Lustful Intrigue: Forbidden Love Amidst Duty's Chains

Damien would not be blackmailed by any woman, no matter how strong her need for sexual fulfillment.

He leaned against the library door, narrowing his eyes to see the woman standing in front of the half-circle bay of floor-to-ceiling windows. Wispy tendrils of fog connected her to the opening curtains, the former a monolith of black wool and the latter sentry columns of yellow silk.

Rebecca Petre.

He didn't identify her, who was dressed head to toe in a hat and shapeless black cloak and had her back to him. But he wouldn't know her if she was nude and facing him, arms and legs spread wide in shameless invitation.

He was the Bastard Sheikh, the illegitimate child of an English countess and an Arab sheikh. She was the wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and her father was the Prime Minister of England.

She and him did not interact except behind closed doors and between silky beds.

Damien remembered the black-haired woman whose bed he had departed barely an hour before. The Marchioness of Clairdon had met him at the ballum rancum, a whore's ball, where he had danced nude among the other prostitutes. She had used him to fuel her desire for sexual titillation, and for a few hours, he had transformed into the animal she thought he was, thrusting, grinding, and pounding into her body in search of that perfect release where there was no past, no future, no Arabia, and no England-only blinding oblivion.

Perhaps he would accept this lady as well, if she hadn't purposefully pushed her way into his house via coercion and extortion.

With muscles clenched in quiet hostility, he pulled away from the cold press of mahogany and padded over the Persian carpet that covered the library floor. "What do you want, Mrs. Becky Petre, that you invade my home and threaten my citizenship?"

His voice, a raspy purr of English polish covering Arab brutality, bounced off the three sash windows and chased the curving brass curtain pole that rimmed the twelve-foot-high bay ceiling.

He could feel the woman's anxiety, practically smell it through the moist fog.

Damien wanted her to be terrified.

He wanted her to understand how vulnerable she was, alone in the Bastard Sheikh's den, with neither her husband nor father to defend her.

He wanted her to understand in the most basic and fundamental way imaginable that his body was his to gift and that he would not be coerced into having sex.

Damien halted beneath the burning chandelier, waiting for her to turn and face the repercussions of her decisions.

Burning gas hissed and bubbled through the frigid quiet.

"Come now, Mrs. Petre, you were not so reticent with my servant," he gently teased, knowing what she desired, daring her to say the forbidden words, familiar ones, I want to diddle an Arab; I want to rut with a bastard. "What could a woman like you possibly want from a man like me?"

Slowly, slowly, the figure turned, a black swirl of wool framed by glittering yellow silk draperies. The dark veil covering her face did not conceal her horror at seeing him.

Damien's lips twisted in derision.

He understood what she was thinking. What every Englishwoman thought upon first seeing him.

Half-Arab men do not have sun-kissed wheat-colored hair.

Half-Arab men do not wear fitted attire like English gentlemen.

A man who is partly Arab.-

"I want you to teach me how to give a man pleasure."

The woman's voice was muffled by the veil, but her words were clear.

They were not the words he was expecting.

Damien's heart stopped pounding in his chest for a single, timeless second. Erotic pictures rushed before his eyes... of a lady... naked... taking him... in every way a woman can take a man... for both his and her pleasure.

He felt a burning sensation in his crotch. Against his will, he could feel his skin growing and hardening, recalling pictures that would never exist, exiled as he was in this cold, passionless land where women used him for their own needs-or scorned him for his.

His nerves twitched with wrath.

Becky Petre, for invading his house for selfish reasons under the premise of learning how to pleasure a guy.

At himself, who, at the age of thirty-eight, still craved what she had to offer, although knowing it was a lie: Englishwomen were not interested in learning what satisfied a bastard sheik.

Damien deliberately and aggressively reduced the gap between himself and the woman who hid behind a shroud of respectability.

To her credit, she did not flee from his rage.

To his credit, he was fine with simply pulling down her veil.

She could easily see his Arabian ancestry up close, free of the sheer black cloth that obscured her view. His complexion was brown and sunburned, and his hair was sun-kissed.

Now she'd know that his English gentleman persona was simply that: a veneer. He had learnt to be a man in a nation where women are valued half as much as men-a woman might be sold, raped, or killed for daring considerably less than this lady did now.

Becky Petre should be terrified.

"Now, tell me again what you want," he said softly.

She was unconcerned with the stench of whiskey, perfume, perspiration, and sex that he gave out.

"I want you to teach me how to give a man pleasure," she said gently, leaning her head back so she could meet his eyes.

She didn't stand taller than five feet three inches, and she had a long way to gaze up.

Mrs. Becky Petre had extraordinarily white skin, the kind of white that on an Arabian auction block indicated a woman's bondage. She wasn't young. Damien estimated her to be in her early forties. Faint creases extended from the corners of delicate hazel eyes. The face pulled up to his was rounder than oval, the nose more pug than aquiline, and her lips were too thin. Her pupils were dilated, yet her expression was devoid of the anxiety that she must be experiencing.

Ela'na. Damn. Why didn't she reveal it?