FOR some reason Eva had been expecting the Prince to in some way resemble the royal male relatives of her new family—well, he was both male and royal—who were squarely built men whose height enabled them to carry the extra pounds that most did indeed carry.

The man she tilted her head up to look at was indeed tall but he had no spare pounds. Not that Eva immediately registered his lean, athletic frame—it was his face that initially totally transfixed her.

Never had she expected to connect beauty to a face that was so essentially masculine—if you made an exception for the sweep of those curling ebony eyelashes that any woman would have traded an inch of cleavage for.

But he was beautiful, each sybaritic carved line and sculpted angle of the face she gazed at, from the sternly sensual mouth, slashing cheekbones, strong jaw, strongly defined dark brows to the spookily silver—really silver—eyes was without flaw. Even his skin was flawless, a deep even gold.

Eva gathered her wits and, expelling a tiny gusty sigh, closed her mouth with an audible click. Her lashes came down in a protective screen as she dropped her chin and took a deep sustaining breath.

This was really her prince?

The one her grandfather had conceded was quite goodlooking when pressed.

Well, not hers, obviously. Men like this did not belong to women who looked like her, though belonged was actually the wrong word. Belonged implied a degree of domestication that she was unable to mentally connect with this feral, though admittedly completely magnificent creature.

He might be dressed in western clothes, but this was not his natural habitat. It was not a leap to imagine him framed against a cerulean desert sky, his tall, lean frame covered in flowing desert robes.

Eva imagined it and felt her stomach muscles quiver at the sybaritic image…what was her grandfather thinking of? Suitable match, he’d said! Suitable? For heaven’s sake, they were about as suited as an Arab stallion and a shaggy Shetland pony!

One thing was clear, she realised as she lifted her chin and tried to collect her wits, her elaborate plans to convince him she was unsuitable were fairly pointless. This tall man who oozed male arrogance from every perfect pore was not going to buy what was on offer.

On offer…like I’m a commodity on a market stall! Eva’s temper cut through the thrall that had held her immobile. She opened her mouth to say something cold and cutting, but before she could the eyes that had been focused on some place over her left shoulder suddenly connected with her own.

The unfocused blankness and lack of recognition, the pain mirrored in those silvery depths, sent the words from her head.

The last time she had seen an expression like that it had been in the eyes of a young man who had stood watching the car he had been thrown from consumed by tongues of orange flames.

‘I should be in that,’ he had said over and over when Eva, along with another driver who had pulled off the road to help, had tried to pull him back from the heat.

Shock, the paramedics, after one glance at the shivering figure, had explained as they led him to the ambulance.

She angled an assessing glance at her late-night caller, and struggled to be objective. It was hard when the person you were trying to be objective about oozed animal magnetism…It was frankly distracting even for someone like her, who did not go for the muscular macho type.

As she continued to subject the strong lines of his handsome face to a critical scrutiny the last sparks of annoyance in her green eyes morphed into anxiety. Despite that sinfully sexy mouth he did have the look of the walking wounded.

Had the Prince done the equivalent of walking away from a burning car? She was no paramedic, but the man standing there looking back at her but, she suspected, not actually seeing her seemed to be suffering from a similar trauma. And if the purple shadows under his eyes and the deep lines of strain bracketing his sensual mouth were any indicator, galloping exhaustion.

Concern conquered caution, common sense and instinct—the latter was telling her to close the door. She heaved a sigh and tried to inject a note of enthusiasm into her voice as she said abruptly, ‘You’d better come inside. I’m assuming you are the Prince?’ It didn’t seem a big assumption considering the hauteur he projected even in this clearly tormented condition.

He started slightly at the sound of her voice as if he’d forgotten she was there and his glazed eyes narrowed on her face. Eva was conscious of a strange sensation trickling down her spine.

‘I’m Karim Al-Nasr.’ The furrow between his dark brows deepened as his eyes swept her upturned features. There was too much intelligence lurking in those troubled depths to call his expression vacant, but he continued to look at her with an uncomprehending lack of recognition and the sensation she had noted stopped being a tickle and turned into a flood that spread out across her skin, crackling like an unearthed electrical current just beneath the surface.

‘I’m not sure why I’m here.’ His eyes narrowed to silver slits. ‘Do I know you?’ His voice dropped to little more than a husky murmur as his veiled glance brushed across her bright head, following the fall of the tousled curls as they fell down her shoulders. It made the fine hair on Eva’s arms stand on end.

‘Red hair, like flames…’

Heavens! The man could invite sin with a single syllable.

Eve had read of bedroom voices, but this was the first time she’d ever heard one—deep with an abrasive rasp beneath the rich velvet smoothness that was wickedly seductive.

‘I wouldn’t have forgotten that.’

He sounded as positive as she had yet heard him about this and Eva self-consciously reached a hand to drag a tangled Titian skein from her face.

‘Once seen never forgotten.’ Which for some people might be a good thing, but for someone like Eva, who didn’t enjoy drawing attention to herself, it was not. ‘We had a date, Prince,’ she reminded him bluntly.

And after all the names she had called him it looked as if he had a legitimate excuse not to show. What she wasn’t sure of was why he had shown up now, here of all places.

The frown that dug grooves into his broad smooth forehead tugged his strongly defined ebony brows into a straight line above his patrician nose.

‘Did we…? Yes, you’re King Hassan’s lost princess…’ The comprehension that had flared in his eyes faded as he appeared to lose track of what he was saying once more.

From the look on his face Eva got the strong impression that the place his thoughts had gone was not fun. Lost, he’d called her—it looked to Eva as if he were the lost one!

As she watched he swayed slightly and put out a hand to steady himself, clearly dead on his feet. Struggling against a swell of empathy, Eva let the hand she’d instinctively raised fall back to her side.

Even though her next move was obvious and Eva had never had trouble extending a helping hand to someone in trouble in her life, continuing to encourage this man over her threshold was one of the hardest things she had ever done.

Not only was she utterly sure that under normal circumstances he was the total antithesis of vulnerable, but she knew—every instinct, particularly the ones that did not work on a logical level, was telling her—that the kindly gesture would have unforeseen repercussions.

You’re being dramatic, Eva, she told herself, squaring her shoulders and murmuring, ‘Get a grip.’ Anyway, what choice did she have? She could hardly close the door in his face. Gritting her teeth, she took a sustaining gulp of air and, reaching out, laid a hand tentatively on his arm.

He appeared not to notice the hand, but she noticed the muscular hardness—it was hard to miss.