He sighed. Well, let his brothers make of it what they would. He had much more important things to think about now, like a country full of people who had been offered morsels through years where the Emir had grown rich on its resource revenues. Things needed to change. Less money would be lavished on palaces and fripperies. More money would go to funding schools and hospitals, especially outside the city, where needs went unseen and often ignored when they were.
His grip on the alabaster balustrade of the balcony tightened until his knuckles hurt.
It was easy to see where the inequities and injustices lay, but there was so much to address. Could he fix the problems of the past thirty years of maladministration?
Why was he even considering it?
But then somebody had to do it—share the riches and drag this country into the twenty-first century—and he was next in line to the throne.
His gut screwed tighter all over again. God, what was he even doing here? He was a petroleum engineer by day with a reputation as a playboy by night. Apart from his DNA, what qualifications did he have to equip him to run a country?
He looked around. There was that sound again. The child, he realised. But this time there was more.
She was singing that song again.
Both drawn and repelled in the same instant, he watched as Tora emerged from her suite, the baby clutched in her arms as she sang the soft, soothing words of a lullaby he never knew and yet that somehow tugged at some deep part of him. He melted into the shadows as she swayed in the night air, singing words of comfort and peace, her hair down out of that damned bun, just the way he liked it, while the blue light from the pool below turned her long white nightdress translucent so that it floated like a cloud around her slim legs and tickled the tops of her bare feet.
He swallowed back on a surge of lust as he watched, transfixed.
The breeze toyed with the hem of her nightdress, shifting shadows and whispering promises as she sang of apricots and pigeons and waterfalls, and some of her words were wrong or mispronounced, but it didn’t matter because the overall effect was still beautiful.
She was beautiful.
He stood in the shadows with his heart beating too fast at a mystery he didn’t understand.
He stood there utterly bewitched.
Bewitched and rock hard.
She finished the song, the last of the sweet notes trailing away on the night air, the baby in her arms asleep. She turned to go back inside the same moment as he emerged from the shadows. She gasped.
‘Tora.’
And she took a deep breath and then another. ‘You frightened me. What are you doing on my terrace?’
He looked back the way he had come. ‘It appears we have adjoining terraces, as well as adjoining suites.’
Her eyes blinked her disappointment before shuttering down. ‘Well, goodnight.’
‘Tora, wait.’
‘Why? Atiyah needs to go back to bed.’
He looked at the child, her face at peace in Tora’s arms, oblivious to the electricity charging the air between them. ‘She’s asleep.’
‘Which is where I want to be.’
‘Tora.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘No,’ she said, her soft voice tremulous in the velvet night, ‘why are you here? What do you want?’
A heartbeat later he answered. ‘You.’ And in that moment, Tora lost all perception of time, all cognizance of space. Because Rashid was standing there in nothing more than thin white sleep pants slung low over his hips that made no secret of his arousal. And his chest was bare and in his eyes she could see torment and right now he looked as if he’d been sculpted in shadow.
And then he drew closer and she could see there was more than torment in his dark eyes—something far more carnal.
She shuddered from the top of her head all the way to the tips of toes that curled on the cool paving stone, seeking to get a grip on a world where she was a stranger.
‘Rashid...’ But he was already stepping closer, stepping into her space even as she drew back, her arms protecting the baby, leaving her defenceless as his fingers laced through her hair.
‘Rashid...’
And then his lips brushed hers and she breathed him in and he tasted warm and musky and male and his taste and scent sent her spinning back to the place she’d been that first night. So good. So very good that her body hummed into life as readily as if his lips had flicked a switch.
Oh, God.
She wasn’t about to turn it off.
His lips were as soft as the night sky, the sweep of his tongue like a shooting star to her senses, and there was magic in the air all around them.