Forbidden: The Sheikh's Virgin (13 page)

She loved him. She wanted him. He was here now.

That was enough.

His hot mouth was at her breasts, his teeth and tongue combining in their unmerciful assault against one tight nipple and then the other, and her spine was arching with the delicious pleasure, so that she was barely aware of the downward slide of her underwear, or of his.

Until his tongue circled a nipple and she felt his hand cup her mound, felt his long fingers separate her, heat into molten heat, driving her head into the pillows with the sheer force of it. With the wonder of it. With the near agony and ecstasy when he zeroed in on that tight nub of nerves and circled it, the flick of a fingertip turning her inside out.

‘Rafiq!’ she cried, not entirely understanding what she was so desperate for, only knowing that his touch, her very delight, was suddenly her torture.

‘I know,’ he whispered, and he suckled at her throat on the way to reclaiming her mouth, ‘I feel it too.’ And he lay atop her and she felt him, naked and wanting, hard and heavy against her belly. ‘I can’t wait either.’

And this time her stab of fear at what was to follow was blunted by his hot kisses and the knowledge of his own desire and the hot rush of moisture between her thighs. She wanted him. That thought was paramount. She wanted him more than anything in the world, wanted to feel him inside her. Deep
inside her, where her body ached so very much to receive him. And she wanted him
now
.

‘Look at me,’ she heard him urge. ‘Open your eyes.’ And, when finally she had complied, ‘Keep them open. I want to see your eyes when you come.’

He’d sheathed himself and was already between her legs, his thickness nudging at her slick entrance, and her breath hitched, the internal muscles she’d never known already participating, trying to draw him in to their own dance of seduction.

She was burning with need, burning with fire, and the weight of him was heavy against her flesh. Heavy and yet compelling. And still she could feel his control, his tension, as the muscles bunched in his arms around her head, as his body seemed drawn tighter than a bowstring, waiting to release the arrow.

And she looked for him then—because if he was going to see her come, she wanted the very same. Their eyes connected, fused, and the circuit was complete.

And then he moved.

His hips swayed against hers, once and then again. She felt the push and the power, his masculine force against her feminine core, and feared for a moment the impossibility of it ever happening. But he must have read her panic in her eyes, because he slowed and kissed her. Slowly, thoroughly, soul-deep. So deep she melted into him even as he angled her higher.

She looked up at him in that moment and loved him. With her eyes and her heart and her very soul. Loved him for waiting, for hesitating, and for not rushing her. Loved him for the youth he had been. Loved him for the man he was now.

Loved him as he drove into her in one mind-blowing lunge that had her screaming his name.

It couldn’t be possible
. Rafiq was immobilised, buried to the hilt inside her. Buried tight.

Surely it wasn’t possible.

And she opened her eyes and looked up at him, a tear sliding from each eye and scampering for her hair, wonder and astonishment meeting his questioning gaze, telling him that it was.

‘Please,’ she pleaded, her voice husky with sex. ‘Don’t stop. I want you.’

And even inside her he felt himself swell against the press of her tight, slick walls.

She was a virgin.
Had been
a virgin.

‘Please,’ she repeated impatiently, tilting her hips in a way far more persuasive than any words.

One hundred questions raced through his mind, one hundred answers eluded him, and yet he knew this was no time for explanations. The moment he had waited for in vain so many years ago, the moment he had been cheated of, was now his. Totally, exclusively, gloriously his.

And she
was
glorious.

With her black hair splayed across his pillow, her breasts firm and hard-tipped, the sensual curve of waist to hip where they joined.

She was his.
Only his.
And he was glad.

He moved inside her, testing her depths, and she cried out—this time in pleasure—her head pressing into the pillow, before he slowly withdrew, her fingers curling into the bedcover even as her inexperienced muscles clung desperately to him, as if afraid he would not return. She didn’t know him well, for there was no way he could not.

He could take it slowly, in deference to her inexperience. He could try to be gentle. But something told him she wanted neither slow nor gentle. Whatever had been the problem in her marriage, she didn’t want pity. She wanted him, all of him, and she would have him.

Poised at the very brink, his body screaming for comple
tion, he wrapped her long legs around his back. ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Feel me.’

And then he lunged into her again, felt her stretch and hug around him, and recognised somewhere amidst the shower of stars in his brain that he was a fool for even thinking he might be able to go slowly, for there was not a chance.

Each lunge became more desperate, each withdrawal became more fleeting, and she moved with him in the dance, welcomed him, clung to him, driving him mad with the demands of her own pulsing body.

Until her pulses turned into red-hot conflagration and she came apart around him, her eyes wild and wanton, and it was so satisfying that he had no choice but to follow her into the raging inferno.

‘Did I hurt you?’ She was bundled in his arms, their bodies spooned together, as slowly they wended their way down from that mountaintop.

‘Only for just a second,’ she admitted hesitantly. ‘But I didn’t mind. It was wonderful.’

‘It
was
wonderful,’ he agreed, remembering just how good as he pressed his lips into her hair, breathing her in deep for the space of three long breaths before asking the question that had been uppermost in his mind.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

S
HE
stilled in his arms, suddenly so rigid it was a wonder she didn’t snap. So he had worked it out. She’d wondered when he’d hesitated, been afraid he would stop. And yet blessedly, thankfully, he hadn’t stopped, hadn’t expressed surprise or demanded explanation. Instead he’d taken her to a place she’d never been, had shown her a world where she was a stranger, a place of miracles and wonder and magical new sensations.

But he must have been curious. The question had been bound to come. She swallowed back on the lump in her throat and sniffed.

‘Ten years of marriage and still a virgin. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you want to admit to anyone.’ Her voice sounded flat, even to her own ears, and the wonder and delight of her previous words was long gone. ‘It’s not exactly the kind of thing you can be proud of.’ Her voice caught, half a hiccup, on that last word, and she jammed her eyes together to stop the memories and the tears that accompanied them. But the pictures remained; the endless humiliation persisted.

‘Sera?’ She felt herself tugged around to face him. ‘Look at me, Sera.’ Reluctantly she prised open her flooded eyes. ‘You were wasted on him—do you understand me? A man would be a fool not to want to make love to you. Hussein was that fool.’

But her lips remained tightly clenched. Rafiq didn’t understand. Hussein had wanted to, had even been desperate to, she was sure. Why else make her strip in front of him and make her perform like some cheap nightclub dancer as he tugged on himself futilely? And why else would he have been so angry, so bitter, when nothing worked?

‘He said I wasn’t beautiful enough or enticing enough. He said it was my fault that we would never have children—that because I was so undesirable my womb would remain forever empty.’

Blood heated in his veins, reached boiling point in the time it took to take his next breath. ‘Hussein told you that? But you didn’t believe him? You couldn’t have believed him?’

She shrugged. It wasn’t just because of Hussein, but there was no reason to tell Rafiq that. He had discovered she was a virgin and she felt she owed him some kind of explanation. But there was no need to tell him anything else. No need to reveal any more humiliating truths.

‘Why else could he not make love to his own wife? His own wife, Rafiq! For ten years. Why else would he say such things if they were not true?’

‘Because he was using you as an excuse for his own inadequacies! I swear that if Hussein weren’t already dead, I would kill him myself.’

‘Rafiq, you mustn’t say that!’

‘Why not? It would not be murder. He was not a man. He was barely a cockroach. So why do you rush to his defence when he fed you nothing but lies, when he brainwashed you into thinking it was you with the problem?’

‘But you were not there. You don’t know—’

‘I know this. That you have no problem, Sera. You are the most desirable woman I have ever met and I have had no trouble wanting you from the moment I saw you outside my mother’s apartments.’

He kissed the last of her tears from her eyes, pushed her hair behind her ear with her fingers and followed the movement down her neck to shoulder and below, cupping one breast in his hand. She trembled, her breast already swelling, her nipple budding hard against his palm.

‘Why is it so hard to believe, Sera? You are a beautiful woman. A desirable woman. Can you not see what you do to me?’

She felt the nudge of him against her belly and looked down, gasping to see him already swelling into life again. A sizzle of anticipation coursed through her. ‘You want to do it again?’

And he smiled. ‘And again, and again, and again.’

His words shocked her, thrilled her, confused her. ‘But I thought you… I thought this was all about revenge. Because of what you thought you’d been cheated out of. You were so angry before. You said you hated me—’

And he pulled her to him, cradling her head against his chest, aching because she was so right, and had just cause for thinking it. ‘I know, and you’re right. It
was
revenge in the beginning. It was a desire to get even that drove me. I wanted you to accompany me to Marrash to spite you, because I could see you were afraid.’ He paused, retraced his words. ‘It was hate. I’d had more than a decade to do nothing but build a shrine to hatred, and I worshipped there every chance I got. Seeing you again brought the hatred back tenfold. In my own perverse way, making sure you came seemed the perfect way to punish you. I wanted you to suffer in my company if you hated it that much. But I had no idea how much I would suffer in yours, purely because of wanting you.’

She looked up at him with wide eyes. Was it possible he was telling the truth? Was it possible? ‘You really did want me?’

‘I never stopped wanting you,’ he confessed, running his fingers through the thick black weight of her hair to cup her neck and draw her closer into his talking kiss. ‘As you know I want you now. If you feel ready.’

Her lips tingled as she felt his words on her lips, as his teeth nipped at her for an answer. ‘If I feel ready?’

‘I know you might feel too tender.’

Parts of her did feel tender. Deliciously, lusciously tender. But definitely ready. ‘Make love with me, Rafiq.’
Make love with me and blot out the memories of Hussein and his cronies and the men who looked at me as if I was dirt.
‘Make me come apart again.’

Three more times she’d come apart before, utterly exhausted, she’d fallen asleep in his arms. Three more times he’d marvelled at her responsive body, at the way she fitted him so perfectly. She stirred in her sleep and sighed, nestling back into him like a kitten.

But, unusually for Rafiq after a night of sex, sleep eluded him. He lay there in the dark, listening to the sound of her breathing, slow and even, wondering what it was that felt different.

He still wanted her. That felt different. Usually he could discard a woman as easily as he’d picked her up, his desire slaked. But Sera? How many times before his interest waned now that he had had her?

They would be back at the palace tomorrow. He would go back to doing the job he was supposed to be doing—supporting his soon-to-be-crowned brother. Sera would go back to playing companion to his mother.

Sera, who had never slept with anyone but him before.

A gentle breeze stirred up from the desert sands—a warm, unsettling breeze that whispered around the tent, rustling around the edges and whistling low through the tiny gaps.

Sera slept on—despite the steadily building wind and the flapping of canvas somewhere outside, despite the noises of his own mind that were too loud to let him sleep.

And then the coronation would be upon them, and Kareef
would be King. His duty here would be done and he would be free to return to Australia.

Why did that thought suddenly leave him cold? And he looked down at the woman nestled into his shoulder and knew.

It would be justice in a way to leave her cold now that he’d had her. He could walk away, abandon her just as she’d done to him all those years ago. And nobody would blame him.

But he didn’t want that. Whatever this was—this obsession he’d had with her ever since he’d arrived, this need to have her, to possess her—he didn’t want it to end just yet. Maybe he should talk to Kareef. There might be something he could do here, to give him a reason to stay a few days longer. After all, his business was fine. It wasn’t as if he needed to rush back.

Something crashed outside, blown over by the wind, and the woman in his arms stirred, her sleepy eyes blinking in the first grey fingers of dawn. She smiled that secret smile he’d so missed when she saw him, and stretched, pushing deliciously against him as she arched her back.

‘Good morning,’ he growled, kissing her tenderly on her forehead. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Excellent,’ she said, sliding one hand over his belly, her fingers stretched wide. ‘How do
you
feel?’ And then she encountered him and answered her own question, following it with a short, ‘Oh…’

Not that she took her hand away. For the first time she did a little tentative exploration of her own, while his hardness danced and bucked under her inquisitive fingers. Rafiq was forced to grit his teeth as she tried and failed to complete a circle around him, before deciding that stroking him up and down was a more satisfying option. She flicked her thumb over the moist end and it was his turn to gasp.

‘So smooth,’ she said in awe, her teeth at her bottom lip. ‘Like satin. Do you think…?’

‘Do I think what?’ Rafiq groaned, only a few short seconds shy of forgetting
how
to think.

Her cheeks flushed dark. ‘I liked it when you flipped me over that time. Do you think it would work if this time
I
started on top?’

‘I think,’ he said, grinding the words out between his teeth, ‘that would work just fine.’

She straddled him, and the sight of her over him, her breasts firm and dusky, nipples peaked, her black hair in riotous disarray over her shoulders and her gold-skinned body the perfect hourglass, more curvaceous and beautiful than any statue, was nearly enough to bring him undone. She took him in both hands, lifting herself to guide him to her entrance, and he wanted to weep with the pleasure of it.

And then, with a sigh, she slowly lowered herself, and he watched as he felt himself disappear deep into her honeyed depths.

He closed his eyes, using his last remaining brain cell to make a decision while there was still time. He would talk to Kareef. Find any excuse. But he was
definitely
not leaving Qusay or Sera any time soon.

The return trip to Shafar was uneventful, if you didn’t count the innumerable unspoken messages that passed between Rafiq and Sera, and if you didn’t count the number of times one or other of them found the flimsiest excuse to touch the other, to help locate a wayward seat belt buckle, or to brush a strand of hair from the other’s eyes. She was wearing the sunset-coloured gown today, and the colour suited her even more than last night’s ocean-blue—not that she’d actually worn that one for long. If he played his cards right tonight, and managed to shoehorn Sera out of his mother’s apartments as he intended, this gown would no doubt meet the same fate.

He could hardly wait.

The trip back felt much quicker, and it seemed hardly any
time at all before they were through the desert and once again eating up the wide highway as they neared Shafar.

Rafiq would have preferred them to stay another night at the beach encampment, but the dawn wind had blown itself out and come to nothing, and the day that had followed the dawn was still and bright. Besides, the coronation was tomorrow. Missing a state banquet was one thing. Missing his brother’s coronation would be inexcusable. But he wasn’t looking forward to their return. The palace would be heaving with preparations, the walls bulging with visitors and guests, and he cared for none of it. He was pleased for his brother, but he did not really feel part of the celebrations, more an interested onlooker. The only person he really wanted to be with right now was here, in this car, the one who had so aptly labelled him the tourist prince.

So it would not hurt to play tourist a little while longer. His mother would approve of his staying longer, at least. She could hardly disapprove of his relationship with Sera—she had practically forced them together after all. Plus, if Tahir ever bothered to make an appearance, it would be an opportunity for all three brothers to catch up properly.

But his plans to run the idea past Kareef when they arrived at the palace would have to be deferred.

Akmal greeted them in the buzzing forecourt with the news that there was still no sign of Tahir, and that Kareef had taken himself down to Qais for the running of the Qais Cup. The fact that it apparently also had something to do with tonight’s wedding of Jasmine, Kareef’s former lover, surprised Rafiq—although Sera seemed strangely unaffected by the news.

‘I thought from what you were saying that Jasmine was a friend of yours,’ he said, as they retrieved their personal belongings from the car.

‘She is.’

‘Then how is it that you aren’t going to her wedding?’

‘Maybe I don’t enjoy seeing a friend forced to marry someone she doesn’t love.’

And the way the shutters slammed down over her features, as if she was trying to shut out something she’d rather forget, told him it was true. He grabbed her hand across the seat as she reached for her purse. ‘You never loved him at all, did you?’

Her eyes didn’t lift from the upholstery. ‘There was only one man I ever loved.’

And before he had a chance to digest what she had said, let alone work out how to reply, she’d slipped her fingers from his and disappeared in a glide of sunset-coloured silk into the palace.

‘Did everything at Marrash go to your satisfaction, Your Highness?’ asked Akmal, who had suddenly reappeared at his elbow.

Rafiq’s eyes were still on the doorway Sera had disappeared into. ‘Very well, thank you, Akmal.’
On all counts.
Except one… He swung his head around. ‘Although I’m afraid we lost one of the cars.’

‘It broke down?’ The older man looked sceptical.

Rafiq grimaced. ‘More like got bogged down. The last time I saw it, it was up to the windows in sand.’

‘Sinking sands!’ Akmal’s eyes opened wide, and for the first time Rafiq saw the unflappable Akmal, the man who oversaw the goings-on of an entire palace with the calm confidence of a born leader, actually look shocked—as if the prospect of losing one of Qusay’s princes was clearly not on his agenda. ‘I will speak to the drivers. I must apologise—it is unthinkable that something like that should happen.’

Rafiq put his hand to his wiry shoulder. ‘They weren’t driving. It was my fault, Akmal. But we are all safe. It ended well—apart from the car, that is.’

The vizier bowed slightly, and regained his calm demeanour. ‘I am pleased to hear that.’

‘Oh, and Akmal?’ he said, suddenly remembering something else. ‘I need you to arrange something as soon as possible. But first, do you know if my mother is in the palace today?’ The older man nodded. ‘Good. Perhaps you might pass word that I’ll visit her after we’ve had our chat.’