The Sheikh's Innocent Bride

He was staying at Strathcraig Castle as a guest? Why hadn’t that occurred to her before? It was, after all, the most obvious explanation for the presence of a well-spoken stranger in the glen. Dismay replaced the daze that she had been wrapped in and her skin chilled. She had offended him, hadn’t she? Would he complain about her? Say she had been rude to him? Accusing him of vandalism had certainly not been the way to demonstrate a hospitable welcome to a visitor. What on earth had come over her? She shouldn’t have said a single critical word to him. After all, if she was sacked she would never find another job locally, and her father would be outraged.

Shahir replaced his helmet and fired the engine of the powerful motorbike, looking back at her only for an instant before he took off back down the track again. With him travelled the image of glorious green eyes pinned to him with anxious intensity. He wondered what sort of a life she had, with the fanatical father his estate manager had mentioned. She looked scared and unhappy.

A split second later, without any warning whatsoever of the trick his cool and rational brain was about to play on him, Shahir was startled to find himself wondering how Kirsten Ross might adapt to being a mistress. His mistress. The instant the idea occurred to him he was exasperated by the vagaries of his own mind; that type of arrangement was certainly not his style. He was a generous lover, who offered commitment for the duration of an affair. But the affairs began and ended without touching his heart or even his temper. Sex was a pleasure to be savoured, but his libido did not control him and he sought nothing more lasting from the women who entertained him in bed.

In short, a mistress would be a radical new departure for him. She would have a semi-permanent role in his life, and would be dependent on him in a way that he had never allowed a woman to be. It was an insane idea for a male who enjoyed his freedom to the extent that he did, Shahir acknowledged with a brooding frown. What was more Kirsten Ross was an employee, and as such strictly out of bounds; Shahir was a man of honour. What the hell was the matter with him? One minute he was thinking of taking a wife, the next a mistress—and all in the space of twenty-four hours!

Having dug a hole in the soft ground below the trees and buried the magazine, Kirsten ran most of the way home, with Squeak gasping at her heels. Unlocking the back door, she sped through it, only to be brought up short by the dismaying sight of the thickset man lodged in stillness at the back of the sparsely furnished kitchen.

‘I wasn’t expecting you to be home this early…is something wrong?’ Kirsten asked, dry-mouthed with fright at the tension in the air.

‘Mabel’s mother took ill and she’s staying the night with her. Where have you been?’ Her father’s harsh-featured face was ruddy with angry colour and his sharp eyes bright with suspicion.

‘I went for a walk…I’m sorry—’

‘If I’d been here you’d not have been idling away your time,’ he growled. ‘What have you been up to?’

Kirsten was rigid. ‘Nothing.’

‘You had better not be, girl,’ he warned her, closing a powerful hand round her thin forearm with bruising force. ‘Now, go and make my dinner. Then we’ll study the Lord’s Book and we will pray for you to be cleansed of the sin of idleness.’

When Angus Ross had stomped out of the kitchen Kirsten rubbed her aching arm with a shaking hand. She was trembling. Her father had never raised a hand to her in anger. She told herself that she had no reason to be so afraid of the older man. It was true that his temper was violent. And in a rage he ranted and raved and stormed up and down in a very frightening manner, but he had never yet become physically abusive with her—or indeed anyone else. So why did she get the feeling that that was in the process of changing?

CHAPTER TWO

FOUR days later, Shahir sprang out of bed at three in the morning and stalked into the luxurious en suite bathroom to take another cold shower. A more primitive male might have believed he had been bewitched by an enchantress no human male could resist, but Shahir told himself no such comforting tales.

As the cooling water streamed down over the heated length of his bronzed, muscular body, he groaned out loud in furious frustration. Never before had a woman disturbed Shahir’s sleep. But something about Kirsten Ross had fired his imagination to new erotic heights of creativity. The very idea of her as his mistress had become a sexual fantasy he could not shake. Even while he slept his disobedient brain rehashed their brief meeting into an intimate encounter of a wildly uninhibited if unlikely variety that appealed most to the male sex. His inability to control his own subconscious mind infuriated him.

Resting his arrogant dark head back against the cool stone surround, he thought about Faria instead. It was rare for him to indulge himself with reflections about what could not be, for he knew how pointless it was to lament the inevitable. Faria, with her laughing dark eyes and compassionate heart, could never become his wife. Although Faria and he were not related by blood, Faria’s mother had briefly acted as Shahir’s foster mother when he was very young. And Shahir’s religion forbade the marriage of a man to his foster-sister.

He had not known what love was before the day he had glanced across a courtyard at an interminable wedding and seen a very pretty brunette entertaining the children with magic tricks. Faria had grown up while he’d worked abroad, and she had trained as a teacher. He hadn’t even recognised her. On the last occasion he had seen her she had still been a little girl.

While Faria had been brought up in the knowledge that Shahir was her foster-brother, he had barely heard the matter mentioned. Shahir was royalty, and all too many people claimed to have a connection with him. And, having enjoyed a brief period of intimacy with the royal family in the aftermath of tragedy, Faria’s parents, who had never been socially ambitious, had soon returned to their quiet lives. Meeting her as an adult, Shahir had immediately recognised that Faria was exactly the kind of young woman he wanted to marry. In that very acknowledgement the damage had been done—even before he could appreciate that he had mistakenly set his heart on a woman who rightly regarded him as an honorary brother.

Was his nature innately perverse? Shahir asked himself now, his lean strong face shadowed by a dark frown. Although he would not mention his lust for Kirsten Ross in the same sentence as his unspoken admiration for Faria, he could not avoid registering that once again he was guilty of desiring a woman who was forbidden to him. Even that vague similarity disturbed him. In another sense it also challenged him, for Kirsten Ross was by no means out of reach.

Perhaps, Shahir reflected in exasperation, he had become too careful—too fastidious in his refusal to let his libido rule him. Almost certainly he was suffering from the effects of too much sexual denial, and the most effective cure for the foolish fantasies assailing him in the middle of the night would be a welcoming and hopefully very wanton woman.

And he knew exactly who was most likely to qualify in that department. Lady Pamela Anstruther, his nearest neighbour at Strathcraig, invariably acted as his hostess when he entertained at the castle. The arrangement suited them both. Pamela was clever and amusing, a strikingly attractive widow with champagne tastes, struggling to get by on a small income. Shahir respected her honesty and her survival skills. Pamela had never hidden the fact that she wanted him, and that sentiment would not complicate the issue.

At morning break, later that same day, Jeanie frowned at Kirsten. ‘You look like you’re sickening for something,’ she scolded. ‘You have dark shadows under your eyes. Aren’t you sleeping properly?’

‘I’m fine…’ Uneasy with telling even that minor lie, Kirsten dropped her head. Several disturbed nights of sleep had left their mark on her face, and she was ashamed of her inability to get the motorcyclist out of her head. Time and time again their encounter would replay in her memory, and when she went to sleep her dreams took over. The disturbing and horribly embarrassing content of them she would not have shared with a living soul.

‘Is something wrong at home?’

‘No.’ Kirsten chewed tautly at the soft underside of her lower lip before finally surrendering to the pressure of her curiosity and saying, as artlessly as she could contrive, ‘There was a guy riding a motorcycle up our way last Friday afternoon. I think he was staying at the castle…’

‘There’s always a bunch of new faces staying in the service wing.’ The other woman’s attention was concentrated on the large scone she was liberally spreading with butter. ‘I bet it was that old tubby guy with the pigtail. You know…the one here to write a history book about the castle. Someone told me that either him or the photographer arrived on a motorbike, dressed like a Hell’s Angel.’

‘He doesn’t sound much like the man I saw.’ Kirsten focused on Jeanie’s scone, which was being cut into tiny slices so that the pleasure of eating it could be extended. ‘He was young, and he looked like he might have originally come from another country—’

‘Oh…him!’ Jeanie’s eyes lit up like a row of winning symbols in a fruit machine. ‘That’ll be the Polish builder working on the stable block. Tall, dark, tanned, superfanciable?’

Kirsten nodded four times in eager succession, like a marionette.

‘I saw him on a motorbike in the village on Saturday night.’ Jeanie gave her an earthy grin. ‘You’ve got a pair of eyes in your head at last, have you?’

Kirsten had flushed to the roots of her hair, but could not restrain the all-important question brimming on her lips. ‘Do you know if he’s married?’

‘Kirsten Ross—you shameless hussy, you!’ Jeanie guffawed with noisy appreciation. ‘No, he’s not married. That was checked out by an interested party on his first day. No wonder you’re away with the fairies this morning. I spoke to you twice and you didn’t notice. Did you get talking to him? I hear he speaks great English. Did you fall madly in love at first sight?’

Kirsten was squirming with embarrassment. ‘Jeanie! I was out for a walk and we only spoke for a minute. I was just being curious.’

‘Course you were…’ Jeanie was merrily grinning at the prospect of what she saw as entertainment. ‘Right, with your face getting off with that builder will be no problem—but somehow I think that getting past your dad is likely to be the biggest challenge.’

‘So it’s just as well that I’m not thinking of trying to get off with anyone!’ Kirsten whispered in feverish interruption. ‘Look, please don’t go talking about this, Jeanie. If my dad hears any gossip about me he’ll go mad! He does not have a sense of humour about things like that.’

‘Kirsten…’ Jeanie leant across the table, her plump face arranged in lines of sympathy. ‘I don’t think anyone would repeat gossip about you to your father. Since he had that row with the minister and the church elders and left the congregation folk have been very wary of rousing his temper.’

Kirsten jerked her head in mortified acknowledgement of the point.

When the housekeeper signalled her from the doorway, she was glad of the excuse to leave the table and go and speak to the older woman. Offered the chance to work extra hours to cover for a sick colleague, Kirsten accepted gratefully and phoned her stepmother to say that she would be late home.

It was a welcome distraction to be sent to a section of the castle that was new to her. The extensive service wing had been converted to provide state-of-the-art office facilities and a conference center, as well as accommodation for the constant procession of tradesmen and businessmen who visited the remote estate in a working capacity.

Unfurling a floor polisher in a corridor, Kirsten hummed a nameless snatch of music below her breath. He was from Poland; a builder from Poland. Had she imagined that upper class accent? But then from whom had he learned the language? Perhaps that had influenced the way he spoke? Suddenly she wanted to know everything there was to know about Poland. Her own ignorance embarrassed her.

At the same time she didn’t really know whether she was on her head or her heels. Why on earth was she thinking about a man she would never see again? He worked outside; she worked inside. The castle was huge, the staff extensive. In all likelihood they wouldn’t bump into each other again unless he sought her out—and why would he do that? She had shouted at him. Of course if she was the shameless hussy Jeanie had teased her for being she would seek him out for herself. Only thankfully she wasn’t. But the thought of never laying eyes on him again made her tummy feel hollow, and filled her with the weirdest sense of panic.

Without warning the floor polisher was switched off, and she straightened from her task in surprise.

‘Look, miss. We’re having a very important meeting in here, and that machine’s damn noisy…couldn’t you go and clean elsewhere?’ a young man in a suit demanded angrily.

‘Yes, of course,’ Kirsten muttered, cut to the bone.

Another man appeared behind him, and murmured with glacial cool, ‘Don’t let me hear you address another member of staff in that tone or in that language again.’

‘No, of course not, Your Highness,’ the first man framed in dismay, his complexion turning a dull dark red at that cold rebuke.

Kirsten had stopped breathing when the second male emerged into view, for he was taller, broader and altogether more impressive in stature. Her entire being was wrapped in the sheer challenge of recognition: it was the man on the motorbike. But she could not believe that it could be the same person for he looked so very different, in a formal dark business suit the colour of charcoal: sophisticated, dignified, the ultimate in authority.

Belatedly she registered the significance of the title the younger man had awarded him and incredulity sentenced her to shaken stillness. The guy she had met on the hill above the farm was the Prince? Prince Shahir—the enormously rich owner of Strathcraig and its ninety-odd-thousand acres? Surely that was impossible? This is my land, he had said, but she had assumed he was joking. How could she have possibly guessed that a young man, casually clad in biker leathers, might be so much more than he seemed?

Refusing to allow herself to look back at him, she began to reel in the cable of the floor polisher. Her hands were all fingers and thumbs, and clumsy with nerves. She seized a hold on the weighty machine, in preparation for carting it off to a less contentious area, but her perspiring palms failed in their grip and it toppled back on to the ground again, with a noisy clatter that made her wince in despair. She was supposed to be silent and invisible around him, she recalled in steadily mounting frustration. Was she supposed to abandon the polisher and just run?

‘Let me help you with that…’