His Queen by Desert Decree

And without the smallest warning, Azrael smiled and it illuminated his serious features like a sudden flash of sunlight, firing up the gold in his eyes enhanced by his ridiculously thick black lashes, accentuating his exotic cheekbones, revealing even white teeth and a wonderfully shapely mouth. That charismatic smile made him so handsome that her heart jumped inside her and her tummy dropped as though she had gone down in a lift too fast. She was startled; her mouth ran dry and her breath caught in her throat.

‘So, it’s my fault that you shout,’ Azrael derided silkily in a tone she had never heard from him before.

‘Yes,’ Molly replied squarely. ‘I find you extremely annoying. You try to tell me what to do. You patronise me. Then you freeze if I get annoyed...but you’re the one making me annoyed!’

Azrael paced closer as silent as a stalking cat on the trail of prey. ‘I don’t annoy other people—’

‘And I don’t shout at anyone else,’ Molly interposed.

‘Perhaps you are focusing your anger with Tahir on me,’ Azrael suggested.

‘No!’ Molly disagreed, reluctant to acknowledge that she could possibly be that unaware of her own responses. ‘But why did nobody tell me that I was teaching a teenager? Looking at him, I’d never have guessed that he was still only a boy. Someone should have told me what age he was.’

Azrael lifted a fine ebony brow. ‘Or you should have asked one of the embassy staff.’

‘I had no reason to suspect he was that young and I’m not sure it changes anything.’ Molly looped a long coppery rope of curls back from her hot face and glowered at Azrael accusingly. ‘Why should it change anything? It was a grown-up crime,’ she blustered, not knowing what she planned to do or how she felt about the unexpected fact she had just learned.

But the fact of the matter was that occasionally teenagers did do crazy things and, ironically, nobody knew that better than Molly. At the age of fourteen, Molly had packed her bag and run away from her family home. She had planned to go to London to become a musician in a band, for goodness’ sake. Sadly, the cost of the train fare had thwarted that fanciful ambition and in a rage of tempestuous teenage fury she had landed on Maurice’s doorstep, where he had talked some sense back into her.

Maurice had returned her to her father’s home and when she had seen her, her stepmother had said angrily, ‘I knew it was too good to be true. I knew you’d come back again!’

And then her father and Maurice had had an argument, for which she had also received the blame. Her slight shoulders drooped at her distressing recollection of that day. That was the moment that she knew that she would not approach the police in London about what Tahir had done. He was sixteen and, while she couldn’t forgive him for the fright he had given her and the risk he had taken with her health, she knew that teenagers could make stupid decisions and fatal mistakes and she realised that she no longer wanted him to pay the full adult price for his wrongdoing.

In addition, if she went to the police about what Tahir had done, it would inevitably attract the interest of the press and she didn’t want her name and her face splashed across the newspapers or people speculating about whether or not she might have encouraged Tahir in his delusions. Nor would the subsequent scandal improve her employment prospects. No, there would be no benefit to her in making an official complaint.

Abstractedly, she studied Azrael, guessing that he had probably been a very sensible teenager with an outlook older than his years. ‘You never did tell me how far we are out here from the airport.’

‘Several hundred miles,’ Azrael murmured, his attention welded to the tender fullness of her naturally pink lips while he inevitably wondered if they would taste as soft and lush as they looked.

Her green eyes flew wide. ‘Several hundred?’ she repeated in disbelief, clashing with shimmering dark golden eyes that made her feel oddly light-headed and even more oddly detached from her brain. ‘But how did you get me to the fortress yesterday?’

‘By helicopter, of course,’ Azrael explained. ‘We fly in and out. The cars pick us up at the landing site and drive us the rest of the way—’

‘But there must be a road somewhere nearby—’

‘No. Beyond the oil fields we do not yet have a country-wide network of roads, nor will we have until our construction engineers embark on that project,’ Azrael admitted, faint colour lining his sculpted cheekbones. ‘This part of the desert has always been fairly inaccessible.’

Molly experienced a sudden startling desire to smooth her fingers gently across one of those exotic cheekbones and so foreign was that forbidden prompting that her face began to flush as she questioned it. She had never before wanted to touch a man of her own volition. Her fingers fluttered and her nails bit into her palms, her breathing struggling in the new tightness of her chest. A kind of craving was snaking through her like a wildfire that burned everything that stood before it, and it shook her because that craving was so powerful it swallowed all common sense.

A drumming boom sounded outside the cave and she flinched.

‘It is only the storm,’ Azrael breathed tautly when a crashing roar seemed to shake the very rock walls of the cavern protecting them.

‘I would have hated being caught outside in that,’ Molly admitted shakily, ultra-conscious of the smouldering silence enclosing them and speaking in a deliberate attempt to shatter an atmosphere that was becoming suffocating. ‘I didn’t realise it would be so violent.’

‘The elements in our climate are often violent and perverse,’ Azrael declared huskily, reaching for her hand and tugging her closer, knowing that what he was doing was wrong but utterly unable to continue battling the urge to touch her. ‘Just as you make me feel things I don’t want to feel...’

Her hand engulfed in his, Molly looked up at him, knowing she should back away, knowing that she should be listening to the voice of reason inside her head. But that close to Azrael she couldn’t think, she could only feel. And what she felt just then was the incredibly seductive sensation of being thrillingly alive, her heart thumping fast while adrenalin raced in her veins.

‘Tell me not to touch you,’ Azrael urged thickly, brilliant dark deep-set eyes shimmering like gold ingots across her hectically flushed face.

CHAPTER FOUR

AND MOLLY COULDN’T tell Azrael that because she didn’t want to. Even the innocent word, touch, awakened a storm of seething curiosity and volatile awareness inside her. Her body felt as primed as though a detonator were ready to set it off. She was on the very edge of that fierce craving and, without the smallest hesitation, her hands came up to reach into the front of his robe to bring him closer.

That fast Azrael’s mouth came down hard on hers, driving her lips apart for the savage plunge of his tongue. Molly shuddered, excitement leaping high as flames flared inside her, the hot liquidity at the heart of her swiftly becoming a burning, unbearable ache. Within seconds she wanted more than she had ever wanted before in a man’s arms and she was locked to every long, virile line of him on tiptoe, her hands lacing into the silky depths of his luxuriant black hair. More, more, more, her body seemed to scream with single-minded purpose as the raw hunger threatened to consume her. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think of anything but her instinctive fear that he would let her go.

Azrael tried to let her go but because he had supressed the attraction so hard one tiny taste of Molly’s yielding mouth unleashed a ferocious surge of lust. He was utterly aroused, throbbing close to