His Defiant Desert Queen

by Jane Porter

  “How do you feel?”

  She let out a soft laugh and she turned to him, moving into his arms to rest her face on his chest. She could hear his heartbeat, smell his scent.

  He smelled good. He felt good. He felt perfect, really.

  “Good,” she said softly, smiling unsteadily, because her emotions were bubbling up high and fast. “Very, very good.”

  They slept for an hour like that and Jemma woke first, sleepily stirring but couldn’t move as Mikael’s arms were around her and his muscular thigh was tucked between hers.

  She lifted her head, looked down at him. He was still asleep, his thick black lashes beautiful onyx crescents against the gold of his cheek.

  He looked different asleep. Younger. Boyish. Just a man, not a sheikh.

  She put her head back down and nestled closer, liking the weight of his arm, the texture of his skin. He felt right. Perfect.

  Did other women feel this way after making love? She’d had sex before but it hadn’t felt like this. Like something important had happened. Something significant.

  Even now she felt the rippling of emotion, like aftershocks. Something inside her felt aware, awake. Stirred.

  Was this love? It couldn’t be. She had to be feeling merely the side effect of seduction, and passion, all the result of his expert lovemaking.

  If that was the case, then why did her very heartbeat seem to repeat his name? Mik-ael. Mik-ael. Mik-ael.

  A moment later, he shifted, rolling on to his back, carrying her on top of him. His hand tangled in her long hair, and he parted her thighs, pushing her down against his hips. He was hard again, his erection rubbing against her. “Are you too sore to let me love you again?” he asked, his deep voice as husky and smoky as his dark eyes.

  “No.”

  He lifted her, drawing her down on him, and with his hands on her hips, he helped her ride him, slow and deep, and then faster as the pleasure built.

  After they both came, she tumbled forward onto his chest, and he held her. Her eyes closed. She listened to the thud of his heart and breathed him in.

  He felt so good. He made her feel safe. Happy.

  She was happy. This was the best place she’d been in months, emotionally, physically. In years.

  Silence stretched between them, silence and a tingling awareness that everything had changed.

  Mikael breathed in, out, and she traveled with his breath, his chest lifting her, carrying her.

  That’s how it’d been when they were joined. She’d felt lifted, carried, supported.

  It had been so intimate, and yet it wasn’t just sex. It felt like so much more, maybe because it had been so intense, and so physical, it’d demanded all of her, and she’d surrendered.

  Making love to him, she gave herself up to him, offering him everything—her body, her mind, her emotions...her heart.

  Why her heart? It made no sense. Jemma protected her heart. She’d learned it was necessary for survival. And yet in one morning of lovemaking, she’d dropped her defenses, lost her boundaries and become someone else. Or something else.

  Changed.

  There was that word again. She couldn’t help going back to it. Changed. Altered. Shattered.

  Confused.

  How could sex do that? How could sensation be so powerful? She didn’t understand and yet everything inside her felt open. Her heart felt open.

  She pressed her palm to his chest, savoring the steady thud of his heart. “Did you really buy my mother a house?” she asked huskily.

  His fingers played with her hair, twisting the long strands. “I will go check and see if the escrow has closed. I expect it will have.”

  “And then it will be hers?”

  “And hers alone,” he agreed.

  Jemma hesitated. “Even if I leave here in four days?”

  “No one can take it from her.”

  Jemma was profoundly moved, but also troubled. “I don’t know what to say. I know I should thank you—”

  “You don’t need to thank me. I didn’t buy it for you. I did it for her.”

  “You don’t even know her.”

  “I met her at Morgan’s wedding. She was kind to me. I liked her. She reminded me of my mother.”

  * * *

  Mikael left her to check on the status of the house and Jemma showered and dressed, slipping into the long ruby beaded skirt and matching ruby top laid out on the bed. Breakfast was served in the courtyard. She’d just sat down and had her first coffee when Mikael returned.

  “Escrow closed. The paperwork has been signed. The house is hers,” he said, taking the chair opposite Jemma’s.

  “Thank you,” Jemma said. “Thank you for caring for her. Thank you for wanting the best for her.”

  “I do for her what I should have done for my mother.” His brow furrowed, and his voice dropped, cracking. “I was not good to my mother. I failed her, and I will carry that pain, and that shame, with me forever.”

  She reached across the table, and covered his hand with hers. “How did you fail her? What did you do?”

  “Nothing. That is what I did. Absolutely nothing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When I explain, you’ll be appalled. And you should be. My behavior was selfish and it still disgusts me, but it’s too late to fix things. Too late to make amends.”

  Jemma winced at his sharp tone, his voice laced with self-loathing and scorn. “Explain to me.”

  “I was twenty-two when I learned the truth about my father and mother, that my father had lied to her, and had destroyed their wedding contract so he could take another wife. I was furious with my father,” he said, “but I’d lost my mother years ago, when I was just a boy, eleven, and I was terrified of losing my father, too. He had so many other children, so many other sons he could admire and love, and so I pretended I didn’t know the truth about the divorce. I pretended that I didn’t know who my father was—a liar, a cheat—and I acted as if my father was this wonderful man.”

  “You were his son,” she said. “You were showing him respect.”

  “My father had turned his back on my mother. I understood he expected me to do the same. And so I did, even when she came to me on my twenty-fifth birthday, asking for help. She was nervous about her future. She wanted financial assistance, and advice. She was worried she wasn’t managing her money well. She was worried she’d run out if she didn’t have the right investments.”

  “Did you help her?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  His jaw tightened. “I took her to coffee and told her I couldn’t help her, that she’d created this situation by leaving my father. I told her there was nothing I could do.” Mikael averted his face, staring off across the courtyard, his features set. “She didn’t cry. She didn’t beg. She just folded up her papers and slipped them back into her purse, then kissed me, and left.”

  Jemma’s eyes burned. “You were young.”

  “I wasn’t young. I was angry.” He turned to look at her, expression fierce. “I wanted to punish her for leaving me all those years ago, for leaving me with a father who barely remembered me because he had so many wives and sons and daughters, all clamoring for his attention. So I rejected her, wanting her to hurt as I had hurt.”

  Silence stretched.

  He drew a deep, rough breath. “I never did help her with her investments, even though I had degrees in finance and economics. Even though I worked in London as an institutional investor until I was nearly thirty.” Mikael shifted restlessly. “I knew money. I knew how to make money. And I could have aided her, protected her, but I didn’t. So she went to your father and trusted him, and we all know how that turned out.”

  “But she didn’t go to my father until after Morgan’s weddi
ng. At least, that’s what I thought you said.”

  “Yes. But she went to him because she’d made some bad investments earlier, and your father promised he could do impossible things with what capital she had left. He could get her an incredible return on her investment with him, and so she gave him everything. Everything. And he stole it all.”

  Jemma winced, sickened all over again by her father’s betrayal. “That’s on his head, not yours.”

  Mikael turned his head, looked at her from beneath his dense black lashes. “My mother should have died of old age, comfortable in her American home. But she lost her home, along with her nest egg. Heartbroken, and terrified, she took her life. Hung herself in the hall of her home the day she was to be evicted.”

  Jemma stared at him, aghast. “She killed herself?”

  He nodded. His jaw worked, and he ran a hand down his throat, as if trying to find the words. “She was just fifty-four,” he said when he could finally speak again. “But she’d lost her home...again. She knew she couldn’t go to my father. She was afraid to come to me. We were still rebuilding our relationship and she was afraid I’d be disappointed in her, so she panicked. She did what she thought was the best answer for all.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I still have that last note, the note she left, saying she was sorry, and begging me to forgive her for being stupid and weak.”

  He turned his head abruptly but not before Jemma saw the suffering in his eyes.

  For several moments there was just silence, an endless, impossible silence heavy with grief.

  Jemma reached out and placed her hand over his. “People make mistakes,” she whispered.

  “It’s my fault she died,” he said. “At first I blamed my father, and your father, but I am the one responsible for this. I did this to her. I rejected her. Refused her. I left her no hope—”

  “Would you have helped her if she came to you about her house, Mikael?” she interrupted, leaving her seat and moving around the table to kneel before him. “If she’d told you her situation, that she had nowhere to go, and no way to pay her bills, would you have taken care of her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure? Or is that what you say now?”

  He stiffened, shoulders squaring. His dark eyes burned down at her. “You don’t think I would?”

  “I know you would,” she said, taking his hands, holding them tightly. “But do you? That’s the important question. Because until you believe you would have helped her, you won’t be able to forgive...you, her, or your father.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MIKAEL WAS DONE TALKING. He’d said far more than he’d intended to say but he was glad he’d told Jemma the truth. Glad she knew now who he was, and what he was. Better for her to know on the fourth day than the eighth. Better to give her all the facts up front, instead of blindsiding her at the end.

  He rose from the table, drew her up to her feet. “I cannot think anymore, or talk anymore. I am talked out. I need diversion. What about you?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “You’ll see.”

  She followed him back into the Crimson Chamber. The satin sheets had been changed, and freshly made, the bed lined with stacks of ruby-hued pillows.

  A bright white light shone from the ceiling, onto a screen attached to the far wall.

  He saw Jemma glance up at the light, and then saw the moment she realized it was actually a projector. “Is that what I think it is?” she asked, turning to him.

  “Do you like movies?”

  “Yes.”

  “I do, too. I thought maybe you could use a break from the pool and the sun and would enjoy a good film.”

  “I’d love it. But only if you stay with me. Otherwise I wouldn’t enjoy it at all.”

  * * *

  Jemma loved their afternoon at the movies in the Crimson Chamber. The dark red walls and rich burgundy and ruby pillows and cushions made the room feel like an elegant, and exotic, movie theatre. Staff brought them food during a break between the two films, a break Jemma laughingly called the “intermission,” and then curled back up in Mikael’s arms when the second film began.

  He had to leave at the end of the second movie to check in with his staff. He kissed her before he left and promised to meet her for dinner in the courtyard. They were to dine outside tonight, inside the pink and turquoise tiled pavilion. “We’ll go to the Turquoise Chamber tonight. You’ll enjoy tonight,” he told her, kissing her again.

  “I’ve enjoyed every night,” she answered truthfully, smiling up at him.

  * * *

  She arrived in the courtyard that evening before he did, dressed in the filmy turquoise kaftan that had been laid out for her.

  The kaftan was long, reaching her ankles and it swished as she walked, clinging to her stomach, hips and thighs.

  Jemma wandered around the grand courtyard, admiring the large blue tiled pool lit by blue and pink lights, and pausing to smell the sweet fragrant lilies and roses that grew in clusters in enormous glazed pots.

  She was glad she’d arrived in the courtyard before Mikael. She enjoyed having this moment to herself, liked the excitement bubbling within her, and the sense of anticipation.

  She’d enjoyed this afternoon with Mikael. She’d found it hard to concentrate on the movies, though, with him there, at her side. She’d wanted him to make love to her, but he hadn’t. He’d held her, and kissed her several times, but he’d otherwise shown admirable restraint.

  She, on the other hand, wanted to be touched. She’d curled at his side, pretending to watch the movie when all she really wanted was touch. She was beginning to feel addicted to pleasure. Or was she addicted to him? She didn’t know, wasn’t sure how she could know.

  Jemma felt a tingle down her spine. She wasn’t alone anymore. She knew Mikael had arrived even before she turned to see him.

  Slowly she faced him. He was standing at the far end of the pool, watching her. “That color suits you,” he said.

  Suddenly the courtyard hummed with energy. She felt the same electric surge in her veins, her heart racing, too.

  He was wearing black trousers and a white linen shirt and he looked handsome and virile and confident.

  Her husband. Her king.

  She smiled, amused by the thought, but the thought took hold. He might very well be a good husband for her. He seemed to be a good king.

  A servant appeared with a tray of cocktails and together Jemma and Mikael walked around the courtyard, with Mikael pointing out various plants that had significance, whether due to age, or relationship to the Kasbah.

  “The date palms were for a great-grandmother, and the citrus trees were for my grandmother. The trees are replaced every ten to fifteen years, depending on their maturity and fruit production. My mother loved pink roses, so those were for her.” Mikael smiled at her. “What shall we plant in your honor? What is your favorite flower?”

  She shook her head. “I think it’s all perfect just the way it is. I wouldn’t change anything.”

  “You don’t want to be immortalized in the Bridal Palace’s garden?” he asked.

  She knew he was teasing her. She could see it in his eyes and the quirk of his mouth and she felt a bubble of warmth inside her.

  She was happy.

  That’s why she felt different...why everything seemed different. The happiness explained the bright sparks in her head and in her eyes. The happiness made her tingle, and her insides fizz.

  It wasn’t the desert heat temperatures heating her, warming her, but happiness. And she was happy because of him. Happy because she cared about him. And cared maybe more than she should.

  * * *

  They made love in the Turquoise Chamber and fell asleep tangled together, skin damp, lim
bs intertwined.

  Jemma woke first, it was early.

  Day five, she thought. She would be here for only three more days.

  She counted the nights in her head, remembering the colors...

  White the first night in the Chamber of Innocence, and then Topaz, Amethyst, Ruby or Crimson, and then last night was Turquoise.

  Where would they go tonight? To the Emerald Chamber? Sapphire?

  Did it even matter?

  She had to leave. Had to return to London. Didn’t she?

  Confused by her conflicting thoughts, Jemma quietly left the bed and stepped outside to the courtyard. It was still early. The sun was just rising and the temperature felt cool, the early morning painted the palest pink and yellow.

  Jemma’s maid appeared in the courtyard with coffee and a tray of breakfast pastries. Jemma refused the pastries but sipped the coffee in a chair near the tranquil pool, listening to the chirp of birds nesting high above in the palm fronds.

  Mikael appeared in the doorway a half hour later. He’d showered and dressed and was wearing his robes. “I need to go to Ketama,” he said, approaching her to drop a kiss on the top of her head. “I will be back tonight. I wouldn’t leave if I didn’t have to.”

  She tipped her face up to him, frowning at the amount of time he’d be traveling, first by camel, and then by car. “Won’t it take you all day to get there?”

  He kissed her again, this time on her brow. “I have a helicopter here. The pilot’s ready. If we leave now, I’ll be back this evening.”

  “And you have to go?”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding very decisive.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  He kissed her one last time, this time on the lips. “Always.”

  * * *

  It seemed as if it would be a long day with Mikael gone, but Jemma’s maid led her to the Emerald Chamber, with the wall of antique leather-bound books.

  Jemma studied the spines, delighted to discover that many were in English, and many were written by her favorite English authors. Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, E.M. Forster, and more.