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What was happening to him? Drax challenged himself angrily. He couldn’t believe he had just spoken so intimately to Sadie. He never talked about his parents to anyone other than Vere. He comforted himself that at least their conversation had given him an opportunity to bring Vere’s virtues to her attention. If his brother wasn’t here to encourage Sadie to fall in love with him then he would just have to do his best to help her to do so in his absence. The fact that earlier she had aroused him meant nothing, less than nothing, he assured himself, and if it did happen again…If it did? It wouldn’t. He intended to make sure of that.
‘To lose them both must have been unbearable,’ he could hear Sadie saying.
Was she right in thinking that his words of praise for his brother masked an unacknowledged feeling that his brother had been their parents’ favourite because he was the elder son? Sadie wondered compassionately. If so, how foolish of his parents not to value him as he so obviously deserved to be valued.
Sadie felt angrily protective on his behalf. Was the arrogance she had seen in him simply a means of protecting himself? Like these rooms, pared down and clinically bare of any softening personal things? Her compassion for him grew, startling her when she realised that it was making her feel almost tenderly protective of him. What on earth was happening to her? He was her employer. That was all. She had no need to feel protective of him and he was hardly likely to want it.
Without Vere, the loss of their parents would have been unbearable, Drax admitted to himself. But he had no intention of telling Sadie that. Instead, he said distantly, ‘It had to be borne. That was our duty to Dhurahn and to them.’
His cold sharpness speedily dissipated Sadie’s compassionate concern. She was a fool to feel sorry for him—a fool to feel anything for him, she warned herself firmly, as Ahmed arrived with the coffee.
To Sadie’s relief, if the manservant thought it oddly intimate that his master should be talking to his new employee dressed only in a towelling robe he was too tactful to betray it, simply obeying Drax’s instruction to pour Sadie a cup of coffee while Drax went to get dressed.
As soon as she had emptied the small cup Ahmed lifted the coffee pot to refill it, but Sadie shook her head
and hastily covered her empty cup with her hand, to indicate to him that she didn’t want any more. If she kept on drinking such a strong brew she would be on a caffeine-induced high for the rest of the day. But at least thinking about how dreadful it must have been for Drax and his brother to cope with the deaths of their parents gave her something to help her stop focusing on the memory of his nakedness. She was not the kind of woman who wasted her time mentally dwelling on naked male flesh. Or was she? Wouldn’t it be more honest to admit that she hadn’t previously been that kind of woman?
She was aware, so much aware, that those tiny tingling shudders of ‘being aware’ were still pulsing dangerously inside her—like a kettle simmering just off the boil, just waiting for that touch to turn up the heat, and then…She could feel the beading of sweat breaking out at her hairline.
This was crazy. She couldn’t be obsessing sexually about a man she had only just met. A man who spoke so glowingly to her about his brother that she could be forgiven for thinking that he was actually trying encourage her to fall for him, if such a scenario wasn’t totally unlikely. A man more unlikely to become her lover it was possible to imagine.
Her lover? She was crazy. She had to be. Who had said anything about her wanting a lover? She didn’t do lovers. She never had. And she certainly didn’t go around fantasising about arrogant ruling princes taking her to bed and making love to her. But just thinking about Drax’s tanned, naked body spread against the whiteness of her sheets set her mind racing. What would it feel like to straddle him and keep him there on her bed while she slowly explored the muscular contours of his shoulders and torso? Would he allow her to dominate him like that and take her visual pleasure of him without seeking to master her? Would he let her slowly stroke her way along the byways of his body?
She made a small choking sound of rejection and disbelief in her throat as she tried to disown her thoughts.
‘You would perhaps like water?’ Ahmed offered her solicitously.
‘What? No. Oh, yes, please,’ Sadie answered with a quick smile. Perhaps a glass of water might cool her overheated thoughts as it soothed her throat.
Walking through his bedroom, which was as elegantly minimalist as the rest of his quarters, Drax paused in his dressing room to remove clean clothes and then walked into his bathroom, shrugging off his towelling robe as he did so.
He showered quickly, almost brusquely, refusing to focus on his body in any way as he put up a mental barrier to stop himself from thinking about Sadie and the effect she had had on him earlier. But, while he could control his thoughts, he couldn’t hide from himself the knowledge that both the ache and its urgency were still there, and that were she to come to him now…
Were she to what? Angrily he reached for a towel, jerking it off the heated towel rail. What the hell was he letting himself think that for? She was nothing to him—less than nothing. She was just someone he could use to solve his brother’s current problem.
So he wasn’t going to mind when Vere took her to bed? Vere probably wouldn’t be taking her to bed; all his brother needed to do was persuade her to marry him. He didn’t have to consummate the marriage. In fact it would be better if he didn’t.
Better for whom? For him? Because he couldn’t control the white-hot surge of male blood-lust that possessed him at the thought of his twin touching Sadie? Why should he think something like that? He dropped the towel and strode into his dressing room, pulling on clean clothes—not the white tee shirt and the stone-coloured chinos he had originally intended to wear, but traditional Arab dress instead. Because wearing it would reinforce the barrier he needed to create between him and Sadie?
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘AND this, as you may remember from the plans I showed you earlier, is the main building of the complex.’
Sadie nodded her head, glad that she was wearing her sunglasses and had covered her head against the strong sun as she stood next to Drax, looking towards the gleaming, mirror-fronted building that rose up in front of her from the desert floor and was so many storeys high it seemed as though it was trying to reach the sky.
Apart from being able to recognise the central completed building, Sadie couldn’t pick out any of the other distinguishing features she had seen on the plans in the vast construction site all around them.
Drax had driven them both here himself, not for the first time surprising Sadie with his preference for informality—or at least what passed for informality for him. Sadie hadn’t missed the way people turned to look at him, obviously well aware of who he was.
‘This new four-lane highway you see under construction runs from the complex to the airport, with this spur, which they are currently working on, going into Dhurahn city. Dhurahn Financial, as we intend to call the new development, will in effect be a city within a city. It will operate under English mercantile law and have its own judiciary system and buildings. Those who work here will have the option of living within its environs in apartment blocks or of moving out to the coast. We find that many overseas nationals prefer to live by the sea if they can, and so we plan to construct another four-lane highway to a sleeper township on the coast.
‘The official language within Dhurahn Financial will be English, but naturally translation services will be provided in much the same way as they are in Brussels. Although our system will be rather more state-of-the-art.
‘The new city is being constructed on a circle plan. The central building will be ringed with roads and additional rings of buildings, which will be divided into segments of quarters, eighths, then sixteenths and so on as the circles widen. Each segment will have its own national flavour with regard to facilities and food outlets, as we intend to become a global financial meeting point.’
Sadie listened in awe. The sheer scale of the plan was breathtaking now that she was here at its centre.
‘No one will ever have seen anything like it,’ she said. ‘No,’ Drax agreed calmly. ‘That is our plan: that it shall be unique and remain unique. In order to maintain security we intend to operate a chip and pin pass system for everyone who works here. No one will be allowed to enter Dhurahn Financial without the correct authority. Now, let me show you inside the main building.’
