first time should not be with a casual lover on the floor of an anonymous house,’ he said, and his deep voice was tinged with regret. ‘Your virginity is a gift which you have clearly treasured, as every woman should. You should have saved it for a man you love. Who loves you.’
And with those sad words he smashed all her foolish hopes and dreams. He made her feel as if she had offered him fresh flowers at dawn—still wet with the morning dew—and he had taken them and carelessly tossed them into the gutter, to be ground underfoot into dust and crushed petals.
He seemed so far away, even though he was right next to her. A moment ago he had been kissing her over and over again, but he was not kissing her now. The hands which had wrought such sweet magic were not touching her now. It was done. Finished. And Sienna felt the dull ache of dawning realization, which eclipsed the deeper aching in her newly awakened body.
She had allowed… no, she had been a more than willing participant in allowing herself to be brought here. To lie with him on this hard stone floor and to…to…She would not use the words ‘make love’, for it had not been that. It had been nothing to do with love. He had just told her so.
So why were erotic and tender images still jostling for position in her mind? The way she had called out his name in breathless wonder. The way her body had shivered its pleasure, and the way that pleasure had grown and surged and taken her into a place where the senses reigned supreme. And she had stupidly allowed herself to believe that for him it meant more than simply pleasure. That his whispered words of encouragement and pleasure had been voicing some deeper emotion than mere desire—a longing more precious than lust. But in that she had been totally wrong.
Sienna swallowed, forcing the memories away, for they would soon bring nothing but pain. It was too late for regret, but not too late for pride. ‘Well, there’s no point in having a post mortem, is there?’ she said, hearing the false brightness in her tone.
He was silent for a moment, and then his eyes imprisoned her—searching and seeking to know. ‘Why has there been nobody else?’ he demanded.
It was a question she had asked herself many times—and, oh, how it would feed his monstrous ego if she told him what she suspected was the truth: that he was the only man she had ever remotely imagined making love to. Men had tried, but they had failed. Or was it she who had failed—to abandon foolish hope and try to make the best of an ordinary life?
‘You make it sound like a fault on my part that there hasn’t been,’ she said bitterly.
His eyes narrowed. ‘What happened between us that last time. The way I behaved. Did that put you off men?’
‘In a way.’ But not the way he meant.
‘You should have told me,’ he said, and now his voice was angry. ‘Back then you should have told me. But now—now when you are older and more independent, a true woman at last—you should have said something!’
‘Would you have believed me?’
Another silence.
‘Would you?’ she persisted.
‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘I guess I wouldn’t have.’ He felt like a man who had been swimming towards a familiar shore only to discover that he was headed for a strange land of which he knew nothing. None of it made any sense to him. How could it? She? Of all people? A virgin?
‘Because you’d already made your mind up about what kind of woman I was. The photos proved that I must be some sort of slapper!’
Hashim’s eyes narrowed, his English for once deserting him. ‘Slapper?’
‘The kind of woman who will just sleep with anyone. You didn’t look further than skin-deep, did you, Hashim? You just made a judgement about me. But people are a lot more than they appear to be on the surface. Not cardboard cut-outs but living and breathing flesh and blood, with flaws and strengths all their own! Don’t you realise that?’ she finished.
‘I’m afraid that my position sets me apart,’ he told her coolly, seeking a familiar refuge behind the invisible barrier of his royal status. ‘I do not have the luxury of the time to dig deep beneath the surface.’
‘Or the inclination to even try?’ she challenged.
‘Maybe not,’ he admitted, for it was impossible not to answer that lancing question in her green eyes.
Sienna nodded, forcing herself to voice the bitter truth. She had allowed passion to cloud her vision, but now that passion had passed it was achingly clear. ‘You see women as commodities,’ she whispered. ‘To be used for passing pleasure but little else, other than maybe one day motherhood.’ And she felt a stupid great yearning as she realised that Hashim would never put her in that category. Not in a million years. A woman who had allowed herself to be photographed in that way, a woman who had fallen oh-soeasily into his arms, was merely a woman to be discarded. And the aching sense of longing for something she could never have washed over her in a bitter tide.
He could feel her retreating from him—not just mentally, but physically, too, and that reawakened the desire which had been obscured by his startling discovery. He was used to calling the shots, and by rights he should have been the one to distance himself from her now. Or not.
‘Ah, Sienna,’ he murmured, and reached out his hand to cradle her face. ‘What is done is done. Is it not a little late in the day for words of recrimination?’
Involuntarily Sienna trembled—for the touch of his skin was soft and warm and exquisite to behold. It had the power to lure her back into that place of unimaginable pleasure. But at what cost? She shook his hand away and sat up.
‘Yes, you’re right, it is. I should have said all this before.’
‘But you could not!’ he breathed triumphantly. ‘For you were as much in thrall to me as I to you! What just happened between us was as inevitable as the passing of night through to day. I knew that.’
‘Well, we’re all entitled to make mistakes,’ she said woodenly. ‘And anyway, we’re wasting time, sitting around here talking. Your guests will be arriving very soon and I suggest that we both of us try to tidy up.’ She reached up her hand to feel the bird’s nest mess of her hair, wondering how the hell she was going to tame it down.
She was surprised that he wasn’t leaping around fretting. He hadn’t once mentioned the no-show of the staff. Or the fact that his guests would be upon them shortly. And then something else occurred to her—dripping into her thoughts like slow poison— something which in its way was almost as bad as what she had just let happen. She could feel the heavy plummeting of her heart as everything clicked into disturbingly sharp focus.
Oh, no.
How could she have been so stupid?
Slowly, she turned her head to stare at him. ‘But there aren’t going to be any guests—are there, Hashim?’
He met the accusation in her eyes but he did not flinch from it. ‘No.’
‘There were never going to be any guests, were there?’
‘No.’
She geared herself up for the next blow, knowing the answer to her question before she asked it. ‘And
