Surrender in the Arms of the Sheikh

Stupid, hopeless longing. How was it possible for this man to deride her, to criticise and pour scorn on her, and yet she was still drawn to that dark, lean body, wanted to see those black eyes soften with passion once more? ‘So that’s it. Subject closed.’ She lifted her eyes and met his stare with a steady gaze. ‘So now you know—can we please just forget about this whole farce? You can’t possibly want me to work for you—not really. Get someone else to arrange your wretched party for you.’

The corners of his mouth lifted upwards in a cruel imitation of a smile. She still did not get it! Oh, foolish, foolish woman. ‘On the contrary, Sienna,’ he said softly. ‘I do not want anyone else. It is you I want and you that I shall have.’

And Sienna began to tremble.

CHAPTER SIX

A MONTH was no time at all—but in a way Sienna was glad that Hashim had demanded such an outrageously short time to arrange his party. If it had dragged on over weeks, then what kind of state might she have found herself in?

As it was, she had her work cut out to find a venue—and there certainly wasn’t time to think about his thinly veiled threat, or the sensual way he had looked at her.

Determinedly, she put him out of her mind and holed herself up in her tiny office at her home in Kennington and rang round, using every contact she’d ever made until at last she struck lucky. She could have the use of Bolland House, set in a hundred acres in the glorious Hampshire countryside. She had driven down to see it and had pronounced it perfect.

She had found a local acclaimed chef who cooked using fresh organic produce sourced from nearby farms. She had chosen flowers, and was bussing in her favourite sommelier—though she had warned him that some of the guests might not be drinking alcohol and asked him to provide a wide selection of soft drinks which were rather more exciting than orange juice!

In fact everything was now in place…and with just three days to go it felt a bit as she imagined the atmosphere in one of the giant space stations just before they sent a rocket into flight—the tension of the countdown was almost unbearable. Especially in this heat.

‘I’m making coffee!’ called a voice from the kitchen. ‘Do you want some?’

‘Love some!’ Sienna called back, and sat back in her chair and sighed. It was funny how circumstances could change out of all recognition in such a short time. Up until that meeting with Hashim, Sienna had been utterly contented. She had her little terraced house in Kennington, which she had bought as a neglected and nearly derelict wreck. She had spent every spare minute doing it up—stripping the walls, sanding the paintwork and painting it in light colours, filling it with mirrors to make it seem bigger and brighter. She had saved up to have a new bathroom and kitchen put in and had painted the front door in a deep, dark blue.

When the house had been habitable, she had taken in a lodger to help with the mortgage—Kat, who was now in her last year of studying languages at a nearby university. And only then had Sienna given herself the luxury of turning her attention to the garden and the challenge of making something pretty out of the small square of ground which had looked like a builders’ yard.

‘Coffee’s ready!’ called Kat.

‘Coming!’

Sienna got up and went through to the kitchen, where Kat was just putting the cafetière and mugs onto a pretty spotted tray, her red hair falling over her shoulders. She looked up as Sienna came in and smiled. ‘Shall we drink it in the garden?’

‘That would be lovely,’ said Sienna, but she could hear the flatness in her own voice as she went out into the sunshine.

She felt like an outsider to the rest of the world. Usually she revelled in pride and pleasure at the small oasis she had created in the middle of the city, but not today. She could see the sunlight dappling through the honeysuckle, but she couldn’t seem to smell the fragrant blooms, nor appreciate its simple beauty. Hashim’s reappearance in her life seemed to have sucked the vibrancy out of everything except the memory of his dark and cruel face, and his hard, virile body.

She took the coffee that Kat poured for her and stared into the cup as gloomily as someone with a fear of heights being told to do a high dive.

‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’ said Kat.

Sienna looked up. Her teeth gritted into the bright, cheery smile which she had become rather good at perfecting. ‘Oh, just work. You know. It’s frantic at the moment.’

‘You don’t usually complain,’ observed Kat, her eyes narrowing. ‘You’re usually glad when it’s like that.’

‘Well, it’s hot, too. Isn’t it?’ Sienna wiped her damp brow with a jokey and exaggerated gesture— because how could she tell Kat what was troubling her, and what could she tell her?

Oh, I had a fling with a sheikh until he discovered that I’d done some topless photos, and then he…he…

Little beads of sweat studded her forehead and she wiped them away with an angry hand. How awful it sounded when pared down to the basic facts.

She wouldn’t tell Kat. Because if she told Kat about Hashim then that would give him an identity which would live on for ever. Kat would want to know all about him—who wouldn’t? No, she wouldn’t tell anyone. She would do what he wanted her to do and then hopefully he would leave her alone.

Hopefully?

That was part of the trouble, too. He had forced her into this corner and yet a part of her wanted to impress him. To engineer the most wonderful dinner party for him and dazzle him—leaving him with an altogether better memory of her than he currently had.

And wasn’t there another part of her—a stubborn and stupid and romantic one—which wished that she could just go back and rewrite history?

Sometimes she started thinking about how it might have been if she’d never done those photos—but then she made herself stop. Thinking like that was a pretty pointless exercise. If she hadn’t been able to come up with the money quickly then her mother’s life would have collapsed around her—and how could she have lived with that?

And even if he hadn’t found out it would never have been anything more than a fling—for how could it have been? What had she been imagining—that he’d buy her a whopping great ring and marry her, take her back to Qudamah as the Sheikh’s wife? Sienna took a mouthful of too-hot coffee and winced.

‘Steady,’ warned Kat, only half jokingly.

‘Oh, listen—there’s that wretched phone again!’ Sienna leapt to her feet and gave her housemate an expression which said sorry. But in truth she was glad to get away—to keep herself busy instead of fending off Kat’s concerned questions.

‘Posh Parties,’ she said as she picked the phone up, and then gripped onto it with whitening knuckles.

‘Hello, Sienna,’ Hashim said softly.

He had the kind of voice which made your skin shiver in spite of yourself, and Sienna closed her eyes in despair. She hadn’t spoken to him since that night in the restaurant, and sometimes she had half imagined that she’d dreamt the whole thing up.

But life was rarely as kind as that.

‘Hello, Hashim,’ she said calmly.

Most people might have asked if it was convenient to talk, but not him.

‘It is done?’ he questioned, watching as a blonde on the other side of the foyer crossed one slim, silk- stockinged leg over another and slanted him a smile.

‘Everything is arranged,’ she said mechanically. ‘You got my photos of the venue?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you are happy with the menu plans?’

‘Perfectly happy.’

‘Drinks seven-thirty to eight, dinner at eight-thirty.’ She hesitated. ‘Obviously I will be down there earlier, to oversee everything—but do you…do you want me to stay until the end?’

‘Most assuredly I do,’ he said smoothly, and unseen a slow smile of anticipation curved the cruel line of his mouth. ‘And you will dress to party, Sienna. I want you to blend in. Or stand out,’ he added mockingly, a jerk of longing arousing him as he imagined her baring her white and perfect breasts. And she would. Oh, she would…. ‘The choice is yours.’

She opened her mouth to tell him that she didn’t need advice on what to wear—until she realised that antagonising him would get her nowhere. Grit your teeth and bear it, and it will soon all be over.

‘I shall look forward to it,’ she said crisply.

Hashim’s smile became hard-edged. He could see the blonde sliding her tongue wetly over her lips but he turned away. He had never been turned on by the very obvious—and besides, his thoughts were given over to one seduction alone.

‘Let’s hope it lives up to our expectations,’ he murmured, and his black eyes dilated, like a cat’s. ‘I’ll see you on Saturday.’ Abruptly he terminated the connection, before the sultry throb of desire could be transmuted to his voice. Because he wanted her to be relaxed, her guard down.

Sienna replaced the phone and stood staring at it for long, countless moments. After Saturday it would all be over.

And suddenly she couldn’t wait.

Clunking up the grand drive in her battered old car, Sienna arrived at Bolland Hall just after teatime and let herself in.

‘Hello!’ she called, but there was no response. She walked through the arched hallway into the dining room and saw the table laid for dinner. She was unable to resist a smile of satisfaction. It was perfect.

Beside Georgian silver and priceless crystal, crisp damask napkins were folded into pristine rectangles and tall candles were ready to be lit.

Everything was as it should be.

There was a stunning floral centrepiece. Fragrant flowers of pink and ivory, dotted with the occasional yellow rose—chosen especially because they were the Sheikh’s colours. The colours his jockeys wore. The colour of the Qudamah flag—pink and cream, with a tiny splash of gold in one corner. She breathed in their scent appreciatively.

Similar arrangements of flowers were dotted around the place, and Sienna made her way through the silent house, briefly wondering where all the staff had disappeared to—but they were probably having a well-earned break, since they had clearly been busy.

In the vast kitchen, berry-dark and luscious individual summer puddings lay cooling in the fridge, along with marinades and champagne. Crisp meringues sat snowy-light on a tray next to a bunch of perfect grapes and a dish of white peaches. Several bottles of claret had already been decorked, ready to be carefully poured into the eighteenth-century crystal decanters.

Sienna smiled again. Let Sheikh Hashim Al Aswad try to find any fault with her arrangements!

She heard the crunch of gravel on the drive and wondered if the staff were back. She glanced at her watch. Probably. But as she glanced out of the window she saw a low and screamingly expensive black sports car drawing to a halt. Well, if that was one of the staff then she needed to switch career—and sharpish!

She clip-clopped her way into the hall as the doorbell rang and pulled open the door, her face and her body freezing as she saw Hashim himself standing there, a lazy smile touching the corners of his lips.

Sienna swallowed. She had somehow expected to see him clad in an impeccable dinner jacket, with black tie and snowy white shirt, and dark, tapered trousers which would make his legs look endless. The Western style he seemed to favour the majority of the time.

But he was not. Tonight he was dressed in clothes which heralded far more exotic climes…in fine silk the colour of a pomegranate which clung faintly to hard muscle and lean sinew. It provided the perfect backdrop for his rich black hair and golden-dark skin, but it reminded her of another time—a bitterly erotic one. She felt shame and desire and regret bubbling up inside her, but most of all she felt longing—felt it with an intensity which took her breath away.

Please don’t let it show, she prayed silently.

Hashim saw the play of conflicting emotions which crossed her features, and an emotion which was almost alien to him caught him in its silken snare.

Excitement.

‘Hello, Sienna.’

‘Hashim!’ she said softly, in a tone he couldn’t quite work out. ‘You’re…you’re early.’

She stood bathed in the soft yet fierce light of the setting sun and he thought that he had never seen her look more beautiful—that thick, shiny hair caught up and woven with glittering clips, making him aware that her neck was classically long and swan-like.

Her dress was made of some light, delicate fabric, layer upon gossamer layer of it, in swirls of rose which made him think of the petals of her mouth. The dress was modest by anyone’s standards, even his— and yet he was struck, not for the first time, by how the hint of a body could inflame the senses far more than if it was on show.

As if his senses needed any inflaming!

But he kept his face calmly impassive. This had, after all, been a long time in coming—and he was a master at keeping his feelings hidden. He must not strike until he was certain…

‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’ he queried mockingly.

She knew she should tell him that it was not her place to invite him in—that this was his party, and his money paying for it—but all those thoughts just flew straight out of her mind. For his proximity was making her head spin. She shrank back as he passed by her—as if that could make her immune to the raw virility which seemed to radiate from him. But nothing could make her immune to him.

The black eyes were studying her face as a fox’s might just before it devoured a chicken—whole—and a smile was playing around his lips. A smile that made her feel hot and prickly and distinctly…odd.

‘Do…do you want a drink?’ she questioned. ‘Or to have a look around—check things out?’

‘No.’

She wished he wouldn’t stare at her that way, and yet she never wanted him to stop doing it. Pull yourself together, Sienna, she told herself. Remember who he is.

‘I’m afraid that the staff have gone off on an extended break,’ she said, trying for something light, something to dispel the atmosphere which was fraught and heavy—building into something she didn’t recognise nor even want to acknowledge.

And maybe that was why she relaxed and didn’t see it coming. But even if she had would she honestly have been able to stop it? Or wanted to stop it?

Because Hashim suddenly pulled her into his arms without warning and anchored her firmly against the full length of his body. His smile hardened.

Don’t, she told herself weakly as she felt the musculature and the power. Fight him.

But she did not fight him. She trembled.

And Hashim briefly closed his eyes as one arm encircled the slender column of her waist, sighing with soft triumph as he felt the instinctive flowering of her breasts crushed to his chest. What he had desired for so long would soon be his. It was going to be easier than he had even dared anticipate.

He tilted her chin with the tip of his finger, his black eyes glittering with an inner fire, and she smouldered beneath his scorching gaze. ‘Who cares about the staff?’ he drawled, and his lips began to move towards her as if a magnetic force compelled them to.

‘But—’

‘Shh.’ His lips grazed hers, touchpaper-sure. ‘There are a thousand things I wish to do and show to you, and we must waste not a second.’

Time froze. Her heart seemed to thump out a million beats in those few seconds. His face swam before her, shifting in and out of focus, and she drifted her eyes over it greedily, drinking in the hard, flat planes, the thin, jagged line which ran down the side of his cheek and scarred it.

But most of all it was the mouth which tempted her—the voluptuous cushion of the lower lip contrasting so markedly with the cruel hard line of the upper one. She could see the gleam of his white teeth and the soft pink of his tongue. It was as if all the time in between had never happened, as if nothing existed nor ever had except for what was here and what was now. In this room, in his arms, in the heightened and fragile atmosphere, with the unsteadiness of their breathing and the scent of the flowers.

‘Hashim,’ she whispered, but she never knew what it was she intended to say, for his eyes had hardened in tune with his body and he bent his head to blot out the world.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A KISS could be a question and an answer. It could take or give. But Hashim’s kiss robbed Sienna of everything except her own helpless response to it. Somewhere at the back of her mind a thousand voices screamed out their protest, but she silenced them as ruthlessly as if they had been her enemies. Instead, she opened her mouth beneath the hard, seeking warmth of his lips. And was lost.

Hashim gave a low laugh of delight at the ease with which she pressed her lips so eagerly against his—it grew in the back of his throat and came out like the small groan of a playful lion cub.

‘Oh, yes,’ he murmured into her mouth, and she murmured back, something muffled and incoherent— the mindless sound women sometimes made when they were ready for sex.

But Hashim was careful, and although he felt his heart pounding, desire hardening him with its exquisite torturous heat, he knew that this seduction must be a cold-blooded one. One wrong move and she might flee from his arms. One incautious word and all would be lost.

He knew which buttons to press—for his experience of women was encyclopaedic. He knew when to cajole and when to demand. When to lead and when to follow. But with Sienna it was different. She had stated her resistance to just this act, and while her body might be responding at the moment the mind could be a powerful deterrent. Particularly in a woman’s case.

It was, he realised, as he drifted his mouth away from her neck and began to kiss softly at the line of her jaw, the very first time in his life that he’d had to actually seduce a woman. Normally he had to fight them off. Vaguely he remembered something he had read when schooling himself in the art of love, as royal males of Qudamah did when they reached the age of fifteen. That when a woman was uncertain, you must take it slowly. Very slowly. You must make her believe that you do not have love in mind until it is too late for her to stop. And women did not so easily reach that place of no return as men did.

His mouth was featherlight—provoking and enticing —and Sienna’s head fell back. ‘Hashim,’ she breathed, and all her hopes and longings were focused on that one little word.

He leapt on the spark of assent and sought to fan the fire with sweet words of his own. ‘What is it, sweet Sienna? Sweet, sweet Sienna,’ he whispered. His lips touched the base of her throat, teasing it with the tip of his tongue—an erotic and neglected area, or so he had been told—and her little moan told him that his information had been correct. At the same time he began to stroke his fingers down the curve of her hips, taking great care to avoid the obviously erogenous zones. ‘That pleases you?’

She felt the pulsing of her blood, felt the words spill from her mouth as if she had no control over them. ‘Oh, yes!’ she gasped. ‘Yes!’

Unseen, he smiled, now risking the flat of his hand lightly skating over her bottom, and in silent answer to the unspoken progression of his movements he felt her squirm against him. The smile disappeared as he let it skate right back again, to cup the pert globe with possessive fingers. Of course she was responsive! Was he forgetting what kind of woman she was? But he dampened his anger down, for it made him harden even more. And it was not his wish to just rip her panties off and drive into her. He would make her eat her defiant words of the other day in the most delicious way possible.

And she would beg him to do it to her!

He teased her and excited her, drifting his fingertips along her thighs, skittering them over the hungry fork of her, but, like a man spoilt for choice at a feast, he deliberately stayed away from her breasts. His mouth hardened. Those he was saving until last.

‘Hashim!’ she gasped in wonder, as he tiptoed sensation all over her skin, ignited it where he touched, leading her down a path so unbearably sweet that she could scarcely believe this was happening.

His mind worked more quickly than his fingers. If he sought out the classic place of seduction—a bed— then it might allow time for reality to snap into focus and break the spell. He felt himself grow taut, tense, tight, hard as he realised that it was going to have to be here. Here! Like a schoolboy with no place to go—but the thought of that, too, excited him. Making do was not something he had ever encountered before, and as always the novel had an intoxicating power all of its own.

When he touched her leg she made no objection. He could feel her impatience and he rewarded it with the slow slide of his hand beneath the filmy layers of her delicate dress, circling the cool satin of her inner thigh to the sound of a tiny moan made at the back of her throat.

‘You like that?’

What could she say? Especially as his fingertips were now skating over the moist silk of her panties. Her skin was blazing, her heart was thundering, and warmth and longing overwhelmed her. For only Hashim could make her feel this way—this alive— this wonderful. Like one of those statues brought to life at the end of a play, able to live properly at last. ‘Y-yes.’ She shuddered. ‘You know I do.’

‘Then hold me, Sienna,’ he urged. ‘Hold me.’ And as her hands fluttered up to catch hold of the broad bank of his shoulders he gave a grim kind of smile. That was not exactly what he had meant, but for now it would have to do.

Exulting in the freedom of actually touching him again, Sienna was aware that the tips of her fingers were pressing into the fine silk which covered the infinitely finer silk of the skin beneath. Her nails began to scrabble cat-like against the slippery material, as if she wanted to rip it from his body, and he gave a low laugh of delight.

‘Ah, yes,’ he murmured appreciatively. ‘Much better! I see that time has done nothing but hone your appetites.’

His words should have warned her, or stopped her, or cautioned her, but she was in a golden fog of wanting as he began to touch her with a slow, expert caress, and too bewitched to stop him, wanting more, far more.

He pushed aside the damp fabric of her knickers and touched her intimately, where her heat seared against him, and he felt the warmth of her and now he, too, groaned.

‘Hashim!’ she cried out, startled by sensation—like someone who had jumped out of a parachute after a long absence and forgotten just how mind-blowing it could be. And it had been such a long time…

‘You like that?’ he teased.

The word was wrenched from her. ‘Y-yes.’

‘What else do you like?’

‘You know,’ she breathed. He seemed to know everything.

Amid the clamour of his senses he had one last thought of clarity. That the bodyguards stationed at the end of the drive and on the outskirts of the surrounding farmland could not completely guarantee his privacy. Rogue photographers from the hated press might be hiding in the undergrowth—and what a story this would be!

Sheikh caught in flagrante with employee!

Ruthlessly, he continued to move his fingers against her, until, glancing down, he could see that she was lost. Her eyes were smoky and she trembled like a leaf. Was she as receptive as this with every man? he wondered grimly, unprepared for the poisonous snake of jealousy which coiled around his heart. His black eyes scanned the hallway and the dim, dark corridor which ran from the far end of it. Along there they would be unseen.

He felt her stir restlessly and kissed her again, for he knew that a kiss held more power than anything else. That women could be made to fall in love under the spell of a kiss—for they read into it all their secret desires and needs. He felt an infinitesimal moment of hesitation before she melted right into him, and he knew then that her capitulation was certain.