His mistress. His girlfriend. Whatever she’d been, for once in his life Rami had apparently fallen for a woman who wasn’t his usual type.
He’d been into flash. This woman’s costume, whatever you called it, was flashy, and yet somehow or other she was not. There was something removed about her, something in those dark blue eyes that said, Be careful how you deal with me.
Perhaps that had appealed to Rami. The challenge of getting past the invisible barricade around her. Maybe that had made up for the fact that she didn’t speak in breathy little sentences or flutter her lashes.
Rami had been a sucker for nonsense like that.
Karim couldn’t imagine this woman doing either.
She was tough. Hell, she was fearless.
Any other woman would have screamed for help. Run shrieking into the night. Or, at the very least, begged an intruder for mercy.
She’d come at him with a weapon.
A rather unusual weapon, he thought with wry amusement.
The stiletto-heeled shoe lay on the floor next to him; its mate lay a few feet away. The thing could have done real damage, considering that the heels had to be four or five inches high.
“Stilettos are torture,” a mistress had once admitted, but she’d worn them anyway.
He knew the reason.
Women wore them because they knew damned well that men loved the look those high, thin heels gave to a female body: the slight forward tilt of the pelvis, the added length of leg.
Not that Rami’s woman needed anything to make her legs look longer.
Even now, they seemed endless.
She had stockings on. Hose. Whatever you called sheer black mesh that drew his eyes up and up to where the mesh disappeared beneath that thong.
With stilettos or without them she was a fantastic sight. Sleek. Sexy. All woman.
Why deny it?
She was beautiful, and he was sure it was natural. He’d seen enough women who’d been surgically and chemically enhanced until they were little more than mannequins.
Cheekbones implanted. Lips injected. Foreheads all but immobilized and, worst of all, breasts that looked and felt like balloons instead of soft, warm flesh.
This woman’s breasts would feel just right in a man’s hands. The nipples would taste sweet on his tongue …
Karim felt his body stir.
Hell. He’d been too long without sex. Why else would he react to her? She was beautiful, but she was—she had been Rami’s.
Besides, he liked his women to be … well, at least somewhat demure.
He was a sheikh from an ancient kingdom, a culture still learning to accept some modern concepts about women, but he was also a man of the twenty-first century. He had been educated in the west.