Lord of the Desert Read online

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” she confessed with a tiny smile. She found him even more fascinating now that she knew a little about his life. “Are all the women in your country veiled and kept separate from men?”

  He began to smile. “Ah, the American press,” he mused. His black eyes twinkled wickedly. “I understand. You Americans think that our women are oppressed, that they live in fear of mutilation and death from men.”

  She laughed softly. “Not since I’ve met you, I don’t,” she told him.

  “I’m flattered.” He took a small puff from the cigar. “And as it happens, you’re right. I am working to change the status of women and my father rages at me unsuccessfully for the new laws I have had put in place. He says that I am as decadent as the Europeans and the Americans, wishing to give rights to women that should belong only to men!”

  “Good for you,” she said admiringly.

  He laughed. “He is a Christian, too, you know,” he remarked surprisingly. “He wrested power from his uncle and retained it for forty years. But his faith made his reign somewhat difficult until our religious population became so diverse. This is why he put it out that I was Muslim, and I permitted the assumption until I assumed office. I have the greatest respect for the Prophet and his writings, because a good deal of my family is Muslim,” he added quietly. “We persecute no religion in Qawi.”

  “You said that your country was still rather…primitive.”

  His broad shoulders lifted and fell. “Compared to yours, certainly. But I have great plans for my people, for new educational facilities and modern hospitals and industry. Not polluting industry, however,” he was quick to insert. “We have learned too much about acid rain and chemical spills to import them. No, our industry will be almost exclusively limited to electronics—computers and its accompanying hardware and software. We have already attracted an American franchise here, a corporation that now markets hardware and software together. You might know of its originator, in fact,” he added. “Canton Rourke.”

  She drew in a sharp breath. “‘Mr. Software!’ But didn’t he go bankrupt a few years ago?”

  “He did, and regained his fortune. I know him through a mutual friend, an ex-mercenary who now lives in Cancún, Mexico, a gentleman by the name of Diego Laremos.”

  “You know real mercenaries?” she asked, fascinated.

  He laughed with pure delight. He leaned toward her, glancing warily over her shoulder. “Who do you think Bojo is?”

  Her green eyes widened. “Is he, really?”

  “He belongs to a group of them, headed by a former physician named Micah Steele.”

  Gretchen made a sound in her throat. “Oh, if that isn’t one big coincidence,” she said at once. “For heaven’s sake, I work…worked, that is…with Micah’s stepsister, Callie Kirby, at the law office in Jacobsville, Texas!”

  “Micah speaks of her. Well, then, you may also know Eb Scott and Cy Parks, former members of the group, and perhaps Cord Romero, who was…”

  “Cord was blinded!” she exclaimed. “That’s why my best friend Maggie went home, to take care of him. They were raised together as foster children. I only have this job because she had to forfeit it! We came to Morocco together.”

  His hand reached out and smoothed over her graceful fingers. “Fate,” he murmured, meeting her sparkling eyes.

  “Yes,” she agreed breathlessly. “Fate.”

  His forefinger traced over the back of her soft hand and her lips parted as she struggled with her racing pulse. He saw it and thanked providence for sending him this woman, who made him come alive again, who made him feel like a man again. His body responded even to this light touch, and he caught his breath as he searched her pale eyes.

  The plane began to move while they watched each other. Scant minutes later, it was airborne, high above the tarmac, reaching for the clouds.

  Philippe’s black eyes flashed as he studied her flushed, excited face. She looked as hungry as he felt. Abruptly he unfastened her seat belt and his and pulled her out of her chair. He shot a command to the other men as he passed them, tugging a curious Gretchen along with him to the back of the plane.

  He opened a small door, put her inside, and closed it back. It was like a tiny apartment, complete with luxurious bed, writing desk, and two round windows. It was dark in the compartment, light coming in only from barely open shades over the two seating classes.

  Gretchen started to speak, but he put a firm forefinger over her lips and bent to lift her clear of the floor in his arms.

  He laid her on the bed and slid alongside her. She looked up at him with open puzzlement as he searched her eyes in the dim light.

  “Consider this,” he whispered amusedly at her lips, “a rabidly sexist interview for your new position…!”

  And his hard, beautiful mouth reached down to brush over hers with a tender sensuality that pulled tight every muscle and nerve in her body.

  Her faint gasp brought his head up. His tracing fingers were just above her collarbone, on the silky purple fabric of her long-sleeved embroidered blouse. Her eyes were wide-open, fascinated, as she watched his face tauten. The silence in the cabin was only broken by the high-pitched whine of the jet engines and the rough sigh of Philippe’s breath as he searched her face.

  He could hear her breathing jerk against his mouth, he could feel her galloping heartbeat. “It has been so long, Gretchen,” he bit off. “I have been too intimidated by my condition to even approach a woman intimately for almost nine years.” His hand was faintly unsteady as it drew tenderly against her body. Even through two layers of soft fabric, it burned like a brand. She felt her body go tight and sensitive in the oddest places and she moved involuntarily.

  “Oh…glory!” she choked.

  “You enjoy this? So do I.” His fingers became bolder, tracing the soft curve of her breast. He looked down and, with pure male arrogance, watched her nipples peak. She caught her breath and reached up with nervous fingers to his broad chest in its shirt, gently pressing against it. He felt his body responding to that light, tentative pressure as if she were touching his own skin. He groaned softly.

  Her fingers stilled. “Sorry,” she began, and started to move her hands away.

  He caught them at once and put them back. “I like it,” he told her. “Don’t stop.” His eyes glittered. He guided one soft little hand to the buttons of his vest and nodded.

  “This is uncharted territory for me,” she said gently. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’m going to show you,” he said curtly. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. I am, as you already know, not man enough to pose a risk to your chastity…”

  Her hand had covered his mouth firmly. She looked at him with a fierce, unblinking scrutiny. “You’re a man who had a terrible accident,” she said firmly. “It doesn’t make you less a man. I’m the one who lacks all the usual skills,” she added gently and smiled at him. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to feel, so it isn’t as if I can be critical of anything you do.”

  His short breath was audible. “And I originally hired an experienced woman…!”

  “We all make these little mistakes,” she said wickedly. “You just didn’t know what you’d be missing. That’s okay. I won’t hold it against you.”

  He was torn between amused laughter and a feverish hunger to crush her into the bed under him. These were new feelings. He felt himself begin to react to her silky warmth against him and he stiffened suddenly.

  She felt the increased pressure against her hip and her eyebrows lifted. “I thought you said you couldn’t do that,” she whispered shyly.

  “I haven’t been able to make that happen,” he agreed in a rough whisper. “Not for nine long damned years. And I have to feel it,” he added hotly, “for the first time, with a woman who wouldn’t know an orgasm from a potato!”

  She burst out laughing at his sardonic expression. “Oh, you wicked man!” she whispered huskily.

  Her am
usement veiled a growing passion, and he could see it in her eyes, in the faintly sensuous movement of her body against his hips.

  “Wicked, am I?” he murmured, delighted by her eagerness for him, by her unexpected teasing, by her easy acceptance of his limitations and her pleasure in his touch. He began to smile. What had seemed like a potential ordeal all these years was suddenly fun. He reached under her and pinched her bottom, hard, laughing when she squealed and pushed at him, laughing back.

  One of his long, powerful legs shot between both of hers and he came down on her with almost a decade of buried ardor making his blood hot.

  “Torment,” he breathed into her mouth. “You tease me with dreams of utter paradise…!” He broke her lips apart and began to brush them with his lips and his tongue. All the while, his hands were exploring the slender, warm shape of her body from her rib cage to her hips and back again.

  “Philippe?” she whispered jerkily.

  “What?” he murmured absently.

  “I have breasts,” she bit off as he nipped her full lower lip with his teeth.

  He stilled. His head lifted and his surprised black eyes met hers. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I just thought I’d mention it,” she pointed out, breathless. “You seem to think my only assets are my rib cage and my hips.”

  “You’re a virgin,” he began.

  “Yes, but I’m not dead from the neck down!” she whispered. Her fingers went to the buttons on his vest and then his shirt, and he hung poised just above her with his heartbeat shaking him as he tried to adjust to her mood.

  “Aren’t you uneasy?” he asked.

  She was too busy with buttons to pay much attention. “Uneasy about what? Gosh, you’re hairy here. That feels…wonderful!” She frowned. “Why should I be uneasy?”

  “You little fool,” he ground out. “This is dangerous. I wasn’t making idle conversation when I told you I haven’t had a woman in nine years!”

  “Complaints, complaints,” she muttered, shifting closer. “Oh! Oh, yes…!”

  He felt the sinuous caress of her body against his and he grew even more aroused. He groaned harshly and his hands gripped the pillow under her head as if he wanted to kill it.

  Her legs parted to invite him closer, and her hands smoothed roughly, trembling, up and down his hair-matted chest as she drank in the scents of soap and expensive cologne and cigar smoke that clung to him, filling her nostrils.

  He was there…there! She arched up provocatively, involuntarily, and felt a shudder of such exquisite pleasure that she moaned.

  His hand at her hip stilled her. He shivered. “Gretchen,” he whispered.

  She trembled under him as his hard mouth came back to hers and ground down into it with ardent fury. It felt as though he might devour her. Her head began to spin. Her arms slid under the shirt and around him. Her hand encountered a long, deep scar under his left arm and she stilled.

  He seemed to have stopped breathing for that instant, when he felt her soft hand on the disfiguring scar that was only one of many. His head lifted. He watched her face, waiting for revulsion, distaste.

  “There are others like this, aren’t there?” she asked softly. Her fingers traced it to the belt line of his slacks. She looked into his eyes and began to pull the white shirt slowly out of the belt.

  He hesitated, his hand going to slow the progress of hers as it reached bare skin.

  She hesitated. “Is it…all right…if I touch you?”

  His teeth were clenched. “Not below the belt,” he gritted.

  “Why not?”

  His eyes closed. “Gretchen, the scars, some of them, go all the way to the bone. Those in my groin and my left thigh are…disfiguring.”

  “I’m not the swooning sort of woman,” she pointed out. “I love touching you,” she whispered. “I love letting you touch me.”

  “I haven’t. Yet.”

  Her hand stilled as she searched his face. Her heartbeat became even jerkier. “Would you…like to?”

  His face hardened. “Of all the questions…!”

  She drew back her hand and matter-of-factly began to unbutton her embroidered silk blouse. She watched his black eyes go involuntarily to the lacy little bra that she uncovered.

  “I hope you didn’t have too many expectations,” she murmured, fascinated at her own boldness with him, “because this thing is padded. I…I’m not very big.”

  He frowned. “Padded?”

  She grimaced as she tugged the edges of the blouse apart and unsnapped the clasp that held the cups together. “Padded,” she said, embarrassed.

  “You little fraud,” he teased, but with tender mockery as she balked at pulling the cups aside. “But why should I be disappointed?”

  “Most men like their women voluptuous, don’t they?”

  His lean forefinger traced a path down the valley between her breasts, making little ripples of sensation work their way down her. She lifted helplessly as he trespassed lazily on either side of the valley.

  He laughed in a husky, predatory way. His eyes glittered with feeling. “Men vary in their idea of the perfect woman. Personally,” he whispered as he began to move one of the cups slowly aside, “I like a breast that fits in my mouth.”

  Her expression was priceless. He actually laughed. “Don’t you watch movies?”

  “I watch movies and read books, too,” she choked, lifting again as he traced the cup away to the hard nipple that ached for his touch. “But I never dreamed it would feel like this!”

  “You make me ache to be whole again,” he breathed, watching her eyes as he brushed the cup completely away from her breast and looked down with violent hunger at what he’d uncovered. His fingers traced her breast, lingering on the dark aerole that peaked even more when he took it between his fingers and tested its hardness.

  She made a high-pitched little sound and he searched her face for a few heated seconds before his head bent to her body. “What a wise move I made, to have this cabin soundproofed…!”

  She writhed as if she were being tortured as he took her whole breast into the warm, hot darkness of his mouth and suckled it hungrily. Her nails bit into his broad, warm chest. Her hips twisted into his, her breath seemed suspended in limbo while he made her a sensual prisoner in his arms.

  He started to lift his dark head and she clung, her mouth at his ear.

  “Please don’t stop,” she whispered frantically. “Oh, please!”

  He renewed his efforts, moving from one breast to the other until she shivered, and then down her body to the fastening of her slacks.

  He cursed the fabric as he fought with the closure, and then his mouth was on her flat belly, hard and feverish, and she began to whimper.

  “That won’t do,” he murmured on his way back up to her mouth. “That won’t do at all.”

  While she was trying to think, to make sense of what he was whispering, his lean hands smoothed her slacks and briefs out of his way and he touched her in a way she’d never dreamed a man would.

  “Philippe!” she choked.

  His mouth covered hers while he pleasured her in the tense silence of the cabin. He drew his lips back down to her firm little breast and he suckled her insistently while his hands explored her so intimately that she could have wept for the embarrassment. But even while she was trying to protest, he did something that lifted her completely off the bed. Her startled, horrified eyes met his glittering ones for just a space of seconds before she went over some hot, urgent precipice and began to shudder rhythmically with a pleasure she’d never experienced. Her eyes closed as she arched toward those skillful hands, inhibitions washed away by ecstasy as she felt the first climax of her life…

  She wept then, clinging to him for comfort as he enfolded her against him and rocked her, pressing her naked breasts into the thick mat of hair that wedged down his broad chest. He’d satisfied her, and he was still aroused. It was more than he’d ever hoped for. If he could maintain it for even this long,
there was every chance that eventually he could…have her!

  He lifted his head and looked down at her faintly flushed face, her wide, secretive, shamed eyes. She was still trembling in the aftermath of what he’d given her.

  He pushed back her disheveled blond hair, which was loose and flowing around her face. “When I told you that I could give you satisfaction,” he murmured, “this is what I meant.”

  She swallowed, still embarrassed, but fascinated by the look in his eyes. “Is that how sex feels?” she whispered.

  He smiled tenderly. “I think so. I’m not sure I remember,” he teased.

  Her nails curled into his chest. “Philippe?”

  He bent and brushed his mouth over her eyes. “Yes.”

  “You…you’re still aroused,” she whispered.

  “Very aroused,” he admitted. “It comes as a surprise to me as well. I haven’t been able to maintain it for this long before.”

  She touched his firm chin lightly and then his chiseled, beautiful mouth. “If you want to try…”

  He watched her with dark, brooding eyes. “You would do that for me? Offer me your chastity without marriage?”

  She bit her lower lip. “You’re a head of state,” she began. “When you marry, it will have to be someone equally important.”

  His hands smoothed into her disheveled hair and spread it on the pillow. “It will have to be a woman who can live with my limitations, whatever they turn out to be,” he said quietly. “Just because I can maintain an arousal like this is no proof of my capability in bed. I have a genuine loss of sensation. It may never be possible for me to climax, Gretchen,” he said bluntly. “No, don’t turn your face away. We must speak of it. I can never give you a child, regardless of whether or not I can become your lover. The damage, as I let you discover in a small way, is terrible. Even more terrible than I can show you.”

  “Have you seen a doctor in the past nine years, since they made their original diagnosis?”

  “I have no need to,” he said heavily. He rolled away from her, onto his back, and stared up at the ceiling. “My mirror tells me everything there is to know, when I can bear to look at myself.”