course. Because how could any woman resist a man as gorgeous as Murat the Magnificent? Against the whiteness of the bedding, his body gleamed like burnished gold. He was like a god, she thought as she lowered her head to brush her lips over his. A dark golden god, lying next to her.
But, out of nowhere, that scary feeling came back again. The one which made her feel as if she were falling off the edge of a cliff in slow motion. The one which gave her more pain than pleasure. The one which made her silently want to scream her denial. She wasn’t in love with him. She didn’t want to be. There was nothing to be gained from loving him.
More of her mother’s words came filtering back and she didn’t seem able to silence them.
Has he spoken to you about the future, Catrin? Has he?
Catrin moved restlessly. No, he most certainly had not. Their relationship contained plenty of fancy bows—but no strings. The future had been discussed and dismissed at the very beginning. Put away in a drawer which had been slammed shut and locked away.
‘Stop frowning like that,’ he murmured. ‘And feel this instead.’
His boast was unashamedly sexual as he guided her hand between his legs and her cheeks grew hot as she met the mocking look in his eyes. Her fingers curled around his silken hardness as he pulled her mouth down towards his, and suddenly there was nothing in her mind but sensation.
She wondered if she was a weak person, because all her doubts flew straight out of her mind as soon as Murat began to kiss her. Yet this, more than anything else, felt right and, oh, so familiar.
Her thoughts splintered as she felt his fingers begin to explore her flesh, because hadn’t it always been this way? Hadn’t the chemistry between them exploded from the moment their paths had first crossed, when the impossible had happened?
And a humble girl from the valleys had captured the eye of a powerful and impossibly wealthy sultan.
IT HAD BEEN one of those amazing mornings in Wales, where spring came later than anywhere else in Britain. Blossom was frothing like candyfloss on the trees, and all you could hear was birdsong. Nobody could have predicted that the peace of the small town was about to be broken by the arrival of an exotic stranger with his convoy of bodyguards, who all carried guns beneath the straining suits which covered their bulky frames.
Catrin had been enjoying life and relishing her freedom. She’d finally escaped from the poisonous atmosphere of home and found herself a job in a small hotel on the other side of Wales, though she was still close enough to pay duty calls to her mother. Their relationship had always been difficult, and if it hadn’t been for her younger sister, then Catrin would have left home much sooner. But you couldn’t leave a young girl alone to live with a drunk, could you? Just like you couldn’t stop someone from hitting the vodka, no matter how many bottles of the stuff you tipped down the sink.
Her whole life felt as if it had been consumed with shielding her sister from the daily drama of their mother’s life, but with Rachel now at university Catrin had been able to make a new life for herself.
Freedom felt heady. It made her feel giddy—like a new-born lamb stumbling from the darkness into a sunlit meadow. No longer did she feel fearful whenever she opened the door. She didn’t have to rescue anyone or bail them out. She didn’t have to pretend that things were hunky-dory when patently they were not. She could stay out late and not have to explain herself. Not that there were many opportunities to stay out late—when the nearest big town was miles away and the buses irregular. It was just the principle of freedom which she found so exhilarating.
She was trained for nothing in particular, but she was bright and adaptable and her willingness to work meant that the rest of the hotel staff liked her. Her bookworm habit had given her a knowledge of the world which didn’t match her haphazard schooling, which meant she could talk easily to anyone—so the customers liked her, too. A year after joining the Hindmarsh Hotel, she could begin to see a future for herself in the hospitality industry.
The barmaid had been off sick one day and Catrin had stepped in at short notice, when Murat Al Maisan walked into the bar. A sudden silence descended and Catrin glanced up to find herself looking into a pair of inky eyes. He was staring very hard and it took a moment or two for her to realise that his narrowed gaze was directed at her. If she hadn’t been standing with her back against a wall, she might have thought he was looking at someone else. But he wasn’t.
He was looking at her.
His eyes were travelling over her in a way which if it had been anyone else, Catrin might have found offensive. But with him it didn’t feel a bit offensive. With him, it felt...natural. As if she had been waiting all her life for him to look at her that way. Every vein in her body seemed to open wider to let the ever-quickening pulse of blood through. She could feel her breasts growing heavy and the palms of her hands getting clammy. Her reaction confused her. It scared her and excited her. It made her words come out sounding more clipped than usual, although nothing could disguise the soft lilt of her Welsh accent.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
There was a pause. His eyes were still narrowed. His voice was low and caressing. ‘I suspect you can help me in ways you haven’t even begun to dream of,’ he said, in an accent she’d never heard before.
‘I’m sorry?’
He shook his head, the way people did when they were trying to clear their ears after they’d been swimming. As if he’d just found himself in a place he hadn’t expected to be. ‘Some coffee, I think.’
Catrin raised her eyebrows and spoke to him in exactly the same way as she might speak to any young farmer who had taken temporary leave of their manners. ‘I usually respond better to the word “please”.’
He smiled then, before looking at her with a hard and playful gleam in his eyes. The way a cat looked at a bird which was high up in a tree. ‘Please.’
Afterwards she would discover that it had been impulse which had brought him into the old-fashioned hotel, leaving a whole fleet of accompanying bodyguards kicking their heels outside. He told her later that fate must have lured him there, because he had been meant to meet her. And that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Of course, she hadn’t known any of this as he sat down and began to sip his coffee and asked what her name was. And although she rarely socialised with customers, she found herself standing on the other side of the bar talking to him—or, rather, listening to what he was saying about wind farms, which was the reason for his visit to the area. At that point she still hadn’t discovered that he was a sultan who ruled a vast area of oil-rich land and was wealthy in a way which was outside her understanding.
All she knew was that he spoke like no one else she’d ever heard. His accented voice made her think of velvet and stone. He exuded an air of self-possession she found irresistible. And he flirted in a way she knew was dangerous, but which didn’t stop her from responding. She would have defied any woman on the planet not to have responded.
‘I suppose people must tell you all the time that your eyes are very beautiful,’ he said, making her stomach flip as he sucked on a coffee-dunked lump of sugar. ‘They are the colour of a cactus.’
‘A cactus!’ She looked at him perplexed, and pursed her lips together. ‘A horrible prickly cactus?’
‘That
