The Sheikh's Prize (6 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

S
AFFY
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.