and Madame Martin walked straight in. Hannah thought she was prepared for any eventuality...for dancing girls, or some kind of harem. Or maybe a smoke-filled room where some kind of high-stakes card game was taking place.
What she had not been prepared for was the sight which greeted her—of the Sheikh himself. Her eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets and her throat dried to dust. After the kind of build-up she’d been given, Hannah wouldn’t have been surprised to see him lying half-naked on one of the sumptuous velvet sofas, while some gorgeous nubile woman administered to him with warm oils. Or wearing something lavish and ceremonial—golden robes, perhaps—which swished as he walked.
In fact, he was seated at a desk which overlooked one of the resort’s many swimming pools and there wasn’t a golden robe in sight. He was wearing dark trousers and a blue shirt so pale that it was almost white. The shirt had two top buttons undone and the sleeves had been rolled up to reveal his hair-darkened forearms. Hannah noted these things almost automatically—perhaps as a kind of defensive mechanism. As if labelling the most commonplace things about him could protect her from the impact his sudden searing black gaze was having on her.
Because there was nothing commonplace about his face. It was a face in a million, no question about that. An unforgettable face—with those imperiously high cheekbones and his hair which gleamed like sunlit tar. The olive skin of his hawk-like features glowed with health and vitality, and there was an unmistakably arrogant tilt to his proud jaw. But it was the eyes which did it. She’d seen them from a distance, but up close they were unsettling. More than unsettling. Hannah swallowed. Hard and unflickering and blacker than any eyes had the right to be. And they were staring at her. Staring as if she had some smut on her nose, or the dark stain of sweat at her armpits. Hannah shifted uncomfortably beneath the intensity of that gaze, her hands nervously fluttering to brush away imagined dust from her slightly too small dress until she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to be drawing attention to her hips like that.
‘I am extremely sorry to disturb you, Sheikh Al Diya,’ Madame Martin was saying smoothly. ‘But since no one answered my knock, I assumed nobody was here.’
‘I did not hear you knock otherwise I should have sent you away,’ said the Sheikh, an impatient wave of his hand indicating the mountain of paperwork piled in front of him. ‘As you see, I am busy.’
‘Of course, Your Royal Highness. Perhaps you would prefer us to come back at a more suitable time?’
Kulal put his pen down and studied the two women who were standing before him—the too thin French matron and the curvy chambermaid he’d seen hurrying across the patio a couple of days earlier, with an anxious look on her face. What he would prefer was not to have been interrupted in the first place because he was at a very delicate stage of negotiation. But suddenly, the ever-engrossing topic of solar power melted away as he stared at the ponytailed brunette whose fingers were smoothing down her unsightly uniform dress.
Was that an unconscious gesture to draw his attention to the fecundity of her hips and breasts? he wondered. Or was it deliberate? Either way, she had hit the jackpot. No doubt she was aware that her ripe body was designed to send his hormones shooting into disarray and, inconveniently, they were doing just that. He felt his groin tightening as he imagined his tongue trailing a slow path over those magnificent breasts, and for a moment, he cursed the insidious power of Mother Nature—for were they not all puppets in her need to continue the human race? And that was the reason behind his instinct to get the chambermaid horizontal as quickly as possible, before impaling her with his hardness.
He expected her to meet his gaze with a knowing look of challenge, for he had never met a woman who wouldn’t put out for him within the first minutes of meeting. But the humble chambermaid had dropped her gaze to the ground, her cheeks blooming like roses as she studied the Persian rug at her feet with a fierce intensity.
Unusual, conceded Kulal as he leaned back in his chair. Very unusual. ‘Now that you have managed to successfully interrupt my train of thought,’ he said acidly, ‘you might as well tell me why you are here.’
‘I was showing Hannah around your suite, Your Royal Highness.’
Hannah. Kulal ran a slow finger around the circumference of his mouth. An ordinary name yet somehow it pleased him.
‘Because?’ he interrogated.
‘In view of the enormous interest your presence has generated, and after the unfortunate scene in the main restaurant last night, we decided it would be preferable for you to have your own private maid for the duration of your stay,’ said Madame Martin. ‘Especially since His Royal Highness has brought with him only a skeleton staff.’
‘Because I have no wish to burden myself with the cumbersome accruements of the royal court!’ snapped Kulal. ‘You try travelling with an entourage of a thousand and five hundred tons of luggage, like some of my desert neighbours! If I fill the entire hotel complex with my staff, then how the hell is there going to be room for anyone else?’
‘Quite so. And I can only imagine your aversion to such a logistical nightmare, Your Royal Highness,’ replied Madame Martin diplomatically. ‘Which is why one of your aides made the request earlier and why we are assigning you Hannah, who from now on will be exclusively under your command.’
This was language Kulal was used to.
Command.
Exclusivity.
Words of possession and control, which went hand in hand with being a sheikh. But somehow the words had taken on an unexpectedly erotic flavour when applied to the curvy little servant who stood in front of him. He felt his heart miss a beat as he looked at her still-bent head, the straightness of her parting cutting a stark white line through her shiny brown hair. But her shoulders were stiff and if her body language was anything to go by, she certainly wasn’t as honoured by her sudden promotion as perhaps she should have been. And despite the knowledge that fraternising with the staff was a very bad idea, Kulal couldn’t deny that he found such an unusual response curiously exciting.
‘So how do you feel about working for me, Hannah?’ he questioned softly.
She looked up then and he was surprised by eyes of a startling hue—blue eyes which resembled the colour of the aquamarines his mother used to wear around her throat. Expensive jewels bought by his father in an attempt to compensate for his frequent absences. As if pieces of glass could ever compensate. But his mother had been weak. Weak and manipulative. Prepared to put her own desperate needs above those of her children. Kulal’s mouth hardened as he obliterated the harsh memories and listened to the chambermaid’s response.
‘I am happy to serve you in any way I can, Your Royal Highness,’ she said.
She delivered the words as if she had been coached and maybe she had, for they were dutiful rather than meaningful. A rare flicker of humour lifted Kulal’s lips, but it was gone as quickly as it had arrived. He gave a dismissive nod and picked up his pen. ‘Very well,’ he said as he pulled one of the documents towards him. ‘Just make sure you don’t disturb me. Not in any way. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Your Royal Highness,’ she said, still in that same dutiful voice, and Kulal found himself almost disappointed when she bobbed a clumsy kind of curtsey before backing out of the room as if she couldn’t wait to get away from him.
DON’T DISTURB ME. That had been the Sheikh’s only instruction when she’d first started working for him, but Hannah wondered how the powerful Kulal Al Diya would react if he knew how much he was disturbing her.
She wished he wouldn’t look at her that way.
She wished he wouldn’t make her feel this way.
Or was it all a figment of her imagination? Was his searing ebony gaze really lingering on her for longer than was necessary, or was that simply wishful thinking on her part? One