The Sheikh's Defiant Bride

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—forgot-ten, 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 some thing 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…

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