She was trained for nothing in particular, but she was bright and adaptable and her willingness to work meant that the rest of the hotel staff liked her. Her bookworm habit had given her a knowledge of the world which didn’t match her haphazard schooling, which meant she could talk easily to anyone—so the customers liked her, too. A year after joining the Hindmarsh Hotel, she could begin to see a future for herself in the hospitality industry.
The barmaid had been off sick one day and Catrin had stepped in at short notice, when Murat Al Maisan walked into the bar. A sudden silence descended and Catrin glanced up to find herself looking into a pair of inky eyes. He was staring very hard and it took a moment or two for her to realise that his narrowed gaze was directed at her. If she hadn’t been standing with her back against a wall, she might have thought he was looking at someone else. But he wasn’t.
He was looking at her.
His eyes were travelling over her in a way which if it had been anyone else, Catrin might have found offensive. But with him it didn’t feel a bit offensive. With him, it felt...natural. As if she had been waiting all her life for him to look at her that way. Every vein in her body seemed to open wider to let the ever-quickening pulse of blood through. She could feel her breasts growing heavy and the palms of her hands getting clammy. Her reaction confused her. It scared her and excited her. It made her words come out sounding more clipped than usual, although nothing could disguise the soft lilt of her Welsh accent.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
There was a pause. His eyes were still narrowed. His voice was low and caressing. ‘I suspect you can help me in ways you haven’t even begun to dream of,’ he said, in an accent she’d never heard before.
‘I’m sorry?’
He shook his head, the way people did when they were trying to clear their ears after they’d been swimming. As if he’d just found himself in a place he hadn’t expected to be. ‘Some coffee, I think.’
Catrin raised her eyebrows and spoke to him in exactly the same way as she might speak to any young farmer who had taken temporary leave of their manners. ‘I usually respond better to the word “please”.’
He smiled then, before looking at her with a hard and playful gleam in his eyes. The way a cat looked at a bird which was high up in a tree. ‘Please.’
Afterwards she would discover that it had been impulse which had brought him into the old-fashioned hotel, leaving a whole fleet of accompanying bodyguards kicking their heels outside. He told her later that fate must have lured him there, because he had been meant to meet her. And that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Of course, she hadn’t known any of this as he sat down and began to sip his coffee and asked what her name was. And although she rarely socialised with customers, she found herself standing on the other side of the bar talking to him—or, rather, listening to what he was saying about wind farms, which was the reason for his visit to the area. At that point she still hadn’t discovered that he was a sultan who ruled a vast area of oil-rich land and was wealthy in a way which was outside her understanding.
All she knew was that he spoke like no one else she’d ever heard. His accented voice made her think of velvet and stone. He exuded an air of self-possession she found irresistible. And he flirted in a way she knew was dangerous, but which didn’t stop her from responding. She would have defied any woman on the planet not to have responded.
‘I suppose people must tell you all the time that your eyes are very beautiful,’ he said, making her stomach flip as he sucked on a coffee-dunked lump of sugar. ‘They are the colour of a cactus.’