For a moment there was silence.
Leila’s heart pounded against her ribcage as she heard the blatant challenge in his voice, which countered the silky way he emphasised her name. Her mind was in a muddle and her senses felt raw and exposed. She had taken a risk and she needed to follow it through, but it was proving more difficult than she’d anticipated. Everything so far was going according to plan but suddenly she was filled with a powerful rush of nerves. She wondered how she could have been so stupid. How she could have failed to take into account Gabe Steel himself and the effect he would have on her.
She looked into his grey eyes. Strange, quicksilver eyes, which seemed to pierce her skin and see straight through to the bones beneath. She tried to find the right words to put her case to him, but everything she’d been planning to say flew clean out of her mind.
She wasn’t used to being alone with strange men and she certainly wasn’t used to being in a hotel room with a foreigner. Especially one who looked like this.
He was gorgeous.
Unbelievably gorgeous.
She’d read up about him on the internet, of course. She’d made it her business to do so once she’d discovered that her brother was going to employ him. She’d found out all the external things about Gabe Steel. She knew he owned Zeitgeist—one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies. That he’d been a millionaire by the age of twenty-four and had made it into multimillions by the time he reached thirty. At thirty-five, he remained unmarried—though not for the lack of women trying to get a wedding ring on their finger. Or at least, not according to reports from the rather more downmarket sources.
She’d seen images of him, too. Crystal-clear images, which she’d gazed at with something approaching wonder as they’d flashed up onto her computer screen. Because Gabe Steel seemed to have it all—certainly in the physical sense. His golden-dark hair gave him the appearance of an ancient god, and his muscular body would have rivalled that of any Olympian athlete.
She’d seen photos of him collecting awards, dressed in an immaculate tuxedo. There had been a snatched shot of him—paparazzi, she assumed—wearing faded jeans and an open shirt as he straddled a huge motorbike, minus a helmet. On one level she had known that he was the type of man who would take your breath away when you met him for real. And she hadn’t been wrong.
She just hadn’t expected him to be so...charismatic.
Leila was used to powerful men. She had grown up surrounded by them. All her life, she’d been bossed around and told to show respect towards them. Told that men knew best. She gave a wry smile because she had witnessed how cruel and cold they could be. She’d seen them treat women as if they didn’t matter. As if their opinions were simply to be tolerated rather than taken seriously. Which was one of the reasons why, deep down, she didn’t actually like the opposite sex.
Oh, she deferred to them, as she had been taught, because that was the hand which fate had dealt her. To be born a princess into a fiercely male-dominated society didn’t leave you with much choice other than to defer. There hadn’t been a single major decision in her life which had been hers and hers alone. Her schooling had been decided without any consultation; her friends had been carefully picked. She had learnt to smile and accept—because she had also learnt that resistance was futile. People knew what was ‘best’ for her—and she had no alternative but to accept their judgement.
Materially, of course, she had been spoiled. When you were the only sister of one of the richest men in the world, that was inevitable. Diamonds and pearls, rubies and emeralds lay heaped in jewellery boxes in her bedroom at the palace. Her late mother’s tiaras lay locked behind glass for Leila to wear whenever the mood took her.
But Leila knew that all the riches in the world couldn’t make you feel good about yourself. Expensive jewels didn’t compensate for the limitations of your lifestyle, nor protect you from a future you viewed with apprehension.
Within the confines of her palace home she usually dressed in traditional robes and veils, but today she was looking defiantly Western. She had never worn quite such figure-hugging jeans before and it was only by covering them up with her raincoat that she would have dared. She was aware of the way the thick seam of material rubbed between her legs. The way that the silky shirt felt oddly decadent as it brushed against her breasts. She felt liberated in these clothes, and while it was a good feeling, it was a little scary too— especially as Gabe Steel was looking at her in a way which was curiously...distracting.
But her clothes were as irrelevant as his reaction to them. She had worn them in order to look modern and for no other reason. The most important thing to remember was that this man held the key to a different kind of future. And she was going to make him turn that key—whether he wanted to or not.
Fighting another wave of anxiety, she opened the briefcase she’d been holding and pulled out a clutch of carefully chosen contents.
‘I’d like you to have a look at these,’ she said.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘What are they?’
She walked over towards a beautiful table and spread out the pictures on the gleaming inlaid surface. ‘Have a look for yourself.’
He walked over to stand beside her, his dark shadow falling over her. She could detect the tang of lime and soap combined with the much more potent scent of masculinity. She remembered him wearing nothing but that tiny white towel and suddenly her mouth grew as dry as dust.
‘Photographs,’ he observed.
Leila licked her lips. ‘That’s right.’
She watched him study them and prayed he would like them because she had been taking photos for as long as she could remember. It had been her passion and escape—the one thing at which she’d shown real flair. But perhaps her position as princess meant that she was ideally placed to take photos, for her essentially lonely role meant that she was always on the outside looking in.
Ever since she’d been given her very first camera, Leila had captured the images which surrounded her. The palace gardens and the beautiful horses which her brother kept in his stables had given way to candid shots of the servants and portraits of their children.
But most of the photos she’d brought to show Gabe Steel were of the desert. Stark images of a landscape she doubted he would have seen anywhere else and, since few people had been given access to the sacred and secret sites of Qurhah, they were also unique. And she suspected that a man like Gabe Steel would have seen enough in his privileged life to value something which was unique.
He was studying one in particular and she watched as his eyes narrowed in appreciation.
‘Who took these?’ he questioned, raising his head at last and capturing her in that cool grey gaze. ‘You?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
There was a pause. ‘You’re good,’ he said slowly. ‘Very good.’
His praise felt like a caress. Like the most wonderful compliment she had ever received. Leila glowed with a fierce kind of pride. ‘Thank you.’
‘Where is this place?’
‘It’s in the desert, close to the Sultan’s summer palace. An area of outstanding natural beauty known as the Mekathasinian Sands,’ she said, aware that his unsettling gaze was now drifting over her rather than the photo he was holding. He was close enough for her to be able to touch him, and she found herself wanting to do just that. She wanted to tangle her fingers in the thick, molten gold of his hair and then run them down over that hard, lean body. And how crazy was that?
With an effort, she tried to focus her attention on the photo and not on the symmetry of his chiselled features.
‘I took this after one of the rare downpours of rain and subsequent flooding, which occur maybe once in twenty years, if you’re lucky.’ She smiled. ‘They call it the desert miracle. Flower seeds lie dormant in the sands for decades and when the floods recede,