Date with a Surgeon Prince(35)

‘I will drive you home.’

Gaz appeared at her side as the women left the dining room. He took her hand once again and placed it on his arm in the formal manner he had used before.

She said goodbye to the women she had met, sought out Alima to thank her for the evening, then let Gaz guide her to the door, exhaustion nipping at her heels as the tension she hadn’t realised she’d been feeling drained from her.

Pausing at the front door, she managed to get one sandal on but was having trouble with the second when Gaz knelt and slipped it on her foot.

‘Oh, no!’ she protested, not sure whether to laugh or cry, ‘that is just far too Cinderella! Is your car a pumpkin?’

He looked at her, bemused, but at least it gave her something to talk to him about, explaining the story of Cinderella and her prince.

‘They were real, these people?’ he asked, driving through night-quiet streets, the engine in the big saloon purring quietly in the background.

‘No, it’s a children’s fairy-tale,’ Marni told him. ‘It’s just that I can’t help thinking of it.’ She paused, then added quietly, ‘Probably because it’s easier to be thinking of my life right now as a fairy-tale than be worrying over deceiving nice people like your sisters and their friends.’

He had pulled the car over as she was talking and she looked around, seeing a long wall with an arched opening in it, an ornate gate protecting whatever lay behind the walls.

‘You have the photo,’ he said, turning and taking both her hands in his. ‘How is there deceit?’

‘It’s pretence—you asked me to pretend, remember, to get your sisters off your back.’

‘And it is working,’ he said, lifting her hands and kissing the backs of her fingers, one by one, so she had to struggle to keep her brain working while her body melted from something as unsexy as finger kisses. ‘So much so they are asking about the wedding—about when it will be.’

If finger kisses had melted her bones, talk of a wedding sent such heat washing through her she could barely breathe.

Had to breathe!

Had to protest.

‘But we’re doing this to give you time to get to know your job,’ she reminded him, hoping he wouldn’t hear just how shaky her voice was. ‘A wedding, even if we wanted to marry—well, the kind of fuss that would surely entail would interrupt your schedule far more than just being betrothed. It would be a terrible distraction.’

He didn’t reply, simply using his grasp on her hands to draw her closer then dropping his head to kiss her on the lips.

‘This particular distraction,’ he said a long time later, tilting her head so he could look into her eyes, ‘is interrupting my schedule more than you could ever know. If we were married there’d be one distraction less.’

She frowned at him.

‘Are you talking about sex? Is that the distraction that’s so hard to handle?’

He kissed her again, but lightly.

‘Do you not find it so?’ he teased, and just as she was about to admit she felt it, too, she remembered the virginity thing and was flooded with embarrassment.

Should she tell him now?

But how?

What would he think?

That she was frigid, or had something wrong with her?

Or decide she was pathetic, locked in adolescence, as the last man she’d dated had. Christmas cake, he’d called her, apparently a foreign insult for an older virgin, dried out the way a cake did after the twenty-fifth of December.

He’d laughed at the notion that there was anything special about virginity—not that she’d considered it that way. As far as he’d been concerned, it was nothing more than an embarrassing nuisance. Men, he’d told her, expected a woman to have had experience and be able to please a man in bed.

And that had been a man she’d thought she loved!

The thought of telling Gaz—of his reaction—made her tremble. It was one thing to think she could tell some man with whom she was having a virginity-relieving fling about it, but telling Gaz?

‘I think we’d better just stay betrothed,’ she muttered, her voice sounding like a very creaky gate in desperate need of oil.





CHAPTER EIGHT





‘ARE YOU TIRED, or would you walk with me a little way?

Marni, who’d been expecting an argument, or at least further discussion, over the marriage business, was startled.

‘Walk?

‘In the oasis,’ Gaz said, waving a hand towards the gate. ‘Have you been there?’

‘I remember going past the wall on my way somewhere, but haven’t been inside it. Won’t it be dark?’

‘Wait and see,’ Gaz said. He was already opening his door, coming around to open hers and offering his hand to help her out.