by Lynne Graham
When she walked into the elegant apartment block, the security guard looked surprised to see her. ‘What are you doing here at this time of day? It’s almost lunch time,’ he pointed out.
‘I had an exam this morning. I’m running late.’
‘I’ve just come on duty,’ he replied, smiling at her because she was a very pretty girl, but particularly because she was also a very small girl and she was one of the very few women whom he could look down on. ‘I’ll have to check if the guests have arrived yet. I’m not supposed to give out the key for maintenance after eleven.’
‘Please give me the key,’ Izzy begged in desperation. ‘If the guests arrive to an uncleaned apartment, I’m toast!’
‘Just this once,’ he conceded, stepping back to reach for the key and passing it across the desk, catching her hand in his to add, ‘Fancy a drink some night?’
‘Sorry, I’m seeing someone,’ she lied, rather than turn him down cold when he was doing her a favour in turning a blind eye to her late arrival.
‘Let me know when you’re free again,’ he urged with a wink as she stepped into the service lift that ran up to the rear entrance of the apartment.
In the lift, Izzy dug her pink uniform tabard out of her bag and donned it, smoothing a hand through her mane of tumbled red curls to prevent them from standing on end. She sighed, thinking she couldn’t remember when she had last had a date. Keeping up with her studies, working several cleaning shifts a week and visiting her family at weekends left her with little free time. Indeed, a free night was a big enough treat and usually given over to curling up with a good book or watching a movie with Maya, with whom she shared a small dingy flat. Yet there was her father always telling her that the years of youth were the most fun-filled years of her life! So much for that, she thought wryly, wishing she had at least fancied the security guard because she had yet to meet any man who sparked her interest in that field.
Maya was the beauty in the family with her straight blonde hair, long legs and flawless face. Izzy was red-haired, five feet nothing in height and curvier than she liked. In the street men turned their heads to look at Maya and rarely even noticed Izzy by her side. The sisters might be twins but they were far from identical.
Inserting the pass key in the lock of the rear entrance, Izzy hurried into the apartment and extracted her cleaning box and the fresh linen from a storage cupboard. She spared the kitchen only a quick assessing glance. Although she would clean it before she left, the cooking facilities rarely required much attention because the tourists and business people who normally used the apartment either dined out or ordered in takeout food. As a rule, she spent most of her visit ensuring that the bathrooms were immaculate and, that objective in mind, she headed straight for the en suite bathroom off the main bedroom to start there.
* * *
Rafiq had suffered a very trying morning. An accident leaving the airport in the early hours of the morning had put two thirds of his protection team and his cook into hospital. Fortunately, none of his staff had been badly hurt but Rafiq had spent hours at the hospital and he was tired and hungry. He had been in no mood to deal with his uncle’s panic at the mere idea that his nephew was abroad with only two men left to watch over him. The Regent had insisted that outside security be hired as a precaution even though Rafiq was only in Oxford to open the research facility he had funded at the university and would be flying home the following day.
A strange woman walking into the bathroom at the exact moment he stepped out of the shower was just about the last straw and he erupted into an angry tirade in his own language, demanding to know who she was, how she had gained entrance to the apartment and what she thought she was playing at.
And then he focused on her as he furiously secured the towel round his lean hips and fell abruptly silent, because she looked more like a child than a woman and her tiny body was rigid with fright and surprise, her face telegraphing her concern at the blunder she had made.
Izzy came to a dead halt as she registered too late that the bathroom was actually occupied and a huge bronzed guy in a very small white towel was stalking out of the shower to confront her for her impertinence. She stared at him in shock, her stomach turning over, and she couldn’t stop staring because he was—literally—the most beautiful man she had ever seen. A shock of black tousled hair enhanced his extraordinary dark deep-set amber-gold eyes. He had lashes long enough for a woman to trip on, blade-sharp cheekbones that rivalled a supermodel’s and a five o’clock shadow that huskily accentuated his strong masculine jaw line and wide sensual mouth. He was gorgeous. Even as that inappropriate thought occurred to her, hard hands were clamping into her shoulders from behind and pulling her backwards and her face was burning up with embarrassment.
‘I’m so sorry!’ she began apologising. ‘I thought the apartment was empty.’
‘Who are you?’ Rafiq demanded impatiently.
‘The cleaning and changeover service,’ Izzy confided, shooting a glance to either side of her at the man mountains holding her fast. ‘Steady on, guys. I’m not about to attack anyone!’
‘How did you get in?’ Rafiq shot at her while also directing the overzealous guards to loosen their grip on her. She reminded him of a doll with her white porcelain skin, bright blue eyes and that strangely coloured hair that brought to mind highly polished copper, a wild mop of curls spiralling around her heart-shaped face like question marks and tumbling to her shoulders. But she was not the child he had initially assumed, he registered, scanning the ripe full curve of her breasts and hips with a hunger that he struggled to master because it had been way too long since he had had company in his bed.
‘W-with the pass key.’
An exchange in a foreign language took place over her head.
‘You could not have come through the front door without being seen,’ Rafiq countered.
‘I’m not supposed to use the front door,’ Izzy argued. ‘I used the service entrance off the kitchen—’
Another incomprehensible vocal exchange took place.
‘We were not aware that the apartment had a second entrance,’ Rafiq admitted gravely, shifting a large brown hand in an imperious gesture to indicate that she should be removed from his presence.
‘Look, I’m really sorry about the mistake. I shouldn’t have been here this late in the day but if you report me, I’ll lose my job!’ Izzy exclaimed.
‘And why would I care about that?’ Rafiq asked, stalking lazily into the bedroom as lithe as a panther prowling through the jungle.
‘Because I’ve already had a really horrible day! I’m sitting my final exams and I ran out of time before I could finish the paper, so I might’ve failed,’ Izzy told him flatly.
‘You’re a student?’
Izzy nodded jerkily.
‘Wait next door while I get dressed,’ he instructed. ‘I’ll speak to you then.’
Izzy drew in a quivering breath, deposited her pile of fresh linen on the ottoman at the end of the bed and backed out, the two goons on her heels.
‘Can you cook?’ the guy in the towel asked her abruptly.
Izzy blinked in bewilderment and turned her head. ‘Yes…er…but why?’
‘Later.’ As she was herded into the spacious reception area, the bedroom door thudded shut behind her.
‘You sit there,’ one of the goons told her in a thick accent.
‘I’ll get on with my job,’ Izzy overruled without hesitation, trundling her box of cleaning supplies into the other bathroom to start work.
Why on earth had he asked her if she could cook? Of course, she could cook. Learning had been a necessity with a mother who could barely handle toast without burning it. Both she and Maya had been making meals from an early age. Even her father was handier in the kitchen than her mother was, but she didn’t blame her mother for that failing because in all the ways that mattered in making
children feel loved, appreciated and safe, Lucia Campbell excelled, she thought fondly.
She would finish the bathroom, head into the kitchen and then hopefully the bedroom would be free for her to change the bed, she planned, refusing to allow her brain to dwell on what had occurred…that guy, that totally unbelievably, indescribably gorgeous guy. Izzy blinked, shocked and mortified by her brain’s inability to suppress the images still shooting through it on constant repeat. Yes, like any normal woman she noticed attractive men but certainly not to the extent she had noticed bathroom guy, whose wide-shouldered, lean-hipped, long-legged perfection had imprinted on her like ink she couldn’t wash off.
In fact, until that very day she had never realised that a guy in all his half-naked splendour could even appeal to her in such a very physical way. She had truly believed that she was a little cool on that side of things because no previous man had ever sent an embarrassing flush of heat washing through her entire body and welded her attention to him as though there were nothing else but him. There in the midst of her most embarrassing moment she had been wholly mesmerised by those eyes of his, those hard, dark perfect features, that sleek bronzed torso indented with lean muscles that shifted with his every movement, not to mention the fabled V that ran down from his hip bones… Sucking in a steadying breath, Izzy blanked her mind and got on with the cleaning while scolding herself for behaving like a convent schoolgirl who had never seen a real man before.
There she was, an unapologetic feminist being sexist in the most mortifying way, she thought, shamefaced. She had objectified ‘bathroom guy’ in exactly the same way women complained that men did women, without seeing him as a person, an individual. And sheer lust had dug painful claws into her body, her nipples snapping taut, an awareness she had never felt before slicking over every inch of her exposed skin as insidious heat curled up from her core. It had been mind-blowing, terrifying to feel gripped by something that seemed so much stronger than she was. She had never dreamt that sexual attraction could be that powerful or that instantaneous. Way out of control, not at all the sort of thing she had ever expected to feel.
She had always been far too sensible for stuff of that nature, not remotely like Maya, who, for all her genius, remained a romantic dreamer at heart. No, Izzy was a realist and knew very well that such a very good-looking man would never look back at her with the same hunger. She also suspected that he was, very probably, another woman’s husband or boyfriend and guilt at that likelihood made her shudder at his effect on her. He was far too spectacular to be running around on his own, she thought crazily. No, had he belonged to Izzy he wouldn’t have got more than twenty feet from her and he certainly wouldn’t be stepping almost naked out of a shower in front of some random strange woman!
Rafiq strode out of the bedroom in search of his quarry and asked one of his guards where she was.
‘She doesn’t listen to orders,’ he was told.
Rafiq grinned at the sight of her bending over the bath, her peachy bottom twitching as she energetically scrubbed it. He had never gone for really skinny women. He loved curves and softness and femininity. The lush feminine swell of flesh above and below her tiny waist turned him on hard and fast. He checked his watch and lounged in the doorway. ‘So,’ he murmured softly, making her jump nervously and twist round. ‘Can you cook an omelette?’
Rattled at being taken by surprise yet again, Izzy threw back her stiff shoulders, wishing for only the fiftieth time in recent years that she were tall enough to be taken seriously and not so small that she was regularly taken for an adolescent rather than the woman of twenty-one years that she actually was.
‘Yes…but why would you ask me that?’ she asked impatiently as she swung round to be welded to the spot by dark-as-midnight velvet eyes that had remarkable intensity.
Her mouth ran dry. He was lodged in the doorway, rampantly masculine in his infuriatingly complete relaxation.
‘I want you to cook for me. You have an hour before I have to go out to keep my appointment.’
‘Why wouldn’t you just order food in?’ Izzy prompted in wonderment.
‘I don’t eat junk food. I like a freshly cooked meal served in private,’ Rafiq told her, strangely entertained by the new experience of being treated like an equal by someone who clearly had not the smallest suspicion of his true status.
‘I’m only here to clean and change beds,’ Izzy pointed out abstractedly, taken aback by the demand.
‘But I could throw you out of here and complain about your intrusion if I so desired and you could lose your job,’ Rafiq reminded her with silken immediacy. ‘In return for my generosity in overlooking that offence, you could cook lunch for me and everybody will be happy.’
‘Is that so?’ Izzy gasped, shattered by the ease with which that blatant blackmail attempt had emerged from his perfectly shaped lips.
‘And if lunch is good, you can also cook dinner for me this evening and I will pay you handsomely for your services,’ Rafiq completed levelly.
‘How handsome is handsome?’ Izzy pressed tautly.
Rafiq almost laughed at her upward glance of sudden interest. ‘I’m very generous when it’s a question of my comfort and convenience away from home.’
Izzy nodded slowly. ‘So, I’ll cook lunch.’
‘I thought you would argue.’
Izzy rolled her bright blue eyes. ‘Not a chance if you’re offering to pay me and keep quiet about my late arrival here. I’m not too proud to admit that I’m as poor as a church mouse and that when money talks, I listen.’
Rafiq liked her frankness even if he was a little turned off by it. Of course, he was accustomed to gold-diggers with a little more flair at hiding their true natures, the type that admired diamond jewellery, designer clothing or dropped loaded hints to ensure that they benefitted richly from any time they spent in his bed. Yet the minute his thoughts went in that judgmental direction, he was angry with himself. This particular woman was an ordinary woman working in an equally ordinary job to make a living, a person far removed from the polished models and spoiled socialites of his experience. On her terms, money was a basic need to cover real-world expenses like shelter and food and clothing.
‘You said I’ve got an hour?’ Izzy checked, peeling her tunic off up over her head, copper curls bouncing as she went for the challenge. ‘There’s no food here but there’s a supermarket across the street. You’ll have to tell me your likes and dislikes first.’
With difficulty, Rafiq dragged his attention from the bounce of her full breasts beneath her faded tee shirt as she removed the overall. His groin throbbed as though a blowtorch had been turned on him, the hunger, the need almost painful and at that moment he reached a decision. If everything went the way it should, he would take her to his bed and spend the night with her. Cruising clubs for a suitable pickup wasn’t really his thing. Drunken or loud women turned him off. His guards drew attention to him. Photos would be taken. Discretion was always a problem. Conscious that those sapphire-bright eyes were still locked to him with an air of expectancy, Rafiq stopped plotting and replied.
Izzy checked her watch. ‘First, shopping,’ she told him.
‘One of my guards will accompany you,’ Rafiq informed her.
‘That’s really not necessary.’
The dark eyes went cool and hard. ‘I decide what’s necessary around here.’
‘Oh…’ Izzy succumbed to an involuntary grin as if his innate dominance was somehow amusing. ‘Do you want me to call you “sir”?’
Rafiq thought about it since, after all, that was what he was accustomed to in company. Yet, there was something ridiculously refreshing about her playful irreverence. It lightened his mood and stimulated his sense of humour because he had not the slightest doubt that she’d be ‘sir’-ing him all the way if she knew that he was a crown prince.
‘No. You may call me Rafiq,’ he informed her sm
oothly.
‘Do you live in the UK?’
‘No. I live in Zenara,’ he divulged with greater reluctance.
But Izzy wasn’t even looking at him; she was gathering up her cleaning tools. ‘Never heard of it,’ she told him apologetically.
‘It’s in the Middle East,’ Rafiq felt moved to explain with amusement. ‘I gather you’re not a geography student.’
‘No, I’m doing English. My final year, final exams,’ she burbled with a wince, sidling past him, her hip bumping his. ‘Sorry, but I had better get on with that shopping…’
And just like that Rafiq’s attention was dismissed by a woman. Irritation and surprise and something perilously like pleasure warred within him because a woman had never walked away from him before. No, they always lingered, chatting, flirting, batting eyelashes and desperately trying to hold his interest. She wouldn’t be a pushover, that was for sure, he acknowledged with satisfaction, at that moment loving the prospect of a challenge.
As soon as she crossed the street, a hefty bodyguard at her side, Izzy unfurled her cheap mobile phone and rang her sister, Maya. ‘Well,’ she said cheerfully in a voice laden with sisterly mystery and promise. ‘Have I got a story to tell…’
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’M NOT USED to you describing a guy as “hot”,’ Maya complained worriedly. ‘Are you sure you’ll be safe with him in that apartment? Is he the sleazy type? All over you like a rash?’
‘Totally not. I’m not even sure he’s noticed I’m female,’ Izzy burbled, with the phone tucked between her chin and neck as she settled eggs and butter into the trolley, which was being steered by the guard. He had looked at her aghast when she’d thrust it at him. But as far as she was concerned if she was stuck with him, he might as well make himself useful. ‘I was just there in the right place at the right moment when he wanted a cook, and you know we need the money.’