Pleasure

She gasped. Her breath sighed against his lips. He made a sound deep in his throat and drew her closer.

“Kiss me back,” Tariq whispered.

And she did.

Her lips parted; he slid the tip of his tongue between them, silk meeting silk, heat meeting heat, and the patio faded, the toad faded, nothing existed but the woman in his arms, the feel of her.

“Oh,” she whispered, and he knew it was the same for her.

Her hands rose, flattened against his chest, slipped up and up until her fingers were deep in the thick, silky hair at his nape. She leaned into him, her breasts soft against his chest, her scent in his nostrils.

Tariq groaned.

All the taut sexual control he’d maintained for the past two months fell away. His sex hardened; he felt it leap against her and when she moaned and lifted herself to him, he gathered her closer, deepened the kiss, tasting her, letting her taste him, running his hands down her spine, cupping her bottom, lifting her, bringing her hard against him, cradling the power of his erection in the hot vee of her thighs.

Somehow, they were moving. Off the patio. Into the garden, letting the gathering night close around them, sealing them in its velvet darkness, its sweet floral scent.

The sounds of the party faded; the light spilling from the house diminished. Tariq felt something at his back. The wall of a small building. A summerhouse, screened and secluded, lit by only the softest of lights.

He drew the woman inside; she clung to him, her mouth hot and open to the penetration of his tongue, her breathing as ragged as his, her hands clasping his face as she gave herself over to the wildness of his kiss.

“I want you,” he said thickly.

“Yes,” she whispered, “yes …”

His mouth was at her throat; his hand was on her breast, cupping it, shaping it, his fingertips moving over the engorged nipple that pressed through the silk of her dress and teased his palm.

“You are so beautiful,” he murmured, “so beautiful …”

She slid her hand under his suit jacket, then inside his shirt. Her touch scalded him; he groaned again, grasped the hem of her dress, pushed it up her thighs.

And reached between them.

Skin. Silken and smooth. A strip of lace. Heat. The softness of damp curls.

By Ishtar, he was going to come. He, who never let passion fully sweep him away, who always maintained just enough emotional distance to observe the woman in his arms as he took her.

He was going to come.

But not like this. Damn it, not like this. He wanted to be inside her. Feel her womb close around him. Feel her legs wrap around his waist.

“No!”

Her cry shattered the stillness in the little summerhouse. Tariq raised his head, looked at her through eyes that were all but blind.

“Damn you, get away from me!”

Her fist slammed against his shoulder. It was enough to drag him back toward reality if not fully into it.

“What?” he said. “What?”

“You—you bastard! You no-good son of a—”

Madison slapped both hands against the stranger’s chest, shoved hard. She could feel the panic spreading through her, not of him as much as of herself, at what she had almost done.

“Let go of me,” she said. “Do you hear me? I said—”

“I heard what you said.” His voice was cold. “I’m sure half of Manhattan heard what you said.”

His hands fell away from her. He stepped back but it didn’t mean a damn; she could hear his ragged breathing, smell his maleness. Oh, yes, a predator, and the worst kind. Handsome. Arrogant. Wealthy. He moved in the right circles.

He was everything she despised and somehow, she’d been hovering on the brink of having sex with him. Hovering? Hell, she’d been a kiss away from it. How could that have happened?

A shudder racked her body. “You took advantage of me!”

“I took advantage of you?” he said … and he began to laugh.

She wanted to hit him again, but she was angry, not insane.

“You think this is amusing?”

“What I think,” he said, “is that I probably should thank you for our little encounter. You see, I’ve been searching for something and now I realize it’s going to take longer to find than I thought.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“And, also thanks to you, I just realized how easy—and how unfortunate—it would be should some woman make me give up something I must not give up, except to the right one.”

“Gibberish,” Madison said, folding her arms. “But I don’t care. Whatever you’re talking about means nothing to me.”

“Exactly. And it means everything to.” He paused, frowned, cocked his head. “Of course,” he said softly.

“Of course, what?”

“I just realized why you looked familiar. You’re the ice princess from—what’s that outfit? FutureTense?”

“FutureBorn,” Madison said, “and what would you know about it?”

His cool smile faded. She could almost see his brain rev into high gear.

“Not as much as I’m going to know,” he said cryptically.

“Do you know my boss? If you think you can get me fired—”

He laughed and turned away.

“You can’t,” Madison yelled. “I’m not going to be there long enough for that.”

Tariq didn’t turn around. Whatever she said meant nothing to him.

The toad was still standing on the patio. Tariq flashed a vicious smile. “The lady’s all yours,” he said, and made his way into the house, through the foyer, through the dining and sitting rooms, his purposeful stride attracting curious glances until, at last, he saw his attorney.

Strickland was part of a small knot of people, laughing and chatting.

Tariq stood a few feet away. “Strickland?”

The attorney looked up, saw Tariq and fell silent in midsentence.

“Your highness.”

People turned and stared. Tariq knew the look; it was part respect, part awe, part outright envy.

Ordinarily he loathed it. Now, he welcomed it.

The blonde had made a fool of him tonight but no one else would dare.

Strickland came to his side. “Edward said you were here, your highness. I looked for you, but—”

“I need legal advice.”

The lawyer blinked. “Now?”

“Right now.” Tariq took his cell phone from his pocket, pressed a button and heard, as he had known he would, the voice of his personal physician answering the number that connected him to only this one patient. “Dr. Miller,” he said, with the crisp conviction of a man who never has to ask but has only to command. “I am at my lawyer’s home. Please meet me here in half an hour.”

“Are you ill, sir?” Strickland murmured after Tariq rattled off the address and ended the call.

“Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”

“Yes, of course.”

The lawyer led the way to the second floor and a handsomely furnished den far from the noise of the party.

“No,” Tariq said, once the door was shut, “I’m not ill.”

“Then what …”

“I wish to safeguard the rightful succession of my heir to the throne of Dubaac,” Tariq said briskly, “in the unlikely event something should happen to me before I find a suitable wife. I’ve asked my doctor here to discuss the details but, basically, I intend to have a sample of my sperm frozen and to do it as quickly as possible. Do you foresee any legal problems?”

The attorney smiled. “None, your highness. Actually I’ve handled similar situations before.”

“Good,” Tariq said, and for the first time since his brother’s death, he breathed a long sigh of relief.

CHAPTER THREE

AT NINE Monday morning, Tariq left his Fifth Avenue penthouse, rode his privately keyed elevator to the lobby, declined the doorman’s offer of a taxi and headed south at a brisk walk.

It was a bright summer morning but he’d have walked even if the city was gripped by a January blizzard.

He’d spent most of the night on his terrace, looking blindly into the darkness of Central Park while he told himself what he was going to do this morning was a modern version of an appointment with destiny.

A sly little voice inside him kept describing it in much more earthy terms.

Any way he looked at it, he was about to have sex with a test tube.

He was sure he’d made the right decision but it still made him wince. A healthy man in the prime of his life, a man who’d never met a woman who hadn’t smiled and made it clear she was interested in more than conversation, could not possibly be in any great rush to spill his seed in the romantic confines of a doctor’s office.

Saturday, he’d kept busy reading fifty pages of legalese that spelled out how his “donation” would be stored and how it could be used. He’d gone to bed with all that mumbo-jumbo dancing through his head and awakened to more of the same on Sunday.

Then he ran out of reading material.

Maybe that was why he’d had those dreams Sunday night.

About the blonde. Madison Whitney. The dreams had been intense, erotic … and infuriating. He was a grown man, damn it, not a horny teenage kid.

If he hadn’t awakened just in time, he’d have found himself in a dress rehearsal for what he was scheduled to do this morning.

The only good that had come out of the Friday night disaster was that it had reminded him that he was a prince with an obligation to find a wife, not a man on the hunt for a night’s pleasure.

Still, he hesitated once he reached his doctor’s office.

Don’t be an ass, he told himself, and he raised his chin, tightened his jaw and rang the bell.

The procedure was over in minutes.

Tariq signed some papers, stepped into a small room with a glass vial in his hand, turned down an offer of Playmate magazine with the arrogant assurance of a man who knows the power of his own sexuality.

And his imagination failed him. Nothing happened until he closed his eyes, remembered the woman, remembered her taste, her scent, her silky skin.

Then, only then, he’d done what he had to do.

Now, he could put the humiliation of the morning, his fury at the woman, behind him.

Madison usually began her days calmly.

Serenely, Barb had once said, with a roll of the eyes. Well, why not? Planning ahead, doing things carefully, was how Madison had learned to overcome the uncertainties of a chaotic childhood.

Her automatic coffeemaker was programmed to turn on at six, her alarm at six-oh-five. By six-fifteen, she was always in the kitchen, showered, dressed, ready for her first jolt of caffeine. Ten minutes after that, hair blow-dried into submission, makeup on, she was ready to face the world.

Monday morning, none of that happened.

The coffee hadn’t brewed. Her hair dryer died when she plugged it in. There were no clean panty hose in the drawer. Even her mascara failed her, depositing a smear of black on the lashes of one eye and nothing at all on the other.

Her fault. All of it.

The coffeepot made a carafe of boiled water, not coffee. The dryer had been at death’s door last time she’d used it. Her panty hose were all in the hamper, the mascara had produced a pathetic dab of color because it was empty. Most unbelievable of all, she’d overslept because she’d forgotten—forgotten, for the first time in her life!—to set the alarm.

She’d intended to deal with all that Saturday and Sunday. Go to Zabar’s for coffee, to Macy’s for a new hair dryer, to Saks for mascara, wash her lingerie.

Instead she’d spent both days feverishly doing stuff that didn’t need doing.

She’d cleaned cupboards and closets, floors and furniture until someone from the Department of Health could have done a white-glove inspection and come away smiling and at night, she’d watched reruns of Sex and the City for the hundredth time, made low-cal, low-fat, low-taste microwave popcorn and stuffed her face with it even though she wasn’t hungry.

“And for what reason?” she demanded of her reflection in the bathroom mirror Monday morning.

Because she couldn’t get the SOB, the stranger who’d almost seduced her, out of her head. Because even the memory of what had happened was humiliating.

Because she knew, deep down, that blaming him for everything was the worst kind of lie.

He hadn’t tossed her over his shoulder and carried her away.

He hadn’t lured her into that summerhouse.

He’d kissed her, was what he’d done, and her libido had done the rest, turning her into a creature she didn’t know, a woman who had let a stranger do things to her that still made her blush.

That still made her bones melt, just remembering.

Damn it.

What was the sense in rehashing it all? She’d done what she’d done. It was over.

A deep breath. Another look in the mirror. A lift of the chin.

“Stop whining,” Madison told herself briskly.

Who cared about Friday night? Today was Monday. The Monday. It was the first day of the rest of her life, the day she hoped to conceive her baby, and if that made her sound like a greeting card, so what?

It was the truth.

Madison’s expression softened.

Her baby. A child to love. To nurture. That was all that mattered. Friday night, the man—not worth another second. What mattered was her appointment this afternoon and the sweet, bright promise of pregnancy. She turned her back on her reflection, went to the closet and flung the door open.

It was just that it was crazy that she, of all people, could have been swept off her feet not by a prince, as Barb had teasingly promised, but by the kind of sleazy Don Juans who’d tromped in and out of her mother’s life.

He’d been good-looking but Don Juans always were. Tall. Dark. Drop-dead gorgeous. And with an aura, a hint of something in his bearing, in his speech that hinted at the exotic.

Madison snorted.

He’d probably been born in Brooklyn—and why was she wasting time on him again?

Forget the panty hose. The smooth, tamed hair. Coffee? There was a Starbucks on the corner. Concentrate on the present, not the past.

She dressed quickly. Comfortably. A white blouse. A pale pink skirt. White sling-backs with a comfortable heel, no mascara because she didn’t have any, just some lip gloss, then some gel to tame her hair.

Monday might not have started well but it was going to end brilliantly. And when this was all over and her pregnancy was confirmed, she’d tell Barb Friday night’s Big Lesson.

If you had to weigh the benefits of a man against a test tube, the test tube would win, every time.

No one at FutureBorn knew this was not going to be an ordinary day.

Madison, of course, was the sole exception.

How could she keep her mind on work when something so important was going to happen at two o’clock?

She watched the hands of her watch creep from nine to ten, from ten to eleven, then—was it possible?—slow from a creep to a crawl.

At noon, she opened a container of yogurt, shut her office door, took the file folder that held the data about the donor she’d selected from her locked desk drawer.

She read as she spooned up yogurt.

Yes, absolutely, she’d chosen the right man.

Educated. Healthy. Nice-looking. Polite, soft-spoken and modest. The file didn’t mention anything but education and health but she knew the rest would be true.

Excellent traits for fatherhood.

The stranger had been none of those things. He’d been a walking, talking ad for self-centered arrogance, passionate intensity and macho attitude.

In other words, he’d been sexy as hell.

Madison rolled her eyes, dumped the yogurt in the trash and put away the file.

“Are you crazy?” she muttered.

She had to be.

So what if being in his arms had been like nothing she’d ever experienced in her life?

His touch. His kisses. His hunger … and, oh, the hunger that had blazed inside her. She’d wanted him. Needed him. Another few seconds, she’d have let him take her right there, in the garden where anyone might have stumbled across them.

Let him tear aside her panties. Her thong—and what had made her wear a thong, anyway? A thong and no panty hose. A good thing, because panty hose would have gotten in his way, delayed that incredible minute when he’d put his hand between her thighs.

Madison shot to her feet.

It was barely one o’clock. Her OB-GYN’s office was only a short cab ride away but there was no harm in getting there early. She was nervous and edgy. No wonder she was thinking crazy thoughts.

“Get moving, kid,” she said.

And she did.

It was amazing, how something a man had dreaded could turn out to be the very thing that restored his equilibrium.

At seven that evening, Tariq stepped into the foyer of his penthouse, tossed his keys on the marquetry-topped table near the door and shrugged off his suit jacket.

He’d been so hung up in disliking what he’d had to do this morning that he’d almost forgotten the reason for doing it.

Yes, he still had to find a wife but now he could give the project the time it deserved. Choosing a woman to wed was not like choosing a date for a party. It would require planning, something he had not initially considered.

Tariq undid his tie as he climbed the stairs to his bedroom.

He would draw up a list of qualities he demanded in a wife and a list of women he already knew. Cross-reference the two. He had not considered doing that until now, either.

To solve a problem, any problem, one needed to develop a method that would lead to a solution. It was the way he conducted business; why had he not also realized it was the way to search out a suitable wife?

But not tonight.

Tariq smiled as he stripped off his clothes.

Tonight, he would take a break from his wife-search. A shower. A drink. A meal.

And a woman.

He stepped into the glass shower stall, turned his face up to the spray, turned again and let the water beat down on his neck and shoulders.

Definitely, a woman.

He’d check the names in his BlackBerry, make a call …

Madison Whitney was not in his BlackBerry.

Tariq frowned as he worked a dollop of shampoo through his hair.

Damn right, she wasn’t. What man in his right mind would want to be with a female who could turn on and off like a lightbulb?

She was a cold piece of work … except, she had been hot with passion when he’d held her in his arms and kissed her, hot with passion when he’d dreamed of her, and this morning, when he’d conjured her up, imagined taking her, entering her, hearing her cry out as he brought her to completion. “Hell!”

Tariq turned the water to cold, shivered under the icy needles, then shut off the shower and stepped out of it.

Was he crazy, getting turned on by a memory? By a woman who had teased him almost to the point of no return?

No. He was just frustrated. A healthy male who went without sex for too long was asking for trouble—and nobody could call this morning’s medical exercise “sex.” Fine. He was going to change that right—The telephone rang as he was zipping up a pair of chinos. Let his voice mail take it. But the caller disconnected; in seconds, the phone rang again. And again. Tariq cursed and grabbed for it. “Hello,” he barked, and this had better be—” “Your highness!”

The attorney. Tariq sighed. “What is it, Strickland? Did you think of another fifty pages I should have signed this morning?”

“Not that, your … I … with … twenty minutes ago—knew that—and so—”

“Strickland, are you on your cell? You’re breaking up.” “—yes—t-tunnel—spoke with—and nobody can explain—” “Damn it, John, I can’t hear you. Call me when you get home. Better still, wait until tomorrow and phone me at my—” Suddenly the transmission cleared.

“Something went wrong with your donation,” Strickland said, his voice as clear as if he were in the room.

Tariq sat down on the bed.

“Don’t tell me I have to undergo that procedure all over again.”

“No, sir. It’s nothing like that. The problem wasn’t with the procedure.”

“What, then?”

There was a silence. Had the connection been lost again? No. He could hear Strickland breathing.

“Damn it, man, speak up!”

“Your donation was couriered to the FutureBorn laboratory, sir. Exactly as planned.”

“And?”

“And—and at that point, it should have gone into storage. Instead it was—it was sent out.”

Sent out? Tariq had a wild image of that damnable little vial, out for an evening on the town. Laughable, except for the sudden chill working its way down his spine.

“Sent out where?” he said, very softly.

“To an office. A doctor’s office.”

“Well, get it back!”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible, your highness. It’s been—it’s been used.”

“Used?”

“Yes, sir. Given to a—a recipient.”

“You mean,” Tariq said carefully, “you mean that some woman has been impregnated with my sperm?”

“Inseminated, sir. It would be premature to say she’s been—”

“How in hell could such a thing happen?”

“I don’t know, your highness.”

Tariq’s head was spinning. Somewhere in the vast city, a part of him had entered the womb of a stranger. If she became pregnant, if she bore a child.

“Who is she?”

“Sir. With all due respect—”

“Who is she, Strickland?”

“Your highness, there are issues of privacy here. Until I can research them—”

“Privacy?” Tariq roared, as he shot to his feet. “Some woman I’ve never even laid eyes on is carrying my seed and you’re worried about her privacy? Tell me who she is or so help me, you’ll regret it.”

There was silence. Then Strickland cleared his throat.

“Her name,” he said, “her name is Madison Whitney.”

Tariq had heard that a man’s vision went red with rage.

A lie.

If anything, his took on a brilliant clarity. He could see Madison Whitney as if she were standing in front of him. That coldly beautiful face, her contempt for him glittering in her eyes.

Impossible. Strickland had her name wrong. Or there was another Madison Whitney in New York.

Strickland erased those possibilities. Tariq’s seed had been, as he delicately put it, “misdirected and utilized.” Utilized by the very woman whose image had made Tariq’s “donation” possible.

The irony was inescapable. And, all at once, so was a far darker possibility.

“She is a vice president at FutureBorn,” Tariq said sharply.

“Yes.”

“Perhaps she did this deliberately.”

“Your highness—”

“If she knew what I intended to do—”

“Sir, it’s not very likely that—”

“She would also know who I am. That I am a man of considerable wealth and—”

“And what, sir? What possible benefit could she see in it? Even if the procedure she underwent worked—and there’s no guarantee it did—having your child to get at your money is a bit far-fetched—if you’ll pardon me for saying so.”

Tariq rubbed his forehead, where an entire assortment of percussionists seemed to have set out their drums.

“Additionally, your highness, it seems the woman had been planning this for some time. She had already selected a donor.”

“A man she knows?” Tariq asked sharply, though why that should matter made no sense.

“She opted for an anonymous donor, sir.”

Tariq closed his eyes while Strickland went on talking.

“I’ll begin checking the grounds on which we’ll sue, and—”

“Is that your best legal advice? That I should sue and let the entire world laugh?”

“The woman might choose to sue, even if you don’t.”

Could this nightmare get worse?

“Thus far, no one has told her of your involvement. It might not please her, any more than it pleases you.”

“I am a prince,” Tariq said imperiously. Later, he would recall those words and wince.

“Your highness. For now, the best option might be to do nothing.”