Master of the Desert

She was safe from him—too young, too reckless, plus he resented the intrusion. Any other time or place and he would have had her removed from his presence.

But she was tougher than she looked or she would have been reduced to a hysterical mess by now. She was an irritation, but she was also courageous, he concluded, and a breath of fresh air after the painted harpies who regularly served themselves up at court for his perusal.

There was only one thing wrong with the girl: she reminded him of someone else. Those tangled locks and slanting eyes held an echo of his father’s mistress, a woman who had destroyed his mother’s life and who had referred to Razi—the step-brother he couldn’t have loved more if they had shared the same blood—as the worst mistake she had ever made. That woman might be dead now, but she had left disaster in her wake, and as far as he was concerned she had defined his father’s weakness. It had been a fatal weakness that had stolen his father’s attention away from his country and its people. With that lesson guiding him, things had changed for the better since he had assumed control. There was no longer chaos in Sinnebar, and his people knew that he would never repeat his father’s mistake and become a slave to his heart.

He refocused as the girl shifted restlessly on the bench. ‘I’m going to bathe your scratches before they turn septic,’ he informed her crisply.

She recognised a command, but to his astonishment something in her eyes said she would dearly like to strike him. ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ he warned grimly, at which she scowled and slumped back like the spoiled teen he thought her to be. ‘When did you last eat?’ he demanded as he assessed her wounds and general condition.

Her stomach answered this question with an imperative growl, and then he remembered the hunk of bread she’d dropped on the deck. ‘When I’ve finished, you can eat.’

She tilted her chin at a defiant angle to stare haughtily past him.

So, let her go hungry—though he was forced to concede he admired her nerve. He liked the electricity between them too, but neither of these things would affect how he dealt with her. He would administer basic first-aid and then turn her over to the authorities. ‘Arms,’ he prompted brusquely, and then, deciding he would teach her what it meant to risk her life in the Gulf, he demanded, ‘Don’t you know anything about maritime law?’

Her flickering gaze suggested not.

‘If I report your actions to the ruling Sheikh in Sinnebar…You have heard of the man known as the “Sword of Vengeance”, I take it?’ He had the satisfaction of seeing her pale. ‘If I tell him that you came aboard my yacht, stole my food and threatened me with one of my own knives I would imagine the most lenient sentence he could hand out would be life imprisonment.’

‘But you wouldn’t!’

Even as she protested her eyes were narrowing in defiance. He liked her fire. He liked her voice. He liked…‘Report you?’ he rapped, calling his wayward thoughts back to order. ‘That depends on you telling me exactly how you got here. And be completely honest with me; I shall know at once if you lie.’

Hearing the menace in his voice, she slowly unfurled her legs as if deciding a temporary truce was her only option. ‘You were moored up, and so I thought…’

She’d take her chances, he silently supplied, feeling a beat of lust as she held his gaze. She spoke English well, but with the faintest of Italian accents. ‘You don’t look Italian,’ he said, dropping it in casually.

‘I had an English mother,’ she explained, before her mouth clamped shut, as if she felt she’d said too much.

‘Start by telling me what brought you to the Gulf and how you arrived on my yacht.’

‘I jumped overboard and swam.’

‘You swam?’ He weighed up her guarded expression. ‘You’re telling me you jumped overboard and swam through these seas?’ His tone of voice reflected his disbelief.

‘For what felt like hours.’ She blurted this, and then fell silent.

‘Go on,’ he prompted, continuing to bathe her wounds.

‘Before the mist closed in, the boat we were on was hugging the coastline.’

‘“We”?’

She shook her head as if it was important to concentrate. ‘I could see this island and was confident I could make it to the shore.’

‘You must swim well,’ he commented.

‘I do.’

She spoke without pride, and, taking in her lithe strength, he was tempted to believe her. But she must have swum like an athlete to survive the storm, and however capable she believed herself to be she was no match for the dangerous currents and unpredictable weather conditions in the waters of the Gulf.

The girl had stirred some instinct in him, he realised. It was the instinct to protect and defend, and he hadn’t felt that so strongly since his brother Razi had been young. ‘What made you jump overboard?’ He had his own suspicions, but wanted to hear it from the girl.

Her face grew strained as she remembered. ‘Our boat was attacked.’

‘I’ll need more than that.’ If his suspicions were correct, his security forces would need all the information he could glean from her. ‘Was your boat attacked by pirates?’

‘How do you know that?’ The terror in her eyes suggested she thought he was one of them. In fairness, she had had quite an experience, and he was tempted to comfort her. It was an impulse he resisted.

‘I suspected as much, and you just confirmed it. And I’m not a criminal,’ he added when she continued to stare at him as if he had just grown horns. ‘Quite the contrary—I bring people to justice.’

‘So you’re a law-enforcement officer?’

‘Something like that,’ he agreed.

Partially reassured, she settled back. ‘I was lucky to escape with my life,’ she said, echoing his thoughts exactly. ‘I escaped.’

And now she was over-doing it with a dramatic hitch in her voice. As she looked at him, as if trying to gauge his reaction, he suspected she was used to playing someone—an older brother, perhaps? She was out of luck with him. He wasn’t so easily won over. ‘You are lucky to have escaped with your life—and I’m not talking about the pirates now. You boarded my yacht without permission. I carry arms on board and wouldn’t hesitate to use them. What use would your little knife have been to you then?’

Colour rushed to her cheeks while her intelligent eyes sparkled like aquamarines. He didn’t need a further reminder to put some distance between them. He picked up the radio, to call the officer on duty and let him know the girl had been found and was safe—and when he turned to look at her he felt another bolt of lust.

She couldn’t stop shaking and the man didn’t help. She had never imagined such a combination of brutal strength and keen intelligence existed, let alone in such a perfectly sculpted form. His manner was proud—disdainful, even. He was magnificent. He only had to touch her for her body to react as if he was caressing her intimately. There was just one thing wrong. She could be as bold and determined as she liked, but she was way out of her depth here, and he frightened her. She was a flirt, a tease, and was used to getting her own way, but she had never met a man so hard—so hard on her. She wasn’t used to indifference. She was spoiled—she was the first to admit it—spoiled, both by a brother who adored her and by the attention of half the world’s men. If anything, there were times when she wished herself invisible. This was not one of those times.

But why should the man be interested in her? He was out of her league—older, tougher, better looking and more experienced in every way. She had left her comfortable cocoon back in Rome to learn about life, but never had she anticipated learning quite so much quite so fast. She didn’t even know if this man was more trustworthy than the pirates, and only had the fact that he had bathed her wounds to go on. Would he have done that if he had intended to harm her?

However caring that might make him seem, she refused to be reassured, or to relax her guard. There was something dangerous about him. At least when the pirates had attacked she’d had the chance to jump overboard, but she suspected this man had lightning reflexes and slept with one eye open. Right now he was talking on the radio in a husky tongue she guessed must be Sinnebalese. She had studied the language before setting out on her journey, and could pick up a word or two, but frustratingly not enough. She could learn more from his manner, Antonia decided, which was brisk, to the point and carried an air of authority. He was someone important—someone people listened to—but who?

He made no allowances for the fact that she was young and vulnerable, and she couldn’t decide if she liked that or not. Her brother smothered her, believing she required his constant supervision, whereas this man was more like a warrior from one of her fantasies, and had no time to waste on indulging her. Tall, dark and formidably built, in her dreams she would think of him as a dark master of the night, intense and ruthless, the ultimate prize—in reality, he made her wish she had never left home.

She continued to watch him furtively through a curtain of hair. She’d had no alternative but to board his yacht. She had swum to the point of exhaustion, and when she’d seen his boat looming out of the mist she hadn’t thought twice about seizing her chance.

As soon as he finished the call, she quickly drew up her feet and locked her arms around her knees, burying her head to avoid his penetrating stare. But he was ignoring her again, she realised, peeping at him.

She studied him some more as he moved about the cabin. He was spectacularly good-looking, with deeply bronzed skin and wild, black hair that caught on his stubble. The firm, expressive mouth, the earring, the look in his eyes, his menacing form all contributed to the air of danger surrounding him. He might look like her ideal man, but this was not one of her fantasies, and she was so far out of her comfort zone she was having to make up the rules as she went along. But there was no question he could melt hearts from Hollywood to Hindustan, and would certainly make a great Hollywood pirate, with those sweeping, ebony brows and that aquiline nose.

Then she remembered that real pirates were scrawny, smelly, ugly and mean.

As she whimpered at the memory of them, he whirled around. ‘What’s wrong with you now?’

‘Nothing,’ she protested. She’d get no sympathy here.

CHAPTER TWO

‘YOU must never put yourself in such a vulnerable position again,’ he told the girl sternly.

She looked at him in mute surprise, but he cut her no slack. If he eased up she’d think taking chances in the wilderness was acceptable, whereas he knew that if the visibility had been better, and helicopter gun-ships from his air force had been flying over the yacht when she boarded, his snipers might have shot her.

‘My boat was attacked by pirates,’ she protested. ‘I jumped overboard and swam for my life. What else was I supposed to do?’