Surrender To The Sheikh
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She let herself in through the front door and put her handbag on the hall table, relieved to be home. And safe.
She loved her flat—it was her very first property and occupied the first floor of a grand old high-ceilinged house. But it was an ambitious project for a first-time buyer and the repayments on her loan were high, which was why she had taken on a flatmate—Lara.
Lara was a struggling actress who described herself as Rose’s lodger, but Rose never did. Equality was something she strove for in every area of her life. ‘No, we’re flatmates,’ she always insisted.
It was a typical bachelor girls’ home—full of colour in the shared areas and rather a lot of chaos in Lara’s bedroom—because, much as she nagged, there didn’t seem to be anything Rose could do to change Lara’s chronic untidiness. So now she had given up trying.
There were brightly coloured scarves floating from a coat-stand in the hall, and vases of cheap flowers from the market dotted around the sitting room. And the bathroom was so well stocked with various lotions and potions that it resembled the cosmetics counter of a large department store!
‘Anyone at home?’ she called.
‘I’m in the kitchen!’ came the muffled reply, and Rose walked into the kitchen to find Lara busy crunching a chocolate biscuit and pouring coffee into a mug. Her staple diet and my coffee, thought Rose ruefully as Lara looked up with a smile and held a second mug up. ‘Coffee?’
Rose shook her head. ‘No, thanks. I think I need a drink.’
Lara raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘But you’ve just been to a wedding!’
‘And I barely touched a drop all day,’ said Rose grimly. She had deliberately avoided liquor so that she would have all her wits about her, and then just look at the way she had behaved on the dance-floor! She sighed as she poured herself a glass of wine from the cask in the fridge.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Lara curiously.
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘You just seem a little…I don’t know…tense.’
Tense? Rose sipped at her wine without enjoyment. She could see her reflection in the pig-shaped mirror which hung on the kitchen wall. Her face was unbelievably pale. She looked as if she’d seen a ghost. Or a vision maybe…‘I guess I am,’ she said slowly.
‘So why? What was the wedding like? Awful?’
‘No, beautiful,’ said Rose reflectively. ‘The most beautiful wedding I’ve ever been to.’
‘Then why the long face?’
Rose sat down at the kitchen table and put her wineglass down heavily. ‘It’s stupid, really—’ She looked up into Lara’s frankly interested brown eyes. ‘Did I ever tell you that Sabrina’s new husband is best friends with a prince?’
Lara’s eyes grew larger. ‘You’re winding me up, right?’
Rose shook her head and bit back a half-smile. It did sound a bit far-fetched. ‘No, I’m not. It’s the truth. He’s prince of a country—more a principality, really—called Maraban—it’s in the Middle East.’
‘And next, I suppose you’ll be telling me that he’s outrageously good-looking and rich, to boot!’
Rose sighed. ‘Yes! He’s exactly that. Just about the most perfect man you’ve ever seen. Tall, and dark and handsome—’
‘Oh, ha, ha, ha!’
‘No, he is! Honestly. He’s divine. I danced with him…’ Her voice tailed off as she remembered how it felt to have his body so tantalisingly close to hers. ‘Danced with him, and—’
‘And what?’
‘And—’ No need to point out that she had got a little carried away on the dance-floor. She squirmed with remembered pleasure and glanced up to see Lara’s open-mouthed expression.
‘Oh, Rose, you didn’t?’
Rose blinked as the implication behind Lara’s question squeaked its way home. ‘No, of course I didn’t! You surely don’t imagine that I’d meet a man at a wedding and hours later leap into bed with him, do you?’ she questioned indignantly.
But you did it in thought if not in deed, didn’t you? mocked the guilty voice of her conscience.
Lara was looking at her patiently. ‘So what happened?’
‘He, well, he asked me to go for a drink with him once the bride and groom had left,’ explained Rose.
‘What’s the problem with that? You said yes, of course?’
‘Actually,’ said Rose, in a high, forced voice, not quite believing that she had had the strength of will to go through with it, ‘I said no.’
Lara was blinking at her in bemusement. ‘You’ve lost me! He’s gorgeous, he’s royal and you turned him down! Why, for heaven’s sake?’
‘I don’t know.’ Rose sighed again. ‘Well, maybe that’s not true, I suppose I do, really. He’s so utterly irresistible—’
‘That’s usually considered a plus where men are concerned, isn’t it?’
‘But he would never commit, I know he wouldn’t—it’s written all over his face!’
Lara stared at her incredulously. ‘Never commit?’ she echoed. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this! Rose, you’ve danced with the guy once and already you’re talking commitment? And this from the woman who has always vowed never to get married—’
‘Until I’m at least thirty-five,’ said Rose with a look of fierce determination. ‘I’ll have achieved something by then, so I’ll be ready! And people live longer these days—it makes sense to put off getting married for as long as possible.’
‘Very romantic,’ said Lara.
‘Very realistic,’ commented Rose drily.
‘So why the talk of commitment—or, rather, the lack of it?’
Rose took a thoughtful sip of wine. She wasn’t really sure herself. Maybe because she didn’t want to be just another woman in a long line of discarded women.
But wouldn’t it just sound fanciful if she told Lara that Khalim had a dangerous power about him which both attracted and yet repelled her? And wouldn’t it sound weak if she expressed the very real fear that he could break her heart into smithereens? Lara would quite rightly say that she didn’t know him—but Rose was intuitive, more so than usual where Khalim was concerned. She knew that with a bone-deep certainty—she just didn’t know why.