The Sheikh's Baby Omnibus

by Penny Jordan

  What had been his for keeping his knowledge to himself and withholding it from her? she wondered. What had his motive been for sharing it with her now? Her instincts were warning her to be on her guard.

  She was lying, of course. Vere knew it. She had to be. The only reason she had been interested in the changed course of the river was because the Emir was paying her to cause trouble for them. He knew that too.

  How much had she told the Emir already? Had he, or those who had hired her on his behalf, suggested ways in which she might manipulate the facts to fit in with his personal agenda?

  Had she hoped that by giving herself to him she could learn something that would aid the Emir’s cause? The mere fact that he had slept with her so casually would be enough to discredit him and, via that, damage the reputation of their country. He had been a fool to let his desire for her overwhelm his judgement.

  Vere thought quickly. He needed to protect Dhurahn against its current exposure to the Emir’s schemes, and to negate the effect his relationship with the Emir’s paid pawn might have. He needed to turn the tables on the Emir, and fast, and he thought he knew exactly how to do that.

  If he were to establish Sam publicly as his official mistress, then who would place credence on any claims the Emir might try to make off the back of her investigations? No one.

  Vere had no idea how such a plan had come to him. To take a person and use them without their knowledge for his ulterior purposes was ethically against everything he believed in. He wasn’t doing this for himself, though, he reminded himself. He was doing it for Dhurahn.

  Sam had shown herself willing to share his bed privately, so why should it make any difference to her if she shared it publicly? And their relationship would have to be shown publicly in order for it to benefit Dhurahn. The Heads of State would need to know that the ‘expert witness’ the Emir believed was secretly in his pocket was publicly in Vere’s bed.

  Publicly taking a mistress went against everything Vere held most dear, for he was a deeply private man, a man of pride and honour, but he knew that the only criticism of his actions would be his own. Drax would be more amused than shocked—all the more so if he believed that Vere genuinely felt desire for Sam—and Vere would keep from him the fact that his affair was a premeditated plan to outwit the Emir.

  As for Sam herself... Vere frowned. He would make sure she was well reimbursed for her trouble, and that she knew she would be. All she needed to know was that he desired her and that he wanted her to be with him. If she was greedy and immoral enough to accept the Emir’s bribe then she was hardly likely to turn down his offer, was she? A rich lover, ready to pay for the pleasure of having her in his bed, wasn’t something she was going to turn her back on, was it? It was probably the kind of offer she had been hoping for from the start.

  But, no matter how much he underpinned his decision with such thoughts, Vere knew that something deep inside him recoiled from it and felt tainted by it.

  She had shown such trust and innocence last night, such sweetness in the way she had given herself to him so freely. Or had she? Had he simply allowed himself to think that because it was what he wanted to think? If things had been different, if she had been different, then his own future could have been so much happier than he had ever dreamed.

  It was pointless thinking like that, Vere warned himself. He had a duty to do what must be done to protect Dhurahn.

  ‘It’s time we returned to the main camp,’ he told Sam.

  Sam nodded her head—but when she turned on her heel to start walking back to the four-by-four she slipped on the pebbles and lost her balance.

  She could feel herself falling and cried out automatically—only to feel the breath leaking from her lungs as Vere reacted to her plight, catching hold of her and supporting her.

  She looked up at him, intending only to thank him, she assured herself, but somehow her gaze slithered as helplessly to his mouth as her feet had done on the pebbles. And once there she couldn’t remove it. Instead her imagination burned her senses with vivid images of a cool deep pool of water in which their naked bodies entwined as they swam together, before they stopped to stand body to body in its shallows, their hands and lips discovering one another.

  ‘No...’

  But it was too late. As though he had shared her intimate vision Vere was kissing her once, then twice, and then over and over again, as though his hunger for her was such that nothing could assuage it. Just like her hunger for him.

  And when he did release her it was only to take her hand and lead her back to the four-by-four.

  Neither of them spoke as he drove them back to the small camp. There was no need, Sam thought. She knew exactly what was in his mind, what he ached and yearned for, because the same thing was in her own.

  In the cool shadows of her tent she watched as he undressed her, his lean long-fingered hands trembling visibly, but no more than her own fingers did when it was her turn to reach out and touch him.

  Her body, knowing the delights ahead after last night, pulsed with eagerness and longing. Shrugging off the last of her clothes, she reached up to him, unable to wait any longer, urging him down towards her.

  Outside the tent the sun scorched the earth in an embrace that was almost too much for it to bear. Inside, Sam lay in Vere’s arms and felt that her desire for him was almost too much for her senses to bear. Several times tears scalded her eyes, and she cried out when Vere’s touch carried her too close to her own pleasure.

  ‘We mustn’t,’ she whispered to him. ‘The risk...’

  ‘Trust me, there will be no risk,’ Vere soothed her, assuring himself that there would be no danger if he contented himself with simply pleasuring her and taking his own pleasure from that. He kissed her breasts and her belly, then moved lower, the tip of his tongue inscribing circles of indescribably intense pleasure against her thigh.

  When he reached the swollen lips of her sex he stroked his fingertip along the length of its secrets. She was moist and ready, quickening to his touch, her flesh as sweet as fruit ripened to the moment of perfection. His hunger to taste her thundered through him, driving him beyond what he thought he knew of himself and what he was. It stripped away everything but his own need, forcing it and him into a single desire.

  He tasted her with his tongue and then his lips. But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy his need.

  Unable to withstand her own pleasure, Sam cried out, her back arching and inviting. The feel of Vere sliding his body the length of hers made her sob with relief and cling to his shoulders. There was no need for her to urge him, though. He was already surging into her, filling her and completing her. He drove them both through their pleasure and beyond it to another level, and then another, each plateau more intense than the last, until finally all boundaries disappeared and they were at one with the universe, both of them oblivious to the risk they had taken.

  Sam surfaced slowly through the layers of sleep that, when she had first closed her eyes, had cocooned her as securely as Vere’s arms. Her body felt boneless and relaxed, and at the same time heavily sweet with the echoes of pleasure that clung to her like an invisible veil of sensation. She had never felt happier, nor more aware of how vulnerable she was. Of how finely balanced her emotions and senses were on the see saw edge of the intimacy she had shared with Vere. The heights and the depths were both there within her reach. With a single smile Vere could make her soar up to one and plunge down to the other.

  Ve
re!

  He was seated on the edge of the bed, fully dressed now, she realised, but with his head still bare. She could smell the freshly showered scent of his skin separating him from her, because her body was still perfumed with their intimacy.

  ‘This can’t be allowed to continue. For the Ruler of Dhurahn such clandestine behaviour is not fitting. Matters cannot continue as they are. Changes will have to be made.’

  His harsh words plunged Sam down into the darkness of loss and despair. He was going to have her dismissed from her job, she recognised miserably.

  She wanted to protest, but how could she? What could she say? No matter how much both of them might try to deny it, it was obvious that the sexual chemistry between them was too powerful for them to resist.

  ‘I refuse to be forced to creep into your quarters under cover of darkness and then have to leave them again before the break of day, like some thief taking what he should not have. Instead I propose that you become my official mistress, and that I publicly acknowledge you as such. You will return with me to Dhurahn, where you will have your own suite of rooms in the royal palace. Your status will be recognised and respected. It is a great honour in the eyes of our people for a woman to be chosen to be their Ruler’s mistress. You will share my life and my bed for as long as we continue to desire one another, and no one will dare to question our relationship.’

  ‘You want me to be your mistress?’ Sam could barely take in what he was saying, though she could feel the hollowness inside her filling with pain.

  His mistress. How cold and unloving he made it sound—a union purely for sex, with no love or emotional bonding shared between them. There were no words from him to reassure her that, even if his position meant that he did not want to marry her, at least he cared enough to understand how important it was to her to know that he felt love for her.

  ‘It seems a logical solution to a situation which we both know now is becoming untenable.’

  She ought to turn him down and walk—no, run away from him just as far as she could, if only for the sake of her own pride. But how would she feel once she had done that? How would she feel back home in England, knowing she could have been with him? Would her pride sustain her then, when she was lying awake at night hungering for him?

  It shocked her that she could feel like this, that there could even be any question of what she should do. What had happened to her inner belief that it was only within a secure and mutually committed, loving relationship that she would experience true sexual pleasure and satisfaction? What had happened to the conviction that for her a relationship without those things just wasn’t worth having? That without being loved and loving in return, without being valued and valuing in return, there was no way she would want to be with a partner?

  Vere offered her none of those things. Even his desire for her was a desire she felt he resented and in part blamed her for—a need which, when he wasn’t being intimate with her, she suspected he felt extremely hostile towards.

  Surely knowing all of these things her logic and common sense could only urge her in one direction. That direction being the opposite one from the one Vere was taking.

  By rights she ought to be refusing him, telling him quite categorically that she had no wish to become his mistress. His mistress, she reminded herself. Not his lover. Even in choosing his wording Vere was offering her a position in his life which made them unequal.

  But maybe it was understandable that he should withhold himself emotionally from her. A man in his position would have to be wary and careful. Women must throw themselves at him in their dozens. He had already accused her of doing exactly that, and said he wanted nothing more to do with her, but he had been the one who had instigated their lovemaking, and there Sam could find no fault with him at all. There, he had given her everything she had dreamed of in her wildest dreams and more.

  She knew instinctively that it just wasn’t possible for any other man to take her to such heights or show her such pleasures. No matter what she did from now on no one could ever match the sensuality of Vere’s lovemaking. Her body would forever have desire for it and for him. Why not allow it to have what pleasure it could, even if she knew that ultimately that pleasure would be brought to an end?

  She could live like that, couldn’t she? She could endure the heights of sexual delight, knowing that what they had already shared had tipped her over the edge of fantasising about Vere into the painful reality of loving him, whilst Vere felt nothing emotionally for her. Was she sure she had the right degree of strength and self-discipline to separate her sexual fulfilment from the emotional barrenness of the relationship he was proposing without it destroying her?

  But what if with time Vere should grow to love her? What if the sexual pleasure they shared led him to fall in love with her? Could she really bear to turn her back on the chance that that might happen?

  The chance? It was a very small chance!

  Yes, but it was there, wasn’t it? And whilst it was there she could hope. Wasn’t her love for him worth taking a risk for?

  She gulped in a shallow breath of air and then exhaled, trying to steady her nerves.

  ‘Some people might think it’s an insult to a woman to offer her such a role,’ she told Vere lightly.

  ‘Might they? I doubt it. On the contrary. My opinion is that people will view the fact that I am publicly acknowledging you as a mark of my respect for you. Surely it is more insulting by far for me to be with you in secret, as though I feel that being with you shames me? As my mistress you will have status and position. Financially—’

  ‘No!’ Sam stopped him sharply. ‘I don’t want money to come into this. If I agree, then it is because...’ She looked proudly at him. ‘It is because I want you, not your money.’

  ‘You say that, but if it is true then why do you hesitate? After all, I already know you want me.’

  He had cut the ground from beneath her so neatly she had fallen straight into his trap, Sam acknowledged. She opened her mouth and then closed it again. Shaking her head, she finally admitted, ‘Since you put it like that, then I don’t suppose I can refuse, can I?’

  ‘No,’ Vere agreed softly. ‘You can’t. And nor would I have allowed you to do so.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SAM suspected that it wasn’t just the motion of the helicopter Vere had summoned to transport them swiftly to Dhurahn that was making her feel slightly dizzy. From the second she had given her agreement to Vere’s proposition things had moved so fast that Sam had barely had time to catch her breath at all.

  When she had protested that she needed time to explain things to her colleagues, Vere had told her arrogantly that no explanation would be needed. The very fact that she was with him would be enough. And of course he had been right.

  Anne, who had come to see her whilst she had been packing, had shaken her head and taken hold of Sam’s hands in hers to say, almost maternally, ‘Oh, my dear, are you sure?’

  ‘That I’m doing the right thing? No,’ Sam had admitted, choking back a small laugh. ‘But I’m sure that if I don’t go with him I shall regret it.’

  ‘You’re in love with him,’ Anne had guessed. ‘Well, I can’t blame you. But these men are autocrats, my dear, and their way of life...’

  ‘I know it won’t last for ever,’ Sam had told her bravely.

  Anne had patted her hand without reassuring her, saying only, ‘I do so hope that you won’t end up being hurt.’

 
Would she end up being hurt? Sam wondered now, as they flew over the fertile area of land irrigated by the Dhurahni River. Or would the miracle she longed for occur and Vere fall in love with her?

  Down below them she could see fields of crops, olive groves, and a wide, straight arterial road.

  ‘Our farmers grow the crops that feed the tourists who flock to Zuran,’ Vere told her, leaning across her slightly, his body hard against the softness of her own.

  She had already noticed the respect with which she had been treated by the men who had accompanied Vere to the camp when he had escorted her from her tent to the helicopter. She shivered a little now, still not really able to take in the public change in her circumstances. All she wanted was Vere the man, as her lover and her love, but Vere was more than Vere the man; he was also the powerful Ruler. How would she fit in to his environment?

  They were flying into what Sam assumed must be Dhurahn’s airport.

  Sam looked uncertainly at Vere, suddenly feeling very vulnerable and anxious.

  ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ she asked him. ‘I mean, with you being Dhurahn’s Ruler...and your brother...what will he—’

  ‘Drax will thoroughly approve.’

  Sam could see how Vere’s expression softened and lightened when he mentioned his twin. She felt a small pang of jealousy. Vere loved his brother. She so desperately wanted him to love her. She knew so little about Vere’s life, but she felt unable to ask too many questions. What did that tell her about the imbalance in their relationship?

  The helicopter had come to rest. Vere touched her arm, indicating that she was to follow him.

  By the time they were standing on the concrete runway a vehicle had pulled up in front of them, the driver getting out and salaaming to Vere before opening the car doors for them.