Michelle Reid - Hot-Blooded Husbands

But this was not the time to play the demanding husband. She would reject him as she had rejected him many times a year ago. What hurt him the most about remembering those bleak interludes was not his own angry frustration but the grim knowledge that it had been herself she had been denying.

‘Was the Petronades yacht party an elaborate set-up?’ she asked suddenly.

A brief smile stretched his mouth, and it was a very selfmocking smile because he had truly believed she was as concentrated on his close physical presence as he was on hers. But, no. As always, Leona’s mind worked in ways that continually managed to surprise him.

‘The party was genuine.’ He answered the question. ‘Your father’s sudden inability to get here in time to attend it was not.’

At least his honesty almost earned him a direct glance of frowning puzzlement before she managed to divert it to his right ear. ‘But you’ve just finished telling me that I was snatched because my father was—’

‘I know,’ he cut in, not needing to hear her explain what he already knew—which was that this whole thing had been very carefully set up and co-ordinated with her father’s assistance. ‘There are many reasons why you are standing here with me right now, my darling,’ he murmured gently. ‘Most of which can wait for another time to go into.’

The my darling sent her back a defensive step. The realisation that her own father had plotted against her darkened her lovely eyes. ‘Tell me now,’ she insisted.

But Hassan just shook his head. ‘Now is for me,’ he informed her softly. ‘Now is my moment to bask in the fact that you are back where you belong.’

It was really a bit of bad timing that her feet should use that particular moment to tread on the discarded abaya , he supposed, watching as she looked down, saw, then grew angry all over again.

‘By abduction?’ Her chin came up, contempt shimmering along her finely shaped bones. ‘By plots and counter-plots and by removing a woman’s right to decide for herself?’

He grimaced at her very accurate description. ‘We are by nature a romantic people,’ he defended. ‘We love drama and poetry and tragic tales of star-crossed lovers who lose each other and travel the caverns of hell in their quest to find their way back together again.’

He saw the tears. He had said too much. Reaching out, he caught the glass just before it slipped from her nerveless fingers. ‘Our marriage is a tragedy,’ she told him thickly.

‘No,’ he denied, putting the hapless glass aside. ‘You merely insist on turning it into one.’

‘Because I hate everything you stand for!’

‘But you cannot make yourself hate the man,’ he added, undisturbed by her denunciation.

Leona began to back away because there was something seriously threatening about the sudden glow she caught in his eyes. ‘I left you, remember?’

‘Then sent me letters at regular intervals to make sure I remembered you,’ he drawled.

‘Letters to tell you I want a divorce!’ she cried.

‘The content of the letters came second to their true purpose.’ He smiled. ‘One every two weeks over the last two months. I found them most comforting.’

‘Gosh, you are so conceited it’s a wonder you didn’t marry yourself!’

‘Such insults.’ He sighed.

‘Will you stop stalking me as if I am a hunted animal?’ she cried.

‘Stop backing away like one.’

‘I do not want to stay married to you.’ She stated it bluntly.

‘And I am not prepared to let you go. There,’ he said. ‘We have reached another impasse. Which one of us is going to win the higher ground this time, do you think?’

Looking at him standing there, arrogant and proud yet so much her kind of man that he made her legs go weak, Leona knew exactly which one of them possessed the higher ground. Which was also why she had to keep him at arm’s length at all costs. He could fell her in seconds, because he was right; she didn’t hate him, she adored him. And that scared her so much that when his hand came up, long fingertips brushing gently across her trembling mouth, she almost fainted on the sensation that shot from her lips to toe tips.

She pulled right away. His eyebrow arched. It mocked and challenged as he responded by curling the hand around her nape.

‘Stop it,’ she said, and lifted up her hand to use it as a brace against his chest.

Beneath dark blue cotton she discovered a silk-smooth, hard-packed body pulsing with heat and an all-too-familiar masculine potency. Her mouth went dry; she tried to breathe and found that she couldn’t. Helplessly she lifted her eyes up to meet with his.

‘Seeing me now, hmm?’ he softly taunted. ‘Seeing this man with these eyes you like to drown in, and this nose you like to call dreadful but usually have trouble from stopping your fingers from stroking? And let us not forget this mouth you so like to feel crushed hotly against your own delightful mouth.’

‘Don’t you dare!’ she protested, seeing what was coming and already beginning to shake all over at the terrifying prospect of him finding out what a weak-willed coward she was.

‘Why not?’ he countered, offering her one of his lazily sensual, knowing smiles that said he knew better than she did what she really wanted—and he began to lower his dark head.

‘Tell me first.’ Sheer desperation made her fly into impulsive speech. ‘If I am here on this beautiful yacht that belongs to you—is there another yacht just like it out there somewhere where your second wife awaits her turn?’

In the sudden suffocating silence that fell between them Leona found herself holding her breath as she watched his face pale to a frightening stillness. For this was provocation of the worst kind to an Arab and her heart began pounding madly because she just didn’t know how he was going to respond. Hassan possessed a shocking temper, though he had never unleashed it on her. But now, as she stood here with her fingers still pressed against his breastbone, she could feel the danger in him—could almost taste her own fear as she waited to see how he was going to respond.

What he did was to take a step back from her. Cold, aloof, he changed into the untouchable prince in the single blink of an ebony eyelash. ‘Are you daring to imply that I could be guilty of treating my wives unequally?’ he responded.

In the interim wave of silence that followed, Leona stared at him through eyes that had stopped seeing anything as his reply rocked the very axis she stood upon. She knew she had prompted it but she still had not expected it, and now she found she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even move as fine cracks began to appear in her defences.

‘You actually went and did it, and married again,’ she whispered, then completely shattered. Emotionally, physically, she felt herself fragment into a thousand broken pieces beneath his stone-cold, cruel gaze.

Hassan didn’t see it coming. He should have done, he knew that, but he had been too angry to see anything but his own affronted pride. So when she turned and ran he didn’t expect it. By the time he had pulled his wits together enough to go after her Leona was already flying through the door on a flood of tears.

The tears blinded what was ahead of her, the abaya having prevented her from taking stock of her surroundings as they’d arrived. Hassan heard Rafiq call out a warning, reached the door as Leona’s cry curdled the very air surrounding them and she began to fall.

What he had managed to prevent by the skin of his teeth only a half-hour before now replayed itself before his helpless eyes. Only it was not the dark waters of the Mediterranean she fell into but the sea of cream carpet that ran from room to room and down a wide flight of three shallow stairs that led down into the yacht’s main foyer.