into the air, throwing all her weight into her attempt to gain freedom. She might as well have been struggling against solid stone.
“Your manners leave a lot to be desired.” The sound of Adham’s familiar, faintly accented voice made her sag with relief. For a moment.
She swore violently in Italian—very colorful and inappropriate words she’d learned from her brother, muffled by Adham’s hold.
“Will you keep quiet if I remove my hand?” His tone had an edge to it—anger, extreme annoyance, and something else that she couldn’t place.
She nodded, and he let his hand fall away from her mouth but kept his arms around her.
He held her tightly against his solid body. She tried to wiggle out of his hold and his arms tightened, making her extremely conscious of all the hardened muscle of his body. All that finely honed masculinity. For a moment she could only be fascinated by the feel of him, by each and every minute difference between the male and female body.
Her breasts felt heavier, and she could feel her nipples tightening against the silken fabric of her bra. Her pulse beat heavily. In her neck, her head, down to the apex of her thighs.
“Do you have any idea what you’re asking for?” he asked, his voice rough.
No. She truly didn’t. Her body was asking for, craving, more of his touch. But she didn’t have a clue as to why. Why she wanted to lean into his strength rather than struggle against it. Why she wanted his arms to stay locked around her. Why she wanted more of the sweet languor that was spreading through her.
“You’re asking to be killed,” he growled. Clearly he was letting the subject of their mutual attraction drop. “I could have been anyone. You’re walking around out here in the middle of the night with designer luggage. You look as wealthy as you are. Worse, you look as ridiculously naive as you are. You’re asking to be robbed. Or worse.”
“I didn’t … I didn’t think of that.” Logically, she knew crime rates in urban areas were much higher than in the small island nation she was from. But the thought had never crossed her mind. Her only thought had been escaping Adham. She’d set out to prove a point about her ability to look out for herself, and she’d done a spectacular job of not thinking it through.
He turned her so that she was facing him, her arms still pinned tightly to her sides. His hands held her steady, preventing her from running.
“What do you think you’re going to do with all this freedom you seek, Isabella? You have no job, no skills. You are so naive you shouldn’t be allowed to cross the street on your own!”
His words hurt. They hurt because, as much as she hated to acknowledge the truth in them, it was there. He was right. She’d never had a job. She didn’t know how to go about getting one. Or an apartment. She didn’t know how to drive. She had a lot of knowledge, but all that had come from books. She had never had to apply the things she’d learned to anything real or practical.
“I can find something to do,” she said, pushing her reservations to one side.
“With a body like that there will be many men willing to help. For a price.” His eyes raked over her, hot, glittering. There was nothing passive in those black depths—not now. There was only fire.
She struggled against him. “Let go of me.” She needed to get away from him. It wasn’t about the broader scope, the two months of freedom. Now it was all zeroed in on getting out of his hold—away from him and the strange electric feelings that were zinging through her system.
A man who was walking by the alley turned toward them. His expression, barely visible in the light of the lamp he stood under, was concerned.
Adham backed her up a few steps, so that she rested against the brick wall of the boulangerie, and before she could protest his mouth was covering hers, his tongue sliding against the seam of her lips, requesting entry. She gave it.
Her mind was blank of everything but the feeling of his lips on hers. His hands roaming from her hips to her waist, to the swell of her breasts. She gripped his shoulders, steadying herself, grateful for the wall of the building behind her and the wall of his body in front. If not for those things she would have melted into one of the rain puddles at his feet.
He pulled away suddenly, his breathing harsh in the stillness of the night air. Isabella touched her lips, confirming that they were as swollen as they felt.
“What …?” she breathed, unable to speak any more coherently than that.
“It’s Paris,” he bit out. “No one is going to interrupt lovers. Even if they are having a disagreement.”
He took her arm and led her out of the shadows and back toward the main door of his building. Her rage mingled with something else—something hot and dangerous and completely unsettling. She put a hand to her mouth again, to confirm she hadn’t hallucinated the entire event.
When they were back in the building he propelled her into the lift, the doors shut behind them. She couldn’t believe he had done that. Kissed her as though he had every right to touch her, as though he … he had some claim on her. And only to shut her up. Her first kiss had been a diversion.
Worse than all of that, she couldn’t believe the restless ache that was building in her body. The curiosity. The need to know what it would be like to kiss him again. Only this time longer and gentler, slowly so she had time to process it, to learn the texture of his lips, the rhythm of his movements.
She shut that traitorous part of her brain down. He’d had no right to do that. She wore another man’s ring. Even in her wildest fantasies of escape she had never imagined betraying her fiancé in that way. She didn’t know the man. She certainly didn’t love him. But they had a signed agreement, and she had no intention of violating it.
He’d done it to shut her up. That stung her pride. Much more than it should.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she said icily.
He looked at her, his dark eyes unreadable, his lips—lips that had just claimed hers with what had felt like hunger—now pressed into a flat, immovable line. There was no passion there. He was unaffected. A man made of cold, unyielding stone.
“If you learn one thing about me learn this, and learn it quickly,” he said, his voice hard. “I will do whatever it takes to ensure my objective is met. I intend to take you back to Sheikh Hassan, and I will do it.”
She believed him. Her scarred captor with the fathomless eyes was most certainly capable of getting his way. Of seeing that she didn’t get hers. She felt as if she’d stepped into water, expecting a wading pool, only to find she had swum out into the middle of an ocean. Out of her depth didn’t begin to describe it.
She walked from the lift back into the penthouse, and tried not to imagine a barred cell door swinging shut when Adham closed the door behind them.
“How did you know? How did you get down there so fast?”
“I was expecting it. I deal with masterminds, Isabella, one naive princess is not going to pull one over on me. There’s an alarm on the door that’s linked to my mobile phone, and the stairs are faster than the elevator.”
She closed her eyes against mounting anguish,
