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“Sabeen, get up and get dressed.”
The young woman had been in the early stages of waking and Roark’s sharp, loud demand acted like a shrill alarm clock. She sat up and clutched a sheet to her small breasts, but not before giving Roark a good look at what she was offering. He scowled at her. Her sleepy mind took a second to catch up to what she was seeing. A second later, her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open as she stared at the knife in his hand.
“Roark, where have you been?”
“Making love to my fiancée. You remember Elizabeth, don’t you?” Contentment rolled through him as he recalled the last several hours with Elizabeth. “She’s the only woman I want in my bed.”
Color flooded Sabeen’s cheeks at Roark’s rebuke, but her confidence never wavered. “She’s too dull for you. You need a woman with passion. Someone who can satisfy you.”
“Elizabeth satisfies me. More than any woman I’ve ever known.” Roark had no idea what prompted him to add the second sentence, but he spoke the truth.
“You’ve never known me.” She let the sheet fall and reached up to run her fingers through her long hair.
Roark felt nothing. For all that he thought of her as a little sister, she was an incredibly beautiful woman. But her nudity and seductive pose aroused him no more than a marble statue.
Time for a little hard truth. “And I never will. You are a child, Sabeen. Elizabeth is a woman.”
“You don’t love her. The engagement isn’t even real.”
Any warm spot Roark may have once had for his mentor’s precocious daughter turned to ice at her accusation. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I?” Sabeen slid off the bed and stalked him like a jungle cat. “You forget that I’m not one of your stupid society friends, ready to believe any story you concoct. I know where you’ve been this last year and what you’ve been doing. There’s been no woman in your life.”
Roark scooped her clothes off the chair where she’d left them and tossed them her way. “Get dressed.”
“Tell me you love her.” Sabeen wasn’t going to let the issue of his engagement drop until she received some confirmation of its legitimacy.
Roark wasn’t going to lie. “My relationship with Elizabeth is none of your business.”
“You don’t love her.”
“And you’re such an expert?” In her attempt to goad him, she’d unleashed his impatience. “What about the business between you and that fortune hunter? When you looked in his eyes, did you see love or dollar signs?”
Gasping, Sabeen turned her back on him. Her hunched shoulders told Roark his point had hit home. Not proud of his counterattack, he returned the knife to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. As the dark brown liquid streamed into a glass pot, the blast of adrenaline receded. Weariness hit him. Roark rubbed his face and wondered how Elizabeth was doing. He wished he was snuggled beside her in that ridiculously tiny apartment she lived in.
They’d been hitting the social scene pretty hard these past ten days in an effort to establish the legitimacy of Roark’s transformation from playboy into someone stable and responsible. Not that it was all for show. He might not want to tear up the town with a different woman every night, but that didn’t mean the itch to embark on his next antiquity hunt was gone. Already the necessity to appear at parties and charity events chafed at him. He wasn’t cut out to dress up and play nice. He’d rather be skulking through back alleys in Cairo or tracking down hidden caches in Kabul.
Only in the private moments he shared with Elizabeth did the restlessness leave him. Damn. He was on the verge of being domesticated.
“May I have a cup of coffee or are you planning on kicking me out as soon as possible?”
Roark poured a second cup and slid it across the counter toward her. Sabeen had dressed in black leggings and a short green skirt. A long black and maroon scarf, wound several times around her neck, almost obscured the black lace blouse she wore. Intricate gold earrings, Middle Eastern in design, played peekaboo with her black hair.
She wasn’t dressed to seduce. Her appearance in his bed had been an act of opportunity rather than premeditation.
“Give me the key.” He looked at her purse. “Your brother has access to the loft so he can assist me when I’m overseas and need him to research something. You are not to come here without my permission.”
She sulked as she fetched the key. “I came because I’m worried about Darius.”
“So worried that you crawled naked into my bed?”
His point struck right where he wanted. She wouldn’t look at him.
“The wedding is just around the corner. He’s going to do something stupid—I just know it.”
Concern buzzed. “The only stupid thing he could do is to help Fadira escape her father’s plans for her.”
And Sabeen’s expression told him that’s exactly what her brother intended to do. Cursing, Roark pulled out his phone and dialed Darius’s number. It rolled to voice mail and Roark left him a terse message.
