KRISTI GOLD - Sheikh's Captured Bride - The Sheikh's Prize / The Sheikh's Son / Captured by the Sheikh

Zahir went for a shower—a very cold one. A great well of burning hunger was consuming him but it was cooled by disturbing memories of Sapphire shaking with unmistakeable fear when he had tried to make love to her during their marriage. Even with all the sexual experience he had painstakingly acquired since then, he was wary and seriously distrustful of the physically encouraging vibes she was putting out. He had been wrong before; why shouldn’t he be wrong again? And while a faint sense of wonderment was stirring that he should actually have her in a bed again within reach, no sense of regret yet assailed him. In fact a merciless sense of all-male satisfaction was still driving him hard.

Saffy froze when she heard the door open again and rolled over, ridiculously conscious that her eyelids and her nose were probably pink from the overload of emotion and events that had brought overwrought tears to her eyes. She sat up in honest surprise to stare at Zahir, poised one step inside the door clad in only a pair of black silk boxers. Her throat closed over and she stopped breathing.

‘There is only one bed…’

‘It’s not a problem,’ Saffy responded as carelessly as she could contrive, rolling off the bed and yanking the bedspread off the mattress in almost the same movement. ‘I’ll sleep on the floor, although you could have taken one of the sofas.’

‘I refuse to do so and you can’t sleep on the floor.’

‘I can do whatever I want to do,’ Saffy told him, rolling herself into the spread and lying down beside the bed as well wrapped up as an Arctic explorer.

‘Except when I’m around,’ Zahir pronounced in direct challenge, snatching her up from the floor and planting her back on the divan with the strength that came so naturally to him.

‘I’m not sharing that bed with you!’ Saffy spat at him.

Zahir dealt her a derisive appraisal. ‘Even when you already know that you can certainly trust me to hear the word no?’ he queried in a very dry reminder.

Hot pink colour washed her lovely face and then receded to leave her pale and stricken. She was crushed by all that went unsaid within that aide-memoire, but equally suddenly she felt foolish making such a fuss about sharing a bed, and she squirmed out of the cloaking folds of the spread to slide below the sheet. ‘This is all your fault—you should never have brought me here!’

Zahir almost laughed. She was shouting at him again, fighting with him, and he should have been furious at her lack of respect but he wasn’t; he was too busy enjoying the novelty of being treated like an equal by a woman. Sapphire wouldn’t bat her eyelashes at him, look down in submission and offer honeyed words of feminine flattery as the other women he met did. He climbed into the bed and lay back against the pillows. With Sapphire’s mane of hair tossed all over the pillow beside his, the smell of the shampoo she used wafted into his nostrils, a familiar floral scent she had worn ever since he had known her, and that evocative aroma awakened too much that he would have preferred to forget. Slowly his lean brown hands clenched into fists, the tension in his lean powerful body extreme.

‘Well, isn’t this cosy?’ Saffy mocked, determined not to show weakness again.

‘Don’t rock the boat…’ Zahir purred softly in warning.

‘Your English has improved so much,’ Saffy remarked acidly, staring up at the boarded ceiling. ‘Was that a by-product of your promiscuity with various Western women or did you actually have to study the language?’

His even white teeth gritted. The novelty of her backchat was fast dimming in appeal and he sat up to stare down at her. ‘I was not promiscuous…’

Saffy stared stonily back at the lean bronzed beauty of his arresting face. ‘None of my business.’

Eyes as dark a black and cold as she had ever seen them, he swivelled away from her and turned on his side and she caught a glimpse of his back, and anything else provocative that she might have said was forgotten instantly. Without thought she thrust down the sheet to get a better look. The once-brown silken sweep of his smooth, muscular back was marred with slashed and intersecting lines of scars. Before she could think better of it, she exclaimed, ‘What on earth happened to your back?’

In an abrupt movement, Zahir flipped round to lie flat on his back again while colour crawled across his slashing cheekbones because he had forgotten to keep his shirt on. ‘Not something I want to talk about.’

‘But it looks like you were beaten… whipped! ’ Saffy burst out, unable to stifle her horror at the thought of anyone deliberately inflicting that amount of pain on him. His back must have been shredded to leave scars that deep and extensive.

In the nerve-racking silence, which only Zahir was capable of using like a weapon he switched out the light. She could recall so many times when he had shut her out like that five years earlier, keeping his own counsel, refusing to share his thoughts or even the details of what he did or where he went when he was away from her. He wasn’t the confiding type, never had been, was very much made in the iron image of an army officer with the proverbial stiff upper lip. She compressed her lips on the questions tumbling on her tongue. Had he been caught, imprisoned and mistreated during the rebellion that had brought his father down? But surely his status as his father’s heir should have protected him on either side of the fence?

Bewildered, even wondering why she should be so curious, Saffy closed her eyes and instead pictured him lounging in his boxers by the door and finally she smiled faintly in the darkness, the more disturbing images banished. He might have acquired a few scars but he was still a vision of bronzed masculine perfection, still her fantasy male from his perfect pecs to his six-pack abdomen and powerful hair-roughened thighs. He would either be highly amused or highly offended to learn that she pictured him when she tried to look sexy in a pose.

SAFFY WOKE UP because she was too warm and then went rigid, for at some stage of the night she and Zahir had drifted across the great divide of mattress separating them in the huge bed and it was hardly surprising that she had overheated. Their bodies were welded together like two magnets and, compared to her, he put out the most extraordinary amount of heat. Even more disturbing, however, was the hard male arousal she could feel thrusting against her thigh.

He was always in that state in the morning: she had realised that while she was married to him. But the flush of awareness that shimmered through her was shockingly new, fresh and intensely energising and she shivered. Her fingers flexed against the male bicep they were resting on, colour flashing across her embarrassed face as a hunger to touch him flared deep inside her. It was a supreme irony that in the past, while she couldn’t bear him to touch her, she had loved to touch him.

Black lashes dark as midnight and effective as silk fans swept up and she collided with stunning golden eyes and knew instantly what he was thinking. She yanked her hand off his strong muscular bicep and snaked back from him but she wasn’t quick enough, for Zahir had closed long brown fingers into her hair to entrap her.

‘Right at this minute,’ he positively purred like a very large predatory jungle cat on the prowl, ‘I’m all yours.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ she said in desperation, a spasm of panic claiming her.

‘Want me to tell you what you’re thinking about?’ Zahir husked. ‘Or will I just tell you what I’m thinking about?’

‘Let me go!’ she gasped.

He freed her hair and rolled back.