to be safe to venture into his own bedroom.
Reeling with the effects of travel fatigue and whiskey, he’d mounted the stairs and made his way down the hallway, conscious of the silence all around him and his heartbeat ticktocking away like an old-fashioned grandfather clock. He was used to the silence of an empty house, but it was odd, he thought, how weighty silence seemed in a house that wasn’t as empty as it should be. He was thinking about that, about the usual silence and emptiness of his house at night, when he turned the knob and pushed open his bedroom door.
Then his only thought was: Oh God, what now?
There she was, not only awake but looking like the overture to some erotic dream, a vision in sea-green silk that covered every inch but failed to disguise one centimeter of her curves, her hair cascading down around her shoulders like midnight rain. Every man’s dream…his worst nightmare.
He didn’t know how long he stood there in the doorway looking at her. Just looking at her, with all sorts of emotions shooting off in every direction inside him so that for a moment his brain function felt more than anything like an explosion in a fireworks factory. Now what? What was he supposed to say to her? He couldn’t think of a thing.
It came to him gradually, as the shock subsided and his mind began functioning again, that he’d made a serious miscalculation. With all that had happened, he’d forgotten that, from almost the first moment he’d laid eyes on Leila Kamal, he’d wanted her.
He remembered it now. He remembered that the idea had amused him at the time, that he’d laughed at himself for his adolescent foolishness. He wasn’t laughing now.
“You’re still up,” he finally said—as inane an observation as ever there was.
“I waited for you.” She said it without a trace of seduction in her voice, facing him bravely with the light from a bedside lamp shimmering in her hair and making deep, dark mysteries of her eyes. She looked so incredibly beautiful …and nothing at all like the buoyant, flirtatious girl he remembered meeting in Tamir. Right now what she looked like more than anything was a virgin waiting to be sacrificed.
“You shouldn’t have,” he said, but in a gentle tone to temper the abruptness of it. He launched into his prepared justifications as he came into the room, keeping at a wary distance from her like a hiker circling a pit of quicksand. “Look…Leila. You’ve had a long day—you must be tired. I know I am.” He stifled an ostentatious yawn. “I, uh…had a few things I needed to take care of—business things that couldn’t wait.” He brushed them aside with a diffident wave of his hand. “Things pile up when I’m away. I’m going to be doing a lot of catching up during the next several days….”
“Oh yes,” she murmured, “I understand.”
For some reason her acquiescence annoyed him, made him feel fraudulent and unworthy. He cleared his throat and ventured a look at her, squinting as if she were a light too bright for his eyes. He continued almost defiantly, “In fact, there’s something—this weekend I have a thing I’m supposed to do—I promised a client I’d take him hunting out at the ranch.”
A frown appeared between her eyebrows. “The…ranch?”
“Yeah—I told you about it—west Texas?”
“Oh—yes, yes—I remember.” She sounded eager, now. “And you will fly there in your airplane?”
His insides writhed with guilt. Furious with himself for it, furious with her for making him feel it, he fought the urge to fidget and cleared his throat instead. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow, actually. Straight from work. So I won’t be—”
“Tomorrow?” He could hear a different breathiness in her voice now…unmistakable touches of panic.
“Look—I’m sorry. It’s been scheduled for a while. It’s a client—I couldn’t very well cancel at the last minute.” Cade chose that moment to escape into his bathroom, too cowardly to risk another look at her. He didn’t need to see the shock, dismay and disappointment he knew would be written all over her face…that incredibly expressive face that sometimes seemed to him like watching a video tape on fast forward.
Just inside the bathroom doorway, again he stopped dead.
In only a matter of hours his bathroom had become an alien place. A lush and steamy greenhouse garden, redolent of all sorts of flowery, exotic scents, where jewel-toned bottles sprouted like mushrooms from the marble countertops and a rainbow of fabrics intertwined with the more subtle hues of damp towels bloomed in tropical profusion over every available surface.
Closing his mind to both the chaos and the disturbingly evocative smells, Cade set about gathering up the toiletries Betsy had unpacked for him, putting them back in their travel case. And while he was doing that he went on glibly talking, telling Leila in a logical, reasonable way how he thought she should spend the time while he was gone, catching up on her rest, settling in, getting to know the place…
But not too well, he reminded himself. No sense in her getting too settled in and comfortable here. This “marriage” was only going to be temporary, after all.
Listening to himself talk like that, without Leila’s disturbing presence to distract him and just the sound of his own voice and his reassuringly normal reflection glaring back at him from the mirrors, he could feel his self-assurance coming back. Everything he said sounded reasonable and sane—even logical and wise. And why shouldn’t it? He was Cade Gallagher, successful Texas businessman, a self-made man who’d had his first few million under his belt before his thirty-fifth birthday. A man with a far-ranging and well-earned reputation as a deal-maker, a man who knew how to play the game—and win.
Play the game…and win.
It came to him then, a flash of self-awareness like a spotlight trained on a dark corner of his soul, just what had happened to him back there in Tamir. In the first place, he’d gone to Elena’s wedding with a business deal in mind. Once there, he’d gotten so caught up in the game and so blinded by the idea of winning, he’d lost his perspective. In order to win the game he’d let himself be coerced into marrying a woman he didn’t love, with whom he had nothing whatsoever in common.
But the truth was, he didn’t need this “win.” He didn’t need the old sheik’s oil deal. He’d made his millions right here in Texas, and there was plenty more where that came from.
He’d been an ambitious fool and had paid the price, but all was not lost. He could still get out of this. He could still get his life back.
Just as long as he did not consummate this marriage.
That was it—the key to his deliverance. Because, from what he’d learned of Leila’s culture so far, it seemed to him that when it came to marriage, it was all about the consummation. Even the Walima, the marriage feast, was to celebrate, not the wedding, but the consummation. The way Cade saw it, so long as he didn’t make love to his wife, he wasn’t even really married.
No problem. So what if she was one of the most beautiful and seductive women he’d ever seen in his life? He was thirty-six years old—a grown man, not a randy teenager. The image that looked back at him in the mirror was confident and mature…eyes world-weary, smile wry, eyebrows set at a sardonic tilt. Yes, he told himself, he had more than enough willpower, he ought to be able to resist one little black-eyed virgin princess.
He picked up his toiletry kit and turned around. And
