by Valerie Parv
Not that he hadn’t wanted to for a long time. Shara didn’t know it, but the reason he’d turned away so abruptly after meeting her and her father on their cattle-buying spree years before was because he’d been fairly sure the king wouldn’t approve of having his daughter thrown over Tom’s saddle and carried off.
The scene, like something out of an old Hollywood movie, had played in Tom’s head long after their first brief encounter. Having her beauty largely masked by a silk scarf had only added to her mysterious allure. He’d been unable to tear his eyes away from a figure as perfect as a goddess’s and movements as gracious as any dancer’s.
She’d been stroking a horse’s head, her long, aristocratic fingers playing over the muzzle. The horse had whinnied its pleasure and Tom had been instantly, insanely jealous. Of a horse. So like a true hero, he’d ridden away as fast as he could.
It hadn’t stopped him from asking Judy about her afterward. Or taking an interest when Judy and the princess had launched an indigenous art-exchange program, telling himself his fascination with rock art was the only reason. In a pig’s eye, he’d told himself.
Now Shara was in his arms and her long fingers were tugging at his shirt. He looked down into eyes that were cloudy, not with anger, but with desire. She wasn’t trying to break free. In fact, she was as close to him as she could get without them both being naked.
So he wasn’t the only one wanting this. The thought made him feel light-headed.
When she wriggled her hands up inside his shirt, her nails lightly scraped his back, and heat pulsed through him. Fighting the urge to devour her mouth, he forced himself to shape her lips gently under his.
“You don’t have to be so careful. I won’t break into little pieces,” she murmured against his mouth.
Maybe not, but he might if he didn’t drink his fill soon. In spite of her invitation, he didn’t want to risk hurting her. He tangled his fingers in her hair, sliding them down her soft nape to bring her mouth closer, deepening the kiss without giving in to the urge to plunder. The slight taste he allowed himself was pure honey.
When she locked her hands behind his head and opened her mouth to him, his resistance ebbed faster than a northern Australian tide. He was left high and dry with one thought in his head. He would be a fool not to take what she was so blatantly offering.
Okay, so he was a fool.
Her tongue touched his for a brief, giddy moment, and he bucked as the rest of him went on full alert. As a gentleman of sorts, he usually tried to allow a little more time to elapse between first course and mains, but Shara’s kiss gave him no chance. “I want you so much,” he growled, stirring against her.
She purred softly. “How can I not know?”
He felt a desperate need to be closer still, to bury himself in her until they were both gloriously sated. “We can’t,” he said, hearing more than regret in his tone. “Because you’re not free.”
Her wide-eyed look at least got that delectable mouth doing something else besides taunt him. “My father might consider me engaged to Jamal, but I don’t.”
He was definitely a fool, he thought as he unhooked her hands from his neck and held her at arm’s length. Her lips were moist from their kiss and her cheeks glowed with hectic color. There were stars in her lovely dark eyes and it didn’t help to know he’d put them there. “You’re alone in a strange land, unsure of your future. And Jamal is still out there.”
He hated himself for replacing the stars in her eyes with a sudden jolt of fear, but his words had the desired effect, he saw, as she wrapped her arms around herself. “And if he was not?” she asked in a hollow voice.
He owed it to both of them to be honest. “If he was not, and you weren’t doing this for all the wrong reasons, nothing would keep me from making love to you.”
“You have no idea what my reasons are,” she said.
He ticked them off on one hand. “Fear, loneliness, the need to feel safe for a while. They’ll do for a start.”
Her gaze darkened. “Do you have to be right all the time?”
He cupped her hands in his. They felt chilled. “It doesn’t give me any joy. Believe me, right now I’d far rather show you how I feel than stand here discussing it.”
She turned away. “I have to be content with that, I suppose.”
“Until we can change the future.”
“Do you think we can change it?” Her tone was dubious.
He nodded grimly. “If the desire is strong enough.”
Her desire was more than strong enough, Shara thought. Now its magical power was tempered by frustration at being unable to do anything about it.
All because of Jamal.
She felt Tom’s hand under her chin. “Look at me, Shara. I know how you feel at this moment. Right now you want to kill him, don’t you?”
Unable to speak for the hatred gorging her throat, she nodded.
Tom’s gaze bored into her as if he could see into her very soul. “Don’t let him do this to you. There was someone in my life, someone very close to me, who almost warped my life. I wanted to kill him, too. I wasted several years on that hatred, and you know what? It didn’t even touch him.”
“How did you deal with the feeling?”
“I went to see him. I’d believed my life would be fine if I never set eyes on him again, but it wasn’t true. Seeing him, and how little my hatred affected him, helped me to move on.”
Her mind worked overtime. Had this man abused Tom as a boy? He’d said they were close. She knew her eyes were full of questions, but he shook his head before she could voice them. “You have enough problems of your own. You don’t need to hear about mine, not yet. Maybe someday. Just remember what I’ve said and don’t let hatred drive you, or Jamal will have won more than your hand in marriage.”
She forced the words out. “I know.” Tom was right. Had she been compelled to marry Jamal, he may have owned her body but she would never have surrendered her spirit. Not to him or any man.
“Hungry?” Tom asked.
The question caught her unawares. Then he gestured toward the kitchen. He meant for food. If they did something as mundane as preparing a meal, perhaps it would give her time to subdue the yearnings gripping her. She could live in hope. “A little,” she said then added, “I’m afraid I won’t be much help with the cooking. Making coffee is about all I know how to do.”
At the kitchen door, he turned. “Living in a palace, surrounded by servants, wouldn’t give you much practice. Doesn’t matter. I can throw together a pretty mean Spanish omelette.”
She’d never eaten one but it sounded interesting. “As long as it isn’t made of witchetty grubs.”
He responded to her attempt at humor with a teasing smile. “Don’t you know? In the Kimberley, they’re a key ingredient of every omelette.”
He began to move about the kitchen and she settled herself on a wooden stool, content to watch him. Her experience of domesticity might be limited, but she doubted if many Australian men were as at home in a kitchen as Tom looked.
He cracked eggs one-handed into a bowl then began to chop green peppers, onions and tomatoes. “Where did you learn to cook?” she asked.
He handed her a block of cheese the size of her fist and a three-sided metal grater, demonstrating how she was supposed to use it. “Des expected all of us to take turns cooking, making beds, doing laundry and cleaning house. At first I accused him of being a slave driver who fostered kids so he’d have someone to do his dirty work. Now I’m grateful. He made sure we could all take care of ourselves.”
Feeling clumsy, she steered the cheese up and down the grater, her fingertips in danger of joining the growing pile of shredded cheese. “Des doesn’t seem like the slave-driver type.”
Tom poured cooking oil into a skillet and added the chopped vegetables. Almost immediately the delicious aromas made her mouth water. “Hardly. He said his mother had done everything for him, and he’d had to struggle to find his way around the kitchen
. He didn’t want any of us to be at a similar disadvantage.”
“Wise man.” Wiser than her own father, who’d never considered such a thing. “I was taught to run a palace but never to actually get my hands dirty. My father assumed we’d always have servants to take care of us.”
Tom stirred the vegetables around in the pan. “Regrets, Shara?”
“A few. But not because I’ve been pampered. Mostly for what I haven’t had the chance to learn and experience. I feel so inadequate when it comes to the most basic tasks. Such as how I’m supposed to grate this last sliver of cheese without my fingers going with it.”
Removing the skillet from the heat, he took cheese and grater from her. The brush of his hand sent powerful sensations arrowing along her arm. She had to stop herself from clutching her chest near her heart, as if the arrows had actually lodged there.
He winked at her. “You’ve just identified one of civilization’s most elusive secrets, how to grate the last of the cheese.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“It’s true. We can send a man to the moon but we can’t make a cheese grater that doesn’t take fingers with it.”
“Maybe I’ll become an inventor and solve this great mystery,” she mused aloud, her heart beating faster at the closeness the cooking task engendered. Preparing the meal was supposed to put some distance between them. It was having the opposite effect on her.
His gaze lingered on her face as if he was committing her features to memory. “Something tells me you’re destined for bigger things, Shara.”
She could hardly speak. “As a princess?”
“As whatever you choose to be.”
She hadn’t thought of herself in such a way. Suddenly she felt less inadequate. Her gaze blurred. “Thank you.”
He gave her a look of being found out. “For showing you how to grate cheese?”
“For making me feel as if I’m not totally useless. I already feel like a fish out of water in the Kimberley.”
He slid a hand along her arm. “Practically everyone in Australia was a fish out of water here at one time, or their forebears were. The country was founded by immigrants. Even the Aboriginal people can only trace their history back forty thousand years or so.”
“Only?”
“Recent research suggests maybe sixty thousand,” he conceded. “So you see, you’re not the only one.”
For a moment she thought he was going to lean over the counter separating them and kiss her again, and her heart thudded in anticipation. Instead, he tipped the cheese into the frothy eggs and mixed them together with a spatula.
She should be glad he was stronger than she was, but she felt cheated. Why couldn’t he sweep her into his arms and teach her all he knew of lovemaking? Showing her how to cook was a poor substitute.
But he was pouring the egg mixture into the skillet while he gave a running commentary about how to slide the spatula under the cooked parts to allow the uncooked egg to run underneath. She looked and listened dutifully, but inside she wanted to scream with frustration.
Tom was well aware of her dissatisfaction. Hard not to be when he shared her feelings. He wasn’t especially noble and was glad she didn’t know it wasn’t the first time he’d cooked an omelette for a woman, as a substitute for lovemaking.
Des had wanted his boys to learn to cook for their own good, never suspecting what a turn-on it would be for the women they met. At least Tom didn’t think he suspected.
More than one female had licked her lips in anticipation of more than a meal as they watched him potter around this room. Something about a man who was at home in a kitchen made them weak at the knees. Feeding them bites of the one dish he could cook really well finished the job. By the time he suggested they move on to the bedroom, they were practically melting.
So why was he so intent on keeping Shara out of his bedroom? Could it be because she touched parts of him no other woman had come close to touching? And he wasn’t thinking of the more sensitive parts of his anatomy. If he wanted to be dramatic, he’d say she touched his soul. And that scared the hell out of him.
She wasn’t the type a man could love and leave, and there lay the problem.
“I think the omelette is done,” she observed quietly.
Startled, he dragged his mind back to his task. His hand had stilled long enough for the underside of the omelette to start to crisp. He moved the pan off the heat. “See, you have the right instincts.”
She laughed. “Having a nose for when something is cooked hardly makes me a gourmet chef.”
He regarded the omelette ruefully. “Makes two of us. There goes my chance to impress you.”
“I’m sure it’s perfectly fine. By now I’m hungry enough not to care.”
“A lady after my own heart,” he said, thankful that she didn’t know how truly he spoke. He sliced and buttered crusty rolls from the local bakery and brought them to the dining table on the bread board he’d carved and polished from a round of fallen log.
At his request she carried cutlery and paper napkins to the table. While he tossed some salad greens in a bowl with bottled dressing, she pleated the napkins with deft fingers. By the time he had everything on the table, the napkins had become elegant swans, their long necks dipping over the plates.
He stared at them in fascination. “How’d you do that?”
“I may not have learned any useful domestic arts, but I was taught how to be decorative.”
His mouth dried. “Sweetheart, I doubt you needed any lessons.”
She dipped her head, the casual endearment more touching than he probably meant it to be. “You keep saying those things, yet you don’t seem to find me decorative.”
She sounded angry. He reached across the table and took her hand, marveling at how soft it felt in his. “Does it help if I say I find you more decorative than is good for me?”
Her head lifted and her shining eyes dazzled him. “You mean it?”
“It’s taking me all my strength to sit here and eat a meal with you, instead of what I’d really like to do.”
She must have read his desire in his expression, because she didn’t ask what he’d prefer. “I should be grateful for your strength,” she said.
“But you’re not.”
“Yes—no—I don’t know. When you’re accustomed to having every decision made for you, and you finally taste freedom, you resent any suggestion that someone else knows what’s best for you.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Do you think that’s why I’m not taking you to bed?”
“Isn’t it?”
His breath gusted out. “This isn’t what’s best for you, as much as what’s best for me.”
She toyed with a piece of bread. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t expect you to, since I barely understand it myself.” He served her then himself, leaving the singed bits of omelette in the pan. “Tell me about Jamal. What is his master plan for overthrowing the crown?”
She forked the food into her mouth and was gracious enough to look appreciative. Swallowing, she said, “The countries around Q’aresh are always warring about something or other. My father has kept us neutral and at peace with everyone including the West.”
“The Switzerland of the Middle East.”
She nodded. “A valid comparison. Jamal argues that we should ally ourselves with more belligerent regimes in order to gain power in the region.”
“And your father objects.”
“He feels we are peaceful and prosperous with no need to covet the land and resources of others.”
Tom offered her the salad. She took a small amount then watched as he piled his plate high. “Unless you’re power hungry,” he observed.
“A good way to describe Jamal.”
“Why hasn’t he staged a coup?”
“He lacks the necessary following. As King Awad’s son-in-law, he would gain access to the treasury and would be able to buy the support he needs to depose my father and then
attack our neighbors.”
Tom ate thoughtfully. “Charming man. No wonder you don’t want to marry him.”
She pushed her plate away with a savage gesture. “His lust for power is not the only reason I hate him. He uses people, especially women. Our law still permits a man to chastise the women in his household. No self-respecting man takes advantage of this law, but Jamal openly glories in it.”
Tom’s appetite had also deserted him suddenly. “He beats women?”
“I knew a woman he’d abused. She told me he becomes violent and sadistic with very little provocation. One day I fear he will kill a woman for some fancied misdemeanor. How could I have any feelings for such a man?”
He felt his jaw tighten. “You couldn’t, of course.”
She gave him a gentle smile. “I’m glad you understand.”
He understood all right, more than she imagined. Tom’s family history made him more like Jamal than was good for either of them. Blake’s assurance that Tom was different from his father didn’t help. How could Blake know, when Tom didn’t, that under pressure he wouldn’t turn into a violent monster, even though at this moment the thought of laying a hand on Shara made him sick with horror.
His father, too, had reacted with repugnance when he realized what he’d done, Tom recalled. But always too late, after Tom’s mother lay on the floor sobbing and nursing a newly inflicted injury.
“I’ll clean up here then I have some work to do in my office. You can use the spa bath if you like,” he said brusquely, still haunted by the vision.
A frown made a small valley in her forehead. “You’re angry. Do you think I should do my duty and marry Jamal?”
The denial exploded from him. “Good grief, no. You’d never know peace with a man like him.”
She touched his hand, her frown deepening when he couldn’t stop himself from recoiling. “What is it, Tom? I feel as if there’s something you aren’t telling me.”
“Some things you’re better off not knowing.” He pushed his chair away from the table and began to gather up the dinner things.
She watched for a moment in wounded silence, then stood up slowly. “All my life I’ve been protected, told what’s good for me and steered in the way others thought I should go. But I won’t allow it anymore. Especially not from you.”
