The Call of the Desert

An urgent voice jarred her out of the memories. Dredging up strength from somewhere deep inside her, from a place she hadn’t needed to visit in a long time, Julia steeled herself and turned around. She was going to have to stand up in front of all these people and speak for fifteen minutes, all the while knowing he was there, watching her.

Remembering?

Perhaps he wouldn’t even remember … Perhaps he’d struggle to place her in his past. Her mouth became a bitter line. He’d certainly had enough women to make her blur into the crowd—not to mention a marriage of his own. She hated to admit that she was as aware of his exploits as the next person on the street who read the gossip rags on their lunchbreaks.

Maybe he’d wonder why she looked familiar. Acute pain gripped her and she repressed it brutally. Perhaps he wouldn’t remember the long nights in the desert when it had felt as if they were the only two people in the world underneath a huge blanket of stars. Perhaps he wouldn’t remember the beautiful poignancy of becoming each other’s first lover and how their na?ve lovemaking had quickly developed beyond naivetеe to pure passion and an insatiable need for one another.

Perhaps he wouldn’t remember when he’d said to her one night: “I will love you always. No other woman could ever claim my heart the way you have.”

And perhaps he wouldn’t remember that awful day in the beautiful Royal Palace in Burquat when he’d become someone cold and distant and cruel.

Reassuring herself that a man like Kaden would have consigned her to the dust heap of his memories, and stifling the urge to run from the room, Julia pasted a smile on her face and followed her colleague back into the crowd, trying desperately to remember what on earth she was supposed to talk about.

“Ah, Sheikh Kaden, there you are. Dr Julia Somerton is just about to speak. I believe she used her research in Burquat for her masters degree. Perhaps you met her all those years ago? She’s involved in fundraising now, for various worldwide archaeological projects.”

Kaden looked at the red-faced man who’d forced his way through the crowd to come and join him, and made a non-committal response. The man was the managing director of the club, who had invited him with a view to wooing funds out of him. Kaden was trying to disguise the uncomfortable jolt of shock to hear the name Julia. Despite the fact that he’d never met another Julia in Burquat, he told himself that there might have been another student by that name and he wouldn’t have necessarily been aware, considering his lack of interest in all things archaeological after she’d left.

This was his first foray back into that world and it would be ironic in the extreme if he was to meet her. She had been Julia Connors, not Somerton. Although, as an inner voice pointed out, she could be married by now. In fact, why wouldn’t she be? He had been married, after all. At the memory of his marriage Kaden felt the usual cloud of black anger threaten to overwhelm him. He resolutely pushed it aside. He was not one to dwell on the past.

And yet one aspect of his past which had refused to dissolve into the mists of time was facing him right now. If it was her. Unaccountably his heart picked up pace.

A hush descended over the crowd. Kaden looked towards the front of the room and the world halted on its axis for a terrifying moment when he saw the slim woman in the black cocktail dress ascending the steps to the podium. It was her. Julia. In a split second he was transported back to the moment when he’d realised that, because of lust, he’d placed her on a pedestal that she had no right to grace. And only that realisation had stopped him making the biggest mistake of his life.

Shaking his mind free of the disturbingly vivid memory, Kaden narrowed his eyes on Julia. Her voice was husky; it had caught him from the first moment they’d met. She’d been wearing a T-shirt and dusty figure-hugging jeans. Her long hair had fallen in bright tendrils over her shoulders. A safari-style hat had shaded her face from the sun. Her figure had been lithe and so effortlessly sensual he’d lost the power of speech.

If anything she was more beautiful than that first day he’d seen her. Time had hollowed out her cheeks, adding an angularity that hadn’t been there before. She’d only been nineteen. Her face had still held a slight hint of puppy-plumpness. As had her body. From what he could see now, she looked slimmer, with a hint of enticing cleavage just visible in the V of her dress. In fact there was a fragility about her that hadn’t been there before.

She was a million miles from that first tantalising dusty image he held in his mind’s eye; she was elegance personified now, with her long blonde hair pulled back into a low ponytail. The heavy side parting swept it across her forehead and down behind one ear. Her groomed appearance was doing little, though, to stop the torrent of carnal images flooding Kaden’s mind—and in such lurid detail that his body started to harden in response.

He would have anticipated that she’d have no effect on him. Much like any ex-lover. But the opposite was true. This was inconceivable. He had to concede now, with extreme reluctance, that no woman since this woman had exerted such a sensual hold over him. He’d never again lost control as he had with her—every time.

And he’d never felt the same acrid punch of jealousy to his gut as when he’d seen her in another man’s arms, with another man’s mouth on hers, tasting her … feeling her soft curves pressed against him. The vividness of that emotion was dizzying in its freshness, and he fought to negate it, too stunned by its resurgence to look too closely into what it meant.

This woman had been a valuable lesson in never allowing his base nature to rule his head or his heart again. Yet the years of wielding that control felt very flimsy how he was faced with her again.

More than a little bewildered at this onslaught of memories, and irrationally angry that she was here to precipitate them, Kaden felt his whole body radiate displeasure. Just then a rumble of laughter trickled through the gathered crowd in reaction to something she’d said. Kaden’s mouth tightened even more, and with that tension making his movements jerky he said something about getting some air and stalked towards the open patio doors.

As soon as Julia’s speech was over he was going to get out of there and forget that he’d ever seen her again.

Julia stepped down off the dais. She’d faltered during her speech for long seconds when she’d noticed Kaden head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd, at the back of the room like a forbidding presence, those dark eyes boring through her. And then with an abrupt move he’d moved outside. Almost as if disgusted by something she’d said. It had taken all her powers of concentration to keep going, and she’d used up all her reserves.

To her abject relief she saw her boss at the fundraising foundation come towards her. He put a hand to her elbow and for once she wasn’t concerned about keeping distance between them. Ever since her divorce had come through a year ago Nigel had been making his interest clear, despite Julia’s clear lack of encouragement. Tonight, though, she needed all the support she could get. If she could just get through the rest of the relentless schmoozing and get out of there perhaps she could pretend she’d never seen Kaden.

Nigel was babbling excitedly about something as he steered her away, but she couldn’t even hear him above the din of chatter and the clink of glasses. People were making the most of the gratis champagne reception. Julia craved that sweet oblivion, but it was not to be.

With dread trickling into her veins and her belly hollowing out, she could already see where they were headed—towards someone at the back of the room, near the terrace. Someone with his back to them: tall, broad and powerful. Thick ebony-black hair curled a touch too much over the collar of his jacket, exactly the way it had when she’d first met him.

Like a recalcitrant child she tried to dig her heels into the ground, but Nigel was blithely unaware, whispering confidentially, “He’s an emir, so I’m not sure how you have to address him. Maybe call him Your Highness just in case. It would be such a coup to interest him in the foundation.”

In that split second Julia had a flashback to when she’d met Kaden for the first time. She’d only been working on the dig for a couple of weeks, had still been getting used to the intense heat, when a pair of shoes had come into her line of vision. She’d barely looked up.

“Don’t step there. Whoever you are. You’re about to walk on top of a fossil that’s probably in the region of three thousand years old.”

The shoe had hovered in mid-air and come back down again in a safer spot, and a deep, lightly accented voice had drawled seductively, “Do you always greet people with such enthusiasm?”

Julia gritted her teeth. Since she’d arrived she’d been the object of intense male interest and speculation. She was under no illusions that it was most likely because she was blonde and the only female under fifty on the dig. “If you don’t mind, I’m in the middle of something here.”

The shoes didn’t move and the voice came again, sounding much more arrogant and censorious. “I do mind, actually—I am the Crown Prince and you will acknowledge me when I speak to you.”

She’d completely forgotten that the Emir was due to visit with some important guests that day—and his son. Dismay filling Julia, she put down her brush and finally looked up, and up, and up again, to see a tall, broad figure standing over her. The sun was in her eyes so all she could make out was his shape—which was formidable.

Taking off her gloves, she slowly stood, and came face to face with the most handsome man she’d ever seen in her life. Robes highlighted his awe-inspiring height and broad shoulders. He wore a turban, but that couldn’t hide the jet-black hair curling down to his collar, or the square cut of his jaw. The most mesmerising dark eyes.

Feeling more than a little overwhelmed she took off her hat and held out her hand …

“And this is Dr Somerton, who you just heard. As our funds manager she’s been instrumental in making sure that funding reaches our digs all over the world.”

Past merged into present and Julia found that she was holding out her hand in an automatic response to the introduction. She was now facing Kaden, and much as she’d have loved to avert her gaze he took up a lot of space, completely arresting in a dark suit with a snowy-white shirt open at the neck, making him stand out from the men in the crowd who were more formally dressed. He looked darker, and infinitely more dangerous than any other man there.

There was no such thing as sliding towards middle age with a receding hairline and expanding gut for him. He oozed virility, vitality, and a heady, earthy sexual magnetism far more powerful than she remembered. There was not a hint of softness about him, or his face. He was all lean angles. The blade of his slightly crooked nose highlighted a sense of danger and a man in his vigorous prime. She remembered the day he’d got that injury, while playing his country’s brutal national game.

Her heart squeezed as she recalled that moment and saw the new harshness stamping the lines of his face. She wondered how long it had been there. Her eyes slid down helplessly … his mouth hadn’t changed. It was as sensual as she remembered, with its full lower lip and the slightly thinner, albeit beautifully shaped upper lip. She’d used to love tracing that line with her finger. Heat flared in her belly. And with her tongue. It was a mouth which held within it the power to inspire a need in the most cynical of women to make this man hers.

The strength of that need washed through Julia, and dismay gripped her. She couldn’t still want this man—not after all these years. Her hand hovered in mid-air as the moment stretched out between them. He was looking at her as intently as she was looking at him, but it was no consolation. There was no polite spark of recognition, only an extreme air of tension. He knew her, but clearly did not relish meeting her again.

Julia realised that just as his big hand enveloped her much smaller one, and a million and one sensations exploded throughout her body.

Far too innately civilised to be deliberately rude and ignore Julia’s hand, as he perversely longed to do, Kaden reached out to take it. He instinctively gritted his jaw against the inevitable physical contact but it was no good. At the first touch of his fingers to that small, soft hand he wanted to slide his thumb with sensual intent along the gap between her thumb and forefinger in a lover’s caress. He wanted to curl his fingers around her palm and feel every delicate bone.

He wanted to relearn this woman in an erotic way that was so forceful it set off a maelstrom of biblical proportions inside him. And somewhere in his head he wondered when had just shaking a woman’s hand ever precipitated such an onslaught of need.

A voice answered him: about twelve years ago, in the searing heat of the afternoon sun amongst dusty relics, when this same woman had stood before him with a shy smile on her face, her hand in his. And, much to his chagrin, Kaden felt his intention to walk away and forget he’d seen her again dissolve in a rush of lust.

CHAPTER TWO

A MINOR earthquake was taking place within Julia’s body, and Kaden seemed loath to let her hand go—about as reluctant as she was for him to let it go. The realisation shamed her, and yet to her horror she couldn’t seem to muster up the energy to extricate her hand from his. She noticed the look in his eyes change to something ambiguous, and every cell in her blood jumped and fizzed in reaction.

An emotion which felt awfully poignant and yearning was threatening. She struggled to remember where she was, and with whom, but it was almost impossible. The reality that it was Kaden in front of her was too much to take in. All she could do was react.

As suddenly as Julia had registered the changed intensity in Kaden’s gaze locked onto hers it was gone, and his eyes moved to take in their companions. Julia had forgotten all about them. Her hand was dropped as summarily as if he had flung it away from him, and a dark cloud of foreboding seemed to blot out the sultry evening just visible through the open patio doors. She shivered in response, and wanted to hug her arms around her body.

Nigel was saying nervously, “His Royal Highness the Emir of Burquat,” and Julia was wondering a little hysterically if she should be curtseying. She didn’t trust her voice to speak and then Kaden’s black gaze was back on her.

“Dr Somerton.”

His voice was so achingly familiar that she longed to be able to hold onto something for balance, only dimly registering the cool tone.

A small anxious-looking man with a red face was beside Kaden. Julia recognised him as the director of the club. He was talking, but his voice seemed to be coming from far away,