Judith McWilliams - The Sheik's Secret

Chestnuts were good luck, his nanny had told him. As a boy he’d gathered them by the pocketfuls and hidden them in his room against future need. Which is what he would like to do with this woman. Secrete her away somewhere for his own personal enjoyment.

“Karim?”

Dimly, as if from a distance, Hassan heard the melodic sound of her voice, and his eyes dropped to her lips. A sudden tightness encircled his chest as he studied their delectable curve. They looked so soft. Soft and mobile and made to be kissed.

Karim was out of his tiny little mind, Hassan thought as he remembered his brother’s description of her. Calling her “kind of attractive” was like calling their father “kind of rich”—the understatement of the year. Kali Whitman was the most sensually alluring woman he had ever seen.

He froze as she unexpectedly leaned toward him and kissed his cheek. His guts clenched painfully at the feel of her lips against his skin, and it was all he could do not to grab her and capture her mouth with his own. He wanted—

His head examined, he thought uneasily. Kali Whitman had been taken advantage of enough by his brother without him compounding the sin by kissing her.

Kali stared up into his face, instinctively shaking her head in an attempt to banish the surge of desire that had so unexpectedly engulfed her when she’d kissed him. What was the matter with her? she wondered uncertainly. She’d kissed Karim when she’d accepted his proposal. Or rather he’d kissed her. A rather restrained touching of their lips that she found vaguely pleasant. So why was it different this time?

And it was different. For a timeless moment she’d completely lost track of what she’d wanted to say to him. All she’d been able to think about was how she’d felt. Excited and full of anticipation. As if he really were a beloved fiancé who’d just returned from an interminable absence.

Troubled, Kali studied his face, looking for a clue to explain her strange reaction. She couldn’t find one. Except for appearing slightly paler, as if he’d spent the entire two weeks of his conference in Australia inside, he looked exactly the same as she remembered. Her inexplicable sense of disorientation grew as she suddenly noticed the silvery sparks that seemed to swirl through his night-dark eyes. Funny, she’d never noticed them before. She blinked, and they were gone, making her wonder if she really had seen them.

“Um, I…” Hassan said, and Kali winced at the uncertain note in his voice. Poor Karim, he’d asked her to marry him because she was a levelheaded, intelligent woman not given to romantic excesses, and here she was staring at him like a teenager unexpectedly faced with her favorite rock star.

Feeling gauche, Kali rushed to say, “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you. I was afraid you wouldn’t get back in time.”

“In time?” Hassan repeated, looking for an opening to break his news.

Kali stepped back. The added distance helped her to think a little more clearly. From here she couldn’t smell the delicious scent that clung to him. It reminded her of woodlands and sunshine and crisp autumn air. And it wasn’t the one he’d been wearing the night he’d taken her out to celebrate their engagement. Perhaps it was something he’d picked up in Australia? If so, she hoped he’d brought plenty of it back with him because it was—

A distraction, she hurriedly cut off the thought. She needed to concentrate on her problem, not on how she was finding Karim so inexplicably attractive.

“Karim—”

“Hassan,” he corrected her.

Kali blinked in confusion, wondering why he’d suddenly decided he wanted to be called by a nickname. Worry about it later, she told herself. For now she needed to focus on a more urgent problem.

“My mother called last night to warn me that my nephew’s christening is tomorrow,” she said.

“Warn?” Hassan picked up on the odd word. He’d been to a couple of christenings, and he couldn’t remember anything about the ceremony that would necessitate a warning.

Kali grimaced. “You remember when I accepted your proposal I said that a marriage based on friendship and shared interests was what I wanted, too?”

Hassan frowned, taken aback. She still thought he was his brother, but why? He’d told her his name was Hassan. Unless Karim hadn’t bothered to tell her that he had a twin brother? Or even a brother named Hassan.

He opened his mouth to explain who he really was, but before he could get the words out she continued.

“You see, I didn’t mention it at the time, but the reason I feel that way is because I had an experience with the falling-madly-in-love bit. And it was a disaster.”

Hassan was appalled at the echo of remembered pain and humiliation he could see shimmering in the depths of her gorgeous eyes. He wanted to thump the lout who was responsible for that look.

“I take it he turned out to be a jerk?”

Kali sighed. “No, it would have been a whole lot easier to deal with if he had been. To make a long, sad story short, a month before the wedding Bart met my younger sister, Annette, for the first time. It was a classic case of love at first sight for them both. Bart married her instead of me.”

Driven by a need to console her, Hassan reached out and pulled Kali’s slender body against his, holding her comfortingly close.

“That must have been rough,” he finally said.

Kali closed her eyes as she savored the feel of his hard body pressing into her much-softer curves. He felt so good. So solidly reassuring, and he was showing far more empathy than her short acquaintance with him would have led her to believe he possessed. A fact that pleased her since it argued well for the success of their marriage.

Stepping out of his arms, she said, “I was pretty upset about Bart’s defection at the time, but that was almost two years ago. I’ve long since gotten over him. In fact, these days I find him a bit of a bore. The problem is that my family thinks I’m harboring this great unrequited love for him. When I try to tell them that I could care less, they just smile and tell me that I’m being so brave.”

Hassan chuckled at her indignant expression, and the warm sound rolled through Kali, drowning her annoyance. She’d never heard Hassan chuckle before. It was the most sexually enticing sound she’d ever experienced. And the most distracting. She fought to keep her focus on what she wanted to say and not on how she felt.

“So I thought that if I were to take you with me to the christening of Bart and Annette’s baby tomorrow and introduce you to my family, they’ll realize that I’m not still hankering after Bart.

“And you did say that we’d go out and meet them when you got back,” she added when he didn’t respond.

Now what? Hassan wondered in dismay. This was hardly the time to tell her that not only wasn’t he Karim, but Karim had changed his mind about marrying her. She’d be humiliated when she had to go home and tell her family that she’d been rejected by yet another fiancé.

Hassan stared down into her soft, brown eyes and felt a surge of tenderness at the uncertainty he could see there. He couldn’t do it to her. Not without some warning. And his bad news could easily wait until after the christening. In fact, it would probably be better to tell her then. That way she’d have some time to figure out the best way to tell her family about Karim’s defection.

And he did have the weekend free. He didn’t have to be back in Boston until Monday morning.

But to impersonate his brother…That was the kind of impulsive behavior that had always characterized Karim, not him. He was the cautious twin. The one who could always be counted on to do the right thing.

But wasn’t minimizing the impact Karim’s defection had on Kali the right thing to do? Or was he simply rationalizing his inexplicable desire to see more of her even though he knew perfectly well that nothing could ever come of it.

His motives were irrelevant, he finally decided. His family owed Kali a fiancé for the weekend. Since he was the only one in America at the moment, it was up to him to pay the debt.

“I’ll go,” Hassan blurted out and then winced at the curt sound of his acceptance. He’d sounded as if he were agreeing to something he didn’t want to do, and it wasn’t like that at all.

“Thanks, Karim. Um…Hassan. Why do you want to be called Hassan all of a sudden?” she asked.

“It’s my nickname in the family,” he lied. “And I much prefer it to Karim.”

“Oh,” Kali muttered, wondering why he hadn’t mentioned his preference of names when she’d accepted his proposal. Although there hadn’t been much opportunity for him to tell her anything so far, she reminded herself. The only time they’d had together was that one rushed evening before he’d had to fly to Australia. This really was the first chance he’d had.

Hassan shifted from one handmade shoe to the other as he quickly sifted through his mind, looking for another topic of conversation. One that didn’t have any hidden dangers to it. Not only did the thoughtful expression on her face make him very uneasy, but he didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to go back to Karim’s empty apartment. He wanted to stay here and listen to the seductive sound of Kali’s voice.

He wanted to do a whole lot more than talk to her, he admitted. His eyes instinctively homed in on her luscious lips. He wanted to pull her back into his arms and cover her mouth with his. He wanted to taste the essence of her. He wanted to breathe in the luxuriant floral scent that clung to her. She was like an erotic gift that a benevolent deity had packaged for some lucky man.

A gift! He suddenly remembered that one took a present to christenings.

“What did you buy for the baby?”

“Nothing yet,” Kali said. “I was going to pick something up during my lunch hour yesterday, but like most Fridays I wound up running late and never got around to it.”

“Why don’t we go and buy something now?”

The sudden spurt of pleasure that shot through Kali at the thought of spending the afternoon with him caught her by surprise. But why shouldn’t she find pleasure in his company? She was going to marry the man. It was probably just the thought of spending tomorrow, with her sister giving her guilty looks, that had unsettled her. Once the christening was over, things would return to normal.

“I’d love to. I—” Kali paused as she suddenly remembered something. “Did you bring my boomerang?”

“Boomerang?” he asked cautiously.

“You forgot to get it.” She gave him a ruefully exasperated look that made him want to kiss it off her lips…and then to keep on kissing her until she couldn’t remember the first thing about boomerangs.

“I just forgot to bring it with me,” Hassan said, hastily improvising. “I’ll give it to you tomorrow.

“Would you mind if I used your bathroom before we go shopping?” As soon as he asked, he wished he hadn’t. He had no idea where her bathroom was, and his brother would surely have known.

“Help yourself.” Kali made a faint gesture toward the hallway at the back of the living room.

Hassan walked toward it, trying to look more sure of himself than he felt. To his relief, the bathroom door was ajar.

Slipping inside, he hastily closed the door behind him. He turned the water on full force to hide the sound of his voice, hurriedly dialed his father’s consulate on his cell phone and asked for the consul, Mohammed. A minute later, Hassan had arranged for a boomerang to be delivered the following morning to Karim’s apartment.