LITMIR.BIZ

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creak and scuffle of footsteps outside Cade’s bedroom door. Her heart skittered and bolted like the squirrel she had seen that afternoon in the lane as she watched the doorknob slowly turn and the door swish inward, silent and stealthy as a thief in the night, to frame the tall, imposing figure of her husband.

      For a moment he hesitated, looking as if he wasn’t sure whether he’d got the right room. Then he stepped through the doorway and carefully closed the door behind him. All the while his eyes never left her face, and they reflected the glow of the lamps she’d turned on low beside the bed so that they seemed to catch fire and flare hot as he looked at her.

      Her stomach gave a lurch as the magic carpet of confidence she’d been riding on went into a steep crash dive.

      Chapter 7

      She was every man’s dream. And Cade’s worst nightmare.

      He’d just about driven himself crazy, trying to think what he was going to do about this, his so-called wedding night. How did a man avoid consummating a marriage that never should have happened in the first place, without seeming to reject the woman he’d married and had already thoroughly humiliated once?

      In the end, it had seemed to him that the best course of action was also the easiest one: Do nothing at all. If he stalled long enough, he reasoned, Leila was bound to fall asleep, as thoroughly jet-lagged as she must be. Then he could tiptoe in, snag his overnight bag and sneak off to the guest room, and his excuse would be that she needed her rest and he hadn’t wanted to disturb her—what a considerate guy he was. Tomorrow morning early he’d be off to work, and after that—well, he had the pretty good excuse of a prior commitment, a weekend hunting trip to the ranch with a client he was trying to woo. No reason he couldn’t arrange to fly out a day early, if the client was willing.

      On Sunday when he got back, he’d sit Leila down and have a serious talk with her, and they could both try to figure out what they were going to do. By then, he told himself, they’d both be rested up and thinking clearly, and between them they ought to be able to come up with a way out of this farce with a minimum amount of embarrassment for all parties concerned.

      It had seemed so reasonable to him, sitting there in his study sipping bourbon and enjoying a cheroot he knew he was going to catch hell for from Betsy tomorrow. He’d dozed a little bit in his chair and woken up stiff and groggy to find that it was well past midnight. Thank God, he’d thought, figuring there was no way in hell Leila would be awake at that hour. It ought to be safe to venture into his own bedroom.

      Reeling with the effects of travel fatigue and whiskey, he’d mounted the stairs and made his way down the hallway, conscious of the silence all around him and his heartbeat ticktocking away like an old-fashioned grandfather clock. He was used to the silence of an empty house, but it was odd, he thought, how weighty silence seemed in a house that wasn’t as empty as it should be. He was thinking about that, about the usual silence and emptiness of his house at night, when he turned the knob and pushed open his bedroom door.

      Then his only thought was: Oh God, what now?

      There she was, not only awake but looking like the overture to some erotic dream, a vision in sea-green silk that covered every inch but failed to disguise one centimeter of her curves, her hair cascading down around her shoulders like midnight rain. Every man’s dream…his worst nightmare.

      He didn’t know how long he stood there in the doorway looking at her. Just looking at her, with all sorts of emotions shooting off in every direction inside him so that for a moment his brain function felt more than anything like an explosion in a fireworks factory. Now what? What was he supposed to say to her? He couldn’t think of a thing.

      It came to him gradually, as the shock subsided and his mind began functioning again, that he’d made a serious miscalculation. With all that had happened, he’d forgotten that, from almost the first moment he’d laid eyes on Leila Kamal, he’d wanted her.

      He remembered it now. He remembered that the idea had amused him at the time, that he’d laughed at himself for his adolescent foolishness. He wasn’t laughing now.

      “You’re still up,” he finally said—as inane an observation as ever there was.

      “I waited for you.” She said it without a trace of seduction in her voice, facing him bravely with the light from a bedside lamp shimmering in her hair and making deep, dark mysteries of her eyes. She looked so incredibly beautiful …and nothing at all like the buoyant, flirtatious girl he remembered meeting in Tamir. Right now what she looked like more than anything was a virgin waiting to be sacrificed.

      “You shouldn’t have,” he said, but in a gentle tone to temper the abruptness of it. He launched into his prepared justifications as he came into the room, keeping at a wary distance from her like a hiker circling a pit of quicksand. “Look…Leila. You’ve had a long day—you must be tired. I know I am.” He stifled an ostentatious yawn. “I, uh…had a few things I needed to take care of—business things that couldn’t wait.” He brushed them aside with a diffident wave of his hand. “Things pile up when I’m away. I’m going to be doing a lot of catching up during the next several days….”

      “Oh yes,” she murmured, “I understand.”

      For some reason her acquiescence annoyed him, made him feel fraudulent and unworthy. He cleared his throat and ventured a look at her, squinting as if she were a light too bright for his eyes. He continued almost defiantly, “In fact, there’s something—this weekend I have a thing I’m supposed to do—I promised a client I’d take him hunting out at the ranch.”

      A frown appeared between her eyebrows. “The…ranch?”

      “Yeah—I told you about it—west Texas?”

      “Oh—yes, yes—I remember.” She sounded eager, now. “And you will fly there in your airplane?”

      His insides writhed with guilt. Furious with himself for it, furious with her for making him feel it, he fought the urge to fidget and cleared his throat instead. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow, actually. Straight from work. So I won’t be—”

      “Tomorrow?” He could hear a different breathiness in her voice now…unmistakable touches of panic.

      “Look—I’m sorry. It’s been scheduled for a while. It’s a client—I couldn’t very well cancel at the last minute.” Cade chose that moment to escape into his bathroom, too cowardly to risk another look at her. He didn’t need to see the shock, dismay and disappointment he knew would be written all over her face…that incredibly expressive face that sometimes seemed to him like watching a video tape on fast forward.

      Just inside the bathroom doorway, again he stopped dead.

      In only a matter of hours his bathroom had become an alien place. A lush and steamy greenhouse garden, redolent of all sorts of flowery, exotic scents, where jewel-toned bottles sprouted like mushrooms from the marble countertops and a rainbow of fabrics intertwined with the more subtle hues of damp towels bloomed in tropical profusion over every available surface.

      Closing his mind to both the chaos and the disturbingly evocative smells, Cade set about gathering up the toiletries Betsy had unpacked for him, putting them back in their travel case. And while he was doing that he went on glibly talking, telling Leila in a logical, reasonable way how he thought she should spend the time while he was gone, catching up on her rest, settling in, getting to know the place…

      But not too well, he reminded himself. No sense in her getting too settled in and comfortable here. This “marriage” was only going to be temporary, after all.

      Listening to himself talk like that, without Leila’s disturbing presence to distract him and just the sound of his own voice and his reassuringly normal reflection glaring back at him from the mirrors, he could feel his self-assurance coming back. Everything he said sounded reasonable and sane—even logical and wise. And why shouldn’t it? He was Cade Gallagher, successful Texas businessman, a self-made man who’d had his first few million under his belt before his thirty-fifth birthday. A man with a far-ranging

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