Taken by the Sheikh Read online

  When she had seen her current job advertised, in the columns of a national broadsheet newspaper, she had been so excited that she had had to warn herself that there would be hundreds of applicants and that she probably wouldn’t stand a chance.

  But then, when Monika al Sawar had interviewed her and told her that she specifically wanted to employ a female MBA—‘Because my husband is very much the Arab male, and will not tolerate me working one to one with another man’—her hopes had started to rise.

  The job Monika had described to her had sounded perfect—challenging and exciting, with plenty of room to grow. Monika’s business, she had told Sadie, involved advising new residents to Zuran in the wake of the tourist boom on investment, the buying of Zurani property, and arranging finances for property purchases. Monika had further told Sadie that she wanted a keen young assistant she could train up to work as a financial adviser in her own right.

  Sadie had been in seventh heaven when she had got the job—even when the promised business-class flight to Zuran had somehow turned out to be an economy-class flight, and the promised advance of funds to pay a lump sum off her student loan had not materialised.

  But then had come the discovery that the accommodation she had been promised was the not the apartment in a modern executive block she had somehow imagined, but instead a very small and basic room in the al Sawar house—and, more disturbingly, that Monika was deducting what seemed to be an overly large sum of money from Sadie’s wages to cover her ‘bed and board’. Sadie’s awkward attempt to discuss her dissatisfaction with this situation had led to the first of the now regular and familiar outbursts of Monika’s temper, and with it the withholding of Sadie’s wages.

  Now, with only a very small sum of money left from the funds she had brought with her, Sadie was getting desperate. Very desperate. But she was not going to let Monika see that.

  ‘Very well, then. I’ll go,’ Sadie said quietly. ‘But not until you have paid me the wages owing to me.’

  The scream of fury that erupted from the other woman made Sadie wince, and it could be heard all over the house.

  And also outside in the street, where Drax, having parked the hire car he preferred to the Ruler’s offer of a chauffeur-driven limousine—mainly because of the privacy it afforded him—was walking towards the house. He slowed his pace to match that of Amar al Sawar. The kindly older man had been a close friend of the twins’ father, and neither of them ever visited Zuran without calling to see him. Drax had found him on this occasion at the Royal Palace, and had reluctantly accepted his invitation to return to his home with him. Neither Drax nor Vere liked their father’s elderly friend’s younger second wife.

  ‘Oh, dear me. I’m afraid it sounds as though Monika is a little upset,’ Amar apologised. ‘And I had so hoped that this time she would take to the new assistant she hired. Such a delightful young woman. English, and well-educated—a good, kind girl too, modest and sweet-natured.’

  If she was all of those things then she was certainly no match for Monika, Drax reflected.

  ‘I cannot understand why it is that such an attractive young woman should choose to work instead of marry. If I had a son she is just exactly the kind of girl I would want for him as a wife.’

  Now Amar had surprised Drax. The older man was very much of the generation and outlook that followed the old ways and looked for the kind of virtues in a young woman that very few now possessed. Drax suspected that the older man, who was no match for his aggressive wife, deeply regretted having allowed Monika to bully him into marrying her.

  From inside the courtyard, the piercing sound of her wrath could still be heard quite plainly by the two men as she berated her young assistant.

  ‘Wages? You expect me to pay you for practically ruining my business? Hah!’ Monika screeched at Sadie. ‘You are the one who should be paying me. Be glad that I am letting you go without demanding any recompense from you. If you are wise you will leave now, this minute, before I change my mind and set my lawyers to work on you.’

  Before Sadie could object Monika had turned round and begun walking away from her, leaving her standing in the courtyard.

  ‘My clothes…’ she began, too stunned and battered by Monika’s loud ranting and merciless tactics for logic or argument. ‘My passport…’

  ‘Zuwaina has packed them for you. Take them and go,’ Monika said triumphantly, as a young maid appeared in the courtyard, pulling Sadie’s case on wheels with one hand and holding her handbag and passport in the other.

  It gave Sadie a sharp sense of revulsion to know that Monika had been through her personal belongings, but the real cause of the sickness making her feel so clammy and light-headed was the reality of what she was now facing. No job, no money, no plane ticket home. All she could think of to do was throw herself on the mercy of the British Consulate—although it would mean a long walk in to town to get there.

  The courtyard gates were being opened and two men were walking through, both of them wearing traditional Arab dress. One of them was the elderly husband of her employer—a charming, educated man who made Sadie think yearningly of the grandfather she could just about remember—while the man with him…Sadie made an involuntary sound deep in her throat, her eyes widening and her heart thudding heavily into her chest wall. The other man was quite simply so compellingly male, and so arrogantly alive with raw sexuality and power, that he was mesmerizing. All Sadie could do was stand there gazing—no, not gazing at him so much as gaping in awe, Sadie mentally derided herself. She who had not only never gaped at a man before, but who had never imagined she would want to do so.

  She could feel her face turning pink as he turned his head, so that instead of just seeing his profile she met a full-on swift, hawkish assessment from a pair of narrowed, shockingly unexpected ice-green eyes. Ice-green? Her hands were trembling so much she almost dropped her handbag, grabbing hold of it as it threatened to slip sideways from her grasp.

  What was happening to her? Her instinctive and immediate response to her physical reaction was to take refuge in the safety of denial and tell herself that what was happening was caused by her defences having been undermined by Monika’s attack on her, not by anything—or anyone—else. But she couldn’t escape from the knowledge that with just one glance from those far too knowing green eyes a total stranger had stripped from her the protection with which she had previously kept his sex at bay.

  Without saying or doing anything he had broken through her barriers and made her so intensely aware of his male sexual driving force that her whole body was now a mass of chaotic, over-sensitised and far too receptive sexually attuned nerve-endings.

  So this was physical desire, then! This white-hot unstoppable flood of bitingly intense, dangerously seductive longing mixed with promise, possessing her and dominating everything she was feeling and thinking—changing her from what she had been into something else as surely as though she had been given into the hands of a sorcerer.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘ARE you all right, child?’

  Sadie could hear the gentle voice of her employer’s husband, but somehow it was impossible to drag her imprisoned gaze away from the dangerous, almost cruelly handsome perfection of the man standing beside him. She felt as though she was having to bring herself back up to the clear light of day from the darkest depths of some secret hidden place.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine,’ she managed to gulp—even though she knew that both men must be perfectly aware that she was not.

  She risked another look at Professor al Sawar’s much younger companion. To her relief, he wasn’t searching her soul with that too-intense glittering look any more, and some of the turbulence inside her subsided, allowing her to tell herself that she had over-emphasised his earlier effect on her—no doubt because of the trauma she had just experienced. Relief poured through her like cool, soothing water on over-heated skin.

  She could see in the Professor’s face that both men had overheard Monika’s angry tirad
e. Her now ex-employer’s husband reached into his robe and withdraw a wallet. Normally such an incongruity as the sight of a modern wallet concealed within the folds of such a traditional garment would have made her smile, but now she was struggling too hard to rationalise the rush of unfamiliar sensations seizing her to do anything other than note vaguely that the older man was opening his wallet and withdrawing some money.

  ‘Please—take this…’ he was urging her.

  Now she had to force herself to focus on him.

  ‘I don’t know how much my wife owes you, but…’

  There was a look in the ice-green eyes that burned her pride. Her reaction was instinctive and immediate. Shaking her head, she stepped back mutely.

  ‘Please…’ the Professor was insisting.

  ‘No,’ Sadie refused fiercely. Whether his act was a kindness to protect her or a bribe designed to protect his wife, she didn’t know; all she did know was that she would not and could not take his money, his charity. She had earned her wages, and it was her wages she wanted—not the professor’s generosity.

  ‘No,’ she repeated in a calmer, more rational tone, even if her voice was shaking slightly. She grabbed hold of her suitcase and hurried towards the still open courtyard gates.

  Drax watched her go, protectively shielding the intensity of his desire by lowering his eyelids to hood his focused concentration on her. The familiar, dry, sand-blown scent of the desert in the air he was breathing into his body was sharpened and flooded by the heat of his own arousal. Dismissively he mentally shrugged off the warning his body was activating. He was man, wasn’t he? And a man who had perhaps been voluntarily celibate longer than was wise. Drax didn’t take women to his bed on sexual impulse. His sense of his position was too strongly developed for that. Actions that potentially shamed him did not just shame him, they shamed Vere—and they shamed the reputation that had been handed down to them. Nevertheless, while it was not his habit to go in for casual serial partner sex, it was perhaps time that he found himself a discreet mistress.

  The gates had been closed behind the young woman for several seconds when, as though she had been surreptitiously watching from inside the house, Drax recognised, Monika came into the courtyard, beckoning them both inside. Reluctantly following the Professor, Drax almost missed seeing the small maroon oblong lying on the ground. Bending to pick it up, he frowned when he realised that it was a passport. He opened it, flicking through. Sadie Murray, twenty-five years old, single, light brown eyes, dark blonde almost brown hair, her only distinguishing mark a small mole on the inside of her left thigh…

  ‘Vere—it is always such a pleasure to see you,’ Monika was gushing, causing Drax’s eyes to narrow as she hurried forward to envelop him in the overpowering strength of her scent. Tucking the passport away, he stepped back from her.

  ‘Sadly for both of us, I’m not Vere,’ he told Monika coolly. Over a decade ago, in the early days of her marriage to the Professor, when Drax himself had been a young man in his early twenties, Monika had offered herself to him. She would never forgive him for rejecting her, Drax recognised, and he would never forget that she had so easily planned to betray her husband.

  ‘I appreciate that you have your reasons for doing so, my dear, but, really—that poor child…to dismiss her like that…’ the Professor was saying with a worried frown.

  ‘She deserved it,’ Monika returned sharply. ‘She refused to carry out my instructions with regard to one of my clients, and in doing so cost me a great deal of money.’

  ‘But, my dear, she’s so young, and all alone in a foreign country,’ the Professor wavered unhappily. ‘And morally—’

  ‘Morally? Hah! It is her morals that have caused me so much of a problem. Why should I have to suffer the disadvantages of employing a young western woman who has chosen to behave like a traditional virgin?’

  ‘My dear…’

  Drax could hear the distress in the older man’s voice, but Monika chose to ignore her husband’s shock.

  Tossing her head, she continued sharply, ‘I need a female employee who knows how to persuade men to become my clients, not one who freezes them away.’

  ‘Sadie should surely be praised for her virtue, Monika?’ the Professor protested.

  ‘I did not employ her for her virtue. She is pretty enough, but plainly she doesn’t know how to use that prettiness to her own advantage.’ Monika gave a dismissive shrug. ‘Now she has to learn the hard way that that does not make good business sense.’

  ‘You have ensured that she has sufficient money to pay for her air ticket home?’

  Drax watched as Monika’s mouth hardened. ‘That is not my concern. If she hasn’t, then it will teach her much needed lesson. Let me summon the maid and get her to bring you both some coffee,’ she told her husband, determinedly changing the subject.

  As a Lebanese woman, Monika lived a far more independent life than that of a traditional Zurani wife, who would never have dreamed of even appearing in front of a male guest of her husband, never mind addressing him directly. She was certainly far too strident for his taste, Drax acknowledged, and he shook his head and refused. ‘Not for me, Monika. I’m afraid I can’t stay. I have an appointment.’

  It might only be March, but Zuran did not have a spring. Its climate went straight from a welcome ‘cool’ winter temperature of around twenty-five degrees in February to a swiftly climbing forty-five-degrees-plus in the middle of summer.

  For Sadie, having to walk all the way into town with her case, and without the hat she normally wore for protection, the rising temperature felt distinctly too hot. Her hair might be thick and long, its burnished light brunette warmed with natural gold highlights, but it was no protection against the sun. At least she had her sunglasses to shield her eyes from the harshness of the sunlight as it bounced off the white-painted walls of the houses lining the roadside.

  No one walked in Zuran—which was no doubt why so many male drivers slowed down as they drove past her. At least, that was what she was going to tell herself, Sadie decided, gritting her teeth as she ignored yet another car driver crawling along beside the kerb, murmuring to her words she was relieved she could not understand before thankfully he drove off when he realised that she had no intention of acknowledging him.

  Her dismissal was so unfair. She had been good at her job, she knew that, but no way had she intended to coax and tease men into signing up with Monika by hinting at providing them with a sexual reward that she was not going to deliver. Sadie loathed that kind of female behaviour, and she loathed even more the kind of men who expected it.

  Perhaps she was naïve, but it had shocked her to discover that a female employer should expect it of her—especially out here in this predominantly morally conservative part of the world. About her reaction to the man who had been accompanying Monika’s elderly husband she did not want to think at all.

  Drax was just about to put his foot down to join the fast lane of traffic when the car phone rang. He knew it would be Vere calling him. It was typical of Drax that he never questioned why or how he should know that without looking at his phone. It was just an accepted part of their twinship.

  ‘How did the meeting go with the Ruler?’ Vere asked.

  ‘Well enough—although I don’t think he was too pleased that I turned up in your place. And, speaking of people who weren’t as pleased to see me as they would have been to see you, I’ve just seen the Professor. Monika asked to be remembered to you.’

  ‘So you’ve been too busy to find me a wife, I take it?’ Vere responded, ignoring Drax’s dig about Monika.

  Up ahead of him, in the dust of the roadside, Drax could see the lone figure of a young woman walking and dragging her suitcase behind her. She looked weary—forlorn, almost.

  What was it Amar has said about her? That she was modest, the kind of young woman he would be happy to see his son marry. Drax remembered the passport he had picked up. By rights he should have handed it over to the al Sawars, becau
se the girl would surely return there to look for it once she realised she had lost it.

  She certainly wasn’t greedy, he acknowledged. He had seen that with his own eyes. And she had to be naïve if she’d let herself be persuaded into working for Monika.

  ‘Drax? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m still here, Vere. As to your bride—well, that’s where you are wrong, my brother. It just so happens that I may have found you the perfect temporary wife.’

  Drax switched off his phone before Vere could say anything, and then started to cut the speed of his car.

  Sadie could hear the now familiar tell-tale sound of a car braking to a crawl just behind her, but she refused to look round. However, this car didn’t pull away as quickly as the others had when she did not respond. Instead it continued to keep pace with her, casting a long shadow in front of her. She tried to walk a little bit faster, wishing she could move away from the side of the road, but the land beyond was too rough for her to wheel her case over it.

  There was no need for her to panic, she assured herself. It was broad daylight and, even if he was being more persistent than the others, surely whoever it was would soon get bored when she didn’t respond, soon put his foot down to race past her in a cloud of sandy dust.

  Only he didn’t. And out of the corner of her eye she could see a long black bonnet edging just ahead of her, then keeping pace with her.

  She couldn’t walk any faster; she was panting slightly already, her skin soaked with perspiration caused not just by the heat now but by her anxiety as well.

  ‘Ms Murray?’

  Hearing her name spoken in crisp accent-free English gave her such a shock that she froze. Just as he had estimated she would, she reflected bitterly several seconds later, when the car stopped, the driver’s door opened and the driver himself stepped out in front of her, trapping her between his body and his car.