The Sheikh's Innocent Bride Read online

  ‘Would you like it?’ At lunchtime another member of staff extended the magazine she had been reading to Kirsten. ‘It’s OK…I’m finished with it.’

  Her face suffused with self-conscious pink, Kirsten accepted the item with a muttered word of thanks. As she left the basement staffroom, she heard the woman say, ‘It’s a pity about her, isn’t it? Angus Ross should be hung for treating her the way he does! She’s scared of her own shadow!’

  No, I’m not, Kirsten thought, frantically pedalling away her hurt pride and resentment as she headed home on her bike. She was not scared of her own shadow—but neither was she mad enough to go head to head with her father before she had the means to leave his home.

  The beauty of the early summer day soon calmed her temper and raised her spirits. After all it was a Friday, and her favourite day of the week. On Fridays she finished work early, and the house would be empty whilst Mabel and her father did the weekly grocery shopping. Afterwards they would visit Mabel’s elderly mother, and remain with her for their evening meal. Kirsten decided to take her dog for a walk and read the magazine.

  Half an hour later she walked through her father’s fields, which led right up to the edge of the forest. She was dismayed to see that fresh tyre tracks had torn up the soft ground, leaving messy furrows of mud that would fill with water when the rain came. Her father had been outraged a few weeks earlier, when a pair of yobs on motorbikes had torn up a newly sown field. News of a second visit and further damage to the land would put Angus Ross into the kind of temper that made Kirsten suck in her breath in dismay.

  Deciding that it would be wiser to let her father discover the damage for himself, she crossed the stile that marked the boundary of the farm and followed a little-used path up through the forest to the top of the hill. She kicked off her shoes, undid a couple of buttons at the neck of her blouse, and loosened her hair to relax in the sunshine. Her dog, Squeak, a small, short-legged animal of mixed ancestry, sank down in the middle of the grassy path, for the steep climb had exhausted him. His perky little ears did not prick up at the distant growl of an engine across the valley for as his age had advanced his hearing had steadily become more impaired.

  Kirsten began to devour her magazine, and before very long was absorbed to the exclusion of all else in the delightful world of celebrities, fabulous fashion and wicked gossip.

  One minute she was dreaming in the sunlight, the next she was jerking up from her reclining position with a stricken exclamation as a giant black motorbike burst with a roar over the hill and headed straight for Squeak. Kirsten made a violent lunge at the old dog to grab him out of the way. Mere feet from her, the bike skidded at fantastic and terrifying speed off the track, and the rider went flying up into the air. Horror stopped her breathing. But, in what seemed like virtually the same moment, he hit the ground and rolled with the spectacular, almost acrobatic ease of a jockey taking a fall.

  Kirsten looked on wide-eyed as the rider, who was clearly uninjured, vaulted back upright again. Her shock was engulfed by a flood of unfamiliar anger.

  ‘You’re trespassing!’ she heard herself yell at the impossibly tall black-leather-clad figure approaching her as she scrambled up.

  Shahir was furious with her for sitting in the middle of a track, like a target waiting for a direct hit from on high. She was very fortunate not to have been killed. He could not credit that she was shouting at him—nobody ever shouted at him—but, perhaps fortunately for her, the alluring picture that she made clouded that issue. Her shimmering silvery blonde hair was loose round her narrow shoulders and fell almost to her waist in a stunning display of luxuriance. He encountered eyes that were not the Celtic blue he had expected, but the verdant green of emerald and moss. His attention was by then irretrievably locked to her, and he noticed that she was surprisingly tall for a woman. As tall as his Berber ancestors himself, he stood six feet five in his socks, but barefoot she was still tall enough to reach his chin.

  ‘In fact, not only are you trespassing—’

  ‘I am not a trespasser,’ he countered, his dark, deep voice muffled by the black helmet which concealed his face from her.

  ‘This is private ground, so you are trespassing.’ As far as Kirsten was concerned his failure to offer an immediate apology merely added insult to injury, and her soft mouth compressed. ‘Don’t you realise how fast you were going?’

  ‘I know exactly what my speed was,’ Shahir confirmed.

  He might behave like a yob, but he didn’t speak quite as she had assumed he would. His accent was unmistakably English and upper class, his crystal-clear vowel sounds crisply pronounced in spite of the helmet. She told herself off for being so biased in her expectations. A tourist toff could be just as much of a hooligan as a yob out for a day biking through the hills. Her chin took on a stubborn tilt.

  ‘Well, you frightened the life out of me and my dog!’ she asserted, lowering her arms to let Squeak down, his solid little body having become too heavy for comfort.

  Far from behaving like a traumatised animal, Squeak padded over to Shahir’s booted feet, nuzzled them, wagged his tail in a lazily friendly fashion and then ambled off to curl up and sleep in the sunshine.

  ‘At least he’s not shouting at me as well.’ Shahir said dryly.

  ‘I wasn’t shouting.’ Her lilting accent took on a clipped edge of emphasis. His refusal to admit fault was testing even Kirsten’s tolerant nature. ‘You could have killed me…you could have killed yourself!’

  Shahir flipped up his visor. Kirsten stilled. Her first thought was that he had the eyes of a hawk from the castle falconry: steady, unblinking, unnervingly keen. But his gaze was also a spectacular bronze-gold in colour, enhanced by lashes lush as sable and dark as ebony. Her heart jumped behind her breastbone and suddenly she was conscious of its measured beat. Indeed, it was as if her every sense had gone on to super-alert and time had slowed its passage.

  ‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Shahir drawled.

  ‘You were travelling at a crazy speed…’ she framed breathlessly.

  Shahir watched the sun transform her hair to a veil of shining silver that he longed to touch. He was so taken aback by the inappropriate desire that for the first time in his life he forgot what he was about to say. ‘Was I?’

  He pulled off his helmet and smoothed back his ruffled black hair with long brown fingers. Kirsten’s mouth ran dry. He was so exceptionally handsome that she simply stared. He also had the most unforgettable face. His fantastic bone structure was composed of high, slashing cheekbones and sleek planes and hollows, divided by a strong, masculine nose and defined by level dark brows. His bronzed complexion and very black hair suggested an ancestry at variance with his beautifully enunciated English. Every aspect of him offered a source of immediate fascination to her. She felt dizzy, as if she had been spinning round and round like a child and had suddenly stopped to find her balance gone. A tiny twist of something she had never felt before pulled low in her pelvis.

  ‘Were you what?’ she mumbled, belatedly striving to recall the conversation.

  The hint of a smile tilted the beautiful curve of his mouth. She was as enchanted by the movement of his sculpted lips as though a magic wand had been waved over her.

  ‘I always travel at a crazy speed on the motorbike. But I’m a very safe rider.’

  Kirsten made a frantic attempt to rescue her wits. ‘But you couldn’t even see where you were going,’ she reminded him.

  Shahir was not accustomed to a consistent reminder of his apparent oversight, and he fought back. ‘Should I expect to find a woman and a dog parked in the centre of the track?’

  ‘Perhaps not…but you are on private land—’

  ‘I know—and I knew there were no livestock up here. This is my land.’

  Kirsten giggled. ‘No, it’s not. I live just down the hill, and you can’t fool me.’

  ‘Can’t I?’ Shahir watched amusement light up her exquisite face and realised that she assumed he was teasing he
r. She genuinely had no idea of his identity.

  But the sound of that unfamiliar light-hearted giggle emerging from her own lips had startled Kirsten. Her eyes veiled, and dropped from his in dismay. She was finally recalling the furrows ploughed on her father’s ground at the foot of the hill, and she was dismayed that she had contrived to forget what she had seen.

  ‘This isn’t your first visit here, though, is it?’ she said tautly. ‘You and your motorcycle have already made a mess of the field below the forest!’

  Incredulous at the sudden accusation, Shahir surveyed her with narrowed eyes that had the subtle gleam of rapier blades. ‘Now you are talking nonsense. I respect the field boundaries. I am not a teenage vandal.’

  Kirsten coloured, but persisted. ‘Well, it seems to me that it’s too much of a coincidence to be anyone else but you who was responsible. Someone has been in that field within the last few days, and there’s been a lot of damage done.’

  ‘It was not I. You should not make such an allegation without evidence to support it,’ Shahir condemned, with a gravity that was very much at odds with the apparent casualness of his motorbike leathers. ‘I find it offensive.’

  His measured intonation made her pale. His dark gaze was uncompromisingly direct, and he spoke with a clear authority that unnerved her. Involuntarily, for she had lowered her scrutiny, she stole a glance at him. Her eyes glittered like jade in the pale oval of her face. ‘I find it offensive that you haven’t even said sorry for giving me the fright of my life.’

  The silence lay like a charge of dynamite already lit.

  An almost imperceptible touch of colour highlighted his superb cheekbones; Shahir had always cherished the belief that he was innately courteous. ‘Naturally I offer you my apologies for scaring you.’

  ‘Well, if it wasn’t you who cut up my father’s field,’ Kirsten said doubtfully, ‘I’m sorry I suggested it was.’

  Shahir bent down with fluid grace and swept up the magazine lying abandoned on the ground and extended it to her. ‘You were reading?’

  ‘Yes…thanks.’ Suddenly aware of his keen regard, Kirsten blushed to the roots of her hair and dragged her attention from him, wondering in a panic of embarrassment if he was staring at her only because she had been staring at him.

  A sweet, savage hunger gripped Shahir as he studied her downbent head and luscious pink mouth. He let his attention roam to the pouting fullness of her small full breasts. His body hardened with an ardent masculine urgency that shook him.

  Kirsten was conscious of the tense atmosphere, and of the inexplicable sense of excitement trying to pull at her senses. She did not understand its source, for it filled her with too much confusion. While one part of her wanted to run away, the rest of her wanted to prolong the meeting. She fumbled frantically for something to say. ‘Is your motorbike going to be all right?’

  ‘I believe so.’ He had mastered his hunger with fierce self-discipline, and Shahir’s drawl was as cool and discouraging as a shower of rain. He was annoyed by his own brief loss of control. Admittedly, she was very beautiful, but he was used to gorgeous women. Perhaps, he reasoned, there was something especially appealing about such natural loveliness and unmistakable modesty when he was usually accustomed to meeting with boldness.

  ‘Have you far to go?’ Kirsten muttered, scarcely crediting her own daring. But at that moment all she was aware of was that he was about to walk away and she didn’t want him to.

  ‘Only to the castle.’ Shahir strode over to the fallen machine and hauled it up out of the flattened grass with strong hands. He could have told her who he was, but he saw no point in embarrassing her when it was unlikely that they would ever meet again. Someone else would soon tell her of the mistake she had made.

  He was staying at Strathcraig Castle as a guest? Why hadn’t that occurred to her before? It was, after all, the most obvious explanation for the presence of a well-spoken stranger in the glen. Dismay replaced the daze that she had been wrapped in and her skin chilled. She had offended him, hadn’t she? Would he complain about her? Say she had been rude to him? Accusing him of vandalism had certainly not been the way to demonstrate a hospitable welcome to a visitor. What on earth had come over her? She shouldn’t have said a single critical word to him. After all, if she was sacked she would never find another job locally, and her father would be outraged.

  Shahir replaced his helmet and fired the engine of the powerful motorbike, looking back at her only for an instant before he took off back down the track again. With him travelled the image of glorious green eyes pinned to him with anxious intensity. He wondered what sort of a life she had, with the fanatical father his estate manager had mentioned. She looked scared and unhappy.

  A split second later, without any warning whatsoever of the trick his cool and rational brain was about to play on him, Shahir was startled to find himself wondering how Kirsten Ross might adapt to being a mistress. His mistress. The instant the idea occurred to him he was exasperated by the vagaries of his own mind; that type of arrangement was certainly not his style. He was a generous lover, who offered commitment for the duration of an affair. But the affairs began and ended without touching his heart or even his temper. Sex was a pleasure to be savoured, but his libido did not control him and he sought nothing more lasting from the women who entertained him in bed.

  In short, a mistress would be a radical new departure for him. She would have a semi-permanent role in his life, and would be dependent on him in a way that he had never allowed a woman to be. It was an insane idea for a male who enjoyed his freedom to the extent that he did, Shahir acknowledged with a brooding frown. What was more Kirsten Ross was an employee, and as such strictly out of bounds; Shahir was a man of honour. What the hell was the matter with him? One minute he was thinking of taking a wife, the next a mistress—and all in the space of twenty-four hours!

  Having dug a hole in the soft ground below the trees and buried the magazine, Kirsten ran most of the way home, with Squeak gasping at her heels. Unlocking the back door, she sped through it, only to be brought up short by the dismaying sight of the thickset man lodged in stillness at the back of the sparsely furnished kitchen.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you to be home this early…is something wrong?’ Kirsten asked, dry-mouthed with fright at the tension in the air.

  ‘Mabel’s mother took ill and she’s staying the night with her. Where have you been?’ Her father’s harsh-featured face was ruddy with angry colour and his sharp eyes bright with suspicion.

  ‘I went for a walk…I’m sorry—’

  ‘If I’d been here you’d not have been idling away your time,’ he growled. ‘What have you been up to?’

  Kirsten was rigid. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You had better not be, girl,’ he warned her, closing a powerful hand round her thin forearm with bruising force. ‘Now, go and make my dinner. Then we’ll study the Lord’s Book and we will pray for you to be cleansed of the sin of idleness.’

  When Angus Ross had stomped out of the kitchen Kirsten rubbed her aching arm with a shaking hand. She was trembling. Her father had never raised a hand to her in anger. She told herself that she had no reason to be so afraid of the older man. It was true that his temper was violent. And in a rage he ranted and raved and stormed up and down in a very frightening manner, but he had never yet become physically abusive with her—or indeed anyone else. So why did she get the feeling that that was in the process of changing?

  CHAPTER TWO

  FOUR days later, Shahir sprang out of bed at three in the morning and stalked into the luxurious en suite bathroom to take another cold shower. A more primitive male might have believed he had been bewitched by an enchantress no human male could resist, but Shahir told himself no such comforting tales.

  As the cooling water streamed down over the heated length of his bronzed, muscular body, he groaned out loud in furious frustration. Never before had a woman disturbed Shahir’s sleep. But something about Kirsten Ross had fired his
imagination to new erotic heights of creativity. The very idea of her as his mistress had become a sexual fantasy he could not shake. Even while he slept his disobedient brain rehashed their brief meeting into an intimate encounter of a wildly uninhibited if unlikely variety that appealed most to the male sex. His inability to control his own subconscious mind infuriated him.

  Resting his arrogant dark head back against the cool stone surround, he thought about Faria instead. It was rare for him to indulge himself with reflections about what could not be, for he knew how pointless it was to lament the inevitable. Faria, with her laughing dark eyes and compassionate heart, could never become his wife. Although Faria and he were not related by blood, Faria’s mother had briefly acted as Shahir’s foster mother when he was very young. And Shahir’s religion forbade the marriage of a man to his foster-sister.

  He had not known what love was before the day he had glanced across a courtyard at an interminable wedding and seen a very pretty brunette entertaining the children with magic tricks. Faria had grown up while he’d worked abroad, and she had trained as a teacher. He hadn’t even recognised her. On the last occasion he had seen her she had still been a little girl.

  While Faria had been brought up in the knowledge that Shahir was her foster-brother, he had barely heard the matter mentioned. Shahir was royalty, and all too many people claimed to have a connection with him. And, having enjoyed a brief period of intimacy with the royal family in the aftermath of tragedy, Faria’s parents, who had never been socially ambitious, had soon returned to their quiet lives. Meeting her as an adult, Shahir had immediately recognised that Faria was exactly the kind of young woman he wanted to marry. In that very acknowledgement the damage had been done—even before he could appreciate that he had mistakenly set his heart on a woman who rightly regarded him as an honorary brother.

  Was his nature innately perverse? Shahir asked himself now, his lean strong face shadowed by a dark frown. Although he would not mention his lust for Kirsten Ross in the same sentence as his unspoken admiration for Faria, he could not avoid registering that once again he was guilty of desiring a woman who was forbidden to him. Even that vague similarity disturbed him. In another sense it also challenged him, for Kirsten Ross was by no means out of reach.