by YoBro
But, after a few seconds, she began to shift in his arms.
"Are you uncomfortable?" he said softly.
She shook her head.
"Was I—was I too fast for you?"
She shook her head again.
He wished she would say something. They had just been as intimate as a man and a woman could possibly be but he could feel her leaving him, not physically, but in some other, indefinable way.
There was a sofa in the room.
He wanted to carry her to it. Undress her. Remove all her things, slowly, garment by garment, bare her to his eyes, his hands.
His mouth.
He wanted time to explore her.
Yes, there was the danger of someone stumbling upon them but that wasn't what kept him from it.
It was the way he could feel her changing, as he held her. The wonderful, graceful fluidity of sex was being overtaken by a kind of rigidity. Her arms were still around his neck. Her face was still against his throat. Her breathing was still rapid but—
"This isn't how I wanted us to be together the first time."
"You mean, you planned it?"
"Planned…?" He almost laughed. Would a man who planned a sexual encounter have chosen this setting? "No. Of course not. I didn't plan anything." His voice roughened. "I thought about you, yes. I thought about how I wanted to kiss you again. The right way. How I wanted to touch you—"
She lifted her head.
"And now," she said, her voice without inflection, "you've done both."
He smiled. "But not enough of either."
He brushed his lips over hers. She turned her face away. A warning tingle danced along his spine.
"Laurel?"
"Put me down, please."
"Wait a minute."
"I said—"
"I want you to listen to me first."
"I did. I heard that whole clever speech, about how you shouldn't have done what you did the other night, and how you owed me an apology."
She was right. He had told her those things, but they sounded very different when she said them.
Women were often mysterious creatures and men were sometimes thick-skulled but it didn't take a genius to figure out that something had gone very, very wrong.
She drew back as far as she could, considering the way he was holding her, and flattened her palms against his chest.
Amazing. They were still entwined, but she had managed to erect a barrier between them that was every bit as effective as a wall.
"Put me down, Khan."
"What is this? One minute, we were making love, and the next—"
"It wasn't love, it was sex."
"I don't give a damn what you call it. The point is—"
Her fist pounded once, hard, against his shoulder.
"Put-me-down!"
He did as she'd asked. As she'd demanded! She turned her back to him and adjusted her clothes. He watched her, his mood going rapidly downhill.
Jaw set, he zipped his fly, then put his hands on his hips.
"All right," he said coldly. "I'm waiting."
"For what?"
"For an explanation. What's this all about?"
"You're a smart man, your highness. I'm sure you can figure it out."
Khan clasped her shoulders and turned her toward him. She wrenched free of his hands.
"You wanted what just happened as much as I did," he growled.
"Lovely," she said. "A gentleman, to the end." Her chin came up. "I'll say one thing for you." Her tone was not just cool, it was glacial. "You have an unusual way of offering a woman an apology."
Khan felt his face heat.
"That's a hell of a thing to say!"
"Honesty is a virtue," Laurel said, "but what would you know about honesty?"
It was her getaway line; he had nothing to offer as a rejoinder.
This was the second time she'd left him speechless. The last time, he'd been fool enough to think he could make up for it by kissing her.
Fortunately, he was not a man to make the same mistake twice.
All he could do was watch her draw a deep breath, open the door…
And walk out.
CHAPTER FOUR
The week passed quickly. By its end, Khan was convinced that coming to Texas had not been one of his better ideas.
Thus far, what had he accomplished?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Well, that wasn't exactly true.
He'd collected more information on oil drilling and seismic surveying than a man could use in a lifetime; he'd met enough guys in suits and hard hats to make up the population of a small nation.
And he'd met a woman.
If you could call being insulted by her and then having sex with her 'meeting a woman.'
He couldn't.
He had never been involved in anything even remotely like this before.
For starters, nobody insulted him. It was part of being a prince. People might say things behind your back. They might even print unpleasant things in magazines or put them online, but say them to your face?
Never.
Khan scowled as he sat at the desk in his hotel sitting room.
Laurel Cruz had insulted him. So, he'd kissed her. And, yes, he could probably spend the next year trying to make sense out of that, except it wasn't worth the effort.
An insult. A kiss.
Illogical.
And then he'd done something even more illogical.
He'd had sex with her, if you could call tearing at each other like a pair of animals in heat, sex. In what was, to all intents and purposes, a public place.
Still, for all of that, pretty good sex. Okay. Very good sex. Dammit, the best sex of his life.
Then she'd walked out on him. After insulting him again. And he'd let her do it.
Khan shot to his feet.
It was time to reassess. Forget the Cruz woman. She was history and he'd spent more time thinking about the whole mess than it was worth.
She'd ticked him off, maybe—if he was brutally honest—even bruised his ego, but so what? He was in Dallas on business.
It was time to get back to basics.
Review what had come of the endless lunches and dinners. Check the notes he'd made in the oil fields he'd tromped through. Figure out if all his questions had been answered and if not, determine how to get those answers.
Then he could make a logical decision as to whether he should stay here a little longer, or head home.
That was the reason he was spending the evening alone.
No diversions. No distractions. He'd ordered in—a sandwich and a big pot of coffee—and he'd eaten while he sifted through all the material he'd accumulated in the past six days. Handsomely-bound reports. Multi-colored charts. He figured half the R&D departments in town had been working overtime since his arrival.
Added to that were notes he'd scrawled notes on endless scraps of paper, other notes he'd entered more formally in the leather-bound notebook he carried in his pocket, still more notes he'd entered into his iPhone and his laptop computer.
Time to get back to them.
Khan sighed, ran both hands through his dark hair until it stood up in little tufts and looked at the sitting room desk. It was a handsome rococo thing, but an orange crate would have offered a bigger surface.
Was a person actually supposed to get work done at it?
Briskly, he cleared the surface of a lamp table and moved it next to the desk. Better, if not great. Moving quickly, he transferred half the stuff from the desk to the table, hit a key on his computer, another on his iPhone, watched the screens blink to life.
He sat down, reached for his cup of coffee, swallowed a mouthful.
It was awful.
Hotel coffee.
Hotel work-space.
Hotels in general.
Maybe it was time to make other living arrangements.
His suite was handsome, the service was impeccable, but a hotel was still a hot
el. Even the best ones had a sterile feel to them.
And he had no real privacy. Since last week's incident with the women in the elevator, the paparazzi were everywhere. He'd had to give up the rented Land Rover for a chauffeured Mercedes.
Driving around by himself was a thing of the past.
One lunatic woman had sprung at him seemingly from out of nowhere, yanked up her shirt and begged him to autograph her naked breasts. He'd kept moving, never stopped, never made eye contact, but it didn't matter.
Some enterprising soul had snapped a shot of the encounter.
Khan groaned at the memory.
The next day, the picture was everywhere. It was one hell of a photo. His stunned face. Her wild eyes.
Her breasts.
Some fool got through the hotel telephone system and left messages on his voice mail.
You want big tits, your highness? Mine are bigger than any you've ever seen. Call me. I'll come right over. You can do whatever turns you on… followed by a graphic description of what she thought that might be.
He shuddered.
He'd raised hell with the manager over that but he knew it wasn't the man's fault. It was life in the 21st century. If you were a public figure, you were up for grabs.
Of course, once the photo hit the internet, the crazies got worse. Now, even when he finally made it into the lobby, he wasn't home free. Hotel security did what they could but their resources had been overwhelmed.
Inevitably, he'd had to admit defeat. He'd contacted his head of security back home. Jamal, his childhood friend, was not given to subtlety but he was also a stickler for tradition, which was surely the only reason he hadn't looked Khan in the eye when he arrived and said, I told you so.
He'd brought with him what looked like a small army, fully prepared to guard their prince—their king, as Jamal pointed out—24/7.
Khan had refused.
"I will not have my life turned into a three ring circus! Place your men where you must, but not where I can see them."
Jamal had argued his case forcefully but politely, even while the expression on his face said he thought Khan was a fool.
They'd finally agreed on two-man teams in strategic locations around the hotel: in the lobby, at service entrances, on the roof.
"That is more than enough," Khan had said.
Of course, it wasn't.
Frowning, he rose to his feet again.
Last night, somebody had knocked on his door. It had been late, after ten; he'd only returned from dinner a short while before. He knew it could have only been Jamal.
Straight out of the shower, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his hips and a scowl, he'd marched to the door and flung it open.
"Now what?" he'd barked.
But it hadn't been Jamal.
It had been a woman.
The one who'd offered him her breasts for autographing.
This time, she'd offered him a larger canvas.
"You knew I would come," she'd said happily, and she'd flung open the raincoat she was wearing to reveal her breasts and, bloody hell, everything else.
Khan had started to push the door closed. She'd shoved a fleshy thigh between it and the jamb.
"If you don't let me in," she'd said with what he supposed she thought was a coy smile, "I'll call Entertainment Tonight and tell them you invited me here and exactly what you did to me once we were alone."
"Do that," he'd said coldly, "and be prepared to live out the rest of your life in the dungeons of Altara."
It was an excellent line.
A lie, certainly, but it had given him what he'd needed: a gasp, a look of shock and, best of all, the withdrawal of that huge thigh from the doorway. He'd slammed the door, locked it, and phoned Jamal, who'd shown up in less than thirty seconds.
This time, Jamal had not kept to tradition.
"Dammit," he'd snarled, "I told you so." A two second pause, and then he'd added, "Your highness."
They'd glared at each other. Then Khan had grinned. So had Jamal. It had been just what Khan needed, a release of tension—
And heightened security coverage.
Two men now stood guard outside the suite.
Another pair was stationed at the door that led to the fire stairs.
Fortunately, the woman's threat had come to nothing—except for Khan finally agreeing that Jamal was right.
He could not go on living in a hotel.
Sighing, he put down the cup of oily, cold coffee and got to his feet.
If he stayed in Dallas, he had to rent a place. A house. An apartment. A condo. It didn't matter as long as it was comfortable, well-located, and met with Jamal's approval, a dwelling his men could check thoroughly and easily protect.
Until his father's death, Khan had scoffed at that kind of thing.
Now, as his ministers kept pointing out, he could not afford to scoff.
He was responsible for his people and his nation. Who would take over, if something happened to him? He had no siblings. No children. Well, that was because he had no wife, which was another thing his ministers kept pointing out.
The bottom line was that if something happened to him, his ministers would determine who would rule in his place.
Khan had two cousins, second and third in line to the throne.
And that was the problem.
His mouth twisted.
The older cousin was addicted to gambling, drinking and whoring. The younger was a three year old child, with a greedy shrew for a mother.
And, damn, these were not things to think about tonight. He had enough on his plate.
He had to focus.
"Focus," he muttered, as he paced back and forth through the sitting room.
All right. He'd reached a decision. He could not yet leave America. His obligation was to Altara, and that meant concluding his plans for development of the new oil field.
First step, then.
Move out. ASAP. Tomorrow, if possible. He should have done it days ago. He remembered considering it but he'd never done anything about it because…
Because, he'd lost focus. That word, again.
And it was all Laurel Cruz's fault.
The woman occupied his thoughts. His dreams. And not for any pleasant reason. She was in his head because he'd never gotten her out of it, because it irritated the hell out of him that he'd imagined wanting to start all over again with her.
The truth was, he'd wasted a lot of time lately, only half-hearing what people said to him whether he was seated at a table in a plush boardroom or up to his ankles in mud while he inspected a drilling rig.
The verbal assault that first night? Bad enough. That kiss she'd insisted she despised except for that little giveaway sigh? Not good, either. But the thing at Travis's place, her going at him every bit as frantically as he'd gone at her, coming apart in his arms, hell, going crazy in his arms and then walking out on him after getting within a breath of telling him he was just what she'd called him that first time…
A barbarian.
"Focus," Khan said grimly.
Goddammit, he would.
Moving quickly, he crossed the sitting room, snagged his phone and the keys to the Rover, still parked in the hotel garage. Then he flung open the sitting room door.
The two men standing outside snapped to attention.
"My lord?"
"Did you want something, sir?"
Khan barely looked at them as he marched to the elevator, the bodyguards hustling after him.
"I'm going out," he said, his tone flat and all but daring them to argue. "Alone."
"Sir. Your driver—"
"I don't need him."
The lights above the elevator glowed discreetly as the car rose from the lobby floor. The bodyguards exchanged frantic glances.
"But, sir…"
"Come on," Khan muttered, jamming his finger against the call button as if that might make the elevator rise more quickly."
"My lord. You surely are n
ot going out alone."
"Completely alone."
The men looked at each other again. One pulled out his cell phone.
"My lord. You cannot—"
He swung toward them. They were right, but he'd be damned if he'd let that interfere with his decision.
"Who am I?" he demanded.
The men paled. One looked as if he might fall to his knees. If the idiot did that, Khan thought coldly, he would have his head.
"Dammit, answer the question. Who am I?"
"You are—you are the Prince of Altara. Our king. The Lord of our realm."
"Not a monster? A dictator? A barbarian?"
Was there a shade beyond pale? There had to be, because 'pale' was no longer an adequate description for what he saw in the faces of his bodyguards.
"No, Lord Khan! Never, sir! You are—you are—"
The elevator doors opened. Khan stepped inside. Folded his arms over his chest. Glared at the two men.
"I am not to be followed. Is that clear?"
They nodded. A pair of six-foot-something, bobble-head dolls. Part of him wanted to laugh. Part wanted to apologize for reducing such brave men to frightened children, but he did neither.
This was not his fault.
It was Lauren's.
It was yet another example of Lauren Cruz stirring up trouble in his life.
Focus, he thought coldly.
As if on cue, the elevator doors slid shut.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lauren had decided tonight was the night to wash her hair.
Well, she washed it every night, or, to be accurate, every morning when she showered, but tonight was The Works. Wash. Condition. Rinse. Deep Condition, using that funky goop that supposedly tamed it but never did. Rinse again. Blow dry.
She peered into the bathroom mirror.
The Works would take up most of the evening.
That was good.
It was excellent.
She had a briefcase full of files to study but lately, she had trouble concentrating. Something like dealing with her hair—there was a lot to deal with, when your hair was long and curly and had a mind of its own—something so straightforward would surely go a long way toward settling her down.
Or forcing her not to think.
Not to think about—about—
About something not worth thinking about, she told herself firmly.
