stood up on tiptoe and framed her hands around his hard jaw before leaning forward to brush her lips over the sensual curve of his mouth. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘For your hospitality and your chivalry.’
For a moment he didn’t move and it was as if her soft words had turned him to stone. Rosa could see a little muscle working overtime at his temple before he drawled out a sardonic reply. ‘I’d like to say that the pleasure was all mine, but that wouldn’t be true.’
She looked at him uncertainly. ‘No?’
‘In fact, it was an evening which fell pretty short on the pleasure quota for both of us, and I’m wondering whether it might not be too late to remedy that....’
Rosa was unprepared for the decisive way that he pulled her against him and the equally decisive way that he drove his mouth down onto hers. His hands were cupping her head and her hair was spilling through his fingers and suddenly he was kissing her like she’d never been kissed before. She could feel the instant flowering of her breasts and a delicious warmth between her legs. Did he know that? Was that why he thrust one hard thigh between hers, as if sensing that might help alleviate the sudden aching she could feel at the most intimate part of her body?
‘Oh,’ she said against his lips, swallowing down her sense of wonder. ‘Oh.’
With an effort, he tore his lips away and looked down into her upturned face. ‘How commendably circumspect I have been with you, my beauty,’ he said shakily. ‘But that all ends as of now. You are no longer drunk and I am no longer angry. This may be one of the most ill-judged decisions of my life, but I want you—and, sweet heaven, I am going to have you. Right now.’
His emphatic statement should have daunted her, but it didn’t. She suspected that he didn’t particularly like or respect her, but suddenly Rosa didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything other than the way he was making her feel. Why shouldn’t she taste the pleasures which seemed to drive everyone else in the human race, except for her—poor, protected Rosa, who had been shielded from the world for so long? Her lips were dry but somehow she managed to echo his words as she felt his thumb tease its way over one painfully erect nipple.
‘I want you, too,’ she whispered. ‘And right now is fine with me.’
With a hard smile of satisfaction, he bent his head to kiss her again and Rosa never knew what would have happened next had she not heard the sound of an embarrassed cough behind them. With a start, they sprang apart—as if they’d been caught red-handed at the scene of a crime.
And maybe they had, she thought. Because there, standing at the edge of the private garden watching them, was a man as dark-skinned as Kulal himself, though his head was dipped with the faintest degree of subservience.
She watched as a look of anger darkened Kulal’s face. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded. ‘Why the hell are you disturbing me, Mutasim—creeping up on me like a spy?’
Rosa thought she’d never seen a man look more embarrassed than Mutasim did as Kulal’s words fired into him, and she noticed that the stranger hadn’t met her eyes. Not once.
‘I beg your indulgence at this untimely intrusion, Your Highness,’ said Mutasim softly. ‘But your brother, the king, craves your company at the earliest opportunity.’
Rosa’s lips parted in shock as the words registered in her befuddled brain. She looked up at Kulal, her bewildered eyes asking him a silent question.
Highness? King?
Were they playing some sort of joke on her? Talking in some kind of code? But her confusion was quickly superseded by shame as Kulal took no notice of her silent plea. Completely ignoring her, he walked over to the dark-skinned man and began to speak in a low voice, in a language she couldn’t begin to understand.
And Rosa felt completely invisible.
‘SO WHAT DID you think you were playing at, Kulal?’ The king was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘When you decided to take some drunken pole dancer back to your hotel?’
For a moment Kulal didn’t answer. Instead he sat back in one of the ornate chairs in the throne room and stared up at the old-fashioned fan which was whirring in the vaulted, golden ceiling. He was back in the ancient palace in which he’d been raised, having flown to Zahrastan as soon as he had received word that the king wished to speak with him. He’d never received a summons quite like this and it occurred to him that he’d never seen his brother look quite so exasperated either. Not even during that time when he had caught Kulal leaving one of the chambermaid’s rooms, smoothing down his ruffled robes and smirking all over his face.
Or the time when Kulal had ‘borrowed’ one of the palace cars for an unauthorised trip into the desert when he was barely sixteen and nobody had known that he could drive. On both those occasions—and, indeed, on many more—righteous anger should surely have come flooding the younger prince’s way, but it had not. It was almost as if it had been expected that he should behave wildly—and everyone knew why. Weren’t motherless children always indulged?
As two royal princes of a fabulously rich desert kingdom, the two men should have been close but an accident of birth meant that they had grown up living two very different lives. Hazail was the older, the heir to the throne, and the defining factor of his life had always been that he would one day inherit the crown. It had been Hazail’s destiny which had occupied most of their father’s time as he had tutored his elder son in the art of ruling a powerful desert kingdom.
Kulal had simply been the ‘spare’—the extra boy child born as an insurance policy to ensure the line of succession. He had been brought up by a series of amahs—female servants who had adored him but had lacked the strength to discipline the strong-minded little boy. Consequently, he had been given freedom—perhaps a little too much freedom for so strong and so wilful a character. But that had never compensated for the heavy weight which had hung over him since his mother had died—a shocking death which had sent the country spiralling into deep mourning. And Kulal had been marked out by that terrible loss, for she had died saving his life. Deep down he knew that was the reason why his father and his brother had always been so distant towards him. He knew that subconsciously they blamed him for the queen’s untimely end, even if logic told them that it was nothing but the cruel intervention of fate. Of two people being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Perhaps it had been to make up for their emotional distance that they had tended to overlook Kulal’s misdemeanours. But it seemed that they were not being overlooked this time. Hazail was pacing the floor like an expectant father, before turning back to his younger brother, still with that exasperated expression on his face.
‘She wasn’t a pole dancer,’ Kulal protested as he picked up a golden goblet and swirled the pomegranate juice it contained.
‘No?’ Hazail looked at him. ‘It is fiction, then, that she was seen writhing around in a nightclub, showing much of her underwear in the process? That is simply a figment of my informant’s imagination, is it?’
‘Which informant?’ Kulal demanded, trying to dampen down the vivid image of Rosa’s curvaceous body as it had twisted itself around the pole. Or the fact that his brother’s damned servant had interrupted him just as he had started to seduce her!
‘That is surely beside the point,’ answered Hazail coolly.
