Taken by the Sheikh. Penny Jordan

her sternly.

      Water! Until he had spoken she hadn’t realised how thirsty she was. Sadie’s tongue-tip flicked against the dry saltiness of her lips as she reached eagerly for the unopened bottle.

      Removing the top, she lifted the bottle towards her mouth.

      The traffic was heavy enough for Drax to slow down and watch her. Her lips were soft and full, and as she closed them around the head of the bottle she also closed her eyes, as though she was giving herself over to a much longed-for sensory pleasure. She drank quickly, the muscles of her throat contracting and expanding as she swallowed and then drank more deeply.

      The arousal Drax had felt earlier returned, thrusting past the barriers of civility and necessity. Was she aware of just how intensely erotic her actions were? Drax wondered, as between one breath and the next he became trapped within the sexual urgency and immediacy of the images his own brain was creating from her actions. Inside his head the soft fullness of her lips clung eagerly not to the water bottle but to his flesh, greedily absorbing its texture and taste. A pothole in the road caused water from the bottle to trickle from her lips down her throat and beyond, filling the hollow at its base and then spilling from it. If he were to lap its wetness from her skin now it would taste of her flesh and her heat, and the taste would feed his tongue to taste her more intimate wetness, to…

      The sudden sharp blare of a car horn somewhere up ahead of them wrenched Drax out of his fantasy and back to reality. His heart was the thudding in slow, heavy erotic beats as it urged his body to greater arousal. He reached for his own bottle of water, and drank fiercely from it, as though to quench the heat of what he was experiencing.

      The air-conditioning was on, so why was she suddenly feeling aware of a heat so physical that it not only seemed to be filling the interior of the car, it also felt as if it was actually touching her, pressing against her skin as though in a caress? Because she wanted to be caressed? By him? What kind of craziness had possessed her? Was this some kind of heat-induced lust that was a by-product of too much exposure to the sun? Sadie’s thoughts spilled dizzily on top of one another, blocking her rational exit from them. She fought valiantly against them, making herself focus on the scenery outside the car.

      ‘We’re almost in the city,’ she told Drax. ‘It’s kind of you to think about offering me a job, but really there’s no need. If you give me my passport and drop me off—’

      ‘You’re rejecting the job without knowing what it is?’

      Sadie’s words had aroused two very different and competing instant reactions inside Drax—one, that he should stop the car, give her the passport and forget that he had ever seen her; the other that there was no way he was going to let her go.

      He pressed harder on the accelerator, swinging the car into the outer lane that led away from the city.