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She would tell him about the baby soon. But there was no reason to tell him tonight. Would it be so wrong to enjoy this time with him, while he was relaxed—or more relaxed than usual—and playful?
Reaching out, he ran his thumb under her nipple and made her gasp. She felt it squeeze and tighten, instantly responsive to his touch.
‘It is strange, but they seem larger than I remember them,’ he said.
Because they were.
She thanked God for the shadows in the room so he couldn’t read the guilty look that crossed her face. He dipped his head, ready to take the aching peak into his mouth and build the hunger again, but she drew back.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asked, instantly alert to her hesitation.
Her heart pounded hard. How could this man be so aware of her needs, her wants?
‘Could we…? Is it okay if we just talk for a minute?’
His eyebrows rose. ‘This is not what a man in my state likes to hear,’ he said boldly, but his lips had quirked in a strained half-smile and she knew he was joking. Or mostly joking.
Climbing off the bed, he found the boxer briefs he had discarded earlier and put them on, then walked to the bathroom and returned with a fluffy robe. ‘You had better put this on.’ He threw the robe to her and she stuffed her arms into it, wrapped the belt around and tied it.
He had picked up the phone next to the bedside. ‘Are you hungry?’
She nodded. The truth was she was ravenous, and for much more than food. He looked ridiculously gorgeous standing there in his boxer shorts, but she wanted to speak to him and food felt like the perfect distraction. Also, she hadn’t eaten since before she’d done the test that morning, thanks to her nerves.
‘Is there anything you don’t eat?’ he asked.
‘Sheep’s eyeballs,’ she said, knowing it was a delicacy of the Kholadi, and he laughed at her joke.
‘You do not know what you are missing,’ he said, then reeled a selection of delicious items off the room-service menu.
Her stomach rumbled as he sat on the bed, leaning against the headboard. Stretching out his legs, he beckoned her. ‘Come.’
She crawled towards him, impossibly touched when he wrapped an arm around her. She went to rest against his right side, enjoying the moment of closeness, but remembered the appendectomy scar just in time.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Stop apologising,’ he said, tugging her back down again, until she was nestled under his arm. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’
She didn’t entirely believe him, but he seemed unconcerned. He was clearly a man who had endured a lot of pain in his life—enough that a wound such as this was insignificant.
‘What is it you wish to talk about?’ he asked.
There were so, so many things she wanted to know about him, she realised, but she didn’t have the right to ask them. Not until she had told him about her baby. Their baby. So she settled for something she did have the right to know.
‘Why did you pretend you were still just the Kholadi Chief at the oasis…’ Just. The qualifier echoed in her consciousness.
Whatever had happened to change his circumstances in the last five years, to turn him into a billionaire with considerable power and influence outside his desert kingdom, he had never been just a chieftain. He had always been charming, intelligent, a brilliant political strategist and a worthy diplomatic opponent, according to Zane. Hadn’t Cat once mentioned that he spoke seven languages fluently?
The Bad-Boy Sheikh tag was one the girls in the palace’s women’s quarters had created for him, because it had added to the fantasies they’d all whispered about him. It had made him hotter. But he really didn’t need to be any hotter than he already was. Maybe he had no formal education, unlike her, but he had risen to the task of leading his people as a teenager and she would guess that was the motive behind what he was doing here now.
She looked up at him. His brows quirked, the smile widening, and she wondered why her question amused him.
‘I did not pretend to be something I am not.’
‘But you could have told me about your other life. Your life in the West. As a businessman. Why didn’t you?’ She looked away, out into the night sky. Embarrassed at the memory of telling him about Cambridge University as if he would never have heard of the place.
Wow, she’d really messed up—in so many ways.
Strong fingers captured her chin and tugged her gaze to his. The sparkle of amusement had died, his eyes intent. ‘You think because I have money now, because I know how to work the stock market, how to invest and diversify the riches of my people, my country, so they can have more options, that this makes me a better man than I was before?’
