Desert Prince, Defiant Virgin

by Kim Lawrence

  She forced her next words past the wild hysterical laugh that was locked in her throat. ‘You think I’m having an affair with Tariq…?’

  ‘There are others? You are a serial seductress?’

  She ignored the acid insert and carried on staring at him blankly. She wiped the moisture from her eyes, the tears having been an emotional release of a sort—at last she finally knew what this was about. ‘You have no idea.’

  She had no idea how badly he wanted to cover her mouth with his, Tair thought, or she might not look so relaxed.

  ‘Is anything about you the real thing?’ His lip curled in disgust. ‘There’s nothing about you to alarm a wife, is there, with your meek mouse look and the ridiculous glasses you don’t need?’

  Molly wiped away the tears from her cheeks and hastened to set the record straight. ‘I can’t help my face and there’s nothing sinister about my glasses. They’re just…I wanted to look older and it got to be a habit…’

  Her voice trailed away as she recognised that even to her ears this explanation sounded weak. So much for honesty being the best policy!

  Her present predicament was a perfect example of how in the real world a lie frequently sounded more credible than the truth. Laughter would be the most likely response she’d get if she went around telling her family and friends an Arab prince had kidnapped her because he thought she was some sort of…How on earth had he decided she was some sort of femme fatale?

  ‘I’m flattered you think I’m so irresistible, but—’

  ‘I am not such an easy mark as my cousin, Miss Mouse.’ His voice dropped to a nerve-tingling purr as he added softly, ‘I prefer to be the hunter and not the hunted.’

  Looking at his dark, proud, predatory features, Molly did not find this statement hard to believe. ‘That was a joke,’ she said hoarsely. ‘This isn’t what you think…’

  A look of bored irritation, slightly marred by the nerve that clenched and unclenched in his lean cheek, settled on his handsome face. ‘Before you launch into an impassioned and lengthy speech of denial, let me explain that I saw Tariq coming out of your room last night.’

  ‘Last night…’ Her eyes widened. ‘Oh, last night, but that was…’ She stopped, her soft features stretching into a grimace as she recalled her promise to Tariq.

  ‘Perfectly innocent?’

  The sarcasm brought an angry tide of colour to her cheeks. ‘As a matter of fact it was.’

  ‘The sad thing is that Beatrice is probably trying to tell herself the same thing.’

  Molly’s eyes locked with his contemptuous gaze as she struggled to follow. ‘Should I understand what you’re trying to say?’ It seemed safe to assume there was an insult in there somewhere.

  If she had shown a flicker of remorse and not maintained this ridiculous denial he might have felt more inclined to show some tolerance. Weakness was forgivable, but her calculated selfish attitude was not.

  ‘If you had an ounce of empathy you might. But you are clearly incapable of putting yourself in anyone’s skin but your own.’ As his scornful gaze drifted down the pale column of her throat he was forced to concede that it was pretty perfect skin, pale and flawless with a glow he might have imagined was an outward sign of inner radiance had he not known what a selfish little cheat she actually was.

  ‘Whereas you are totally able to identify with a wronged wife? Or is it just Bea that has a special place in your heart?’

  He sucked in an angry breath through flared nostrils. ‘Be very careful what you say, Miss Mouse.’

  Molly tossed her head, but beneath her defiance she was actually nervous. Tair Al Sharif was a dangerous man and she was making him very angry. The problem was she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

  After a lifetime of caution and prudence she was suddenly acting with a reckless lack of restraint and a part of her was actually enjoying it! It was almost liberating, she thought, before also thinking that she must be deeply twisted to feel that way.

  ‘Well, you do seem very concerned about Beatrice.’ She hoped that he couldn’t hear the undercurrent of unattractive jealousy that made her inwardly wince. ‘Maybe,’ she speculated, ‘you’re projecting your guilt onto me because you think I’m doing what you’d secretly like to. Or maybe you’re a hypocrite and have already done it?’

  She knew she’d gone too far the moment the provocative jibe left her lips, but, unable to back down, she lifted her chin and watched the dull colour run up under his golden skin.

  If someone had offered her a million pounds to take her eyes off his face it wouldn’t have made any difference—there was something totally compelling about the fury etched in the powerful lines and sharp angles of his overwhelmingly masculine features.

  Her defiant façade wobbled as his anger hit her like a solid wall. She swallowed as she lifted a shaking hand to her throat, where a pulse ticked like a time bomb.

  ‘Is someone flying this plane?’ she asked, hoping to divert him. ‘I suppose,’ she added nervously, ‘that you can multitask.’ As in throttle her while flying a small plane across the desert.

  ‘I would never creep around and have some sordid affair!’ He didn’t raise his voice but Tair managed to pack enough menace in his soft words to scare the life out of anyone with an ounce of self-preservation. ‘Do not judge others by your own gutter standards.’

  His contempt caught Molly on the raw. How dared he take the high moral ground? She was pretty sure he had more skeletons in his cupboard than she did—she didn’t have any, which made her incredibly boring.

  In some ways, she mused, it was almost better to be thought a bitch than boring.

  ‘Have I got this right?’ she said, adopting an expression of exaggerated bemusement. ‘It’s not that you wouldn’t like to have an affair, it’s just that you’re too pure, too good to have an affair?’

  ‘I do not pretend to be a saint—’

  With a mouth like his—a mouth that invited sinful thoughts—it would have been pretty pointless, she thought, her eyes lingering on the firm sensual curve.

  ‘I would never have an affair,’ he repeated in a goaded voice. ‘Because I saw firsthand what my father’s affairs did to my mother. He never tried to hide them, he actually seemed to take a malicious pleasure in humiliating her, parading his women in front of her. She was a proud woman but he wore away her spirit and her pride.’

  Tair thought how his mother would be little more than a memory to him had it not been for the diaries her maid had given him when he was sixteen. Those diaries had provided some insight into how a woman who was humiliated by her husband’s repeated infidelities might feel.

  Tair Al Sharif was the last man on the planet Molly had ever expected to feel any empathy for, but as she watched him close his eyes and drag a hand through his dark hair her heart ached for him.

  To watch one parent do that to another and be unable to do a thing but stand and watch must be terrible for any child. The king sounded like a vile man. He might not have actually raised his hand to his wife, but his actions were another equally damaging form of abuse.

  Molly voiced her next thought without realising. ‘He must have loved her once.’ Although she couldn’t understand how anyone could do that to another person, let alone someone they had ever cared for.

  At the sound of her voice Tair’s head lifted and he looked straight into amber eyes glowing with the compassion he’d accused her of not possessing.

  He bit back a curse. He had broken the habit of a lifetime by allowing her to goad him into justifying himself and as a direct result he had got sucked into a conversation that touched on deeply personal issues. Issues he would not have chosen to discuss with his closest friends.

  ‘It was my father’s second marriage, a political arrangement not a love match.’

  He spoke in a manner designed to close the subject and make it quite clear he didn’t require her understanding.

  Any more than he required Molly James’s good opinion.

  �
�To force someone into a loveless marriage is so callous and cruel!’ she exclaimed.

  Clearly she had not received the message.

  ‘Possibly,’ he conceded in his most chilling voice. ‘But, please, no more of the slushy sentimentality. I have a weak stomach.’

  And, it would seem, an allergy to sympathy. She had never seen him look so uncomfortable. He obviously didn’t want anyone to suspect he had any weak spots.

  ‘Relax,’ she drawled.

  He shook his head in irritated incomprehension. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’m not going to feel sorry for you—if it makes you feel any better I still can’t stand the sight of you!’

  It might have been her imagination but the glimmer in his eyes might have been humour. ‘Or I you.’

  ‘And I’m allowed an opinion.’

  His brows lifted. ‘One?’

  ‘I still think arranged marriages are totally wrong.’

  ‘Not all arranged marriages are unhappy and there is no force involved in such arrangements. Many arranged marriages are successful. Sometimes they are necessary. A person cannot always put their happiness ahead of their duty.’

  She not only didn’t look convinced, she looked appalled. Her eyes suddenly widened. ‘Would you…?’

  ‘I am the heir, and political alliances are important.’ He consulted the dials, made a quick mental calculation and nodded before turning back to her.

  ‘But surely seeing how unhappy a marriage like that made your mother…’

  ‘Many love matches do not end in undiluted joy…Tariq professed to love Beatrice.’

  A flash of anger lit Molly’s eyes. ‘You’re not comparing Tariq with someone like your father?’

  ‘No, I’m not, but you’re a lot more dangerous, Miss Mouse, than my father’s mistresses.’

  The novelty of being called dangerous momentarily robbed her of speech.

  ‘With them what you saw was what you got. They were not exactly subtle.’ His lips thinned with contempt. ‘You’re insidious, you creep up on a man and because you seem so benign and harmless there are no alarm bells, a man doesn’t realise you’ve crept under his skin and your voice has seeped into his bloodstream until it’s happened.’ He reached out and touched a strand of the shiny hair that had escaped its confinement. ‘There’s something about you that takes a man over the edge.’

  Her insides trembled as his fingertips grazed her cheek before his hand fell away. His shoulders lifted in a fluid shrug while his eyes drifted across her flushed features. ‘With temptation out of the way—’ his eyes slid to her mouth and he thought how that sort of temptation did not come more appealingly packaged ‘—I don’t think it will take Tariq long to remember where his loyalties lie. For him to realise that Beatrice is worth ten of a woman like you!’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS so mind-bogglingly weird to have a man who looked like Tair talking as though she were some sort of sexy siren that if Molly hadn’t been so furious she might have been flattered.

  ‘Temptresses don’t wear B-cup bras.’

  His blue gaze fell to her chest and stayed there.

  Painfully conscious of her tingling nipples, she clenched her fists to stop herself covering them. ‘And if,’ she continued hoarsely, ‘I was having an affair…’

  This brought his eyes upwards and she saw there was a cynical gleam in his sky-blue beautiful gaze. ‘So you admit it.’

  She ground her teeth. ‘I’ve never been a swearing sort of person but I’m starting to feel I could learn fast. How can I spell it out so that even you can understand? I am not having an affair with anyone.

  ‘But,’ she added, miming a zipping motion across her lips to forestall the inevitable sarcastic intervention from him. She was guessing from the look of sheer stunned incredulity on his hatefully perfect face that he didn’t get told to shut up even in sign language very often.

  ‘Even if I was, what gives you the right to interfere in other people’s lives?’ Given the fact she was going to have to break her promise to Tariq, because nothing but the truth was going to stop this man going through with his crazy plan, she felt she had the right to demand a few explanations from Tair Al Sharif first!

  She gritted her teeth, resenting the fact that she was left with little choice but to expose her connection with the Al Kamal Royal household. She watched as he fixed her with a contemptuous stare.

  It was so unfair, she thought, eying him with simmering resentment. The man couldn’t look anything less than incredible even if he tried. His hair probably looked sexily rumpled when he woke in the morning. Her eyes narrowed as the mental picture of him in bed first thing grew in her head. The dark shadow on his jaw…the sleepy sex look in his heavy-lidded eyes…?

  She stopped and moved her hand in a sweeping motion in front of her face in an effort to make the image disappear. It could not be healthy or wise to spend time wondering about how a man who had just kidnapped her would look after a night of passion. This was something someone who had just been kidnapped should definitely not want to know. Though this didn’t seem to stop her eyes from being drawn to the firm contours of his sculpted lips and a little shiver shimmying up her spine as she considered how he would hardly be a low-maintenance lover.

  As if she knew much about lovers.

  She ignored the voice in her head and the little bubble of excitement that exploded in her belly like a hot star-burst as Tair answered her question.

  ‘You mean I should cross to the metaphorical other side of the street and watch my friends’ marriage destroyed? Which wouldn’t, if last night was anything to go by, be very long. How long do you think it would have been before people caught on? I mean, you were hardly very discreet—all those yearning looks and meaningful glances across the table.’

  ‘Not everyone has a mind like a sewer. This is so stupid!’ she wailed. ‘Why couldn’t you just have minded your own business? But I forgot—everything is your business,’ she added bitterly.

  Her insults slid off him like water off a duck’s back.

  Molly sucked in an angry breath through flared nostrils and glared at the back of his neck. ‘Will you look at me when I’m talking to you? Not only are you a control freak, you’re a control freak with no manners.’

  ‘You can have manners or you can arrive alive—take your pick. There is some turbulence ahead that requires my attention.’ As if to back up this point the small plane took a sudden unscheduled drop. ‘Fasten your seat belt.’

  Molly was already buckling up.

  The pocket of turbulence lasted another few minutes, but it seemed longer to Molly, who was not a good flyer at the best of times.

  She expelled a long shaky sigh when Tair removed his brown fingers from the controls and struggled to match his nonchalant attitude to the white-knuckle ride they had just endured.

  ‘You were saying?’ He did not pause to allow her to respond but added, ‘Let me help you—you were explaining that I am a control freak with no manners. You might incidentally like to keep such opinions to yourself when we are not alone as it is not exactly customary to speak to me this way.’

  ‘You think you’re so clever, don’t you? If you were half as omnipotent as you like to think…’ She squeezed her eyes tight shut and just managed to stop herself blurting out the truth. She wanted to choose her moment and watch this man’s ego deflate when he realised his mistake.

  ‘Your arrogance really is off the scale, you know. How would you like it if Tariq interfered in your love affairs?’

  He wouldn’t like it all, but to Tair’s way of thinking that was not the point.

  ‘I interfere because I can and because seeing them together gives hope to the rest of us…’ He stopped, perturbed that he had allowed her to goad him into the admission, an admission he had not previously acknowledged even to himself.

  The utterly unexpected response made Molly, who was mentally rehearsing her speech about how Tariq and Khalid were her half-brothers, lose her
thread. ‘You envy what they have?’

  Envy implied he wanted what they had, and he was the last person in the world who she would have thought craved love and babies.

  ‘There is very little point envying what you cannot have.’

  She struggled to hide her curiosity and failed. ‘Why can’t you have it?’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Why can’t you stop talking?’ he cut back sharply. He did not care for Miss Mouse applying her amateur psychology to him.

  ‘Possibly it is a reaction to being kidnapped. You haven’t thought this through. What do you think’s going to happen? I can’t just vanish off the face of the earth?’

  He gave a scornful snort. ‘You are so important?’

  ‘Not like you maybe,’ she snapped sarcastically. ‘People don’t bow to my every wish, but I hope you realise they do that out of fear, not respect.’

  ‘Actually it is tradition.’ It was a tradition he would happily have consigned to history, but such changes were not brought about overnight.

  Her expression showed what she thought of tradition, but, in case he didn’t get the message, she added with a sneer, ‘I’d die before I bow to you!’

  He threw back his head and laughed. The deep, uninhibited sound was attractive. Unlike his personality, she muttered under her breath.

  ‘Bowing is not essential to my plan. You really do have a turn for the dramatic. That is something I had not anticipated,’ he admitted, his glance moving from her sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks to her heaving bosom. Neither had he anticipated feeling attracted to her this way.

  Her cheeks flamed. ‘You think that’s dramatic,’ she said, tossing her head and waving her finger at him.

  He pursed his lips and let out a silent whistle. ‘My, you do have a temper.’

  ‘It’s not the only thing I have. I have people who care about me,’ she told him in a voice that shook. ‘My half-brothers…actually, you know—’ She stopped abruptly mid-tirade and gasped. ‘Oh, my God!’

  Tair watched as the colour drained from her skin, leaving her paper-pale.