Girl in the Bedouin Tent Read Free Page B

self-deprecating humour. He was a cool customer. Being attacked by a desperate woman wielding a knife hadn’t ruffled his composure one iota!
    Nor had it affected his exquisite manners. With another graceful movement he reached for a ewer and bowl and silently invited her to wash her hands. Despite her dire situation, or perhaps because of it, his old-fashioned courtesy soothed her shredded nerves.
    Slowly Cassie extended her hands over the bowl. He poured water over her fingers, waited till she rubbed them clean, then poured again.
    He passed her a towel of fine cotton, careful not to touch her. Cassie drew in a quick breath of relief and dried her hands, trying not to notice that even his hands were attractive—strong and well shaped.
    Instead she concentrated on the soft comfort of the towel. How different the luxury here compared with the Spartan tent where she’d been held!
    Only the best for a royal sheikh.
    ‘Besides,’ he continued as if uninterrupted, ‘the chain could have been a ploy.’
    ‘A ploy?’ Cassie’s voice rose and her body froze in outrage. ‘A ploy? You think I’m wearing this thing for
fun?
It’s heavy and uncomfortable and … inhuman!’
    And it made her feel like a chattel, a
thing
rather than a person.
    Cassie pulled the thick cloak tighter round herself, seeking comfort in its concealing folds.
    The abduction had been shocking and terrifying, but beingtethered with a chain like an animal plumbed the depths of her darkest fears. It put her captors’ intentions on a new and horrible level.
    Even her mother, whose life had revolved around pleasing a man, had never faced a reality so brutal.
    ‘As you say. Even in this lawless part of the world, I didn’t expect to find kidnap and slavery.’
    At her wide-eyed stare he went on. ‘In the old days, centuries ago, slaves were held that way.’ He nodded curtly to the chain that snaked across the floor towards the bed. ‘It’s a slave chain. I thought it possible Mustafa had used it symbolically, rather than seriously.’
    ‘You thought I might have
agreed
to this? That I
chose
to dress this way?’ Cassie snapped her mouth shut, remembering her struggles as the women had stripped her clothes away. The horror when they’d produced this gaudy outfit that barely covered her breasts and drew attention to every curve.
    She remembered too the searing look, quickly veiled, in this man’s eyes when she’d been brought before him in the communal tent. It had heated her as no fire could.
    ‘I didn’t know what to think. I don’t know you.’
    Cassie drew a calming breath. Finally she nodded.
    He was right. He knew as little of her as she did of him. The chain
could
have been a stage prop worn for effect—there to spice the jaded appetites of a man who got turned on by the idea of a woman totally at his mercy. A woman with no function but to please him.
    Was Amir that sort of man?
    Without warning that ancient memory broke through her weary brain’s defences again. The one memory she usually kept locked tightly away. Of Curtis Bevan, who’d been her mother’s lover the year Cassie turned sixteen. How he’d strutted around her mother’s apartment with condescending pride, knowing everything there was bought with his money. Even his lover. How he’d turned his proprietorial eyes on Cassie that day she’d come home for Christmas—
    ‘Cassie?’
    The sound of her name in that soft-as-suede voice shattered the recollection. She looked up into a cool obsidian gaze that she would swear saw too much. Her breath snared and for a moment she foundered, caught between her nightmare past and the present.
    Deliberately she straightened her shoulders.
    ‘For the record, I don’t want to be here! When you came in I thought …’ Her words dried at the recollection of what she’d thought. That he’d come here for sex. That it wouldn’t matter if she was unwilling.
    ‘You thought you had no choice.’ His voice was low and his expression