Midnight in Arabia: Heart of a Desert Warrior / The Sheikh's Last Gamble / The Sheikh's Jewel

She had, but book smart didn’t equal people smart as she’d learned unequivocally her sophomore year. “I was the bookish, shy student who didn’t make friends easily.”

“Because you were afraid to let them in.”

“Partly.” And partly because she was socially awkward.

He gently tipped her head back toward him. “I would have been your friend.”

It was a nice thing to say, but she couldn’t stifle her laughter. “No, you wouldn’t. You would have been one of the popular people. You couldn’t have helped yourself. You wouldn’t have even noticed me.”

“I noticed you in college and you had not appreciably changed by then I think.”

“True.” Why was she sharing her past again when he wasn’t going to be in her future? “Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s old news anyway.”

“Tell me about this bet.”

“The year I was a sophomore, the senior boys had a bet going on for who could bag the most virgins.”

“Bag?”

“Get in the sack … have sex with.”

“I see, and clearly at that age, you were a virgin.”

“I was. When the senior boy who decided to make me one of his conquests started flirting with me, I had no clue what was going on. It was only the middle of the school year, but by then, most of the students knew about the bet, so girls were wary of these boys.”

“But you are not a gossip and you pay little attention when it goes on around you.”

“Right. So I didn’t know. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I thought he just wanted to be my friend. And the funny thing? We ended up enjoying each other’s company a lot. He became my best friend.”

Asad winced. “Then you had sex.”

“Yes. Despite my naïveté, I wasn’t an easy mark—simply because the idea he’d want sex with me was so completely outside my thought process.”

“And sex would have been an intimate encounter for you, something you’d already learned to avoid.”

“You understand me so well.” She bit her lip. “So did Darren. We finally had sex the week before graduation. It only happened once. I didn’t like it very much.”

“He was harsh?”

“No. He tried to make it good for me. He kept asking me if I was okay. He wasn’t a cruel boy, not really. But it was my first time and I wasn’t doing it because I wanted him. I never desired anyone that way until I met you. I just wanted to be close to him.”

“What a little bastard.”

“No. Selfish and thoughtless? Yes.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know about the bet until two days later when one of the other boys in the competition came up to me and complained about how he’d had it in the bag until I won it for Darren.”

“The little prick.”

“Yes, he was. He wanted me to hurt, to know the sex hadn’t been about love, but in that, the joke was on him. I never thought Darren loved me.” She’d thought he was her friend and she’d felt enough betrayal from that, though they’d worked through it in the end.

“Yet you had sex with him.”

“He was leaving.”

“So you gave him your virginity?”

“I don’t expect you to understand.” Darren had, though. He’d known how hurt she was by the bet too, even though she’d pretended indifference. “Darren’s guilt was way worse than my embarrassment.”

“Don’t tell me you forgave him?”

“He’s one of my dearest friends.” Though they hadn’t seen each other more than a handful of times in the intervening years, they stayed in touch with email and telephone.

He’d invited her to his wedding and introduced Iris to his wife as the girl who had made him the man he’d come to be. That bet had had a transforming influence on Darren, changing forever the way he related to others and decimating the power of peer pressure in his life.

He’d told her once that she’d freed him. She’d told him he was an idiot, but knew deep down that in a way he was right. Only it had been his own deep regret at hurting her and the other girls that had truly set him free.

“You cannot be serious.”

“I can. Darren learned not to use people.” Iris hadn’t been so lucky. She hadn’t learned not to be used, not then anyway.

“You cannot be this disgusting boy’s friend. I forbid it.”

She laughed, finding the telling easier than she’d expected it to be. “Too late. And he’s no longer a boy. He’s an adult man, married with two children and working in the diplomatic corps.”

“I will see about that.”

“You will do no such thing. Darren hurt me, but he didn’t abandon me, not like you did. The boy who told me about the bet? Darren disowned their friendship.”

“He was quite the tarnished knight,” Asad said with heavy sarcasm.

“He apologized. We moved forward.”

“I too apologized.”

“And I’m lying here in your bed. What more do you want, Asad?”

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_d17a761e-6882-5d19-99dd-2a580b3a7ac9)

THE question took Asad by surprise. Surely she knew exactly what he needed from her. “Your forgiveness.”

She stared up at him in silence for several long seconds, her captivating blue eyes weighing him in a way he rarely encountered and then said, “I forgive you.”

Could it truly be that easy? “You don’t mean that.”

“Would I be here if I didn’t?” she asked, again referring to her place in his bed, their naked bodies pressed together, her gorgeous red tresses spread over his sheets.

“You forgive too easily.”

“Not really.”