Shamed in the Sands Read online

  Her heavy golden fork clattered to her plate and he saw the apprehension on her face as she turned to face him.

  ‘There’s no intrigue,’ she answered, her voice as low as his.

  ‘No? Then why all the mystery? Why not just tell your brother that we’ve already met. Unless he doesn’t know, of course.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Maybe he has no idea that his sister came to my hotel today,’ he continued remorselessly. ‘And let me—’

  ‘Please.’ Her interruption sounded anguished. ‘We can’t talk here.’

  ‘Then where do you suggest?’ he questioned. ‘Same time, same place tomorrow? Maybe you’d already planned to return for a repeat performance, wearing a different kind of disguise. Maybe the masquerade aspect turns you on. I don’t know.’ His eyes bored into her. ‘Had you?’

  ‘Mr Steel—’

  ‘It’s Gabe,’ he said with icy pleasantry. ‘You remember how to say my name, don’t you, Leila?’

  Briefly, Leila closed her eyes. She certainly did. And she hadn’t just said it, had she? She’d gasped it as he had entered her. She had whispered it as he’d moved deep inside her. She had shuddered it out in a long, keening moan as her orgasm had taken hold of her and almost torn her apart with pleasure.

  And now all those amazing memories were being swept away by the angry wash from his eyes.

  She wished she could spirit herself away. That she could excuse herself by saying she felt sick—which was actually true, because right at that moment she did feel sick.

  But Murat would never forgive her if she interrupted the banquet—why, it might even alert his suspicions if he suspected that she found the Englishman’s presence uncomfortable. He might begin to ask himself why. And surely the man beside her—the man who had made such incredible love to her—couldn’t keep up this simmering hostility for the entire meal?

  ‘Look, I can understand why you’re angry,’ she said, trying to keep her tone conciliatory.

  ‘Can you?’ His pewter eyes glittered out a hostile light. ‘And why might that be? Because you failed to reveal your true identity to me?’

  ‘I wasn’t—’

  ‘Or because it’s only just occurred to you that you might have compromised my working relationship with your brother?’ His voice was soft but his words were deadly. ‘Because no man likes to discover that his sister has behaved like a whore.’

  He leaned back in his chair to study her, as if they were having a perfectly amicable discussion, and Leila thought how looks could deceive. The casual observer would never have noticed that the polite smile on his lips was completely at odds with the angry glitter in his grey eyes.

  ‘I was behaving as other women sometimes behave,’ she protested. ‘Spontaneously.’

  ‘But most women aren’t being pursued by bodyguards at the time,’ he continued. His voice lowered, and she could hear the angry edge to his words. ‘What would have happened if they had burst in and found us in bed together?’

  Leila tried desperately to block the image from her mind. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, I think you’ve got a pretty good idea. What would have happened, Leila?’

  She swallowed, knowing that he was far too intelligent to be fobbed off with a vague answer. ‘You would have been arrested,’ she admitted reluctantly.

  ‘I would have been arrested,’ he repeated grimly and nodded his head. ‘Destroying my reputation and losing my freedom in the process. Maybe even my head?’

  ‘We are not that barbaric!’ she protested, but her words did not carry the ring of conviction.

  ‘It’s funny really,’ he continued, ‘because for the first time in my life I’m feeling like some kind of stud. Wham and bam—but not much in the way of thank you, ma’am.’

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Really? Then what was it? Love at first sight?’

  Leila picked up her goblet of black cherry juice and drank a mouthful, more as a stalling mechanism than because she was thirsty. His words were making her realise just how impulsive she had been and how disastrous it would have been if they’d been caught. But they hadn’t been caught, had they? Maybe luck—or fate—had been on their side.

  And the truth of it was that her heart had leapt with a delicious kind of joy when she’d seen him again tonight, in his charcoal suit and a silver tie the colour of a river fish. She had stared at the richness of his hair and longed to run her fingers through it. Her eyes had drifted hungrily over his hard features and, despite everything she’d vowed not to do, she had wanted to kiss him. She had started concocting unrealistic little fantasies about him, and that was crazy. Just because he had proved to be an exquisite lover, didn’t mean that she should fall into that age-old female trap of imagining that he had a heart.

  Because no man had a heart, she reminded herself bitterly.

  ‘Love?’ She met the challenge in his eyes. ‘Why, do you always have to be in love before you can have sex?’

  ‘Me? No. Most emphatically I do not. But women often do, especially when it’s their first time. But then I guess most women aren’t just spoiled little princesses who see what they want and go out and take it—and to hell with the consequences.’

  Leila didn’t react to the spoiled-little-princess insult. She knew people thought it, though no one had ever actually come out and said it to her face before. She knew what people thought about families like hers and how they automatically slotted her into a gilded box marked ‘pampered’. But what they saw wasn’t always the true picture. Unimaginable wealth didn’t protect you from the normal everyday stuff. Glittering palace walls didn’t work some kind of magic on the people who lived within them. Prick her skin and she would bleed, just like the next woman.

  ‘It was an unconventional introduction, I admit,’ she said. ‘To bring my work to your hotel room unannounced like that and ask you for a job.’

  ‘Please don’t be disingenuous, Leila. That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.’ He sounded impatient now. ‘Which guide to interview technique did you study before you started removing your clothes and climbing all over me? The 1960s Guide to Sexual Behaviour? Or A Hundred Ways To Make The Casting Couch Work For You?’

  ‘You didn’t seem so averse to the idea at the time!’

  ‘Funny that,’ he mused. ‘A beautiful woman comes up to my suite, turns her big blue eyes on me and starts coming on to me. She brushes my arm so lightly that I wonder if I’d imagined it, though my senses tell me I hadn’t. Then she pirouettes around so that there can be no mistaking the tight cut of her jeans or the cling of her blouse as she shows off her amazing body. She gazes into my eyes as if I am the answer to all her prayers.’ And for one brief moment hadn’t he felt as if he could be?

  There was a pause as Leila forced herself to scoop some jewel-coloured rice onto her fork—terrified that someone might notice that she hadn’t eaten a thing and start asking themselves why. Had she done everything which Gabe had accused her of? Had she behaved like some kind of siren? She lifted her head to look at him. ‘You could have stopped me,’ she said.

  Gabe stilled as he met the challenge sparking from her blue eyes. Because hadn’t he been thinking the same thing ever since it had happened? He could have stopped her. He should have stopped her. He should have waited until her bodyguards had gone and then told her to get out of his room as quickly as possible. He could have dampened down his desire, using the formidable self-control which had carried him through situations far more taxing than one of sexual frustration. He could have told her that he didn’t have a type, but that if he did—she wouldn’t be it.

  He didn’t like women who were obvious. Who had persistent exes or brothers who were sultans. He had an antenna for women who were trouble and it had never failed him before. He resisted the tricky ones. The
neurotic and needy ones.

  But something had gone wrong this time.

  Because he hadn’t resisted Leila, had he? He had broken his own rules and taken her to bed without knowing a single damned thing about her. And he still couldn’t work out why. He shook his head slightly. It had been something indefinable. Something in those wide blue eyes which had drawn him in. He had felt like a man whose throat was parched. Who had been shown a pool of water and invited to drink from it. He had felt almost...

  His eyes narrowed.

  Almost helpless.

  And that was never going to happen.

  Not twice in a lifetime.

  ‘I could have stopped you,’ he agreed slowly.

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  He didn’t answer straight away because it was important to get this right. He wanted to send out a message to her. A very clear message she could not fail to understand. That it had meant nothing to him. That it would be a mistake to fall for him. That he caused women pain. Deep pain.

  ‘Sometimes sex is like an itch,’ he said deliberately. ‘And you just can’t help yourself from scratching it.’

  Her face didn’t register any of the kind of emotions he might have expected. No indignation or hurt. He suspected that hers was a world where feelings as well as faces were hidden. But he saw her eyes harden, very briefly. As if he had simply confirmed something she had already known.

  ‘I’m sure that the romantic poets need have nothing to fear from your observations,’ she said sarcastically.

  He picked up his goblet of wine, twirling the long golden stem between his fingers. ‘Just so long as we understand each other.’

  She leaned forward, and he caught a drift of some faint scent. It made him think of meadow flowers being crushed underfoot. He found it...distracting.

  ‘Oh, I get the message loud and clear,’ she said. ‘So forgive me if I ignore you as much as possible for the rest of the meal. I think we’ve said everything there is to say to each other, don’t you?’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LEILA GRIPPED THE side of the washbasin as terror sliced through her like the cold blade of a sword. She wanted to scream. Or to throw back her head and howl like an animal. But she didn’t dare. Because her fear of discovery was almost as great as the dark suspicion which had been growing inside her for days.

  She stayed perfectly still and listened, her heart thudding painfully in her chest. Had anyone heard her? Had one of the many unseen servants been close enough to the bathroom to catch the sound of her shuddered retching?

  She closed her eyes.

  Please no.

  But when she opened them again, she knew that she could no longer keep pretending. She couldn’t keep hoping and praying that this wasn’t happening, because it was.

  It had started with a missed period. One day late. Two days late—then a full week. Her nerves had been shot. Her heart seemed to have been permanently racing with horror and fear. She was never late—her monthly cycle was as reliable as the morning sunrise. And the awful thing was that she’d had to pretend that it had arrived. She’d forced herself to wince and to clutch at the lower part of her stomach as if in discomfort, desperate not to alert the suspicions of her female servants. Because in that enclosed, watched world of the palace, nothing went unnoticed—not even the princess’s most intimate secrets.

  She had told herself that it was just a glitch. That it must be her body behaving in an unusual way because it had been introduced to sex. Then she had tried not thinking about it at all. When that hadn’t worked, she’d made silent pleas to Mother Nature, promising that she would be good for the rest of her life, if only she wasn’t carrying Gabe Steel’s baby.

  But her pleas went unanswered. The horror was real. The bare and simple fact wasn’t going away, simply because she wanted it to.

  She was pregnant.

  Her one brief experiment with sex—her one futile attempt to behave with the freedom of a man—had left her with a consequence which was never going to leave her. Pregnant by a man who never wanted to see her again.

  She was ruined.

  With trembling fingers, she tidied her mussed hair, knowing she couldn’t let her standards slip. She had to maintain the regal facade expected of her, because if anyone ever guessed...

  She thought about the meagre options which lay open to her and each of them filled her with foreboding. She thought what would happen if her brother found out, and a shudder ran down her spine. She gripped the washbasin, and the cold porcelain felt like ice beneath her clammy fingers. Murat must not find out—at least, not yet.

  She was going to have to tell Gabe.

  But Gabe had gone back to England and there were no plans for her to see him again. He had spent a further fortnight working here in Qurhah without their paths ever crossing. Why would they? He had made it clear that he wanted to forget what had happened and she had convinced herself she felt the same way. She’d found herself reflecting how strange it was that two people who’d been so intimate could afterwards act like strangers.

  Even the farewell dinner given in honour of the English tycoon had yielded no moments of closeness. She and Gabe had barely exchanged any words at all, bar a few stilted ones of greeting. During the meal she’d read nothing but cool contempt in his pewter eyes. And that had hurt. She had experienced for the first time the pain of rejection, made worse by the dull ache of longing.

  Her mind working overtime, Leila shut the bathroom door behind her and walked slowly back to her private living quarters. Gabe Steel might not be her first port of call in normal circumstances, but right now he was the only person she could turn to.

  She had to tell him.

  But how?

  She looked out over the palace rose gardens where the bright orange bloom which had been named after her in the days following her birth was now in glorious display.

  If she phoned him, who wasn’t to say that some interfering palace busybody might not be listening in to her call? And phoning him would still leave her here, pregnant and alone and vulnerable to the Sultan’s rage if he found out.

  But if she left it much longer it was inevitable he would find out anyway.

  A sudden knock at the door disturbed her, and her troubled thoughts became magnified when one of her servants informed her that the Sultan wished to see her with immediate effect.

  Leila’s mouth was dry with fear as she walked silently along the marble corridors towards Murat’s own magnificent section of the royal palace. Had he guessed? Was he summoning her to tell her that she had brought shame on the royal house, and that she was to be banished to some isolated region of their vast country to bring up her illegitimate child in solitude?

  But when she was ushered into his private sitting room, Murat’s demeanour was unusually solicitous, his black eyes narrowed with something almost approaching concern.

  He began by asking whether she was well.

  ‘Yes, I am very well,’ she lied, praying that her horror at this particular question would not show on her face. ‘Why...why do you ask?’

  Murat shrugged. ‘Just that you seem to have been almost invisible lately. You don’t seem to have been yourself at all. Is something wrong, Leila?’

  He’d noticed!

  Despite her wild flare of fear, Leila knew that she must not react. She must not give her clever brother any inkling that she was concealing a desperate secret. With a resourcefulness she wasn’t aware she possessed—though maybe desperation was in itself an inspiration—Leila shrugged. ‘I have been feeling a little discontented of late.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘In what way?’

  She licked her lips. ‘I feel as if I have seen nothing of the world, or of life itself. All I know is Qurhah.’

  ‘That is because you are a princess of Qurhah,’ M
urat growled. ‘And your place is here.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Leila, thinking that he made her sound like an ancient piece of furniture which had never been moved from its allocated place on the rug. ‘But you travel. You get to visit other countries. And I...I have seen nothing of the world, other than the surrounding lands of the desert region.’

  The Sultan’s black eyes narrowed. ‘And?’

  She forced herself to say the words, to make him think that she had accepted the future which had been planned for her. A future which could now never happen, because what prospective royal husband would wish to take a bride who carried another man’s child?

  ‘I know that my place is here, Murat,’ she said quietly. ‘But before I immerse myself in the life which has been mapped out for me—could I not have an overseas trip?’

  Beneath his silken headdress, Murat’s dark brows knitted together. ‘What kind of trip?’ he echoed.

  Leila could hardly believe she’d got this far and knew she mustn’t blow it now. She thought about the tiny, forbidden life growing inside her and she drew in a deep breath. ‘You know that Princess Sara has a place in London?’

  ‘So I gather,’ said Murat carelessly.

  Leila watched her brother’s reaction closely, but if he was hurt to hear the name of the woman he’d once been betrothed to, he didn’t show it.

  ‘She often writes to me and tells me all about the fabulous shopping in the city,’ Leila continued. ‘Many times she has asked me to visit her there. Couldn’t I do that, Murat—just for a few days? You know how much I love shopping!’

  There was silence for a moment. Had she made her request sound suitably fluffy? If she’d told her brother that she wanted to go and see a photographic exhibition which was being launched, he would never have approved. He was one of those men who believed that shopping kept women subdued. Lavish them with enough stuff and it kept them satisfied.

  ‘I suppose that a few days could be arranged,’ he said eventually.