The Sheikh's Destiny (Harlequin Romance) by Melissa James Read Free Book Online Page A

eyes cool, calm—and how she made him ache with her beauty when she was coated in dust and clumps of mud, wearing a baseball cap and a shirt that looked like charity would reject it, he had no clue. ‘Let’s go.’
    The utter relief to be upright, enjoying the luxury of walking again, flooded him until the headache grew to severe proportions. He said nothing to her until she called for another halt.
    After he’d taken some tablets with water, she said, ‘We’ve gone almost as far as we can before sunrise.’ She saw him rubbing at his underarm with his arm, trying to scratch unobtrusively. ‘How’s your skin? Is it itching with all the dirt?’
    His jaw tightened and he stopped moving. Yet another reminder: Beauty was letting the Beast know just who he was to her, reminding him what he was to himself. ‘I’m fine.’
    â€˜I don’t want to embarrass you. You won’t be able to travel at night if the grafted skin or the burns rip, bleed or itch. We just crawled more than five kilometres. There has to be damage.’
    â€˜I said I’m fine.’ He sounded curt with rejection she didn’t deserve, but he couldn’t help it. ‘Give me the cream and I’ll do it when I need it.’
    Hana sighed. ‘There are ways to rub the cream in that optimise stretching and physical comfort for you while we’re travelling. It will also give you better sleep. I can see you’re uncomfortable with my doing it, but we have four days of hard walking to go, sleeping in dirt and mud that could irritate your skin, and—’
    Alim heard his teeth grind before he spoke. ‘You’re not going to stop arguing until you get your way, are you?’
    â€˜Probably not,’ she conceded with a gentle laugh.
    His head felt like a light and sound show, brilliant stabs of pain shooting from his neck to his eyes. He couldn’t manage rubbing the entire length of his scars now if he tried. ‘Do it, then.’
    The words had been clipped, order from master to servant, but she didn’t argue. ‘Stay still, and close your eyes.’ Her voice was gentle, soothing, stealing into his battleground mind with tender healing.
    He felt her undoing the buttons of his shirt…oh, God help him for the male reaction to her touch she’d be bound to see. The sun was beginning to rise.
    â€˜Your tension won’t help, you know. Breathe deeply, relax and let me make it better.’
    She might have been speaking to a child, but her warm, wet hands against his itching, burning scars, filled with beautiful, scented oils, took away any power to speak. He breathed, and felt the irritable tension leaving him, leaving him only aroused.
    â€˜That’s it, much better. I’m sorry I can’t use any water to wash away the dirt, but the olive oil is helping.’ Her hands were tender magic, kneading softly, moving in slow, deepcircles. Her fingers rotated over his skin, deep then soft; her palms pushed up and around, spreading more oil. ‘This solution is fifty per cent cold-pressed olive oil, forty per cent pure aloe juice and ten per cent essential oils of lavender, rosemary and neroli. I make ten litres a month for burns victims or scarring from rifle wounds. A village about forty kilometres from the refugee camp is a Free Trade village, and orders everything I need.’
    â€˜Hmm.’ She could be reciting the alphabet or the phone book for all he cared. Her voice was a siren’s call, an angel’s song; her touch was sweet relief, bliss , releasing him from the burning ropes of limited movement, giving him freedom to lift his arm as she moved it to massage where the scar tissue was worst. Though she said and did nothing a nurse wouldn’t do for any patient, she made him feel like a man again, because she’d treated him like a man.
    â€˜It’s feeling better?’ she asked softly. She sounded—odd.
    â€˜Oh,