Free Shamed in the Sands by Sharon Kendrick

he usually operated? Probably not at two in the morning when his night was being disturbed by a woman he was indifferent to...
    For a moment she wondered what she might have done in this situation if she’d been a normal, Western woman—with all the freedoms that those women seemed to take for granted. There would have been no need for her to behave like this. Moving around under cover of darkness. Having to throw herself on the mercy of someone who didn’t want her...
    ‘No, I don’t want a drink, thanks,’ she said. ‘That’s not why I’m here.’
    ‘Then why don’t you sit down,’ he suggested, ‘and tell me why you are?’
    She sank onto a leather sofa which was more comfortable than it looked. ‘Look, there’s no easy way to say this—and I know it’s going to come as a shock, but I think I’m pregnant.’
    For a moment Gabe didn’t say a word. He couldn’t. It was a long time since he had felt fear, but he felt it now. It was there in the hard beat of his heart and the icy prickle of his skin. And along with fear came anger. The sense that something was happening to him which was outside his control—and hadn’t he vowed a long time ago never to let that happen to him again?
    Yet on some instinctive and fundamental level, her words were not as shocking as she had suggested. Because hadn’t he already guessed what she was going to say? Why else would she have pursued him like this across thousands of miles? She was a desert princess and surely someone like her wouldn’t normally seek out a man who’d shown her nothing but coldness, no matter how much she had enjoyed the sex.
    But none of his thoughts showed in his face. He had been a survivor for too long to react to her dramatic words—at least, not straight away. He had spent his life perfecting this cool and impenetrable mask and now was not the time to let it slip. He studied her shadowed eyes and seized on the words which offered most hope. The only hope.
    ‘You only think you’re pregnant?’
    She nodded. ‘Yes, but I’m pretty sure. I’ve been sick and my...’
    Her words tailed off, as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to say the next bit, but Gabe was in no mood to help her out—and certainly in no mood to tiptoe around her sensibilities. Because this was the woman who had disguised herself. Who had burst into his suite and come on to him without bothering to tell him who she was. She might have been a virgin but she certainly hadn’t acted like one—and he was damned if he was going to let her play the shy and sensitive card now. Not when she was threatening to disrupt the ordered calm of his life. Disrupt it? She was threatening to blow it apart.
    He felt a sudden flare of rage. ‘Your what?’ he prompted icily.
    ‘My period is late!’ she burst out, her cheeks suddenly turning red.
    ‘But you haven’t done a pregnancy test?’
    ‘Funnily enough, no.’ She bit her lip. ‘It’s not exactly easy for me to slip into a chemist back home to buy myself a kit. Somebody might recognise me.’
    He wanted to say, You should have thought of that before you let me strip you naked and lead you to my bed. But he was culpable too, wasn’t he? He had deflected the advances of women before and it had never been a problem. So why hadn’t he sent this one on her way? Why hadn’t he read any of the glaring clues which had warned him she was trouble? Had the subterfuge of her disguise and the fact that she was being pursued by bodyguards turned him on? Brought colourful fantasy into a life which was usually so cool and ordered?
    ‘I used a condom,’ he bit out.
    Like a snake gathering strength before striking again, she drew her shoulders back and glared at him with angry blue eyes. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that somebody other than you could be the father, Gabe?’
    He remembered the way her trembling hand had circled his erection until he had been forced to push it away, afraid he might come before he was inside her. Had