The Desert Prince's Mistress

His hair was very dark—though not quite black—and was shaped to a head which was held with confidence and a certain arrogance. And pride. And irritation.

‘Do you make a habit of turning up late for jobs?’ he questioned tersely.

Lara was having to fight an uncomfortable desire to run over to him, whisper her fingertips wonderingly down the side of his hard, beautiful face and tell him that she alone had the secret of his ancestry.

With an effort, she pulled herself together. ‘Of course not!’

Her complete absence of an apology made Darian tense, and he narrowed his eyes, feeling the tiny hairs prickle at the back of his neck as he looked at her. Her rain-sprinkled dark hair was awry and her cheeks were flushed. And her eyes were the bluest he had ever seen. They made him think of summer skies and cornflowers and Mediterranean seas. Momentarily, and inexplicably, he was sucked in by the sheer beauty of those eyes and the distraction irritated him.

‘And are you in the habit of poor time-keeping?’

Be bold, Lara, she thought. You don’t need this job.

She shrugged. ‘Not usually.’

Not usually? It was not the reaction that Darian had been expecting. Didn’t she care that there were women in this room who looked as if they would kill to get the job? And, judging from some of the shameless glances they had been directing at him, they would also offer far more sensual incentives if they thought that might work.

‘Looking as if you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards?’ he continued, in an acid tone.

‘So much for the tousled look!’ retorted Lara flippantly. ‘Actually, the reason I’m late is that my agency nearly didn’t send me.’

He met the challenge in her gaze, and something about her directness made him carry on staring at her. He wasn’t used to a challenge—and certainly not from a woman.

‘I’m not surprised,’ he said softly.

She arched her brows, hot and bothered and not just from her hurried journey. Something in the way those gold eyes were studying her made her wish that she was looking as cool and unflappable as every other woman in the room. But Lara knew that nobody could guess what you were feeling on the inside; it was what you projected from the outside that counted. Which meant that her one-word reply shot back at him sounded cool, and only just on the right side of insolent. ‘Really?’

‘Yes, really,’ he mocked. ‘The brief was to look like an English rose,’ he added impatiently. ‘Since when did that entail looking as if you’re in the middle of hitching a ride to a rock concert?’

Lara heard a little buzz from the other models, and she guessed that they were enjoying seeing the delectable Mr Wildman losing his cool with one of the competition. She glared at him.

‘Do you want me to ask her to leave, Darian?’ murmured Scott, in a low voice.

‘No, I don’t,’ demurred Darian. ‘I asked a question and I’m waiting for an answer.’

She felt like asking him sweetly if he always got whatever it was he wanted, but she refrained. It was neither the time nor the place, and she suspected that the answer would be yes anyway.

‘It depends what your interpretation of an English rose is, surely?’ she answered confidently. ‘Even they have to run for taxis or buses sometimes, don’t they? They can’t spend the whole of their lives sitting on pretty wicker furniture and fanning themselves! Not modern English roses anyway!’

There it was again, he thought, with a cross between grudging admiration and irritation. She was talking to him in a way which he could have confidently predicted no one else in the room would have dared try! And she did have a point, he conceded. Modern was what he was really looking for. A modern look for modern technology.

Ask for someone who summed up everything that it was to be English, and everyone immediately jumped back a century or two! He glanced around the room at the lace and the flower-sprigs and the muslin and he frowned. Modern and English—surely the two weren’t completely incompatible?

‘You do have a point,’ he admitted grudgingly.

Lara lifted her chin, telling herself that she definitely wasn’t going to get the job now, so what did she have to lose? How far could she push him? She had seen for herself that he was grumpy—as well as successful, powerful and devastatingly attractive—would his temper really turn ugly if she challenged him a little bit more?

‘Tell me, how do you see the woman you’re looking for?’ asked Lara calmly.

Scott bristled. ‘I think you’ve said quite enough, don’t you?’

But Darian shook his head. ‘No, let her speak.’

‘Gosh…thanks!’ said Lara sarcastically.

Darian knitted his brows together, wondering if this rather unusual tendency to answer back at what was essentially a serious job interview was simply a way of getting herself noticed. Didn’t people sometimes act outrageously in order to detract attention from their glaring faults? And did she have any?

He let his eyes travel from the top of her head to the tips of her pointed leather boots. If you discounted the fact that her hair looked as though she had spent a large part of the morning being pulled through a particularly thorny hedge it really was the most glorious colour—the deep, burnished mahogany of a lovingly polished piece of furniture, touched with deeper, brighter shades of gold and amber. Dyed, most probably. All women dyed their hair these days. His mouth twisted. He had yet to meet a natural blonde!

But her brows were beautifully shaped and arched, and her skin looked soft—all roses and cream—like petals in the early morning when they had been kissed by the dew. It was skin that made her look as though she’d been brought up in the fresh air, raised on nothing stronger than milk and honey.

She had answered her own question, he realised. She was exactly the woman he was looking for.

‘Take your jacket off,’ he said slowly.

For a second Lara’s sang-froid almost deserted her. It was a perfectly normal request to make in the circumstances. It wasn’t as though he was asking her to perform a striptease. But that was exactly what it felt like. Inside, she was suddenly overcome with a bubbling mass of insecurity, which was crazy—crazy—and yet there was something about this darkly golden man which made his request seem like an intrusion. She didn’t move.

Darian raised his eyebrows questioningly, ignoring Scott’s frown and the indignant glances of the other women.

Lara flashed him a cool and professional smile and slid her jacket from her shoulders with hands which were miraculously steady. Then casually slipped her finger through the loop of the jacket and stood before him, feeling a little as she imagined the favoured member of a harem must feel. All the women vying for one man’s attention and only one of them receiving it. Her heart was beating fast. You’re concocting fantasy, she told herself sternly. That’s all. Just because you think he’s the brother of the Sheikh you’re attributing to him all those kind of primitive man-woman things which you wouldn’t dream of doing if he was any average man.

‘How’s that?’ she asked, in a voice which she hoped didn’t betray quite how unsettled he was making her feel.

‘That’s fine,’ he said evenly, trying to be objective, but for once it wasn’t easy. Her body was good. Very good. She was tall and slender, and yet curved in just the right places, and her breasts were quite simply perfect—not too full and not too small, the white tee-shirt emphasising their shape and not quite disguising the pinpoint thrust of her nipples, which made him tense in desire even though he tried not to.

Darian looked around at the others. In terms of beauty there was not one woman present who could be faulted. There was every variety of womanhood represented here today. Most were slim—too slim, in his opinion, but that was the fashion. True, there were a couple whose curves were more luscious than slim, but the camera didn’t flatter real curves; he knew that.

Leisurely, he ran his eyes over each and every one of them, until they came back to rest and stay on the girl in the jeans. She looked normal and healthy and glowing and…and something about her was still making his skin tingle.

He nodded and turned to Scott. ‘Can I have a word, please? In private?’ he asked him.

‘Sure,’ Scott replied.

The two men moved to the only vacant corner of the studio. ‘I think we’ve found our English rose,’ Darian said slowly. ‘Don’t you?’

Scott turned to him. ‘But she’s a brunette!’

‘So? I don’t remember specifically asking for blonde!’

Scott lowered his voice. ‘We haven’t even tested her yet, Darian,’ he said, a touch anxiously. ‘In fact, we haven’t tested any of them.’

Darian gave an arrogant shrug. ‘There’s no need. She’s the one I want.’

‘But she might project completely the wrong image.’

Darian studied the varying blondes in the studio, who were all looking at him hopefully. They looked…they looked…bland, he realised impatiently. He flicked another glance at the brunette, who seemed so full of life and vitality in comparison, and a steady pulse began to beat at his temple. ‘She won’t,’ he said steadily. ‘Trust me.’

‘The place will erupt if you don’t test the others, too,’ protested Scott.