‘I belong to no man,’ she said. ‘I belong to myself, and no man will ever own me.’

‘Then you have never known love. When you do, you’ll find that your aloof ideas mean nothing. When you love, you will give, and it must be all of yourself, or the gift means nothing.’

‘And who do you belong to?’ she demanded with spirit.

He laughed. ‘That is quite another matter. But I could say that I belong to a million people.’ Kamar had a population of one million. ‘No part of my life is entirely my own. Even my heart is not mine to give. Tell me about the little man with you. I wondered if he might have been your lover.’

‘Would that have made any difference to you?’

‘None at all, since he made no effort to protect you from me. A man who cannot hold onto his woman is no man.’

‘Do I need protecting from you?’ Fran mused, teasing him with her eyes.

He laid his lips against her hand. ‘I wonder if we’ll discover that we each need protection from the other?’ he said thoughtfully.

‘Who knows?’ she murmured, replying as she felt her role required. ‘The pleasure will come in discovering.’

‘And you are a woman made for pleasure.’

Fran drew a slow breath, shocked at how much the words affected her. She was used to hearing her brains praised. Howard admired her looks but was just as likely to acclaim her common sense. And her common sense told her that, while passion mattered, it wasn’t the whole of life. Suddenly she was no longer sure of that.

He listened to her silence and added, ‘You’re not going to pretend not to know what I mean.’

‘There are many kinds of pleasure,’ she fenced.

‘Not for us. For you and I there is only one kind- the pleasure to be shared by a man and a woman in the heat of desire.’

‘Isn’t it a little soon to be thinking of desire?’

‘We were thinking of desire the moment our eyes met. Don’t try to deny it.’