Desert Sheikhs Collection: Part 1. Jane Porter

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СКАЧАТЬ didn’t want Darian Wildman anywhere near her. She didn’t.

      Okay, she did.

      But that was on some stupid fundamental level. That was a Lara who didn’t exist, wanting to be with a Darian who didn’t exist. If only they could be standing here, a man and a woman who had just met…but that was crazy.

      If they had only just met then they most definitely wouldn’t be standing here—and neither would she be wearing just a towel covering her nakedness. A nakedness she was pretty sure he was responding to, judging from that dark, seductive look in his eyes, as if he were running those long, experienced fingers over every single crevice of her body. And yet the contrast between that hot look of desire and the cold contempt which rang from his voice was almost unbearable.

      ‘Darian,’ she breathed. ‘We…we can’t!’

      ‘Can’t what?’ he enquired unhelpfully.

      ‘We can’t share a room together—you know we can’t!’

      ‘Afraid that you won’t be able to resist me?’ he questioned insultingly.

      Yes! ‘No! I will not stay here—not with you!’

      ‘But our host has allotted us this room,’ he ground out. ‘We cannot question the Sheikh or his judgement.’

      ‘Oh, really?’ she demanded furiously. ‘He just happened to put us in here together, did he? Without any pressure from you?’

      ‘No pressure from me, I can assure you.’ He gave a slow smile, pleased to see her give an instinctive little wriggle of frustration, knowing that her body craved him even while her mind fought him. ‘He simply asked whether or not we were lovers, and I told him that yes, we were. So here we are,’ he finished, on a murmur which somehow managed to sound like a sultry threat.

      ‘We are not lovers!’ she declared.

      ‘Want to do something about that?’ he drawled, and began to unbutton his shirt.

      ‘Darian, stop it!’

      ‘Stop what?’

      ‘Un…’ The shirt fluttered to the floor and Lara watched it in fascinated horror, lifting her eyes only to be confronted by the infinitely more disturbing vision of Darian’s bare chest—the tawny flesh gleaming enticingly. ‘Undressing!’ she managed to get out.

      ‘But I have to undress,’ he said seriously. ‘I’m going to take a shower.’

      His belt was unclipped and she heard the rasping of a zip. She closed her eyes in horror.

      ‘I refuse to share a room with you!’

      ‘Then go and tell Khalim that yourself!’

      The silky challenge made her open her eyes again, and she wished she hadn’t—because he was completely naked. And completely at ease with it.

      Lara went hot. Then cold.

      ‘Are you trying to torment me?’ she gasped.

      He frosted her with an icy smile. ‘That’s about the most honest thing you’ve said so far,’ he clipped out. ‘But then, honesty isn’t really your forte, is it, Lara?’

      She wanted to appeal to his better judgement. But how could she appeal to anything when now he wasn’t just naked, but was showing unmistakable signs of…

      She turned her back, biting her teeth down into the flesh of her bottom lip, hearing his low laugh with something approaching despair as he walked towards the bathroom and slammed the door behind him.

      Lara had never dressed more quickly in her life. Whipping through the few outfits she had brought for herself, she slithered into a dress she had bought on a modelling assignment in Singapore. It was a long, fitted dress in bright scarlet silk piped with black—high-necked and skimming her body to fall demurely to her ankles. She controlled the most wayward of her curls with tiny jet-covered clips, applied mascara and lipstick with a trembling hand, and then went over to the bookcase which stood in one corner of the large room, determined to have something to occupy her. Anything to keep her mind and her eyes off the impending and disturbing prospect of Darian emerging from the bathroom…

      But it was difficult to concentrate on the book—a beautifully photographed history of Maraban—which would normally have fascinated her. She could hear the splash, splash of the shower, and the sound of Darian singing, loudly and rather tunelessly—as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

      He seemed to have settled in and coped with his momentous news with amazing ease, she thought, her eyes nearly popping out of her head as she studied a photo of Khalim and Rose’s wedding—and her own unmistakable profile as she bent to adjust Rose’s train!

      Darian switched off the powerful jet of water and stepped out of the shower, shaking his dark head slightly as he began to rub the droplets of water away. This felt like a dream from which he would in a minute wake—and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

      The emotions he had felt when confronted with what seemed like the uncontradictable truth of his heritage had been varied. There had been confusion, yes—and yet a strange sense of calm, as though the answer to a question he had never dared to ask had finally been given.

      Didn’t this news of his father’s identity make a whole lot about himself clearer and more understandable? That sense of being different, of being an outsider, had always burned much stronger in him than in any of the other fatherless boys he had grown up with. It hadn’t just been the strange and exotic colour of his skin and the unusual gold of his eyes; it had gone far deeper than that.

      Even as a child Darian had always been a loner. He had kept his emotions and his affections severely contained and restrained. So had that been something he’d been born with, or something he had learned along the way?

      He had not grown up in an environment where you got close to people, and this was a habit he had carried with him into his adult life. In a way it had made his success more achievable—if you didn’t carry around the baggage of close relationships then you had a lot less to distract you from your ambition.

      He reflected on the bizarre events of the day, thinking that Khalim, too, had been a surprise—in more than one sense. From making the discovery that he was related to the dark, powerful and enigmatic leader it had proved a disturbingly short step to discovering that he might actually like him—maybe even form some kind of tenuous bond with him.

      He didn’t know what the outcome of this strange and totally unexpected visit to Maraban would be, and for once in his life it didn’t bother him. Usually Darian liked everything mapped out, to know where he was going and what he was doing, but suddenly he recognised that sometimes you just had to go with the flow.

      In fact, the only shadow on the current landscape took the form of the woman he could hear moving around in the adjoining room. His mouth twisted with a mixture of contempt and desire.

      What could have been a straightforward—if highly unusual—state of affairs had been complicated and made distasteful by the behaviour of Lara Black.

      He felt the slow, steady pulsing of his heart, wondering why it should bother him—why he couldn’t СКАЧАТЬ