Surrender to the Sheikh

Where they could watch a video and eat their supper lolling around on a sofa, as he had seen his friend Guy do with Sabrina on so many occasions.

‘Very well.’ He nodded, and his mind started ticking over. ‘I can see the wisdom behind your idea. I will get Philip to start looking immediately—’

‘No, Khalim!’ she said, interrupting him. ‘You have to do it like other people do! You go and look at flats. You find the one you want and you do all the transactions. Do it yourself for once! Forget Philip!’

Her feisty challenge drove the blood heatedly around his veins and in that moment his desire to possess her made him feel almost dizzy. But he would have to wait. He would not bed her here with the feckless actor and her sweet but rather untidy flatmate listening to them.

‘I most certainly will, Rose,’ he promised. ‘And with haste.’ He lowered his voice into a sensual whisper. ‘Because believe me when I tell you that I cannot bear to wait for you much longer.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

IT WAS not a flat, of course. It was a magnificent, four-storey house in Chelsea.

‘A flat would have caused too many problems for my security,’ explained Khalim as he showed her through a wealth of magnificent, high-ceilinged rooms. And his Head of Security still had not forgiven him his breach when he had galloped off across the desert sand with Rose locked tightly against him! ‘So what do you think?’ he murmured. ‘Does my Rose approve?’

How could she do anything but? Rose let her gaze travel slowly around the main drawing room. Everywhere she looked she could see yellow and blue flowers—saffron roses and lemon freesias, and the splayed indigo fingers of iris—and she was reminded of the bouquet he had sent her, when he’d first been trying to…

To what? To seduce her? She turned her head, so that he could not see her eyes. Had that been his only intention? Maybe it had, she acknowledged, but something else had grown from that intent. You didn’t share a house with a woman if sex was the only thing on your mind.

Oh, stop it, Rose, she remonstrated with herself. Stop playing Little Miss Wistful.

‘I love it. It’s beautiful,’ she said, and hoped that her voice didn’t sound too wistful. Because they were playing house, not setting up house together, and she must never let herself forget that. But at times like this it wasn’t easy.

She stared in slight awe at the two white sofas with their jade-green cushions, and the low bleached oak coffee-table. ‘It all looks brand-new,’ she commented with approval.

‘That’s because it is.’

Rose raised her eyebrows. Heaven only knew how much he would be paying per month for a place like this. She asked the question she had been dreading asking. ‘How long is the let for?’

There was a momentary pause. ‘I am not renting it,’ he said quietly. ‘I bought it.’

‘You bought it? What, just like that?’ she asked incredulously, until she realised how preposterous she must have sounded. A place like this would be nothing to a man of Khalim’s wealth.

He saw her look of discomfiture. ‘And for security reasons, all the furniture had to be brand-new—’

‘What, in case there was an explosive device stashed behind the sofa?’ she joked, then wished she hadn’t.

‘Something like that,’ he agreed wryly.

‘Sorry. That was a stupid thing for me to say!’

He smiled. ‘How very magnanimous of you, Rose.’

When he smiled like that she was utterly lost. ‘So you’ve bought a house,’ she observed slowly.

‘Well, to be honest—nothing I looked at to rent—’ he remembered the bemusement of house-owners when he’d turned up with his bodyguard in tow ‘—came up to—’

She me

t his glittering black gaze. ‘Palace standards?’ she questioned drily.

How he loved it when she teased him that way! ‘Mmm.’ He swallowed down the desire which had been bubbling over all week. ‘Anyway,’ he finished, ‘it will be a good investment.’

A good investment. Of course. That was how the rich made themselves richer, wasn’t it? They invested.

Trying not to feel a little like a commodity herself, Rose wandered over to one of the huge picture windows which overlooked an intensely green square surrounded by iron railings and looked out.

‘A very good investment, I’m sure,’ she echoed.