on edge because she was clearly developing an unhealthy fascination for a complete stranger, Sarah remembered her glass of wine. As she took a steadying sip, her cell phone chimed. Setting the glass back down, she rummaged in her handbag and found the phone and another text from Graham. Although there was nothing romantic or even polite about the words. Where are you?
Annoyed at his blunt irritation, the cavalier way he hadn’t bothered to meet her as they had arranged, Sarah punched the delete key. She might be a victim of the love game, but she would not be a doormat. Temper on a slow simmer, she shoved the phone back in her handbag.
Gabe terminated his call. “Are you with someone? I noticed you came in alone.”
Suddenly the tension was thick enough to cut, although she couldn’t invest the knowledge that he had noticed her entrance with too much importance. She was the only person dressed in red in a sea of black and gray; of course he had noticed her. “Uh, I was supposed to meet someone...”
“A man.”
She crushed the urge to say she wasn’t meeting another man; that would have been a lie. “Yes.”
He nodded, his expression remote, but she was left with the unmistakable impression that if she had said she was alone the evening might have taken a more exciting turn than she could ever expect with Graham.
His expression suddenly neutral, Gabe checked his watch. “If you’ll excuse me. I have a call to make.”
Sarah squashed a plunging sense of disappointment. As he walked away, she forced herself to look around for Graham.
She spotted him across the room involved in an animated discussion with a man wearing a business suit and a kaffiyeh, the traditional Arabic headdress. She studied the Arab man, who she assumed must be the sheikh. She had read a lot about Zahir, but most of it had been history, since Zahir was a small, peaceful country that didn’t normally make the news. She knew that the sheikh was on the elderly side, and that he had married a New Zealander, a woman who had originally come from Wellington, which explained Zahir’s close ties with her country.
She strolled closer just as the man with the kaffiyeh moved away and finally managed to make eye contact with Graham.
The blankness of his expression changed to incredulity. “You.”
Not for the first time Sarah looked at Graham and wondered how such a pleasantly handsome man could inspire little more in her than annoyance. “That’s right, your date.”
He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “If you’d told me you were going to change your appearance—”
Her jaw locked at Graham’s unflattering response, as if the act of putting on a dress, a little extra makeup and messing with her hair was some kind of disguise. “This is how I look.”
He stared at her mouth, making her wonder if she’d been a little too heavy on the berry lip gloss. “Not usually. If you had, we might have hit it off a little better.”
Sarah realized there was one very good reason she had never been able to really like Graham. Not only was he self-centered with a roving eye, he had a nasty streak. She had been looking for a prince and, as usual, had ended up dating a frog. “How about I make it easy for us both. From now on don’t call and don’t come around to my mother’s house for dinner. A clean break would suit me.”
His expression took on a shifty cast. “What about the journal? You said I could look at it.”
“That was all you really wanted, wasn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t say that, exactly.”
No, because what he really wanted was to find the lost dowry and cash in on it. Sarah drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. The first two men in her life had dumped her for other women; that she could accept. Graham preferring a book and the possibility of cold hard cash over her was the proverbial last straw. “Forget the journal. It’s a private, family document. Hell would freeze solid before I’d give it to you.”
Feeling angry and hurt, hating the fact that she had lost her temper but relieved she had finally finished with Graham, Sarah spun on her heel then froze as she spotted Gabe talking with an elderly lady. He was close enough that he had probably heard some of her conversation with Graham. His gaze locked with hers, sharp and uncomplicatedly male, and for a moment the room full of people ceased to exist. Then a waiter strolled past with a tray filled with glasses, breaking the spell.
Her stomach clenched on a sharp jab of feminine intuition, that despite knowing she had a date, after he had made his call, Gabe had come looking for her. When he’d seen her talking with Graham, he’d stopped far enough away to allow her privacy—to allow her a choice—but close enough to keep an eye on her.
Graham didn’t find her attractive, but she was suddenly acutely aware that Gabe did. Talking to him at the sword display had been easy; there had been nothing at stake. Instinctively, she knew a second conversation meant a whole lot more. It meant she would have to make a decision. Suddenly the whole concept of abandoning her rule about no sex before commitment seemed full of holes when what she really wanted was love, not sex.
Feeling utterly out of her depth, her chest tight, she dragged her gaze away and made a beeline for the ladies’ room and the chance to regroup.
Pushing the door open, she stepped into a pretty tiled bathroom. Her reflection bounced back at her, tousled hair and smoky eyes, sleek dress and black boots. Her cheeks flushed as she registered what Gabe was seeing. Graham was right. She barely recognized herself. The woman who stared back at her looked exotic and assured. Experienced.
She wondered if all Gabe saw was the outer package and the possibility of a night of no-strings passion. What if, like Graham, Gabe wouldn’t be attracted to who she really was?
She found her lipstick and reapplied it, her fingers shaking very slightly. The knowledge that Gabe was attracted to her, that the improvement she had made to her appearance had worked, was unsettling. She hadn’t expected such an instant response.
She should be buoyed by her success. Instead, she felt on edge and, for want of a better word, vulnerable. Maybe it was because in her mind Gabe had become linked with the dream that had been the catalyst for all of this change. She knew almost nothing about him, but in the moment he had picked up the sword, he had made an indelible impression; he had symbolized what she wanted.
She stopped dead as the final piece of the puzzle of her dysfunction with men dropped neatly into place. She drew a deep breath. She felt like quietly banging her head against the nearest wall, but that would not be a good idea with all the security personnel roaming around. The reason she had not been intimate with anyone, even her fiancés, was because, hidden beneath the logic and practicality and years of academia, she was an idealist. Worse, she was a romantic.
Maybe all the years of burying her head in history books had changed her in some fundamental way because it was now blindingly clear why an ordinary, everyday kind of guy with a nine-to-five job had never been quite enough. Somehow, despite common sense, in her heart of hearts, she had wanted the kind of seasoned, bedrock strength and stirring romanticism that it was difficult to find in the twenty-first century.
She had wanted a knight.
When she stepped back into the reception room, despite giving herself a good talking-to about the dangers of projecting crazy romantic fantasies onto a man she barely knew, she found herself instantly looking for Gabe. When she couldn’t find him, disappointment gripped her. In an adjacent room the lecture on Zahir was beginning. She strolled inside and saw him at the back, in conversation with a well-known government official.
The jolt in her stomach, the relief and the tingling heat that flooded her, should have been warning enough. In the space of an hour she had somehow fallen into a heady infatuation with a virtual stranger, but after years of emotional limbo the blood racing through her veins, the crazy cocktail of emotions, was addictive. Just as she debated what to do—brazenly approach Gabe or wimp out completely