LITMIR.BIZ

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off the powerful jet of water and stepped out of the shower, shaking his dark head slightly as he began to rub the droplets of water away. This felt like a dream from which he would in a minute wake—and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

      The emotions he had felt when confronted with what seemed like the uncontradictable truth of his heritage had been varied. There had been confusion, yes—and yet a strange sense of calm, as though the answer to a question he had never dared to ask had finally been given.

      Didn’t this news of his father’s identity make a whole lot about himself clearer and more understandable? That sense of being different, of being an outsider, had always burned much stronger in him than in any of the other fatherless boys he had grown up with. It hadn’t just been the strange and exotic colour of his skin and the unusual gold of his eyes; it had gone far deeper than that.

      Even as a child Darian had always been a loner. He had kept his emotions and his affections severely contained and restrained. So had that been something he’d been born with, or something he had learned along the way?

      He had not grown up in an environment where you got close to people, and this was a habit he had carried with him into his adult life. In a way it had made his success more achievable—if you didn’t carry around the baggage of close relationships then you had a lot less to distract you from your ambition.

      He reflected on the bizarre events of the day, thinking that Khalim, too, had been a surprise—in more than one sense. From making the discovery that he was related to the dark, powerful and enigmatic leader it had proved a disturbingly short step to discovering that he might actually like him—maybe even form some kind of tenuous bond with him.

      He didn’t know what the outcome of this strange and totally unexpected visit to Maraban would be, and for once in his life it didn’t bother him. Usually Darian liked everything mapped out, to know where he was going and what he was doing, but suddenly he recognised that sometimes you just had to go with the flow.

      In fact, the only shadow on the current landscape took the form of the woman he could hear moving around in the adjoining room. His mouth twisted with a mixture of contempt and desire.

      What could have been a straightforward—if highly unusual—state of affairs had been complicated and made distasteful by the behaviour of Lara Black.

      He felt the slow, steady pulsing of his heart, wondering why it should bother him—why he couldn’t just dismiss the thought of her. Heaven knew, he usually managed that just fine. But she was like an itch. Something niggling away at him, stinging at his skin and making him feel aware of her in a way he didn’t want to be. He needed to get her completely out of his system, he decided grimly, and there was one surefire way to do that.

      But this time Lara would fight him all the way, he recognised, and somehow that sharpened his senses even more. He gave a slow smile of anticipation as he wrapped a towel around his narrow hips and sauntered back into the bedroom.

      She was lost in the book she had been reading, but at the sound of his footfall she automatically looked up and her mouth dried. ‘Oh, I see you’ve bothered to put something on,’ she observed caustically, even though her heart was thudding away like a piston.

      His fingers hovered provocatively over the knot of the towel at his hip and he raised his eyebrows mockingly. ‘Is that disapproval I hear in your voice, Lara? You’d prefer me to lose it, would you?’

      She swallowed down the infuriating desire to say yes. ‘I’ll just carry on reading my book while you get dressed,’ she said, then glanced at her watch. ‘Better hurry up,’ she added sweetly. ‘Khalim is not a man who should be kept waiting.’

      She saw him shrug and then stared unseeingly at the words on the page, listening while he pulled on his clothes, not saying a word. The silence seemed to grow until it became huge and unwelcome. And suddenly all Lara’s doubts and fears and uncertainties began to nag at her. She was angry at him for all kinds of complex reasons, but deep down she feared that her main motive was self-seeking. Wasn’t she angry because he had shown a decided lack of interest in her as a person—because she had started to fall for him in a big way and he clearly hadn’t reciprocated her feelings? And wasn’t that a rather shameful reason for helping to maintain this sizzling undercurrent of tension between them? What good was that going to do any of them?

      Maybe it was up to her to try and make peace.

      She waited until he had slipped his shoes on, and then looked up to see him running his fingers through still-damp hair.

      ‘Darian?’ she said quietly.

      The look he gave her was deliberately impartial—but then he wasn’t foolish enough to get himself worked up into a state of sexual desire just before dinner, not when there wasn’t enough time to see it through to its ultimate conclusion. ‘Yes, Lara?’

      She closed the pages of the book and put her fingertips on the soft leather which bound it. ‘I’m sorry that I deceived you.’

      ‘Sorry that you deceived me?’ he questioned tonelessly. ‘Or just sorry that I found out?’

      ‘But it was inevitable that you would find out!’ she argued. ‘You must understand why I wanted to get to know you before I decided what action to take about the letter—why, you could have been any kind of maniac, for all I knew!’

      ‘As opposed to a red-hot stud, you mean?’

      ‘You flatter yourself, Darian.’

      Their eyes met, his gaze boring into her until her cheeks began to burn. ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ he said softly. ‘You may be an actress, Lara, and a very good one at that—but I know enough about women to realise that you weren’t faking it.’

      She slapped her palms to her hot cheeks. ‘Don’t!’

      ‘Don’t speak the truth? No, I can see that might bother someone with your morals.’

      This was just getting worse instead of better. She drew a deep breath, hoping to appeal to his sense of reason—to something…anything that would make him stop looking at her with that reluctant desire which made her feel so small.

      ‘Surely you can understand why I didn’t mention anything to you, Darian? At least not until I’d spoken to Khalim? I’ve known him and Rose for a long time—I didn’t know you at all!’

      ‘But you sure knew me better after dinner, didn’t you?’ He gave a low and insulting laugh. ‘Did you want to make sure that the brother to the Sheikh fulfilled all the criteria for being a man?’

      Her temper snapped. ‘Now you are wilfully twisting everything I say! I had no intention of letting you make love to me that night. It just…it just…happened,’ she finished lamely.

      ‘Does it happen a lot for you that way?’ he enquired, with the sardonic air of someone asking an unnecessary question.

      ‘Never!’ she retorted. ‘I told you that at the time!’

      ‘So it was just me,’ he mused. ‘In which case—I should be flattered.’ He lowered his voice to a sultry promise. ‘It was pretty good for me, too, Lara, if you really want to know—which makes me wonder why you’re being so unnecessarily prim. After all, if you had sex with me when we barely knew each other, then I should have thought you would be eager to repeat the experience now that we’re so much better acquainted.’ He smiled as he let his gaze travel to the huge brocade-covered bed. ‘It seems a bit of a waste of a good opportunity otherwise, don’t you think?’

      He couldn’t have made it sound more mechanical if he had tried—a man and a woman who were fiercely attracted to one another—simply making use of the facilities on offer! But while Darian might have a heart of stone Lara was simply not made that way.

      She opened her mouth to tell him that he was the last person on the planet she would ever get intimate with after what he had said to her, but at that precise moment there was a light rap on the door.

      Darian raised his eyebrows.

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