Emma Darcy: Traded To The Sheikh

As amazing as all this was, Emily’s gaze almost instantly zeroed in on the man who was certainly the focal centrepiece of this totally decadent and fabulous luxury. He rose with majestic dignity from a thronelike sofa which was upholstered in red and gold. His clothes—a long white undertunic and a sleeveless over-robe in royal purple edged in gold braid—seemed to embrace Arabian culture but he didn’t look like an Arab, more aristocratic Spanish. What wasn’t in any doubt was that Emily was faced with the most stunningly beautiful man she had ever seen in her life.

Beautiful…

Strange word to apply to a man yet handsome somehow wasn’t enough. The cast of his features was perfectly boned and balanced as though he was the creation of a mastor sculptor. A thick mane of straight black hair was swept back from his forehead, falling in shaggy layers to below his ears but not to shoulder-length. It was a bold and dramatic frame for a face that comprised brows which kicked up at a wicked angle, lending an emphatic effect to riveting dark eyes; a classically straight nose ending in a flare of nostrils that suggested a passionate temperament; a mouth whose upper lip was rather thin and sharply delineated while the lower lip was full and sensual.

The man fascinated, mesmerised, and although she thought of him as beautiful, there was an innate arrogant maleness to him that kicked a stream of primal fear through her highly agitated bloodstream. He was fabulous but also very foreign, and he was unmistakably assessing her female assets as he strolled forward, apparently for a closer examination.

Because he was at a lower floor level, Emily had the weird sense of catapulting back in time to the days when Zanzibar was the largest slave trading centre of the world, with herself being held captive on a platform for the buyers’ appraisal.

He lifted a hand to seemingly flick a hair back from his forehead as he spoke in Arabic to one of the guards holding her. The scarf she’d tied around her head was suddenly snatched away, the rough movement dislodging the pins which had kept her hair in a twisted coil around her crown. The sheer weight of the untethered mass brought it tumbling down, spilling over her shoulders and down her back.

‘Hey!’ Emily cried in frightened protest, her imagination rioting towards being stripped of her bikini, as well. She was suddenly feeling extremely vulnerable, terrified of what his next command might be.

A burst of fluent French came from the Spaniard/Arab. It was accompanied by a cynical flash of his eyes and finished with a sardonic curl of his mouth. While Emily had picked up a smattering of quite a few languages on her travels, she was not up to comprehending this rush of foreign words and she didn’t care for the expression that went with them, either.

‘Look, I’m not French. Okay?’ she pleaded. ‘Any chance you speak English?’

‘So—’ one black eyebrow lifted in sceptical challenge ‘—you are English?’

‘Well, no actually. I’m Australian. My name is Emily Ross.’ She nodded to the waterproof bag still being held by one of her guards. ‘My passport will prove…’

‘Nothing of pertinent interest, madamoiselle,’ he cut in drily.

Emily took a deep breath, pulling her wits together enough to address the real situation here. ‘Then may I ask what is of pertinent interest to you, monsieur?’

He made an oddly graceful gesture suggesting a rather careless bit of interest he was just as happy to dismiss. ‘Jacques Arnault gave a description of you which I find surprisingly accurate.’ He spoke in a slow drawl, laced with irony, his eyes definitely mocking as he added, ‘This has piqued my curiosity enough to inquire if he spoke more truth than I anticipated.’

‘What did he claim?’ Emily asked, her teeth clenching as she anticipated hearing a string of lies.

‘That you are a virgin.’

A virgin!

Emily shut her eyes as her mind exploded with the shocking implications behind her promised virginity.

It could mean only one thing.

Jacques Arnault…who couldn’t lie straight in bed at night even if he tried, the consummate con artist who’d tricked her into crewing on his yacht, the sneaky drug-runner who had no conscience about anything, whose mind was completely bent on doing whatever served his best interests…had obviously come up with a deal to save his own skin.

She was to be traded off as a sex slave!

‘No!’ she almost spat in fierce indignation, her eyes flying open to glare at the prospective buyer. ‘Absolutely not!’

‘I did not believe it,’ he said with a dismissive shrug, the tone of his voice a very cold contrast to her heat. ‘Since the evidence points to your being a professional belly-dancer, I’m sure you’ve had many patrons.’

‘A professional belly-dancer?’ Emily’s voice climbed incredulously at this further off-the-wall claim.

He gave her an impatient look. ‘Your costumes were found onboard Arnault’s yacht, along with the other luggage you abandoned in fleeing from being associated with the Frenchman’s criminal activities. Avoiding capture.’

Capture!

So Jacques had definitely been nabbed doing his drug-dealing, and his yacht subsequently searched, leading this man to think she’d twigged that the game was up and had taken to the water to escape being caught up in the mess.

‘I was not fleeing from capture tonight, monsieur. I was fleeing from being a captive on that boat since it set sail from the Red Sea.’

‘Jacques Arnault was holding you against your will?’

‘Yes. And any belly-dancing costumes your search turned up do not belong to me, I assure you,’ she stated heatedly, resenting the implied tag of being a professional whore, as well.

The heat in her voice slid right down her entire body as he observed in mocking detail every curve of her femininity; the voluptuous fullness of her breasts, the smallness of her waist, the broad sweep of her hips, the smooth flow and shape of her thighs, calves, ankles…

‘Your physique suggests otherwise, Miss Ross,’ he commented very dryly.

Emily burned. Her arms, released by the guards who were still flanking her, flew up to fold themselves protectively across her chest. Her chin lifted in belligerent pride as she stated, ‘I’m a professional diving instructor. I have a certificate to prove it amongst my papers in the bag your men took from me.’

Her inquisitor smiled, showing a flash of very white teeth, but something about that smile told Emily he was relishing the prospect of tearing her into tasty morsels and chewing on them. ‘It’s my experience that people can be many things,’ he remarked with taunting ease.

‘Yes. Well, you’re not wrong about that,’ she snapped. ‘Jacques Arnault is a prime example. And I think it’s time you told me who you are and what right you have to detain me like this.’

Emily was steaming with the need to challenge him, having been put so much on the spot herself. The idea of bowed head and downcast eyes was long gone. She kept a very direct gaze on his, refusing to back down from her demands.

‘You were caught trespassing on property that belongs to my family and you are closely linked to a man who was engaged in criminal activity on this same property,’ he clipped out as though her complaint was completely untenable—a total waste of time and breath.

‘You have no evidence that I was engaged in criminal activity,’ Emily swiftly defended.

He rolled his eyes derisively.

‘I swear to you I wasn’t,’ she insisted. ‘In fact, the costumes you found probably belong to the woman who posed as Jacques Arnault’s wife when I was tricked into becoming the only crew member on his yacht.’

‘Tricked, Miss Ross?’