Read The Sheikh's Baby Omnibus Online
Authors: Penny Jordan
The Sheikh’s Blackmailed Mistress
PROLOGUE
‘Ohhhh, no!’
Her anxious warning protest had come too late, and now she was pressed hard against the very male body of the robed man who had been turning the corner at the same time from the opposite direction.
Her startled cry and the clear visual imprinting her eyes had relayed to her brain—of a tall, broad-shouldered and very arrogant-looking handsome male, with the most extraordinarily green eyes she had ever seen—was all there’d been time for before that image had been blanked out by her abrupt and far too intimate contact—visually and physically—with his body.
Now, with her face virtually buried against his shoulder, her senses were being assaulted by that intimacy in every sensory way that there was. She could feel the heat of his body, and smell its personal slightly musky male scent, mingled with the cool sharpness of the cologne he was wearing. She could feel, too, the heavy thud of his heart beating out a demand that called to her own heartbeat to follow it. Lean, strong fingers gripped her arm, bare flesh to bare flesh setting a panicky, firework-intense burst of lava-hot sensation spilling through her own body.
The manner in which they had collided had brought her up against him in such a way that she now realised she was leaning against one of his thighs, her own having somehow softened and parted to admit its muscular male presence. The lava flow changed from a rolling surge of heat into an explosion of female arousal that wrenched any kind of control over her body from her and claimed it for itself. Quivers of female recognition at his maleness were softening her flesh into his. Breathing was becoming a dangerously erotic hazard that leached her small soft moan of longing into the once sterile silence of the corridor.
She mustn’t do this. She mustn’t raise her head from the muscle-padded warmth of his shoulder to look up into his face. She mustn’t let her desire-dazed gaze dwell yearningly on his mouth. She mustn’t quiver and then sigh, and then place her hand on his chest, whilst lifting her gaze reluctantly from his mouth to his eyes, so that her own could whisper to him how much she ached to trace the sensuality of that full lower lip set beneath its sharply cut partner with her fingertip, or better still with her tongue-tip, caressing it into a reciprocal hunger for the kiss she now wanted so badly.
No, she must not do any of those things—but she was doing them, and he was looking back at her as though he wanted exactly what she wanted, and for all the same reasons.
The air in the corridor hadn’t changed, but she still shivered and trembled and then moaned as he lowered his head to hers, his free hand sliding into the untidy tangle of her honey-streaked curls.
She could feel the warmth of his breath against her skin—feel it and taste it, with its erotic mix of promised delights. Longingly she watched the slow descent of his mouth towards her own, savouring each millimetre of movement that brought him closer—until finally he stopped. Then she looked up at him, her face relaying a message that was a mixture of female pride and passionate longing. His eyes blazed with emerald fire and the pure intensity of male sexual arousal, burning the air between them.
Sam raised herself up on the tips of her toes, her lips parting on a shaky breath of urgent need, clinging to his robe as she did so to support herself. What she was inhaling and tasting now was an aphrodisiac far stronger than any wine.
He brushed her lips with his own, their touch warm and hard and yet exquisitely sensual and caressing, and then drew back to look at her. She moved closer, pressing herself to him in a silent plea for more. Lifting her face towards him, he kissed her briefly again, and then again, until finally he did what she knew she’d wanted him to do from the first and drew her to him in a kiss that possessed her as totally as the desert possessed those whose hearts it stole.
A commotion further down the corridor out of sight from them had them springing apart. Her face on fire, Sam fled, all too conscious of the fact that she was now going to be even later for her appointment than she had already been. Her heart was thumping with a mixture of shock and disbelief.
She was here in the Arabian Gulf on business, not to behave in the reckless and out-of-character way in which she had just behaved.
Her impromptu trip out into the desert this morning might have increased her longing to get this job she had come so far to be interviewed for, but it had also meant that she had not really left herself enough time in which to get ready for the interview—which was why she had been hurrying at speed down the hotel corridor in the first place.
Now she had less than half an hour in which to shower and change and get to her appointment—and
that
was why her heart was thudding so fast and so erratically, not because of what had just happened with the man she had bumped into.
What on earth had come over her?
After all, she knew perfectly well that if anything it was even more pertinent in this part of the world than it was in the west for a woman who wanted to be taken seriously professionally and respected to behave in a way that did not compromise her status—with no inappropriate sexual behaviour towards Arab men.
And as, according to the lectures she had attended to prepare herself for this interview, inappropriate behaviour here in the Arabian Gulf could mean something as simple as a woman reaching out to touch a man on the arm, or engaging him in eye contact, what she had just done definitely came under the heading of
very
inappropriate behaviour indeed.
Even now, despite that knowledge, and despite the fact that normally she wouldn’t have dreamed of acting as she had—would indeed have been shocked if anyone had suggested she might—she was still so aware of the swollen ache deep inside her that even breathing as hard as she was doing right now was enough to make her grit her teeth. Uncharacteristic longings seemed to have taken control of her thought-processes. Longings which were making her wish...
Wish what? That he had taken her to a bedroom and made mad, passionate love to her? A bedroom? Mad, passionate love? Who was she kidding? The kind of behaviour she had just indulged in was not conducive to that kind of encounter—and it would be naïve of her not to understand that. She was weaving ridiculous fantasies inside her head of mutual overwhelming passion at first sight.
She needed bringing to her senses and some icy water thrown on the sexual heat that was now tormenting her.
What
was
this? She had heard that the desert could turn people crazy, but surely not after a mere couple of hours’ viewing from the inside of a luxurious four-by-four air-conditioned vehicle? Oh, but he had been so handsome, and she had wanted him so much—still wanted him so much. She had never experienced anything remotely like the longing that had rolled over her when their bodies had made contact. It had been as though an electric surge of emotion had somehow bonded her to him, fusing them together, so that now she actually felt a physical pain, as though they had been forcibly wrenched apart.
One look into his eyes had been all it needed to complete her subjugation to what she had felt. If he had spoken to her then, and asked her to commit herself to him for the rest of her life, Sam suspected that she would quite willingly have agreed.
She tried to laugh herself out of her own emotional intensity, deriding herself for being silly and telling herself that she was probably simply suffering from too much sun. It wasn’t much of an explanation for what she had felt, but it was way better than the alternative—which was to admit that with one single look she had fallen in love with a stranger to whom she would now be emotionally bound for ever.
CHAPTER ONE
V
ERE
looked through the window of his
office in the palace of Dhurahn, thinking not of the beauty of the gardens that
lay within his view, which had been designed by his late mother, but of the
desert that lay beyond them. The familiar fierce need that was stamped into his
bones was currently possessing him. He wanted to put aside the cares and
complexities of rulership of a modern Arab state and enjoy instead that part of
his heritage that belonged to the desert and the men who loved it.
Which in one sense he would soon be doing. In one sense, maybe,
but not wholly and freely. On this occasion it was his responsibility to his
country and his people that was taking him into what was known as the ‘empty
quarter’ of the desert, to the boundary they shared there with the two of their
Gulf neighbours.
As he crossed to the other side of his office to look down into
the courtyard, where his household were preparing for his departure, the remote
and aloof air that was so much a part of him, which those who did not know him
thought of as regal arrogance, was very much in evidence. Vere felt the weight
of his responsibility towards the birthright he shared with his twin brother
very deeply. He was, after all, the elder of the two of them, and his nature had
always inclined him to take things more to heart and more seriously than Drax,
his twin.
To Vere, ruling Dhurahn as their father and mother would have
wished was a duty that was almost sacred.
There had only been one previous occasion on which his longing
for the desert and the solace it offered him had been as strong as it was now,
and that had been the time following the tragic death of his parents—his
mother’s passing having hit him particularly hard. That thought alone was enough
to fill him with a savage determination to tighten his control over his current
feelings, which he saw as a wholly unacceptable personal weakness.
It was unthinkable that his physical desire for the carnal
pleasure afforded by one of those western women who came to the Gulf ready to
trade their bodies for the lifestyle they thought their flesh could buy—a woman
ready to give herself on the smallest pretext, shamelessly openly—should have
driven him to the point where he felt his only escape from it could come from
the same place where he had sought solace for the loss of his mother. It was
more than unthinkable. It was a desecration, and a personal failure of the
highest order.
It was more than half his own lifetime ago now since the death
of their parents, but for Vere as a teenager, struggling to be a man and
ultimately a ruler, with all the responsibilites that meant, the loss of the
gentle Irish mother who had supplied the softening wisdom of her love against
his desire to emulate his father’s strength, had been one that had taken from
him something very precious, leaving in its place a need to protect himself from
ever having to endure such pain again.
Some men might think that for a man in his position the answer
to the sexual hunger that was threatening to destroy his self-control was to
satisfy it via marriage or a mistress.
His brother Drax was, after all, already married, with his wife
expecting their first child in the near future, and Drax had hinted to him that
he would like to see Vere married himself.
Vere frowned as he watched the four-by-fours being loaded for
the long overland drive to the empty quarter.
The initiative prompted originally by the Ruler of Zuran, to
investigate and if necessary redefine the old borders that separated their
countries from one another, and from the empty quarter, was one he fully
supported. They all in their different ways held certain territorial rights over
the empty quarter, but by long-held and unwritten tradition they tended to
ignore them in favour of the last of the traditional nomad tribes, who had for
centuries called the empty quarter home.
The Ruler of Zuran wanted to bring the small band of nomadic
tribespeople within the protection of the opportunities for education and health
welfare he provided for his own people, and to this end he had contacted his
neighbours: the Emir of Khulua, and Vere and Drax.
His initiative was one that was very close to Vere’s own heart,
provided it could be accomplished without depriving the tribes of their right to
their own way of life. The Emir, not wanting to be excluded even though he was a
more old-fashioned and traditional ruler, had also indicated that he wanted to
be involved in the project, and as a first step the Ruler of Zuran had funded
the cost of a team of cartographers to thoroughly map out the whole of the
area.
It had been the Emir who had suggested that whilst this was
being done it might be a good idea to reassess and establish their own
individual borders with one another, which met at the empty quarter.
It was a good idea that made sense—as long as the Emir, who was
known for his skill at adapting situations to suit his own ends, did not make
use of the re-mapping to claim territory that was not strictly his. During
private talks with the Ruler of Zuran, both he and Drax had agreed to keep a
very strict eye on any attempts the Emir might make to do that. As part of their
agreed preventative measures against this it had been decided that each ruler
should take it in turn to be involved ‘on the ground’ with the project, and now
it was Vere’s turn to drive out to the border region of the empty quarter.
A movement on the balcony above him caused Vere to look
upwards, to where his twin brother Drax and his wife Sadie were standing. The
sight of their happiness and their love for one another touched a place inside
him he hadn’t known existed until Drax had fallen in love.
As twins they had naturally always been close, but the car
accident that had killed their parents when the brothers were in their teens had
made the bond between them even stronger. In the eyes of the world he, as the
elder twin, was the one to step into their father’s shoes, but both he and Drax
knew that it had always been their father’s intention that they would share the
rulership and the responsibility for Dhurahn. However, every country was
expected to have a single figurehead—and that duty rested with him.
Up until recently the duty had never been one he considered
irksome. Where Drax embraced modernity, especially in architecture and design,
he preferred to cling to tradition. Where Drax was an extrovert, he was more of
an introvert. Where Drax enjoyed the buzz of busy civilisation, he preferred the
silent solitude of the desert. They were as all those who knew them best often
said, two halves of one whole.
Like many cultured Arab men, Vere revered poetry and studied
the verse of the great poets, but just recently—although he hated having to
admit it—the beauty of those words had brought him more pain than pleasure.
Normally he would have welcomed the chance to spend time in the
desert, embracing the opportunity it gave him to be at one with his heritage,
but now the knowledge of how close the desert was brought him to those things
within himself that he felt the most need to guard. It was making him feel
irritable and on edge.
Because he knew that being in the desert would exacerbate that
sense of emptiness and loss that lay within him, and with it his vulnerability?
Vere swung round angrily, as though to turn his back on his own
unwanted thoughts. His pride hated having to acknowledge any kind of flaw, and
to Vere what he was experiencing was a weakness. He wanted to wrench it out of
himself and then seal it away somewhere, deprived of anything to feed on so it
would wither and die.
But, no matter how hard he fought to deny it any kind of
legitimacy, every time he thought he had succeeded in destroying it, it
returned—like a multi-headed monster, infuriating him with the mirror it kept
holding up to him, reflecting back his faults.
Generations of proudly arrogant male blood ran through Vere’s
veins. The moral code of that blood was burned into him by his own will. He came
from a race that knew the value of self-control, of abstinence, of starving the
body and the spirit in the eternal battle to survive in a harsh desert
environment. Real men, the kind of man Vere had always considered himself to be,
did not allow uncontrolled hungers of any kind to rule them. Not ever.
And certainly not in a hotel corridor, with an unknown woman,
and in such a way that—
He wheeled round again, his body tight with anger, ignoring the
harsh glare of the sun as it fell across his face, highlighting the jut of his
cheekbones and the searing intensity of his gaze. Not for Vere the protection of
designer sunglasses to shadow and colour reality.
Lust must surely be the most despicable of all human vices. It
was certainly the cause of a great deal of human misery. Vere had always
considered himself above that kind of selfish weakness. As the Ruler of Dhurahn
he had to be. And yet he could not escape from the knowledge that for a handful
of minutes he had been rendered so oblivious to his position by his own senses
that nothing had mattered more to him than his desire for the woman he had held
in his arms.
Another man might have shrugged his shoulders and accepted that
he was a man, and thus vulnerable to the temptations of the flesh, but Vere’s
pride refused to accept that he could be so vulnerable, so prone to human
frailty. He had fallen below the demands he made upon himself to meet certain
standards. Others might not condemn him for doing so, but Vere condemned
himself.
He wasn’t entirely alone, though, in his belief that a man
needed to prove he could withstand the most rigorous of tests before he could
call himself a man and a leader of other men. There was an ‘other’ to share his
belief, and that ‘other’ was the desert.
The desert had a way of drawing out a man and highlighting both
his strengths and his weaknesses. Normally Vere looked forward to the time he
could spend in the desert as a means of replenishing his sense of what he truly
was—but right now he wasn’t sure that he wanted to submit his current state to
that test. He had found himself wanting, and he feared that so too would the
desert—that he would no longer be at one with it, just as he could no longer
feel at one with himself.
More than anything he wanted and needed to dismiss the woman
and the incident from his mind for ever—and then to deal with the damage she and
it had done to his pride.
But the truth was he couldn’t. The memory of her was branded
into him and he couldn’t seem to free himself from it—no matter how much he
loathed and resented its presence. And her. He hadn’t slept through a full night
since it had happened. He didn’t dare to let himself dream too deeply, fearing
that if he did his dreams would be filled by her, and the ache of need he
managed to control during the day would overpower him when he was asleep. It was
bad enough having to acknowledge that every time he let his concentration slip
the memory of her was there, waiting to taunt him. At its worst, that memory had
him mentally lifting his hands to her body, determined to push her from him as
he should have done all along, but knowing that in reality he would end up
binding her to him.
How was it possible for one woman, a complete stranger, to
invade the most private and strongly guarded recesses of his heart and mind and
possess them, haunting and tormenting him almost beyond his own endurance?
It was mid-afternoon. He planned to leave for the desert camp
of the surveyors as the sun began to set, so that he and his small entourage
could make the most of the cooler night hours in which to travel. He had some
work to do first, though, he reminded himself.
Whilst Drax and his wife occupied the new wing of the palace
that Drax had designed for his own occupation before his marriage, Vere’s
personal apartments were in the older part of the palace, and had traditionally
housed Dhurahn’s rulers through several generations.
Thus it was that when he stood in the elegantly furnished and
decorated private salon that lay behind the formal reception room where he held
his public
divans
, to which his people were entitled
to come and speak to him and be heard, he might be alone in the flesh, but in
spirit the room was peopled with all those of his blood who had gone before him.
His formidable great-grandfather, who had ridden with Lawrence
of Arabia and fought off all comers to maintain his right to his lands. His
French grandmother, so elegant and cultured, who had bequeathed to him a love of
art and design. And his own parents: his father, so very much everything that a
true ruler should be—strong, wise, tender to those in his care—and his lovely
laughing mother, who had filled his life with happiness and joy and the
traditions of her homeland. Here in this room, at the heart of the palace and
his life, he had always believed that he would never really be alone.
And yet now, thanks to one incident that was impossible to
forget, that sense of comfort had been stolen from him and replaced with a stark
awareness of his own inner solitude that he could not escape.
If he were reckless enough to close his eyes he knew that
immediately he would be able to conjure up the feel of the thick silk of her
wild curls beneath his hand, the scent of her woman’s flesh—sweet and warm, like
honey and almonds—the stifled heat of her breath when her body discovered the
maleness of his own. And most of all her eyes, so darkly blue that they’d caught
exactly the colour of the desert sky overhead just before the sun finally burned
into the horizon. A man could lose his reason if he looked too long at such a
sky, or into such eyes...
Was that what he believed had happened to him? Vere grimaced,
bringing himself abruptly back to reality. He was a modern man, born in an age
of facts and science. The fact that he had turned a corner in a hotel corridor
and bumped into a young woman with whom he had shared a kiss—no matter how
intensely passionate and intimate, no matter how bitterly regretted—hardly
constituted an act of fate that had the power to change his whole life. Unless
he himself allowed that to happen, Vere warned himself.