Scandal: His Majesty's Love-Child. Annie West

sense. His father lived in the city, with easy access to his vices of choice: women, gambling and brokering power and money corruptly.

      ‘You seemed to think you’d been beaten.’

      Instantly Tahir froze. He would never have admitted such a thing, especially to a stranger! Not even to his closest friends.

      Who was this woman?

      He forced his eyelids open again and found himself sinking into warm sherry-tinted depths.

      By daylight she looked even better than she had the first time. For he remembered her now, this woman who’d haunted his thoughts. Or were they dreams?

      ‘Who are you?’ A swift glance took in hair scrupulously pulled back from her lovely face, an absence of jewellery, a long-sleeved yellow shirt and beige cotton trousers. She didn’t dress like a local in concealing skirts. Yet surely only a local would be here?

      From where he lay, looking up, her legs looked endless. She moved and he watched the fabric pull tight over her neatly curved hip and slim thighs. A moment later she sat on the floor beside him, her faint, sweet fragrance tantalising his nostrils. Her shirt pulled across her breasts as she leaned towards him.

      A jolt of sensation shot through his belly.

      No. He wasn’t dead yet.

      Perhaps there were some compensations after all.

      ‘My name is Annalisa. Annalisa Hansen.’ She paused, as if waiting for him to say something. ‘You arrived at my campsite days ago. Just walked out of the desert.’

      ‘Days ago?’ How could he have lost so much time?

      ‘You’re injured.’ She gestured to his head, his side. ‘My guess is you were in the desert for quite a while. When you reached me you were seriously dehydrated.’ She lifted a hand to his brow. Her palm was cool and curiously familiar.

      He had a jumbled recollection of her touching him earlier. Of blessed water and soothing words.

      ‘You’ve been drifting in and out of consciousness.’ She leaned back, lifting her hand away, and Tahir knew a bizarre desire to catch it back.

      ‘Your little friend has been worried.’

      ‘Little friend?’ Automatically he looked past her, taking in the cool interior of the tent, the neatly stowed gear in one corner. A ripple of pages as a furtive breeze played across a book left open a few metres away.

      ‘You don’t remember?’ She surveyed him seriously.

      ‘No.’ He remembered just in time not to shake his head. He was no masochist and the pain was already bad enough. ‘I don’t recall.’

      It was true. His thoughts were fluid and incomplete. He was unable to fix anything in his mind.

      ‘That’s all right,’ she said with the calm air of one who’d perfected a soothing bedside manner. Vaguely he wondered who this woman was, caring for him at a desert oasis. ‘You’ve taken a nasty knock to the head so things could be jumbled for a while.’

      ‘Tell me,’ he murmured, forcing down rising concern at his faulty memory. He recalled a casino. A woman all but climbing into his lap as the chips rose before him. He remembered a cruiser in a crowded marina. A party in a city penthouse. A meeting in a hushed boardroom. But the faces were blurred. The details unclear. ‘What little friend?’

      The woman…Annalisa, he reminded himself…smiled. A shaft of sunlight pierced the interior of the tent, or so it seemed, as he stared up into her calm, sweet face.

      ‘You were carrying a goat.’

      ‘A goat?’ What nonsense was this?

      ‘Yes.’ This time her smile was more like a grin. Her dark eyes danced and she tilted her head engagingly. ‘A little one. Obviously it’s a friend of yours. It’s been foraging for food but it keeps coming back to sleep just outside the tent.’

      A goat? His mind was blank. Frighteningly blank.

      ‘What else?’ he murmured. There must be more.

      She shrugged and he caught a flash of something in her eyes. Distress? Fear?

      ‘Nothing else. You just appeared.’ She waited but he said nothing. ‘So, perhaps you could tell me something.’ She lifted a hand and tugged nervously at her earlobe. ‘Who are you?’

      ‘My name is Tahir…’

      ‘Yes?’ She nodded encouragingly.

      A sensation like a plummeting lift crashed through the sudden void that was his stomach. Blood rushed in his ears as he met her gaze. The kaleidoscope of blurry images cascaded through his brain into nothingness.

      ‘And I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.’

      He forced a smile to lips that felt stiff and unfamiliar. ‘I seem to have mislaid my memory.’

      CHAPTER THREE

      FOR a man who couldn’t remember his name Tahir was one cool customer.

      Annalisa read the shock flaring in his eyes and the way he instantly masked it. Ready sympathy surged but she beat it down, knowing instinctively he’d reject it.

      Despite never having left Qusay, Annalisa had seen a lot in her twenty-five years. As her father’s assistant she’d seen the effects of accident and disease, the way pain or fear could break even the strongest will.

      Yet this man, traumatised by wounds that must be shockingly painful, smiled at her with a veneer of calm indifference. As if he were one of her father’s scientist friends and they were conversing over a cup of sweet tea in her father’s study.

      Yet none of her father’s friends looked like Tahir. Or made her feel that warm tingle of awareness deep inside.

      Years ago, with Toby, the man she’d planned to marry, she’d known something like it. But not so instantaneously, nor so strong.

      There was something about Tahir that she connected with at the deepest level. More than his extraordinary looks or the innate sophistication that had nothing to do with his beautiful clothes. Something that set him apart. She was drawn by his core of inner strength, revealed as intensely blue eyes met hers with wry humour, ignoring the unspoken fear that his memory lapse was permanent.

       He comes from another world. One where you don’t belong.

      She’d do well to remember it.

      A pang shot through her and her calm frayed at the edges. Just where did she belong?

      All her life she’d never fitted in. She was a Qusani but didn’t live as other Qusani women or fit their traditional role. She was poised between two worlds, belonging to neither. She’d been part of her father’s world, his assistant, his confidante.

      But he’d gone, leaving her bereft.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ Tahir’s deep voice roused her from melancholy reflection. ‘Are you all right?’

      Despite herself Annalisa smiled. Lying flat on his back, bruised and barely awake, his memory shot, yet this man was concerned for her?

      She laid a reassuring hand on his arm. His muscles tensed beneath the fine cotton of his shirt. His warm strength radiated up through her fingertips and palm.

      A zap of something jagged between them as she met those piercing eyes. His nonchalant half-smile disappeared, replaced by frowning absorption.

      ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she said briskly, slipping her hand away. It tingled from the contact and she clenched it at her side. ‘Your foggy memory is normal. It should come back in time.’ She drew her lips up in a smile she hoped looked reassuring. ‘You’ve got two head wounds. Either would be enough to knock you about for a couple of days.’

      Or do