The Sheikh’s Tempted Prisoner by Holly Rayner Page 0,7

approached. Her skin tingled as he drew near. His eyes were so focused, so intense. Why did he have to look at her like that?

“You want to go back to the scene of the crime?” he asked, his voice hushed.

Lily looked up at him. She had to crane her neck to keep eye contact as he came near enough for her to smell the musky cologne on his skin. She planted her feet, refusing to be cowed.

“Yes. I should pay for what I did. I destroyed my friend’s car and left it in the street! When she gets back, she’ll have no idea where the car is, not to mention where I am. She’ll be worried sick, and I have no way to replace her car as it is. I’ll have to find a way to make it up to her. I have to find a way to fix this.”

Her voice carried around the vast chamber, muted slightly against the sconces high up on the walls. Atnan continued to stare, his face unreadable but strikingly handsome. If she wasn’t so attracted to him, she would certainly think him the most annoyingly aggravating man on earth. Why wasn’t he saying anything?

After a pause, he stepped back to pace around her.

“So you would like to place yourself into police custody when at least a dozen or more people saw you crash a car in the middle of rush hour traffic and then proceed to get into mine before speeding away?”

His questions were making her uneasy, but Lily stood her ground, grasping at straws to come up with a solution.

“I don’t have to go into police custody. For heaven’s sake, it was a simple car accident, and no report was even filed because, if you remember, you decided to drive off and not press charges. They have no case against me and no reason to hold me against my will. I assume this country allows some freedoms in that sense?”

Atnan’s face twisted momentarily before he fixed his features back to neutral. He must have assumed Lily hadn’t noticed, but she certainly had. What was he hiding?

“The police in this country are ruthless and omnipresent. There will now be a warrant out for your arrest since you ran from the scene of a crime—regardless of what my actions might have been. You think they wouldn’t be able to spot you in a millisecond? Do you know how many blond-haired, blue-eyed women there are in this country?”

That was the second time Lily’s looks had been pointed out to her, and she didn’t exactly appreciate being singled out for them. Still, the Sheikh wasn’t wrong. If the police really did press charges for leaving the scene, she would be in big trouble if she stepped foot back in the capital. It was clear she would be arrested on sight, wherever she was.

The palace was the only place she knew she could stay safe.

Beyond that, it was clear that Atnan had no interest in returning to the city anytime soon, having been spotted himself. Lily wondered if he was trying to convince her not to go because of her own safety or his. He was still pacing around her, then finally he returned to face her head-on.

“Ah, I see you’ve welcomed reason into your life. That is good news. You see now that your only course of action is to stay here.”

“You certainly have deduced much from my silence,” she shot back, annoyed.

He assumed so much for a man who hadn’t even bothered to ask for her name.

“I have been raised since infancy to read people. I know how to interpret emotions that are unspoken. It is an excellent skill to have when working in politics.”

“If that’s true, what am I thinking right now?” Lily asked, crossing her arms.

His eyes sparkled with a glint of humor, and she had a sudden urge to slap him in the face. There was nothing about her situation that warranted laughter. She was trapped in a foreign country with a future monarch who appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be running from the law himself. Had she mistaken who he was in the first place? Perhaps he was an imposter posing as the Sheikh and had been forced into hiding by the royal family!

“You are thinking about where you will sleep tonight, and I have just the answer for you.”

“Wrong,” she said, and the Sheikh chuckled.

“Not entirely. That thought is in the back of your mind somewhere, just not before