Maisey Yates - Midnight on the Sands - Hajar's Hidden Legacy / To Touch a Sheikh / Her Sheikh Protector

But she didn’t want to be his bandage. She’d wanted to be his woman. His lover.

And now she was just convinced that there was truly nothing behind the rock wall he’d built around his soul. Nothing but darkness.

Avoidance, it turned out, was easy in the Hajari palace, as long as it was what Katharine wished.

Zahir had hardly seen her in the week and a half since the impromptu press conference. Since he’d come to her room and tortured himself by inches while he tasted and caressed her gorgeous, smooth body.

All he had been able to do was worship her perfection. Because he had not allowed himself to take. He had been too afraid. Of what might happen. Of what he might do or say. Of harming her in some way. Of what might happen if the rock-hard barrier of his control burst and all of the images came pouring through while he was at his most vulnerable.

He had not allowed himself to seek women out. Had not allowed himself to remember the kind of oblivion sex could bring, because oblivion was not kind to him anymore. It made him lose everything. He could not do that to her. Lose himself in her. He would not be a man if he were willing to do such a thing.

He might harm her in the worst case scenario, and in the best, she would find herself without that bargaining chip she had in her virginity.

A shiver of disgust ran through him. He didn’t see it that way, but his barbarian ancestors certainly had. His father, it seemed, had too. He doubted Malik had cared one way or the other. His brother had had such a laid-back manner, such an open acceptance and ease to him.

He was not Malik. That was for certain. Katharine would have been better off with Malik. Or with him, if the attack hadn’t happened. An ache spread through him, fierce, painful. It was the first time he’d allowed himself to think of what might have been if he and Katharine had been able to meet before the attack. If they had simply been a man and a woman.

“But that isn’t what happened,” he said into the empty space of his office.

And all of his reasons for stopping himself from having sex with her remained.

But his body was punishing him for it. He woke hard and aching in the middle of the night, his mind filled with visions of her pleasure-clouded eyes, full, parted lips reddened from kissing. That soft, curvy body. Perfect in every way, nothing to mar to her luscious beauty. The sound of her soft sighs filling his ears.

It was better than images of exploding grenades and the sounds of chaos and screaming.

The door to his office opened and he knew it was Katharine. Anyone else would have knocked. Katharine didn’t behave like everyone else. She didn’t bow and scrape and defer to his every command.

“We leave for Austrich tomorrow.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Well, I thought we should formulate a plan.” She eyed him as though it was his fault there wasn’t one, her pert chin angled out, her lips pursed.

He put his palms flat on his desk and stood, leaning in slightly. Her scent caught him, so warm and inviting. “I am not the one who has been doing the avoiding.”

Her mouth opened and closed, reminiscent of a goldfish. “I have not been avoiding you.”

“Well, you haven’t invaded my bedroom or my gym in nearly two weeks, and it’s been the same amount of time since you’ve invaded my office. Not only that, but you haven’t taken Lilah out for a ride. You’ve been hiding.”

“I don’t hide,” she said stiffly.

“Don’t you?” He looked at her haughty pose, at those steely-green eyes of hers. “You’re hiding now. Behind this facade. Emotionless, forceful, but I know the real woman. I’ve held her in my arms while she came apart with her pleasure.”

Color flooded her pale cheeks. “Just because you gave me an orgasm doesn’t mean you know me.”

“That’s not why I know you.”

He didn’t know why he said it, why he pressed. Except that he wanted her to admit that there was something between them. That there was heat. That she was more than the uppity princess that had stormed his castle over a month ago.

Because she was. He was certain of it.

It should not matter. Whoever she is, she’ll be gone when Alexander is of legal age. She’ll never be yours .

And he didn’t want her to be. It was a cruel joke, the mere thought of it. Because she was perfection. She was light and open and beneath that spine of steel, there was strength.

He was darkness. And he wanted to remain in the shadows. How could he do anything else when no one else involved in the attack was able to do anything? They were gone. They could never move on from it. Why should he? How could he? It seemed his duty, his responsibility, to cling to the memory, but it kept him apart.

“Why do you know me then?” she asked, her full lips turned down into a frown.

“Because … you’ve given yourself to me.”

It was true. She had. She was the image in his mind now, instead of grenades. When the crowd surrounded their town car in the market, he saw her face.

“I haven’t given myself to you.” She wrinkled her nose, as though the very idea disgusted her.

“I didn’t seem so repellent to you the other night in your bed,” he said, anger roaring through him immediately.

“That isn’t what I mean! Obviously I don’t … Obviously I … I don’t belong to you.”

“No, Katharine, you don’t. You could never belong to any man. It is far too passive a place for you to be. And you are anything but passive.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I do. I have the internal battle scars to prove it. I simply meant you have taken time with me. Taken the time to try and …” He didn’t like the word help . It seemed weak to him. And yet he’d needed it. And she had given it. “You have helped me.”

She looked down. “I needed to.”

His chest felt tight. “So that I can make a show of being a strong Regent to your country?”

She nodded, the motion jerky. “Of course.” She looked up, her green eyes wells of emotion so deep he could not see the end of them. And he didn’t want to. “Remember that it’s much colder in Austrich than it is here. The air is thinner, too.”

“Naturally.”

“What time do we leave tomorrow?”

“If we leave in the morning we should arrive with daylight left in Austrich. Eight o’clock?”

She forced a smile. “I guess coordinating wasn’t all that complicated.”

Maybe it wasn’t. But everything else was. Zahir wasn’t the kind of man who did complicated. Everything in his life was simple. Get out of bed, get through the day, try to find some rest in the sleep that always tried to elude him.

Not since Katharine had come. And he could truly say he didn’t want things back the way they were before she came.

But he wasn’t sure he could stand six years of denying himself while she lived in the palace, as his wife. Untouchable and more tempting than any woman he had ever encountered.

Green trees, capped with pristine white snow blurred together as their private plane landed on the airstrip that was positioned behind the palace in Austrich’s capital.

The deep saturation of color, after coming out of the washed-out landscape of Hajar was almost blinding in its intensity. Surreal as Katharine descended from the steps and onto the tarmac, her high-heeled shoe making contact with the icy ground.

It was never quiet in the desert. There was always the buzz of an insect or the sound of the wind skipping over the sand. But in Austrich, the mountains and trees offered insulation from noise, and brought a kind of silence that bordered on the surreal.

“You all right?” she asked, turning to face Zahir, who was looking at the sky, the gray, overcast sky that must seem completely foreign to him.