The Sheikh's Chosen Wife

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.

‘Tell me first.’ Sheer desperation made her fly into impulsive speech. ‘If I am here on this beautiful yacht that belongs to you—is there another yacht just like it out there somewhere where your second wife awaits her turn?’

In the sudden suffocating silence that fell between them Leona found herself holding her breath as she watched his face pale to a frightening stillness. For this was provocation of the worst kind to an Arab and her heart began pounding madly because she just didn’t know how he was going to respond. Hassan possessed a shocking temper, though he had never unleashed it on her. But now, as she stood here with her fingers still pressed against his breastbone, she could feel the danger in him—could almost taste her own fear as she waited to see how he was going to respond.

What he did was to take a step back from her. Cold, aloof, he changed into the untouchable prince in the single blink of an ebony eyelash. ‘Are you daring to imply that I could be guilty of treating my wives unequally?’ he responded.

In the interim wave of silence that followed, Leona stared at him through eyes that had stopped seeing anything as his reply rocked the very axis she stood upon. She knew she had prompted it but she still had not expected it, and now she found she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even move as fine cracks began to appear in her defences.

‘You actually went and did it, and married again,’ she whispered, then completely shattered. Emotionally, physically, she felt herself fragment into a thousand broken pieces beneath his stone-cold, cruel gaze.

Hassan didn’t see it coming. He should have done, he knew that, but he had been too angry to see anything but his own affronted pride. So when she turned and ran he didn’t expect it. By the time he had pulled his wits together enough to go after her Leona was already flying through the door on a flood of tears.

The tears blinded what was ahead of her, the abaya having prevented her from taking stock of her surroundings as they’d arrived. Hassan heard Rafiq call out a warning, reached the door as Leona’s cry curdled the very air surrounding them and she began to fall.

What he had managed to prevent by the skin of his teeth only a half-hour before now replayed itself before his helpless eyes. Only it was not the dark waters of the Mediterranean she fell into but the sea of cream carpet that ran from room to room and down a wide flight of three shallow stairs that led down into the yacht’s main foyer.

CHAPTER THREE

CURSING and swearing in seething silence, Hassan prowled three sides of the bed like a caged tiger while the yacht’s Spanish medic checked her over.

‘No bones broken, as far as I can tell,’ the man said. ‘No obvious blow to the head.’

‘Then why is she unconscious?’ he growled out furiously.

‘Shock—winded,’ the medic suggested, gently laying aside a frighteningly limp hand. ‘It has only been a few minutes, sir.’

But a few minutes was a lifetime when you felt so guilty you wished it was yourself lying there, Hassan thought harshly.

‘A cool compress would be a help—’

A cool compress. ‘Rafiq.’ The click of his fingers meant the job would be done.

The sharp sound made Leona flinch. On a single, lithe leap Hassan was suddenly stretched out across the bed and leaning over her. The medic drew back; Rafiq paused in his step.

‘Open your eyes.’ Hassan turned her face towards him with a decidedly unsteady hand.

Her eyes fluttered open to stare up at him blankly. ‘What happened?’ she mumbled.

‘You fell down some stairs,’ he gritted. ‘Now tell me where you hurt.’

A frown began to pucker her smooth brow as she tried to remember.

‘Concentrate,’ he rasped, diverting her mind away from what had happened. ‘Do you hurt anywhere?’

She closed her eyes again, and he watched her make a mental inventory of herself then give a small shake of her head. ‘I think I’m okay.’ She opened her eyes again, looked directly into his, saw his concern, his anguish, the burning fires of guilt—and then she remembered why she’d fallen.

Aching tears welled up again. From coldly plunging his imaginary knife into her breast, he now felt it enter his own. ‘You really went and did it,’ she whispered.

‘No, I did not,’ he denied. ‘Get out,’ he told their two witnesses.

The room emptied like water down a drain, leaving them alone again, confronting each other again. It was dangerous. He wanted to kiss her so badly he could hardly breathe. She was his. He was hers! They should not be in this warring situation!

‘No—remain still!’ he commanded when she attempted to move. ‘Don’t even breathe unless you have to do so! Why are females so stupid?’ he bit out like a curse. ‘You insult me with your suspicions. You goad me into a response, and when it is not the one you want to hear you slay me with your pain!’

‘I didn’t mean to fall down the stairs,’ she pointed out.

‘I wasn’t talking about the fall!’ he bit out, then glared down into her confused, hurt, vulnerable eyes for a split second longer. ‘Oh, Allah give me strength,’ he gritted, and gave in to himself and took her trembling mouth by storm.

If he had kissed her in any other way Leona would have fought him with her very last breath. But she liked the storm; she needed the storm so she could allow herself to be swept away. Plus he was trembling, and she liked that too. Liked to know that she still had the power to reduce the prince in him to this vulnerable mass of smashed emotion.

And she’d missed him. She’d missed feeling his length lying alongside her length, had missed the weight of his thighs pressing down on her own. She’d missed his kiss, hungry, urgent, insistent…wanting. Like a banquet after a year of long, hard fasting, she fed greedily on every deep, dark, sensual delight. Lips, teeth, tongue, taste. She reached for his chest, felt the strong beat of his heart as she glided her palms beneath the fabric of his top robe where only the thin cotton of his tunic came between them and tightly muscled, satin-smooth flesh. When she reached his shoulders her fingers curled themselves into tightly padded muscle then stayed there, inviting him to take what he liked.

He took her breasts, stroking and shaping before moving on to follow the slender curve of her body. Long fingers claimed her hips, then drew her against the force of his. Fire bloomed in her belly, for this was her man, the love of her life. She would never, ever, find herself another. What he touched belonged to him. What he desired he could have.

What he did was bring a cruelly abrupt end to it by rising in a single fluid movement to land on his feet beside the bed, leaving her to flounder on the hard rocks of rejection while he stood there with his back to her, fighting a savage battle with himself.

‘Why?’ she breathed in thick confusion.

‘We are not animals,’ he ground back. ‘We have issues to deal with that must preclude the hungry coupling at which we already know we both excel.’

It served as a dash of water in her face; and he certainly possessed good aim, Leona noted as she came back to reality with a shivering gasp. ‘What issues?’ she challenged cynically. ‘The issue of what we have left besides the excellent sex?’

He didn’t answer. Instead he made one of her eyebrows arch as he snatched up her spritzer and grimly downed the lot. There was a man at war with himself as well as with her, Leona realised, knowing Hassan hardly ever touched alcohol, and only then when he was under real stress.

Sitting up, she was aware of a few aches and bruises as she gingerly slid her feet to the floor. ‘I want to go home,’ she announced.

‘This is home,’ he replied. ‘For the next few weeks, anyway.’

Few weeks? Coming just as gingerly to her feet, Leona stared at his rigid back—which was just another sign that Hassan was not functioning to his usual standards, because no Arab worthy of the race would deliberately set his back to anyone. It was an insult of the worst kind.

Though she had seen his back a lot during those few months before she’d eventually left him, Leona recalled with a familiar sinking feeling inside. Not because he had wished to insult her, she acknowledged, but because he had refused to face what they had both known was happening to their marriage. In the end, she had taken the initiative away from him.

‘Where are my shoes?’

The surprisingly neutral question managed to bring him swinging round to glance at her feet. ‘Rafiq has them.’