Kitabı oku: «The Sheikh's Collection», sayfa 4
Zahir went for a shower—a very cold one. A great well of burning hunger was consuming him but it was cooled by disturbing memories of Sapphire shaking with unmistakeable fear when he had tried to make love to her during their marriage. Even with all the sexual experience he had painstakingly acquired since then, he was wary and seriously distrustful of the physically encouraging vibes she was putting out. He had been wrong before; why shouldn’t he be wrong again? And while a faint sense of wonderment was stirring that he should actually have her in a bed again within reach, no sense of regret yet assailed him. In fact a merciless sense of all-male satisfaction was still driving him hard.
Saffy froze when she heard the door open again and rolled over, ridiculously conscious that her eyelids and her nose were probably pink from the overload of emotion and events that had brought overwrought tears to her eyes. She sat up in honest surprise to stare at Zahir, poised one step inside the door clad in only a pair of black silk boxers. Her throat closed over and she stopped breathing.
‘There is only one bed…’
‘It’s not a problem,’ Saffy responded as carelessly as she could contrive, rolling off the bed and yanking the bedspread off the mattress in almost the same movement. ‘I’ll sleep on the floor, although you could have taken one of the sofas.’
‘I refuse to do so and you can’t sleep on the floor.’
‘I can do whatever I want to do,’ Saffy told him, rolling herself into the spread and lying down beside the bed as well wrapped up as an Arctic explorer.
‘Except when I’m around,’ Zahir pronounced in direct challenge, snatching her up from the floor and planting her back on the divan with the strength that came so naturally to him.
‘I’m not sharing that bed with you!’ Saffy spat at him.
Zahir dealt her a derisive appraisal. ‘Even when you already know that you can certainly trust me to hear the word no?’ he queried in a very dry reminder.
Hot pink colour washed her lovely face and then receded to leave her pale and stricken. She was crushed by all that went unsaid within that aide-memoire, but equally suddenly she felt foolish making such a fuss about sharing a bed, and she squirmed out of the cloaking folds of the spread to slide below the sheet. ‘This is all your fault—you should never have brought me here!’
Zahir almost laughed. She was shouting at him again, fighting with him, and he should have been furious at her lack of respect but he wasn’t; he was too busy enjoying the novelty of being treated like an equal by a woman. Sapphire wouldn’t bat her eyelashes at him, look down in submission and offer honeyed words of feminine flattery as the other women he met did. He climbed into the bed and lay back against the pillows. With Sapphire’s mane of hair tossed all over the pillow beside his, the smell of the shampoo she used wafted into his nostrils, a familiar floral scent she had worn ever since he had known her, and that evocative aroma awakened too much that he would have preferred to forget. Slowly his lean brown hands clenched into fists, the tension in his lean powerful body extreme.
‘Well, isn’t this cosy?’ Saffy mocked, determined not to show weakness again.
‘Don’t rock the boat…’ Zahir purred softly in warning.
‘Your English has improved so much,’ Saffy remarked acidly, staring up at the boarded ceiling. ‘Was that a by-product of your promiscuity with various Western women or did you actually have to study the language?’
His even white teeth gritted. The novelty of her backchat was fast dimming in appeal and he sat up to stare down at her. ‘I was not promiscuous…’
Saffy stared stonily back at the lean bronzed beauty of his arresting face. ‘None of my business.’
Eyes as dark a black and cold as she had ever seen them, he swivelled away from her and turned on his side and she caught a glimpse of his back, and anything else provocative that she might have said was forgotten instantly. Without thought she thrust down the sheet to get a better look. The once-brown silken sweep of his smooth, muscular back was marred with slashed and intersecting lines of scars. Before she could think better of it, she exclaimed, ‘What on earth happened to your back?’
In an abrupt movement, Zahir flipped round to lie flat on his back again while colour crawled across his slashing cheekbones because he had forgotten to keep his shirt on. ‘Not something I want to talk about.’
‘But it looks like you were beaten…whipped!’ Saffy burst out, unable to stifle her horror at the thought of anyone deliberately inflicting that amount of pain on him. His back must have been shredded to leave scars that deep and extensive.
In the nerve-racking silence, which only Zahir was capable of using like a weapon he switched out the light. She could recall so many times when he had shut her out like that five years earlier, keeping his own counsel, refusing to share his thoughts or even the details of what he did or where he went when he was away from her. He wasn’t the confiding type, never had been, was very much made in the iron image of an army officer with the proverbial stiff upper lip. She compressed her lips on the questions tumbling on her tongue. Had he been caught, imprisoned and mistreated during the rebellion that had brought his father down? But surely his status as his father’s heir should have protected him on either side of the fence?
Bewildered, even wondering why she should be so curious, Saffy closed her eyes and instead pictured him lounging in his boxers by the door and finally she smiled faintly in the darkness, the more disturbing images banished. He might have acquired a few scars but he was still a vision of bronzed masculine perfection, still her fantasy male from his perfect pecs to his six-pack abdomen and powerful hair-roughened thighs. He would either be highly amused or highly offended to learn that she pictured him when she tried to look sexy in a pose.
CHAPTER FOUR
SAFFY WOKE UP because she was too warm and then went rigid, for at some stage of the night she and Zahir had drifted across the great divide of mattress separating them in the huge bed and it was hardly surprising that she had overheated. Their bodies were welded together like two magnets and, compared to her, he put out the most extraordinary amount of heat. Even more disturbing, however, was the hard male arousal she could feel thrusting against her thigh.
He was always in that state in the morning: she had realised that while she was married to him. But the flush of awareness that shimmered through her was shockingly new, fresh and intensely energising and she shivered. Her fingers flexed against the male bicep they were resting on, colour flashing across her embarrassed face as a hunger to touch him flared deep inside her. It was a supreme irony that in the past, while she couldn’t bear him to touch her, she had loved to touch him.
Black lashes dark as midnight and effective as silk fans swept up and she collided with stunning golden eyes and knew instantly what he was thinking. She yanked her hand off his strong muscular bicep and snaked back from him but she wasn’t quick enough, for Zahir had closed long brown fingers into her hair to entrap her.
‘Right at this minute,’ he positively purred like a very large predatory jungle cat on the prowl, ‘I’m all yours.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ she said in desperation, a spasm of panic claiming her.
‘Want me to tell you what you’re thinking about?’ Zahir husked. ‘Or will I just tell you what I’m thinking about?’
‘Let me go!’ she gasped.
He freed her hair and rolled back.
Low in her pelvis something clenched almost painfully while her nipples tingled into throbbing beads.
‘You want me to take care of this myself?’ He gestured towards where his erection was evident beneath the sheet, shameless in his enjoyment of her most mortifying yet moment of recollection as if he had somehow worked out exactly what was on her mind.
No, she wanted to flatten him to the bed, kiss her way down the roped muscles of his stomach and… With a stifled sound of distress, Saffy leapt off the bed as though she had been bitten and fled from the room to the bathroom. He had kidnapped her, deprived her of her freedom and she had been lying there in that bed tempted to reach for him, touch him, caress him with her mouth, watch him reach a climax with pride and satisfaction, the only satisfaction she had ever known in the bedroom, an entirely one-sided stunted thing born of her inability to engage in intercourse.
He was cruel; no, he was gorgeous. She couldn’t make her mind up to the extent that in the grip of that struggle she felt semi-insane and, refusing to think, she took care of her more pressing needs instead. A knock sounded on the door when she had finished brushing her teeth with the brand new battery-powered toothbrush set out for her use. After a moment’s hesitation, she yanked the door open. Sheathed in jeans and nothing else, Zahir handed her a pile of clothing.
‘I was joking.’
‘No, you weren’t,’ Saffy snapped.
Zahir lifted and dropped his lean brown hands and sudden amusement slashed his full sensual mouth. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have said no…first and foremost, I’m a man and I have some very hot memories of you.’
‘H-hot?’ Saffy stammered helplessly, taken aback by the word, certain he must have misused it.
Zahir stared at her, taking in the tousled golden hair hanging like a veil round her slim shoulders, the brighter than bright blue eyes, and acknowledged that the embarrassment her entire stance telegraphed was not at all what he had expected from her. She wasn’t an innocent any more, so why was she blushing?
‘In that department you were very hot.’
Cold tainted her at the meaning of that sentence, the reminder that there had been others intimate with him since their divorce. ‘Now that you can make comparisons?’
‘Don’t take that angle—it’s offensive,’ Zahir ground out with sudden force. ‘If I’d known what I was doing in our bed, we wouldn’t have had problems!’
Consternation slivered through her taut length. ‘Is that what you thought? That it was somehow your fault? You are so wrong, Zahir. There was nothing you could have done to make things any different between us,’ she declared with fierce conviction, her innate sense of fairness making her speak up. ‘I needed professional help.’
Saffy couldn’t believe she was telling him her even a little piece of her biggest secret, but then he had been the only other person who had experienced her problems with her. It shook her that he had blamed his inexperience for her failure in the bedroom, but then how could he possibly have guessed what was really wrong with her? Was that why he had come up with the insane idea of kidnapping her? Was that why he still supposedly wanted her? Was that ferocious pride of his still set on rewriting the past and retrieving his masculine pride?
Zahir frowned, his surprise palpable. ‘Professional help?’
‘Never mind. Like you last night and your back…not something I choose to discuss,’ Saffy fielded, because she was extremely reluctant to share her secrets, and indeed was already wondering if he might consider her in some way ‘soiled’ if he knew the truth. And just at that moment, quite ridiculously in the circumstances, she really did value the fact that, in spite of everything, Zahir was still attracted to her. It made her feel better about the past, and when she collided afresh with his mesmerising dark golden eyes she was beset by a stark sense of regret and loss. After all, when she stripped all the complications away one fact stood clear: he wanted her and she was still fiercely attracted to him, the guy she had fallen for as a teenager. Did that make her sad and pathetic? Was it the pull of first love that still made her want to reach out to him? Or simply that all-important element of sexual desire that she had not so far managed to find with another man?
And did it really matter? she asked herself, for at last the opportunity to move into the adult world and be a normal woman was being offered to her with no strings attached. If she had sex with Zahir, nobody would ever know about it and she would never see him again… Wasn’t this finally the chance for her to achieve the intimacy that she had always longed to experience? Sex was a physical thing, she bargained with herself, and it didn’t have to mean anything, didn’t have to take place within a defined relationship. Her sister, Kat, was a bit of a prude and had raised her to have a very different outlook…but Saffy had done the serious thing, the marriage thing and the love thing and had ended up broken to pieces inside herself, enduring a pain and insecurity that she had still not managed to overcome. Simple sex would be enough for her, she reasoned in desperation, suppressing her uneasy feelings while telling herself that she was surely old enough and mature enough to follow her own instincts.
‘Go back to bed,’ Saffy murmured tautly, the momentous decision already made and it was a choice that she felt she could live with. ‘I’ll join you in a few minutes…’
Zahir’s cloaking black lashes lifted on frowning dark eyes of incomprehension. ‘What are you saying?’
Saffy shrugged a slender shoulder, putting on a face because her pride was too great to allow him to suspect how insecure and inexperienced she actually was. ‘It’s only sex, not something worth making a fuss about…’
Taken aback by that blunt statement, Zahir breathed in deep. ‘Passion is always worth pursuing.’
‘Not in my world,’ Saffy countered doggedly, thinking of the many casual affairs she had seen begin and end among her friends, and she doubted that true passion-ripping-your-clothes-off passion—had driven many of them. Loneliness and lust would be a more honest description of their motivation.
Zahir stepped forward, lean brown hands reaching up to curve to her cheekbones and centre her gaze on him. ‘If that’s true, I find it sad. I want to give you passion.’
‘No, you don’t,’ she whispered. ‘You said it yourself. I’m the one who got away and you can’t live with that.’
‘It’s not that simple,’ Zahir growled, protest etched in every hard, angular line of his powerful bone structure while he clashed with her beautiful blue eyes, knowing that no other eyes had ever been so very deep a blue that they reminded him of the sky on a hot summer day.
‘Don’t make it complicated,’ she urged, her breath hitching as he angled down his tousled dark head and her lips tingled like a silent invitation.
‘It was always complicated with us,’ Zahir argued, stubborn to the last.
And Saffy rose up on her toes and angled her lips up to his, eager to stop him talking and treading all over her memories with hob-nailed boots in that obstinate, all-male, infuriating way of his. He kissed her and her heart seemed to jolt to a sudden halt inside her chest. He stole her breath with a kiss of such unashamed passion that she felt light-headed and her legs went weak.
He carried her back to bed, yes, carried, her bemused mind savoured, for very few men were physically big enough or strong enough to lift five-foot-ten-inch Saffy off her feet as if she were of tiny and delicate proportions. He captured her mouth again with intoxicating urgency, his tongue delving deep between her lips, and her body sang. Even while doubts and fears about how she would react to what came next were circulating madly in the back of her head, she could feel the supersensitive awareness of desire infiltrating her, sending prickling spasms of warmth across her breasts and a kick of heat down into her pelvis.
‘I assumed I would have to seduce you,’ Zahir admitted, staring down at her with those amazing eyes and the kind of honesty she had once loved him for.
‘It’s no big deal,’ Saffy countered a tad shakily, wondering if he would assume that she was a slut, always up for the possibility of a little fling with an attractive man when she was on her travels. But what did it matter what he thought? she demanded angrily of herself, because what she was planning to do was entirely for her own benefit and nothing whatsoever to do with him. That he would also be getting what he apparently wanted was only an accidental by-product of her decision. She was the one in control, full control. This was sex, nothing to do with the softer emotions, because she simply refused to let him screw up her emotions again.
Taken aback by that statement, Zahir frowned again, ebony brows drawing together.
‘Call a spade a spade, Zahir!’ Saffy snapped, out of all patience. ‘Isn’t this why you brought me here?’
‘You’ve changed,’ he condemned.
‘Of course I have…I grew up, realised fairies and unicorns didn’t exist, got divorced,’ Saffy recited tightly.
And then he kissed her again, his mouth crashing down on hers with angry fervour and, even though she recognised the anger, she was exhilarated by his passion. He tugged her up into a sitting position and before she even knew what he was about he had swept the kaftan off over her head, leaving her naked but for the cloaking veil of her long blonde hair.
‘You’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known,’ Zahir declared.
And she still wasn’t comfortable being naked around him, Saffy registered in dismay, fearful that the embarrassment enveloping her was only a small taster of the discomfiture she had felt in the past with her own body. Casual nudity was the norm behind the scenes at catwalk shows where fast changes of clothing were a necessity and that didn’t bother her, but being naked in front of Zahir bothered her on a much more visceral level. As he studied her a veil of hot red colour blossomed on her skin in a flush that ran from her breasts to her brow.
Long brown fingers lifted to the rounded perfection of pale breasts topped with distended pink nipples and he stroked the tightly beaded tips before he pushed her gently back against the pillows and bent his tousled dark head to put his sensual mouth there instead, suckling at the straining peaks until she gasped for breathe, shaken by even what she recognised to be a relatively minor intimacy. Even so, it was an intimacy that sent arrows of fire hurtling to her womb and her thighs trembled at the thought of what was yet to come. Let it be all right this time, she pleaded inside her head, snapping her eyes shut, seeking to blank out her thoughts lest the old panic take hold of her again.
Zahir couldn’t quite believe that this was Sapphire, lying there, admittedly passive but not freaking out. It felt just a little like all his fantasies rolling up in one go and that disturbed him. He didn’t know what he had expected and could only recognise how much she had changed while wondering with dark, forbidding fury which of her men had succeeded where he had so comprehensively failed. That mystery burned through his bloodstream like acid and he had to fight it, suppress it and exert iron control not to ask questions and demand answers. On the other hand, what if she was acting like a human sacrifice because that was how she felt?
He tasted her lush mouth with driving hunger, tried and failed to squash that inner question and lifted his head again. ‘If you don’t want this, tell me,’ he told her.
Consternation filled Saffy to overflowing as she registered that evidently she wasn’t putting on a very good impression of being a relaxed and experienced lover. She sat up with a start, her pale hands fixing to his smooth bronzed shoulders, blue eyes wide. ‘I want this…I want you.’
‘Then touch me,’ he growled low in his throat, his hunger unconcealed in his star-bright gaze.
And on the edge of fright and uncertainty, she did, smoothing her hands over his warm golden skin, feeling the rope of muscles beneath his hard, flat stomach and his sudden driving tension as she found him with her fingers. Hard and silky and so velvety smooth and large. She gulped at the very thought of what he was going to do with it…if she managed—and she had to manage, had to be normal for the sake of her own sanity and his.
Zahir groaned with unashamed sensuality, lying back against the pillows, his black hair in stark contrast to the pale linen, eyes half closed and screened by his outrageous black lashes. ‘Not too much,’ he warned her unevenly. ‘I’m too aroused.’
So, she stayed with the touching, her hand trembling slightly while she felt her body progressively warm in a great surging wash of desire. She needed him to touch her, needed that so badly that it hurt yet she was terrified that she might lose her nerve, her control. He hooked a long thigh over hers, nudging her legs apart, and she stopped breathing as if she were a candle being snuffed out, for this was the acid test, the one she couldn’t really call and couldn’t afford to fail. Long brown fingers smoothed down her thigh as if he knew on some level that, even hungry as she was, she was scared as no adult woman should be scared. After all, it wasn’t as though he had ever physically hurt her. She regulated her breathing, cleared her head of such dangerous thoughts, for thinking that way was surely like inviting her phobia back in. He skated through the crisp golden curls on her mound and she bit her tongue so badly she tasted blood in her mouth and she was trembling, all hyped up with expectation, wanting and not wanting in that moment to test her boundaries. New boundaries, she reminded herself resolutely.
He kissed her again and she squirmed against him, insanely conscious of that exploring hand touching where she had never been touched in adult memory, rubbing over that wildly sensitive little button that she hadn’t even known existed for more years than she cared to recall. Sensation sparked through her, startling in its very intensity, sending another cloud of heat through her quivering length. Before she even guessed what he was about to do, he eased a finger into her and she didn’t go off into a panic attack, didn’t jackknife back from him as though he had assaulted her. It felt strange to be touched like that, by someone else rather than by herself, but it didn’t hurt and it didn’t make her feel sick or frightened, and hope rose in a heady gush inside her that she was going to be all right, after all, and the scene was not set for another disaster.
With so much frantic reflection taking place inside her head, it took a minute at least for Saffy to register that she liked what he was doing, the sweet rise of sensation fanning through her lower body as his mouth toyed with an achingly sensitive nipple and his fingers delved into the tender wetness of her body. She hadn’t expected to like it, she acknowledged, had simply regarded it as something she had to get through, the mountain of her virginal state at nearly twenty-four years of age a complex challenge that had to be conquered solely for her own benefit.
‘I want you so much but you’re very tight, aziz.’ Zahir groaned, snaking down her body, and she didn’t know what he was doing and almost yelped in dismay when he put his carnal mouth between her parted thighs instead, caressing the sensitive pink folds of her femininity.
Saffy lay there like a stone dropped to the bottom of a very deep well, so far out of her depth she felt lost, indeed shattered by the gathering waves of increasingly powerful sensation that he was wringing from her untried body. The wave gathered her up and kept on pushing her higher until she was pulsing and throbbing and aching with an excitement that she had never known existed. Her hips were rising, her back was arching and then suddenly, with very little warning, the instant she had most feared was there: his bold shaft was nudging against her for penetration and she tensed, struggling not to freeze, but every skin cell in her body was gripped by nerves that her body might bottle out and let her down at the worst and most unforgivable moment.
And then she experienced the delicious friction of his entry eased by the slick dampness of her arousal. He was pushing, stretching her inner sheath with the hard, demanding pressure of his entrance and she was briefly amazed at what he felt like inside her. Instinctively she lifted her pelvis and he plunged forward and then it was done, a sharp stinging pain flashing through her so that her eyes widened and she gritted her teeth together, contriving to rein back a cry of pain. She pushed her face up into his shoulder to further conceal her reaction. He had no entitlement to the privilege of learning that, against all odds, he had become her first lover, and there was not much she would not have withstood to keep him from that knowledge. On that ungenerous thought a spasm of intense pleasure took her quite by surprise as her inner muscles tightened their grip on his intrusion.
With a low growl of satisfaction that vibrated his chest against her soft breasts, he began to move, pulling out, pushing back in. The strange seductive sensations built and she gasped, feeling her control sliding against the onslaught of a wild excitement she hadn’t anticipated. Excitement roared through her, her heart hammering while she panted for breath. He lifted her legs over his shoulders, rising up over her like a conquering god, his lean darkly handsome face flushed and taut with driving desire and uninhibited satisfaction while he drove into her hard and fast with a pagan rhythm that put her every sense on overload.
Nothing had ever felt so good or so necessary to her. Had he stopped she would have screamed. He touched the tiny button below her mound again, rubbing fast, and the golden light already expanding inside her burst through into brilliance and exploded in a series of violent aftershocks throughout her body. The waves of hot, sweet pleasure racked her with compulsive shivers of disbelief and a certain amount of awe, for she had never dreamt that he might make her feel so much. He shuddered over her with a moan of intense masculine satisfaction and then fell still, letting her legs fall back down on the bed and rolling off her to pull her close.
‘That was absolutely amazing,’ Zahir breathed, his diction ragged, his accent pronounced, his chest still heaving against her as he pulled her close, their bodies damp with perspiration and sliding against each other.
But Saffy’s sense of perfect peace lasted for only a few seconds. What struck her as most amazing at that moment was how much other women must have taught him, how much practice he must have had in other beds to have gained the sexual expertise he had just demonstrated. That fast she wanted to thump him hard and kick him out of bed and her hands knotted into fists of restraint below the sheet. Careful, she told herself in fierce and bemused rebuke, for she didn’t recognise the feelings bombarding her. He was her ex-husband, not her lover, and she wasn’t jealous or possessive where he was concerned. He meant absolutely nothing to her and she didn’t understand why he was still holding her and pressing a kiss to her delicate jaw bone as though they had shared something special. After all, she had just used him to have sex for the first time and he had been good…well, amazing, to borrow his word. But that was an acknowledgement that only made her fists knot tighter and her temper flare even higher, for nothing could have been more different from the tentative and inexperienced young husband she remembered than the uninhibited demonstration of raunchy sex he had just treated her to.
Without hesitation, indeed reacting on pure gut instinct, Saffy pulled free of Zahir and slid off the bed in one strong movement, a mane of rumpled golden hair falling round her pale slender length like a veil. ‘Do I qualify for a car to the airport now?’ she asked thinly, blue eyes cold as the polar wastes.
Raking long brown fingers through his black hair, Zahir sat up in the tangled sheets, the white linen providing a striking foil for his golden skin. He tensed and swore and, assuming his reaction was the result of her sudden exit from the intimacy of the bed, she flicked him a bitter glance. Yes, he was still unquestionably gorgeous, but she hated him, totally hated him, wanted to be gone now as fast as possible, escaping the scene of the crime. No doubt he thought he had used her but it was the other way round and she would have liked the freedom to tell him that, but was still not prepared to spill her deepest secrets to him.
‘I want you to stay until tomorrow,’ Zahir admitted in a low-pitched tone evocative of anticipation.
Her blue eyes flashed. ‘No. I’m done here. I want to go home right now.’
Zahir, gloriously unaccustomed to being in receipt of a negative female response since his divorce, stared back at her with faint but perceptible hauteur while he wondered what had gone wrong. ‘I don’t do one-nighters.’
Her lovely face without expression, Saffy dealt him an impatient glance, eyes as unemotional as stones. ‘I do and, as I said, I’m done.’
Determined not to meet his gaze, Saffy focused on the neat pile of freshly laundered clothes sitting on a chair and wondered when they had arrived, where they had contrived to get washed and ironed and when they had been returned, for all of those inconsequential thoughts were safer than thinking about the insane passion she had just shared with Zahir. She scooped her clothes up and headed at a brisk pace for the bathroom.
Zahir leapt out of bed and reached the door a step ahead of her, one brown hand bracing on the door to keep it shut. ‘There’s something I should tell you first.’
Refusing to look directly at him, Saffy grimaced. ‘What?’ she asked impatiently.
