Page 11 of Her Vow to Be His Desert Queen

His gaze glittered in the setting sun. ‘I became a king, Sidonie.’

A creeping sense of dislocation hit her in that moment. He looked the same as she remembered, his face with all those beautifully carved planes and angles so familiar to her. The face of her once best friend. Yet there was a hardness to his strong jaw, a firmness to his mouth, a sharp intensity in his eyes.

Hewasa king. And it had changed him.

You aren’t the same and neither is he.

That was true. She’d changed in the past five years, and she couldn’t expect him to have stayed the same. Especially not since he’d been on the throne. The friend she remembered, who’d been puzzled by the existence of debit cards and then had been delighted when she’d shown him to use one, who’d been arrogant and yet had waited patiently outside a department-store changing room holding five shopping bags so she could try on clothes, who’d been intense and passionate about wanting to make the lives of his people better, encouraging her in her own dreams of starting a charity, had gone.

The man at her side looked iron-hard, and there was no passion at all in his dark, cold eyes. A stranger’s eyes.

Perhaps she needed to start thinking of him like that now. As a stranger. It would certainly mean less hurt for her as well as helping her to keep her distance.

Khalil raised a brow. ‘Lost for words? Surely not.’

She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. If she was going to think of him as a stranger then here she was, in a helicopter, being taken to Paris, essentially kidnapped by a man she didn’t know. A man who was a king, who apparently had taken it into his head to marry her.

He wouldn’t hurt her—not physically at least—and she wasn’t afraid of him in that way. But she was afraid of being swept away from the life she’d built for herself. A successful life with important work and people who depended on and needed her. She didn’t want to leave it. She couldn’t leave it.

You will have to resist him.

The words whispered through her head, and she took a quick, silent breath, conscious of his intense stare. He was so very beautiful.

But no, resisting him was easy. All she had to do was think of how much it had hurt when he’d walked away and how she never wanted to open herself up to that level of pain again.

There. Easy.

‘Not lost for words. I’m just considering what to say next, because you do understand that I have no supervisor, don’t you?’

His expression remained impassive, but she thought she saw a flicker of surprise in his eyes, which sent an odd little ripple of satisfaction through her.

What had he thought she’d been doing these last five years? That she’d just be sitting around on her hands mourning him?

‘Are you working for yourself, then?’ he asked, the surprise gone as if it had never been.

‘You must have forgotten the charity I started up,’ she said acidly. ‘Remember? We talked about it a few months before you left.’

‘Yes,’ he said expressionlessly. ‘I remember.’

‘Well, it’s grown a lot since then and I have many people depending on me. If I’m not going to be back in London before tomorrow, I will need to make some calls.’

‘I see.’ The words sounded very neutral and yet she knew they were not. There were undertones in his voice, a thread of yet more surprise perhaps, or annoyance—she didn’t know which.

The satisfaction that she’d knocked his seemingly unassailable confidence deepened. ‘You didn’t know, did you?’ This time it was her turn to raise a brow. ‘Perhaps you should have investigated that before you came back. Contrary to what you might think, I actually have a life of my own and it’s a very successful one, thank you very much.’

Khalil’s expression remained as impassive as ever. ‘Clearly,’ he said.

‘In fact,’ she went on, since she might as well, ‘I bet there are many other things you don’t know about me, Khalil.’ She paused. ‘Or should that be Your Majesty?’

Sparks glittered in his eyes just then, and she wasn’t sure if it was the last rays of the setting sun catching them or something else, but it suddenly felt as if all the remaining air in the helicopter had been sucked out of it.

His gaze roamed over her face, studying her as if he’d never seen her before in his life, and she was once again suddenly and painfully aware of him. Of the lithe strength of his body and the pull of his trousers across his powerful thighs. Of his warmth. Of the bronze skin of his throat and the pulse that beat there, strong and steady.

The night of her birthday he’d pulled her into his arms for a dance. She’d never been that close to him before. She’d never been that close to any man before, let alone one so tall. He’d felt hard and hot, and her heart had been beating so fast. She hadn’t known what it was she was feeling, at first. Then she’d understood...

Her heart was beating that fast now; she could hear it resounding in her head.

That hint of a smile curved one corner of his mouth again, as if he’d seen something that pleased him. ‘I appreciate “Your Majesty”,’ he said, his voice almost on the edge of a purr. ‘“Sir” is also acceptable. My people, of course, call me a god, but that would be a step too far for you, I think.’

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