Lustful Intrigue Forbidden Love Amidst Dutys Chains

Damien would not be blackmailed by any woman, no matter how strong her need for sexual fulfillment.

He leaned against the library door, narrowing his eyes to see the woman standing in front of the half-circle bay of floor-to-ceiling windows. Wispy tendrils of fog connected her to the opening curtains, the former a monolith of black wool and the latter sentry columns of yellow silk.

Rebecca Petre.

He didn't identify her, who was dressed head to toe in a hat and shapeless black cloak and had her back to him. But he wouldn't know her if she was nude and facing him, arms and legs spread wide in shameless invitation.

He was the Bastard Sheikh, the illegitimate child of an English countess and an Arab sheikh. She was the wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and her father was the Prime Minister of England.

She and him did not interact except behind closed doors and between silky beds.

Damien remembered the black-haired woman whose bed he had departed barely an hour before. The Marchioness of Clairdon had met him at the ballum rancum, a whore's ball, where he had danced nude among the other prostitutes. She had used him to fuel her desire for sexual titillation, and for a few hours, he had transformed into the animal she thought he was, thrusting, grinding, and pounding into her body in search of that perfect release where there was no past, no future, no Arabia, and no England—only blinding oblivion.

Perhaps he would accept this lady as well, if she hadn't purposefully pushed her way into his house via coercion and extortion.

With muscles clenched in quiet hostility, he pulled away from the cold press of mahogany and padded over the Persian carpet that covered the library floor. "What do you want, Mrs. Becky Petre, that you invade my home and threaten my citizenship?"

His voice, a raspy purr of English polish covering Arab brutality, bounced off the three sash windows and chased the curving brass curtain pole that rimmed the twelve-foot-high bay ceiling.

He could feel the woman's anxiety, practically smell it through the moist fog.

Damien wanted her to be terrified.

He wanted her to understand how vulnerable she was, alone in the Bastard Sheikh's den, with neither her husband nor father to defend her.

He wanted her to understand in the most basic and fundamental way imaginable that his body was his to gift and that he would not be coerced into having sex.

Damien halted beneath the burning chandelier, waiting for her to turn and face the repercussions of her decisions.

Burning gas hissed and bubbled through the frigid quiet.

"Come now, Mrs. Petre, you were not so reticent with my servant," he gently teased, knowing what she desired, daring her to say the forbidden words, familiar ones, I want to diddle an Arab; I want to rut with a bastard. "What could a woman like you possibly want from a man like me?"

Slowly, slowly, the figure turned, a black swirl of wool framed by glittering yellow silk draperies. The dark veil covering her face did not conceal her horror at seeing him.

Damien's lips twisted in derision.

He understood what she was thinking. What every Englishwoman thought upon first seeing him.

Half-Arab men do not have sun-kissed wheat-colored hair.

Half-Arab men do not wear fitted attire like English gentlemen.