Hot-Blooded Husbands: the Sheikh's Chosen Wife

Impasse, Leona repeated. He believed their failed marriage was merely stuck in an impasse. ‘I’m not coming back to you,’ she declared, then turned away to pretend to take an interest in her surroundings, knowing that his grim silence was denying her the right to choose.

They were enclosed in what she could only presume was a private stateroom furnished in subtle shades of cream faced with richly polished rosewood. It was all so beautifully designed that it was almost impossible to see the many doors built into the walls except for the wood-framed doors they had entered through. And it was the huge deep-sprung divan taking pride of place against a silk-lined wall, that told her exactly what the room’s function was.

Although the bed was not what truly captured her attention, but the pair of big easy chairs standing in front of a low table by a set of closed cream velvet curtains. As her heart gave a painful twist in recognition, she sent a hand drifting up to her eyes. Oh, Hassan, she thought despairingly, don’t do this to me…

She had seen the chairs, Hassan noted, studying the way she was standing there looking like an exquisitely fragile, perfectly tooled art-deco sculpture in her slender gown of gold. And he didn’t know whether to tell her so or simply weep at how utterly bereft she looked.

In the end he chose a third option and took a rare sip at the white wine spritzer he had just prepared for her. The forbidden alcohol content in the drink might be diluted but he felt it hit his stomach and almost instantly enter his bloodstream with an injection of much appreciated fire.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ he announced, and watched her chin come up, watched her wonderful hair slide down her slender back and her hand drop slowly to her side while she took a steadying breath before she could bring herself to turn and face him.

‘I’ve been ill—with the flu,’ she answered flatly.

‘That was weeks ago,’ he dismissed, uncaring that he was revealing to her just how close an eye he had been keeping on her from a distance. The fact that she showed no surprise told him that she had guessed as much anyway. ‘After a virus such as influenza the weight recovery is usually swift.’

‘And you would know, of course,’ she drawled, mocking the fact that he had not suffered a day’s illness in his entire life.

‘I know you,’ he countered, ‘and your propensity for slipping into a decline when you are unhappy…’

‘I was ill, not unhappy.’

‘You missed me. I missed you. Why try to deny it?’

‘May I have one of those?’ Indicating towards the drink he held in his hand was her way of telling him she was going to ignore those kind of comments.

‘It is yours,’ he explained, and offered the glass out to her.

She looked at the glass, long dusky lashes flickering over her beautiful green eyes when she realised he was going to make her come and get the drink. Would she do it? he wondered curiously. Would she allow herself to come this close, when they both knew she would much rather turn and run?

But his beautiful wife had never been a coward. No matter how she might be feeling inside, he had never known her to run from a challenge. Even when she had left him last year she had done so with courage, not cowardice. And she did not let him down now as her silk stockinged feet began to tread the cream carpet until she was in reach of the glass.

‘Thank you.’ The wine spritzer was taken from him and lifted to her mouth. She sipped without knowing she had been offered the glass so she would place her lips where his lips had been.

Her pale throat moved as she swallowed; her lips came away from the glass wearing a seductively alluring wine glossed bloom. He watched her smother a sigh, watched her look anywhere but directly at him, was aware that she had not looked him in the face since removing the abaya, just as she had stopped looking at him weeks before she left Rahman. And he had to suppress his own sigh as he felt muscles tighten all over his body in his desire to reach out, draw her close and make her look at him!

But this was not the time to play the demanding husband. She would reject him as she had rejected him many times a year ago. What hurt him the most about remembering those bleak interludes was not his own angry frustration but the grim knowledge that it had been herself she had been denying.

‘Was the Petronades yacht party an elaborate set-up?’ she asked suddenly.

A brief smile stretched his mouth, and it was a very selfmocking smile because he had truly believed she was as concentrated on his close physical presence as he was on hers. But, no. As always, Leona’s mind worked in ways that continually managed to surprise him.

‘The party was genuine.’ He answered the question. ‘Your father’s sudden inability to get here in time to attend it was not.’

At least his honesty almost earned him a direct glance of frowning puzzlement before she managed to divert it to his right ear. ‘But you’ve just finished telling me that I was snatched because my father was—’

‘I know,’ he cut in, not needing to hear her explain what he already knew—which was that this whole thing had been very carefully set up and co-ordinated with her father’s assistance. ‘There are many reasons why you are standing here with me right now, my darling,’ he murmured gently. ‘Most of which can wait for another time to go into.’

The my darling sent her back a defensive step. The realisation that her own father had plotted against her darkened her lovely eyes. ‘Tell me now,’ she insisted.

But Hassan just shook his head. ‘Now is for me,’ he informed her softly. ‘Now is my moment to bask in the fact that you are back where you belong.’

It was really a bit of bad timing that her feet should use that particular moment to tread on the discarded abaya, he supposed, watching as she looked down, saw, then grew angry all over again.

‘By abduction?’ Her chin came up, contempt shimmering along her finely shaped bones. ‘By plots and counter-plots and by removing a woman’s right to decide for herself?’

He grimaced at her very accurate description. ‘We are by nature a romantic people,’ he defended. ‘We love drama and poetry and tragic tales of star-crossed lovers who lose each other and travel the caverns of hell in their quest to find their way back together again.’

He saw the tears. He had said too much. Reaching out, he caught the glass just before it slipped from her nerveless fingers. ‘Our marriage is a tragedy,’ she told him thickly.

‘No,’ he denied, putting the hapless glass aside. ‘You merely insist on turning it into one.’

‘Because I hate everything you stand for!’

‘But you cannot make yourself hate the man,’ he added, undisturbed by her denunciation.

Leona began to back away because there was something seriously threatening about the sudden glow she caught in his eyes. ‘I left you, remember?’

‘Then sent me letters at regular intervals to make sure I remembered you,’ he drawled.

‘Letters to tell you I want a divorce!’ she cried.

‘The content of the letters came second to their true purpose.’ He smiled. ‘One every two weeks over the last two months. I found them most comforting.’

‘Gosh, you are so conceited it’s a wonder you didn’t marry yourself!’

‘Such insults.’ He sighed.

‘Will you stop stalking me as if I am a hunted animal?’ she cried.

‘Stop backing away like one.’

‘I do not want to stay married to you.’ She stated it bluntly.

‘And I am not prepared to let you go. There,’ he said. ‘We have reached another impasse. Which one of us is going to win the higher ground this time, do you think?’

Looking at him standing there, arrogant and proud yet so much her kind of man that he made her legs go weak, Leona knew exactly which one of them possessed the higher ground. Which was also why she had to keep him at arm’s length at all costs. He could fell her in seconds, because he was right; she didn’t hate him, she adored him. And that scared her so much that when his hand came up, long fingertips brushing gently across her trembling mouth, she almost fainted on the sensation that shot from her lips to toe tips.

She pulled right away. His eyebrow arched. It mocked and challenged as he responded by curling the hand around her nape.

‘Stop it,’ she said, and lifted up her hand to use it as a brace against his chest.

Beneath dark blue cotton she discovered a silk-smooth, hard-packed body pulsing with heat and an all-too-familiar masculine potency. Her mouth went dry; she tried to breathe and found that she couldn’t. Helplessly she lifted her eyes up to meet with his.

‘Seeing me now, hmm?’ he softly taunted. ‘Seeing this man with these eyes you like to drown in, and this nose you like to call dreadful but usually have trouble from stopping your fingers from stroking? And let us not forget this mouth you so like to feel crushed hotly against your own delightful mouth.’

‘Don’t you dare!’ she protested, seeing what was coming and already beginning to shake all over at the terrifying prospect of him finding out what a weak-willed coward she was.

‘Why not?’ he countered, offering her one of his lazily sensual, knowing smiles that said he knew better than she did what she really wanted—and he began to lower his dark head.