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“Was that one of your lovers?” Ariel asked.
She said it casually. But she sounded jealous.
“Did you not hear what we were speaking of?”
Ariel shrugged. “I heard a woman’s voice.”
“I do not ever speak to my lovers on the phone. There is never a reason to. That was one of my oldest friends. She is overseeing Riyaz.”
“And?”
“Progress is yet to be made. But I trust her.”
“So you do trust some people,” she said.
“I rescued her,” he said. “She is bound to me. Who better to trust?”
“You have a habit of that,” she said. “Rescuing people, I mean.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The woman who did my hair and makeup. She told me. About how everyone in your employ was smuggled out of the country. That you saved them.”
“Brianna is not from Nazul,” he said. “But yes.”
“Brianna,” she said. “Is that the woman with Riyaz?”
“It is. She is a very dear friend.”
“Forgive me,” she said. “But you do not seem like the sort of person who has friends. Though I will concede that perhaps I only feel this way because of the way that we reconnected with one another.”
“Glad I could surprise you,” he said.
What he did not like, was the way his body was responding to her. It was very deep and elemental. And it was unacceptable. The way that he had once felt about Ariel was immaterial. And it should not be bleeding into this present moment. But she was... Stunning. No photograph or media had prepared him. He had any number of beautiful women. Of course he had. He was a man with money and influence. A man with power. It was an aphrodisiac, even without what he knew to be physical attributes that women enjoyed.
But there was something different about her. There always had been. He despised that. That there should be something singular about this woman.
It made no sense as to why. “Come,” he said. He stood and held out his hand. Determined to touch her now, because he would defy this attraction between them. He would make it his own. Force it into submission. He was not controlled by his body.
It was one of the assets of years of hedonism.
For him, there was nothing yet to discover.
Except for her.
Women were all the same. He placed that thought firmly in his mind. She did not reach out to take his hand, so he took it on his own.
A sharp gasp exited her lips, and she looked up at him, her eyes wide.
“Come,” he repeated. “We will go to dinner.”
“All right,” she said, tilting her chin upward. Her hand was soft. It was the bland list of observations. Women’s hands were often soft, and Ariel did not do manual labor. Why would her hand be anything but soft?
And yet he had not expected her palm to feel as the silken petal of a desert lily. He had not anticipated that it would be something beyond mere softness, but a home that seemed to slip beneath the barrier of his soul and create in him a dry well of longing that was like a man who needed drink in the desert. The sensation that one might die if they could not satiate that need.
Oh, yes. He had expected that she would be soft. But he had not expected this.
Ruthlessly, he shut that down. And he led her from the seating area where he had been speaking to Brianna, into the dining room. The table was laid with a grand feast. Traditional meals of his country.
