by Penny Jordan
‘You!’
Why had she said that? It had sounded so personal and so betraying somehow—as though she were deliberately creating an intimacy between them. And that hadn’t been her intention. She was just so shocked to see the man she had last seen standing in the Al Sawars’ courtyard with her employer’s husband standing in front of her.
Unlike her, he wasn’t wearing sunglasses, and something about the look she could see in his eyes made her feel like some poor creature of the desert caught in the predatory searching stare of a falcon.
‘If Madame Al Sawar asked you to come after me…’ she began uncertainly.
Before she could finish what she was saying Drax silenced her with a swift frown.
‘I can acquit you because you do not know me well enough to know that I do not act as an errand boy for others,’ he told her arrogantly. ‘But do you really know Monika so little that you think she’d show that kind of remorse?’
Sadie looked away from him. He was right, of course. Monika was not the type to suffer from second thoughts, much less guilt over what she had done.
‘I came after you because there is something I want to discuss with you. The Professor speaks very highly of you. He considers you to be a young woman of good morals and intelligence.’ Drax was not going to tell her that the Professor had also confirmed his own assessment that she was more inclined to think the best of others than the worst, and that this made her vulnerable to the selfish machinations of the unscrupulous.
Sadie could feel a pink flush heating her face as she listened to this praise.
‘You are fully qualified to work in the financial services industry, so I understand?’
His question startled Sadie. ‘I have a degree and an MBA,’ she acknowledged. She could see Drax nodding his head, as though her words had confirmed what he already knew.
‘It could be that I can offer you a job to replace the one you have just lost.’
Now he could see uncertainty and suspicion in her eyes, along with the kind of female wariness that made Drax congratulate himself again on his own intuition. She would be perfect for the plan he had outlined to his twin.
Sadie looked at him with a challenging expression. She wasn’t so naïve that she wasn’t aware that there was a certain type of Arab male who looked to western women to satisfy his sexual needs via a series of brief sex-only liaisons.
‘Thank you, but my plan has always been to return to the UK to work.’
‘But not without the money to pay your fare or your passport?’ Drax suggested.
Her passport? Sadie looked at him, and then looked down at her bag. But there was no need for her to look inside it, because Drax was already holding her passport in his hand.
‘What…?’
‘Why don’t you get in the car?’ Drax looked at his watch. ‘I can tell you about the job that’s on offer over a late lunch in the city.’
Did he really expect her to fall for that kind of line? She wasn’t that naïve. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not interested—in anything,’ she emphasised firmly, reaching for her passport.
Drax stepped back from her, sliding her passport out of sight somewhere within the folds of his dishdasha.
‘Very well,’ he said calmly, and turned back to his car.
‘My passport…’ Sadie protested frantically.
‘What passport? If, when I reach the airport for my return flight to Dhurahn, I find that I still have the passport I found lying on the ground in Zuran City, then I shall naturally see that it reaches the nearest British Embassy.’
‘What?’ This was getting worse by the minute. Not only had he got her passport, he was also planning to leave the country. ‘No, you can’t do that!’ Sadie told him wildly.
‘No?’ The ice-green eyes had hardened.
Ignoring the warning in them, Sadie tried to grab her passport back from him, crying out as she stumbled over a sharp piece of rock jutting out of the earth and then fell heavily against Drax.
Drax’s reactions were quicker than Sadie’s. He caught her easily, and could have held her away from him so their bodies didn’t come into contact, but for some reason he wasn’t prepared to explain to himself he didn’t. Instead, he wrapped his hands around her upper arms to steady her, and let her body rest against his own. He could feel the soft rounded swell of her breasts, and the temptation to slide his hands from her arms to her hips, to pull her more intimately against him, was so strong and instinctive that it startled him. She smelled hot and sweet, and her scent caused an unexpected surge of sexual awareness to grip him. It took him off guard.
What the hell was this? He didn’t normally react with this kind of easy arousal. A man in his position had to be careful about his sexual liaisons. Drax had learned that long ago. He had a responsibility towards the position he held. He and Vere had a shared duty to give their subjects a good example and to set high moral standards. Casual sex wasn’t something he indulged in, and yet here he was so stiffly erect that he felt downright uncomfortable—and all on account of this dusty young woman with her topaz eyes and her pale skin. A woman he had already decided to offer to his brother.
Which was, of course, why he was testing her moral standards. If she took advantage of their shared intimacy now to come on to him he would know there was no point in pursuing his plan. Neither could he afford to become sexually involved with her—it wasn’t for sex that he wanted her. She must be proved to be the kind of woman the Professor believed her to be. The kind of woman who was the opposite of women like Monika al Sawar and who would not try to institute sex with a man without being invited to do so.
After Sadie’s shock at being so unexpectedly close to Drax, with all its drugging excitement, came recognition of her vulnerability—and with it panic.
‘Let go of me!’ She sounded more pleading than assertive, Sadie recognised weakly, as she heard the emotion in her own voice. Being this close to this man wasn’t good for her, she admitted. It reactivated everything she had felt in the courtyard, and underlined her inability to override her physical response to him.
So why wasn’t she doing more to make him release her? Why, in fact, was she leaning into him as though she couldn’t stand without the support of his body? Did she really not care about the danger of her own actions? Not just via the casual sex with a stranger he might think she was inviting but, just as dangerously, via the effect her proximity to him was having on what she had always believed to be givens about herself. Givens like the fact that she wasn’t a woman who had strong sexual urges; like the fact that she wasn’t a woman who could ever be overwhelmed by desire for a man just by looking at him; like the fact that she was far too sensible to take risks with her sexual and emotional health.
It was the heat of the sun that was making her feel weak, she hurried to reassure herself. Nothing else. She certainly wasn’t entertaining the kind of fantasies she had heard some western women had about sexy Arab sheikhs—even if this man was everything that such a man should be, right down to the aura of danger surrounding him.
‘This is Zuran,’ she heard him telling her coldly as he thrust her away. ‘Here it is not acceptable for a man and a woman to embrace in public, no matter what you may be used to doing elsewhere!’
What she might be used to doing elsewhere? He was making it sound as though he thought she was coming on to him. Mortified, Sadie pulled away from him and stepped back. She was right about one thing. She had been out in the hot sun for longer than was wise, and her own sudden movement had caused a wave of faintly nauseating dizziness to swamp her.
The sight of Sadie’s suddenly too pale face accompanied by her soft gasp of shock had Drax reacting with instinctive speed as he recognised the onset of heat sickness. He bundled her into the car so quickly that Sadie didn’t have time to do anything more than make an incoherent protest. She could feel the car depressing as he slid into the driver’s seat and switched on the engine. She could hear too the sound of the doors locking as he set the ca
r in motion and pulled away from the kerb.
‘Stop,’ she said frantically. ‘You can’t do this!’
‘What would you have preferred me to do—leave you where you were to suffer sunstroke?’
‘There’s plenty of shade in the city.’
‘You would never have made it that far,’ Drax told her bluntly, before adding, ‘And you needn’t look at me like that. You have nothing to fear from me.’
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Sadie retorted shakily. ‘You’ve practically kidnapped me, and—’
‘And now you’re worried that I might be carrying you off to my harem to have my wicked way with you?’ Drax mocked her, raising one dark eyebrow. ‘Do you really think that’s likely? Let’s be honest with one another—in today’s world, if I wanted to indulge myself sexually with a disposable partner I would hardly need to kidnap one, would I?’
Her eyes were the colour of clear warm honey, Drax noticed, her tawny hair as polished and silken as the coat of one of his cherished pure-bred Arab mares. He sensed within her the same pride that possessed his falcons—a pride he had the power and the skill to tame, so that they came to his hand as softly, as though they were doves.
Her skin was too pale, though, for the harshness of the desert’s midday sun, and she was paying for her folly in ignoring that fact now. Perspiration beaded her forehead and her head drooped on the slender stem of her neck. Drax guessed that in addition to her obvious apprehension at being bundled into his car she was probably also feeling slightly nauseous. She was certainly likely to be dehydrated.
He reached out and tapped open the centre console that separated their seats. ‘You will find a bottle of water in here. Take it and drink some,’ he advised her sternly.
Water! Until he had spoken she hadn’t realised how thirsty she was. Sadie’s tongue-tip flicked against the dry saltiness of her lips as she reached eagerly for the unopened bottle.
Removing the top, she lifted the bottle towards her mouth.
The traffic was heavy enough for Drax to slow down and watch her. Her lips were soft and full, and as she closed them around the head of the bottle she also closed her eyes, as though she was giving herself over to a much longed-for sensory pleasure. She drank quickly, the muscles of her throat contracting and expanding as she swallowed and then drank more deeply.
The arousal Drax had felt earlier returned, thrusting past the barriers of civility and necessity. Was she aware of just how intensely erotic her actions were? Drax wondered, as between one breath and the next he became trapped within the sexual urgency and immediacy of the images his own brain was creating from her actions. Inside his head the soft fullness of her lips clung eagerly not to the water bottle but to his flesh, greedily absorbing its texture and taste. A pothole in the road caused water from the bottle to trickle from her lips down her throat and beyond, filling the hollow at its base and then spilling from it. If he were to lap its wetness from her skin now it would taste of her flesh and her heat, and the taste would feed his tongue to taste her more intimate wetness, to…
The sudden sharp blare of a car horn somewhere up ahead of them wrenched Drax out of his fantasy and back to reality. His heart was the thudding in slow, heavy erotic beats as it urged his body to greater arousal. He reached for his own bottle of water, and drank fiercely from it, as though to quench the heat of what he was experiencing.
The air-conditioning was on, so why was she suddenly feeling aware of a heat so physical that it not only seemed to be filling the interior of the car, it also felt as if it was actually touching her, pressing against her skin as though in a caress? Because she wanted to be caressed? By him? What kind of craziness had possessed her? Was this some kind of heat-induced lust that was a by-product of too much exposure to the sun? Sadie’s thoughts spilled dizzily on top of one another, blocking her rational exit from them. She fought valiantly against them, making herself focus on the scenery outside the car.
‘We’re almost in the city,’ she told Drax. ‘It’s kind of you to think about offering me a job, but really there’s no need. If you give me my passport and drop me off—’
‘You’re rejecting the job without knowing what it is?’
Sadie’s words had aroused two very different and competing instant reactions inside Drax—one, that he should stop the car, give her the passport and forget that he had ever seen her; the other that there was no way he was going to let her go.
He pressed harder on the accelerator, swinging the car into the outer lane that led away from the city.
CHAPTER THREE
‘AS JOINT rulers of Dhurahn, my brother and I have for some considerable time been looking into ways to provide our country and our people with a prosperous future once our oil runs out.’
Did he really expect her to believe that he was a ruler of Dhurahn? She had heard of Zuran’s neighbouring state, but she had also seen the protocol and the hierarchy of personnel that attended Zuran’s Ruler whenever he left the palace.
‘To this end, as you may know, we have developed an agricultural policy that has led to us provide other Gulf States with fresh produce. That is all well enough in its own way, but my brother and I both believe that we need something more. To effect this we have been in negotiation for some time now with various organisations in the City of London, with a view to establishing a business and financial centre of excellence within Dhurahn.’
Sadie started to frown. She had heard vague rumours of something like this, she acknowledged. In the way of such things word had got out of this ambitious plan by an unnamed gulf state, and she had also heard the young male MBAs with whom she’d worked stating that if the plan went ahead it would be a golden opportunity for the ambitious.
‘My brother and I are now at a stage in our negotiations where we are looking to put together a team of young MBAs to work with the experts we’ll be bringing in to implement our plans. Professor al Sawar, who was a long-standing friend of our late father, speaks very highly of you, and naturally it occurred to me that you would be an ideal candidate for our team.’
Drax gave a small shrug. ‘Of course I appreciate that offering you a job in this manner is not exactly orthodox business procedure, but events have moved ahead with more speed than we had anticipated. Interviewing and selecting a large number of the right young graduates and MBAs is going to take time. We have therefore decided to set up a small, specially selected team with all speed. The fact that you are here in Zuran and in need of a job makes you an ideal candidate for a place on that team.
‘Time is very much of the essence here. My brother has to leave for London for further negotiations, and I need to return to our country to allow him to do so, since one of us must always be resident in Dhurahn. If I can take you back with me and set you to work, initially as my PA with regard to the preliminary paperwork and the setting up of procedures and negotiations, that will allow me to have more time to work on other aspects of this ground breaking project.
‘You will be well paid. My brother and I have already agreed upon a salary scale for our young graduates—it is almost double the best rate paid in London, and I assure you that you will be paid. As rulers of Dhurahn our word is our bond, and we do not operate the same kind of business ethics as Monika al Sawar.’
‘You don’t really expect me to believe that you’re a ruler of Dhurahn, do you?’ Sadie challenged him. Just what kind of idiot did he take her for?
‘You’re accusing me of lying to you? Why should I bother to do that?’
‘Rulers of Arab states don’t drive themselves around without escorts, or—’
‘You know this for a fact, do you? So, how many rulers of Arab States exactly are you familiar with? Have you any idea just how insulting you are being?’ he asked Sadie softly. ‘Under traditional Dhurahni law people can be locked away for the rest of their life for such an insult to a member of its Ruling Family. In ancient times they would have had their tongue cut out so that they could never speak another lie. Th
at was if they were allowed to live.’
Sadie shuddered, sickened by the graphic image he was forcing on her. He was certainly every inch the haughty all-powerful potentate whose word was absolute law, she admitted, wishing now that she had not spoken out so rashly.
‘I do not lie, Ms Murray. I do not need to. I could drive back to Zuran City and take you to the Ruler to verify my identity for you. Indeed, I could ask the same of your own Embassy. But I don’t have time. I need to return to Dhurahn before my brother leaves.’
Sadie saw the look in his eyes as his mouth curled downwards in hard dismissal, and knew that he meant what he said.
It was still hard for to take what he was saying at face value—especially after she had been so naïvely taken in by Monika.
‘I find it hard to accept that you’re willing to offer me a job without knowing anything about me, or—’
‘Here in the Gulf we believe very strongly in fate. It is true that when I left the Royal Palace earlier today with Professor al Sawar the thought of employing you or anyone else was not something I had planned. However, a clever man does not ignore the opportunities that fate offers to him.’ Drax gave another shrug. That was certainly what he believed, even if the opportunity he believed ‘fate’ had given him on this particular occasion was not the one he was now promoting to Sadie Murray.
‘A contract will be drawn up that allows us both a probationary period in which to assess the consequences of what might seem to be a too-hasty decision. I have no desire to keep you in my country against your will. An unwilling worker is of no benefit to Dhurahn. As co-rulers of Dhurahn, both my brother and I are well aware of that. Neither of us would ever tolerate anything that prejudices the progress or the reputation of our country. And, just for the record, I have no desire to keep you in my bed unwillingly, where the same principle applies. I see no pleasure to be gained in a woman who is not there of her own free will and her own desire.’
