Desert Prince, Defiant Virgin. KIM LAWRENCE

bit my tongue, that’s all.’

      Feeling the guilty heat rise to her cheeks, she fixed her gaze on her hands clasped primly in her lap. Adjusting her regard onto the arid scenery they were driving through, she thought how there wasn’t a single landmark in the miles and miles of featureless desert. It had to be very easy to miss a turning out here. It wasn’t as if there were signposts or, for that matter, anything else.

      She averted her gaze from the bleak landscape with a shudder, unable to see the beauty in this empty land that Beatrice spoke of. Presumably her mother had seen no appeal in it either.

      ‘I suppose satellite navigation must be essential out here,’ she remarked casually. The vehicle they were in was equipped with it, but Tair had not switched it on.

      His broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘Useful, I suppose, if you are not accustomed to negotiating the desert terrain.’

      ‘Which you are?’

      ‘Which I am,’ he agreed. ‘It is in my blood.’

      Molly could have listed the constituents of blood and to her knowledge the items would not include a sense of direction. She kept a discreet silence on the subject but possibly her scepticism showed because he volunteered further information to back up his claim.

      ‘My mother came from a Bedouin tribe, and my grandfather is the sheikh of his tribe.’

      Her eyes widened. As she glanced at him it was impossible not to see him as a romantic figure in flowing desert robes. ‘People still live that way?’

      ‘The tribal way of life is dying out,’ he admitted.

      It was hard to tell from his expression if he considered this a bad thing or not.

      ‘But there are some like my grandfather who keep tradition alive.’

      ‘Your grandfather is alive?’

      He flashed her a grin and for a brief moment looked less austere and stern. ‘My grandfather is very much alive, but Mother died when I was a child.’

      ‘Mine too.’ Which was about the only thing they could possibly have in common.

      ‘You have no family?’

      Her eyes dropped as she shook her head. ‘Dad is alive and I have two stepsisters, and two half-brothers.’

      His brows lifted. ‘A large family.’

      Families were a place Molly did not want to go! She was beginning to wish she had stuck to a safer subject like the weather.

      ‘Big queues for the bathroom,’ she said, trying to close down the subject, though she couldn’t help but wonder what his reaction would be if she said, Actually I’m Tariq and Khalid’s half-sister—my mother divorced the king.

      His blue eyes looked over at her face. ‘But you could not have been lonely growing up.’

      Did that mean he had been? Did lonely little boys turn into men as self-reliant as this one? Despite the extreme unlikelihood of this, an image of a dark-haired little boy with lonely blue eyes flashed into her head. The sort of little boy you’d want to pull into your arms.

      Only, little boys you wanted to hug grew up into men around whom it would be wise to keep such impulses under control!