Sheikh's Captured Bride

‘How did you find out that I was back so quickly?’ Saffy prompted.

‘She’s been phoning here every day…I texted her after you called me from the airport,’ Cameron, a tall attractive man with close-cropped dark curls, told her from his position by the state-of-the-art cooker.

‘I assumed you’d want to stay on at Kat’s with Emmie,’ Saffy remarked.

‘No, Kat and Mikhail are hosting a big dinner tonight and I wasn’t in the mood to play nice with loads of strangers,’ Topsy confided with a slightly guilty wince. ‘And Emmie has already gone home again.’

Saffy’s heart sank at that news because it was obvious to her that once again her twin had chosen to dodge meeting her. Her estranged twin was still avoiding her, Saffy acknowledged unhappily, wounded by Emmie’s reluctance to even be in her company. Was she that bad? Was she truly so hateful to her twin? Or was it a simple if unpalatable fact that her past sins were beyond forgiveness?

‘Emmie’s gone back to Birkside?’ she checked, referring to Kat’s former home in the Lake District, the farmhouse her elder sister had inherited from her late father.

Kat was the daughter of their mother Odette’s first marriage, the twins the daughters of her second marital foray while Topsy was the result of their mother’s short-lived liaison with a South American polo player. By the time the twins reached twelve years of age they were a handful and Odette had placed all three girls in foster care. Kat, then in her twenties, had made a home at Birkside for all three of her sisters and Odette had had very little to do with her children since then. In every way that mattered, Kat had become the loving, caring mother her sisters had never really had.

‘Should Emmie be on her own up there?’ Saffy questioned the younger woman anxiously. ‘I mean, it’s a lonely house and now that she’s pregnant…?’

Topsy rolled her eyes. ‘Emmie always does her own thing and she has friends up there and a job,’ she pointed out breezily. ‘I also think that just at the minute Kat and Mikhail being so lovey-dovey makes them hard for Emmie to be around.’

Even while Saffy adored the fact that Kat had found happiness with a man who so obviously loved her, she too had felt like a gooseberry more than once in the couple’s company. If her twin’s solo pregnancy was the result of a recent relationship breakdown, Emmie was probably feeling a great deal more sensitive to that loving ambiance.

‘Dinner will be ready in ten minutes,’ Cameron announced.

‘I’ve got time to get changed, then?’

‘Yes. Let’s go into your room,’ Topsy urged, tugging at Saffy’s arm.

A frown indented Saffy’s brow at her sister’s obvious eagerness to get her alone. ‘What’s up?’ she asked as she closed her bedroom door.

Topsy, all liveliness sliding from her expressive face, sank down on the edge of the bed, hunched her shoulders and muttered, ‘I found out something I wasn’t prepared for this week and I didn’t want to bother Kat with it,’ she admitted.

Saffy dropped down on the stool by the dressing table. ‘Tell me…’

‘You’ll probably think it’s really silly,’ Topsy confided.

‘If it’s upset you, it’s not silly,’ Saffy declared staunchly.

Topsy pulled a face. ‘I don’t know if I am upset. I don’t know how I feel about it—’

‘How you feel about what?’ Saffy prompted patiently.

‘A few weeks ago, my dad, Paulo, asked me to agree to a DNA test. I’m eighteen. We didn’t need Kat’s permission,’ Topsy explained as Saffy raised her brows in astonishment at the admission. ‘Apparently Dad had always had doubts that I was his child and since he got married he and his wife have had difficulty conceiving—’

‘Your dad’s got married? Since when? You never told us that!’ Saffy exclaimed.

Topsy sighed. ‘It didn’t seem important. I mean, I’ve only met him a half-dozen times in my whole life. With him living in Brazil, it’s not like we ever had the chance to get close,’ she pointed out ruefully. ‘Anyway, his new wife and him went for testing when she didn’t fall pregnant and it turns out he’s sterile.’

Saffy stiffened at the news. ‘Hence the DNA testing…’

‘And it turns out that I couldn’t possibly be his kid,’ Topsy confided with a valiant smile. ‘So, I went to see Mum—’

Saffy gave her a look of dismay, for Odette was a challenging and devious personality. ‘Please tell me you didn’t!’

‘Well, she was the only possible person I could approach on the score of my parentage,’ Topsy pointed out ruefully. ‘First of all she tried to argue that in spite of the DNA evidence I was Paulo’s kid—’

‘I doubt if she wanted the subject dug up after this length of time,’ Saffy remarked stiffly, cursing their irresponsible and selfish mother and hoping she had dealt kindly with her youngest daughter.

‘She definitely didn’t,’ Topsy admitted with a grimace of remembrance. ‘She just said that if Paulo wasn’t my father, she didn’t know who was. Did she really sleep with that many men that she wouldn’t know, Saffy?’

Saffy reddened and veiled her eyes. ‘There were periods in her life when she was very promiscuous. I’m sorry, Topsy. That was an upsetting thing for you to find out. How did Paulo react?’

‘I think he had already guessed. He didn’t seem surprised. Let’s face it, I don’t look the slightest bit like him. He’s over six foot tall and built like a rugby player,’ Topsy reminded her companion ruefully. ‘Now I’ll probably never find out who my father is but why should that matter to me? After all, you and Emmie have a father who lives right here in London but who still takes no interest in you.’

Saffy groaned. ‘That’s different. Mum and him had a very bitter divorce. She dumped him because he lost all his money. When he built a new life and remarried and had a second family he didn’t want anything more to do with us.’

‘Does that bother you?’

‘No, not at all. You can’t miss what you’ve never had,’ Saffy lied, for that was another rejection that still burned below the layer of emotional scar tissue she had formed. When she and her twin had been at their lowest ebb, their father, just like their mother, had turned his back on them and had said he wanted nothing to do with them.

‘You’re evil…just like your mother. Look what you’ve done to your sister!’ he had told Saffy when she was twelve years old, and even the passage of time hadn’t erased her memory of the look of dislike and condemnation in his gaze.

‘Sorry to land you with all this,’ her kid sister muttered guiltily.

Beyond the door Cameron called them for dinner and Saffy seized the chance to give her kid sister a comforting hug, wishing she had some clever reassurance to offer Topsy on the topic of absent father figures. Unfortunately, not having normal caring parents left a hole inside you and even Kat’s praiseworthy efforts to fill that hole for her sisters had not proved entirely successful. Saffy had simply learned that when bad things happened you had to soldier on, hide your pain and deal with the consequences in private.

Only when Topsy had returned to Kat and Mikhail’s home for the night with her spirits much improved did Cameron turn with a concerned look in his shrewd eyes to ask Saffy suspiciously, ‘What—or should I say who—kept you unavoidably detained in Maraban?’

Saffy visibly lost colour. ‘It’s not something I want to talk about right now.’

‘You know that’s not a healthy attitude,’ Cameron, who was a firm believer in therapy, warned her.

‘Talking about anything personal will never come easily to me,’ Saffy admitted tightly. ‘I spent too many years locking everything up inside me.’

She was extraordinarily tired and she went to bed and lay there with her eyes wide open in the darkness, struggling to suppress the images of Zahir stuck inside her head. Fighting thoughts teemed alongside those unwelcome images. She would get over that little desert rendezvous in Maraban and leave Zahir behind her…in the past where he truly belonged.

Ten days later, Saffy wakened because while she had slept she had slid over onto her tummy and her breasts were too tender to withstand that pressure. With a wince, she sat up, wondering if it was time to use the pregnancy kit she had bought forty-eight hours earlier, but she was still strangely reluctant to put her suspicions to the test. Could she have enjoyed intimacy just one time and conceived when her unfortunate sister, Kat, had been trying without success to fall pregnant for many months? It struck her as unlikely and she had only bought the test in a weak moment of dreaming about what it might be like to become a mother.

Such silly dreams, childish dreams for a grown woman to be indulging in, she scolded herself impatiently, dreams full of fluffy, fantasy baby images and not a jot of reality. Somewhere deep down inside her a voice was telling her that a baby would be one little piece of Zahir that she could have and cherish, but she was intelligent enough to know that the reality of single parenthood was sleepless nights, cash worries and nobody else to share your worries and responsibilities with. Frustrated by her own rebellious brain, she got up and did her morning exercises, desperate to think of something else. When that didn’t work she changed into her sports gear and went out for a run, returning to the apartment drenched in perspiration and on legs wobbly from over-exertion. Stripping, she walked into the shower and washed. She was towelling herself dry when she heard the doorbell buzz. She pulled on her robe and padded across the hall to answer.

She looked through the peephole first and froze, looked again, her heart rate kicking up a storm. Zahir? Here in London? Her teeth gritting, she undid the chain and opened the door.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded sharply.

CHAPTER SIX

‘INVITE ME IN,’ Zahir commanded.

Saffy was uneasily aware of the two security men standing by the lift, of the status and level of protection Zahir now required as the ruler of Maraban, and the very idea that he was now at risk of becoming a target for attack gave her stomach a sick jolt. She swallowed hard, mustering her defences such as they were. ‘No.’

‘Don’t be juvenile,’ Zahir urged, his handsome mouth tightening, his air of gravity lending a forbidding edge to the smooth planes of his lean dark absolutely gorgeous face. ‘We have business to discuss.’

‘Business?’ Saffy parroted, suddenly wishing she hadn’t opened the door with wet hair and a face bare of make-up for, deprived of her professional grooming, she felt defenceless.

‘I told you that I would investigate the trust fund I set up for you.’ Impatience edged his dark deep drawl, energised his stunning dark deep-set eyes with sparks of gold, and as she watched him her mouth ran dry as a bone. ‘I have now done so.’

‘Oh, the missing money,’ she muttered in weak comprehension, and she stepped back with stiff reluctance to open the door, for she didn’t want him inside her personal space, didn’t want one more memory or association with him to further colour her existence.

‘Yes, the money,’ Zahir said drily, in a tone that suggested that he could have no other reason to roll up on her doorstep.

She studied him, in a split second memorising sufficient to commemorate his image for life, and she turned away, colour crawling up painfully over her cheekbones as she led the way into the living room. He wore a business suit, a beautifully tailored designer effort that showcased his height and breadth and long powerful legs. He had had his hair cut since she had last seen him, jet black hair feathering back from lean strong features to brush the collar of his shirt, the inevitable stubble shadowing his sculpted mouth and stubborn jaw line because he needed to shave twice a day. She felt like a vulture swooping down greedily on every tiny intimate detail of him and her tummy hollowed with a sense of dread, for she had never felt so vulnerable.

Zahir focused on the fluid sway of her hips encased in colourful silk as she moved ahead of him. He guessed she had just stepped out of the shower and was naked beneath those swirling folds of fabric and he was assailed by a slew of highly erotic images that sent a surge of lust shooting straight to his groin. He gritted his even white teeth and flung his arrogant dark head high. He knew what he was doing; he knew exactly what he was doing this time. He might have ditched his sense of honour but he had made a decision he could live with. Nobody was perfect, nobody followed every rule… Imperfection had suddenly become newly acceptable to him.

Saffy turned round and regarded him expectantly, her gaze slanting out of a direct meeting with his shrewd eyes and focusing on his wide sensual mouth instead. Instantly she felt hunger flare like a storm in her pelvis and perspiration beaded her short upper lip as she fought the weakness and tried to crush it out. But her body, it seemed, had discovered a treacherous life all of its own and she was suddenly aware of the heaviness of her tender breasts and the straining, aching peaks.

‘That five million you told me about?’ she prompted with deliberate tartness of tone, keen for him to take his leave again.

‘My London lawyer set up the fund with your solicitor. But five years ago nobody involved was aware that your solicitor was in the early stages of senile dementia and, sadly, he didn’t do his job properly,’ Zahir explained grimly. ‘You were not informed about the fund as you should have been and when your solicitor took early retirement through ill health, his son took over his legal practice. When the son realised that you were ignorant of the money accumulating every month, he committed fraud.’

‘Fraud?’ Saffy parroted, her bright blue eyes widening.

‘He’s been syphoning off the funds for his own benefit ever since. I have put the matter in the hands of the police,’ Zahir informed her grimly. ‘I owe you an apology for accusing you of having excessively enriched yourself since our divorce.’

Saffy lifted her chin. ‘Yes, you do.’

‘In spite of everything, I did intend for you to have that money as security and I am very angry that you did not receive it,’ he admitted shortly. ‘It is possible that you would never have become a model had you known that you were already financially secure.’

Saffy blinked in surprise at that suggestion. ‘I doubt that. Had I known about the fund, I would have refused to accept it. We were married for such a short time that I didn’t feel that you owed me anything.’

‘You were my wife and my responsibility. I felt differently,’ Zahir disagreed with unblemished cool.

‘If you’d still had a large financial stake in my future, I wouldn’t have felt free to put our marriage behind me,’ Saffy admitted with quiet dignity as she began moving back to the door with obvious intent. ‘But since I didn’t know about the fund, it hardly matters now. I’m just relieved you’ve managed to sort it out. Now, if that’s all you have to say—’

‘No, it’s not all. I have something else I wish to discuss.’

Saffy froze in her tracks and slowly turned back to him. ‘If it’s anything to do with the recent past, it’s unwelcome and I don’t want to hear it.’

Zahir regarded her with glittering dark golden eyes. ‘Tough,’ he told her. ‘I’m here and you’ll listen.’

‘Look, that kind of attitude may go down well in Maraban but it leaves me cold!’

‘But I don’t…leave you cold,’ he affixed as if she might be in some doubt as to his meaning.

A flush of pink washed from her long slender throat up in a wave of burning mortification, for to have him throw that in her face was an affront of no mean order. ‘I’m not listening, Zahir… I’m going to show you out. I want you to leave.’

Instead he stalked towards her like a prowling jungle cat cornering a prey. ‘No, you don’t. You’re being stubborn. You don’t like the tables being turned but you put this ball into my court—’

‘No, I didn’t!’ Saffy exclaimed in angry vexation.

‘You came to me willingly—’

‘I said I wasn’t going to talk about this!’ Saffy flung back at him furiously.

Zahir sent the door behind her crashing shut with an imperious shove of one strong hand. ‘I have a proposition I want you to consider—’

‘No…no.’ Saffy whipped up her hands to press them against her ears in desperate defiance. ‘I’m not listening. You’ve got nothing to say that I could want to hear.’

Zahir grabbed her hands and yanked them down, retaining a firm hold on her wrists. ‘I’ve already bought you an apartment here in London. You’ll move out of this one into it and I will visit you there whenever I am free…’

As simple shock winged through Saffy in a tidal wave her hands went limp in his grasp and she stared up at him wide-eyed with astonishment and no small amount of incredulity. ‘An apartment? What on earth are you suggesting?’

‘That you leave your current lover and become mine,’ Zahir spelt out with barely leashed ferocity. ‘I don’t want you here with him. I don’t care what arrangement you have. I will only come to you if you are mine alone!’

Saffy blinked rapidly, processing his words in disbelief. ‘You’re insane. Five years ago, you divorced me and cast me off like an old shoe you’d outgrown!’ she condemned rawly. ‘And now you’re asking me to be your mistress?’

Brilliant dark eyes narrowed and he freed her hands. ‘That’s an emotive label and rather outdated.’

‘And yet you’ve got the nerve to suggest such a demeaning relationship might suit me?’ Saffy hissed at him furiously.

‘Yes, I have the nerve,’ Zahir declared in a driven undertone, his accent very thick. ‘I want you to the edge of madness but I won’t share you with other men.’

‘My goodness,’ Saffy said in a sharp and brittle voice. ‘Was I that good in the tent?’

‘Stop it,’ Zahir urged harshly, stroking a stern finger across her parted lips, leaving a tingle in the wake of his warning. ‘Don’t reduce us both to that level with that tongue of yours. There is no sin in us indulging ourselves in pleasure. Who would it harm? We would be discreet. I would spend as much time with you as I can find to spare.’

But Saffy was still stunned by what he was proposing. A mistress? A kept woman in the background of his life, a dirty secret? Her? He had to be kidding. Her pride and independence would never allow her to accept such a relationship. Of course, how could he know that? At eighteen she had been loving, clingy and needy and that was probably how he still saw her. Back then marriage and a man she loved had been the zenith of her ambitions. But the more she thought of it the insult of what he was prepared to offer her in the present cut very deep indeed and she could not credit that he would believe even for a second that she could agree to be any man’s secret mistress!

‘It really is time that you go,’ Saffy snapped, throwing her head back, damp golden hair rippling back from her taut cheekbones. ‘You’ve said what you wanted to say and my answer is no. No, no, no! I like my life just the way it is.’

‘Look at me and tell me you don’t want me,’ Zahir growled.

And she looked and lingered on those lean, darkly handsome features and lost, blue eyes fearlessly clashing with smouldering gold, and then it was as if a knot were unfurling faster and faster inside her, unleashing a disturbing blast of emotions and responses that shook her inside out. But even then in the midst of that gathering storm she knew that no way would she ever sink low enough to become his mistress. Yes, she wanted him, but no, she would never take what he was offering because the price was too high.

Saffy parted her lips. ‘I don’t want you enough for that…’

Zahir glowered down at her. ‘Liar.’

Saffy tossed her head. ‘You can’t bully me into giving you the answer you want—’

‘I don’t bully you. I have never bullied you,’ Zahir countered wrathfully.

‘You’ve very domineering.’

‘You like it,’ he told her with a roughened edge to his voice, lush black lashes low over his gaze as he watched the tip of her tongue snake out to moisten her lower lip.

‘I like my men civilised,’ Saffy shot back scornfully.

‘But you still want me,’ Zahir framed with hungry intensity.

‘As I said…not enough to become your personal, private slut,’ she spelt out succinctly, but her breathing pattern was fracturing, her tension so great as he came closer that it was like a tightening band constraining her lungs.

‘Prove it,’ he said, backing her up against the wall, winding long brown fingers into her golden hair to anchor her in place, and drew her head up.

Saffy trembled, pink flying into her cheeks. ‘No kissing, no anything,’ she warned him. ‘I won’t let you do this to me—’

And being Zahir, who had a lot in common with an express train when he was set on a goal, he simply ignored her, bending his head, nuzzling her throat, licking a delicate path along her collarbone with such erotic skill that the pulse there went crazy. Her hands knotted into fists at her side to prevent herself from touching him even while the lips he had so far ignored tingled and burned for attention.

‘And how dare you offer me that option?’ Saffy continued heatedly, her rancour on that point unforgotten.

‘He who does not dare loses,’ Zahir traded with assurance, welding his hard, demanding mouth to hers in an explosion of passion that sent her heart racing and the blood pumping insanely fast through her veins.

‘What the heck are you playing at?’ she gasped strickenly, appalled by the insidious weakness spreading through her lower limbs and the glow of heat and yearning firing up low in her pelvis.

‘I’m not playing,’ Zahir said thickly, returning to plunder her mouth, sliding his tongue in and out between her parted lips and then delving deep in a sensual assault that made tiny shudders rack her tall, shapely frame. He pressed her back against the wall and even through the barrier of the suit she could feel him hard and urgent and ready. ‘I want you. I have wanted you every day since you left Maraban… I can’t sleep for wanting you!’

And although words were easy to say and often empty, something still quickened and tightened inside Saffy’s chest when he admitted that she exerted that much influence over him. Her robe came undone as he jerked it loose, sliding a hand below it to trail his fingers up her inner thigh. Instantly every sense went on red alert. In that moment she wanted him to touch her more than she had ever wanted anything and she went rigid with anticipation, unable to breathe for longing. She burned; she ached. And then with one stroke of his clever fingers he found her and an agonised moan was wrenched from her as he toyed with her tender flesh, rubbing the tiny bud that controlled her until she strained against him, whimpering, quivering, helpless with need while he explored the slick, hot heat between her legs and she gasped under his marauding mouth. Time had no meaning for her. Indeed it felt as if the world had speeded up because she was so frantically impatient, every skin cell reaching for the climax her body was so desperate to experience.

Zahir paused and she heard the sound of a zip, the crackle of foil and she blinked like someone coming out of the dark into the light, but her hunger didn’t abate even a little when she met stunning coal-black-fringed golden eyes alight with desire. She trembled, tried to reason and discovered that she was quite incapable of logic in the grip of the uncontrollable need clawing at her like a kind of madness…terrifying and overwhelming, utterly shameless in its single-minded focus.

‘I cannot take you to another man’s bed,’ Zahir growled, snaking one arm round her waist to lift her off her feet. ‘Wrap your legs round me,’ he urged.

And she did, hungry for him to put his mouth back on hers, unbearably hungry for him to touch her again. Her arms locked round his neck to steady herself and he braced her against the wall while he angled his hips and lowered her until she felt the smooth, hot crown of his bold shaft pushing against her most tender flesh. Her eyes widened to their fullest, her head rolling back on her shoulders as he slowly, strongly pressed his passage up into her tight sheath. Her excitement went into a tail-spin as he stretched her with his fullness, his grunt of all-male satisfaction vibrating sexily in her ear. He angled her back, withdrew from her achingly tender flesh and then brought her down again hard, sending shockwaves of sensation pounding through her lower body.