The Sheikh's Impatient Virgin
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Eva gave an anguished groan as she sat up in bed, scarlet to the roots of her hair, and yelled after him, ‘This isn’t what it looks like, Luke!’
‘He is particularly gullible, then, your boyfriend? Or just the forgiving kind?’
Eva looked down at the man lying in the bed beside her, one arm curved over his head, the other touching the gash on his head. Gone was the air of vulnerability and vagueness of the previous evening; replacing it was a sardonic expression and a remarkably expressive and deeply unpleasant sneer.
He didn’t look forgiving; he looked like a man who held grudges.
There was a time lapse of several seconds before she realised that his eyes were trained on her gaping top.
Hating the blush that rose to the roots of her hair, Eva bunched the fabric of her top in one hand and, flinging off the duvet with the other, leapt out of bed. Her expression of indignant reproach produced a bold grin that revealed even white teeth and contained no hint of repentance for the ogling—not that she had a lot to ogle.
Not that she gave a damn how this stranger rated her breasts, because that would make her needy and mildly pathetic.
‘Last night…’ she began, struggling to look like someone who took waking up with a man in her bed in her stride, ‘…you were…’
‘Last night…’ he echoed.
Eva saw the sudden recognition flash into his eyes and watched as the sardonic amusement faded abruptly.
‘You’re Hassan’s lost princess.’
‘I’m not lost. I live here.’
He flashed a less than enthusiastic look around the room and said, ‘But you’re planning on moving up in the world, aren’t you, Princess?’
The rather cryptic observation brought a distracted frown to Eva’s brow…distracted because she was conscious of the background clatter as Luke slipped the latch on her front door.
‘I won’t be a minute.’ She gave an apologetic grimace and snatched up her robe from a chair.
‘I do not have a minute,’ Karim observed grimly.
His guilt climbed as he thought of his extended absence…his recollection was hazy, but one fact was inescapable: he had presumably, in some aberrant moment of unforgivable, shameful weakness, walked, or at least wandered, away from his responsibilities.
If he was not there when Amira woke he would never forgive himself.
The glance he slid her had the chill factor of an arctic front and Eva couldn’t help but contrast his present manner with the heat of his lips on her neck and the urgency in his hard, hot body as it had pressed into hers minutes earlier.
‘What time is it?’ he snapped, throwing aside the covers and vaulting with fluid grace from the bed.
Eva tried not to stare. His body stood up well to daylight scrutiny. Perfect was like that, she thought with a sigh. His eagerness to be gone was not exactly flattering to her ego, but his departure could not, she told herself, be too soon for her.
‘I don’t know.’
The honest response drew a forbidding frown.
‘Look, I won’t be a second…’ she called back as she ran to catch Luke. While she was answerable to nobody about whom she shared her bed with—up to this point no one—she felt an urgent need to put the record straight, and she really didn’t want Luke to leave with the wrong idea.
Chapter Five
KARIM walked into the minuscule sitting room, his eyes moving immediately to the face of the clock sitting on the mantle. He grimaced and felt a fresh surge of guilt when he thought of Amira waking up and him not being there.
And why wouldn’t he be there? Even with hazy recall the answer did not require hours of deep analysis—it was right there in the waking impressions that lingered in his head.
Lithe pale limbs, warm soft curves, skin like satin and a supple body curved into his.
His mouth curved into a grimace of self-contempt even as his body hardened in response to the memory. During the barren years of marriage he had turned control of his passions into an art form, but inexplicably that control had deserted him at the worst possible moment.
A muscle worked in his lean jaw emphasising the hollows beneath his strongly etched cheekbones as Karim considered what the moment of inexplicable weakness combined with the scheming of a woman was going to cost him.
The irony was he couldn’t even remember the pleasure he was about to pay so dearly for—that part of the night remained a total blank.
The same could not be said for all of the night. A brooding frown on his face, he walked to the window and glanced down at the street below. Any faint hopes he nurtured that this specific section of intact memory was not real died an instant death.
The stationary car opposite was depressingly real. He turned away and wondered how long it would take for the information his granddaughter had spent the night with Karim Al-Nasr to reach King Hassan.
Of the King’s reaction there was no similar question. While the ruler of Azharim was not a man who was averse to change, tradition and honour were two things he placed highly. Karim had offered him an insult and only one response would make that insult forgivable.
Karim closed his eyes and, his expression harsh with selfrecrimination, wondered if there was a fatal flaw in his makeup.
Was he preordained to make the same mistake over and over again? Recognising the self-pity insidiously creeping into his thinking, he pushed away the thought, firm in his belief such a mindset was for men who could not accept responsibility for their own actions.
No excuses, no extenuating circumstances and no amount of extraordinary red hair changed the fact he had messed up and he would pay.
The depth of his own stupidity was still hard for him to fully grasp. He inhaled through flared nostrils and, exerting the control that had let him down the previous night, he pushed away a subject he had no time to explore right now and estimated how long it would take him to get to the hospital.