Summer Sheikhs: Sheikh's Betrayal / Breaking the Sheikh's Rules / Innocent in the Sheikh's Harem

Desi had reacted to the challenge with predictable outrage. ‘So what?’ she had cried. ‘I bet there are lots of countries where they have them ten thousand years old!’

His mouth smiled when she reminded him; his eyes were too shadowed to read.

‘You made me so mad! But I think I made up my mind then that one day I’d come to Barakat and see what you were talking about, a city five thousand years old!’

‘And now you are here.’

She hated the way he said it.

‘Won’t you find archaeology tame after a career as a supermodel?’

‘It beats marketing a perfume called Desirée,’ she said dryly. Her distaste for that at least was no lie. ‘“Feminine, delicate, but with a smouldering hint of sensuality.” Or a chain of restaurants: Desi’s Diner. How would you like it?’

He had the grace to laugh.

‘But isn’t a chain of restaurants with a smouldering hint of sensuality just what the world needs?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Not from me.’

‘And only an urgent visit to my father’s site will save you from this fate?’

How she hated the lies! But Sami’s anguished voice was there in her head…I’ve only got one chance to derail this thing…

‘I told you—it’s the only time I have free,’ she said. ‘This is the time I go to the island every year. I thought how great if I could get in on the ground floor with your father and he let me volunteer on the site for a couple of seasons. That’s a requirement of the course.’

The explanation had sounded halfway reasonable during the planning stage. She wasn’t sure now.

To her relief, Salah hardly seemed to hear. He was tearing at a chicken wing.

‘Try this,’ he said, leaning right over to hold up to her mouth a piece thick with a purply-black sauce. Desi automatically opened her mouth and bit into the tender flesh, then grunted at the rich, melting flavour.

‘Mmm! What is that black stuff? I’ve never tasted anything so yummy in my life!’ she said when she could speak.

‘Pomegranate sauce. Another speciality of the mountain tribes.’

A drop of sauce was on her cheek too far for her tongue to reach. Salah caught it with a fingertip and presented it to her mouth. She licked instinctively, then her eyes flew to his.

He slid his wet finger deliberately across her lower lip.

The hoarse intake of her breath told him everything. A jolt of electricity zapped the night air. In his black eyes two tiny golden flames were reflected, as if to warn her his touch would burn. His white teeth tore off a bite from the same piece he had offered her, and the sensual intimacy of that hit her another blow.

Desi dropped her eyes and made a business of wiping her cheek with a napkin. She tried to think of something to say, but her mind had been tipped onto its back and lay there, kicking helplessly. She felt gauche, inexperienced. As if the ten years were smoke and mirrors.

Silence fell, a silence thick with feeling, expectation, a question asked and answered.

She began to eat.

The little lamps on the cloth lighted his hand as he ate, emphasizing the strength of his fingers, the fluid grace of his wrist that transformed into power whenever he grasped a bit of naan or a goblet. Involuntarily the memory came to her of that same hand, painted in moonlight and shadow, rough and tender with inexperienced passion as they lay under the dock.

Sometimes, too, his mouth and jaw were touched with gold: a stern mouth, a full lower lip that the chiaroscuro painted in more sensual lines than was revealed in ordinary light. His eyes were mostly shadowed, except for a black glinting in the darkness.

‘You go to the island still?’ he asked. She wished he had started any topic but that one, but she had to answer.

‘My parents live there full-time now. I spend a month there every summer, and Christmas if I can.’

He asked after her parents, her young sister, after Harry, her brother. Softly, softly, he drew her into remembering. She knew it was deliberate, to prove some point, to set some mood—but she could neither prevent it, nor resist.

The shadows, the stars, his voice, the talk of those island summers—everything conspired to take her back to the sweet hours they had lain undetected and undisturbed in their refuge under the ancient dock, their world of two. She began to feel like that child-woman again, on the brink of discovery of self and other, of love and desire, of her own sexual power, and another’s.

He had been her lover. She knew what it meant for those hands, with light and shadow playing on them like this, to caress and stroke her. Sometimes when his hand disappeared again into shadow, her body shivered in the unconscious expectation of a caress.

Desi sank into the embracing cushions as they talked, her legs folded with unconscious grace, naked toes curling as she rested on one elbow and ate with her fingers. All her guard had come down. She was eating more food than she’d had at one go for a decade. This was a total sensual delight.

He watched her soften, and the predator in him gloried in his success even as he told himself it meant nothing.

The last course was put in front of them then, a pastry oozing with the promise of sweetness, and she summoned resistance at last. ‘That looks lovely, but I never eat sugar,’ she said.

‘This is made with honey.’

‘Or honey.’ But for once she could not resist. ‘Just a taste,’ Desi said.

Fatal mistake. ‘Oh, that is just too delicious!’ she exclaimed, hastily dropping the little gold fork.

Salah bent his head, and she saw his eyes clearly. They glinted amusement at her, and something else, and her blood leapt so painfully in response she almost whimpered.

‘Do you push temptation away so easily, Deezee?’ he asked, his voice caressing her nerve endings like soft sandpaper.

She looked at him, a hard man if there ever was one. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Not such temptation as this,’ he said. She knew he did not mean the little honey-crusted sweet. Flame flickering in the black eyes, he picked up the sweetmeat from her plate with his fingers, tilted his head back and caught it on his tongue.

It nearly flattened her. Sensation roared over her skin, bringing every cell to attention.

His gaze caught hers before she could turn away, and it was all there in her eyes. She saw him read it. The heat rose up in her cheeks, but she could not tear her gaze from his.

Her eyes were emerald with desire. He smiled like a wolf, dark and determined, and said what he did not want to say…

‘Shall I come to your bed tonight, Desi?’

Warmth flooded her body. Oh, how could she be so weak? She’d had ten years to get over this!

‘No.’

He shrugged. ‘Then you must come to mine.’

‘Mmm. I’ll be riding a flying pig.’

She was falling apart, and it was only the first day. Desi took a deep, trembling breath. She was headed out of her depth here. The sooner she got out of the palace and onto the dig with other people, the better.