The Sheikh's Undoing. Sharon Kendrick

really pictured Izzy in a cottage which was distinctly chocolate-boxy despite the sub-zero temperatures. Not that he’d given very much thought at all as to how his assistant lived her life.

      Stifling a yawn, he looked around. The sitting room had those tiny windows which didn’t let in very much light, and a big, recessed fireplace—the kind you saw on the front of Christmas cards. She was crouching down in front of the grate, and he watched as she began to blow on the flames to coax them into life. He found his eyes drawn to the denim skirt, which now stretched tightly over the curves of her buttocks.

      He swallowed down a sudden, debilitating leap of desire which made him harden in a way he hadn’t been expecting. In five years of close contact with his highly efficient assistant he couldn’t remember ever noticing her bottom before. And it was actually a rather fine bottom. Firm and high and beautifully rounded. The kind of bottom which a man liked to cup in the palms of his hands as he …

      ‘What?’ Isobel turned round and frowned.

      ‘I didn’t …’ Tariq swallowed. What the hell was going on? Did bumps to the head make men lose their senses, so that they started imagining all kinds of inappropriate things? ‘I didn’t say anything.’

      ‘But you made a funny sort of noise.’ Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him. ‘Are you all right? Your eyes have gone all glazed.’

      ‘Are you surprised?’ Shifting his position, Tariq glared at her, willing his erection to subside. ‘I’ve just had to endure your driving.’

      Isobel turned back to the now leaping flames, an unseen smile playing around her lips. If he was jumping down her throat like that, then there couldn’t be very much wrong with him.

      She waited until the fire was properly alight and then went into the kitchen and made his favourite mint tea—bringing it back into the sitting room on a tray set with bone china cups and a jar of farm honey.

      To her relief, she could see that he had taken her at her word. He’d kicked off his hand-made Italian shoes and was lying stretched out on the sofa, despite it being slightly too small to accommodate his lengthy frame. His thick black hair was outlined by a chintz cushion and his powerful thighs were splayed indolently against the faded velvet. It made an incongruous image, she realised—to see the über-masculine Sheikh in such a domestic setting as this.

      She poured tea for them both, added honey to his, and put it down a small table beside him, her gaze straying to his face as she sat on the floor beside the fire. Tariq was known for his faintly unshaven buccaneering look, but today the deep shadowing which outlined the hard definition of his jaw made him look like a study in brooding testosterone.

      Now it was Isobel’s turn to feel vulnerable. That faint butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling was back, bigtime. And so was that sudden sensitive prickling of her breasts. She swallowed. ‘How are you feeling?’

      His eyes narrowed. ‘Will you stop talking to me as if I’m an invalid?’

      ‘But that’s what you are, Tariq—otherwise you wouldn’t be here, would you? Just put my mind at rest. I’m not asking you to divulge the secrets of your heart—just answer the question.’