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involved.’
    â€˜You’re unbelievable,’ Joanna said, ‘absolutely unbelievable! Do you really imagine you can tell my father what to do? Maybe you should have spent more time in the West, Khalil. Maybe you’d have realised you’re only a man, not a—a tin god whose every insane wish has to be obeyed!’
    â€˜I’m impressed,’ he said, with a condescending little smile, as if she were a pet he’d just found capable of some clever and unexpected trick. ‘Any other woman would be begging for mercy, but not you.’
    Joanna’s chin lifted. ‘That’s right,’ she said, determined not to let him see the depths of her fear, ‘not me! So if that’s why you abducted me—so you could have the pleasure of seeing me grovel and weep for mercy—you’re out of luck.’
    â€˜I’m sorry to disappoint you, Joanna, but my reasons were hardly so petty.’ He gave her a slow, lazy smile. ‘I took you because I can use you.’
    Her eyes flashed to his. ‘Use me?’ she repeated. ‘I don’t—I don’t understand...’
    His smile changed, took on a darkness that made her breath catch, and his gaze moved over her lingeringly, from her wide eyes to her parted lips, and finally to the swift rise and fall of her breasts.
    â€˜Don’t you?’ he said softly.
    â€˜Khalil.’ She swallowed, although the effort was almost painful. ‘Khalil, listen to me. You can’t—you can’t just—’
    â€˜Shall I have you sold at the slave-market?’ He took her face in his hands and tilted it to his. ‘You would bring a king’s ransom in the north, where eyes the colour of jade and hair like the embers of a winter fire are very, very rare.’
    Oh, God, Joanna thought, oh, God...
    â€˜You wouldn’t do that,’ she said quickly. ‘Selling me would be—’
    â€˜It would be foolish.’ He smiled again, a quick angling of his lips that was somehow frighteningly intimate. ‘For only a fool would sell you, once he had you.’
    â€˜Abducting me is foolish, too!’ She spoke quickly, desperately, determined to force him to listen to reason. ‘You must know that you can’t get away with—’
    â€˜What would you be like, I wonder, if I took you to my bed?’
    Patches of scarlet flared in her cheeks, fury driving out the fear that had seconds before chilled her blood.
    â€˜I’d sooner die than go to your bed!’
    He laughed softly. ‘I don’t think so, Joanna. I think you would come to it smiling.’
    â€˜Not in a million years!’
    His fingers threaded into her hair; his thumbs stroked over her skin.
    â€˜How would your skin feel, against mine?’ he said softly. ‘Would it be hot, like fire? Or would it be cool, like moonlight against the desert sand?’
    There it was again, that sense of something dark and primal stirring within her, like an unwanted whisper rising in the silence of the night.
    â€˜You’ll never know,’ she said quickly. ‘I promise you that.’
    Khalil’s eyes darkened. He smiled, bent his head, brushed his lips against Joanna’s. A tiny flicker of heat seemed to radiate from his mouth to hers.
    â€˜Your words are cool, but your lips are warm,’ he murmured. Her breath caught as his hands slid to her midriff. She felt the light brush of his fingers just below her breasts. ‘Fire and ice, Joanna. That is what you are. But I would melt that ice forever.’ He pressed his mouth to her throat. ‘I would turn you to hot flame that burns only for me,’ he said, the words a heated whisper against her skin.
    She wanted to tell him that it was he who’d burn, in the eternal fires of hell—but his arms were tightening around her, he was gathering her close, and before she could say anything he crushed her mouth under his.
    He had spoken of