Lord of the Desert

by Diana Palmer

  She crept up to his chest and slid an arm around him, pressing close to his side so that she could pillow her cheek on his bare shoulder. “You’d have to show me how,” she said softly, “but I’m more than willing to try to do for you what you just did for me.”

  His heart stopped. His arm enveloped her and held her tight for a few seconds. “A generous offer, and one for which I am more grateful than you know. But I wouldn’t subject any woman to the feel of me, much less a virgin who has no knowledge of men’s bodies.” He rolled over and put a finger over her protesting lips. “I am disfigured.”

  She caught his fingers in hers. “If you didn’t trust me, you would never have allowed me to come in here with you in the first place.”

  “I was aroused,” he corrected. “I wanted to see if I could function.”

  “But you had nothing,” she said sadly. “It was all for me.”

  He drew her fingers to his lips as he rolled back over and lay looking at the ceiling. “Perhaps this is all there will ever be, for me,” he said, his voice very quiet.

  Her fingers tangled in the thick curling hair over his chest and her eyes closed. “Do you have any sensation there?”

  “An odd sort,” he replied after a minute. “I feel it most intensely when I touch you.” He smoothed back her disheveled hair.

  “Haven’t you tried to make love to anyone since the accident?”

  “The doctors told me it would be of no use, and I believe they were right.” His hand tightened in her hair. “The reaction I have to you is a mystery.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t feel anything because you wouldn’t let yourself try.”

  “I did, once,” he said bitterly. “With a woman in Europe.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, and she found the situation quite amusing.” His voice became grim at even the memory of the woman’s contemptuous laughter. “That was when I gave up. I decided that a charade was the only option left to me, the pretense of a serious relationship to put the old gossip to rest.”

  “I would never have laughed at you,” Gretchen said with anger at the nameless woman.

  He wrapped her up tightly in his arms and drew her over him, so that her hips lay angled across his. “I should send you back to Texas, right now.”

  “And I’d go back to my old, dismal job looking up legal precedents while somebody else gets to be the wild woman of the harem,” she said with deliberate disgust. “How could you even think of doing that to me?”

  He lifted an eyebrow and studied her, drawing his gaze lazily down to the soft breasts pressed into the thick hair of his chest. He was still aroused. She made him feel stronger than he ever had in his life. As he studied her, it occurred to him that what he was offering her really was a bad reputation. His Middle-Eastern roots shuddered at just the thought of such impropriety. She was innocent. It shamed him to have even considered dishonoring her in such a way.

  He traced around her full lips. “So you would prefer to live with me and play doctor, hmmm?” he teased gently.

  She gave him a mock glare. “Only if you play fair. I’m not going to be the only person taking her clothes off around here.”

  His black eyes danced. He felt joy as almost a tangible thing when she lay in his arms. “Pity,” he mused, drawing her gently closer. “When you look so enticing without them.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to learn to organize luncheons and meetings and social functions,” she sighed.

  He traced her soft blond hair. “I have an entire roomful of people who do nothing except that. Your only concern will be me.”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “I’ll get fat.”

  He smiled. “You won’t have the time. I expect to be at the palace for quite some time to come. I have plans which are about to come to fruition, especially in the field of education. You can help me convince the people in the outlying tribes to allow their children to be educated.”

  “I’d love to do that! But I don’t speak your language,” she said.

  “You can learn it. It’s a dialect of Arabic, and I’ll have you tutored.”

  “Something else to look forward to,” she mused, searching his eyes. “A mission of my very own.”

  “Something else, you said?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She reached down and drew her lips tenderly over his, nibbling first the thin upper one and then the fuller lower one.

  “Like this,” he murmured, guiding her lips against his until she understood the pressure and contact he wanted. “Yes, that’s it. What else?” he persisted.

  She nipped his lower lip softly. “I want you to deflower me.”

  He was very still. He frowned. “The translation must be an idiom.”

  She chuckled and leaned down to his ear. “I want you to become my lover.”

  His lean hands spread on the soft, warm flesh of her bare back. “I want nothing more than that,” he groaned, holding her even closer. “But you must realize that the odds are very much against it.”

  “The odds were very much against the condition you’re in right now,” she whispered. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, my grandfather used to say.”

  “More idioms, you little pest…!”

  She’d put her open mouth on his chest, and he gasped.

  She hesitated. Under her hand she felt the sudden violent shudder of his heart. He wasn’t moving. He didn’t even seem to be breathing.

  She moved closer and did it again, deliberately moving her mouth against his tight nipple and suckling it, as he’d done to her, earlier.

  His body came right off the bed. He shuddered. His hands caught the back of her head. He held her mouth to him. His fingers spread into her hair and coaxed her to suckle him again.

  She barely lifted her lips as her hand slid to his navel. “Teach me how,” she whispered as she put her mouth on his chest again.

  He was muttering something, harsh and feverish, in a language she didn’t understand. But he wasn’t fighting her wandering fingers. He jerked the belt loose and worked the closure, bringing her hand onto silky fabric. But when she moved it under the waistband, he stopped her firmly.

  “It won’t matter,” she whispered.

  “It will,” he ground out. “Don’t stop.”

  He drew her hand onto him, feeling it jerk a little despite her resolve when she touched him. There was a velvety hardness under the silk, and he taught her how to brush it, how to explore it, in a silence that was loud with the sound of breathing.

  He shivered, but despite the pleasure, there was no upsurge, no building heat. “Damnation!” he choked. “I…can’t…!”

  “What am I doing wrong?” she asked.

  He stilled her hand against him and held it there as he exhaled roughly. His eyes closed. “The pleasure is there, but I can’t reach it. The problem is in me, not in you. And this is not the time, nor the place.”

  He moved her hand and rolled away from her. He got to his feet efficiently and refastened his clothing. While he dressed, so did Gretchen, but she felt no embarrassment with him now. Her eyes told him so when he turned to look at her.

  “I’m not sorry,” she said before he could speak.

  “Neither am I.” His eyes met hers. “You belong to me now,” he said, and he didn’t smile. “We must marry.”

  “Why?” she asked huskily.

  “Because if there’s any possibility that I can have you, I’m going to,” he said bluntly, holding her eyes. “In my world, no man has a virgin unless he is her husband.”

  “But I’m not your social equal,” she protested.

  “Gretchen, do you want me to turn the jet around and send you back to the States?”

  “After that?” she exclaimed, her expression starting to fill with hurt.

  He chuckled. He pulled her tight into his arms and rocked her, cradled her, cherished her against his heart. “It was the single most delightful pleasure of my life,” he whispered. “If you’re willing to take the chance, we can b
e married under my own customs, my own law.” He hesitated. “Such a marriage would be binding only in Qawi,” he added reluctantly, “so that if I am unable to consummate the relationship, you can go home still a virgin.”

  “And if you can consummate it?” she whispered back.

  He lifted his head and met her eyes with his. “It will take an army to get you out of the country. Because if I can have you completely,” he added huskily, “you will never escape me in this lifetime!”

  Chapter Eight

  Gretchen’s warm eyes wandered over his face and she smiled tenderly. “I never dreamed anything like this would ever happen to me,” she said softly. “I’d love to marry you. But you don’t have to.”

  “Having you the object of lurid gossip in the palace would demean me and dishonor you. My father would cut off my hands,” he pointed out. “He’s a stickler for tradition. So am I.” He pursed his lips and smiled at her. “So are you, in fact.”

  “I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”

  “You make me a man again, and you think I see you as trouble?” he asked sardonically.

  “You hadn’t really tried to make love to anyone since the accident, had you?” she asked, seeing the truth in his face. “You might still be able to, with someone else. With that blond woman you said I remind you of,” she added with a surge of jealousy that she fought to keep hidden.

  “Brianne.” He thought back to his relationship with Brianne, and his expression hardened. He had adored her, ached for her, and lost her to Pierce Hutton because he thought himself incapable with any woman ever again.

  Gretchen saw the disappointment in his eyes and felt uncertain of herself. “Do you still care for her?” she persisted.

  “I will always care for her,” he said bluntly. “But she’s happily married and she has a two-year-old son. Even if I were whole again, there’s no hope. Not with her.” He turned, his black eyes lancing into her green ones. “But my reaction to you is quite promising, and I have every intention of pursuing it. That should make my position crystal clear. If you want to run, do it now.”

  She pursed her lips and lifted her eyebrows. “Got a parachute?”

  He chuckled. “No.”

  “Then I guess you’re stuck with me. Monsieur Souverain,” she murmured mockingly.

  He caught her hand in his and opened the cabin door. “Out,” he said on a laugh, nudging her into the aisle in front of him.

  She laughed, too, and the bodyguards stared at both of them with varying degrees of puzzlement. Probably they’d heard all that gossip, too, Gretchen thought, but she was disheveled and her mouth was swollen and Philippe didn’t look too neat himself. They looked shocked to see such radiance on their ruling sheikh’s lean, hard face. Good. That ought to give them something to think about, she told herself smugly.

  She sat beside Philippe until the plane landed in Qawi. It was no more what she’d expected than Morocco had been. There were date palms everywhere, sandy stretches that led to the Persian Gulf, and sparkling blue water. Inside the ancient wall of the old city, the buildings were a blinding white. There were beautiful mosques and a cathedral, and in the distance, she saw what looked like the beginnings of a new and modern city.

  Philippe motioned to one of the stewards, and the neatly uniformed young woman in the head scarf smiled at Gretchen as she handed Philippe what looked like a bundle of black cloth.

  “This is necessary,” he told her solemnly. “It is the same as opening an umbrella during a rainstorm in your own country. I am sovereign of my country, and I must respect all its traditions as well as protect you from any extremists who live here.”

  “You don’t have to explain it to me,” she assured him. “I spoke to a Muslim woman in the hotel and she told me that to a lot of them who live strictly by the Qu’ran, the aba and hijab are visible signs of their pride and their purity.”

  He smiled radiantly. “Who taught you the words for cloak and head covering?”

  “She did,” she told him. “And it’s a thobe that men wear with a bisht over the thobe and a gutra on the head held in place by that rope-thing called an igal.”

  He pursed his lips. “I’m impressed.”

  “Shukran.”

  He chuckled. She’d thanked him in Arabic. “Now I’m really impressed,” he added when she grinned. “Here.” He stood and dropped the dark hijab over her head, covering her neat bun of blond hair. He added the huge black hooded cloak to it. “There are still those among my people who might do you harm if they see your shape blatantly displayed. I won’t have you at risk, in any way.”

  She smiled up at him. “Thanks. But it’s okay,” she assured him. “If you came home with me, you’d have to put on a cowboy hat and somebody would probably try to trick you into getting on an unbroken horse.”

  He choked back a laugh at her assumption that he couldn’t ride an unbroken horse. She had an interesting, if incorrect, opinion of him. She was going to be surprised when she saw him as he truly was, on his own home ground. He stood aside to let the bodyguards open the door of the huge black stretch limousine for them.

  “You might have told me who you were from the beginning,” she pointed out when they were flying down the paved road toward what must be the capital city.

  “What, and take all the fun out of our relationship?” he replied with a grin. “Surely, men are more attractive to women when they remain mysterious?”

  “You’re a king.” She was still getting used to that, and it helped if she reminded him occasionally, too.

  “I’m a sheikh,” he corrected. “The head of the tribe which traditionally held power in this part of the continent. The line has come down relatively unbroken through imamates for six generations, although my father is the first Christian leader.”

  “I see. You inherit the crown, so to speak, like kings do.”

  He lifted an eyebrow and for an instant, he seemed very foreign. “No one inherits a title among these desert people,” he said softly. “It is won, and held, only by the man who can defend it.”

  That was confusing and she wanted to ask more questions, but the phone rang and in seconds, the intercom came alive. Philippe listened and then picked up the receiver at his side, speaking abruptly and rapidly into it. He hesitated and then spoke again, grimacing as he put the phone down.

  “More trouble,” he said shortly. “A raid at the border. Several men were killed.” He glanced at her. “It will mean a trip to the border on our northern desert. I must deal with this.”

  “Do you have an army?” she asked.

  “Not in the sense you mean, not yet,” he replied. “We are an old country, but without a modern base of power unless you include long-range tactical weapons and an elite but small military unit with a limited amount of equipment. No, the rebels will have to be met in the old way. And while we solve that problem, we can solve our own,” he added with a lingering search of her eyes. “I will arrange the wedding at the same time.”

  “You’re really serious?”

  “I am.”

  “But you said your father didn’t like Americans,” she pointed out.

  “Gretchen, you will enchant him,” he said quietly. “All it needs is time.”

  “Will we leave right away?”

  “Not for several days,” he replied. “I have to meet with my ministers and my father to discuss the treaties I have just signed, and the contracts I have negotiated. You will have enough to occupy you,” he promised gently. “My minister of education will bring you up-to-date on my kindergarten project.”

  “I hope I can do what you want me to,” she said worriedly.

  “Of that, I am certain. And soon, so will you be,” he said.

  “You make me feel as if I can do anything,” she confessed. “Until the past few days, I was sort of a bystander of life. You make me want to be a participant.”

  His eyes narrowed. “This man who wanted to marry you,” he said, his eyes intent on her face, “what became
of him?”

  “Daryl?” She sighed. “He took up with a banker’s daughter and left skid marks…” She saw the lack of comprehension in his face and laughed. “Sorry. I’m afraid that idioms are second nature to Americans. He started dating a banker’s daughter. He couldn’t get away from me fast enough. He thought my mother would leave a great deal of insurance money. But there was none.”

  “An opportunist,” he commented.

  “Yes, and I hadn’t the experience to recognize that when I saw him,” she said self-consciously. “Mother was very possessive of me, especially when I got old enough to date. I think she knew she was dying and she was afraid of being left alone. As if I would ever even have thought of leaving her by herself!”

  “No,” he mused, studying her. “You are not the sort of person to abandon a loved one in need.”

  “At least he was around when she died, so I wasn’t totally alone. Marc was in Florida working undercover. He didn’t get home until after the funeral.”

  He muttered something, his eyes flashing. “You had no one to help with the arrangements?”

  “I sort of had Daryl, at least until he felt safe mentioning the will.” She shook her head. “But I guess there aren’t a lot of men who’d want to settle for life on a run-down cattle ranch in a small Texas town.”

  “You sell yourself short,” he said curtly.

  Her eyes widened. “Speaking of selling women,” she said, leaning toward him, “did white slavery really go on over in this part of the world?”

  He burst out laughing. “Why do you want to know?” he teased. “Do you think I might be tempted to sell you?”

  “I guess not,” she said with a smile. “You wouldn’t need the money.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” he agreed. His eyes slid over her warmly. “White gold,” he murmured. “That’s what they would have called a woman like you. You would have fetched a handsome price.”

  “There, you see, it did cross your mind!” she chided.

  He chuckled softly. “Even if I were a brigand, would I sell the greatest treasure in my storehouse?” he murmured.