Trish Morey - Innocent in the Desert - The Sheikh's Impatient Virgin / The Sheikh's Convenient Virgin / The Desert Lord's Bride

It would not be so very difficult to eat her up. ‘You’re meant to be enjoying yourself.’

Shaking a little from the anticlimax, she fixed him with a narrow-eyed glare. ‘Well, I’m not—not enjoying myself.’

‘You seemed to be enjoying yourself when you were talking to my cousin.’

‘Cousin? Could you be a bit more specific? You do have hundreds.’

‘Hakim.’

‘Oh, the doctor—yes, he’s really nice.’

‘That’s what all the girls think before he breaks their hearts.’

She watched him walk away with a puzzled frown. Anyone who didn’t know the circumstances might have confused his attitude with jealousy. Next time she saw him the orchestra had struck up a slow number that drew several couples to the floor.

Eva, uncertain of the protocol, turned to him for clarification and found he was watching her with an expression that she struggled to decipher. ‘Are we meant to dance?’

Karim, already in a state of arousal, was skeptical of his ability even in his loose robes to hold her in his arms and not reveal the fact to everyone present.

‘I don’t dance,’ he said, but he did other things well and tonight he planned to show her.

That had been ten minutes earlier and she could still see his face when he said it, still hear his dismissive tone.

She was hearing it as she listened to what Julia’s extremely handsome and charming husband was saying. Eva’s own smile had become fixed and strained—she hoped in an intelligent way, but the fact was she was finding it virtually impossible to concentrate on what her companion was saying.

Rage and a strong sense of misuse made her chest tight. She struggled against a suffocating sensation to get her breath … was he trying to humiliate her?

Don’t let anyone see you care. Don’t let him see you care . Her lips compressed as her glance was once again drawn to the dance floor. She looked quickly away, a smile frozen on her face, thinking, Don’t let anyone see you care .

Don’t let him see you care!

Why did she care?

Presumably Karim’s non-dancing stance only applied to dancing with her, because for someone who didn’t dance he was managing rather well as he circled the floor with the highborn beauty in his arms.

They moved as one, bodies close, dark heads closer, the diamonds around Layla’s wrists and lovely neck catching the lights of the chandeliers overhead.

Eva had struggled hard against the irrational dislike she had felt earlier when the brunette had been introduced, but she now stopped trying—call it a personality clash.

Call it jealousy , said the voice in her head.

Logically she had no reason to dislike a woman she had not exchanged more than a dozen words with, if you discounted the way she touched Karim at every opportunity and spoke to him in that husky voice pitched too low for anyone else to hear, but obviously what she said was witty because Karim laughed more than once, looking younger and more relaxed as he did so than Eva had ever seen him.

The music stopped and Eva expelled a relieved sigh that drew an amused look from the man beside her. She said something to cover the moment, aware in the periphery of her vision of Karim bowing his head to his dance partner, but before he could leave Layla took his hand, tilting her head and pouting as she moved in close and whispered something in his ear.

Eva gave up all pretence of making conversation and watched, her eyes as hard as the emeralds around her neck as Karim shook his head, trying—not very hard, it seemed to Eva—to leave before he allowed his partner to drag him back to the centre of the dance floor. She could hear from where she was standing the tinkling sound of the brunette’s laughter as she laid her fingers against Karim’s neck.

Eva watched them dance, but she wasn’t the only one who did so. She knew that several glances were cast in her direction and the voltage of her smile and the level of her animation rose in direct proportion to the interest.

Finally when she laughed too loudly at something, Alain leaned forward with an expression of genuine concern and asked softly, ‘Are you all right?’

It was at that moment it hit her.

She shook her head slowly, a stunned look on her face as her glance slid towards the dance floor where Karim was moving, his grace and co-ordination matched by those of his partner.

‘No, I’m not all right.’ I’m in love with my husband .

Now how stupid was that?

She shook her head. It wasn’t possible!

She obviously had spoken the latter aloud because though Alain was looking at her with concern it was not the sort of alarm someone would reserve for a bride who was having a breakdown at the possibility she was in love with her husband.

‘Shall I get someone … Karim …?’

The suggestion made her eyes widen with horror. ‘No, not Karim!’

Her vehemence appeared to take the Frenchman aback, but he smiled and said tentatively, ‘A glass of water?’

‘That would be nice,’ she said, thinking, Pull yourself together, Eva, at least until you get out of here . ‘There’s no need to worry Karim,’ she added.

Alain nodded, but did not look entirely convinced by her addition and, catching sight of herself in the reflective surface of a plate-glass window, Eva was not surprised. The only colour in her face was the green of her eyes, which looked enormous in her pale face.

She pressed her fingers to her temples where the thudding intensified as the pressure in her head increased.

Getting out of here was her one coherent thought in a brain that was seething with confusing and ambiguous thoughts. As soon as the Frenchman moved out of view she made her way towards the open glass doors.

People had spilled out into the enclosed courtyard where the sound of tinkling fountains was a pleasant background noise to conversation.

Her heels clicked on the mosaic floor as she exchanged a few comments with people. She had no idea what she said, but presumably she must have made sense, unless they were just politely ignoring the fact that she was talking gibberish.

As she stepped through a large metal-banded door and into the corridor beyond, closing the door behind her, the almost monastic silence hit her.

CLOSING HER EYES AS she pressed her shoulders into the wall, Eva felt the tears begin to seep from under her lashes.

Angrily she brushed them away and straightened up.

She sniffed and inhaled. ‘Don’t get hysterical, Eva. This isn’t love … it’s sexual attraction and it will pass.’ She began to laugh as the irony struck her that she was upset because there was a possibility she was in love with her own husband.

‘Now how crazy is that?’ she asked the painting that showed a stern man with a nose like Karim’s looking noble astride a flashing-eyed stallion.

He didn’t comment, neither did any of the servants she encountered as she walked through a maze of corridors with no particular idea of where she was going. Being the boss’s wife had some perks and there was no sign of her shadows.

When some time later she found herself outside and near a gated entrance to the compound, the idea of escaping, at least temporarily, was too strong to resist.

Maybe outside without people watching her every move she’d be able to think straight? She held her breath as she walked past the armed guards and expelled it again when they made no attempt to detain her as she left the palace compound that was situated a few miles outside the capital, whose lights illuminated the horizon to the south.

When she had last passed along this well-lit palm-lined avenue it had been seething with people; now it was totally deserted. Recalling Karim’s rather stern lectures on security and the dangers of the desert, she felt a faint twinge of anxiety but she pushed it away.