Why wouldn’t they? He was gorgeous. It had been as flattering as hell to know he wanted to sleep with her because she’d certainly wanted to sleep with him.
And she had.
Most definitely the end of the story…or it should have been.
The trouble was, no matter how many times she told herself that, the real end of the story intruded.
Amanda leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. The scene played in her mind over and over like a videotape caught in a loop.
Nick, hatred blazing in his silver eyes.
Nick, calling her a whore.
Nick, believing that she’d written that article, that she would ever hurt him or betray him. How could he think it? Didn’t he know how much she loved him? That her heart would always long for him, want him, ache for him?
She drew a shaky breath, then slowly let it out.
Okay. So—so maybe she’d loved him just a little. What did it matter? They’d only spent a handful of days together. Surely that didn’t really add up to “love.”
Love didn’t come on with the speed of a hurricane. It didn’t overwhelm you. It grew slowly into something deep and everlasting.
And the foolishness of thinking Nick loved her…Oh, it was laughable! He didn’t. He never had. He’d called her beloved, said he wanted her with him forever, but so what? She wasn’t naive. Men said lots of things they didn’t mean in the throes of passion.
Love—real love—wasn’t only about sex. It was about little things. Things like taking walks in the rain. Like laughing, maybe even crying, over a movie you’ve seen before. It was about trust.
Especially trust.
If Nick had loved her, he’d have taken one look at the Gossip piece and known it was a fake. “It’s a lie,” he’d have said if he loved her. And then he’d have set out to discover who’d actually written those horrible things, who’d lied and used her name to drive them apart.
But he hadn’t done any of that. He’d turned on her in fury, humiliated her, terrified her, believed she’d violated his confidence, talked about the things they’d done together in bed—
“It was a lie,” a husky masculine voice whispered.
Amanda’s heart skittered into her throat.
“I know it now, beloved. I only hope you can forgive me for not knowing it then.”
The world stood still. Please, she thought, oh, please…
She turned slowly, wanting it to be him, afraid it would be him.
Nick stood in the shadows as still as if he’d been carved from stone.
Her knees buckled. He moved quickly and caught her. “Sweetheart. Oh, sweetheart, what have I done to you?”
His face was inches from hers. She longed to touch his stubbled jaw, to trace the outline of his mouth with the tip of her finger, but he had broken her heart once and she wasn’t about to let him do it again.
“Let go of me, Nick.”
He swung her into his arms.
“No,” she said breathlessly. “Put me down.”
“Hey. Hey!”
Nick turned, still holding Amanda. The man with the nice smile and the great face came toward them.
“What’s going on here?”
Nick looked at him. Whatever the man saw in his eyes made him retreat a couple of steps before he spoke up again.
“Say the word, lady, and I’ll send this dude packing.”
“You’ll try,” Nick said softly, “But you won’t succeed.” His arms tightened around Amanda. “This woman belongs to me.”
“I don’t belong to you! I don’t belong to anybody.”
His eyes met hers. “Yes, you do.” He bent his head and kissed her gently. “You’ll always belong to me, and I to you, sweetheart, because we love each other.”
The words he’d spoken stunned her. She wanted to tell him she didn’t love him, she’d never loved him. She wanted to tell him he’d never loved her—but he smiled into her eyes and she saw something in those cool silver depths that stole her breath away.
“Lady?”
Nick lifted his head. He was smiling, the way he’d smiled after they made love the very first time. “The lady is fine,” he said quietly, his eyes never leaving hers.
The man looked from Amanda to Nick and back again. “Yeah,” he said with a little laugh, “yeah, I can see that.”
Nick set off through the terminal, Amanda still in his arms. She saw the startled faces all around them, the wide eyes of the women, the smiles on the lips of the men. Her cheeks flushed crimson and she buried her face in his shoulder. Doors opened and shut; she felt the rush of cool air against her hot face, the silence of enclosed space.
When she lifted her head and looked up again, they were in Nick’s private plane. He let her down slowly. And when her feet touched the floor, her sanity returned.
“What do you think you’re doing, Nick?”
He smiled and linked his hands at the base of her spine. “I love you, Amanda.”
“Love?” She laughed. “You don’t know the meaning of the—”
Nick lifted her face to his and kissed her. She felt her heart turn over, felt the longing to put her arms around him sweep through her blood, but she would not make a fool of herself ever again.
“If you really think you can—you can just pretend what you did never happened…”
Nick put his arm around her, led her into the cockpit.
“What are you doing?”
“Sit down,” he said calmly. “And put on your seat belt.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I will not—”
He sighed, pushed her gently into the co-pilot’s seat and buckled the belt around her.
“Dammit,” she sputtered, “you can get away with kidnapping in Quidar, but this is France. You can’t just—”
Nick silenced her with a kiss. She moaned; she didn’t mean to, but the feel of his mouth on hers, the soft pressure of it, was almost more than she could bear.
“Neither can you,” he said with a little smile. He leaned his forehead against hers. “You can pretend you don’t want me, sweetheart, but your kisses speak the truth.”
“The truth,” she said coolly, “is that I’m as human as the next woman. You’re a charming man, Lord Rashid.”
Nick grinned as he took the pilot’s seat. “A compliment! Who’d have believed it?”
“Charming, and good-looking, but—”
“Very good-looking. That’s what women always tell me.”
“And clever,” Amanda said crisply. “But I’m not going to be taken in again.”
“Do you think I flew all the way to Paris to charm you, sweetheart?”
She looked away from him, folded her arms and stared straight out the windshield. “I don’t know why you came, and I don’t care. I am not going anywhere with you.”
“You do care, and you are going with me.”
“You’re wrong, Lord Rashid.”
“I came because I love you, and you love me. And we’re never going to be separated again.”
“You found me enjoyable.” Her voice wobbled a little and she silently cursed herself for even that tiny show of weakness. “Enjoyable, Your Highness. That was your very own word.”
Nick sighed. “A bad choice, I admit.” He smiled. “True, though. You were wonderful in bed.”
Color scalded her cheeks. “Which is why you regret getting rid of me before finding a replacement.”
“Amanda. I know I hurt you, sweetheart, but if you’d listen—”
“To what? More lies? More whispers about—about wanting me forever?” Tears rose in her eyes. Angrily, she dashed them away with the back of her hand. “Look, it’s over. I slept with you and I don’t really have any regrets. It was—it was fun. But now it’s time to go back to New York and pick up my life.”
“Deanna wrote that article.”
“Am I supposed to go saucer-eyed with shock?”
“Hell.” Nick sat back and rubbed at the furrow that had appeared between hi
s eyebrows. “Amanda, please. Just give me a chance to explain.”
“The same chance you gave me?”
“All right.” He swung toward her, eyes glittering, and grabbed her hands. “I was a fool, but now I’m trying to make it right. I’m telling you, Deanna wrote that thing—with Abdul’s help.”
“Frankly, Lord Rashid, I don’t really give a…” Her mouth dropped open. “Abdul? He helped her do such a terrible thing to you?”
“He saw what was happening between us.”
“Sex,” Amanda said with a toss of her head. “That’s what was happening between us.”
“He saw,” Nick said gently, taking her face in his hands, “that we were falling in love.”
“What an ego you have, Your Excellency! I most certainly did not—”
Nick kissed her again. It was a tender kiss, just the whisper of his lips against hers, but it shook her to the depths of her soul. All her defenses crumpled.
“Nick.” Her voice trembled. “Nick, I beg you. Don’t do this unless you mean it. I couldn’t bear it if you—”
“I love you,” he said fiercely. “Do you hear me, Amanda? I love you.” He lifted her hands to his lips and pressed kisses into each palm. “Abdul listened at the door the night I told you about the double-faced coin.”
“He eavesdropped? But why?”
“He must have sensed something even then.” Nick stroked a strand of pale blond silk back behind her ear. “The old man knew the truth before I was willing to admit it. I was falling in love with you.”
“And he didn’t trust me?”
“He wouldn’t trust any female unless she was born in Quidar.” Nick smiled. “And it would probably help if she had a hairy mole on her chin and weighed only slightly less than a camel.”
Amanda laughed, but her laughter faded quickly. “But you believed I’d written that—that piece of filth. How could you have thought that, Nick? If you loved me, if you really loved me—”
“I was wrong, sweetheart. Terribly wrong. And I’ll spend the rest of my life making up for it.” A muscle flickered in Nick’s jaw. “I know it’s not an excuse, but—but once I was a man, the only person who loved me for myself was my father. People see me as a—a thing. A commodity. They want what they can get from associating with me. But not you. You wanted what was in here,” he said softly, and placed her hand over his heart. You looked beyond all the titles and saw a man, one who loved you. It’s just that I was too stupid to trust my own heart.”
“Not stupid,” Amanda said, and slipped her arms around his neck. “You were afraid, Nick. And I was, too. That’s why it took me so long to admit I loved you.” She laughed. “Well, maybe not so long. We’ve known each other, what, four days?”
“We’ve known each other since the beginning of time,” Nick whispered, and kissed her again.
“I love you,” she sighed. “I’ll always love you.”
“You’re damned right you will,” he said gruffly. “A man expects his wife to love him forever.”
Amanda’s eyes glittered. “Yes, my lord,” she said, and smiled.
“I have so much to tell you, sweetheart. Things are changing in Quidar. I may not be the Lion of the Desert for much longer.”
Her smile softened. She framed his face in her hands and drew his mouth to hers. “You’ll always be the Lion of the Desert to me.”
Sheikh Nicholas al Rashid, Lion of the Desert, Lord of the Realm and Sublime Heir to the Imperial Throne of Quidar put his arms around the woman who’d stolen his heart and knew that he had finally found what he’d been searching for all of his life.
* * * * *
Now, read on for a tantalizing excerpt of Caitlin Crews’ next book,
MY BOUGHT VIRGIN WIFE
I’ve never wanted anything like I want Imogen. I married her to secure my empire—but my wife has ignited a hunger in me. I will strip away her obedience, and replace it with a passion to match my own…
Read on for a glimpse of
MY BOUGHT VIRGIN WIFE
CHAPTER ONE
Imogen
IN THE MORNING I WAS TO MARRY A MONSTER.
IT DID NOT matter what I wanted. It certainly did not matter what I felt. I was the youngest daughter of Dermot Fitzalan, bound in duty to my father’s wishes as women in my family had been forever.
I had always known my fate.
But it turned out I was less resigned to it than I’d anticipated when I was younger and far more silly. And when my wedding had not loomed before me, beckoning like some kind of inevitable virus that nothing could keep at bay.
There were no home remedies for my father’s wishes.
“You cannot let Father see you in this state, Imogen,” my half sister, Celeste, told me briskly as she swept in. “It will only make things worse for you.”
I knew she was right. The unfortunate truth was that Celeste was usually right about everything. Elegant, graceful Celeste, who had submitted to her duty with a smile on her face and every appearance of quiet joy. Stunning, universally adored Celeste, who had the willowy blond looks of her late mother and to whom I had forever been compared—and found lacking. My own lost mother had been a titian-haired bombshell, pale of skin and mysteriously emerald of eye, but I resembled her only in the way a fractured reflection, beheld through a mist, might. Next to my half sister, I had always felt like the Fitzalan troll, better suited to a life beneath a bridge somewhere than the grand society life I’d been bred and trained for.
The life Celeste took to with such ease.
Even today, the day before my wedding when theoretically I would be the one looked at, Celeste looked poised and chic in her simple yet elegantly cut clothes. Her pale blond hair was twisted back into an effortless chignon and she’d applied only the faintest hint of cosmetics to enhance her eyes and dramatic cheekbones. While I had yet to change out of my pajamas though it was midday already and I knew without having to look that my curls were in their usual state of disarray.
All of these things seemed filled with more portent than usual, because the monster I was set to marry in the morning had wanted her first.
And likely still wanted her, everyone had whispered.
They had even whispered it to me, and it had surprised me how much it had stung. Because I knew better. My marriage wasn’t romantic. I wasn’t being chosen by anyone—I was the remaining Fitzalan heiress. My inheritance made me an attractive prospect no matter how irrepressible my hair might have been or how often I disappointed my father with my inability to enhance a room with my decorative presence. I was more likely to draw attention for the wrong reasons.
My laugh was too loud and always inappropriate. My clothes were always slightly askew. I preferred books to carefully vetted social occasions where I was expected to play at hostessing duties. And I had never convinced anyone that I was more fascinated by their interests than my own.
It was lucky, then, that my marriage was about convenience—my father’s, not mine. I had never expected anything like a fairy tale.
“Fairy tales are for other families,” my severe grandmother had always told us, slamming her marble-edged cane against the hard floors of this sprawling house in the French countryside, where, the story went, our family had been in residence in one form or another since sometime in the twelfth century. “Fitzalans have a higher purpose.”
As a child, I’d imagined Celeste and me dressed in armor, riding out to gauzy battles beneath old standards, then slaying a dragon or two before our supper. That had seemed like the kind of higher purpose I could get behind. It had taken the austere Austrian nuns years to teach me that dragon slaying was not the primary occupation of girls from excruciatingly well-blooded old families who were sent away to be educated in remote convents. Special girls with impeccable pedigrees and ambitious fathers had a far different role to fill.
Girls like me, who had never been asked what they might like to do with their lives, because it had all been plotted out already without their inp
ut.
The word pawn was never used. I had always seen this as a shocking oversight—another opinion of mine that no one had ever solicited and no one wanted to hear.
“You must find purpose and peace in duty, Imogen,” Mother Superior had told me, time and again, when I would find myself red-eyed and furious, gritting out another decade of the rosary to atone for my sins. Pride and unnatural self-regard chief among them. “You must cast aside these doubts and trust that those with your best interests at heart have made certain all is as it should be.”
“Fitzalans have a higher purpose,” Grand-Mère had always said.
By which, I had learned in time, she meant money. Fitzalans hoarded money and made more. This was what had set our family apart across the centuries. Fitzalans were never kings or courtiers. Fitzalans funded kingdoms they liked and overthrew regimes they disparaged, all in service to the expansion of their wealth. This was the grand and glorious purpose that surged in our blood.
“I am not ‘in a state,’” I argued to Celeste now, but I didn’t sit up or attempt to set myself to rights.
And Celeste did not dignify that with a response.
I had barred myself in the sitting room off my childhood bedchamber, the better to brood at the rain and entertain myself with my enduring fantasies of perfect, beautiful Frederick, who worked in my father’s stables and had dreamy eyes of sweetest blue.
We had spoken once, some years ago. He had taken my horse’s head and led us into the yard as if I’d required the assistance.
I had lived on the smile he’d given me that day for years.
It seemed unbearable to me that I should find myself staring down so many more years when I would have to do the same, but worse, in the company of a man—a husband—who was hated and feared in equal measure across Europe.
Today the historic Fitzalan estate felt like the prison it was. If I was honest, it had never been a home.
My mother had died when I was barely eight, and in my memories of her she was always crying. I had been left to the tender mercies of Grand-Mère, before her death, and my father, who was forever disappointed in me but still, my only remaining parent.
Mistress of the Sheikh Page 18