* * *
A week later, Lily pushed her chair away from the desk and leaned back, rubbing her eyes. She’d spent most of the day looking over some financial reports and the figures were now starting to blur on the page.
The sounds of the fountains in the palace courtyard outside the window were a calming counterpoint, but unfortunately she didn’t feel calm. She felt tired. And worry had started to sink its claws into her.
No one had heard from him. Not even his staff. She suspected the desert tribes might have an inkling about where he’d gone, but all the feelers she’d put out in that direction had come up against brick walls. It was starting to get to the point where she was seriously considering getting one of his security team to take her out in a helicopter to do some fly-bys.
“What a rude and troublesome sheikh you are,” she said to the empty room and the world in general. “I don’t know why your people put up with you.”
Neither the world nor the room gave her an answer to that, so slowly she turned her chair to face the gardens, looking out into the calming green.
Better to look at that than think of him lying dead in the desert, buried by sand.
A strange prickling feeling swept over her. As if she was being watched.
She inhaled softly, collected herself. Then, turned her attention to the doorway because someone was standing there. Looking at her.
An impossibly tall, broad, powerful figure.
Isma’il.
The fierce lines of his face were dark, his skin weathered and roughened by sun and wind, making the startling blue-green of his eyes more intense. He had a brilliant blue headscarf still wrapped around his head, the ends of it stained by sand and sweat and dirt, the same stains marking the loose black Bedouin robes he wore too.
Her heart nearly stopped, the weight of relief and joy crushing it.
“You’re back,” she said, her voice breathless.
“What are you doing here?” It was more a demand than a question.
Slowly, Lily pushed herself out of the chair, gathering her strength. This was one fight she was not going to lose. “You left without saying goodbye. I thought that was rude.”
“You stayed a week in my palace, without my invitation or my permission, merely because you wanted me to say goodbye to you?”
“Dahar is supposed to be famous for its hospitality. I expected more from its sheikh.”
His blue eyes glittered dangerously in his dark face. “My purpose is not to meet your expectations, Ms. Harkness.”
“No. Apparently your purpose is to continually run off into the desert like a frightened boy.”
She put her hands on the desk, so he wouldn’t see them shake. “But if you think I’m going to let you keep doing that, you have another thing coming, Isma’il.”
Something passed over his face, a ripple in the cold, mask he wore. “You do not let me do anything. What you should have done is got back on that jet of yours and gone back to Sydney like you were told to do.”
“Ah yes. Because I always do what you tell me, don’t I?” Lily straightened. “You should know me better than that by now, Sheikh.”
He moved, so swiftly and silently she was barely conscious of the fact he’d done so before he’d crossed the room, rounded the desk, forcing her right back against the hard edge of it. “You should not be here, Lily,” he said harshly. “I told you before that I have nothing to give you.”
The hot, dry smell of the desert was on him, underlain with the spicy, masculine scent that was all Isma’il. He looked brutal, uncivilized, a desert warrior, a stranger.
Lily looked up into his eyes. “Then, I’ll just have to stay here until you do. I’m not leaving, Isma’il. Don’t you see? I love you and I’m here to fight for you. And there’s nothing you can do that will stop me.”
Chapter Eleven
“Then you will have to stop loving me,” Isma’il said hoarsely, shock adding to the pressure of fury already spreading through him. Fury at her for being here where she should not. For reminding him of what a week in the heat of the desert hadn’t been able to erase—the need for her and the unrelenting knowledge that he could not have her.
Lily just looked him up and down, unflinching. “Don’t you dare tell me what I can and cannot feel.”
She was so close. The warmth of her, the scent of her, everything he’d been dreaming about for the past week. He came closer, unable to stop himself. Because he’d expected her to be long gone and she wasn’t. She was here. Right here with him.
A familiar heat lit in her dark eyes and he could feel her excitement at his anger, almost taste it in his mouth.