he continued, and reached his hand out to run his fingertips over the long, bare line of her neck, feeling it tremble in response. ‘If I had but known that you were in need of a man’s body, then I should have oh, so willingly complied with your wishes.’

  ‘G-go away,’ she said helplessly.

  His voice deepened as he saw her body sway instinctively towards his. ‘But you don’t want me to. You want me, Jenna. You always did. And now you always will. You will ache with the memory of what you have thrown away for the rest of your days. That will be my curse on you!’

  He pulled the towel away from her unprotesting fingers, and as it fell redundantly to the ground he sucked in a raw breath of longing as she stood naked before him, her body more beautiful than he had dreamt of, even in his wildest dreams.

  Her skin gleamed as if of gold, with dark and secret shadows, and the lush swell of her breasts was tipped with dark rose. He sucked in a shuddering breath as he felt his body jerk into life.

  ‘May the desert always bloom!’ he groaned thickly, and pulled her urgently into his arms to kiss her, more excited than he had ever been in his life.

  Melded tightly against him, Jenna could feel every lean, hard contour of his body through his silken robes, even while his mouth worked its predictable magic, and then she was lost from all sane thought. Many times she had imagined a kiss like this, and yet the reality blew the fantasy away in meaningless little pieces.

  ‘R-Rashid,’ she whispered shakily, lacing her fingers possessively in his hair, as she had wanted to do for as long as she had been a woman.

  He groaned again as he reached down to cup one breast, feeling its ripe, warm weight nestling in the palm of his hand while his thumb teased the hardening nub with an expertise which had her almost fainting. ‘Rashid, what?’ he questioned unsteadily. ‘Rashid, make love to me? Rashid, join me to your body? Is that what you want, Jenna?’

  May God forgive her—because that was exactly what she wanted! She gave no answer, merely a fraught little whimper of assent, because now his hand was splayed possessively over the slight swell of her belly and was moving down between her thighs. She should have felt frightened, but all she felt was a deep, almost unbearable sensation of longing.

  And then he found her, touched her where she was filled with heat, and she bucked with unexpected pleasure as the drift of his fingertip filled her with a curling sense of warmth which made her knees buckle.

  He was famous for his restraint. For his ability to pleasure a woman until she could be pleasured no more. Then and only then would he take his own release. But this time there were no thoughts of restraint or finesse or of demonstration of his consummate skill as a lover. This time he would not wait. He groaned again as he tugged at the silken tie of his trousers. Could not wait.

  Somehow she had fallen backwards onto the bed, on top of her discarded clothes which had been lying there, but none of that seemed to matter. Nothing mattered other than the sight of her dark and golden and fiercely aroused lover as he prepared to straddle her, and a sigh caught painfully in her throat.

  Rashid! Her beautiful, beloved Rashid! Hers, but never really hers. Not now. Only this once. She felt the threat of tears pricking at her eyes. She wanted him. Needed him. She always had done. And just for once she would taste the pleasures of paradise in his arms. She opened her eyes and her arms to him in silent invitation though her heart felt as if it was breaking.

  For with that look of raw, ill-concealed passion on his face it was so very easy to imagine that she loved him still. She made a little moan of regret and longing, and her fingertips met the rasp of his shadowed chin. He bent his head to kiss her again, and that kiss swept her away into a world that she could barely believe existed.

  He moved over her, so aroused that he could barely contain himself. What had she done to him? This vixen! This desert cat! This wicked, wanton and unknown Jenna who had taken another to her bed! He lifted his mouth away from hers and bent his head to briefly suckle her breast, felt the knife-edge of bitterness as he thought of what she had thrown away. She could have suckled his baby, he thought. That joy could have been hers. And his.

  But then his thoughts were overtaken by a need to possess her. A need so strong and so urgent that he was eaten up by it. Her eyes were wide and her lips were parted in gleaming invitation as he entered her.

  And when she let out a stifled cry he thought at first it was because he was so big inside her. By the desert flower, he had never felt so big! But something warned him that this was not all as it seemed. The little tremor as her nails bit into his shoulders—as if what was happening was new to her.

  He stared down at her in disbelief, watching the tears begin to slide from beneath the corners of her tightly closed eyes, and it hit him like a body-blow just what was happening.

  He tried to stop himself, but it was too late for that—far too late. He felt the slow shuddering of an orgasm so deep and intense and earth-shattering that he thought he might die at that very moment, and be happy to die that way.

  For a moment the world lost meaning as it shifted out of focus, and then reality began to creep back, like the first faint sun after the winter freeze.

  He stifled a groan, and when he had stilled he withdrew from her as gently as he could. But he did not need to see the scarlet flowering which had spread over the clothes and divan like new blossom. He had guessed for himself.

  He caught her against his bare chest. But she was stiff and unmoving in his arms as the words caught in his throat like dust and his heart pounded with something very close to pain.

  ‘You were a virgin,’ he said flatly.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JENNA didn’t answer for a moment, but when she opened her eyes it was to surprise an expression of something approaching sorrow in his own. Moving out of his embrace, she reached for the huge towel which lay beside the bed and cuddled it over her protectively, though its warmth did little to take the edge off her feeling of naked expos
ure and her teeth began to chatter violently.

  ‘Weren’t you, Jenna?’ he demanded again, but this time his voice was gentler. ‘A virgin?’

  ‘Y-yes,’ she stumbled.

  ‘You lied to me,’ he said, but it was less an accusation and more as though he was trying to work out some kind of insoluble calculation.

  She bit down on her lip. ‘Yes, again.’

  There was a heartbeat of a pause. ‘But I don’t understand.’ His voice sounded dazed. ‘I don’t understand why.’

  It was the closest she had ever heard to Rashid admitting confusion. She opened her eyes and wished that she hadn’t, for he was lying on his side, leaning on his elbow with his chin resting on his hand. And, although his eyes burned into her with their jet-dark question, he seemed thoroughly unself-conscious in his nakedness.

  His body was burnished gold by the sunlight which filtered in through the shutters, as if he had been moulded from some precious metal. It was a very, very beautiful body, thought Jenna.

  But it had not brought her pleasure, she reminded herself achingly—and now it never would.

  ‘Why, Jenna?’ he persisted, and his eyes narrowed as he saw the sudden tremble of her lips. He who had never failed a woman had failed this one!

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not having this conversation now. Not here. Like this.’ Beneath the towel she felt more vulnerable still, worried that he might touch her again—and even more stupidly worried that he would not. How had this unthinkable situation come about? ‘I’d l-like to get dressed, please.’

  He narrowed his eyes, and then nodded. ‘Go and get dressed, then,’ he said quietly. ‘But I’m not going anywhere.’

  She edged him a pleading look as she moved off the bed with as much dignity as she could muster.

  But he ignored her silent request. He obviously had no intention of moving. True to his word, he continued to lie there, as lazily indolent as a cat who had just sampled a particularly large saucer of cream. Couldn’t he just do the decent thing, and go—and leave her with this terrible sense of regret?