face burning with guilt, she carefully draped the throw over him, avoiding all form of skin-to-skin contact as she pulled it up to cover his shoulders and, her eyes still on him, bent to pick up the wet clothes scattered around the room.
She did not need the hand-stitched labels to tell her they had not come off any peg. In the act of raising the silk fabric of his shirt to her face to inhale the subtle fragrance that she had noticed, she froze when she realised what she was doing.
‘You have a problem, girl!’ she told herself as she folded his clothes neatly at arm’s length and placed them over the back of a chair. She cast a last look at the sleeping figure before switching off the lights and tiptoeing, though heaven knew he seemed dead to the world, towards the door. Hand on the handle, she turned back, and by the light shining under the door from her bedroom retraced her steps and flicked on the lamp beside the sleeping figure.
This time her glance lingered. She couldn’t help herself. His face in repose exerted an almost hypnotic fascination for her from the chiselled angle of his high cheekbones to the contrasting soft sweep of his lashes. And his mouth…Swallowing, she dragged her gaze clear of the sensually sculpted outline and expelled a shaky sigh. He really was an astonishing-looking man.
Eva had never understood the attraction herself, but they did say that power and wealth, both of which he apparently had in abundance, were aphrodisiacs—but frankly he didn’t need any assistance. If Prince Karim Al-Nasr had been born just plain Joe Bloggs and his worldly possessions only consisted of that mouth he’d collect women as a honeypot collected bees!
Eva found herself wondering about women. Was there a particular one who woke up looking at that face, maybe seeing that mouth smile? Those eyes smoulder with need? Would his marriage alter that situation?
The unsettled line of speculation sent a rush of heat through Eva’s body, but despite the hot prickle under her skin she was shivering as, feeling ridiculously like a thief in the night, which was pretty crazy considering this was her flat and he was the intruder, she crept back to her bedroom.
This time she didn’t look back.
She wasn’t exactly amazed when sleep eluded her. Her overactive brain kept replaying the strange events that had led to a man being asleep in the next room.
A man her grandfather would have liked to see her married to. Up until this point she had considered King Hassan a fairly rational man. She shook her head. The evening had not been what she had anticipated, but who could have foreseen what had actually happened?
As she lay tossing and getting hot, sticky and tangled in her pyjamas, Eva was plagued by doubts that she had done the right thing.
What if he was concussed or worse?
She could have invited a homicidal maniac into her home.
She comforted herself with the fact if he was he was in no condition to do her much harm and, to her admittedly untrained eye, his condition appeared to have more to do with sleep deprivation than anything more life threatening. His colour had seemed healthy as he lay sleeping and he had been quite clear on the subject of medical assistance.
She wondered a little about his seeming aversion to doctors.
She shook her head impatiently. If she was going to lie in her bed, reading something into every syllable he had uttered and every expression, she was never going to sleep. The answer was probably as simple as the man had just been partying too hard.
Not that he had looked the self-indulgent type, unless that indulgence was sex, she thought, her stomach muscles quivering as an image of his face floated before her eyes. The aura of raw sensuality and power he projected did not suggest he was exactly a stranger to carnal pleasures. It was an aura that Eva was glad she had not walked into unprepared when he wasn’t in a physically weakened condition.
In the morning, after sleep, he would probably be back to his normal self, whatever his normal self was. Eva couldn’t help but be mildly curious.
She toyed with the idea of going back into the room to check on his condition, but after a sly voice in her head cast some doubt on her motivation, she decided against this action.
At some point Eva did fall into a fitful sleep. When she woke it was morning and the light was filtering through her curtains. She gave a sleepy yawn, began to stretch, then suddenly the events of the early hours came flooding back and she was fully awake.
At almost the same moment the memories surfaced she became aware of the mattress creaking gently, only she wasn’t moving. She carried on not moving as her heart rate picked up and she recognised the sound of someone breathing and it wasn’t her!
The sound was very close. It was…She swallowed convulsively and fought down an inappropriate desire to laugh—a normal person would have screamed. There was someone in her room. The mattress gave way…there was someone in her bed!
Hysteria a heartbeat away and not daring to move or open her eyes, Eva tried to breathe quietly as horror steadily ate into her fragile control.
Well, you can’t just lie here, woman—do something! Heart thudding, she forced herself to open her eyes.
Oh, my God!
Even though she had been half prepared it was still a shock to her nervous system to see Prince Karim Al-Nasr, his dark head lying on the pillow beside her.
His breathing suggested he wasn’t going to wake up any time soon—her first break. All she had to do was get out of bed without him noticing—the simplest plans were always the best—and a lot of embarrassment would be spared all round.
Her racing thoughts, not racing as fast as her heart, reconstructed a probable scenario that had ended with him in her bed. Stumbling around his unfamiliar surroundings half asleep in the night the Prince had presumably stumbled his way into her bed…or rather any bed—it just happened to be hers.
Nothing personal, it wasn’t the lure of my body. A bubble of hysteria rose in her throat as she pressed a hand to her lips. She finally had a man in her bed. Of course, he was unconscious and she hadn’t intended for him to be there, so possibly it didn’t count.
Eva, her wide eyes fixed on the sleeping man, began to surreptitiously ease herself away from the sleeping prince and towards the edge of the bed.
She was tantalisingly close to achieving her goal when the sleeping figure moaned in his sleep and shifted his position.
Dismayed, she looked down at the arm that he had thrown across her waist. A second later a heavily muscled thigh followed and she was effectively pinned to the bed.
She was reviewing her options when he reached out blindly and pulled her to him. Their bodies collided, her softer one automatically moulding itself with startling ease to his hard contours.
Shock held her momentarily immobile, then something else stopped her from pulling back.
The something had a lot to do with the intoxicating novelty of being held this intimately close to a hard male—or was it just this male in particular?
The disturbing question was for another time when her mind was not being bombarded with so many new and exciting sensations. Her nostrils flared as her senses responded, independent of her brain, hungrily to the musky male scent of his warm body.
