Free Taken by the Sheikh by Kris Pearson

he’d put her in. Insisting she share his bed. Tying her up as though she couldn’t be trusted. Lying beside her in the pulsing darkness and taking no notice of her.
    She flinched at the last strange idea her brain had conjured up.
    Of course she wanted him to leave her alone! But although he’d left her body alone, her mind was another matter. There he kept intruding outrageously, and Laurel had the sneaking suspicion it was far more her fault than his.
    Even without touching him, her skin detected his heat flowing across towards hers. And he’d not fallen asleep either; his breathing sounded deep and regular, but somehow not quite deep and regular enough to assure her he’d dozed off. He wasn’t snoring or snuffling in the least—just lying there breathing.
    Spicy cologne drifted from his skin and crisp dark hair. Sometimes it overcame the faint lavender fragrance on the sheets. She’d hated the smell of him in the van, but maybe his scent was tied so closely to that terrifying situation, and the bag and the handcuffs and his strong dominating body, that nothing would have smelled good then. Now she found it exotic and right for him.
    Although, she had to remind herself yet again, he was still a disgusting terrorist who kidnapped women and held them against their will. She was not in the least attracted to him. Of course she wasn’t. How could she even be thinking such ridiculous thoughts!
    She found the shadowy bedroom well lit by moonlight once her eyes had accustomed themselves to the night. It was a hard, terrifying, masculine room. Who’d want guns and knives on their bedroom walls? The vague silhouettes of the highest ones were visible where he’d left them. Just as visible as his silhouette against the pale pillow if she turned her head again. She sighed and rolled over; yes—there he was.
    “Not asleep, Miss Kiwi?” His voice washed over her like a husky caress in the intimate darkness.
    “Are you surprised?”
    “Relax and drift off, Laurel. After what you went through today you need to rest and recover.”
    “It was you who put me through it.” She drew a deep angry breath. “Do you seriously think I can just forget an experience like that?”
    “Fayez identified the wrong woman.”
    Laurel puffed the breath out in a sharp sound of disapproval. “And just as well. Poor Maddie would have been terrified. She’s barely eighteen. Still living at home.”
    “And you’re so much older?” She could hear the taunt in his voice, but chose to ignore it.
    “Twenty-three. And I’ve had to be much more independent than she has.”
    “You left home early?”
    Left home? Where was home...?
    “My mother died when I was five,” she said, still feeling the hurt those words always stirred up. “She wasn’t married so I became a foster-child. Moved on several times. You get harder after situations like that.”
    “Yes...”
    She heard the sorrow in his voice, and realized that he, too, had lost his home and family. But why should she sympathize? He’d kept her here against her will. He had no right to—no matter how often he claimed her life was in danger, and that other people’s safety also depended on her remaining out of sight. He’d given her precious few details as to why.
    “So who brought you up?” he asked, breaking into her fractured thoughts.
    “I wasn’t brought up, I was dragged up,” she muttered. “In other people’s homes, paid for by the Government. Given food and clothes. Sent to school.” She fell silent, and it was some time before she spoke again. “I think my mother was ill. I have memories of her being often in bed. And in hospital before she died.”
    “And your father? De Courcey sounds like a French name?”
    “He was a sailor, or so she said. Maybe already married to someone else. Perhaps he never existed. It’s just the name on my birth certificate; I don’t remember him. She might have made him up—she didn’t seem to have a proper family.”
    Laurel