A Whisper of Disgrace

by Sharon Kendrick

  ‘Imagine if there was a fire in the middle of the night,’ her mother had once said, in that tart way she had of speaking to her only daughter. ‘And the fireman found you naked and indecent. That is not the way a lady behaves, Rosa.’

  As she stood beneath the torrential jets of the shower, Rosa’s lips curved with derision. She had just accepted her mother’s opinion, hadn’t she? The way she always did. Never realising that the woman who had brought her up so strictly was nothing but a cheating hypocrite.

  Quickly, she turned on the cold tap—hoping that the shock of the icy water might wash away the memories of the past few days, but it wasn’t easy to forget her mother’s dramatic confession. She stayed in the shower until she had scrubbed herself clean, and afterwards she found an unused toothbrush and paste and located her clothes and hairbrush. By the time she heard a knock on the bedroom door, she felt a million times better and she psyched herself up to face the judgemental face of Kulal.

  ‘Come in,’ she said crisply, her heart beginning to race as he walked in. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘So I see,’ Kulal said, reluctantly letting his gaze drift over her. Her feet were bare and the crimson minidress brushed the smooth skin of her thighs. For a moment he felt a powerful wave of temptation as he imagined taking her back to bed, before he swatted it away. She was trouble, he told himself. Last night, he might have been swayed by her beauty and her dancing, but in the cold light of day he knew she was best avoided.

  ‘I’ve ordered breakfast to be served on the terrace,’ he said. ‘So why don’t we go downstairs?’

  Hunger made Rosa nod her head in grudging agreement and she followed him down a wide marble staircase and out onto a terrace, where a table had been laid with croissants, juices and jams, and what looked like a dish of iced mango. The terrace overlooked landscaped gardens and, in the distance, she caught a glimpse of the sapphire sea. It felt as if they were in a self-contained world of their own—a private little bubble which was miles away from the hustle and bustle of the French Riviera. ‘Did you say this was a hotel?’ she asked curiously.

  ‘It is, but I always rent one of the two villas which are attached to it. They come with their own gardens and that affords me more privacy.’

  Rosa sank into one of the wicker chairs and looked up into the flatness of his eyes. ‘Which makes it easier to get rid of unwanted overnight guests in the morning, I suppose?’

  He sat down opposite her—a movement which immediately heralded the appearance of a butler bearing a large silver pot of coffee. Let her know exactly where she stands, Kulal told himself. Tell her the truth, even if the truth hurts. ‘That is always a consideration to take into account,’ he agreed.

  Rosa stared at the inky coffee which was being poured for her before Kulal waved the butler away. She wasn’t going to cause a scene about what he’d just said, when all he’d done was be honest. It would have been much worse if he’d pretended otherwise—if he made out that he’d never taken a strange woman back to his hotel before. And wasn’t she all done with lies and subterfuge? ‘Wise man,’ she said lightly.

  Her casual tone made Kulal relax and he sat back in his chair. So she was going to behave herself, was she? He guessed she must have done this kind of thing plenty of times herself. The slightly stilted morning breakfast after a night of red-hot sex.

  His mouth hardened as he forced himself to face the frustrating and rather laughable truth. Because you haven’t actually had sex with her, have you?

  He watched as she pulled a croissant from the bread basket and began to cover it in strawberry jam. With her dark hair drying in the sunshine and her body smelling of soap rather than perfume, he thought how different she looked this morning. Her face was completely bare of make-up so that she looked very young and almost innocent. Her pink lips were so delicious that it seemed a crime not to lean across the table and kiss them, and for a split second he imagined his tongue licking its way inside her mouth. Until he remembered the way she’d been writhing her hips around the pole last night and forced himself to dampen down his ardour. What chameleons women were, he thought. How they changed faster than the seasons! She was about as innocent as one of the houris who charged men by the hour for their services.

  Even so, as he watched her lift a glass of jus de pamplemousse to her lips, he couldn’t ignore the undeniable regret that he hadn’t made love to her. Because she would be an amazing lover. The sexual connoisseur in him told him that—even if he hadn’t witnessed the sensational way she’d been moving on the podium last night. As he’d put her to bed, her beauty had been revealed to him in all its shockingly sensual glory. He had felt deliciously firm skin as he’d peeled the little dress from her body. And it had taken more strength than he’d ever needed to walk away and spend a restless night in the bed next door.

  He waited until she’d finished eating, until she had dabbed those delectable lips with a napkin, before putting down his own coffee cup and subjecting her to a steady stare. ‘I’m assuming that by now you’ve remembered where you’re staying?’

  Rosa winced. What would he say if she told him that she’d never been drunk like that before? That she’d just discovered that her mother had cheated with her husband’s own brother—and her whole world had been smashed apart?

  How would he react? Well, he might believe her or he might not, but that would make no difference to the fact that he couldn’t wait to get rid of her.

  ‘I’m staying at the Hotel Jasmin,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘So if you wouldn’t mind calling me a cab, I’ll get out of your way.’

  Kulal rose from the wicker chair, knowing that he could easily send her home in his own car, but it was a pretty distinctive car and it would inevitably connect them. This part of the Riviera was always crawling with paparazzi, eager to capture the indiscretions of celebrities. They’d been lucky enough not to have been seen last night when he’d had to carry her inside—so maybe he should count his blessings and get rid of her as anonymously as possible.

  ‘I’ll get reception to organise it for you,’ he said. ‘And arrange for someone to show you through to the main part of the hotel.’

  Rosa felt like a piece of garbage which was headed for the recycling bin and wondered if it was possible to feel any worse than she did right then. She was never going to touch another drop of alcohol in her life! And she was never going to dance with dark and dangerous-looking strangers in nightclubs. She nodded as she looked up into his black eyes, unprepared for his sudden movement as he touched her hair before running his fingertips lightly down the side of her face in a gesture which felt almost gentle.

  ‘Just do yourself a favour, will you?’ he said roughly. ‘And stay off the booze in future.’

  His words affected her far more than they should have done and Rosa recognised how lucky she’d been in her choice of rescuer. He had plucked her from the sweaty scrum in the nightclub and danced with her, and then she had blown it. She had got drunk and passed out but he hadn’t taken advantage of her sorry state, even though it would have been easy for him to do so. And if he was clearly appalled by her behaviour—well, who could blame him? She was pretty appalled by it herself and she’d never get another chance to show him that deep down she wasn’t really like that. Worst of all was that she would never know what it was like to kiss him… .

  The old Rosa might have slunk off—but of course the old Rosa would never have found herself in such a compromising position. And the new Rosa wanted to have a taste of pleasure—just one—before she walked out of his life for good.

  She stood up on tiptoe and framed her hands around his hard jaw before leaning forward to brush her lips over the sensual curve of his mouth. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘For your hospitality and your chivalry.’

  For a moment he didn’t move and it was as if her soft words had turned him to stone. Rosa could see a little muscle working overtime at his temple before he drawled out a sardonic reply. ‘I’d like to say that the pleasure was
all mine, but that wouldn’t be true.’

  She looked at him uncertainly. ‘No?’

  ‘In fact, it was an evening which fell pretty short on the pleasure quota for both of us, and I’m wondering whether it might not be too late to remedy that… .’

  Rosa was unprepared for the decisive way that he pulled her against him and the equally decisive way that he drove his mouth down onto hers. His hands were cupping her head and her hair was spilling through his fingers and suddenly he was kissing her like she’d never been kissed before. She could feel the instant flowering of her breasts and a delicious warmth between her legs. Did he know that? Was that why he thrust one hard thigh between hers, as if sensing that might help alleviate the sudden aching she could feel at the most intimate part of her body?

  ‘Oh,’ she said against his lips, swallowing down her sense of wonder. ‘Oh.’

  With an effort, he tore his lips away and looked down into her upturned face. ‘How commendably circumspect I have been with you, my beauty,’ he said shakily. ‘But that all ends as of now. You are no longer drunk and I am no longer angry. This may be one of the most ill-judged decisions of my life, but I want you—and, sweet heaven, I am going to have you. Right now.’

  His emphatic statement should have daunted her, but it didn’t. She suspected that he didn’t particularly like or respect her, but suddenly Rosa didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything other than the way he was making her feel. Why shouldn’t she taste the pleasures which seemed to drive everyone else in the human race, except for her—poor, protected Rosa, who had been shielded from the world for so long? Her lips were dry but somehow she managed to echo his words as she felt his thumb tease its way over one painfully erect nipple.

  ‘I want you, too,’ she whispered. ‘And right now is fine with me.’

  With a hard smile of satisfaction, he bent his head to kiss her again and Rosa never knew what would have happened next had she not heard the sound of an embarrassed cough behind them. With a start, they sprang apart—as if they’d been caught red-handed at the scene of a crime.

  And maybe they had, she thought. Because there, standing at the edge of the private garden watching them, was a man as dark-skinned as Kulal himself, though his head was dipped with the faintest degree of subservience.

  She watched as a look of anger darkened Kulal’s face. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded. ‘Why the hell are you disturbing me, Mutasim—creeping up on me like a spy?’

  Rosa thought she’d never seen a man look more embarrassed than Mutasim did as Kulal’s words fired into him, and she noticed that the stranger hadn’t met her eyes. Not once.

  ‘I beg your indulgence at this untimely intrusion, Your Highness,’ said Mutasim softly. ‘But your brother, the king, craves your company at the earliest opportunity.’

  Rosa’s lips parted in shock as the words registered in her befuddled brain. She looked up at Kulal, her bewildered eyes asking him a silent question.

  Highness? King?

  Were they playing some sort of joke on her? Talking in some kind of code? But her confusion was quickly superseded by shame as Kulal took no notice of her silent plea. Completely ignoring her, he walked over to the dark-skinned man and began to speak in a low voice, in a language she couldn’t begin to understand.

  And Rosa felt completely invisible.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘SO WHAT DID you think you were playing at, Kulal?’ The king was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘When you decided to take some drunken pole dancer back to your hotel?’

  For a moment Kulal didn’t answer. Instead he sat back in one of the ornate chairs in the throne room and stared up at the old-fashioned fan which was whirring in the vaulted, golden ceiling. He was back in the ancient palace in which he’d been raised, having flown to Zahrastan as soon as he had received word that the king wished to speak with him. He’d never received a summons quite like this and it occurred to him that he’d never seen his brother look quite so exasperated either. Not even during that time when he had caught Kulal leaving one of the chambermaid’s rooms, smoothing down his ruffled robes and smirking all over his face.

  Or the time when Kulal had ‘borrowed’ one of the palace cars for an unauthorised trip into the desert when he was barely sixteen and nobody had known that he could drive. On both those occasions—and, indeed, on many more—righteous anger should surely have come flooding the younger prince’s way, but it had not. It was almost as if it had been expected that he should behave wildly—and everyone knew why. Weren’t motherless children always indulged?

  As two royal princes of a fabulously rich desert kingdom, the two men should have been close but an accident of birth meant that they had grown up living two very different lives. Hazail was the older, the heir to the throne, and the defining factor of his life had always been that he would one day inherit the crown. It had been Hazail’s destiny which had occupied most of their father’s time as he had tutored his elder son in the art of ruling a powerful desert kingdom.

  Kulal had simply been the ‘spare’—the extra boy child born as an insurance policy to ensure the line of succession. He had been brought up by a series of amahs—female servants who had adored him but had lacked the strength to discipline the strong-minded little boy. Consequently, he had been given freedom—perhaps a little too much freedom for so strong and so wilful a character. But that had never compensated for the heavy weight which had hung over him since his mother had died—a shocking death which had sent the country spiralling into deep mourning. And Kulal had been marked out by that terrible loss, for she had died saving his life. Deep down he knew that was the reason why his father and his brother had always been so distant towards him. He knew that subconsciously they blamed him for the queen’s untimely end, even if logic told them that it was nothing but the cruel intervention of fate. Of two people being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Perhaps it had been to make up for their emotional distance that they had tended to overlook Kulal’s misdemeanours. But it seemed that they were not being overlooked this time. Hazail was pacing the floor like an expectant father, before turning back to his younger brother, still with that exasperated expression on his face.

  ‘She wasn’t a pole dancer,’ Kulal protested as he picked up a golden goblet and swirled the pomegranate juice it contained.

  ‘No?’ Hazail looked at him. ‘It is fiction, then, that she was seen writhing around in a nightclub, showing much of her underwear in the process? That is simply a figment of my informant’s imagination, is it?’

  ‘Which informant?’ Kulal demanded, trying to dampen down the vivid image of Rosa’s curvaceous body as it had twisted itself around the pole. Or the fact that his brother’s damned servant had interrupted him just as he had started to seduce her!

  ‘That is surely beside the point,’ answered Hazail coolly. ‘Unless you’re denying that you took this exhibitionist back to your hotel with you?’

  Kulal shrugged. ‘No, I am not denying it.’

  ‘She seems a little outré even for your extravagant tastes, Kulal.’

  ‘I know.’ Kulal met the question in his brother’s eyes with a faintly bemused shrug, because he couldn’t have begun to describe the sensation which had washed over him when he’d watched Rosa walk into the nightclub that night. Lust didn’t begin to cover the hunger he’d felt when he’d seen her. There had been something in her eyes—a look which had seemed so at odds with the provocative curves of her body and which had called out to something inside him. He had noticed the defiant way she’d lifted the champagne bottle to her mouth and the small rush of foam which had trickled erotically over her lips. And then she had begun to dance… .

  Kulal felt desire shiver over his skin as he remembered that dance. It had been an invitation to sex. The most blatant and beautiful invitation he had ever witnessed and he had simply been unable to resist it. He had walked towards her like a man on autopilot, with his heart thundering and his body on fire
. ‘But she is very beautiful,’ he said simply.

  ‘There are a lot of beautiful women in the world, as well you know,’ came Hazail’s dry rejoinder. ‘Surely you could have found someone a little more suitable to have sex with?’

  Kulal wanted to protest that they hadn’t actually had sex, but his fiercely masculine pride would not allow him to make such a disclosure, especially not to his brother. ‘I’m not really clear about why there has been a big drama about it, Hazail?’ he drawled. ‘Why the sudden interest in my sex life?’

  ‘Because you are engaged to be married—in case it had slipped your mind. And therefore it is inadvisable for you to behave like a rutting stag!’

  Kulal thought of his serious-faced fiancée—a blue-blooded princess who hailed from the neighbouring country of Buheiraat. He thought about the matter-of-fact way the two of them had sat down to work out an agreement for their forthcoming nuptials. He thought about her complete lack of passion and compared her to the fiery and responsive Rosa, and his heart sank.

  He shot his brother a cool look. ‘I made a single, minor transgression, Hazail,’ he said. ‘I hardly think that puts me in the category of “rutting stag.” And besides, you know how these things work. Ayesha will not be expecting her prince to come to her on her wedding night as a cowering innocent. She will expect her husband to be experienced in matters of sexuality.’

  ‘Well, Ayesha’s expectations are now academic,’ said Hazail. ‘Since the wedding is now off.’

  Kulal stilled. ‘The wedding is off?’

  ‘Yes. She has sent word to the palace through one of her envoys that she will no longer marry you.’

  Kulal’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ exploded Hazail. ‘Because word has got back to her about your exploits, that’s why! You seem to forget that modern princesses are different to the way they used to be. They are no longer prepared to turn a blind eye to behaviour which they find intolerable. And you have hardly been the soul of discretion on this occasion, Kulal. A discreet liaison is one thing, but openly spending the night with a complete stranger is something else.’