She treated him the way he suspected she’d treat anybody else. Anybody else she didn’t like, he thought, and he smiled.
Rachel was a very interesting woman.
She was a woman making it on her own, with a child to raise. That couldn’t be easy. His mother—his and Rami’s—had been a woman with all possible means and resources at her fingertips, yet her sons had been amusing at best and at worst an inconvenience.
He could not imagine Rachel ever feeling inconvenienced by the child.
So what?
Good mother or not, the baby would be better off with him. Being a prince was the child’s destiny. Rachel would get over losing him …
Dammit, why was he thinking about her at all?
His mouth thinned.
He knew why.
Sex.
He wanted Rachel in his bed.
He wanted her naked and moaning beneath him, wanted the taste of her on his tongue. He wanted her scent on him, her wet heat on him, he wanted to sink into her and watch her eyes blur as he made her come and come and come …
Karim cursed and rubbed his hands over his face. He was being a damned fool.
He’d kissed her but that would not happen again. Absolutely it would not. He certainly would not sleep with her—and standing here, thinking about it, was pointless.
He strode through his rooms, yanked open the door and headed for the stairs.
A brandy. Two brandies. Then he’d stop this nonsense, go back to his rooms, fall into bed—
What was that? A faint sound. The wind?
The sound came again.
It was the baby.
Rachel had said something about teething. Babies cried when they teethed; he’d heard that or read it somewhere.
Dammit, that was all he needed. A crying child …
The sound stopped.
Karim waited but it didn’t come again. Either the child had gone back to sleep or Rachel was soothing him …
Enough thinking about Rachel tonight.
Moonlight dappled the living room, lost itself high in the shadowy darkness of the fourteen-foot ceilings. He went straight to his study, to the teak shelves and a Steuben decanter of—