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He’d looked uneasy a minute ago. Now, he sat back and laughed.
“The women’s quarters are hardly a prison.”
“They are to me. I came here to work. Instead I’ve spent my time doing nothing in an isolated part of the palace.”
“I’m sorry about that, too. Some things came up that had to be dealt with.”
“Yes. So I noticed.”
She wanted to bite off her tongue, but it was too late.
“Am I missing something here, Megan?”
“Only that I’d like to get busy on our project.”
“Of course. And since today seems to be my day for apologies, let me make one more. I should have explained why I put you in the women’s quarters. It was for your own sake. I wanted to be sure my people understand our relationship. You’re unmarried, you see, and a foreigner.”
“And?”
“And, it’s important we avoid any hint of impropriety.”
“Ah. Then I take it that the woman I saw you with a little while ago is married as well as Suliyamese, or that you don’t give a damn about any hints of impropriety where she’s concerned.”
Qasim looked surprised. Dear God, so was she! Had she really said something so stupid? His eyes darkened; they locked on hers and she felt a flood of heat rise in her face.
“I’m only asking as a matter of curiosity,” she said stiffly. “You keep telling me about all these customs and traditions…”
“Alayna is one of us, yes.”
One of us. Who was he kidding? The lady was more than that.
“But she isn’t married.”
“I see. In other words, it’s all right for you to be seen with an unmarried woman as long as that woman isn’t me?”
Qasim looked at her for an endless few seconds. Then he gave her a slow, sexy grin. “Are you jealous, kalila?”
“Certainly not. I told you, I’m just—”
“Curious.” He sighed, as if a weight were on his shoulders, and his smile faded. “Alayna is my cousin.”
His cousin. That gorgeous creature was his cousin. Why did she feel such a sense of relief? Qasim could have a dozen beautiful women around him, for all she cared.
“I would have introduced you, but Alayna has some personal problems just now. That was why she came to see me. To discuss them.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
Qasim reached for her hand. She let him take it—it would have been ridiculous to try and tug it back—and tried to pretend she didn’t feel the rush of heat his touch sent racing along her skin.
“I should not have neglected you these past days, Megan. It’s just that I had many things to attend to.”
Things like assuring Alayna that he would find a way to keep her from having to marry a man who had been chosen for her, that she could, instead, marry a man she loved. That, alone, had involved him for two days. And, after that, the careful plans he’d made for the first meeting he and Megan would attend had started coming apart.
It would be the most difficult of the meetings because it involved Ahmet, one of the most powerful traditionalists in Suliyam. Caz had arranged to meet with Ahmet and his men here, in the palace, to make no mention of Megan’s presence beforehand.
But Ahmet had phoned yesterday to say he’d fallen ill and couldn’t travel. Would Qasim bring the meeting to him, at his ancestral home deep in the mountains beyond the vast desert that stretched away from the sea?
“It would be a generous thing to do, my lord,” Ahmet had said in a wheezing voice.
