turn to be surprised, and unpleasantly so, as she marked the sharp curtness in a male voice that had abruptly become disconcertingly chilly.
‘Not for real,’ she told him quickly, before he could say anything more. ‘What I want is for you to pretend to seduce me.’
‘Pretend? Why?’ he demanded baldly. ‘Do you already have a lover you wish to make jealous? Is that it?’ he guessed insultingly.
Petra glared at him.
‘No, I do not. I want to pay you to ensure that I lose my…my reputation.’
For one unguarded moment Petra saw his face and wondered exactly what the sudden frown creasing his forehead and the complete stillness of his body meant.
‘Am I allowed to ask why you want to lose it?’ he asked her.
‘You can ask,’ Petra told him. ‘But I don’t intend to tell you.’
‘No? Well, in that case, I don’t intend to help you.’
He was already turning away from her and Petra started to panic.
‘I’m prepared to pay you five thousand pounds,’ she called out to him.
‘Ten thousand and then we might…just might have a deal,’ he told her softly as he stopped and turned to look at her.
Ten thousand pounds. Petra felt sick. Her parents had left her a very generous trust fund, but until she turned twenty-five, there was no way she could raise such a large sum without the approval of her trustees—one of whom was her godfather, who was after all part of the reason why she needed to do this in the first place.
Her body slumped in defeat.
He was still walking away from her, and had almost reached the end of the beach. In another few seconds he would be gone.
Swallowing against the bitter taste of her own failure, she turned away herself.
CHAPTER TWO
REFUSING to give in to the temptation of watching him disappear, Petra fixed her gaze on the sea.
Most people, on first seeing her, assumed that Petra carried either Spanish or Italian blood in her veins. Her skin had a soft creamy warmth and her dark brown hair was thick and lustrous, her bone structure elegant and delicately patrician. Only her brilliant green eyes and the narrow straightness of her small nose, combined with her passionate nature, gave away the fact that she possessed Celtic genes, inherited through her American father’s Irish ancestry. Very few people guessed that her colouring came from an exotic blending of those genes with her mother’s Bedouin blood.
She could feel the evening breeze lifting her hair, its coolness raising tiny goosebumps on her skin, but they were nothing to the rash of sensation that flooded atavistically through her body as she suddenly felt the pressure of a male hand on the nape of her neck.
‘Five thousand, then—and the reason,’ a now familiar silken voice whispered in her ear.
He had come back! Petra didn’t know whether to be elated or horrified!
‘No haggling!’ the silken voice warned her. ‘Five thousand and the reason, or no deal.’
Petra’s throat had gone dry. She didn’t want to tell him, but what option did she have? And besides, what harm could it really do?
‘Very well.’
What was it that was making her voice sound so tremulous? Surely not the fact that his hand was still on her nape?
‘You’re trembling,’ he told her, so accurately tracking and trapping her own thoughts that his intuitiveness shocked her. ‘Why? Are you afraid? Excited?’
As he drawled the soft words with deliberate slowness, almost whispering into her ear, his thumb stroked against the side of her throat, trapping the pulse fluttering there.
Stalwartly Petra wrenched herself free and told him resolutely. ‘Neither! I’m just cold.’
She could see the taunting cruelty in the mocking curve of his smile.
‘Of course,’ he agreed. ‘So, you want me to publicly pursue and seduce you?’
He questioned her as though he had suddenly grown bored with tormenting her, like a domestic cat suddenly tiring of the prey it had caught as a plaything rather than for food. But this man was no domesticated fireside pet! No, everything he did had a raw, untamed danger about it, a warning of power mockingly leashed.
‘Why? Tell me!’
Petra took a deep breath.
‘It’s a long and complicated story,’ she warned him.
‘Tell me!’ he repeated.
Briefly Petra closed her eyes, trying to marshal her thoughts into logical order, and then opened them again, beginning quietly, ‘My father was an American diplomat. He met my mother here in Zuran when he was posted here. They fell in love but her father did not approve. He had other plans for her. He believes that it is a daughter’s duty to allow herself to be used as a pawn in her family’s empirebuilding.’ As she spoke Petra could hear the anger and the bitterness in her own voice, just as she could feel it surging inside her—a mixture of a long-standing old pain on behalf of her mother and a much newer, bitter anger for herself.
‘My grandfather refused to have anything to do with my mother after she ran away with my father. And he forbade his family—my mother’s brothers and their wives—from having anything to do with her either. But she told me all about him. How cruel he had been!’ Petra’s eyes flashed.
‘My parents were wonderfully, blissfully happy, but they were killed in an accident when I was seventeen. I went to live in England with my godfather who, like my father, is a diplomat. That’s how they met—when my godfather was with the British Embassy in Zuran. Everything was fine. I finished university and then I travelled with my godfather, I worked for an aid agency in the field, and I was…am planning to take my Master’s. But then…
‘A short time ago, my uncle came to London and made contact with my godfather. He told him that my grandfather wanted to see me. That he wanted me to come to Zuran. I didn’t want to have anything to do with him. I knew how much he had hurt my mother. She never stopped hoping that he would forgive her, that he would answer her letters, accept an olive branch, but he never did. Not even when she and my father were killed. He never even acknowledged her death. No one from my family here came to the funeral. He would not allow them to do so!’
Tears of rage and pain momentarily filled Petra’s eyes, but determinedly she blinked them away.
‘My godfather begged me to reconsider. He said it was what my parents would have wanted—for the family to be reconciled. He told me that my grandfather was one of the major shareholders in this holiday complex and he had suggested that both I and my godfather come and stay here, get to know one another. I wanted to refuse, but…’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘I felt for my mother’s sake that I had to come. But if I’d known then the real reason why I was being brought out here—!’
‘The real reason?’ There was a brusqueness in the male voice that rasped roughly against her sensitive emotions.
‘Yes, the real reason,’ she reiterated bitterly.
‘The day we arrived my uncle came here to the hotel with his wife, and his son—my cousin Saud. He’s only fifteen, and…They said that my grandfather wasn’t well enough to come, that he had a serious heart condition, and that his doctor had said that he needed bed rest and no excitement. I believed them. But then, when we were on our own together, Saud accidentally let the cat out of the bag. He had no idea, you see, that I didn’t know what was really going on!’
Petra shook her head as she heard her voice starting to tremble. ‘Far from merely wanting to meet me, to put right the wrong he had done to my parents, what my grandfather actually wants is to marry me