The Sheikh's Virgin Bride. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ was hardly going to be conducive to concluding her plan successfully, she reminded herself wryly. At least his attitude confirmed her assumption that he was a sexual predator—not the kind of man a potential husband would want consorting with the woman he wanted to make his wife. In short this man was ideal for her purpose.

      ‘It isn’t that kind of proposition,’ she denied firmly.

      ‘No…? So what kind is it, then?’ he challenged her.

      ‘The kind that pays well and isn’t illegal,’ Petra replied promptly, crossing her fingers and hoping inwardly that her comment would have piqued his interest.

      He had moved again, and now Petra realised that it was her turn to have her features revealed to him in the increasing illumination of the decorative lights.

      She wasn’t a vain person, but she knew that she was generally considered to be attractive. But if this man found her so, he certainly wasn’t showing it, she acknowledged as she was subjected to a cool visual inspection that made her itch to step back into the protective shadows, her arms wrapped protectively around her body.

      ‘Sounds fascinating,’ he mocked her laconically. ‘What do I have to do?’

      Petra allowed herself to begin to relax. ‘Pursue me and seduce me—very publicly,’ she told him.

      Just for a second she had the satisfaction of seeing that she had surprised him. His eyes widened fractionally before he controlled the movement.

      ‘Seduce you?’ he repeated. And now it was Petra’s turn to be surprised, and unpleasantly so, as she marked the sharp curtness in a male voice that had abruptly become disconcertingly chilly.

      ‘Not for real,’ she told him quickly, before he could say anything more. ‘What I want is for you to pretend to seduce me.’

      ‘Pretend? Why?’ he demanded baldly. ‘Do you already have a lover you wish to make jealous? Is that it?’ he guessed insultingly.

      Petra glared at him.

      ‘No, I do not. I want to pay you to ensure that I lose my…my reputation.’

      For one unguarded moment Petra saw his face and wondered exactly what the sudden frown creasing his forehead and the complete stillness of his body meant.

      ‘Am I allowed to ask why you want to lose it?’ he asked her.

      ‘You can ask,’ Petra told him. ‘But I don’t intend to tell you.’

      ‘No? Well, in that case, I don’t intend to help you.’

      He was already turning away from her and Petra started to panic.

      ‘I’m prepared to pay you five thousand pounds,’ she called out to him.

      ‘Ten thousand and then we might…just might have a deal,’ he told her softly as he stopped and turned to look at her.

      Ten thousand pounds. Petra felt sick. Her parents had left her a very generous trust fund, but until she turned twenty-five, there was no way she could raise such a large sum without the approval of her trustees—one of whom was her godfather, who was after all part of the reason why she needed to do this in the first place.

      Her body slumped in defeat.

      He was still walking away from her, and had almost reached the end of the beach. In another few seconds he would be gone.

      Swallowing against the bitter taste of her own failure, she turned away herself.

      CHAPTER TWO

      REFUSING to give in to the temptation of watching him disappear, Petra fixed her gaze on the sea.

      Most people, on first seeing her, assumed that Petra carried either Spanish or Italian blood in her veins. Her skin had a soft creamy warmth and her dark brown hair was thick and lustrous, her bone structure elegant and delicately patrician. Only her brilliant green eyes and the narrow straightness of her small nose, combined with her passionate nature, gave away the fact that she possessed Celtic genes, inherited through her American father’s Irish ancestry. Very few people guessed that her colouring came from an exotic blending of those genes with her mother’s Bedouin blood.

      She could feel the evening breeze lifting her hair, its coolness raising tiny goosebumps on her skin, but they were nothing to the rash of sensation that flooded atavistically through her body as she suddenly felt the pressure of a male hand on the nape of her neck.

      ‘Five thousand, then—and the reason,’ a now familiar silken voice whispered in her ear.

      He had come back! Petra didn’t know whether to be elated or horrified!

      ‘No haggling!’ the silken voice warned her. ‘Five thousand and the reason, or no deal.’

      Petra’s throat had gone dry. She didn’t want to tell him, but what option did she have? And besides, what harm could it really do?

      ‘Very well.’

      What was it that was making her voice sound so tremulous? Surely not the fact that his hand was still on her nape?

      ‘You’re trembling,’ he told her, so accurately tracking and trapping her own thoughts that his intuitiveness shocked her. ‘Why? Are you afraid? Excited?’

      As he drawled the soft words with deliberate slowness, almost whispering into her ear, his thumb stroked against the side of her throat, trapping the pulse fluttering there.

      Stalwartly Petra wrenched herself free and told him resolutely. ‘Neither! I’m just cold.’

      She could see the taunting cruelty in the mocking curve of his smile.

      ‘Of course,’ he agreed. ‘So, you want me to publicly pursue and seduce you?’

      He questioned her as though he had suddenly grown bored with tormenting her, like a domestic cat suddenly tiring of the prey it had caught as a plaything rather than for food. But this man was no domesticated fireside pet! No, everything he did had a raw, untamed danger about it, a warning of power mockingly leashed.

      ‘Why? Tell me!’

      Petra took a deep breath.

      ‘It’s a long and complicated story,’ she warned him.

      ‘Tell me!’ he repeated.

      Briefly Petra closed her eyes, trying to marshal her thoughts into logical order, and then opened them again, beginning quietly, ‘My father was an American diplomat. He met my mother here in Zuran when he was posted here. They fell in love but her father did not approve. He had other plans for her. He believes that it is a daughter’s duty to allow herself to be used as a pawn in her family’s empirebuilding.’ As she spoke Petra could hear the anger and the bitterness in her own voice, just as she could feel it surging inside her—a mixture of a long-standing old pain on behalf of her mother and a much newer, bitter anger for herself.

      ‘My grandfather refused to have anything to do with my mother after she ran away with my father. And he forbade his family—my mother’s brothers СКАЧАТЬ