Scandal: His Majesty's Love-Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 floorbeside 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 acruiser 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