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of
smashed emotion.
    And she'd missed him.
She'd missed feeling his length lying alongside her length, had missed the weight
of his thighs pressing down on her own. She'd missed his kiss, hungry, urgent,
insistent...wanting. Like a banquet after a year of long, hard fasting, she fed
greedily on every deep dark, sensual delight. Lips, teeth, tongue, taste. She
reached for his chest, felt the strong beat of his heart as she glided her
palms beneath the fabric of his top robe where only the thin cotton of his
tunic came between them and tightly muscled, satin-smooth flesh. When she
reached his shoulders her fingers curled themselves into tightly padded muscle
then stayed there, inviting him to take what he liked.
    He took her breasts,
stroking and shaping before moving on to follow the slender curve of her body.
Long fingers claimed her hips, then drew her against the force of his. Fire
bloomed in her belly, for this was her man, the love of her life. She would
never, ever, find herself another. What he touched belonged to him. What he
desired he could have.
    What he did was bring a
cruelly abrupt end to it by rising in a single fluid movement to land on his
feet beside the bed, leaving her to flounder on the hard rocks of rejection
while he stood there with his back to her, fighting a savage battle with
himself.
    'Why?' she breathed in
thick confusion. 'We are not animals,' he ground back. 'We have issues to deal
with that must preclude the hungry coupling at which we already know we both
excel.'
    It served as a dash of
water in her face; and he certainly possessed good aim, Leona noted as she came
back to reality with a shivering gasp. 'What issues?' she challenged cynically.
'The issue of what we have left besides the excellent sex?'
    He didn't answer. Instead
he made one of her eyebrows arch as he snatched up her spritzer and grimly
downed the lot. There was a man at war with himself as well as with her, Leona
realised, knowing Hassan hardly ever touched alcohol, and only then when he was
under real stress.
    Sitting up, she was aware
of a few aches and bruises as she gingerly slid her feet to the floor. 'I want
to go home,' she announced.
    'This is home,' he
replied. 'For the next few weeks’.  Coming just as gingerly to her feet, Leona
stared at his rigid back—which was just another sign that Hassan was not
functioning to his usual standards, because no Arab worthy of the race would deliberately
set his back to anyone. It was an insult of the worst kind.
    Though she had seen his
back a lot during those few months before she'd eventually left him, Leona
recalled with familiar sinking feeling inside. Not because he had wished to
insult her, she acknowledged, but because he had refused to face what they had
both known was happening to their marriage. In the end, she had taken the
initiative to be away from him.
    'Where are my shoes?'
    The surprisingly neutral
question managed to bring him swinging round to glance at her feet. 'Rafiq has
them.'
    Dear Rafiq, Leona thought
wryly, Hassan's ever-loyal partner in crime. Rafiq was an Al-Qadim. A man who
had attended the same schools, the same universities, the same everything as
Hassan had done. Equals in many ways, prince and lowly servant in others. It
was a complicated relationship that wound around the status of birth and the
ranks of power.
    'Perhaps you would be
kind enough to ask him to give them back to me.' Even she knew you didn't command
Rafiq to do anything. He was a law unto himself—and Hassan. Rafiq was a
maverick. A man of the desert, yet not born of the desert; fiercely proud,
fiercely protective of his right to be master of his own decisions.
    'For what purpose?'
    Leona's chin came up, recognising
the challenge in his tone. She offered him a cool, clear look. 'I am not
staying here, Hassan,' she told him flatly. 'Even if I have to book into a
hotel in San Esliban to protect your dignity, I am leaving this boat now,
tonight.'
    His expression grew
curious, a