The Sheikh's Prize (7 page)

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.

‘The condom I used broke...I suspect I was too passionate. I assume that you’re on the contraceptive pill and that there’s no risk of conception?’ he pressed with the evident belief that that was the natural order for a woman like her.

For a split second her eyes narrowed and she paled as she assimilated that shocking information, suddenly grasping what had most probably provoked his curse mere minutes earlier, and although a chill of dismay gripped her she nodded immediate agreement. ‘Of course,’ she lied, wanting him to believe that she was already taking that precaution against pregnancy because she slept with other men, for that belief best conserved her pride. And she also knew how much that belief would annoy him...for he was possessive to his backbone. At least, he
had
been when she knew him, she qualified grimly, but who could say what drove him now? Five years’ separation, a lot of other women and possession of a throne had changed him: of course, they had. It would be very naïve of her to think otherwise.

‘I’ll organise transport,’ Zahir breathed grittily. ‘And see that the film shot of the commercial is also delivered to you before you depart.’

‘Is that my reward?’ Saffy enquired drily, concealing her relief that he was willing to hand over the film, well aware that the film crew and her clients would be going mad over its confiscation.

His handsome features clenched. ‘If you choose to see it that way—’

‘Oh, I do,’ Saffy asserted, watching gold glimmer like a flame in his dark as midnight eyes and loving the burn of it, knowing she had annoyed him as he threw open the door for her to leave the bedroom section of the tent. ‘And while I remember it, I would advise you to look more closely into the disappearance of that five million pounds you mentioned—because I’m telling you now, I didn’t receive a penny of it!’

Zahir inclined his arrogant dark head in grudging acknowledgement. ‘I will have the matter investigated,’ he conceded, coldly formal in tone.

Was he offended that she hadn’t appeared to want a repeat of their intimacy? Saffy stepped into the shower and washed her skin clean of the scent of him. She felt sore, every movement of her lower limbs reminding her of his passionate possession. It was done. She was no longer a virgin. She had surmounted her fears. She was
finally
a normal young woman and now in a condition to consider a relationship as a potential part of her future. That was good, she told herself firmly. She forced her stiff facial muscles into a determined smile and had just wrapped a towel round her dripping body when a knock sounded on the door and heralded Zahir’s reappearance, his lean bronzed body still clad only in boxer shorts.

‘Yes?’ Saffy prompted tightly, not having wanted to see him again because seeing him hurt, made her think of the other women he had been with and, even though it wasn’t fair or even rational when she had been unable to consummate their marriage while they were together and they were now divorced, she hated him for having found pleasure and satisfaction when she could not.

‘I must have hurt you...there’s spots of blood on the sheet,’ Zahir informed her grimly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Hot colour flew into her cheeks like a banner of scarlet. It had not occurred to her that there might be any detectable physical proof of her innocence and she was mortified by his discovery. ‘You didn’t hurt me...er, it’s been a while for me, so perhaps that explains it,’ she muttered awkwardly through clenched teeth of discomfiture.

‘Why has it been a while for you?’ Zahir demanded bluntly. ‘You live with a man.’

Somehow he contrived to voice that statement in a manner and tone that implied she regularly sold her body on street corners. ‘That’s my business,’ Saffy responded flatly, her eyes veiled.

‘You should see a doctor,’ Zahir informed her curtly. ‘I can contact someone—’

‘No, thanks.’ Her cup of humiliation now truly running over and threatening to drown her, Saffy moved towards him and opened the door for his exit. ‘Excuse me, I’d like to get dressed.’

‘Sapphire...’ Frustration stamped on his lean dark features, Zahir glowered down at her, smouldering golden eyes alight. ‘Why are you behaving like this? Is this a habit of yours? Do you often indulge in casual sex?’

She refused to look at him and her lush mouth compressed so hard that her lips turned bloodless. ‘That would be kissing and telling, which I definitely
don’t
do.’

CHAPTER FIVE

S
AFFY
RESTED
BACK
in her cream leather reclining seat in Zahir’s incredibly opulent private jet, but beneath the skin her every muscle was tense and she could not relax.

Even so, Zahir had certainly ensured that she was travelling back to London in style. She frowned at the acknowledgement because she would have preferred to consign every image and conversation of the past twenty-four hours to a mental dustbin sealed with a good strong lid. She had slept with her ex, no big deal, she told herself with rigorous resolve. It was only a major event for her because having sex had been something she had, until relatively recently, been afraid she couldn’t ever do.
She
had used
him.
That was how she had to look on what had happened. If he knew that his temper would have gone nuclear because Zahir expected everything on his own terms. In that spirit he had married her and in the same spirit he had decided to divorce her again. Nothing had ever been equitably discussed: he had been happy to make his mind up for both of them.

Five years ago, they had landed in Maraban as a newly married couple and that too had been very much on his terms, with her not having the first clue about the dysfunctional royal family she had joined. His father, King Fareed, had been livid that his younger son had married a foreigner and had initially refused to even meet her. She had met Zahir’s older brother, Omar, and his wife, Azel. Omar had died in a car crash a few months after Saffy arrived. As Omar and his wife had been childless, Zahir’s importance to his father had mushroomed once he became the heir-in-waiting and Saffy had seen even less of her husband as he was forced to take on the ceremonial roles that had once been his brother’s.

Staying in the royal palace just outside the city limits, Saffy had been sentenced to a very boring and hidden existence. As her father-in-law refused to accept her as part of the family and was determined to keep the presence of a Western blonde in the palace a secret, she had not been allowed to go out and about in Maraban and explore freely. Indeed aside of a few stolen shopping expeditions in the company of her widowed sister-in-law, Azel, Saffy had barely gone out at all. Zahir had declared that
eventually
his father would accept her as his wife but that she would have to be patient. But twelve months living like the invisible woman had convinced Saffy that her marriage had been a major mistake, particularly when things between her and Zahir had gone badly awry as well.

‘You’re very unhappy here,’ Zahir had acknowledged the very last time she saw him during their marriage. ‘You’ve been telling me that you wanted a divorce for the past six months and now I must agree.’

‘Just like that you
suddenly
agree?’ Saffy had yelled at him incredulously, shock at his change of heart winging through her in sickening waves as she realised he had clearly had enough of her and their marriage. ‘But you swore that you still loved me, that we could work it out...’

‘But now I want you to go home to London as soon as it can be arranged. I want to divorce you and set you free,’ Zahir had countered as stonily as though she had not spoken.

It was true that for weeks whenever they argued she had hurled the threat of a divorce at him on a fairly frequent basis. But she had never really
meant
it, had simply been dramatising herself and struggling to make her young husband take her unhappiness seriously. But she had somehow still expected Zahir to continue to refuse to even consider divorce as the answer to their problems. Coming at her out of the blue like that, his volte-face had shocked her and pleading in the face of his clear determination to get rid of her had been more than she could bear. For so long, regardless of their difficulties, she had clung to her conviction that Zahir still loved her no matter what and that what they had together was still worth fighting for. Deprived of that consolation and cruelly rejected by the divorce that swiftly followed, Saffy had been heartbroken and not surprisingly had felt abandoned.

Her older sister, Kat, who had raised her from the age of twelve, had tried to comfort Saffy, pointing out that King Fareed’s opposition to their marriage must finally have worn Zahir down while reminding Saffy that neither she nor Zahir had foreseen the very real difficulties that would arise in Saffy’s struggle to adapt to life in a different country, far from family and friends. Saffy didn’t want to remember how appallingly she had missed Zahir after she left Maraban or how many months had passed before she could enjoy the freedom she had reclaimed and stop thinking about Zahir at least once every minute. She had genuinely loved him and it hurt to appreciate that he had moved on from her so much more easily than she had moved on from him. Maybe he had never really loved her, Saffy conceded painfully. Maybe it had
always
been about the sex and only the sex. Certainly, given his behaviour in shipping her out to the desert for seduction, that looked like the most viable explanation. It was equally agonising to admit that had she been capable of doing what she had just done with him five years earlier they might still have been together. Or
would
they have been? Was that just fantasy land? Perhaps all along she had only been a fling in the form of a wife for Zahir.

But didn’t she have rather more pressing concerns in the present? What about that contraceptive accident they had had? Saffy tensed, her appetite evaporating in front of the beautiful lunch she had been served as her skin chilled with complete fright at the idea of being faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Once she had believed she would never have children because she wasn’t able to have sex or even handle the concept of artificial insemination. Now she knew differently and knew her future had opened up another avenue once barred to her. So, if she did fall pregnant, what would she do about it? She had friends who would rush to request the morning-after pill after such a mishap to ensure that no conception took place, but if against all the odds new life did begin inside her, Saffy registered that she was totally unwilling to consider a termination. In that moment she was suddenly realising with a heart that felt full enough to burst that a baby would mean the sun, the moon and the stars to her and that there was nothing she would cherish more. It might be a disaster as far as her current clients were concerned, but it would only be a short-term one and surely her earning power wouldn’t die overnight. She breathed in deep and slow, both terrified and enervated by the risk she was prepared to take with her own body. If conception happened, she decided, it would happen and she would embrace it without regret.

Having dropped off the film of the shoot with the exceedingly relieved production company, Saffy caught the tube back to the two-bedroom apartment she had bought with Cameron. Cameron, a keen cook, was in the kitchen dicing vegetables, but it was the sight of the small brunette perched on the counter chatting nineteen to the dozen to him that startled Saffy.

‘Saffy!’
Topsy cried, velvety somber eyes full of warmth as she leapt off the counter like a miniature whirlwind and threw herself exuberantly into her much taller sister’s arms. At slightly less than four feet eleven inches tall, Topsy was tiny. ‘I wish you hadn’t been away this week. I wanted to go out with you to celebrate the end of my exams!’

Saffy’s eyes stung as she gratefully accepted her youngest sister’s affectionate hug. Topsy always wore her feelings on her sleeve. At eighteen years of age, having just finished school, Topsy was much less damaged by their disturbed childhood and more outgoing than her older sisters. She was also exceptionally clever and overflowing with an irrepressible joie de vivre that few could resist. Yet as Saffy studied the younger woman she saw shadows below her eyes and a tension far removed from Topsy’s usual laid-back vibe and she wondered what was wrong.

‘How did you find out that I was back so quickly?’ Saffy prompted.

‘She’s been phoning here every day...I texted her after you called me from the airport,’ Cameron, a tall attractive man with close-cropped dark curls, told her from his position by the state-of-the-art cooker.

‘I assumed you’d want to stay on at Kat’s with Emmie,’ Saffy remarked.

‘No, Kat and Mikhail are hosting a big dinner tonight and I wasn’t in the mood to play nice with loads of strangers,’ Topsy confided with a slightly guilty wince. ‘And Emmie has already gone home again.’

Saffy’s heart sank at that news because it was obvious to her that once again her twin had chosen to dodge meeting her. Her estranged twin was
still
avoiding her, Saffy acknowledged unhappily, wounded by Emmie’s reluctance to even be in her company. Was she that bad? Was she truly so hateful to her twin? Or was it a simple if unpalatable fact that her past sins were beyond forgiveness?

‘Emmie’s gone back to Birkside?’ she checked, referring to Kat’s former home in the Lake District, the farmhouse her elder sister had inherited from her late father.

Kat was the daughter of their mother Odette’s first marriage, the twins the daughters of her second marital foray while Topsy was the result of their mother’s short-lived liaison with a South American polo player. By the time the twins reached twelve years of age they were a handful and Odette had placed all three girls in foster care. Kat, then in her twenties, had made a home at Birkside for all three of her sisters and Odette had had very little to do with her children since then. In every way that mattered, Kat had become the loving, caring mother her sisters had never really had.

‘
Should
Emmie be on her own up there?’ Saffy questioned the younger woman anxiously. ‘I mean, it’s a lonely house and now that she’s pregnant...?’

Topsy rolled her eyes. ‘Emmie always does her own thing and she has friends up there and a job,’ she pointed out breezily. ‘I also think that just at the minute Kat and Mikhail being so lovey-dovey makes them hard for Emmie to be around.’

Even while Saffy adored the fact that Kat had found happiness with a man who so obviously loved her, she too had felt like a gooseberry more than once in the couple’s company. If her twin’s solo pregnancy was the result of a recent relationship breakdown, Emmie was probably feeling a great deal more sensitive to that loving ambiance.

‘Dinner will be ready in ten minutes,’ Cameron announced.

‘I’ve got time to get changed, then?’

‘Yes. Let’s go into your room,’ Topsy urged, tugging at Saffy’s arm.

A frown indented Saffy’s brow at her sister’s obvious eagerness to get her alone. ‘What’s up?’ she asked as she closed her bedroom door.

Topsy, all liveliness sliding from her expressive face, sank down on the edge of the bed, hunched her shoulders and muttered, ‘I found out something I wasn’t prepared for this week and I didn’t want to bother Kat with it,’ she admitted.

Saffy dropped down on the stool by the dressing table. ‘Tell me...’

‘You’ll probably think it’s really silly,’ Topsy confided.

‘If it’s upset you, it’s not silly,’ Saffy declared staunchly.

Topsy pulled a face. ‘I don’t know if I am upset. I don’t know how I feel about it—’

‘How you feel about what?’ Saffy prompted patiently.

‘A few weeks ago, my dad, Paulo, asked me to agree to a DNA test. I’m eighteen. We didn’t need Kat’s permission,’ Topsy explained as Saffy raised her brows in astonishment at the admission. ‘Apparently Dad had always had doubts that I was his child and since he got married he and his wife have had difficulty conceiving—’

‘Your dad’s got married? Since when? You never told us that!’ Saffy exclaimed.

Topsy sighed. ‘It didn’t seem important. I mean, I’ve only met him a half-dozen times in my whole life. With him living in Brazil, it’s not like we ever had the chance to get close,’ she pointed out ruefully. ‘Anyway, his new wife and him went for testing when she didn’t fall pregnant and it turns out he’s sterile.’

Saffy stiffened at the news. ‘Hence the DNA testing...’

‘And it turns out that I couldn’t possibly be his kid,’ Topsy confided with a valiant smile. ‘So, I went to see Mum—’

Saffy gave her a look of dismay, for Odette was a challenging and devious personality. ‘Please tell me you didn’t!’

‘Well, she was the only possible person I could approach on the score of my parentage,’ Topsy pointed out ruefully. ‘First of all she tried to argue that in spite of the DNA evidence I
was
Paulo’s kid—’

‘I doubt if she wanted the subject dug up after this length of time,’ Saffy remarked stiffly, cursing their irresponsible and selfish mother and hoping she had dealt kindly with her youngest daughter.

‘She definitely didn’t,’ Topsy admitted with a grimace of remembrance. ‘She just said that if Paulo wasn’t my father, she didn’t know who was. Did she really sleep with that many men that she wouldn’t know, Saffy?’

Saffy reddened and veiled her eyes. ‘There were periods in her life when she was very promiscuous. I’m sorry, Topsy. That was an upsetting thing for you to find out. How did Paulo react?’

‘I think he had already guessed. He didn’t seem surprised. Let’s face it, I don’t look the slightest bit like him. He’s over six foot tall and built like a rugby player,’ Topsy reminded her companion ruefully. ‘Now I’ll probably never find out who my father is but why should that matter to me? After all, you and Emmie have a father who lives right here in London but who still takes no interest in you.’

Saffy groaned. ‘That’s different. Mum and him had a very bitter divorce. She dumped him because he lost all his money. When he built a new life and remarried and had a second family he didn’t want anything more to do with us.’

‘Does that bother you?’

‘No, not at all. You can’t miss what you’ve never had,’ Saffy lied, for that was another rejection that still burned below the layer of emotional scar tissue she had formed. When she and her twin had been at their lowest ebb, their father, just like their mother, had turned his back on them and had said he wanted nothing to do with them.

‘You’re evil...just like your mother. Look what you’ve done to your sister!’
he had told Saffy when she was twelve years old, and even the passage of time hadn’t erased her memory of the look of dislike and condemnation in his gaze.