The Sheikh's Undoing (11 page)

‘A
fumble?
’ he interrupted furiously. ‘This is how you dare to describe what happened between us?’

‘How would
you
describe it, then?’

‘With a little more poetry and imagination than that!’

‘Okay. That … that amazing sex we had, pressed up against the wall of your office.’ She sucked in a deep breath—because if she didn’t tell him what was bugging her then how would he know? ‘And you then treating me like a total stranger in the car before waltzing off to your fancy party at the embassy.’

Tariq narrowed his eyes with sudden comprehension. So
that
was what this was about. She wanted what all women wanted. Recognition. A place on his arm to illustrate their closeness—to show the world their togetherness. But wasn’t she being a little
presumptuous
, in the circumstances?

‘I didn’t touch you because I knew what would happen if I did—and I had no intention of walking into the party with the smell of your sex still on my skin. No.’ He shook his head as he saw her open her mouth to speak. ‘Let me finish, Izzy. It would have been inappropriate for me to take you to the party,’ he added coolly. ‘For a start, you weren’t exactly dressed for it.’

‘You mean I would have let you down?’

‘I think you would have felt awkward if you’d gone to a party in your rumpled work clothes, post-sex. Especially to a diplomatic function like that.’

‘I’m surprised you know the meaning of the word
diplomatic
,’ she raged, ‘when you can come out with a statement as insulting as that!’

‘I was trying to be honest with you, Izzy,’ he said softly. ‘Isn’t that what this is all about?’

His question took the wind right out of her sails. She supposed it was. She had no right to be angry with him just because he wasn’t telling her what she wanted to hear. If he’d come out with some flowery, untrue reason why he hadn’t taken her to the embassy, wouldn’t she have called him a hypocrite?

‘Maybe last night should never have happened,’ she said in a small voice.

Ignoring the sudden hardening of his body, Tariq thought about the mercurial nature of her behaviour. Last night she had been
wild
and today she was like ice. Was she testing him to see how far she could push him? She had turned away from him now, so that he got a complete view of her thick curls tied back in a ribbon and a dress he’d seen many times before. Nobody could accuse Izzy of responding to their lovemaking by becoming a vamp in the office. She was probably the least glamorous woman he’d ever met.

Yet the strange thing was that he wanted her. Actually, he wanted her more than he had done yesterday. The contrast between her rather unremarkable exterior and the red-hot lover underneath had scorched through his defences. The memory of how she had yielded so eagerly wouldn’t leave him. But it was more than a purely visceral response. Her freshness and eagerness had been like sweet balm applied to his jaded senses. Hadn’t she given him more than any
other woman had ever done—surrendering her innocence with such eagerness and joy?

And yet what had he done for her? Taken that innocence in as swift a way as possible and offered her nothing in return. Not even dinner. He felt the unfamiliar stab of guilt.

‘What are you doing tonight?’ he said.

The question made Isobel turn round. ‘It’s my book club.’

‘Your book club?’

‘Six to eight women,’ she explained, since he’d clearly never heard of the concept. ‘We all read a book and then afterwards we sit round and discuss it.’

He knitted his brows together. ‘And that’s supposed to be enjoyable?’

‘That’s the general idea.’

‘Cancel it.’ The answering smile he floated her was supremely confident. ‘Have dinner with me instead.’

Shamefully, she was almost tempted to do as he suggested—until she imagined the reaction of her girlfriends. Hadn’t she let them down enough times in the past, when Tariq had been in the middle of some big deal and she’d had to work right through the night? Did he really expect her to drop everything now, just so he could get a duty dinner out of the way before another bout of sex?

She thought about everything she’d vowed. About not leaving herself vulnerable to heartbreak—which wasn’t going to be easy now that she
had
taken such a big leap in that direction. But even if she had made herself vulnerable she didn’t have to compound it by being a total doormat.

‘I don’t want to cancel it, Tariq—I’m hosting in my
apartment. There’s two bottles of white wine chilling in the fridge and we’re reading
Jane Eyre
.’

Damn
Jane Eyre
, he thought irreverently—but something about her resistance made his lips curve into a sardonic smile.

‘What about tomorrow night, then? Do you think you might be able to find a space in your busy schedule and have dinner with me then?’ he questioned sarcastically.

Her heart began thundering as she stared at him. Wasn’t that what she’d wanted all along? The cloak of respectability covering up the fact that they’d had sex without any of the usual preliminaries? Wouldn’t a civilised meal prevent their relationship from being defined by that one rather steamy episode—no matter what happened in the future? Because the chances were that they might decide never to have sex again. Maybe in a restaurant, with the natural barrier of a table between them and the attentions of the waiting staff, they could agree that, yes, it had been a highly pleasurable experience—but best kept as a one-off.

Isobel nodded. ‘Yes, I can have dinner with you tomorrow night.’

‘Good. Book somewhere, will you? Anywhere you like.’

His expression was thoughtful as he walked through to his inner sanctum. Because this was a first on many levels, he realised.

The first time he’d ever had sex with a member of his staff.

And the first time a woman had ever turned him down for a dinner date.

‘T
HIS
is the last kind of place I’d have thought you’d choose,’ said Tariq slowly.

Isobel looked up from the laminated menu, which she already knew by heart, and stared at the hawk-like beauty of the Sheikh’s autocratic features. ‘You don’t like it?’

He looked around. It was noisy, warm and cluttered. Lighted candles dripped wax down the sides of old Chianti bottles, posters of Venice and Florence vied for wall-space with photos of Siena’s football team, and popular opera played softly in the background. He could remember eating somewhere like this years ago as a student, at the end of a rowdy rugby tour. But never since then. ‘It’s … different,’ he observed. ‘Not the kind of place I normally eat in. I thought you might have chosen somewhere …’

‘Yes?’ Isobel raised her eyebrows.

‘Somewhere a little more upmarket. The kind of place you’d always wanted to go but never had the chance.’

Isobel put the menu down. ‘You mean somewhere like the Green Room at the Granchester? Or the River Terrace? Or one of those other fancy establishments with a celebrity chef, where you can only ever get a table at
short notice if you happen to
be
someone? All the places
you
usually frequent?’

‘They happen to be very good restaurants.’

She leaned forward. ‘
This
happens to be a good restaurant, too—though you seem to be judging it without even trying it. Just because you don’t have to take out a mortgage to eat here, it doesn’t mean the food isn’t delicious. Actually, I thought
you
might like to try somewhere different and a bit more relaxing. Somewhere you aren’t known, since you often complain about rubbernecking people staring at you.’ She sat back in her chair again and shot him a challenge with her eyes. ‘But maybe you like being looked at more than you care to admit—and anonymity secretly freaks you out?’

He gave a soft laugh. ‘Actually, I’m rather enjoying the anonymity,’ he murmured, and glanced down at the menu. ‘What do you recommend?’

‘Well, they make all their own pasta here.’

‘And it’s good?’

‘It’s more than good. It’s
to die for
.’

His gaze drifted up to the curve of her breasts, which were pert and springy and outlined by a surprisingly chic little black dress. ‘I thought women didn’t eat carbs.’

‘Maybe the sorts of women you know don’t,’ she said, thinking about his penchant for whip-thin supermodels and feeling a sudden stab of insecurity. ‘Personally, I hate all those dietary restrictions. All they do is make people obsessed with eating, or not eating, and their whole lives become about denying themselves what they really want.’

Tariq let that go, realising that he was denying himself what
he
really wanted right at that moment. If it was
anyone other than Izzy he would have thrown a large wad of notes down on the tablecloth and told the waiter that they’d lost their appetite. Then taken her back to his apartment and ravished her in every which way he could—before sending out for food.

He realised that he was letting her call the shots, and briefly he wondered why. Because he’d taken her innocence and felt that he owed her? Or was it because she worked for him and his relationship with her was about as equal as any he was likely to have?

‘Perhaps we’ll have a little role-reversal tonight. How about you choose for me?’ he suggested.

‘I’d love to.’ She beamed.

She lifted her head and instantly the waiter appeared at their table, bearing complementary olives and bread and making a big fuss of her. For possibly the first time in his life Tariq found himself ignored—other than being assured that he was a very lucky man to be eating with such a beautiful woman.

As he leant back in his chair he conceded that the waiter had a point and Izzy
did
look pretty spectacular tonight. For a start she’d let down her hair, so that corkscrew curls tumbled in a fiery cascade around her shoulders. Her silky black dress was far more formal than anything she’d ever worn to work, and it showcased her luscious curves to perfection. A silver teardrop which gleamed at the end of a fine chain hung provocatively between her breasts. And, of course, she had that indefinable glow of sexual awakening …

With an effort, he dragged his gaze away from her cleavage and looked into tawny eyes which had been highlighted with long sweeps of mascara, so that they seemed to dominate her face. ‘I take it from the way the
waiter greeted you like a long-lost relative that you’ve been here before?’

‘Loads of times. I’ve been coming here since I first started working in London. It’s always so warm and friendly. And at the beginning—when I didn’t have much money—they never seemed to mind me spending hours lingering over one dish.’

‘Why would they? Restaurants never object to a pretty girl adorning their space. It’s a form of free advertising.’

Isobel shook her head. ‘Were you born cynical, Tariq?’

‘What’s cynical about that? It happens to be true. I’m a businessman, Izzy—I analyse marketing opportunities.’

She waited while the waiter poured out two glasses of fizzy water. ‘And did you always mean to become a businessman?’

‘As opposed to what? A trapeze artist?’

‘As opposed to doing something in your own country. Doing something in Khayarzah. You used …’

He frowned as her words trailed off. ‘Used to what?’

‘At school.’ She shrugged as she remembered how sweet he had been to her that time—how he’d made her feel special. A bit like the way he was treating her tonight. ‘Well, I hardly knew you at school, of course, but I do remember that one time when you talked about your homeland. You spoke of it in a dreamy way—as if you were talking about some kind of Utopia. And I suppose I sort of imagined …’

‘What did you imagine?’ he prompted softly.

‘Oh, I don’t know. That you’d go back there one day.
And live in a palace and fish in that silvery river you described.’

‘Ah, but my brother is King there now,’ he said, his voice hardening as he acknowledged the capricious law of succession and how it altered the lives of those who were affected by it. ‘And Zahid became King very unexpectedly, which changed my place in the natural order of things.’

Isobel looked at him. ‘How come?’

‘Up until that moment I was just another desert sheikh with the freedom to do pretty much as I wanted—but when our uncle died suddenly I became second in line to the throne. The spare.’

‘And is that so bad?’ she prompted gently.

‘Try living in a goldfish bowl and see how
you
like it,’ he said. ‘It means you have all the strictures of being the heir, but none of the power. My freedom was something I cherished above everything else …’ Hadn’t it been the one compensation for his lonely and isolated childhood? The fact that he hadn’t really had to account for himself? ‘And suddenly it was taken away from me. It made me want to stay away from Khayarzah, where I felt the people were watching me all the time. And I knew that I needed to give Zahid space to settle into his Kingship in peace.’ There was a pause. ‘Because there is only ever room for one ruler.’

‘And do you miss it? Khayarzah, I mean?’

He studied her wide tawny eyes, realising that he had told her more than he had ever told anyone. In truth, his self-imposed exile had only emphasised his feelings of displacement, of not actually belonging anywhere. Just like the little boy who had been sent away to school. As
a child he’d felt as if he’d had no real home and as an adult that feeling had not changed.

‘Not really,’ he mused. ‘I go back there on high days and holidays and that’s enough. There’s no place for me there.’

Isobel sipped her drink as the waiter placed two plates of steaming pasta before them. His last words disturbed her.
There’s no place for me there
. Wasn’t that an awfully
lonely
thing to say? And wasn’t that what she’d thought when she’d seen him lying injured in hospital—that he’d looked so alone? What if her instinct then had been the right one?

‘So you’re planning on settling down in England?’ she questioned, and then gave a nervous laugh. ‘Though I guess you already are settled.’

There was brief pause as Tariq swirled a forkful of tagliatelli and coated it in sauce. But he didn’t eat it. Instead, he lifted his eyes to hers, a sardonic smile curving his lips. It was always the same. Or rather women were. Didn’t matter what you talked about, their careless chatter inevitably morphed into thinly veiled queries about his future. Because didn’t they automatically daydream about
their
future and wonder if it could be a match with his? Weren’t they programmed to do that, when they became the lover of a powerful alpha male?