The Sheikh's Innocent Bride. Lynne Graham

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      If only her father were a more reasonable man. If only he would allow her to go out and about and enjoy mixed company, like other women her age. After all, he must have dated her late mother to have married her—and surely that could not have been morally wrong?

      Her father was growing terrifyingly unreasonable in his attitudes and his demands. After a dispute with the church elders, the older man would no longer attend church, and Kirsten and Mabel had been forced to stay home as well. Kirsten loved music. One of her few pleasures had been her radio, and he had broken that in a fit of rage when Mabel complained that her stepdaughter spent so much time listening to it that she was late making breakfast. Mabel had been shaken by her husband’s reaction, though, Kirsten recalled heavily. It was small comfort for her to suspect that her stepmother was not wholly content with her hasty second marriage.

      ‘Would you like it?’ At lunchtime another member of staff extended the magazine she had been reading to Kirsten. ‘It’s OK…I’m finished with it.’

      Her face suffused with self-conscious pink, Kirsten accepted the item with a muttered word of thanks. As she left the basement staffroom, she heard the woman say, ‘It’s a pity about her, isn’t it? Angus Ross should be hung for treating her the way he does! She’s scared of her own shadow!’

      No, I’m not, Kirsten thought, frantically pedalling away her hurt pride and resentment as she headed home on her bike. She was not scared of her own shadow—but neither was she mad enough to go head to head with her father before she had the means to leave his home.

      The beauty of the early summer day soon calmed her temper and raised her spirits. After all it was a Friday, and her favourite day of the week. On Fridays she finished work early, and the house would be empty whilst Mabel and her father did the weekly grocery shopping. Afterwards they would visit Mabel’s elderly mother, and remain with her for their evening meal. Kirsten decided to take her dog for a walk and read the magazine.

      Half an hour later she walked through her father’s fields, which led right up to the edge of the forest. She was dismayed to see that fresh tyre tracks had torn up the soft ground, leaving messy furrows of mud that would fill with water when the rain came. Her father had been outraged a few weeks earlier, when a pair of yobs on motorbikes had torn up a newly sown field. News of a second visit and further damage to the land would put Angus Ross into the kind of temper that made Kirsten suck in her breath in dismay.

      Deciding that it would be wiser to let her father discover the damage for himself, she crossed the stile that marked the boundary of the farm and followed a little-used path up through the forest to the top of the hill. She kicked off her shoes, undid a couple of buttons at the neck of her blouse, and loosened her hair to relax in the sunshine. Her dog, Squeak, a small, short-legged animal of mixed ancestry, sank down in the middle of the grassy path, for the steep climb had exhausted him. His perky little ears did not prick up at the distant growl of an engine across the valley for as his age had advanced his hearing had steadily become more impaired.

      Kirsten began to devour her magazine, and before very long was absorbed to the exclusion of all else in the delightful world of celebrities, fabulous fashion and wicked gossip.

      One minute she was dreaming in the sunlight, the next she was jerking up from her reclining position with a stricken exclamation as a giant black motorbike burst with a roar over the hill and headed straight for Squeak. Kirsten made a violent lunge at the old dog to grab him out of the way. Mere feet from her, the bike skidded at fantastic and terrifying speed off the track, and the rider went flying up into the air. Horror stopped her breathing. But, in what seemed like virtually the same moment, he hit the ground and rolled with the spectacular, almost acrobatic ease of a jockey taking a fall.

      Kirsten looked on wide-eyed as the rider, who was clearly uninjured, vaulted back upright again. Her shock was engulfed by a flood of unfamiliar anger.

      ‘You’re trespassing!’ she heard herself yell at the impossibly tall black-leather-clad figure approaching her as she scrambled up.

      Shahir was furious with her for sitting in the middle of a track, like a target waiting for a direct hit from on high. She was very fortunate not to have been killed. He could not credit that she was shouting at him—nobody ever shouted at him—but, perhaps fortunately for her, the alluring picture that she made clouded that issue. Her shimmering silvery blonde hair was loose round her narrow shoulders and fell almost to her waist in a stunning display of luxuriance. He encountered eyes that were not the Celtic blue he had expected, but the verdant green of emerald and moss. His attention was by then irretrievably locked to her, and he noticed that she was surprisingly tall for a woman. As tall as his Berber ancestors himself, he stood six feet five in his socks, but barefoot she was still tall enough to reach his chin.

      ‘In fact, not only are you trespassing—’

      ‘I am not a trespasser,’ he countered, his dark, deep voice muffled by the black helmet which concealed his face from her.

      ‘This is private ground, so you are trespassing.’ As far as Kirsten was concerned his failure to offer an immediate apology merely added insult to injury, and her soft mouth compressed. ‘Don’t you realise how fast you were going?’

      ‘I know exactly what my speed was,’ Shahir confirmed.

      He might behave like a yob, but he didn’t speak quite as she had assumed he would. His accent was unmistakably English and upper class, his crystal-clear vowel sounds crisply pronounced in spite of the helmet. She told herself off for being so biased in her expectations. A tourist toff could be just as much of a hooligan as a yob out for a day biking through the hills. Her chin took on a stubborn tilt.

      ‘Well, you frightened the life out of me and my dog!’ she asserted, lowering her arms to let Squeak down, his solid little body having become too heavy for comfort.

      Far from behaving like a traumatised animal, Squeak padded over to Shahir’s booted feet, nuzzled them, wagged his tail in a lazily friendly fashion and then ambled off to curl up and sleep in the sunshine.

      ‘At least he’s not shouting at me as well.’ Shahir said dryly.

      ‘I wasn’t shouting.’ Her lilting accent took on a clipped edge of emphasis. His refusal to admit fault was testing even Kirsten’s tolerant nature. ‘You could have killed me…you could have killed yourself!’

      Shahir flipped up his visor. Kirsten stilled. Her first thought was that he had the eyes of a hawk from the castle falconry: steady, unblinking, unnervingly keen. But his gaze was also a spectacular bronze-gold in colour, enhanced by lashes lush as sable and dark as ebony. Her heart jumped behind her breastbone and suddenly she was conscious of its measured beat. Indeed, it was as if her every sense had gone on to super-alert and time had slowed its passage.

      ‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Shahir drawled.

      ‘You were travelling at a crazy speed…’ she framed breathlessly.

      Shahir watched the sun transform her hair to a veil of shining silver that he longed to touch. He was so taken aback by the inappropriate desire that for the first time in his life he forgot what he was about to say. ‘Was I?’

      He pulled off his helmet and smoothed back his ruffled black hair with long brown fingers. Kirsten’s mouth ran dry. He was so exceptionally handsome that she simply stared. He also had the most unforgettable face. His fantastic bone structure was composed of high, slashing cheekbones and sleek planes and hollows, divided by a strong, masculine nose and defined by level dark brows. His bronzed complexion and very black hair suggested an ancestry at variance СКАЧАТЬ