She could not ask for a better place to work, Lexi conceded a few days later. She had been given a luxurious apartment at the palace with her own private terrace and pool, and she had access to the beautiful royal gardens, where it was pleasant to sit by the ornamental fountains and feel the cool spray on her face.
Kadir had a busy schedule and attended meetings and functions most days, requiring Lexi to fly him by helicopter to towns across the kingdom. The previous day she had flown him along Zenhab’s stunning coast so that he could inspect the site of a new hotel complex, which his adviser Yusuf had said was going to be built by the Russian businessman Boris Denisov.
Apart from bidding her good morning, Kadir had not spoken to her, and he’d sat in the rear of the helicopter. He obviously intended to keep their relationship strictly professional, but Lexi had been aware of his brooding gaze burning between her shoulder blades during the flight.
She was lonely at the palace, and missed the sense of camaraderie she’d had with her friends in the coastguard agency and the RAF. From one of the tallest towers she was able to look out over the desert, and remembering the dusty military base at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan and the other pilots she had flown missions with increased her sense of isolation.
As was her habit, she turned to physical exercise to relieve her frustration, and went running every morning before the sun rose high in the sky and the temperature soared. She’d also discovered an air-conditioned gym in the palace where Kadir’s bodyguards worked out. Ashar and Nasim were reasonably fluent in English, and Lexi spoke some Arabic. Once they had got over their initial hesitancy at sharing the gym with a woman, the two young men were friendly and their company went some way to alleviating her loneliness.
‘I’ll grant you that men are physically stronger than women, but in a test of stamina and endurance women can equal, or even beat their male counterparts,’ Lexi argued one afternoon.
Nasim stepped off the treadmill. ‘Okay, prove it. Push-ups until one of us gives up.’
Determination gleamed in Lexi’s eyes. ‘You’re on. Ashar, you can act as judge.’
Kadir frowned as he walked down the corridor to the gym and heard voices from behind the door. He had been busy with matters of state since he had returned to the palace, and this was his first chance for a workout. He had hoped to find the gym empty but, as he opened the door, he came to an abrupt halt at the sight of one of his bodyguards and his private pilot stretched out on gym mats, pumping their bodies up and down in a series of push-ups.
From where he was standing he had a perfect view of Lexi’s pert bottom covered in bright pink satin shorts—lifting and lowering, lifting and lowering in a steady rhythm that had a predictable effect on his pulse rate. He visualised her slender body arched above him, the tips of her bare breasts brushing his chest as she slowly lowered herself onto him... His arousal was instant and so hard that he hastily held his towel in front of him and cursed beneath his breath.
‘What is going on?’ He knew it was a stupid question, but the sound of his voice had the desired effect of making Lexi and the bodyguard stop what they were doing and jump to their feet. The guilty expression on Nasim’s face heightened Kadir’s anger. Why did the bodyguard look guilty, unless the push-ups were a prelude to another form of exercise? he thought grimly.
‘Do you not kneel before your Sultan?’ he demanded to Nasim and Ashar.
‘Your Majesty!’ The men immediately dropped down onto one knee, but Lexi remained standing and met Kadir’s hard stare with a challenge in her eyes as she placed her hands on her hips.
‘Is there a problem, Your Highness?’
You’re damned right there’s a problem, Kadir thought to himself. But he was not going to admit that his body felt as if it was about to explode, or that he was unbearably tempted to dismiss the bodyguards and make love to his feisty helicopter pilot right there on the gym mat. He was shocked and, if he was honest, ashamed of his ferocious desire for Lexi. No other woman had ever made him feel so out of control. He was a powerful Sultan, but she reminded him that he was also just a man with an inexplicable hunger clawing in his gut.
‘My bodyguards owe you an apology. They should have respected your privacy and departed from the gym while you were exercising.’
Lexi shrugged. ‘They offered to leave, but I don’t have a problem with them being here. I was used to training alongside men when I was in the RAF.’
Kadir’s jaw tightened. ‘You must understand that we have different ways here than in England.’
Lexi knew that although Zenhab was one of the more liberal countries in the Middle East, there were rules regarding men and women socialising together. ‘I understand that I wouldn’t be allowed to mix with men in a public gym, but this is a private facility and surely the same rules don’t apply? After all, the palace is your home, and you make the rules.’
‘That’s right,’ Kadir said in a dangerously soft voice intended to warn Lexi that she was close to overstepping the mark, ‘and my rule is that from now on you will be allocated separate times to use the gym when the men are not allowed in.’
Lexi could see that further arguing would be pointless. The Sultan had spoken. She glanced at the bodyguards, who were still kneeling, their heads bowed. Usually Kadir had an easy-going relationship with his protection officers and she did not understand why he was so annoyed. She did not want to lose her friendship with the two bodyguards. They were her only companions at the palace and if she was banned from spending time with them she knew she would feel even more isolated.
‘Please don’t blame Nasim and Ashar. It was my fault if any rules were broken.’
Her defence of the two men further fuelled Kadir’s temper. He held the door open for Lexi to leave. ‘I will deal with them as I see fit, before I deal with you.’
‘Deal with me?’ The vague threat was like a red rag to a bull. ‘What are you going to do, send me to bed with no tea? Put me across your knee?’
‘Would you like me to spank you?’ Kadir murmured dulcetly. He had followed Lexi out into the corridor so that the bodyguards could not hear their conversation.
A shockingly erotic image of him holding her face down over his thighs while he chastised her flashed into her mind and fiery colour flooded her cheeks. ‘Of course not,’ she said sharply.
His husky chuckle warned her that he had read her thoughts, and Lexi’s embarrassment became more acute. But she wondered why he was clutching his towel in front of his hips as if his life depended on it. Her senses, acutely attuned to him, detected the undefinable essence of male pheromones, the scent of sexual arousal.
‘Why does it matter to you if I hang out with Nasim and Ashar in my free time?’ she burst out. ‘There is no one else I can socialise with and I realise that it is not possible for me to go out in the city in the evenings on my own. I feel like I’m trapped at the palace.’
‘You have been provided with excellent accommodation and leisure facilities; I did not realise you expected to have a full social calendar. The palace is hardly a prison,’ Kadir said drily.
Lexi gave up trying to make him understand that she craved the company of other people. When she had served in the RAF she’d had a wide group of friends and had felt a sense of belonging that had been missing with her adoptive parents. Being alone gave her too much time to think, and stirred up her old feelings of loneliness and inadequacy she had felt as a child.
But Kadir knew nothing about her troubled background, and she had no intention of telling him. A dignified retreat seemed her best option but, as usual, she was determined to have the last word.
‘Perhaps hard physical exertion in the gym will relieve some of your tension,’ she murmured, before she turned and marched down the corridor, leaving Kadir fighting the temptation to go after her and kiss her sassy mouth into submission. There was only one kind of physical exertion that he knew was guaranteed to relieve his sexual frustration, but he could not make love to Lexi, no matter how much he wanted to.
> * * *
Lexi had hoped that a punishing fifteen-kilometre run through the palace grounds would expend her anger with Kadir for criticising her friendship with his bodyguards. But when she returned to her apartment her temper was still simmering, and to cool down she dived into the pool and swam twenty lengths. Breathless at last, she hauled herself onto the poolside and shook her wet hair back from her face.
She stiffened when she saw Kadir was standing watching her. ‘I assume you have no objection to me swimming in my private pool?’ She hoped her cool tone disguised the heat that surged through her as she drank in the sight of him in cream chinos and a black polo shirt. His eyes were hidden behind designer shades and he was so outrageously attractive that Lexi almost jumped back into the pool to hide her body’s reaction to him. Her nipples were as hard as pebbles and she hastily dragged the towel around her shoulders to hide her traitorous body from view.
He gave her a lazy smile, no hint now of his earlier bad mood. ‘None at all,’ he assured her, ‘although I am wondering why you aren’t wearing your silver bikini.’
She shrugged. ‘A one-piece is more comfortable for swimming. But another reason is that I do appreciate the cultural differences in the Middle East. Although the pool is for my private use, the palace staff are around and out of respect for them I chose to wear a swimming costume. It’s more demure than a bikini.’
Demure! Kadir wondered if Lexi had any idea how sexy she looked in her sleek navy costume, which clung to every dip and curve of her superbly toned figure. He could not forget the image of her taut buttocks covered in tight pink shorts pumping up and down when she had been doing push-ups in the gym. Fire heated his blood and he altered his position to hide the evidence of his arousal beneath his trousers, which suddenly felt uncomfortably tight.
‘Anyway, there is no point in me wearing my bikini when I’m not allowed to socialise with anyone at the palace, or get a chance to meet a guy who I would like to untie the strings,’ Lexi said defiantly.
Kadir’s eyes narrowed. ‘Always you challenge me, Lexi. You want to be careful that I do not rise to your bait.’
Her gaze did not waver from his. ‘You have already demonstrated that that isn’t going to happen. I made a fool of myself in Italy,’ she said bitterly. She hated herself for the way she had responded to him like a gauche teenager on a first date. He was the only man who had ever made her lose control and the level of her desire had shocked and shamed her.
She suddenly became conscious of how close they were standing. The air between them throbbed with tension and every nerve ending on her body tingled with sexual awareness that she knew he felt too.
‘I was the fool, for kissing you when I knew I was not free to make love to you,’ Kadir said harshly. He picked up her robe and handed it to her. ‘Put this on, before I forget my good intentions.’ He gave a wry smile that did not reach his eyes, and Lexi had a sudden sense of how lonely his role as Sultan must be. His father was dead, his mother lived abroad and he was destined to marry a woman he had never met who had been chosen for him.
If he had not been contracted to his arranged marriage, she knew that they would be lovers by now. His desire for her smouldered in his dark eyes, but the firm set of his jaw told her that he would put his duty to his kingdom before his personal desires.
She pulled on the robe and tied the belt tightly around her waist. ‘Why did you want to see me?’
Because he could not keep away from her, Kadir thought grimly. She was like a drug in his veins and even the knowledge that his desire for her was forbidden did not stop him thinking about her constantly.
‘I came to apologise for my behaviour earlier. I appreciate that you might feel cut off from your friends and family. I have come with an invitation to tea from someone who I believe you could become friends with.’
Lexi eyed him suspiciously. ‘Who?’
His grin made him look suddenly younger. ‘I’m taking you to meet the most important woman in my life.’
* * *
‘I’m seventy-six,’ Mabel Dawkins told Lexi as she poured tea into bone china cups and nodded towards a plate of scones. ‘Help yourselves. I always make scones when Kadir comes to tea. When he was a boy he could eat a plateful all to himself.’
Lexi settled back on the chintz sofa in Mabel’s pretty apartment at the palace and bit into a feather-light fruit scone. ‘So you were Kadir’s nanny when he was growing up?’
‘Lady Judith hired me when her son was born. After she left the palace and returned to England, Sultan Khalif asked me to remain here to give Kadir stability because it was a difficult situation for a young boy to grow up in two very different cultures, here in Zenhab and at Montgomery Manor in England.’
Lexi glanced at Kadir. ‘It must have been strange to move between Western culture and Middle Eastern traditions. Do you think of yourself more as an English Earl or an Arab prince?’
‘I love my mother and I was close to my grandfather, the tenth Earl. But I am my father’s son, from an ancient line of desert kings, and my heart and soul belong to Zenhab,’ he said without hesitation.
Recalling how, when they had arrived in Zenhab, Kadir had wielded a fearsome-looking sword and given a battle cry to rouse his horsemen, Lexi was learning that beneath his playboy image reported in the European press there was a far more serious side to the Sultan of Zenhab that the paparazzi never saw.
She was agonisingly conscious of him sitting next to her. The two-seater sofa was made even smaller because it was stuffed with Mabel’s many crocheted cushions and, however stiffly Lexi held herself, she could not prevent her thigh from touching Kadir’s. She could feel his hard muscles through her thin skirt, and the spicy tang of his cologne wove a seductive spell around her.
‘What made you decide to join the RAF?’ Mabel’s voice dragged Lexi’s mind away from her wayward thoughts.
She shrugged. ‘I wanted an exciting career, the opportunity to travel.’ She did not explain that one reason why she had joined the air force had been because she had been looking for somewhere where she felt she belonged. Her adoptive parents had not really wanted her, and she had been hurt that her birth mother had insisted on keeping her a secret from her husband, as if Cathy was ashamed of her.
‘It must have been an exciting life, but dangerous too,’ Mabel said. ‘I expect your parents must have worried about you when you were stationed in Afghanistan.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Lexi said wryly. ‘My parents are busy with their own lives.’
‘Kadir told me that you will be staying in Zenhab and working as his helicopter pilot for six months. That’s a long time to be away from home, although I suppose when you were in the RAF you got used to living away from loved ones. Do you have a sweetheart back in England?’
Lexi was amused by the elderly nanny’s curiosity. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘I’m surprised. You’re such a pretty girl. Are you gay?’ Mabel asked bluntly.
Lexi choked on a mouthful of scone and hastily washed it down with a sip of tea. ‘No, I’m not.’ Realising that Mabel had no qualms about prying into her personal life, she murmured, ‘Actually, I was engaged but it didn’t work out.’
‘Mabel, it’s unfair to interrogate Lexi,’ Kadir interrupted. He had felt the sudden tension that gripped her and forced himself to ignore his own curiosity about her love life. He recalled Charles Fairfax had mentioned that she had been engaged but her fiancé had ended the relationship. Was she still in love with the guy she had hoped to marry? he mused, wondering why he disliked the idea.
His phone rang and he glanced at the name of the caller. ‘I’ll have to take this, I’m afraid,’ he said apologetically. ‘Lexi, please stay and finish your tea. If you think Mabel’s scones are good, wait until you try her sponge cake.’
‘He works so hard,’ Mabel sighed when Kadir had left. ‘He told me that his latest trip to Europe was very successful and he managed to secure several big deals with companies who will inves
t in new businesses in Zenhab.’
Lexi remembered that Kadir’s adviser, Yusuf bin Hilal, had said that the Sultan worked hard to attract foreign investment to his kingdom. ‘The European press seem more interested in Kadir’s private life and his reputation as a playboy.’
‘Oh, the press!’ Mabel gave a snort. ‘Most of what is written in the foreign newspapers is rubbish. The paparazzi don’t know the man that I know Kadir to be. He vowed as his father lay dying that he would devote his life to Zenhab and continue Sultan Khalif’s work to maintain peace and bring prosperity to the kingdom.’
‘Was Kadir close to his father?’
‘Very. Father and son adored one another.’ Mabel’s lined face softened. ‘Kadir was heartbroken when Khalif died but at the same time he was relieved that his father was spared any more suffering.’
Lexi felt strangely unsettled at the thought of Kadir being heartbroken. She had been too ready to believe the stories in the tabloids about him leading a charmed life of hedonistic pleasure, she acknowledged guiltily. But she was discovering that he was a man of deep emotions who had grieved for his father and vowed to rule Zenhab with the same devotion to duty as Sultan Khalif had done. ‘Why did Sultan Khalif suffer? Was he ill before he died?’ she asked curiously.
‘He suffered a stroke when Kadir was sixteen, which left him completely paralysed and barely able to speak. Obviously, Khalif could not continue to rule the country,’ Mabel explained, ‘and Kadir was too young to become Sultan, so Khalif’s younger brother, Jamal, became the interim ruler until Kadir came of age.’
‘And Jamal handed the Sultanate to Kadir when he was twenty-one?’
‘Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Jamal wanted to remain as Sultan, and he had followers who believed that he should rule Zenhab and who were opposed to Kadir’s plans to modernise the country. Before Jamal would agree to step aside and allow Kadir to take his rightful place as Sultan, he insisted that Kadir sign a contract to marry the daughter of Jamal’s great ally, Sheikh Rashid bin Al-Hassan. Since Rashid died two months ago, Kadir has been under pressure to go ahead with his wedding to Princess Haleema to unite the country.
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