Read Online Monarch of the Sands by Sharon Kendrick - Free Book Online

about her in a way which was most uncharacteristic? He enjoyed women and they enjoyed him—but he didn’t get hung up about them. Not ever. Sometimes not even when he was thrusting into them and watching dispassionately as they orgasmed around him and squealed their joy. One of his own perceived strengths was emotional detachment and it had always served him well.
    Yet for days now he’d been remembering Francesca’s firm body and her soft, unpainted lips. The way she made him smile when he least expected it. Those deepblue eyes, which had stared at him from the confusion of his unusually restless and troubled dreams. Even when his sometime Russian lover Katya had arrived the other night—wearing nothing but a fur coat and a pair of tiny, crotchless panties—he had sent her away without making love to her.
    Why the hell had he done that?
    Wouldn’t the best thing of all be for him to send Francesca away, too?
    Because Zahid recognised that something had changed between them—and changed for ever. He no longer saw her as simply Francesca, his innocent childhood friend. He saw her now as a woman—a sexy and experienced woman who had just emerged from a bruising experience. And wasn’t that dangerous?
    Wouldn’t she be feeling very natural frustration now that her relationship with Simon had ended? Wasn’t there a danger that close confinement might prove too much of a temptation for them both?
    He saw her reach out to touch the petals of a spray of orchids with light, tentative fingers and he was just imagining how delicate her touch might be on his aching skin when the telephone rang.
    The sound ruptured his reverie. ‘Answer it,’ he said abruptly.
    ‘But—’
    ‘I said, answer it.’
    Frankie’s heart was thudding as she walked over towards the bureau and picked up the phone. Should she announce that it was the sheikh’s phone? Probably not. It could so easily be the press. ‘Hello?’
    A woman’s sultry and faintly disgruntled voice came down the line. ‘Who the hell are you?’
    Frankie’s fingers tightened around the receiver; she felt fired up by some unknown instinct which had the little hairs on the back of her neck prickling. She wanted to say, “Who the hell are
you
?”, but something stopped her and that something was Zahid watching her very closely. ‘May I help you?’ she questioned politely.
    ‘Sure you can. I want to speak to Zahid.’
    There was the briefest of pauses before Frankie spoke. ‘I’m afraid that the sheikh is unavailable at the moment.’ From the other side of the room, she saw Zahid raise his eyebrows in silent question. ‘But if you’d like to give me your name and number, I’ll make sure he gets it.’
    ‘My name is Katya,’ snapped the voice. ‘And he already has my number—tell him to damned well use it!’
    The connection was broken abruptly and Frankie replaced the phone, looking up to find Zahid’s now inscrutable expression fixed on her. Her heart was thudding fiercely and she wondered who the woman with the sultry voice was.
    ‘Who was it?’ he demanded.
    ‘Katya.’
    His eyes narrowed. ‘You didn’t bother checking whether I wanted to speak to her?’
    Awkwardly, Frankie wriggled her shoulders. Had she overstepped the mark and allowed her feelings of undeniable jealousy to influence her reaction?
    ‘She sounded slightly … angry,’ she explained, in a sudden rush. ‘And I thought that the call might be of a personal nature, which you probably wouldn’t care to take in front of me. Alternatively, if I’d asked you whether you wished to take the call and you’d declined—then that would have been embarrassing forall three of us. I made a judgement, Zahid—which is presumably the reason you asked me to answer your phone.’ Tentatively, she chewed on her lip as he continued to stare at her in that expressionless way. ‘Was it the wrong one?’
    There was a pause while he regarded her thoughtfully. A bold judgement, he thought as he met