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‘What…?’
‘Why don’t you get in the car?’ Drax looked at his watch. ‘I can tell you about the job that’s on offer over a late lunch in the city.’
Did he really expect her to fall for that kind of line? She wasn’t that naïve. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not interested—in anything,’ she emphasised firmly, reaching for her passport.
Drax stepped back from her, sliding her passport out of sight somewhere within the folds of his dishdasha.
‘Very well,’ he said calmly, and turned back to his car.
‘My passport…’ Sadie protested frantically.
‘What passport? If, when I reach the airport for my return flight to Dhurahn, I find that I still have the passport I found lying on the ground in Zuran City, then I shall naturally see that it reaches the nearest British Embassy.’
‘What?’ This was getting worse by the minute. Not only had he got her passport, he was also planning to leave the country. ‘No, you can’t do that!’ Sadie told him wildly.
‘No?’ The ice-green eyes had hardened.
Ignoring the warning in them, Sadie tried to grab her passport back from him, crying out as she stumbled over a sharp piece of rock jutting out of the earth and then fell heavily against Drax.
Drax’s reactions were quicker than Sadie’s. He caught her easily, and could have held her away from him so their bodies didn’t come into contact, but for some reason he wasn’t prepared to explain to himself he didn’t. Instead, he wrapped his hands around her upper arms to steady her, and let her body rest against his own. He could feel the soft rounded swell of her breasts, and the temptation to slide his hands from her arms to her hips, to pull her more intimately against him, was so strong and instinctive that it startled him. She smelled hot and sweet, and her scent caused an unexpected surge of sexual awareness to grip him. It took him off guard.
What the hell was this? He didn’t normally react with this kind of easy arousal. A man in his position had to be careful about his sexual liaisons. Drax had learned that long ago. He had a responsibility towards the position he held. He and Vere had a shared duty to give their subjects a good example and to set high moral standards. Casual sex wasn’t something he indulged in, and yet here he was so stiffly erect that he felt downright uncomfortable—and all on account of this dusty young woman with her topaz eyes and her pale skin. A woman he had already decided to offer to his brother.
Which was, of course, why he was testing her moral standards. If she took advantage of their shared intimacy now to come on to him he would know there was no point in pursuing his plan. Neither could he afford to become sexually involved with her—it wasn’t for sex that he wanted her. She must be proved to be the kind of woman the Professor believed her to be. The kind of woman who was the opposite of women like Monika al Sawar and who would not try to institute sex with a man without being invited to do so.
After Sadie’s shock at being so unexpectedly close to Drax, with all its drugging excitement, came recognition of her vulnerability—and with it panic.
‘Let go of me!’ She sounded more pleading than assertive, Sadie recognised weakly, as she heard the emotion in her own voice. Being this close to this man wasn’t good for her, she admitted. It reactivated everything she had felt in the courtyard, and underlined her inability to override her physical response to him.
So why wasn’t she doing more to make him release her? Why, in fact, was she leaning into him as though she couldn’t stand without the support of his body? Did she really not care about the danger of her own actions? Not just via the casual sex with a stranger he might think she was inviting but, just as dangerously, via the effect her proximity to him was having on what she had always believed to be givens about herself. Givens like the fact that she wasn’t a woman who had strong sexual urges; like the fact that she wasn’t a woman who could ever be overwhelmed by desire for a man just by looking at him; like the fact that she was far too sensible to take risks with her sexual and emotional health.
It was the heat of the sun that was making her feel weak, she hurried to reassure herself. Nothing else. She certainly wasn’t entertaining the kind of fantasies she had heard some western women had about sexy Arab sheikhs—even if this man was everything that such a man should be, right down to the aura of danger surrounding him.
‘This is Zuran,’ she heard him telling her coldly as he thrust her away. ‘Here it is not acceptable for a man and a woman to embrace in public, no matter what you may be used to doing elsewhere!’
What she might be used to doing elsewhere? He was making it sound as though he thought she was coming on to him. Mortified, Sadie pulled away from him and stepped back. She was right about one thing. She had been out in the hot sun for longer than was wise, and her own sudden movement had caused a wave of faintly nauseating dizziness to swamp her.
The sight of Sadie’s suddenly too pale face accompanied by her soft gasp of shock had Drax reacting with instinctive speed as he recognised the onset of heat sickness. He bundled her into the car so quickly that Sadie didn’t have time to do anything more than make an incoherent protest. She could feel the car depressing as he slid into the driver’s seat and switched on the engine. She could hear too the sound of the doors locking as he set the ca
r in motion and pulled away from the kerb.
‘Stop,’ she said frantically. ‘You can’t do this!’
‘What would you have preferred me to do—leave you where you were to suffer sunstroke?’
‘There’s plenty of shade in the city.’
‘You would never have made it that far,’ Drax told her bluntly, before adding, ‘And you needn’t look at me like that. You have nothing to fear from me.’
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Sadie retorted shakily. ‘You’ve practically kidnapped me, and—’
‘And now you’re worried that I might be carrying you off to my harem to have my wicked way with you?’ Drax mocked her, raising one dark eyebrow. ‘Do you really think that’s likely? Let’s be honest with one another—in today’s world, if I wanted to indulge myself sexually with a disposable partner I would hardly need to kidnap one, would I?’
Her eyes were the colour of clear warm honey, Drax noticed, her tawny hair as polished and silken as the coat of one of his cherished pure-bred Arab mares. He sensed within her the same pride that possessed his falcons—a pride he had the power and the skill to tame, so that they came to his hand as softly, as though they were doves.
Her skin was too pale, though, for the harshness of the desert’s midday sun, and she was paying for her folly in ignoring that fact now. Perspiration beaded her forehead and her head drooped on the slender stem of her neck. Drax guessed that in addition to her obvious apprehension at being bundled into his car she was probably also feeling slightly nauseous. She was certainly likely to be dehydrated.
He reached out and tapped open the centre console that separated their seats. ‘You will find a bottle of water in here. Take it and drink some,’ he advised her sternly.
