The Sultan's Bed

She swallowed thickly. “Good.”

“Incidentally, the only sin I cannot seem to shake is continually wanting the one thing I definitely should not have.” His grin widened as his gaze flickered to the white towel she held firmly to her breasts. “But I will never repent.”

Lust ripped through Mariah’s core at his words. The pain in her ankle was nothing to it.

She watched him walk out her bedroom door, leaving an aura of irrepressible and highly erotic male in his wake. For the past four years she’d often wondered if she might be dead from the waist down. But now she knew the truth. She was alive and well and tingling and hot and she wanted to feel a man on her skin again.

But not just any man.

She closed her eyes and inhaled.

That man.

And the knowledge scared her to death.

Five

“You have done what?”

Standing at the kitchen counter, a can of soup in his hand, a cell phone tucked between his ear and shoulder, Zayad tried to explain to his brother the realities of this strange situation he had found himself in tonight. “I have agreed to care for our sister’s roommate until she is back on her feet.”

Sakir snorted. “This is madness. You know nothing about care. You cannot cook, clean, make small talk. She will see through you in an instant.”

“Perhaps, but she has little choice in the matter. She has no other help. Her family is deceased, her friend is gone and…she has no man.”

“No man?” Sakir said all too slowly, a reminder that he still lived most of the year in Texas. “You say this as though it pleases you.”