But Julia was blind to all that.
Her hands gripped the wall so hard her knuckles shone white in the gathering twilight. She was locked in a whirlpool of memories, so many memories, and they were as bright and as painfully bittersweet as if it had all happened yesterday.
Ridiculously tears pricked her eyes, and an awful sense of loss gripped her. Yet how could this be? She was a thirty-two-year-old woman. Past her prime, many people would say, or perhaps coming into it, others would maintain. She felt past her prime. The day she’d flown away from the Emirate of Burquat on the Arabian Peninsula something inside her had withered and died. And even though she’d got on with her studies and surpassed her own dreams to gain a master’s degree and a doctorate, and had married and loved her husband in her own way, she’d never truly felt again. The reason for that was in the room behind her, a silent malevolent presence.
God, she’d loved him so much—
“Dr Somerton, it’s time for your speech.”
An urgent voice jarred her out of the memories. Dredging up strength from somewhere deep inside her, from a place she hadn’t needed to visit in a long time, Julia steeled herself and turned around. She was going to have to stand up in front of all these people and speak for fifteen minutes, all the while knowing he was there, watching her.
Remembering?
Perhaps he wouldn’t even remember … Perhaps he’d struggle to place her in his past. Her mouth became a bitter line. He’d certainly had enough women to make her blur into the crowd—not to mention a marriage of his own. She hated to admit that she was as aware of his exploits as the next person on the street who read the gossip rags on their lunchbreaks.
Maybe he’d wonder why she looked familiar. Acute pain gripped her and she repressed it brutally. Perhaps he wouldn’t remember the long nights in the desert when it had felt as if they were the only two people in the world underneath a huge blanket of stars. Perhaps he wouldn’t remember the beautiful poignancy of becoming each other’s first lover and how their naïve lovemaking had quickly developed beyond naivetée to pure passion and an insatiable need for one another.
Perhaps he wouldn’t remember when he’d said to her one night: “I will love you always. No other woman could ever claim my heart the way you have.”
And perhaps he wouldn’t remember that awful day in the beautiful Royal Palace in Burquat when he’d become someone cold and distant and cruel.
Reassuring herself that a man like Kaden would have consigned her to the dust heap of his memories, and stifling the urge to run from the room, Julia pasted a smile on her face and followed her colleague back into the crowd, trying desperately to remember what on earth she was supposed to talk about.
“Ah, Sheikh Kaden, there you are. Dr Julia Somerton is just about to speak. I believe she used her research in Burquat for her masters degree. Perhaps you met her all those years ago? She’s involved in fundraising now, for various worldwide archaeological projects.”
Kaden looked at the red-faced man who’d forced his way through the crowd to come and join him, and made a non-committal response. The man was the managing director of the club, who had invited him with a view to wooing funds out of him. Kaden was trying to disguise the uncomfortable jolt of shock to hear the name Julia. Despite the fact that he’d never met another Julia in Burquat, he told himself that there might have been another student by that name and he wouldn’t have necessarily been aware, considering his lack of interest in all things archaeological after she’d left.
This was his first foray back into that world and it would be ironic in the extreme if he was to meet her. She had been Julia Connors, not Somerton. Although, as an inner voice pointed out, she could be married by now. In fact, why wouldn’t she be? He had been married, after all. At the memory of his marriage Kaden felt the usual cloud of black anger threaten to overwhelm him. He resolutely pushed it aside. He was not one to dwell on the past.
And yet one aspect of his past which had refused to dissolve into the mists of time was facing him right now. If it was her. Unaccountably his heart picked up pace.
A hush descended over the crowd. Kaden looked towards the front of the room and the world halted on its axis for a terrifying moment when he saw the slim woman in the black cocktail dress ascending the steps to the podium. It was her. Julia. In a split second he was transported back to the moment when he’d realised that, because of lust, he’d placed her on a pedestal that she had no right to grace. And only that realisation had stopped him making the biggest mistake of his life.
Shaking his mind free of the disturbingly vivid memory, Kaden narrowed his eyes on Julia. Her voice was husky; it had caught him from the first moment they’d met. She’d been wearing a T-shirt and dusty figure-hugging jeans. Her long hair had fallen in bright tendrils over her shoulders. A safari-style hat had shaded her face from the sun. Her figure had been lithe and so effortlessly sensual he’d lost the power of speech.
If anything she was more beautiful than that first day he’d seen her. Time had hollowed out her cheeks, adding an angularity that hadn’t been there before. She’d only been nineteen. Her face had still held a slight hint of puppy-plumpness. As had her body. From what he could see now, she looked slimmer, with a hint of enticing cleavage just visible in the V of her dress. In fact there was a fragility about her that hadn’t been there before.
She was a million miles from that first tantalising dusty image he held in his mind’s eye; she was elegance personified now, with her long blonde hair pulled back into a low ponytail. The heavy side parting swept it across her forehead and down behind one ear. Her groomed appearance was doing little, though, to stop the torrent of carnal images flooding Kaden’s mind—and in such lurid detail that his body started to harden in response.
He would have anticipated that she’d have no effect on him. Much like any ex-lover. But the opposite was true. This was inconceivable. He had to concede now, with extreme reluctance, that no woman since this woman had exerted such a sensual hold over him. He’d never again lost control as he had with her—every time.
And he’d never felt the same acrid punch of jealousy to his gut as when he’d seen her in another man’s arms, with another man’s mouth on hers, tasting her … feeling her soft curves pressed against him. The vividness of that emotion was dizzying in its freshness, and he fought to negate it, too stunned by its resurgence to look too closely into what it meant.
This woman had been a valuable lesson in never allowing his base nature to rule his head or his heart again. Yet the years of wielding that control felt very flimsy how he was faced with her again.
More than a little bewildered at this onslaught of memories, and irrationally angry that she was here to precipitate them, Kaden felt his whole body radiate displeasure. Just then a rumble of laughter trickled through the gathered crowd in reaction to something she’d said. Kaden’s mouth tightened even more, and with that tension making his movements jerky he said something about getting some air and stalked towards the open patio doors.
As soon as Julia’s speech was over he was going to get out of there and forget that he’d ever seen her again.
Julia stepped down off the dais. She’d faltered during her speech for long seconds when she’d noticed Kaden head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd, at the back of the room like a forbidding presence, those dark eyes boring through her. And then with an abrupt move he’d moved outside. Almost as if disgusted by something she’d said. It had taken all her powers of concentration to keep going, and she’d used up all her reserves.
To her abject relief she saw her boss at the fundraising foundation come towards her. He put a hand to her elbow and for once she wasn’t concerned about keeping distance between them. Ever since her divorce had come through a year ago Nigel had been making his interest clear, despite Julia’s clear lack of encouragement.