by Penny Jordan
He was not, after all, some sexually deprived teenager! And far from inexperienced! If he wanted a woman there were any number who would be all too eager to share his bed. Any number maybe, but what about this particular one? She was another man's lover. A married man's lover, he reminded himself.
Broodingly he looked down at Katrina, his intellect rejecting the message his body was giving him, and the urge to simply pick her up and carry her into the inner privacy of his sleeping quarters.
She moved her head and a thick lock of her hair fell across her face, making her frown in her sleep. Automatically he reached out to brush it away for her.
Abruptly Katrina opened her eyes, her heart hammering frantically fast inside her chest as she looked up into the molten gold of Xander's fiercely predatory gaze. Helplessly she lay motionless and vulnerable beneath it, pinioned by it, her lips parting as she took short gulps of air.
His fingertips were touching her cheek, four cool, hard pressure points, each one sending shock waves of pleasure that were making her tremble. She could see the dark shadow along his jaw, her eyes widening in betraying female acknowledgement of its message of maleness.
Immediately he lifted his hand from her face, something dark and dangerous glittering in his eyes before he veiled his expression from her.
'I have brought you some food,' he told her curtly.
Katrina could smell it, and her stomach rumbled hungrily, but she compressed her mouth and shook her head, telling him untruthfully, 'I'm not hungry.'
He was frowning as he looked at her.
'Liar,' he said to her flatly, before demanding coldly, 'What is it? Is our food not good enough for you?'
'No, it isn't that!'
'No? Then what exactly is it?' he challenged her sardonically.
'I… Richard—'
'Richard? Your lover, you mean?'
'He is not my lover. He wanted to be, but I… He tricked me and…and drugged me…'
'Drugged you? And you think I might do the same?'
She had angered him; she could tell that!
'Why should I want to do that?'
Stubbornly Katrina refused to answer him.
'Are you really suggesting that I would drug you in order to have sex with you?'
Katrina's face burned.
Put like that it did sound far-fetched, especially when one look at him would tell any fully functioning woman that making love with him would be all pleasure and no penance!
'Even so! Isn't it normally the custom for desert tribesmen to eat first, before their women?'
'Their women? But you are not my woman, are you?' he pointed out softly. 'And we also have a custom that a guest is invited to eat first.'
'But I am not your guest.' Katrina couldn't help answering him sharply. 'I am your prisoner!'
Picking up the stew, he sat down cross-legged on the divan and began to dip a piece of bread into it, scooping up chunks of delicious-smelling lamb.
Katrina's mouth watered. She felt faint with hunger. Pausing between mouthfuls, he demanded brusquely, 'Tell me more about this lover of yours. This Richard…'
'He is not my lover!' Katrina denied angrily. 'I have told you that already.'
'But you agreed to accompany him into the desert…alone…'
'No! It was an expedition—several of us… We are cataloguing the flora and fauna of the area. Richard tricked me into getting into his vehicle, and then…'
Against her will she could feel her own emotions threatening to overwhelm her.
'By the time I realised what he was planning it was too late. When he stopped at the oasis I hoped that I might be able to distract him and escape.'
'Distract him? In what manner? No, I can guess. There is after all only one reliable method by which a woman can distract a man.'
Katrina had had enough!
'You're as bad as Richard! You just don't understand! Believe what you like, I don't care.'
'And neither do I. At least not so far as your sexual history is concerned. What I do care about, however, is your financial value to me.' He stood up and started to walk determinedly towards her.
A sharp thrill of fear seized her. Apprehensively Katrina looked towards the door, but he was standing between her and it.
'Here.' He told her curtly, handing her the bowl of stew. 'It is not drugged. Now sit down and eat!'
Relief filled her. For a moment she had feared… She knew not what she had feared, only that she had been afraid! But it seemed that after all there was a kinder, more compassionate side to her captor!
The stew was every bit as good as it had looked, and she was even hungrier than she had known.
When she had finished Xander told her coolly, 'I have some business I need to discuss with El Khalid, and my horse to see to, but first I will show you where you will sleep.'
She was so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open, never mind follow Xander as he swung back the heavy fabric hanging that separated the outer compartment of the tent from the inner one, and she stumbled exhaustedly after him.
It took her eyes several seconds to adjust to the shadowy darkness of me inner chamber, and its low, wide bed heaped with cushions.
'Through here you will find a shower and—'
'A shower!' Her voice betrayed both her surprise and her relief. The thought of water on her dusty skin was a wonderful prospect, but it was not enough to completely distract her from the sight of the large bed. Quite obviously it was her captor's bed!
But he was already turning away from her and before she could say anything he had gone, leaving her alone in the shadowy darkness of the dimly lit chamber. Warily she started to investigate her surroundings. The bed was easily large enough for two people, and the discovery of the portable shower and loo, which lay in their own tented area beyond it and which, whilst very simple, were immaculately clean, made her exhale a gusty sigh of relief.
Since she was not sure how long Xander would be gone and, therefore, how much privacy she would have, she showered quickly, hesitating a little before wrapping her wet body in one of the obviously luxurious and expensive thick towels she had found neatly stacked on a hanging shelf. Were they someone else's property? Property which had been acquired by theft? It was hard for her to ignore her moral disquiet about using them, but she had no alternative other than to do so, she told herself grimly before fastidiously rinsing out her underwear and tee shirt.
By the time she had done all that it was all she could do to find the energy to crawl onto the bed still wrapped in her towel.
Virtually all the members of the band of renegades who had associated themselves with El Khalid were already waiting for him to begin his evening council when Xander joined them and found a space to sit down cross-legged amongst them.
'You are late, Tuareg,' one of them commented.
'He was probably too busy enjoying his prize,' another joined in coarsely, before adding in warning, 'You had best be on your guard, Tuareg. Sulimen is making no secret of the fact that he believes that the girl is rightfully his and that he wants her back.'
Xander gave a dismissive shrug.
'Sulimen may make as many empty threats as he wishes, the girl stays with me. Has El Khalid spoken yet of this mysterious personage of importance who is to make us all wealthy?' he demanded.
The other men shook their heads, and then fell silent as El Khalid himself appeared from within his large pavilion, flanked by his lieutenants.
Two hours later although many questions had been asked El Khalid had still not informed them of. the identity of the man they had come to the oasis to meet, and Xander suspected that he did not as yet know Nazir's true identity himself.
It was gone midnight when the meeting broke up, and Xander made his way slowly back to his own tent, pausing only to check up on his horse and the sleeping boy who looked after her.
The boy was an orphan who had attached himself to El Khalid's camp. When all this was over he would ask his half-brother to find
him a bed, an education and a job in his stables, Xander decided.
Once inside the pavilion, he removed his mobile phone from his pocket and switched it on. He had deliberately cleared it of any information that might betray him, and he dialled his half-brother's private number quickly, whilst he faced the entrance to the tent, just in case anyone should decide to enter.
'Little brother!'
He could hear the pleasure in his half-brother's voice, and quickly filled him in with what had been happening, using the special code they had arranged.
'You may have been informed of the kidnap of a certain young British woman, a member of an explorative scientific expedition,' he added carefully.
'I have heard of such an incident,' the Ruler agreed equally carefully. 'The head of the expedition has informed us that it took place in the desert some thirty or so miles to the east of our city, and a search is to be made in that area.'
Xander frowned. The oasis was over two hundred miles north of the city, which meant that Richard had lied about where he and Katrina had been when she had been 'kidnapped'.
'The girl is safe—no thanks to the one who placed her in danger. And I shall ensure that she remains so,' Xander informed his half-brother, before they ended the call. Richard might have desired Katrina, but he certainly could not have had any genuine love for her, Xander decided with angry contempt. His hostility towards the other man had grown with every damning word his half-brother had spoken. Not that he believed for one minute the wild fiction Katrina had invented about Richard tricking her into accompanying him. She was no sheltered, inexperienced girl after all, but a travelled and independent young woman who had no doubt long ago lost count of the number of men who had shared her bed.
But that did not make her deserving of the fate that would have been hers if Sulimen had been allowed to claim her.
He hadn't really needed the information relayed to him earlier by his fellows that Sulimen had a weakness for young women and he had a reputation too for treating them very badly. Sulimen didn't just want Katrina for the purpose of ransoming her, that he was sure about…
Xander's mouth compressed. She might be an unwanted complication that he could well do without, but there was no way he could abandon her to Sulimen. As she was a stranger in his country and a woman, he had a moral duty to protect her.
His half-brother had informed him during their telephone conversation that Nazir had let it be known that he was about to leave the country for several weeks. They had both agreed that this was merely an alibi he had created, which would not only enable him to meet and plot with El Khalid, but also to mastermind his planned coup without attracting suspicion to himself.
With the Ruler's sons being under age and too young to step into their father's shoes once Nazir had disposed of him, Nazir was no doubt planning to lay claim to the throne by means of suggesting himself as Regent. Therefore, he would not want the Ruling Council to suspect what he had done.
Nazir would leave it as long as he dared before putting his plan to El Khalid in order to lessen the risk of someone betraying it and him, but he would have to make his move soon.
As he walked into the sleeping area of the pavilion, Xander started to remove his Tuareg headdress, smoothly unwinding the yards of indigo-dyed fabric that comprised it and provided him with his disguise.
Katrina had been both right and wrong in accusing him of not being Tuareg—his father did have some Tuareg blood.
Katrina. Her name had a special melody to it, a musical harmony that fell sweetly on the ear. A poet…a lover might be tempted to use it to write of his love for her. A poet? A lover? Long ago as a callow youth, he might have believed himself to have the soul of a poet, but he was most certainly not the latter. And did not want to be?
Casting aside the indigo fabric, he strode towards the bed and then stopped as he saw Katrina lying where she had fallen asleep on top of it. Her head lay on one of its silk-covered cushions; her body was wrapped in a towel that revealed more of her than it concealed, fully exposing the slender length of her legs with their creamy thighs and delicately boned ankles, so fine he suspected he could have circled one with one hand. An equally delicately boned arm was flung out to one side of her, the other tucked beneath her. She looked more child than woman, at least until one moved closer as he had just done and saw what he had not observed before, which was the upper curve of her breasts, revealed right down to the areolae surrounding her nipples and beyond them to the rosy peaked flare of the nipples themselves.
A sensation he tried savagely to repudiate exploded inside him and with it a need and a hunger that turned his eyes the colour of molten gold slashed with amber. Desire, hot, urgent and compelling, surged through him, threatening to breach his self-control.
If he touched her now he would be no better than Sulimen, he warned himself as he forced himself to walk past her and into the simple shower area, where he stripped off his clothes with swift angry movements before standing beneath the shower's lukewarm spray.
It took longer than he wanted to acknowledge for the uncomfortably hard, swollen evidence of his arousal to subside; he was still aware of it and Katrina herself when he walked past her without looking at her.
In the darkness of the desert night a horse whinnied shrilly, disturbed by a prowling predator. The sound woke Katrina up.
At first her unfamiliar surroundings confused her, but all too quickly she remembered where she was and why.
Desert nights were bitingly cold, especially in winter, and Katrina shivered as she pulled the still-damp towel around herself before glancing fearfully across the bed.
The empty bed! A small frown puckered her forehead. She looked at her watch. It was three o'clock in the morning and the silken bed cover was smoothly undisturbed. She was alone on the bed, and alone too it seemed in the pavilion's sleeping area.
Surely that wasn't disappointment that she was feeling? Not after all those dreams she had cherished for so long, of the man, her man; her soul mate…the one and only man to whom she would give the whole of herself, with whom she would share the whole of herself. Her first and last lover.
This man, Xander, was not that man! How could he possibly be?
The man she had dreamed of was noble, in spirit and in deed, honourable, good and kind. Xander was none of those things. She could not respect him, nor trust him, and she certainly could not love him, surely?
Maybe not, but she could and did want him! Katrina had to swallow hard against her own feelings. Shock fought with need. Anger with hunger. Caution with urgency, and pride with a wild, fierce passion.
This could not be. She could not…must not feel like this.
She slid off the bed, careless of both her nakedness and the cool air as her mind and her body fought with one another.
What would she really do if he were to come in here now and lay claim to her, to her body? For it was impossible that he would want anything else of her! How would she feel if he were to reach out and touch her, his lean, hard hands shaping her, exploring her, knowing her, cupping her breasts, and then moving lower, over her belly and lower still? A shudder of twisted, dangerous, sensual pleasure ripped through her.
How could she allow herself to think like this? What warped inner part of herself was doing this to her? She had always believed that she would love first and desire second, that it would be a meeting and matching of minds and moral values that would be her prelude to emotional and physical arousal.
There was nothing about Xander or the manner in which he lived his life that remotely equated in any kind of way to her own beliefs or values. He was a liar and maybe a criminal, a man who put his own needs first. How could she possibly want him? The kind of people she admired put others first, and the greater good of mankind.
She needed to breathe fresh air to clear her head. Picking up the towel, she wrapped it firmly around herself and made her way hesitantly through to the outer area of the tent.
Xander had woken up the min
ute he had heard Katrina move, and when he saw her edging her way to the exit of the tent he pushed back the covers of the impromptu bed that he had made for himself and went after her.
Her hand was on the heavy exit curtain ready to push it back when Katrina felt Xander's fasten over her bare arm.
'Going somewhere?' he asked her softly.
Immediately she panicked, pulling back from him and demanding passionately, 'Let go of me.'
Her reaction to him ignited the still-smouldering embers of Xander's earlier arousal.
Instead of releasing her he tightened his grip on her, and closed the space between their bodies.
The downward swoop of his head had all the predatory intent of a desert falcon, swift and merciless, his mouth possessing hers before she could even cry out in denial.
But it was her own need that was defeating and betraying her, Katrina acknowledged dizzily as her mouth clung to his, her lips parting with wanton speed and eagerness as they offered his probing tongue the sweet spoils of victory. Longing burned hotly inside her, melting whatever resistance she might have summoned to her aid as their tongues twined and battled for the sweetest intimacies of their shared hunger. Tipping back her head, she let him plunder her mouth, as she in turn wanted to plunder his. She felt her towel slipping away from her body, not with a sense of anxiety, but instead with a wild thrill of female pleasure, for she had already seen—and felt—that the robe he was wearing hung open over his own nakedness.
If their tongues had meshed savagely together in mutual eager hunger, that pleasure was just a tame shadow of how it felt to have him press her the full length of his body. Her skin, her flesh, her innermost self was so intensely aroused just by the feel of him that she pressed herself even closer, moving against him, craving him as so many centuries ago men had craved the hashish to which they had become so addicted that it had destroyed them. As the unbearable craving she felt now for Xander would ultimately destroy her?