Nikos grimaced. ‘I didn’t care about much until I met Maggie again and knew I had a son. Now everything is changed.’ He looked at Liyah and smiled. ‘I blame my wife for the fact that I can’t seem to keep anything to myself these days.’
Liyah smiled too. ‘She’s very sweet.’
Nikos looked over her head, presumably at his wife, and said, ‘Yes she is.’ And then, in an ominous voice, ‘Incoming—behind you. I warn you now: the man is a terrible dancer.’
Nikos disappeared into the crowd just as Sharif appeared in her eyeline. He was glowering after his brother. They stood in the middle of the dance floor, with couples moving around them.
Sharif took Liyah’s hand and moved to walk off, but she dug her heels in and hissed, ‘It’s the middle of the song.’
Sharif faced her. ‘I told you I don’t do this sort of thing.’
Liyah stepped close to him. Lifted her hands. For a moment Sharif looked so like a petulant little boy that she had to bite back a laugh. But then he muttered something and took her into his arms.
Instantly flames raced along Liyah’s veins. Her core grew heavy and hot with desire. Sharif didn’t have his brother’s fluidity, it was true, but he moved with competent grace for such a big man.
Liyah looked up. ‘Why do you hate dancing so much? You’re not as bad as—’ She cut herself off at Sharif’s sharp look.
‘Nikos oversharing again? Marriage and fatherhood have turned his brain soft.’
When he didn’t say anything else, Liyah prompted, ‘Well...?’
Sharif sighed. ‘My father made me go to the Bal des Débutantes, here in Paris.’
‘I know of it... I didn’t go, but my sisters did.’
Liyah felt the familiar prickle of shame and tried to ignore it. The Bal des Débutantes was an invitation-only exclusive event, designed to introduce prominent young men and women of the world to society. Obviously she hadn’t been deemed prominent enough by her family.
Sharif said, ‘You were lucky. My father and I were both invited. Except my father didn’t turn up. I missed the waltz class before the event and I was the only cavalier at the ball who didn’t know how to dance. Throw in the fact that my father was reaching nuclear levels of press coverage at the time, and my mixed race heritage among the blue-eyed Princes of Europe made me stand out like a sore thumb... It didn’t end well.’
Liyah’s eyes widened. ‘You got into a scrap?’
Sharif lifted the hand holding hers and pointed at a scar by his jaw.
Liyah reached out and ran her finger along the small indentation.
The moment Liyah’s finger touched Sharif’s skin an electric jolt went right down to his solar plexus. He stopped moving. She looked up at him, eyes huge. Her hair flowed over her shoulders, marking her out amongst all the other women with their complicated up-dos and overdone faces.
He didn’t know what had compelled him to tell her to leave her hair down.
Yes, you do. You wanted to see her again as you saw her that night. Naked. Wild.
He shoved the provocative thought aside.
Once again she made everyone else pale in comparison. She was vibrant. Full of an earthy sensuality that called to him on such an urgent and deep level that Sharif knew he was fighting a losing battle.
She barely had to touch him and he burned. He felt volatile, and it hadn’t been helped by seeing Nikos and Maggie.
Being around his brothers, and now their wives, always put him on edge, left him filled with mixed emotions. Protectiveness, regret, affection... But also a strong instinct not to trust—and guilt. Because he hadn’t told them everything he was planning.
Just seeing Liyah dancing with Nikos, smiling at whatever he was saying, had made the darkness inside him lash and roar, even when he knew for a fact that Nikos had eyes only for Maggie. He’d learnt
not to test Nikos’s loyalty in that regard, and now, with Maggie pregnant again, they inhabited a place that Sharif could not understand.
Seeing them so happy brought back painful echoes of his relationship with his mother. Her unconditional love and his feeling of security. Something that he’d told himself he would never need again, because the pain of losing it had been so great.
Sharif gritted his jaw. He really wasn’t in the mood for these introspective thoughts. And yet here was Liyah, her huge green eyes looking up at him and making him feel as if she was seeing all the way down to where he kept his darkness hidden.
He’d noticed the emotion in her eyes when he’d shown her the press release about those paparazzi photos claiming to be of her. He knew damn well that he could have left it alone...that his comment about her reputation hadn’t been entirely true—those photos had barely made a dent in the mainstream gossip columns. But he’d seen how much it had affected her when she’d told him about it, and he’d wanted to avenge her. So he’d instructed his legal team to extract an apology and a retraction from the magazine or force them to face a lawsuit.