It was on the tip of Sarah’s tongue to correct his error, but something held her back. Instead, she tightened her grip around Lexi. “I have to get my daughter into bed.”
It was hardly a lie. With no living parents, it had been easy to adopt Lexi, and heaven knew Sarah thought of the little girl as her daughter in every way. Besides, she wasn’t about to air her dirty linen for this man. Not after the way he’d deserted her.
“I will wait.”
Sarah’s jaw dropped. “You’ll wait?” She repeated quickly, perplexed and furious at the same time. “You’ll wait?” She repeated, as though saying it might make more sense of his assertion.
“The lounge,” he nodded towards the room behind them.
How many nights they had spent in that small, cosy room? Sarah’s skin prickled with remembered pleasures. Pleasures so long ago relegated to the back of her mind, to the recesses of hope and the graveyard of possibilities. What the hell was he doing in her house?
It was a question that demanded an answer, but not until she’d put Lexi to bed. The start of Lexi’s short life had been marred by conflict and drama, confrontation and anger, and Sarah had sworn, the day she’d adopted the infant, that she’d do better for her. She’d made sure her life was full of only smiles and love. Good things. Her eyes narrowed as she gave her full attention to the man opposite. “There’s a bar around the corner,” she said stiffly. “You can go and wait there, thank you, while I spend time with my daughter.”
Unused to being directed, it brought back a startling revelation.
She hadn’t known of his position in society. When they’d met, he’d been a man, and she’d been a woman, and they had spoken to one another as equals. He had enjoyed seeing her flex her muscles, at one point; watching her dictate her wishes to him.
Then, he had been her equal, and now?
“Fine.” He nodded curtly. “One hour.”
“Two,” she bartered, thinking again of the shower she desperately needed. Especially if she was going to meet this man with anything like her best food forward.
“One,” he said darkly. He flicked a smile at Lexi. “Good night, little star.”
Shivers ran down her spine. Najin. Starlight. That’s what he’d called her. Back then, when she’d loved him and she’d believed he loved her. When she’d thought him a man, not a King.
The words swirled around them even as he left, closing the door behind him. The term of endearment that had made her feel stellar haunted her for all the minutes of his absence.
“I like him,” Lexi pronounced after at least three seconds consideration. “His voice is like magic.”
“Yes,” Sarah agreed, a wry smile twisting her lips, hiding her heart break. “And his words are just as deceptive,” she said to herself.
“Huh?”
Sarah cleared her throat. “Never mind. Let’s get you ready for bed.”
In the end, an hour was barely enough time. Sarah raced through the bedtime rituals, guiltily thinking of the evening she’d had planned. Lexi was fed a hasty dinner of leftovers, bathed in record time, read only three pages of her favourite book and tucked under the covers with a rushed kiss.
Sarah had just stepped out of the shower, thrown on an outfit, and peeked in to check on Lexi when there was a slightly-restrained knock at the door.
She stroked a hand over Lexi’s curls, tucked Mr Bear into the crook of her arm, and then walked out of the bedroom and down the stairs as though her body wasn’t quivering like a feather on the wind.
As she reached the door, she paused, her hand hovering just above the handle. Why was he here?
Five years ago, she had fallen in love with him. Or lust? Either way, he had buried himself inside of her soul. She’d understood his loss and grief, and she had felt powerful beyond belief to see how their chemistry could chase pain from his mind and heart.
He’d arrived in her life broken by death, and she’d patched him back together.
Then he’d left.
He’d used her. He’d prayed on her sympathies for sex. And when he had felt whole again, he’d crept out of her bed, out of her life, with only a single hand-written note cast on the kitchen table. ‘I have to leave.’
Sarah had heard of people feeling nauseous in anxious circumstances, but the way her stomach was flipping and flopping went beyond simple sickness. She half-thought she might pass out.
Flames of the past licked at the soles of her bare feet. She drew the door inwards on a curse of remembered pain.
Everything she had loved about him slammed into her. She stared at him, his face that she knew every single damned line of, his dark hair, his haunted eyes, and her heart leaped through her body.
He was just the same.
Which was all the more reason to stay away from him.
He was the same man who had broken her heart and chosen to leave her without a backwards glance.
She straightened her spine, pouring into it the kind of iron that could only be formed by nights of devastation and emptiness. “Yes?” She stood just inside the door, not moving to allow him inside.
“How are you?”
It was so far from what she’d expected that she let out a short, sharp laugh. Fog drifted from her; the temperature had dropped rapidly in the evening. Was he cold? He who was used to sand-swept desert nights and the sun on his back? She hoped so.
“After five years, that’s what you came here to say?”
“No.”
“So?” She gripped the door more tightly, her fingers seeking strength.
“Who is the child?”
Straight to it, huh? “My daughter.”
A muscle pounded at the base of his jaw. Out of nowhere, she remembered the way it had done that when he’d been tense and searching for the right words. The words to describe how it had felt to have watched his mother die. To have held her hand as life ebbed from her body. And Sarah had listened with no concept that only six months later his words would become a gruesome reality she understood all too well, for having lived the same loss. Not of a mother, but of a sister.
“Is she mine?”
Something primal twisted in Sarah’s gut. “She could be,” she snapped. “You didn’t stick around to find out. You didn’t call me to check… you didn’t even leave me a way to call you,” she hissed angrily.
“I left you my name,” he said thickly. “Enough to contact me if needed. Is she mine?”
Sarah’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “You are such an arrogant son of a bitch. How did I not see that before?”
He didn’t respond to the question. “She’s not mine?”
“No, she’s not yours, Syed.”
“Her father?” Though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. If she said that she’d met and married another man, started a family, something inside of him would die.
“Dead.” A single word. The flat line of hope. She didn’t elaborate. She couldn’t. Not since that hateful day had she been able to contemplate explaining those injuries to another soul.
He nodded again, slowly, his eyes digging through her experiences, reading them as though she were speaking. She looked away. The intrusion was not welcome. He had learned all of her Tells back then. She was pretty sure he still knew them.
“When?”
November nineteenth. She closed her eyes for a second as the date whispered through her. “When Lexi was a month old.”
He scraped his fingers over his stubbled jaw. “She is how old?”
“Four. She’s four.”
His expression shifted as he did the math. “I see.”
He smelled so good. Just like she remembered. In fact, everything about him was as she’d remembered. His thick hair, strong face, hard body. Inwardly she groaned, recalling the pleasure of loving him, of being needed by him.
Until he had no longer needed her. How easy it had been for him to discard her. And how she had suffered in the wake of that rejection.
“Syed?”
He
flinched at her use of his name. He had simply been ‘Sy’ to her back then.
“You can’t just come back like this.” She swallowed convulsively. His eyes dropped to the smooth skin of her exposed shoulder. As if of their own volition, his fingers drew to the fabric of her sweater and lifted the collar, where it had fallen low. They brushed her flesh and the contact sent darts of awareness through her.
That was normal.
He had been her first lover, and he remained her only lover. His ability to stir her to a fever pitch of need was nothing new. Even her dreams of him had done that, making her cry out with an ache of lust low in her abdomen.
She stepped backwards instinctively, moving out of his reach, and he took advantage of that moment of unknowing surrender to crowd inside her front door.
“I beg to differ.”
But he was big and her house small. She hadn’t really noticed that before. Then. Perhaps she’d just been used to him, and to his dominating presence.
Time had dwarfed her. All of her. Those aspirations that had puffed her up, the optimism of youth. Financial freedom. All of that had flooded from her over the years, leaving a woman who felt frail in Syed’s overwhelming presence.
Timid.
And she hated him for that, even more than she hated him for leaving in the first place.
“What do you want?”
His lips twisted, but it wasn’t what she’d call a smile. “I want you to be mine again, azeezi.”
CHAPTER TWO
The words pounded around the house, reverberating in her ears, hammering inside her fevered blood.
Be mine. He’d said that the night they’d first made love. No, not made love. Had sex. The night she’d surrendered her virginity to a man she’d already handed her heart to.
She turned away from him blindly, her fingertips trailing the wall-papered hallway as she moved deeper into her house, needing a seat before she fell sideways.
The lounge was not as he remembered it.
Her beautiful photographs still hung on the walls, as captivating and haunting now as they had been then. But the shelves, once overflowing with heavy books on art and cameras, were now overtaken with bright children’s books. There were toys too, grouped into baskets that sat lined up by a wall. There was a small table with two chairs where her own dining table had used to sit, and the sofa, once cream with artful black cushions, was covered now in an array of bright throws.
Syed couldn’t immediately put his finger on it, but there was something displeasing about the room.
Something wrong.
He turned to face her, and his displeasure grew. She was like a wraith. So slender, so small, her face pinched, her eyes wary.
What had happened to her? She was a shadow of the woman he had known.
His eyes were raking over her with a clinical detachment. There was nothing heated nor sensual in the appraisal; it was simply a cataloguing of her changes.
And she knew what they were. She imagined what he must be seeing. She saw it, too. She rested her palms on the back of the sofa, realising belatedly that to sit down would only serve to increase the disparity in their sizes. “I don’t understand,” she said finally.
His eyes narrowed. “Have you eaten?”
She’d had Lexi’s leftover beans; a few spoons full. She shook her head. “I was going to make toast.” As soon as she’d said the words, she regretted them. For the look of disdain on his face, and for the fact that she was answering his questions as though he had a right to ask them!
He had no rights! No rights when it came to her life! He had chosen that path for them, and she needed to make him stick to it.
His voice, his language, words she didn’t understand, that she’d only heard him speak once or twice, filled the room. She shifted her attention back to him as he spoke into his cell phone, then disconnected the call in what seemed to be an abrupt manner.
“I have ordered dinner,” he said, his English flavoured with the shadows of his native language.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she replied, exasperated.
“You haven’t eaten. Toast is not suitable for dinner. And I am hungry.”
When was he ever not? The instantaneous thought filled her with barbed annoyance. The memories were so thick in her mind. Shouldn’t they have gone by now? Five years was a very long time.
“Then get your dinner sent somewhere else,” she snapped. “Your highness.” She added the title for good measure. They both knew the betrayal that lurked beneath the innocuous words.
How had she failed to see that he was different? That he wasn’t a mere mortal, a man of flesh and blood? How had she missed all the tell-tale signs that Syed Al’Eba had been raised by Kings. That he was a King from an ancient land, and an ancient bloodline. Call me Si, he’d said, and naively, she’d assumed it was a shortening of something far more pedestrian, like Simon. In the weeks they’d been together, living as a single symbiotic being, she had never once questioned his story. A man who had buried his mother, who was driving across America to find a way to accept the overwhelming loss.
That part might have been true, but he wasn’t just a man. He was a King, driving a five hundred thousand dollar armour-plated Jeep. She should have realised. But she hadn’t. And it was only when he left that she understood the truth, for his royal title had been embossed in the paper he’d written his note on.
“We will eat together.”
Her eyes drew together. “Is that a command?”
He tilted his head forward. “We must speak.”
“Are you kidding me?” She lowered her voice with effort; her heart rate was far more difficult to control. “You don’t just get to appear at my doorstep after five years saying we need to talk.” She sucked in an angry breath.
Five years! Had it really been so long?
“I also said that I want you,” he reminded her silkily, ignoring her objections as though they didn’t matter.
“Sex?” Sarah repeated, her eyes flicking closed, her pulse thready. If only she could! The thought of lying with this man and enjoying his body knowing that it would never happen again… the last time they’d slept together, she hadn’t known that it was the end. She hadn’t realised that it would be the last time she’d feel his weight on top of her, feel him stir passion deep within her.
“Well?” The word was loud. She startled her eyes open and stepped backwards. He was right beside her, and when she moved, he moved with her. She reared her back against the wall. Which was foolish, in hindsight, because it enabled him to trap his hands on either side of her head, holding her captive with his body.
A body she wanted with all of her being.
“I came here because I’ve missed you.”
“And it took you five years to realise that?” She dropped her jaw in disbelief. “You’re out of your mind. I’m not going to just … to just … to sleep with you!”
Her cheeks flushed with colour and speculation flared in his gut. With colour in her face, there was a hint of his Sarah once more.
“You must be crazy. Or desperate.”
His laugh was a sharp retort. “Neither, believe me.”
It was like being punched in the stomach. Of course he wasn’t desperate. While Sarah had found herself in a life of celibacy, Syed Al’Eba had probably been having his every need and urge seen to by a bevy of beautiful women. A harem, even.
She groaned and squeezed her eyes shut. “You can’t be here.”
“I am here.” He whispered the words at the same time he brought his body closer, so that it pressed hard against her.
Need, so strong, so fierce, that it sucked all the breath out of her body, weakened her at the knees.
“I am here,” he said again, this time whispering the words right into her ear, so that his breath tickled her and warmed her.
Her skin dimpled with goose bumps and her mind fogged.
“And I want you.”
I want you. Words they’d said to one a
nother freely in the past. It was only after he’d left that she realised he’d never said, I love you. Not like she had. She had been liberal in telling him how she felt because she’d known he felt the same. Or she’d believed he had.
“Tough.” It was a word of defiance weakened by dishonesty.
The challenge was like a matador’s red flag to Syed’s bullish desire. He lifted a finger and stroked it down her cheek, watching her intently. He dragged it across her lips. They were the same, too. Full and pouted. Lower, lower, over her jutted chin, to the sensitive flesh that ran the side of her neck, to the pulse that was hammering wildly at its base, and then, he pushed his hips forward, leaving her in little doubt as to his state of arousal.
Her eyes flew open, piercing him with her swirling confusion. A confusion he understood but didn’t care to indulge. Confusion was good. Confusion showed that she was wavering.
He dropped his dark head, his lips seeking the pulse point at her décolletage as his hands slid beneath her sweater, rising over her flat stomach up to her small breasts. He cupped them, surprised that they were heavier than they looked, more pleasingly full. Had she nursed the little child? Had her breasts swelled with milk? His fingers brushed her nipples and she moaned, a sound that was so like he remembered that pleasure tore through him.
Pleasure and need.
“Stop,” she whimpered, and he did, immediately lifting his head and dropping his hands, his eyes seeking hers. He hadn’t expected that.
And nor had she. Despair saturated her features. “Don’t stop.” Shame made her drop her eyes. He laughed then, a soft sound of understanding.
She needed him.
It was still there.
His relief was palpable.
Almost as acute as Sarah’s embarrassment. “I hate you,” she whispered throatily, the words suspiciously tinged by tears.
“Do you?”
She moaned as his fingers found her breasts again, thumbing across her taut, over-sensitised nipples.
“I hate you,” she whispered, tilting her head back so that he could return his lips to her flesh, teasing her as she’d always loved.
He flicked his tongue against her pulse point and desire radiated through her whole body.
The Sheikh's Million Dollar Bride Page 2