Shackled To The Sheikh

‘He stood you up, eh?’ said the man, still refusing to give up on his quarry. Still refusing to believe her. ‘Lucky I’m here to rescue you from sitting on the shelf all night.’

‘No,’ she said, in case Mr Beer Breath decided to argue the point, ‘he just walked in,’ and she squeezed her way past him determined to prove it.

* * *

Half-heartedly Rashid scanned the room one last time, already knowing that he was wasting his time in this place. He turned to leave—he would find no oblivion here—when someone grabbed his arm.

‘At last,’ he heard a woman say above the music. ‘You’re late.’

He was about to say she was mistaken and shrug her off, when her other arm encircled his neck and she drew herself closer. ‘Work with me on this,’ she said as she pulled his head down to hers.

It was the woman at the bar—that was his first surprise—and the only thing that prevented him from pushing her away. The fact Ms Bookish had turned into Ms Bold and Brazen was the second. But she’d saved the best for last, because her kiss was the biggest and the best surprise of all. She tried to get away after a moment but her lips were soft, her breath was warm, and she tasted of fruit and alcohol, summer and citrus, all over warm, lush woman, and she wasn’t going anywhere just yet. He ran his arm down her back, from her shoulder to the sweet curve of her behind, his fingers curling as they squeezed, and she arched into him as she gasped in his mouth.

Yes. This was what he needed.

This was what he’d come looking for.

Maybe coming here tonight hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.

‘Let’s go,’ she said, purposefully, if a little shakily, as she pulled away, her eyes shot with surprise as she looked from him over her shoulder to where she’d been sitting. He followed her gaze and saw the men lined up at the bar watching her, saw the slap to the back in consolation to the man who’d been talking to her, and he half wondered what the man had said to her that she seemed so shaken now. Not that Rashid really cared, as he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and cut through the crowd heading for the stairs and the exit, given he’d ended up exactly where he’d wanted.

Tora’s heart was thumping so loud, she was sure it was only the thump-thump of the music in the bar that was drowning it out. She must be more affected by the alcohol than she’d realised.

Why else would she have walked up to a complete stranger and kissed him?

Though it wasn’t just the alcohol fuelling her bravado, she knew. It was the anger, first for her cheating cousin, secondly for that meat market of a nightclub and a creep of a man who imagined there was any way in the world she’d want to spend even a moment with his beery self. And it hadn’t been enough simply to walk away—she’d been wanting to show him she wasn’t some sad lonely woman who’d be flattered to have his attention. Well, she’d sure shown him well and good.

But a peck on the lips in greeting was all she’d intended. A signal to the men watching that she wasn’t alone. She hadn’t expected that man to be so willing to join in her game. Nor had she expected to be sideswiped by a stranger’s taste and touch in the process, leaving her dazed and confused. And the way her skin tingled and sparked when their bodies brushed as they walked side by side—well, that was interesting, too.

She willed the itching fingers on the hand she’d wrapped around his waist to be still, but, God, it wasn’t easy, not when he felt so hard, so lean. Oh, wow... She needed to get outside and let the night air cool her heated skin. She needed the oxygen so she could think straight. She needed to say thank you to this stranger and get herself a taxi and go home, before she did anything else crazy tonight.

Because tonight was shaping up to be all kinds of crazy and the way this man felt, she wasn’t sure she could trust herself.

And then they were out on the street and the nightclub door closed behind them and she never got a chance to say thank you because he was pulling her into the shadows of a nearby doorway and kissing her all over again and she was letting him and suddenly it wasn’t the alcohol or her anger that was affecting her—it was one hundred per cent him.

Madness, she thought as his masterful lips coaxed open hers. She should put a stop to this, she thought as his tongue danced with hers. She didn’t do things like this. They might be in the shadows but they were on a public street after all. What if Matt saw her on his way home?

And then her anger kicked in and she thought, damn Matt, why would she care what he thought? Let him see. And she pressed herself closer.

A moment later she stopped caring about anything but for the hot mouth trailing kisses up her throat to her mouth, his hands holding her tight to him so they were joined from their knees to their lips and every place in between felt like an erogenous zone.

‘Spend the night with me,’ he whispered, drawing back to whisper against her ear, his breath fanning her hair, fanning the growing flames inside her in the process, and she almost found herself wishing he’d said nothing but carted her off to his cave so she didn’t have to think about being responsible. Crazy. She didn’t meet strangers in bars and spend the night with them.

‘I don’t even know your name.’ Her words were breathless, but it was the best she could manage when her mind was shell-shocked and every other part of her body was busy screaming yes.

‘Does it matter?’

Right now? God, he had a point. He could tell her his name was Jack the Ripper and she’d have trouble caring. But still...

‘I should go home,’ she managed to say, trying to remember the good girl she always figured she was and the plan she’d had—something about a taxi and a bottle of Riesling in the fridge and a cheating cousin she wanted to forget about—but she was having trouble remembering the details and wasn’t that a revelation?

Wasn’t that what tonight was supposed to be all about—forgetting?

He pulled away, letting her go even though the distance between them was scant inches. Even now her body swayed into the vacuum where his had so recently been. ‘Is that what you want? To go home?’

She saw the tightness in his shadowed features as if it was physically hurting him to hold himself back, she felt the heat rising from his strong body and she knew what it must be costing him to leave her to decide when the power in his strong limbs told her that he was powerful enough to take whatever he wanted. The concept was strangely thrilling. The perfect stranger. Powerful, potentially dangerous, but giving her the choice.

A choice never so starkly laid out in her mind.

A choice between being responsible and playing it safe and going home and sitting stewing about what she’d missed, or being reckless for once in her life and taking what was on offer—one night with a man whose touch promised to make her forget all the things she’d wanted to forget. One night with a stranger. Her cousin would be horrified, and right now wasn’t that good enough reason in itself?

Besides, all her life she’d played it safe, and where had that got her? Nowhere. She’d done nothing wrong and yet she’d lost more today than she’d ever thought possible.

Tonight was no night to play it safe.

‘No,’ she said, her tongue tasting an unfamiliar boldness on her lips. ‘I want to spend the night with you.’

‘One night,’ he said, and she recognised it as a warning. ‘That’s all I can offer you.’

‘Perfect,’ she said with a smile because that was all she wanted. ‘One night is all I want.’ Tomorrow she could pick up the shattered pieces of her promises and work out where she went from there.

His eyes glinted in the street lighting, a flash of victory that came with a spark of heat, and he reached out his fingers to push a wayward tendril of her hair behind her ear, making her skin tingle. ‘My name is Rashid.’

‘Tora,’ she said, even as she trembled under his touch.

He took her hand and brought it to his mouth, pressing it to his lips. ‘Come, Tora,’ he said.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_9d24ffd5-24e5-5b21-b80b-fb4afb42e17d)

NICE, SHE REGISTERED vaguely as he swept her through the marble-floored lobby of one of the oldest and classiest hotels in Sydney. Very nice. People dreamed of spending a night at The Velatte—ordinary people, that was. Clearly the man at her side was no ordinary person. But then, she already knew that. No ordinary person had ever set her pulse racing just by his presence. No average garden-variety man had ever set fires under her skin merely with his touch.

And now it was anticipation of a night with this far from ordinary man making the blood spin around her veins and her knees feel weak.

The lift whisked them to a high floor, his arm wound tightly around her, another couple in the lift the only thing that kept him from pulling her into his kiss, if the heated look in his dark eyes she caught in their reflection in the mirrored lift walls was any indication—mirrored panels that also gave her the chance to steal a closer look at the man she’d agreed to spend the night with. The flash of strobe in the darkened bar had shown her a face of all straight lines and planes—the dark slash of brows, the sharp blade of his nose, the angles of his jaw—but now she could see the softer lines of his mouth and the fullness of his bottom lip and the curve of flesh over high cheekbones. The combination worked.

It was then she realised that his eyes weren’t black but the deepest, deepest blue, like the surface of the bottomless ocean on a perfectly calm day.

He was beautiful, way too beautiful to be by himself, and the good girl in her wondered why he was, while the bad girl in her—the newly found bad girl who drank cocktails in basement bars and threw herself at random men on a whim—rejoiced. Because right now she was the one here in this lift with him.

He opened the door to his room that turned out to be a suite because it was a sitting room they entered, decorated in modern classics in grey and cream and illuminated with standing lamps, lending the room a subtle golden glow. Oh, no, this man was definitely not ordinary. He was either loaded, or his employer’s accountant was going to have a heart attack when the expense-account bill came in.

‘It’s huge,’ she said, overwhelmed, wondering just who this man she’d met in a nightclub and with whom she’d agreed to a night with actually was.

‘I got an upgrade,’ he said dismissively, as if that explained a suite fit for a king, as he headed towards a phone. ‘Something to drink?’

Her mouth was dry but only because every drop of moisture in her body had been busy heading south ever since he’d asked her to spend the night. ‘Anything,’ she said, and he ordered champagne for two and put the receiver down, the fingers of one hand already unbuttoning his shirt.

‘The bedroom’s through here,’ he said as he led the way into a room with furniture in both gloss white and dark timber, with white louvre glass doors opening onto a terrace beyond. A super-king-sized bed with a plump quilted headrest and snowy white bed linen held pride of place against the opposite wall.