Gambling With the Crown(27)

                “I didn’t say that.” She closed her eyes briefly. “This time, I mean. I was only pointing out what you already know to be true. Lenore would have been a perfectly unsuitable wife, but she wouldn’t have given up the position so easily. Not when it made her a princess and gave her something she could lord over everyone else in her life.”

                “But what you really want to know is what I saw in her in the first place. What I saw in any of them.” His voice was low and intense.

                “That is none of my business.” She knew she sounded prim, and her cheeks flamed. Because he was right, she did want to know. The women he dated were beautiful, but most of them were schemers and, well, groupies of one sort or another. None of them had wanted to see beneath his masks. They’d wanted the prince, the billionaire, the sheikh. They had not wanted the man. Didn’t that bother him? At least a little?

                “Mostly, it was sex.” He went on as if she’d not spoken. “Sometimes, it was companionship. I am not a robot, Emily. I like the warmth of another person next to me. I get lonely, like anyone.”

                Her heart was beating hard now, throbbing in her throat. She’d never thought of him as lonely. Never. He always had people around him. He had friends in every city they visited, and he had women he took to his bed. How could he be lonely?

                But she knew how. She knew because she’d been lonely, too. The loneliest she’d ever felt was in a crowded room. Emptiness was not filled by crowds of people. She was pretty sure it wasn’t filled by sex either, though it had been a long time since she’d experimented with that.

                “I’m sorry.” Her voice was paper-thin. How had this conversation taken a turn like this? It had started out being one thing and ended up as something else entirely. Something that made her heart ache and tears press hard against the backs of her eyes.

                How did he do this to her? How did he take her from murderously angry to aching in the space of only a few moments?

                “And what about you, Emily? Do you get lonely? You cannot have much of a personal life working for me.”

                Her blood felt thick in her veins. Like syrup on a winter’s day. Except she was hot with embarrassment as well. Why had she not seen this coming? Had she really thought she could snap and push him and come away unscathed?

                “My life is fine.”

                He leaned back in the seat then, draped an arm on the armrest between them. His fingers dangled off the end, tapped some imaginary beat in the air. A slow, lazy beat. When she lifted her eyes to his, he was watching her with a hooded expression. Then he picked up that hand and slid his index finger across his lower lip, as if he was thinking.

                Didn’t matter why, since the effect of the gesture was currently what had her beginning to panic. Something bloomed deep inside her, in her core. Some hot, dark feeling that wanted very much to be allowed to blossom into a fuller, darker emotion.

                Emily bit the inside of her lip. After all these years, after how ruthless she’d been with herself, her mother was beginning to creep out. That carnal, needy woman who wanted fun and adventure and licentious couplings with incredibly hot men.

                She put her hands in her lap and clasped them together. She’d worked too hard. Too long. She was nothing like her mother. Sensuality might lurk within her, but she would not give in to that side of her nature ever again. It was under her control. Kadir al-Hassan was not going to reduce her to the kind of woman who would do absolutely anything for one night in his bed. Not ever.

                “Is it?” he finally asked.