Traded To The Sheikh. Emma Darcy

dynamic dark eyes.

      ‘How long ago?’ he asked quietly.

      ‘About two years.’

      ‘He was young?’

      ‘Two years older than me.’

      ‘How did he die?’

      ‘Brian was with a rescue team during a cyclone.’ She grimaced. ‘He died trying to save an old lady’s pet dog. A panel of flying roof hit him.’

      ‘A brave man then,’ came the thoughtful observation.

      She managed an ironic smile. ‘I don’t think fear ever had any influence on Brian’s actions. He just did whatever he set out to do. We used to go adventuring a lot, working our way around Australia.’

      ‘You do not have children?’

      She shook her head. ‘We weren’t ready to settle down with a family. In fact, we were getting ready to set off on a world trip…’

      ‘When the cyclone happened,’ he finished for her.

      ‘Yes,’ she muttered, frowning at the realisation that she’d spoken more of Brian in the past two minutes than in the entire two years since her departure from Australia.

      You have to move on, she’d told herself, and move on she had, a long slow trip across Asia, more or less going wherever the wind blew her on her travels, not wanting to face making any long-term decisions about her life—a life without the man who’d always coloured it.

      She’d attached herself to other groups of people from time to time, working with them, listening to their experiences, soaking up interesting pieces of information, but what was highly personal and private to her had remained in her own head and heart.

      So why had she opened up to this man?

      Her mind zapped back the answer in no time flat.

      Because he was getting to her in a highly primitive male/female way and she’d instinctively brought up the one man she’d loved as a shield against these unwelcome feelings. Her marriage to Brian was a defence against other things, as well, like the idea she was a belly-dancer with indulgent sugar-daddies on the side.

      She was, in fact, a perfectly respectable widow who hadn’t even been tempted into a sexual dalliance by the many gorgeous eye-candy guys who’d offered to share their beds and bodies while they were ships passing on their separate journeys. Sex without emotional involvement hadn’t appealed, and it didn’t appeal now, either, she fiercely told herself, willing her body to stop responding in this embarrassingly animal fashion to a very foreign sheikh who wanted to treat her as a whore.