one this enormous, but as she went to kick the horse with her heels, she glanced down at the man again. He hadn’t moved, the lump of his body just lying there on the ground. Her legs relaxed and, instead of spurring the horse on, she found herself scrambling down from the huge beast.
Perhaps she was nuts—a cockeyed optimist with a side order of starry-eyed romantic—but she just couldn’t bring herself to ride away and leave him lying there. Not after spending what had to have been several hours sleeping in his arms while he’d ridden them both to safety.
Landing on the other side, she grasped the reins and drew the animal further away from the rider’s inert form.
She tried to lead the horse to the tent in the trees, but it wouldn’t budge, simply snuffling and lifting its muzzle. ‘You don’t want to leave him, is that it?’
The horse bounced its head as if it was nodding.
Oh, for… Get a grip, Kasia. Horses don’t speak English—especially not Narabian bandit horses.
Eventually she gave up trying to coax the horse away. And stepped closer to the man’s prone figure. He hadn’t moved, but still she approached him with caution. He’d looked enormous on the horse, and being flat on his back didn’t seem to diminish his stature much.
A shooting star lit up the dark sky, and she gasped as bright light exploded above her, shedding its glow over the man at her feet. The black headdress covering his head and his nose and mouth had fallen off. He had wavy, dark hair, which stood up in sweaty tufts, but it was his strikingly handsome face that stole her breath.
The sight was imprinted on her retinas as the light died and the shadows returned. High slashing cheekbones, black brows, and sun-burnished skin pulled tight over the perfect symmetry of his features. He had several days’ worth of stubble covering the bottom half of his face, but even with the disguising beard, she’d never seen a man as gorgeous. Even Sheikh Zane couldn’t hold a candle to him, his features less refined than the Sheikh’s but so much more compelling.
So not the point, Kaz. Who cares if he looks like a movie star? He’s still a bandit.
But he was the movie star bandit who had saved her, so there was that.
Gathering every ounce of purpose and determination she possessed, she knelt beside him, close enough to make out his features in the dying light. Why did he look familiar?
Another meteor trailed across the night sky, illuminating his face. Shock combined with the heat burning low in her belly as recognition struck.
She gasped. ‘Prince Kasim?’
Ruler of the Kholadi. He had attended Zane and Cat’s wedding five and a half years ago. She knew all the rumours and gossip about this man—that he was the illegitimate son of one of the old Sheikh’s concubines, thrown out of the palace as a boy when Zane, the Sheikh’s legitimate heir, had been kidnapped from his American mother in LA and brought to Narabia as a teenager. The story went that Kasim had crawled through the desert only to be treated with equal contempt by his mother’s nomadic tribe—until he had forced his way to the top of the Kholadi using the fighting skills he’d honed as he’d grown to manhood.
She’d adored all those stories, they’d been so compelling, so dramatic, and had made him seem even more mythic and dangerously exciting, not that she’d needed to put him on any more of a pedestal after setting eyes on him as a nineteen-year-old at Zane and Cat’s wedding.
Clothed in black ceremonial wear, he’d strode into the palace at the head of a heavily armed honour guard of Kholadi tribesman, and stolen her breath, like that of every other girl and woman there. He’d been tall and arrogant and magnificent—part warrior, all chieftain, all man—and much younger than she’d expected. He must have been in his mid-twenties at that wedding because he’d only been seventeen when he had become the Kholadi Chief. After years of battling with his own father’s army, he had negotiated a truce with Narabia when Zane had come to the throne.
Observing him from afar during the wedding and a few other official visits before she’d left for Cambridge, Kasia had become a little obsessed with the warrior prince. His prowess with women was almost as legendary as his skill in combat and his political agility. She’d adored all the stories that had trickled down into the palace’s women’s quarters after every visit—about how manly his physique was unclothed, how impressive his ‘assets’, how he could make a woman climax with a single glance. Like every other piece of gossip in the quarters, those salacious stories had been embellished and enhanced, but every time she’d had a chance to assess his broad, muscular physique or that rakish, devil-may-care smile from afar, she would fantasise that every word was true—and want to be the next woman on whom he bestowed that smile, and so much more.
He’d been a myth to her then, an object of her febrile adolescent desires, who had been larger than life in every respect. But he was just a man now.
The ripple of heat that she had been trying and failing to ignore sank deeper into her sex.
They didn’t call him the Bad-Boy Sheikh for nothing.
She stared at him, unable to believe she’d pointed a gun at him. Thank goodness she hadn’t actually shot him. Despite his wicked ways, he was a powerful prince. Plus, he’d rescued her. From a sandstorm.
As she pondered that far too romantic thought his eyelids fluttered.
The dark chocolate gaze fixed on her face and the heat in her sex blossomed like a mushroom cloud.
‘Prince Kasim, are you okay?’ she asked, the question popping out in English. She repeated it in Narabian. Did he even speak English?
He grunted again and she noticed for the first time the sheen of sweat on his forehead, and that his gaze, so intense earlier, now looked dazed. Then he replied in accented English.
‘My name is Raif. Only my brother calls me by my Narabian name.’ The husky rasp was expelled on a breath of outrage. ‘And, no I’m not okay, you little witch. You shot me.’
The bullet had hit him?
‘I’m so sorry,’ she yelped. But before she could say more, his eyes closed.
The darkness was descending fast, but gripping his robe she tugged it away to reveal bare skin beneath. Scars—so many scars—and a tattoo marred the smooth skin, making the bunch of muscle and sinew look all the more magnificent.
She ignored the well of heat pulsing at her core.
So, so not the point, Kaz.
She pressed trembling fingers to his chest, felt the muscles tense as she frantically ran them over his ribs up to his shoulder to locate the wound. Her fingertips encountered sticky moisture. She drew her hand away, her eyes widening in horror at the stain of fresh blood. The metallic smell invaded the silent night.
She swore again, the same word that had made her feel empowered several hours ago when she’d found herself alone in the desert with a broken-down Jeep.
Now she was alone in the desert with a bleeding man. A bleeding, unconscious warrior prince, who had saved her from a sandstorm and whom she’d shot for his pains.
She’d never felt less empowered in her life.
‘YOU’RE NOT MY SON—you’re not anyone’s son. You’re nothing more than vermin—a rat, born by mistake.’
The angry memory ripped through Raif’s body, his heart pounding so hard it felt as if it would gag him. His father’s face reared up, the cruel slant of his lips, the contempt in his flat black eyes, the cold echo of the only words he’d ever spoken to him cutting through the familiar nightmare like a rusting blade.
‘I clothed and fed you for ten years.