sand with such a man! She was a qualified scientist of twenty-four! And yet…
As he finally disappeared through the doorway she let out her pent-up breath in a leaky sigh of relief.
‘You want this? It’s very fine silk…Very fine. And a very good price.’
Obediently she gave her attention to the silk. It was gossamer-fine and just the right shade of ice-blue for her own strawberry-blonde colouring. Because she was out in public on her own, she had taken the precaution of scraping her hair back off her face and tucking it up into the deep brimmed hat she was wearing.
But in such a fabric her body could be tantalisingly semi-revealed by its gauzy layers, and she could let her hair down in a silken cloud as a man with golden lion eyes looked upon her…
Katrina let the silk drop from her fingers as though it had burned her. As the stallholder picked it up a group of uniformed men came striding into the alley, causing people to scatter as they pushed past them, thrusting open doors and pulling coverings from stalls, quite plainly looking for someone and equally plainly not caring what damage they might cause to either people or belongings as they did so.
For some reason she could not understand, Katrina’s gaze went to the door through which the tribesman had disappeared.
The uniformed men were on a level with her now.
Behind her the door opened and a man stepped into the street. Tall and dark-haired, he was wearing European clothes—chinos and a linen shirt—but Katrina recognised him immediately, her eyes widening in surprise.
The tribesman had become a European. He turned and started to walk down the alleyway. He had just drawn level with the stall where Katrina was standing when one of the uniformed men saw him and pushed past Katrina, calling out to him in English and Zuranese.
‘You! Stop!’
Katrina saw the way the tribesman’s golden gaze hardened, checking, searching…and then stopping as it alighted on her.
‘Darling! There you are—I warned you not to go wandering off without me.’
The lean fingers she had noticed only minutes ago were now manacling her wrist, sliding down over her hand and entwining with her own, in a parody of a lover’s intimacy, holding her hand fast in a locked grip she couldn’t break. A smile that was merely a calculated curling of his mouth briefly broke up the hard arrogance of his face. He took a step towards her.
‘I am not your darling,’ Katrina told him breathlessly.
‘Start walking…’ he told her quietly, the intimidating, hard gaze imprisoning her under its magnetic spell.
Hostility darkened the normal gentleness of her own speedwell-blue eyes, but it was a hostility that was spiked with something much more primitive and dangerous, she admitted numbly as she did as he was instructing her. He moved closer to her and through the hot, sun-baked scent of spices and perfumes she was sharply aware of, first, the discreet expensive lemony scent of his cologne, and then far more disturbingly as he moved closer to her the intimate, faintly musky scent of his body itself.
The alleyway was full of armed men now, pushing open the doors to the small houses and overturning the stalls as they searched impatiently beneath them, plainly intent on finding something or someone!
The earlier atmosphere of relaxed happiness had gone and instead the alleyway and the people in it had become a place of sharply raised voices and almost palpable fear.
A large four-wheel-drive vehicle with blacked out windows came tearing down the alleyway, sending people scattering, and then screeching to a halt. The uniformed man who got out was heavily guarded and Katrina drew in a small gasp of breath as she recognised Zuran’s Minister of Internal Affairs, the cousin of Zuran’s ruler himself.
Apprehensively she looked at her captor, torn between conflicting emotions. She had seen him enter the building across the alleyway dressed as a Tuareg tribesman, and his behaviour was hardly that of a man with nothing to hide. By rights she should at the very least draw the attention of the fearsome heavily armed men swarming the alleyway to his presence and her own suspicions, but…But what? But he possessed a dangerous fascination that was seducing her into…Into what? Determinedly she started to pull away from him. He checked her small movement immediately, not merely tightening his hold on her, but actually dragging her further back into a narrow space in the shadows of the alley, which was so confined that she was pressed right up against his body.
‘Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but—’ she began bravely.
‘Quiet.’ The icy, emotionless command was whispered against her ear. She told herself that the reason her own body was trembling so violently was because she was shocked and afraid; nothing to do with the fact that she was sharply aware of the male hardness of the muscular thigh pressing into her. And the heavy thump of the male heart was beating so strongly that it seemed to pound, not just through his body, but through her own as well, overriding the shallow beat of her own heart, overwhelming her with its life force, making her feel as though his heart were providing the life force for both of them.
The sudden echo of an old, sharp pain speared her. Her parents’ love for one another had been like that: total and all-encompassing, and for ever.
She made a small sound, an incoherent murmur of private emotional angst, but his reaction was swift and punitive.
His hand gripped her throat, his head blotted out the street, and his mouth silenced any protest she could have made even before she had thought to take the breath to make it.
He tasted of heat and the desert, and a thousand and one things that had been imprinted on him, and which were alien to her. Alien and somehow dangerously and erotically exciting, she recognised in self-disgust as against her will an uncheckable surge of primitive female reaction seized her body.
Her lips softened and parted. She felt his missed heartbeat and then the sledgehammer blow of recognition that followed it as he seized like a predator the advantage she had given him. The hard pressure of his mouth on hers increased and fire jolted through her as his tongue thrust fiercely against her own, demanding her compliance.
Her body shook with reaction. Never, ever had she envisaged that she would kiss a man with such intimate sensuality in public and in full daylight, and certainly not a man who was a complete stranger to her.
She was vaguely aware of the sound of the four-wheel drive moving off, but his mouth was still covering hers.
Then, so abruptly that she almost stumbled, he released her. One hand steadied her with a merciless lack of emotion and then he was gone, disappearing into the crowd, leaving her feeling overwhelmed and, more shockingly, as though she had been abandoned.
‘Your Highness…’ Low, respectful bows followed his swift progress through his older half-brother’s royal palace as he made his way to his presence.
The armed guards on duty outside the heavy gold-leaf-covered double doors that led to the Ruler’s formal audience room threw both doors open and then bowed and left.
Xander was now in his half-brother’s presence, and so he bowed deeply as the doors closed behind him. They might share the same father, his elder brother might have a well-known fondness for him, but the man in front of him was Zuran’s ruler, and in public at least respect had to be paid to that fact.
Immediately
