Taken by the Sheikh

She certainly wasn’t greedy, he acknowledged. He had seen that with his own eyes. And she had to be naïve if she’d let herself be persuaded into working for Monika.

‘Drax? Are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here, Vere. As to your bride—well, that’s where you are wrong, my brother. It just so happens that I may have found you the perfect temporary wife.’

Drax switched off his phone before Vere could say anything, and then started to cut the speed of his car.

Sadie could hear the now familiar tell-tale sound of a car braking to a crawl just behind her, but she refused to look round. However, this car didn’t pull away as quickly as the others had when she did not respond. Instead it continued to keep pace with her, casting a long shadow in front of her. She tried to walk a little bit faster, wishing she could move away from the side of the road, but the land beyond was too rough for her to wheel her case over it.

There was no need for her to panic, she assured herself. It was broad daylight and, even if he was being more persistent than the others, surely whoever it was would soon get bored when she didn’t respond, soon put his foot down to race past her in a cloud of sandy dust.

Only he didn’t. And out of the corner of her eye she could see a long black bonnet edging just ahead of her, then keeping pace with her.

She couldn’t walk any faster; she was panting slightly already, her skin soaked with perspiration caused not just by the heat now but by her anxiety as well.

‘Ms Murray?’

Hearing her name spoken in crisp accent-free English gave her such a shock that she froze. Just as he had estimated she would, she reflected bitterly several seconds later, when the car stopped, the driver’s door opened and the driver himself stepped out in front of her, trapping her between his body and his car.

‘You!’

Why had she said that? It had sounded so personal and so betraying somehow—as though she were deliberately creating an intimacy between them. And that hadn’t been her intention. She was just so shocked to see the man she had last seen standing in the Al Sawars’ courtyard with her employer’s husband standing in front of her.

Unlike her, he wasn’t wearing sunglasses, and something about the look she could see in his eyes made her feel like some poor creature of the desert caught in the predatory searching stare of a falcon.

‘If Madame Al Sawar asked you to come after me…’ she began uncertainly.

Before she could finish what she was saying Drax silenced her with a swift frown.

‘I can acquit you because you do not know me well enough to know that I do not act as an errand boy for others,’ he told her arrogantly. ‘But do you really know Monika so little that you think she’d show that kind of remorse?’

Sadie looked away from him. He was right, of course. Monika was not the type to suffer from second thoughts, much less guilt over what she had done.

‘I came after you because there is something I want to discuss with you. The Professor speaks very highly of you. He considers you to be a young woman of good morals and intelligence.’ Drax was not going to tell her that the Professor had also confirmed his own assessment that she was more inclined to think the best of others than the worst, and that this made her vulnerable to the selfish machinations of the unscrupulous.

Sadie could feel a pink flush heating her face as she listened to this praise.

‘You are fully qualified to work in the financial services industry, so I understand?’

His question startled Sadie. ‘I have a degree and an MBA,’ she acknowledged. She could see Drax nodding his head, as though her words had confirmed what he already knew.

‘It could be that I can offer you a job to replace the one you have just lost.’

Now he could see uncertainty and suspicion in her eyes, along with the kind of female wariness that made Drax congratulate himself again on his own intuition. She would be perfect for the plan he had outlined to his twin.

Sadie looked at him with a challenging expression. She wasn’t so naïve that she wasn’t aware that there was a certain type of Arab male who looked to western women to satisfy his sexual needs via a series of brief sex-only liaisons.

‘Thank you, but my plan has always been to return to the UK to work.’

‘But not without the money to pay your fare or your passport?’ Drax suggested.

Her passport? Sadie looked at him, and then looked down at her bag. But there was no need for her to look inside it, because Drax was already holding her passport in his hand.

‘What…?’

‘Why don’t you get in the car?’ Drax looked at his watch. ‘I can tell you about the job that’s on offer over a late lunch in the city.’

Did he really expect her to fall for that kind of line? She wasn’t that naïve. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not interested—in anything,’ she emphasised firmly, reaching for her passport.

Drax stepped back from her, sliding her passport out of sight somewhere within the folds of his dishdasha.

‘Very well,’ he said calmly, and turned back to his car.

‘My passport…’ Sadie protested frantically.

‘What passport? If, when I reach the airport for my return flight to Dhurahn, I find that I still have the passport I found lying on the ground in Zuran City, then I shall naturally see that it reaches the nearest British Embassy.’

‘What?’ This was getting worse by the minute. Not only had he got her passport, he was also planning to leave the country. ‘No, you can’t do that!’ Sadie told him wildly.

‘No?’ The ice-green eyes had hardened.

Ignoring the warning in them, Sadie tried to grab her passport back from him, crying out as she stumbled over a sharp piece of rock jutting out of the earth and then fell heavily against Drax.

Drax’s reactions were quicker than Sadie’s. He caught her easily, and could have held her away from him so their bodies didn’t come into contact, but for some reason he wasn’t prepared to explain to himself he didn’t. Instead, he wrapped his hands around her upper arms to steady her, and let her body rest against his own. He could feel the soft rounded swell of her breasts, and the temptation to slide his hands from her arms to her hips, to pull her more intimately against him, was so strong and instinctive that it startled him. She smelled hot and sweet, and her scent caused an unexpected surge of sexual awareness to grip him. It took him off guard.

What the hell was this? He didn’t normally react with this kind of easy arousal. A man in his position had to be careful about his sexual liaisons. Drax had learned that long ago. He had a responsibility towards the position he held. He and Vere had a shared duty to give their subjects a good example and to set high moral standards. Casual sex wasn’t something he indulged in, and yet here he was so stiffly erect that he felt downright uncomfortable—and all on account of this dusty young woman with her topaz eyes and her pale skin. A woman he had already decided to offer to his brother.

Which was, of course, why he was testing her moral standards. If she took advantage of their shared intimacy now to come on to him he would know there was no point in pursuing his plan. Neither could he afford to become sexually involved with her—it wasn’t for sex that he wanted her. She must be proved to be the kind of woman the Professor believed her to be. The kind of woman who was the opposite of women like Monika al Sawar and who would not try to institute sex with a man without being invited to do so.

After Sadie’s shock at being so unexpectedly close to Drax, with all its drugging excitement, came recognition of her vulnerability—and with it panic.

‘Let go of me!’ She sounded more pleading than assertive, Sadie recognised weakly, as she heard the emotion in her own voice. Being this close to this man wasn’t good for her, she admitted. It reactivated everything she had felt in the courtyard, and underlined her inability to override her physical response to him.

So why wasn’t she doing more to make him release her? Why, in fact, was she leaning into him as though she couldn’t stand without the support of his body? Did she really not care about the danger of her own actions? Not just via the casual sex with a stranger he might think she was inviting but, just as dangerously, via the effect her proximity to him was having on what she had always believed to be givens about herself. Givens like the fact that she wasn’t a woman who had strong sexual urges; like the fact that she wasn’t a woman who could ever be overwhelmed by desire for a man just by looking at him; like the fact that she was far too sensible to take risks with her sexual and emotional health.

It was the heat of the sun that was making her feel weak, she hurried to reassure herself. Nothing else. She certainly wasn’t entertaining the kind of fantasies she had heard some western women had about sexy Arab sheikhs—even if this man was everything that such a man should be, right down to the aura of danger surrounding him.

‘This is Zuran,’ she heard him telling her coldly as he thrust her away. ‘Here it is not acceptable for a man and a woman to embrace in public, no matter what you may be used to doing elsewhere!’

What she might be used to doing elsewhere? He was making it sound as though he thought she was coming on to him. Mortified, Sadie pulled away from him and stepped back. She was right about one thing. She had been out in the hot sun for longer than was wise, and her own sudden movement had caused a wave of faintly nauseating dizziness to swamp her.

The sight of Sadie’s suddenly too pale face accompanied by her soft gasp of shock had Drax reacting with instinctive speed as he recognised the onset of heat sickness. He bundled her into the car so quickly that Sadie didn’t have time to do anything more than make an incoherent protest. She could feel the car depressing as he slid into the driver’s seat and switched on the engine. She could hear too the sound of the doors locking as he set the car in motion and pulled away from the kerb.

‘Stop,’ she said frantically. ‘You can’t do this!’

‘What would you have preferred me to do—leave you where you were to suffer sunstroke?’

‘There’s plenty of shade in the city.’