The Sheikh's Blackmailed Mistress. PENNY JORDAN

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      She stepped barefoot out of the tent into the still coolness of the early morning.

      Traditionally, all the members of a nomad tribe would have been up and busy at first light, to make the most of the cooler hours of the day before the sun rose too high in the sky for them to bear its heat, but in these days of air-conditioning units there was no need for anyone to rise early, and Sam knew from experience that she would have the early-morning peace of the oasis to herself.

      A narrow pathway meandered along the water’s edge, the ground flattened out in certain areas where animals came to drink. As Sam walked along the path a cloud of doves rose from the palm trees and then settled back down. A bird, so swift and graceful that all she saw was the flash of its wings, dipped down to the water and then rose up again with a small fish in its beak.

      Sam turned a curve in the path and then came to such an abrupt halt that she almost fell over her own feet as she stared in disbelief at the man standing facing her. Her heart soared as easily as the doves on a surge of dizzying delight.

      ‘You,’ she breathed, helpless with longing.

      CHAPTER THREE

      WHAT a strange thing the senses were in the way they could instantly recognise a person and then immediately cause one’s body to react to that recognition, Sam thought giddily, as she stared across the space that divided them at the man who was looking back at her.

      She had known he was tall, but she had not realised quite how tall. She had known how virile and broad-shouldered and how muscular his body was, but not how strong and corded those muscles would be with the morning sun delineating the power beneath the flesh.

      She hesitated, engulfed by the intensity of her own emotional and sexual arousal, and torn between flight from it and submission to it. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened to her before—which, of course, was why she had tried to initially evade and then deny it. Now, though, she was face-to-face—quite literally—with a truth she could not escape, with a knowledge about herself and her emotions, and she had no idea how to cope with it.

      How was it possible for her to feel the way she did? How was it possible for her to want him so completely and unreservedly that all she wanted to do was go to him and give herself into his keeping for ever?

      It was crazy, reckless…. dangerous. And if she had any sense she wouldn’t be thinking such things. She looked at his mouth. Sense. What was that? Nothing that mattered. Not like the aching sweetness pouring through her.

      ‘How did you find me?’ She was filled with awe and delight, humbled and elated. Reality belonged to another universe, not this magical place she had suddenly stepped into, where a person’s most secret dreams could come true.

      Perhaps she was dreaming? Only in daylight now, instead of during the protective darkness of the night hours. If so, Sam knew that she did not want to wake up again—ever. Why had she wasted all those hours trying uselessly to convince herself that nothing life-transforming had really happened between them? Why had she not had more faith in what she felt? He obviously had, because here he was. He had found her. He had come for her. Joy flooded through her.

      Vere felt as though he had been turned to stone. No, not stone—because stone could not have felt what he was feeling right now. Stone could not have been pierced by the sharp, immediate and intense male surge of overpowering need to take her, to let his body satisfy the elemental force that was filling his head with images of their bodies together: naked flesh to naked flesh, her head thrown back in ecstasy whilst he moulded her to him, shaping her with his hands, spreading open the softness of her eager thighs, possessing her as she was begging him to do, endlessly and erotically, as she cried out to him over and over again in her pleasure until it became his, until he knew even as fulfilment rushed through him that its satisfaction would never be enough, that like a drug once tasted he would need more, and then still more.

      The young boy’s fear translated into a grown man’s savage anger against what gripped him. He had to get away from her.

      Sam could hardly contain her emotions. They made her tremble like a gazelle scenting the hunter and knowing its fate. In another minute he would reach her and take her in his arms, and then…She started to walk towards him, her pace quickening with the intensity of her need to touch him and be touched by him. A wild thrill of excitement shot through her—only to turn to a sharp stab of shocked disbelief when, just as she had almost reached him, he abruptly turned his back on her and started to walk away.

      Pain and confusion swirled through her, leaving her feeling unsteady and insecure, desperate to stop him from leaving her.

      ‘No!’

      The denial felt as though it had been torn from her heart, it hurt so much.

      Another man had appeared from a side path and was coming between them, bowing low in front of him, to murmur respectfully, ‘Highness.’

      Highness?

      Had she actually whispered her appalled dismay? Was that why he had turned to look at her, that brilliant emerald-green gaze homing in on her, transfixing her to the spot, unable to move, unable to do anything, until it had been removed from her and the two men were walking away from her back down the path.

      Sam searched her too pale expression in the mirror. If she didn’t go and join the others soon, not only would she miss breakfast, she’d almost certainly have someone coming to ask why she wasn’t there and if she was all right.

      All right? She gave a small shiver. She wasn’t sure she would ever be that again.

      Had she actually seen him by the oasis, or had she only thought she had? Had he been merely a mirage, conjured up by her own imagination? And if he had, what did that tell her about the state she was in?

      ‘Sam—at last. I was just about to come and look for you in case you’d overslept.’

      The anxiety combined with just a hint of reproach in the voice of Anne Smith, the female half of a pair of married statisticians who were part of the team, caused Sam to give her an apologetic look.

      ‘Sorry—’ she began, but to her relief, before she was obliged to come up with an explanation as to why she was so late, Anne continued.

      ‘You’ve never missed breakfast before, and with Sheikh Sadir telling us that the Ruler of Dhurahn has arrived, and that we are all to be formally presented to him, I was getting really worried that you wouldn’t make it.’

      At least now Sam knew the likely cause of his sudden reappearance here at the oasis—as well as the reason he had been in Zuran in the first place. He must be part of the Ruler of Dhurahn’s entourage.

      She had been in a total state of shock after seeing him so unexpectedly and then having him refuse to acknowledge her and walk away from her. It seemed ridiculous now that she had actually thought that somehow or other he had known she was there and come in search of her. Patently it was quite impossible—as she had since told herself. But at the time her sense of despairing anguish, coming so quickly on the heels of her earlier euphoria, had meant that it had been several minutes after he’d disappeared before she’d felt able to move. Even when she had, her heart had been thudding so heavily and uncomfortably that she had felt both sick and light-headed by the time she had reached the privacy of her tent.

      Now she wasn’t even sure she could trust СКАЧАТЬ