Her Royal Protector (a Johari Crown Novel) (Entangled Indulgence)

by Alexandra Sellers

  It was unbearable. Shame for her own gullibility roared up and down her body like hot venom, burning and eating away at her. How easily she had fallen for it. God, how he must be laughing. As beautiful as Princess Shakira! If he’d told her he’d love her till the end of time, would she have swallowed that, too?

  “And meanwhile also look for any connection with Webson Attary or Mystery Resorts.”

  Aly closed her eyes against the wash of emotion, silently rolled off the bed and got to her feet. She couldn’t stay here, that was all she knew. It descended on her like total blackout, wiping everything from her brain except the memory of her father’s voice and the certainty that he’d been right all along. A face only a father could love—and not even that. She quietly tossed her things into her duffel bag, slung it over her shoulder, bent and picked up her shoes, held them in her hand.

  Her cabin door was already ajar, and she made no noise in opening it wider. She looked out and saw Arif’s back as he bent over the nav station. “Yes, Qays is one who has been involved in the application from the…”

  It was easy enough to slide by behind him, barefoot and silent, and up the stairs to the deck, where the gangplank was still down and Farhad was bending over in the cockpit. He did not see her. Aly ran along the gangplank and leapt onto the dock. Not stopping to put on her shoes, she dashed down the jetty as fast as she could till she was well hidden in the shadow of another yacht. She looked back towards Janahine. Nothing. No sound of alarm, no voice raised in question. She turned and ran again.

  …

  In the glass doors of the nav station cupboard, the reflection of movement made Arif lift his head. He was in time to see Aly’s legs disappear up the steps behind him. He turned in his chair to call but was stopped by the sight of the duffel bag hanging from her shoulder.

  For a moment he froze, trying to make sense of what he had seen.

  “Something’s come up,” he murmured into the phone. “I’ll call you later.”

  His ears followed the sound of her stealthy step across the deck and along the gangplank. Arif got to his feet and went after her up the steps, till he could just see over the hatch. Aly was running barefoot along the jetty, her bag slapping against her back, as if a devil were after her.

  Running from him.

  …

  The kebab seller was just opening for the lunch trade as Aly sat down on a bench to put on her shoes.

  Time to face the truth. Arif didn’t want her any more than Julian had. Or think her beautiful any more than her father did. Until he’d dumped her, she’d believed Julian fancied her, too. A glutton for punishment. Tell me I’m beautiful and I’ll make a complete fool of myself for you.

  She got up, shouldered her bag, and wandered up into the town. It was busy now, people crowding into cafes and restaurants, or wandering in and out of shops. She’d been right earlier, the day had become very hot. Ahead of her a girl with a long blond ponytail was slathering sun cream on her shoulders as she walked. The smell of coconut reminded Aly of other days spent in the sun, and her stomach tightened with the memory of her father’s eyes looking at her in the first bikini her mother had bought her. What Aly needs is more cover, not less.

  The old humiliation etched into her soul with renewed cruelty. What her father had done was nothing, though, compared to the poison of Arif’s betrayal. She loved him, and because of that she had trusted him, had opened not just her body but her heart to him.

  Aly sank down onto the wall where she had sat eating last night, a hundred years ago, dumped her bag at her feet and took stock. Passport. Air ticket home. Enough money to last a few days, so long as she didn’t eat anything but kebabs and orange soda—and as long as she slept on the beach until she could catch a ferry to the mainland.

  And then she remembered the turtles.

  She gasped so loudly a small group of people all turned to stare at her as they passed.

  This wasn’t real. It must be a dream. Panic pushed up in her throat. What insanity had possessed her? No, she was beyond crazy. There weren’t words for what she had just done. Richard and Ellen would never believe it. What kind of scientist was she, allowing personal considerations to so totally sabotage the most important research trip of her life?

  She’d always known she wasn’t the kind of woman to attract a man like Arif. Men like Arif didn’t get serious hots for women like her, whatever he said about peri perfection. Of course it had been a con. How could she have imagined otherwise, even for five minutes?

  And after all, he was only trying to protect the turtles. His mistake had been to doubt her motives, but given that he had, was what he did so awful?

  A little voice whispered its hurt, but Aly was used to beating that voice down.

  She stood up, her heart thumping crazily. Her personal feelings could not be allowed to destroy this work. She had to do something. She had to go back. She had to try to sneak aboard again and pretend nothing had happened. And she had to do it now, before Janahine set sail without her.

  But what if he felt compelled to continue with the sex as a way of blinding her to his true motives? She couldn’t let him make love to her again, knowing what she knew. It would kill her. And yet, to have to tell him what she knew would be to strip herself naked. It would be unbearable.

  “What is the matter, Aly? What are you doing here?”

  The harsh voice burst the bubble of her confusion. She looked up. Arif was standing five feet away, and the expression in his eyes was like none she’d ever seen.

  “Arif!”

  And even now, even knowing what she knew, her heart leapt, and her body yearned to his.

  “What has happened?” he said. “We are about to cast off. Why are you here?”

  “You ask that as if you know the answer,” she said.

  She saw it hit home. He nodded once. “It was too sudden for you,” he said quietly. “I apologize, Aly. The fault is mine. I should have done better.”

  And just like that, the way back opened before her. She didn’t have to challenge him. Didn’t have to tell him what she knew. All she had to do was pretend that she was running away because the sex had been a mistake. Aly took a deep breath.

  “Yes, I think you should,” she said.

  “Come back to the boat.” His voice was rasping and harsh. “This can’t be allowed to ruin your work.”

  She gave a dry smile. “I’d just come to the same conclusion myself.”

  He stepped closer and bent to pick up her bag, but she stopped him with a gesture.

  “Arif, we need to get one thing clear first. I’ll come back, because I have to come back. But there can’t be any more of…of what happened last night. It stops here. I’d like your agreement to that.”

  He stiffened, and the blue eyes flamed once and went out. “Aly…it will be different next time. Remember that I didn’t know you were a virgin. Now that I know—”

  “There isn’t going to be a next time, Arif. I need your word on that.” Her heart twisted in misery, beating out a plea, hoping for the impossible. “No next time, no attempts, no gentle seduction, no promises. Okay? Nothing. I was half a virgin. Now I’m not. Your responsibility ends here.” Her body ached with hunger, and her hands curled into fists not to reach for him.

  “Aly, you need time, that’s all. Time and a little—”

  Tears burned behind her eyes, but she wouldn’t let him see that if she had to kill herself to prevent it. “Whatever I may need, I don’t need it from you. Ever again,” she said, her voice coming out harsh and cold as she struggled to keep from shouting at him what she had learned and how much it hurt her. If she told him, and he lied, if he touched her while telling his lies…she would not be able to resist. She had to do this. “So I need your promise, Arif.”

  “What do you want me to promise?” Still that flat, empty look behind the blue.

  “That you won’t touch me again,” she said.

  “Aly, believe me, this is not the way. Let me—”
<
br />   “It’s my way, Arif. It may not be your way. And I know you’ve got lots more experience, and you may even be right, but you’re going to let me do this my way.”

  He looked at her and sighed. “All right. What assurance do you want from me? That I won’t try to love you again unless you ask me?”

  “Since I will never ask you, that’ll do. Unless I ask you in so many words. I’m sure you’re a man of your word, Arif, so will you give it to me?”

  He shook his head in resignation, and his whole demeanor abruptly angered her. Why was he playing this game with her? He’d already had all her secrets, he was already convinced she had nothing to do with the Kaljuks. Was it wounded pride? Or merely that he didn’t like the idea of six weeks without sex, and she was handy?

  She cringed inside. Better than nothing. Wow. They could put that on her epitaph.

  “All right, I give you my word,” Arif said, as if the subject now bored him. He bent and picked up her bag. “Now let’s get back to the boat.”

  Hot tears burned her eyes as she followed him along the dock, but she’d be damned if she let them fall.

  …

  Arif steered between two moored mega yachts and out into the Gulf. The sun was beating down on the world, making the varnished trim glisten, the bleached teak underfoot warm.

  With a loud hungry flapping, the mainsail unfurled from the mast and slipped along the boom over their heads. He turned the wheel and the sails caught the wind with a whack to lift Janahine into soaring motion.

  “Lots of wind,” he said, shutting off the engines. The perfect silence of the sea greeted them.

  “Lovely day for a sail,” Aly agreed ironically.

  Arif’s heart twisted with a jolt that made him stagger. Her innocent openness as she had accepted his body into her own, her cries of joy as he moved in her, those grey eyes so open, so loving, the sense of completion he had felt. All were gone now. He looked down to where she sat on the edge of the wheel well. Her face was closed against him. Such unhappiness written there that he longed to take her in his arms and soothe her.

  But it was better this way. She was right to avoid him. He could offer her nothing, and she was a woman who deserved a man’s entire future. Anguish burned his blood. His hands tightened on the wheel, stilling the urge to reach for her. He had no right to try to change her mind.

  His jaw clenched at the thought of his own blindness. Only now did he see how wrong he had been, taking a woman like her to bed without a thought for its effect on her—or himself. Everything in his life had been against his loving her, and he knew it, and thought that made him safe. He had not thought of the effect on her at all, except to think he was doing her a favor by showing her what sex could be.

  He had wanted to protect her against all comers. He should have protected her against himself.

  For himself, it was not too late. He could pull back from the brink. No one went over the edge so soon. No one loved so quickly and completely.

  Except your own father.

  Aly had already been guarded against love, against self-belief. If he could tell her he loved her, tell her they must make it work because their whole future was at stake—that would heal whatever damage he had done, in time. He was sure of that. But with no future to offer he didn’t have the right to try. He could not make the sex right for her and then walk away. She was not the woman for that.

  It was all or nothing. And that meant, had to mean, nothing.

  She sat silent, and he saw tears in her eyes. Each trembling drop was acid on his soul. A man does not make his beloved weep. You will know a man by the way he treats his wife.

  But she could never be his wife. Except in his heart.

  His body ached now, his groin heavy and thick with a kind of yearning he had never experienced before with any woman. To sink himself into her now would not be the simple meeting of bodies he was used to. It would be to own her, to make her his, to be one with her and with all life. Too late he saw the power of what had driven him.

  Farhad was still moving about the deck tidying up the ropes, pretending to notice nothing. A sail flapped and Arif lifted his head from the contemplation of her face and made adjustments to his course and the sails. And now they were heading towards a distant grey shape on the horizon.

  “Faatin,” Arif said, pointing.

  They were well heeled over; Janahine was practically singing in the wind, and Aly reached to grab the handle on the console for balance.

  He was a fool. He was a hundred times a fool.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Faatin proved to be a small, uninhabited island, where black cliffs towered above a white sand beach, fringed by forest, that nestled between two long rocky outcrops to form a natural harbor. Like the breast and arms of the Black Goddess of ancient times.

  “It looks like a woman,” Aly exclaimed.

  They had been mostly silent on the journey, exchanging the odd impersonal comment about the sea or the yacht. But all the time she had been calling herself an idiot to have believed for one brief shining moment that her father had been wrong about her.

  How close she had come to believing herself in love.

  “Yes,” Arif agreed. Aly’s heart twisted with pain every time his gaze, flat and impenetrable, passed over her. “The ancients understood what it meant. Today, however, too many men prefer to forget that the word Faatin, which means charming and seductive, is related to an ancient word for Goddess.”

  The water was clear and turquoise all the way to the white bottom ten meters down, the waves crisp and shining in the afternoon sun, and the prow of the boat cutting through them produced a perfect roll of white froth. Even so far from shore she thought she could smell flowers. Her heart was breaking with the perfection of the moment, aching for the thought of what it might have been, if she were less of a fool. If only she had stayed in her cabin to think over what she had learned calmly. What would have been the harm of living for a few days more in the dream? The end would have been the same—heartbreak. There had been no reason to rush toward it.

  Her body heated every time she let her eyes run over him, every time she thought of the night just past. There was no controlling that.

  Overhead the mainsail luffed with one loud, lazy whack and then caught the wind again. Arif looked up, sniffed the wind, called to Farhad, then said to her, “The wind is changing. We’ll get the sails down here and go in on the engine.”

  He changed course and the boat stopped, the sails flapping in the wind. His hand was reaching for the toggle of the sail motor when a giant gust of wind powered out of the cliff face and across the water to slam Janahine broadside with a shock that made the rigging chime like a demented clock and set the boat rocking.

  If she had not already been holding on, Aly would have been blown to the deck. As it was, she staggered, tripped, and sat with a bump. The mainsail was flapping wildly now; the genny was trying to take off. She heard Arif curse and shout to Farhad, then the whine of the genny furling motor. It came in smoothly enough, but the mainsail was getting completely out of control.

  Another whack of wind, more crazy jangling of the rigging against the mast. Aly’s mouth went bitter with primitive fear. This was no ordinary change in the wind. The sea was another creature now: wild and angry, unpredictable, battering them from all directions. She heard the engine start. Arif struggled with the wheel as the mainsail, with terrifying slowness, began to retract into the mast. Aly made to stand again, but Arif shouted, “Stay low,” so she sat where she was, clinging to the low cockpit wall, and willed the sail to hurry.

  The roar was deafening as Arif brought the bow dead into the wind, but there was not much relief. The wind still pounded them relentlessly, tearing at the sail, at the rigging, coming low across the water to blast the hull with horrendous waves as if Poseidon himself had risen up to slap the boat into submission.

  There was a grudging whine from the sail motor, and the mainsail stopped moving. Arif shouted an instructio
n and Farhad ran to leap up in the seating area, from where he could reach the boom, grabbed the mainsail and jerked it back and forth, struggling to free the pulley that had stuck. For a few moments Arif flicked the mainsail toggle off and on as Farhad worked at it.

  Aly grabbed the chrome handle and stood up. “Let me help,” she shouted. Her words were lost in the terrifying shriek of wind, but her body language was clear.

  After a moment he leaned close and shouted in her ear, “Take the wheel. Hold her dead into the wind.”

  He stood firm as she slid under his arm, straightened up and closed her hands on the wheel. It was vibrating with a power that stunned her.

  “Can you hold her?” he shouted in her ear. Too buffeted by wind to try to turn her head to shout, Aly only nodded. Slowly, Arif lifted one hand and then the other, and now she was holding the wheel against the full might of the wind, and it was an awesome force. She had one moment for a mental nod to that godlike power, and then pitted herself against it, standing like da Vinci’s Proportions of Man, her legs spread wide, her arms at full extent over the circle of the wheel, fighting to hold the nose to the wind. Arif leapt up beside Farhad, then like a trapeze artist he slung himself up onto the boom and sat astride, locking his ankles underneath, struggling with the pulley as the wind tried to drag him down, tried to tear his shirt and shorts and even his hair off and whistle them away.

  The noise was unbearable. The wind shrieked and howled and banged the hull as if a psycho with an iron bar were coming after her. The sea smashed over the bow with malevolent fingers, trying to drag the boat down. Panic sank its teeth into her stomach and venomous fear shot through blood and nerves, making for her heart and brain. She tasted bile. With aching arms she kept her grip on the wheel. Janahine was being battered from side to side on the massive waves now, the mast going a little further each time, a little closer to the sea. If the boat heeled right over and the mast hit the water they were all dead. In a sea like this they were dead.

  Don’t think. She had to focus on her task, on the wheel. The muscles of her back and arms were being shredded with the effort to hold it on course. Never in her life had she fought so hard, hurt so much, been so afraid. Every time she let it slip off true, the wind slapped the boat, the mainsail whacked insanely, and she was sure Arif would be thrown down at her feet. Steering dead into the wind she could barely open her eyes, barely breathe, and she gritted her teeth and lived in dread of the sound of his body hitting the deck.