down, not inflame an already dangerously inflammatory situation.
What I need is distance and plenty of it.
Eva swallowed and tried unsuccessfully to ease her leg from under his; she needed to be somewhere safe from the musky male scent of his body.
The thought was there but not the will to carry it through. Drowning in the sensual lethargy that made her feel intensely aware yet simultaneously strangely disconnected from her own body and what was happening to it, she got fatally distracted by the length of his eyelashes.
Training her gaze on this relatively safe area of his anatomy, she examined with growing fascination his eyelashes. Dark against the angle of his high cheekbones, a hank of dark glossy hair had fallen across his face.
Eva had actually lifted her hand with the intention of pushing it back—this felt as if it were happening to someone else … but it wasn’t!
What was she doing?
Face burning with shame, she began to pull away. As she did so his grip tightened. She felt rather than heard the groan that vibrated in his chest and panicked … He was waking up!
Clumsy in her haste, her elbow connected with his ribs. She was muttering a mortified, ‘Sorry,’ while trying to slide out from under the weight of his arm when, without warning, he buried his face in her neck.
Thoughts of escape went out of the window along with common sense. Her tightly closed eyelids fluttered as she felt his mouth on her neck. Then his hand was pushing under her shirt and closing over her breast and everything inside her melted as his thumb moved across her sensitised nipple and a feral moan was dragged from somewhere deep inside her.
‘No … yes … this is …’ Eva made a token attempt to move, but only managed to get her fingers tangled in his hair.
She wanted to make love to a total stranger—wanted barely began to cover the driving urgency that blitzed along her nerve endings through her veins. The realisation shocked her back to reality.
What are you doing, Eva? Whatever it was it was incredible. ‘Wake up!’
She was afraid her plea did not carry the conviction it ought, but it seemed to have some effect. He stopped nuzzling her neck and lifted his head.
Eva could never be sure in what order the next three events occurred, but his slumberous eyes opened and connected with hers.
She heard herself say stupidly, ‘I’m Eva. How’s your head, Mr … Prince?’
And Luke walked in, his eyes trained on the two takeaway coffees and a carton of croissants he was balancing.
‘I knocked, no answer. I let myself in—a peace offering. Do you know you’re late for your tutorial, Evie?’
Luke’s head lifted and his eyes opened wider than seemed physically possible as he saw the couple in the bed. His eyebrows shot to his hairline as he murmured, ‘Oops!’ And did a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn before exiting.
Eva gave an anguished groan as she sat up in bed, scarlet to the roots of her hair, and yelled after him, ‘This isn’t what it looks like, Luke!’
‘He is particularly gullible, then, your boyfriend? Or just the forgiving kind?’
Eva looked down at the man lying in the bed beside her, one arm curved over his head, the other touching the gash on his head. Gone was the air of vulnerability and vagueness of the previous evening; replacing it was a sardonic expression and a remarkably expressive and deeply unpleasant sneer.
He didn’t look forgiving; he looked like a man who held grudges.
There was a time lapse of several seconds before she realised that his eyes were trained on her gaping top.
Hating the blush that rose to the roots of her hair, Eva bunched the fabric of her top in one hand and, flinging off the duvet with the other, leapt out of bed. Her expression of indignant reproach produced a bold grin that revealed even white teeth and contained no hint of repentance for the ogling—not that she had a lot to ogle.
Not that she gave a damn how this stranger rated her breasts, because that would make her needy and mildly pathetic.
‘Last night …’ she began, struggling to look like someone who took waking up with a man in her bed in her stride, ‘… you were …’
‘Last night …’ he echoed.
Eva saw the sudden recognition flash into his eyes and watched as the sardonic amusement faded abruptly.
‘You’re Hassan’s lost princess.’
‘I’m not lost. I live here.’
He flashed a less than enthusiastic look around the room and said, ‘But you’re planning on moving up in the world, aren’t you, Princess?’
The rather cryptic observation brought a distracted frown to Eva’s brow … distracted because she was conscious of the background clatter as Luke slipped the latch on her front door.
‘I won’t be a minute.’ She gave an apologetic grimace and snatched up her robe from a chair.
‘I do not have a minute,’ Karim observed grimly.
His guilt climbed as he thought of his extended absence … his recollection was hazy, but one fact was inescapable: he had presumably, in some aberrant moment of unforgivable, shameful weakness, walked, or at least wandered, away from his responsibilities.
If he was not there when Amira woke he would never forgive himself.
The glance he slid her had the chill factor of an arctic front and Eva couldn’t help but contrast his present manner with the heat of his lips on her neck and the urgency in his hard, hot body as it had pressed into hers minutes earlier.
‘What time is it?’ he snapped, throwing aside the covers and vaulting with fluid grace from the bed.
Eva tried not to stare. His body stood up well to daylight scrutiny. Perfect was like that, she thought with a sigh. His eagerness to be gone was not exactly flattering to her ego, but his departure could not, she told herself, be too soon for her.
‘I don’t know.’
The honest response drew a forbidding frown.
‘Look, I won’t be a second …’ she called back as she ran to catch Luke. While she was answerable to nobody about whom she shared her bed with—up to this point no one—she felt an urgent need to put the record straight, and she really didn’t want Luke to leave with the wrong idea.
CHAPTER FIVE
KARIM walked into the minuscule sitting room, his eyes moving immediately to the face of the clock sitting on the mantle. He grimaced and felt a fresh surge of guilt when he thought of Amira waking up and him not being there.
And why wouldn’t he be there? Even with hazy recall the answer did not require hours of deep analysis—it was right there in the waking impressions that lingered in his head.
Lithe
