Chantelle Shaw - The Sheikh Who Blackmailed Her - Desert Prince, Blackmailed Bride / The Sheikh and the Bought Bride / At the Sheikh's Bidding

‘He is in his private room in the tower, miss. I think you know where it is.’

Gabby saw the man’s secret little smile. Clearly the grapevine was alive and well in the Palace. And she for one didn’t want to know what garbled version of the truth had been passed around.

Gabby had lifted her hand to tap on the door when she heard the sound of a loud, angry voice inside. She stopped and waited. There was a short silence after the rant ended, and then the even more alarming sound of crashing and smashing began.

Gabby gave up on the idea of announcing herself. Instead she pushed the door open cautiously. It gave. Wondering what on earth she was going to find, she squared her shoulders and stepped inside.

There was evidence of the destruction she had heard, but there was nothing systematic about it as far as she could see. Rafiq, who was pacing the floor like a sleek, feral caged animal, wasn’t simply walking around objects, but through them.

Rafiq turned, a snarl on his face. ‘What are you doing here?’

Their glances connected, worried blue on wrathful and smouldering black, and her breath snagged painfully in her throat. In his primitive anger all pretence of civilisation was washed away and Rafiq was quite simply magnificent. Of course she had always known he was a man of strong passions, and she had even seen him strain at the emotional leash at times, but now it had snapped!

As their glances connected his eyes, blacker than the darkest starless night sky, lit from within by twin flames, drilled into her. Every individual fibre and muscle in his body was bunched and taut. He was an explosion about to happen.

She didn’t want to supply the final trigger. Gabby ran her tongue lightly across her dry lips as something that was part trepidation and part excitement slid through her. Now that really did make her weird …

‘What has happened, Rafiq? Are you ill? Is—?’

‘Not ill—just dying.’ He saw her flinch, but pushed away the shaft of inconvenient guilt that slipped like a dull blade between his ribs.

Gabby, her face pale, bit down on her quivering lip and tucked her hair behind her ears. It immediately sprang free. ‘Well, something must have happened to put you in this mood.’

His upper lip curled into a sneer. ‘Something? Oh, yes, something has happened,’ he agreed darkly as he swung away from her.

Gabby watched, her frustration growing as he recommenced his restless panther-like pacing of the room. She chased after him, catching him as he reached the doors that lay open to the balcony where she had lost her balance the first time they had met.

Without thinking she caught hold of his arm and tugged him to a stop.

He stood breathing hard, staring with a look she couldn’t put a name on at her hand on his arm.

‘Sorry—I’m a tactile person.’ She sincerely hoped he didn’t correctly translate this as I can’t keep my hands off you. ‘I keep forgetting people don’t lay hands on the royal person without an invitation.’

She turned her head to one side and regarded him with a calm she was not feeling.

‘Will you stop being so damned enigmatic and stay still for ten seconds? You can be snide and superior just as well when you’re sitting down. I know this,’ she said, placing her hands flat on her chest, ‘because I’ve seen you do it.’

The fury still pounded inside his skull like a hammer, but Rafiq managed a flicker of a smile as he lowered himself into a chair.

‘Thank you,’ she said, dropping to her knees beside it. ‘Now, you can tell me that it’s none of my business,’ she began, thinking he most probably would, ‘but—’

‘It is your business.’

That threw Gabby off balance. ‘It is?’

‘I received a note form Hakim this morning. He has flown back to Paris.’

Rafiq watched as the colour drained from her face. If his brother had been on the same continent at that moment he would not have been responsible for his actions.

‘How could he? How could he leave now? After …?’ Gabby, her face as pale as paper apart from two bright spots of angry colour on the apples of her cheeks, stopped and pressed a hand to her lips. How could he do this to Rafiq?

The pain in her horrified whisper penetrated a part of Rafiq’s heart that had never previously been exposed.

She lifted swimming blue eyes to Rafiq. ‘I really thought he had more—’ Her voice broke as she considered Hakim’s departure.

‘My brother is a fool, and I am sorry for what he has done to you. His actions are those of a—’ He used a word in his native tongue that she didn’t understand, but his expression was translation enough.

‘Done to me ?’ she echoed, confused.

Rafiq swallowed, the muscles in his throat visibly rippling under his brown skin and his eyes glowing as he contemplated the pleasure of throttling his own brother.

‘You have suffered at the hands of the Al Kamil family.’ He gave a grimace of self-recrimination. ‘I have used you,’ he admitted stiffly, his rage visibly growing as he spoke, ‘but at least I haven’t slept with you, knowing all along I had no intention—’ He closed his eyes and cursed slowly and fluently in several languages.

Gabby, her eyes widening suddenly in angry comprehension, exclaimed, ‘Slept with me! You think I slept with a man I’d only known five seconds?’

Why not just call me a slut and have done with it? she thought, ignoring the sly voice in her head which suggested that two seconds would have done it if the man in question had been Rafiq.

A muscle clenched in his lean cheek as he shook his head in a stiff negative motion. ‘You will not speak of it.’

He could not allow himself to think of it, to torture himself with images and allow the jealousy to bite like acid into him.

‘But I—’

He cut off her protest with a look. ‘I saw him climb into your room.’

Her jaw dropped. ‘You saw …?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘You were watching?’

‘I had something I wished to discuss with you.’

Rafiq had been struggling throughout the day to keep his feelings of guilt at bay, but following their dinner he had come to a decision. He would release her from their bargain. The irony was that, having studied her brother’s case in further detail, he doubted that the case against Paul Barton would have ever made it to court after the scheduled review.

Of course this irony had paled into insignificance beside his finding his own brother scaling her balcony—minus the rose between his teeth, but in all other ways the perfect romantic lover.

‘I had planned to use the door.’

Gabby bit her lip. ‘What did you want to discuss with me?’

‘It is no longer relevant.’ She was puzzling over his sharp retort when he added, ‘To think that I pushed you into his arms!’

His snarled recrimination made Gabby flinch. ‘I’m not some puppet. You’ve never made me do anything I didn’t want to, Rafiq.’

Her clumsy attempt to soothe him had the opposite effect.

‘So you have fallen in love with him?’ he said heavily. It was nothing he had not already suspected. He had seen women fall for his brother’s brand of charm before.

The absurd assumption made Gabby stare at this normally smart man. ‘Of course not. It was just—’

‘Sex?’ he finished for her heavily, before closing his eyes and slipping seamlessly into a flood of Arabic she could not follow apart from some spectacular epithets. She watched him slam his fist into the carved arm of his chair.

A cry of alarm was wrenched from the watching Gabby’s throat as she witnessed this loss of control.

‘For goodness’ sake, Rafiq,’ she cried, tugging at his arm.