Possessed by the Sheikh

Something in his voice was raising goose-bumps on Katrina’s skin and a dangerous burning sensation at the backs of her eyes. The intimate and intense images his words were conjuring for her were intruding on dreams she held so private and secret that just the sound of his voice was enough to bring them to the front of her mind. Hadn’t she always longed for such a man and such a love and hadn’t she told herself that she was hungering for something that did not exist? Hadn’t she strived to make herself put aside such foolishness and to concentrate instead on the realities of life?

Swallowing hard against the ball of emotion blocking her throat, she turned away from him.

‘Go if you wish,’ she heard him say carelessly from behind her. ‘If Sulimen does not take you, then the desert most surely will.’

Katrina made no response. How could she when she knew that he was speaking the truth?

Although she had her back to him, disconcertingly she knew immediately when he had left the living area of the pavilion and gone through to his sleeping quarters.

The rush of adrenalin that had given her the courage to speak so challengingly to him had gone and she felt weak and shaky. The pavilion and its owner were her prison and her guard, but they were also her place of safety and her protection, she acknowledged.

But she must not allow herself to forget just what he was! She could remember reading somewhere of the intense and dangerous emotional dependence a captive could end up having on his or her captor. She must not let that happen to her.

Because he had kissed her? Just because he had used her? Her head had begun to ache and she was beginning to feel slightly sick on the heavy mixture of adrenalin and anxiety unleavened by anything else.

She paced the soft carpet of the pavilion, checking and tensing at every alien sound, but she was still caught off guard when she turned round and saw that Xander had padded soft-footed into the room and was standing watching her.

He was wearing a clean soft white tunic that he was still fastening, his feet and head bare. In the lamplight she could see the golden gleam of his chest through the soft mesh of fine dark hair.

A feeling she couldn’t control exploded deep down inside her body, releasing an ache so shocking and intimate that it made her catch her breath on a betraying indrawn rattle.

His hair was damp and as he walked across the carpet towards her he brought with him the smell of clean skin and the subtle cologne she was already associating with him. Her heart did a neat double somersault inside her body and then just in case she had not got the message, it took a high dive on a trapeze that left her feeling as though it had somehow become lodged in her throat.

He was making her feel uncomfortable and very aware of the difference between his clean, fresh appearance and her own tired stickiness. But even without that he was making her feel uncomfortable, full stop, Katrina acknowledged mutely. She was trying desperately to drag her traitorous gaze away from the dark hand casually fastening the robe buttons and concealing from her the matt satin gold of his bare flesh.

In an attempt to cover what she was feeling she demanded sharply, ‘Just how long do you plan to keep me here?’

He shot her a look of cold arrogance. ‘For as long as I have to!’

She was finding it difficult to swallow. ‘What…what will you do?’ Could he hear the nervousness in her voice?

He gave her a look of narrow-eyed scrutiny and then questioned mockingly, ‘Do?’

‘Yes. I mean—’ She had to stop speaking to swallow again. ‘I mean, how will you let the expedition know that—?’

‘You ask far too many questions! There is a saying, isn’t there, in your country about curiosity?’

‘About curiosity killing the cat, you mean?’ Katrina managed to croak.

‘In your shoes I should concern myself more with questioning how willing your friends are to buy your freedom and at what price than how I intend to go about informing them of your whereabouts.’

Katrina could feel the panic biting into her, but she refused to give in to it. Her parents’ death had forced her into self-reliance at a young age and the habit of depending on herself and facing up to sometimes very unpleasant truths and realities was one she had forced herself to adopt.

And right now there was a very unpleasant question she had to have an answer to. Moistening her over-dry lips, she pressed him huskily, ‘And if my…if the company cannot pay the ransom demand?’

There was a small pause and a flash of something she couldn’t interpret in his eyes before he said softly, ‘Then in that case I shall have to take my goods to a wider market.’ When she looked blankly at him he derided her, ‘Who else will pay handsomely for a young attractive woman?’

Katrina’s eyes widened as she stared at him in appalled anxiety. He couldn’t mean what he was saying. Could he?

Without another word he pulled on his Tuareg headdress, slid his feet into a pair of sandals and, pulling back the heavy curtain, stepped out of the tent.

She was alone! He had gone! She could simply walk out if she wished. But walk out to what? She was pretty sure that a group of men such as these, bound together by their illegal activities, would post guards on their camp. If she tried to leave she would suffer the ignominy of being forcibly brought back, and even if she should succeed in escaping, she knew she could not possibly walk back to Zuran City. No, she had no option other than to wait tamely here, for him and whatever fate he chose to impose on her. And of course he knew that!

Whatever fate?

Supposing he himself should decide that he found her desirable? Her heart thumped heavily against her ribs, and a frisson of sensation that shamingly had nothing whatsoever to do with either fear or outrage stroked feather touches of liquid and dangerous excitement over her.

His dishonesty must obviously pay him well, she decided cynically, at least if the interior of the pavilion and its furnishings were anything to go by.

The carpets covering the floor and ‘walls’ were exquisitely worked and far superior to anything she had seen in the shops she had visited. She touched one of them tentatively, stroking her fingertip along one of the branches and then down the thick trunk of its richly hued tree of life. The silky threads felt as warm as though they were a living, breathing entity. If she closed her eyes she could almost imagine…

Her face was on fire as she snatched her hand back from the carpet as though she had been burned. The carved and gilded raised divan was draped with something dark and soft, jewel-coloured velvet cushions piled on top of it. The flickering oil lamps cast mysterious shadows, which echoed the sensual richness of the fabrics. A discarded lute-like instrument lay on the floor to one side of the divan, and behind them she could see a pile of leather-bound books.

Automatically she went over to them and picked one of them up. Its title was picked out in gold leaf, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam…A book of poetry. It seemed out of character somehow. She put the book back and sat down on one of the cushions. Her head was still aching and she felt both physically and emotionally exhausted. Tiredly she closed her eyes.

Pensively Xander picked his way through the tents towards his own, pausing to check on the mare he had been riding earlier. When she saw him she tossed her head and pushed her nose into his arm, begging for the tidbit he always gave her. The boy whom he paid to keep an eye on her sprang up from where he had been lying several feet away from her and then settled down again as he recognised him.

Katrina’s challenge to him about his European inheritance had rubbed against a raw place in his emotional make-up. His mother had been loved and respected by all of his Zurani family, with the exception of Nazir and Nazir’s late father. And, according to his half-brother, his mother had happily embraced the way of life of her husband. She had loved the desert and its people, as he did himself, but she had not been totally and completely desert blood, bone and sinew, just as he wasn’t himself. His father had chosen to have him educated in Europe, wanting him to experience his European cultural inheritance, and to keep the promise he had made to his dying wife, but Xander had never forgotten overhearing a conversation between his father and the British government official who had undertaken to escort him to his new school in England.