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When his focus dropped to her mouth, Tahir had to clench his gut against the impact of its sensual curve. Pale pink lips tinted with the faintest hint of gloss, which might as well have been painted the deepest scarlet for all the punch it packed, for all the memories it fired through him as he lingered there.
But above all those significant changes, it was the final thing that disturbed him the most.
She was...containedwhere once she’d been effervescent, bursting with youthful outrage and unquenchable passion. There was a guardedness about her that he knew instinctively went deeper than the warranted trepidation filming the eyes locked on his.
It was as if the wattage of her illumination had been turned down.
Deliberately? Self-inflicted or by another’s hand?
He pursed his lips. What did he care?
He remained motionless, as steely eyed as his father’s portrait before him as he watched the woman who’d betrayed him cross the expanse of his official domain, the seat of his power and the space within which he reminded himself daily to be a better man than he’d been twelve years ago.
She stopped at the respectable, reverent distance he knew would’ve been drilled into her. These days, very few people were granted access, never mind allowed to get within touching distance of His Majesty, the Sheikh of Jukrat. He was the ruler who’d taken the passable province his great-grandfather had painstakingly nurtured, and his grandfather and father had then wielded into a respectable state, so that he, Tahir, could elevate it into a formidable, globally recognised and revered sheikhdom.
To drive home that unassailable fact, Tahir remained behind his desk.
Waited until those eyes that had once hypnotised him with their many mesmerising shades of green travelled up from the priceless Jukrat woven rug on which she stood, to meet his.
Waited until those plump, sinfully curved lips parted on a short breath. Then, ‘Hello, Ta...um... Your Majesty.’
Every muscle in Tahir’s body clenched tight, the fire racing through his veins as unwelcome as it was acutely disturbing.
At least one thing hadn’t changed.
Her voice still held the husky, melodic texture, like the dark honeyed, far too rich and deceptively potent drink his mother had loved. Like the deep, hypnotic tones of a distant bell he wanted to ignore but found himself anticipating nevertheless, a part of him breathlessly poised for the next toll. And the next.
That involuntary reaction further irritated him, enough to make his fingers press deeper into the rich polished wood of his antique desk. To make him conscious of every exhale in the effort to rid himself, immediately, of the weakening sensation.
When a full minute went by without him responding, because he hadn’t invited her to be sociable, she went a shade paler, then forced herself to speak again. ‘Thank you so much for seeing me.’
‘Don’t thank me too quickly, Miss Winchester. I may have brought you here just for the pleasure of telling you to go to hell.’ His voice, thankfully, was chilled enough to freeze an impressive swathe of his beloved Jukrat Desert.
Her eyes widened in alarm before they swept away, back to the floor.
In any other woman, Tahir would’ve taken that look for awe and reverence, for appreciation of his station and power.
But unless Lauren Winchester had undergone a personality transplant, he knew it was a false, calculated move. Born of subterfuge? Of desperation? Or even again, a deliberate erasure of a fundamental part of who she’d once been?
Why that thought grated something rigid and knotted inside him, Tahir refused to dwell on.
The slick appearance of her tongue, wetting her lips, focused him far too viciously on what it’d felt like to kiss those lips. To plunder until they both groaned with desire.
‘I hope you don’t.’
‘Why?’ he bit out, willing his body’s rude, primal awakening under control.
‘Because I had to come. I had no choice.’
Nowthishe understood. This argument he could dispense with easily. As Sheikh, he lived with a daily balance of choices. ‘Of course you did. Good or bad. Wise or foolish. There’s always a choice. Presenting yourself at my palace gates was risky. Presenting yourself before me now is stupendously foolish.’
A look flashed through her eyes and his muscles reacted again, this time with memory, as if rousing themselves in recognition of an old friend.
Except this woman wasn’t a friend. She wasDelilah.
She’d carefully cultivated his weakness—an intelligent, fiercely forward-thinking woman with a breathtaking, traffic-stopping body—and used it against him, then tossed him to the lions without a second thought.
‘I... I tried emailing. I also tried calling.’
