The Sheikh's Innocent Bride

Shahir drank in a deep, shuddering breath. Every natural instinct urged him to go after her and apologise for what had transpired, but his staff were already looking for him and Kirsten was obviously upset. It would be foolish to risk a scene that would attract adverse attention to her and increase her embarrassment. What the hell had got into him? He was furious at his loss of control, and could not work out how it had happened. It was as though his libido had hit an override button that had switched off all moral restraint.

Waiting in the elegant reception hall, Lady Pamela Anstruther tapped an impatient foot. Through the glass insert in the fire doors she watched a breathtakingly beautiful blonde girl emerge pell-mell from an office along the corridor. The doors flipped back noisily one by one until the youthful blonde finally rushed past her in tears.

A minute later Shahir came out of the exact same doorway, a forbidding reserve stamped on his devastatingly handsome features.

The attractive brunette’s calculating gaze hardened and veiled as she angrily considered what she had just seen and came up with the most likely explanation.

Kirsten stared at herself in the cloakroom mirror. Her green eyes were raw with guilt and shock. Her lips were red and slightly swollen, and tingling. Her body felt hot and tight and wickedly different. Shame engulfed her in a terrible drowning flood. Prince Shahir had been talking gravely about the damage to her father’s field. She remembered the way she had been looking at him while he spoke and she wanted to die on the spot. He had asked her what she was thinking about because he had noticed that she wasn’t listening properly. Only a very bold woman would then have told him that she was wondering what it would be like if he kissed her! How much more obvious an invitation could a woman give a man? It had been the provocative equivalent of telling him outright that she fancied him. Inwardly she cringed. She was to blame for what had transpired because she had tempted him into touching her.

Finding an empty office, she got on with the job of emptying the bins and dusting and vacuuming. But, as hard as she tried, her response to that kiss kept on coming back to seize hold of her thoughts. In her whole life it had never occurred to her that a man could make her feel like that, and she was shattered by the passion that had lurked undiscovered inside her until that moment of revelation. She was even more devastated by the excitement and pleasure she had felt in his arms. He was a stranger, she didn’t even know him, and yet she had found him irresistible—had been so lost in the delight of it that he could have done anything he wanted to her! She felt even worse that it had been him and not her to call a halt to their intimacy.

It was a relief to finish for the day. The staff locker room was very quiet because her usual shift had finished hours earlier. Buttoning her jacket, Kirsten crossed the coach yard to her bicycle. A man who had climbed out of an opulent sports car a few yards away was staring at her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, and she dropped her head and quickened her step.

‘Hold on a minute…’ the man urged as she reached for her bike. ‘Let me have a proper look at you.’

A bewildered frown denting her smooth brow, Kirsten focused on the tall, thin man in jeans approaching her. ‘Sorry…were you speaking to me?’

‘You are stunning…’ He walked slowly round her, staring at her from every angle with frowningly intent eyes. ‘If you’re photogenic as well, I can make you the discovery of the decade!’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Detaching her bike from the stand, Kirsten began to wheel it swiftly away.

‘Look, I’m Bruno Judd.’ The man hurried after her. ‘You may well have heard of me—I am an internationally acclaimed fashion photographer. I don’t act as a modelling scout in the normal way, but you’re very eye-catching and I’d like to take some photographs of you.’

‘No, thank you.’ Eager to get rid of him, for she thought he was a weirdo, Kirsten climbed on to her bike in haste.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘Please leave me alone!’ she muttered fiercely, and pedalled away, leaving him standing staring after her with an air of disbelieving annoyance.

CHAPTER THREE

‘I WANT you to find out where Kirsten Ross is working today and I want to speak to her in private. Arrange it, but do so with the utmost discretion,’ Shahir instructed his most senior PA, who concealed his surprise at the order with difficulty and bowed out of the room.

Alone again, and restive, Shahir studied the pink roses in the vase by the window. He let a fingertip stroke gently down over the satiny smooth petal of a single perfect bud and thought of the ripe flavour of Kirsten’s lips, and the subtle scent and softness of her skin, and swore under his breath almost simultaneously. Her passion had surprised but enthralled him, but he would not allow his thoughts to linger on that fact.

Pamela Anstruther knocked and entered with a suggested guest list for the house party to be held at Strathcraig the following month. Her china-blue eyes met his and she gave him a playful smile, tossing her head so that her glossy brown hair bounced on her shoulders. Her heart-shaped face was very pretty. She was small and curvaceous, and the low-necked summer dress she wore displayed the plump fullness of her breasts and was tight enough to make it obvious that she was wearing the bare minimum of underwear.

He smiled, but the smile was perfunctory and not encouraging—he didn’t want her. Indeed, the racy brunette’s pert and provocative style was so blatant in comparison to Kirsten’s more natural charms that Shahir was repelled.

At that moment Kirsten was seated with a group of other employees on the rough area of grass that lay behind the coach yard. It was hot, and a couple of the young men had removed their shirts. Kirsten hugged her knees and studied her feet—for, having been raised to cover as much of her own skin as possible, she was ill at ease when other people stripped.

‘Do you like to go for walks?’ the dark-haired man beside her asked quietly.

Her face flamed as the Polish builder addressed her again. He had come over to sit beside her, and everybody had stared, and now he had started to make conversation. She could feel Jeanie’s expectant glare like a blow torch on her profile. ‘I don’t go out very much,’ she muttered in a stifled voice, feeling guilty for wishing he would go away and leave her alone.

‘Why didn’t you make more effort with him?’ Jeanie demanded when the lunch break was over. ‘I dropped a hint or two on your behalf with one of the guys working with him.’

‘Oh, Jeanie…no!’ Kirsten gasped in mortification.

‘Well, I thought you fancied him.’ Annoyance was making the other woman sound sharp. ‘And why wouldn’t you? I wouldn’t say no.’

‘He’s not the guy I met on the hill,’ Kirsten cut in abruptly.

‘He’s not?’ The redhead frowned, the sharp edge fading from her voice. ‘Maybe the lad you met wasn’t staying at the castle and was just passing through.’

‘Maybe so.’ Kirsten hoped that would be the end of Jeanie’s attempt to establish the identity of the mysterious biker.

‘You’ll have to stop being so shy and awkward around men. I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, Kirsten—’ her companion sighed ‘—but you’re hopeless. When you won’t look at a guy, and then you give him the silent treatment, he thinks you’re not interested and that’s that. He won’t come back for a second helping.’

Kirsten went back to cleaning windows in the long gallery. Every so often she spared the baby grand piano at the foot of the vast room a reflective glance. Would she still be able to play? It had been years since she had had the opportunity. In any case, she wouldn’t dare touch any valuable antique at the castle without permission.

Her mother had been a music teacher before her marriage, and had ensured that her daughter had grown up an accomplished pianist. Occasionally Kirsten had stood in for the regular organist at church, but when people had complimented her on her skill her father’s face had begun to darken with disapproval. Inevitably Angus Ross had decided that the playing of music was frivolous, and an exercise in vanity, and soon after that the piano had been sold. Her invalid mother had been heartbroken. That was the day that Kirsten had determined that somehow, some way, she would own a piano again and play it every day—for hours at a time if she so chose.

A door opened off the gallery. A dark, stocky man in a business suit waved a hand at her to attract her attention and addressed her in accented English. ‘I have dropped a tray…may I please have your assistance?’

Kirsten almost laughed at the drama of that announcement, but she hurried into the room he had indicated, well aware that some of the carpets were extremely valuable. Mercifully only a few pieces of china had fallen on to the wooden floor. Nothing appeared broken, and just a small pool of liquid needed mopping up.

Wielding a cloth from her trolley of cleaning utensils, she proceeded to get on with the task. The man had already departed, and she rested back on her heels for a moment to appreciate her surroundings. She was in a gracious sitting room, with a beautiful plasterwork ceiling, picked out in pretty shades of lemon and green. Fresh flowers and comfortable sofas as well as an open fire offered a warm welcome. However, the presence of a cheerfully burning fire in the month of June made her smile. She could only be in a room that he retained for personal use.

Kirsten had begun to listen with interest to the occasional facts that other more informed staff let drop about Strathcraig’s wealthy owner. Apparently, even in summer, Prince Shahir liked fires to be lit in the main reception rooms. He did not like the cold.

A door in the corner of the room opened just as Kirsten was getting ready to wheel her trolley out again. Shahir appeared in the doorway. When she saw who it was, she lost every scrap of colour in her cheeks as her eyes travelled from the top of his handsome dark head and down the magnificent length of him to his polished loafers. He looked so gorgeous her mouth ran dry.

‘I hope you will forgive me for setting up this meeting,’ Shahir murmured levelly, his dark golden eyes absorbing her tension and her pallor.

Her brow pleated. ‘You set it up? I don’t understand. I was called in here because some china had been dropped…’

His strong jawline clenched. ‘I suspect that was merely an excuse to allow me this opportunity to talk to you again in private. I had to see you, to offer you my sincere apologies for my behaviour when we last met. What I did on that occasion was inappropriate and wrong.’

Kirsten was stunned by that forthright declaration. ‘But I—’

‘You must not attach blame to yourself in any way,’ Shahir asserted.

Kirsten knew that such an admission of fault could not come easily to him. In fact she could see the strain of the occasion marked in the tautness of his superb bone structure and the brooding darkness of his gaze. He was a very proud man. Yet he had still gone to the trouble of arranging this meeting so that he could express his regret. She was hugely impressed by the reality that he had not allowed his pride to hold him back. Neither his great wealth and status nor her far more modest position in life had deflected him from his purpose. Even though it would have been much easier for him to forget the incident, he had listened to his conscience and acted on it without hesitation.

‘But I was at fault too.’ Kirsten lifted her chin, her eyes green as emeralds above the delicate pink that overlaid her cheekbones as she made the admission.

‘No. You’re very young. Innocence is not a fault,’ he murmured in gentle disagreement.

As Kirsten gazed up at Shahir he remembered how she had looked on the hill, with her wonderful silvery pale hair cascading over her shoulders. It was a dangerous recollection, for it awakened the hunger he had rigorously repressed. He gritted his teeth, incredulous at the effect she had on him. He was not a randy teenage boy, living in a world of erotic fantasy. He was a man in full control of his own needs. ‘I—’

‘I know you would not wish your presence here with me to be noticed and remarked on,’ Shahir cut in smoothly. ‘It would be unwise for us to linger here chatting.’

Feeling unmercifully snubbed and put back into her place, Kirsten dropped her head and grabbed the trolley.

‘I don’t like to see you engaged in such heavy work,’ Shahir breathed in a driven undertone. ‘You do not look strong.’

A startled laugh fell from Kirsten’s lips and she glanced back at him, green eyes dancing with helpless amusement. ‘I’m as healthy as a carthorse—but I suppose I shouldn’t tell you that because it’s not very feminine to say so!’