Her Exotic Prince

‘There is a place that was once home,’ he told her because the apartment overlooking the old harbour, bought off plan from a developer who had never heard of Kalil al-Zaki, could never be described as the home of his heart, his soul. ‘A faded photograph that hangs upon my grandfather’s wall. A place of stories of the raids, battles, celebrations that are the history of my family.’

Stories that had grown with the telling until they had become the stuff of legend.

It was an image that the old man looked at with longing. Where he wanted to breathe his last. Where he wanted to lie for eternity, at one with the land he’d fought for.

And Kalil would do anything to make that possible. Not that sitting here, sharing a meal with Lady Rose Napier was as tedious as he’d imagined it would be.

‘No one has lived there for a long time,’ he said.

For a moment he thought she was going to ask him to tell her more, but all she said was, ‘I’m sorry.’

She was quiet for a moment, as if she understood the emptiness, the sense of loss and he began to see why people, even those who had never met her, instinctively loved her.

She had an innate sensitivity. A face that invited confidences. Another second and he would have told her everything but, at exactly the right moment, she said, ‘Tell me about your brothers and sisters.’

‘How long have you got?’ he asked, not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed. ‘I have one sister, a year younger than me. I have five halfsisters, three half-brothers and six, no seven, steps of both sexes and half a dozen who aren’t actually related by blood but are still family.’

She counted them on her long, slender fingers.

‘Sixteen?’ she asked, looking at him in amazement. ‘You’ve got sixteen brothers and sisters? Plus six.’

‘At the last count. Sarah, she’s the English ex, and her husband are about to have another baby.’

Lydia sat back in her chair, stunned. As an only child she had dreamed of brothers and sisters, but this was beyond imagining.

‘Can you remember all their names?’ she asked.

‘Of course. They are my family.’ Then, seeing her doubt, he held up his hand and began to list them. ‘My sister is Adele. She’s married to a doctor, Michel, and they have two children, Albert and Nicole. My mother has two other daughters by her second husband…’

As they ate, Kal talked about his family in France, in England and America. Their partners and children. The three youngest girls whose mothers his father had never actually got around to marrying but were all part of a huge extended family. All undoubtedly adored.

His family, but nothing about himself, she realised. Nothing about his personal life and she didn’t press him. How a man talked about his family said a lot about him. She didn’t need anyone to tell her that he was a loyal and caring son. That he loved his family. It was there in his smile as he told stories about his mother in full drama queen mode, about his sister. His pride in all their achievements.

If he’d had a wife or partner, children of his own, he would certainly have talked about them, too. With love and pride.

‘You’re so lucky having a big family,’ she told him as they laughed at a story about one of the boys causing mayhem at a party.

‘That’s not the half of it,’ he assured her. ‘My grandfather set the standard. Five wives, ten children. Do you want their names, too? Or shall I save that for a rainy day?’

‘Please tell me that it doesn’t rain in Ramal Hamrah.’

‘Not often,’ he admitted.

Neither of them said anything while Atiya cleared the table, placed a tray of sweet things, tiny cakes, nuts, fruit, before them.

‘Can I bring you coffee or tea?’ Atiya asked.

‘Try some traditional mint tea,’ Kal suggested before she could reply. He spoke to Atiya in Arabic and, after a swift exchange, which apparently elicited the right answer, he said, ‘Not made with a bag, it will be the real thing.’

‘It sounds delicious.’

‘It is.’

He indicated the tray, but she shook her head.

‘It all looks wonderful but I can’t eat another thing,’ Lydia said. ‘I hope there’s a pool in Bab el Sama. If I keep eating like this I won’t fit into any of my clothes when I get home.’

‘I don’t understand why women obsess about being thin,’ he said.

‘No? Have you never noticed the way celebrities who put on a few pounds are ridiculed? That would be women celebrities,’ she added.

‘I know. Adele went through a bad patch when she was a teenager.’ He shook his head. Took a date, but made no attempt to push her to eat. Instead, he bestowed a lazy smile on her and said, ‘Now you know my entire family. Your turn to tell me about yours.’

Lydia waited while Atiya served the mint tea.

Completely absorbed by his complex relationships, the little vignettes of each of his brothers and sisters that had made them all seem so real, she had totally forgotten the pretence and needed a moment to gather herself.

‘Everyone knows my story, Kal.’

Kal wondered. While he’d been telling her about his family, she’d been by turns interested, astonished, amused. But the moment he’d mentioned hers, it was as if the lights had dimmed.

‘I know what the press write about you,’ he said. ‘What Lucy has told me.’

That both her parents had been killed when she was six years old and she’d been raised by an obsessively controlling grandfather, the one who’d taken a newspaper headline literally and turned her into the ‘people’s angel’.

‘What you see is what you get,’ she replied, picking up the glass of tea.

Was it?

It was true that with her pale hair, porcelain skin and dazzling blue eyes she could have stepped out of a Renaissance painting.

But then there was that mouth. The full sultry lips that clung for a moment to the small glass as she tasted the tea.

A tiny piece of the crushed leaf clung to her lower lip and, as she gathered it in with the tip of her tongue, savouring the taste, he discovered that he couldn’t breathe.

‘It’s sweet,’ she said.

‘Is that a problem?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t usually put sugar in mint tea, but it’s good.’ She finished the tea, then caught at a yawn that, had she been anyone else, he would have sworn was fake. That she was simply making an excuse to get away. ‘If you’ll excuse me, Kal, it’s been a long day and I’d like to try and get a couple of hours’ sleep before we land.’

‘Of course,’ he said, easing her chair back so that she could stand up and walking with her to the door of her suite, unable to quite shake the feeling that she was bolting from the risk that he might expect the exposure of her own family in return for his unaccustomed openness.

Much as he adored them, he rarely talked about his family to outsiders. He’d learned very early how even the most innocent remark to a friend would be passed on to their parents and, in a very short time, would appear in print, twisted out of recognition by people who made a living out of celebrity gossip.

Rose, though, had that rare gift for asking the right question, then listening to the answer in a way that made a man feel that it was the most important thing she’d ever heard.

But then, at the door, she confounded him, turning to face him and, for a moment, locked in that small, still bubble that enclosed two people who’d spent an evening together, all the more intimate because of their isolation as they flew high above the earth in their own small time capsule, neither of them moved and he knew that if she’d been any other woman, if he’d been any other man, he would have kissed her. That she would have kissed him back. Maybe done a lot more than kiss.

She was a warm, quick-witted, complex woman and there had, undoubtedly, been a connection between them, a spark that in another world might have been fanned into a flame.

But she was Lady Roseanne Napier, the ‘people’s angel’. And he had made a promise to his grandfather that nothing, no one, would divert him from keeping.

‘Thank you for your company, Rose,’ he said, taking her hand and lifting it to his lips, but his throat was unexpectedly constricted as he took a step back. He added, ‘Sleep well.’

It was going to be a very long week.

Chapter Four

TIRED as she was, Lydia didn’t sleep. Eyes closed, eyes open, it made no difference.

The hand Kal had kissed lay on the cover at her side and she had to press it down hard to keep it from flying to her mouth so that she could taste it.

Taste him.

His mouth had barely made contact and yet the back of her fingers throbbed as if burned, her body as fired up as if she’d had a faint electric shock.

In desperation she flung herself off the bed, tore off her clothes and threw herself beneath the shower, soaping herself with a gel that smelled faintly of lemons. Warm at first, then cooler until she was shivering. But still her skin burned and when Lydia lifted her hand to her face, breathed in, it was not the scent of lemons that filled her head.

It was nothing as simple as scent, but a distillation of every look, every word, the food they’d eaten, the mint tea they’d drunk. It had stirred the air as he’d bent over her hand, leaving her faint with the intensity of pure sensation that had rippled through her body. Familiar and yet utterly unknown. Fire and ice. Remembered pleasure and the certainty of pain.

Distraction.

She needed a distraction, she thought desperately as she wrapped herself in a fluffy gown, combed out her damp hair, applied a little of some unbelievably expensive moisturiser in an attempt to counteract the drying effects of pressured air.

She could usually lose herself in a book—she’d managed it earlier, even dozed off—but she’d left her book in the main cabin and nothing on earth would tempt her back out there until she had restored some semblance of calm order to her racketing hormones.

She chose another book from the selection Rose had packed for her and settled back against the pillows. All she had to do now was concentrate. It shouldn’t be hard, the book was by a favourite author, but the words refused to stay still.

Instead they kept merging into the shape of Kal’s mouth, the sensuous curve of his lower lip.

‘Get a grip, Lydie!’ she moaned, abandoning the book and sliding down to the floor where she sat cross-legged, hoping that yoga breathing would instil a modicum of calm, bring her down from what had to be some kind of high induced by an excess of pheromones leaking into the closed atmosphere of the aircraft.

Combined with the adrenalin charge of confronting the newsmen, tension at the prospect of facing airport security with Rose’s passport, then the shock of Kalil al-Zaki arriving to mess up all their carefully laid plans, it was scarcely any wonder that the words wouldn’t stay still.

That he was astoundingly attractive, took his duty of care to extraordinary lengths, had flirted outrageously with her hadn’t helped.

When they’d sat down to their dinner party in the sky, she’d been determined to keep conversation on the impersonal level she employed at cocktail parties, launches.

Kal had blown that one right out of the water with his reply to her first question and she’d forgotten all about the ‘plan’ as he’d in turn amused, shocked, delighted her with tales of his family life.

And made her envious at the obvious warmth and affection they shared. His might be a somewhat chaotic and infinitely extendable family but, as an only child with scarcely any close relations, she’d been drawn in by the charm of having so many people who were connected to you. To care for and who cared back. Who would not want to be part of that?

And that was only half the story, she realised. Sheikh Hanif was his cousin and there must be a vast Ramal Hamrahn family that he hadn’t even mentioned, other than to tell her that he and his family were personae non gratae at the Ramal Hamrahn court.

More, she suspected, than he told most people. But then Rose had that effect on people. Drew them out.

Instead, he had turned the spotlight on her, which was when she’d decided to play safe and retire.

There was a tap on the door. ‘Madam? We’ll be landing in fifteen minutes.’

‘Thank you, Atiya.’

She reapplied a light coating of make-up. Rose might want her picture in the paper, but not looking as if she’d just rolled out of bed. Brushed out her hair. Dressed. Putting herself back together so that she was fit to be seen in public.

The seat belt sign pinged as she returned to the cabin and she shook her head as Kal half rose, waved him back to his seat and sat down, fastening her seat belt without incident before placing her hands out of reach in her lap. Not looking at him, but instead peering out at the skein of lights skirting the coast, shimmering in the water below them.

‘Landing holds no terrors for you?’ Kal asked and she turned to glance at him. A mistake. Groomed to perfection he was unforgettable, but after eight hours in the air, minus his tie, in need of a shave, he was everything a woman would hope to wake up to. Sexily rumpled, with eyes that weren’t so much come to bed, as let’s stay here for the rest of the day.

As if she’d know…

Quickly turning back to the window as they sank lower and the capital, Rumaillah, resolved from a mass of lights into individual streets, buildings, her attention was caught by a vast complex dominated by floodlit domes, protected by high walls, spread across the highest point of the city.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

Kal put a hand on the arm of her chair and leaned across so that he could see out of her window, but he must have dialled down the pheromone count, or maybe, like her, he was tired because, even this close, there was no whoosh of heat.

‘It’s the Emiri Palace,’ he told her.

‘But it’s huge.’

‘It’s not like Buckingham Palace,’ he said, ‘with everything under one roof. The Emir’s palace is not just one building. There are gardens, palaces for his wives, his children and their families. The Emiri offices are there too, and his Majlis where his people can go and see him, talk to him, ask for his help, or to intercede in disputes.’

‘I like the sound of that. The man at the top being approachable.’

‘I doubt it’s quite as basic as it was in the old days,’ he replied. There was an edge to his voice that made her forget about the exotic hilltop palace and look more closely at him. ‘We’ve come a long way from a tent in the desert.’

We.

He might be excluded but he still thought of himself as one of them. She resisted the urge to ask him. If he wanted her to know he would tell her.

But, fascinated, she pressed, ‘In theory, anyone can approach him?’

‘In theory.’

There was something in his voice, a tension, anger, that stopped her from saying more.

‘And you said “wives”. How many has he got?’

‘The Emir? Just one. The tradition of taking more than one wife began when a man would take the widows, children of brothers slain in battle into his family. Then it became a sign of wealth. It’s rare these days.’ Then, with a curl of his lip that could have been mistaken for a smile if you hadn’t seen the real thing, ‘My family are not typical.’

‘And even they take only one at a time,’ she replied, lifting her voice a little so that it was gently teasing.

‘Legally,’ he agreed. ‘In practice there tends to be some overlap.’

‘And you, Kal?’

‘How many wives do I have?’ And this time the smile was a little less forced. ‘None, but then I’m a late starter.’

That she doubted, but suddenly the runway lights were whizzing past and then they were down with barely a bump.

Before she left the aircraft she visited the cockpit—now that it was safely on the ground—to thank the crew for a wonderful flight and, by the time she stepped outside into the warm moist air of the Gulf, her luggage had already been transferred to the waiting helicopter.

‘Ready?’ Kal asked.

She swallowed, nodded.

She’d been bold enough when the reality of committing her safety to what seemed to be a very small, fragile thing beside the bulk of the jet had been a distant eight hours away.

Now she was afraid that if she opened her mouth her teeth would start chattering like a pair of castanets.

Apparently she wasn’t fooling Kal because he said, ‘That ready? It’s not too late to change your mind.’

She refused to be so pathetic and, shaking her head once in a let’s get this over with gesture, she took a determined step forward. His hand at her back helped keep her moving when she faltered. Got her through the door and into her seat.

He said something to the pilot as he followed her—what, she couldn’t hear above the noise of the engine.

He didn’t bother to ask if she needed help with the straps, but took them from her and deftly fastened them as if it was something he’d been doing all his life. Maybe he had.

Then he gently lowered the earphones that would keep out the noise and allow the pilot to talk to them onto her head, settling them into place against her ears.

‘Okay?’ he said, not that she could hear, but she’d been sent on a lip-reading and signing course by the supermarket and had no problem understanding him.

She nodded and he swiftly dealt with his own straps and headset before turning in his seat so that he was facing her.

‘Hands,’ he said, and when she lifted them to look at them, not knowing what she was supposed to do with them, he took them in his and held them as the rotor speed built up.

She tried to smile but this was far worse than in a passenger aircraft. Everything—the tarmac, the controls, the reality of what was happening—was so close, so immediate, so in your face.

There was no possibility of pretence here.

No way you could tell yourself that you were on the number seven bus going to work and, as the helicopter lifted from the ground, leaving her stomach behind, she tightened her grip of his hands but, before the scream bubbling up in her throat could escape, Kal leaned forward and said, ‘Trust me, Rose.’

And then he kissed her.

It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was powerful, strong, demanding her total attention and the soaring lift as they rose into the air, leaving the earth far behind them, was echoed by a rush of pure exhilaration that flooded through her.

This was flying. This was living. And, without a thought for what would follow, she kissed him back.

Kal had seen Rose’s momentary loss of courage as she’d looked across the tarmac from the top of the aircraft steps to the waiting helicopter, followed by the lift of her chin, an unexpectedly stubborn look that no photographer had ever managed to capture, as she’d refused to back down, switch to the car.

It didn’t quite go with the picture Lucy had painted of the gentle, biddable girl—woman—who’d lovingly bowed to the dictates of her grandfather. Who was desperate for some quiet time while she fathomed out her future.

That was a chin that took no prisoners and, certain that once she was airborne she’d be fine, he hadn’t argued. Even so, her steps had faltered as they’d neared the helicopter and as they’d boarded he’d told the pilot to get a move on before she had time for second thoughts.

This was not a moment for the usual round of ‘Lady Rose’ politeness, handshakes, introductions. All that could wait until they arrived at Bab el Sama.

And he’d done his best to keep her distracted, busy, her eyes on him rather than the tarmac.

But as the engine note changed in the moment prior to take-off, her hands had gripped his so hard that her nails had dug into his palms and he thought that he’d completely misjudged the situation, that she was going to lose it.

Hysterics required more than a reassuring hand or smile, they needed direct action and there were just two options—a slap or a kiss.

No contest.

Apart from the fact that the idea of hitting anyone, let alone a frightened woman, was totally abhorrent to him, letting go of her hands wasn’t an option.

His ‘Trust me’ had been a waste of breath—she couldn’t hear him—but it had made him feel better as he went in for the kiss, hard and fast. This wasn’t seduction, this was survival and he wanted her total attention, every emotion, fixed on him, even if that emotion was outrage.

He didn’t get outrage.

For a moment there was nothing. Only a stunned stillness. Then something like an imperceptible sigh breathed against his mouth as her eyes closed, the tension left her body and her lips softened, yielded and clung to his for a moment, warm and sweet as a girl’s first kiss. Then parted, hot as a fallen angel tempting him to sin.

At which point the only one in danger of losing anything was him.

How long was a kiss? A heartbeat, minutes, a lifetime?

It seemed like all three as his hands, no longer captive, moved to her waist, her back, drawing her closer. A heartbeat while he breathed in the clean, fresh scent of her skin; minutes as the kiss deepened and something darker, more compelling stirred his senses; a lifetime while his hormones stampeded to fling themselves into the unknown without as much as a thought for the consequences.

Exactly like his grandfather. Exactly like his father.

Men without a purpose, without a compass, who’d put their own selfish desires above everything.

That thought, like a pitcher of cold water, was enough to jar him back to reality, remind him why he was here, and he drew back.

Rose took a gasping, thready little breath as he broke the connection. Sat unmoving for long moments before her lids slowly rose, almost as if the long, silky lashes were too heavy to lift.

Her lips parted as if she was going to speak but she closed them again without saying a word, instead concentrating on her breathing, slowing it down using some technique that she’d probably learned long ago to manage nerves.

When she raised her lashes again, she was sufficiently in control to speak.

He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she mouthed the words so carefully that he could lipread enough to get the gist, which was, as near as damn it, ‘If you were that scared, Kal, you should have told me. We could have taken the car.’

It was the response of a woman who, with ten years of interaction with the public behind her, knew exactly how to rescue an awkward moment, who could put anyone at ease with a word.

It put a kiss that had spiralled out of hand into perspective, allowing them both to move on, forget it.

Well, what had he expected?

That she’d fall apart simply because he’d kissed her?

She might—or might not—be a virgin princess, but she’d already proved, with her dry and ready wit, that she was no shrinking violet.

He knew he should be grateful that his rescue mission had been recognised for what it was. Received with her legendary good humour, charm.

But he wasn’t grateful. Didn’t want to forget.

He wanted to pull her close, kiss her again until that classy English cool sizzled away to nothing, her ‘charm’ shattered in a pyrotechnic blaze that would light up the night sky and this tender Rose, nurtured under glass, broke out and ran wild.

It wasn’t going to happen.

Even if had been an appropriate time or place, their destinies were written. Even if she rejected the Earl in waiting her grandfather had lined up to walk her down the aisle and chose someone for herself, it was never going to be the scion of a disgraced and dispossessed exile.

And when he took a bride, it would not be in response to carnal attraction, the sexual chemistry that masqueraded as love, stealing your senses, stealing your life. His marriage would be an affair of state that would cement an alliance with one of the great Ramal Hamrahn families—the Kassimi, the Attiyah or the Darwish. The surrender of one of their precious daughters an affirmation that he had restored his family to their rightful place.