“I’m taking the train.”
“Let me drive then,” he murmured. “My car’s over there.”
She bit down on her lip, following his gaze. “Look,” she said after a long moment. “I’m not sure why you’re here. Maybe you feel sorry for me. Maybe you felt rude or whatever…”
“You don’t know what I felt?” His control snapped. He stared at her in frustration and brought his lips down on hers, claiming her with every single cell in his body.
She froze, shocked, and then melded her body to his, her arms wrapping around his back, her face tilted to welcome as much of him as he wanted to give. He kissed her hard, demanding, as though she did this all the time. As though she were used to handsome virtual-strangers launching an all-out assault on her senses. “Ra’if,” she groaned into his mouth, her hands coming to his chest and stroking his abdomen.
“This is why I’m here.”
She jerked her head back, her breathing rushed, her eyes confused. Milky, from pain. “For sex?”
“No!” He laughed, a hoarse sound. “Though that would obviously be … pleasant.” He shook his head ruefully. “I’m here because I can’t stay away. I don’t know if I’m what you need in your life, Melinda, but in my country, we believe things happen with a hand of fate. I met you that night and something clicked inside of me. I want to get to know you.” He grimaced. “That’s actually a very clinical way to describe what I want.” He brought his mouth back to hers and sucked her lower lip between his teeth before releasing her and dragging his mouth to her ear lobe. He whispered throatily, “I want to get to know everything about you. I want to know how you think and feel. I want to touch every single part of you and kiss every single part of you with every single part of me.”
Melinda’s pulse was on fire. Her body was burning up; desire was haemorrhaging her system. “Ra’if,” she shook her head, but what had she wanted to say. Wasn’t it everything she’d needed to hear?
“I stayed away because I am daunted by the intensity of what I feel. I am older than you are. Considerably more experienced. That I might hurt you makes me wish I didn’t feel this.”
She tilted her head back, exposing the column of her neck, and he kissed it now. Tiny little butterfly kisses that made her stomach roll hungrily. “You won’t hurt me.”
“I’m not right for you,” he said with complete confidence.
“I’m not looking for Mr Right,” she responded quickly.
Her words splintered his resolve. A temporary affair? A fling? Was that a way to have his cake and eat it too? To enjoy a relationship with Melinda knowing he could walk away before it became too serious? Before she needed to know the truth about his own relationship with drugs, not to mention his royal lineage?
“Come upstairs.”
“You’re going out,” he murmured, already following her to the apartment.
“It’s not important,” she promised. “Please.”
He nodded. Every sensible thought was put on hold in his brain. This was bigger than them. As soon as they were inside her Christmas grotto and she’d flicked on the lamp by the door, he pulled her closer. She smelled so good. Like cinnamon and cherries. “There’s no future for us. There can’t be,” he said, his eyes locked to hers, holding himself just enough apart to retain a skerrick of his will-power.
“That’s good. That suits me. The last thing I want is to get into something serious. My life’s complicated enough, believe me. But I haven’t had sex with a guy in a really, really, really, really long time. So you know what? Just promise me this will be good and I don’t care what happens next.”
He laughed and nodded, his hands undoing the buttons of her jacket slowly, teasingly. Her eyes followed the progress of his fingers, noting the one piece of jewellery he wore – a thick gold ring that had some kind of gem in the middle.
“What’s that?” She murmured, guessing it had a significance beyond the sartorial.
“A family heirloom,” he said simply, moving painstakingly slowly to the next button.
She stared up at him, swallowing visibly. “Can you possibly do that faster?”
He shook his head. “Nothing about this is going to be fast.”
She groaned. “Didn’t you hear what I said? It has been a really long time …”
“So you want to make up for lost time now?”
“Something like that.” She batted his hand aside and reached for her coat, pushing it off impatiently. She was wearing a black woollen dress beneath, and there was a gaudy reindeer badge fastened to the fabric near her breast. He arched a brow as he studied its amateur construction.
“Jordie made it,” she said with a shake of her head. “How well he knows me, huh?”
“It’s unique,” he murmured, running a finger over the antlers and then lower, to the soft swell of her breasts.
She gasped at the intimate contact. It was exquisite. Her nipples strained against the fabric of her dress, greedy for more. He met her eyes, only desire in them, then carefully reached behind the brooch to unpin it from her dress. He laid it gently on the side-table. With the kind of reverence that made her heart soar, for she understood what a sweet offering it was, even though the colours had bled outside of the lines and the backing was glued on wonky, so that the reindeer was in a state of permanent flight.
His hands dropped to her hips, holding her still.
And he looked at her. He looked at her as though he was committing the moment to his memory, locking it into the vaults of his mind.
She looked back. Unashamed in her appraisal of him.
“I don’t know your last name,” she said with a wobbly smile, knowing it didn’t matter. It was reckless and foolhardy, but he was right. Something about their meeting was fated, and damn it, she wanted him. She wanted him in the way she couldn’t put into words.
“Do you want to know it?”
She laughed. “I guess so.”
He nodded. “Later.”
Those alarm bells that would usually have rung in her head were mute, greedily waiting for the same satiation as the rest of her body. He reached around behind her dress, pulling at the zip, lowering it painstakingly slowly. It was a form of torture, but the best kind.
When the zipper reached the swell of her bottom, he held the fabric wide and dropped it to the ground. She stepped out of it, her mouth dry. Her leggings, socks, shoes, bra and vest were impediments she could have done without. The thought of wriggling out of the skin tight fabric in front of Mr Suave was suddenly mortifying.
“Um, why don’t you give me a minute. To, erm, you know …”
His eyes sparkled. How tempting it was to push aside her objection; to steamroll her vanity and insist on undressing her. He ached to unwrap her as his very own Christmas present. But he understood her need to control the situation. It was threatening to burst completely out of their hands, to flame wildly away from them. “I will give you two minutes,” he murmured with a wink.
Her heart flipped over.
She reached down and scooped up her dress, folding it over her arm as she ducked into the small, tiled bathroom. She undressed quickly, kicking off her shoes, slipping out of her shirt and bra, peeling her leggings off and then gasping when she saw the underpants she’d selected earlier that day. With several holes around the waist band and the white now stained grey from being run through too many loads of wash with denim, they were definitely not the last word in sexy. She stripped them off and stared at her body objectively in the mirror.
Her fingers ran over the tiny spider webbing that crossed her belly, feeling the slight crenulations with pride rather than shame. They were the only signs she bore that she’d carried a child within her body. The rest of her body had returned to its pre-pregnancy state almost instantly. She had, at the time, not appreciated the fact. But years later, she was grateful for the flatness of her stomach and the fullness of her breasts.
Especially with the sexiest man on earth waiting for her in her living room.
“You can do this.” She pulled a face, ran her fingers through her hair and then, as an afterthought, sprayed a single squirt of perfume in the air. She walked through it, then wrenched the door inwards. He was across the room, staring at a photo of her, Jordan and Brent. It had been taken when Jodie had only been two – it was one of the few times they’d spent as a family.
“I got it printed recently,” she said quietly. “He’s been on and on about seeing his father and I thought …” The words died in her mouth as the look of searing possession on Ra’if’s face held her immobile. She could barely breathe. It was as though a weight was pressing down on her chest, pushing all air and sensation from her body.
She was completely naked.
She didn’t care.
He prowled – there was no other word for the gait – across the carpet, his eyes locked to hers as he removed his own shirt to expose a highly muscled chest.
She’d caught a glimpse of the sculpted chest the night he’d rescued her. He’d been wearing running clothes and they’d fit his body like a second skin, leaving little to the imagination.
He stood before her and she lifted her fingers, tracing the ridges of his abdomen, her mind groaning under the weight of her desire.
“Perfect.” She lifted her eyes to his face to find him smiling at her.
“I’m glad you approve.”
“You’re like a model.”
His laugh was rich with disbelief. “Hardly.”
“No, I mean, seriously, you are really, really, really gorgeous.”
His voice took on a husky quality. “I think you are really, really, really gorgeous.”
“No,” she shook her head. “Don’t say that.”
He pulled her forward, brushing her naked body against him; her breasts crushed to his chest. “Believe me, azeezi. I do not offer praise where it is not warranted.”
And the way he said it, his words so filled with command, his tone so richly autocratic, made her blood fizz in her veins.
“Then I’ll take your praise and enjoy it,” she grinned. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He linked his hands behind her back. “We don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.”
“I know.” She licked her lower lip. “I’m nervous. But not because I don’t want to or because I don’t think it’s right. Just because …”
“It’s been a long time.” He dipped his head forward, pressing his forehead to hers. “Then let me slowly remind you what you have been missing.”
When he was turned on, his accent was thicker. He sounded like he’d strolled off the pristine deserts of his faraway land. She could listen to him speak all night.
When he lifted her up, she made a squawk of surprise. She was petite, but no one had carried her in at least nineteen years, since she’d been a toddler! He held her against his broad chest and carried her into the lounge room, laying her down on the rug, with her head beneath the Christmas tree.
“I have a bed you know.”
“And I’m sure we’ll use it,” he promised, bringing his body over hers. “But for a true die-hard Christmas angel, I want you to look at your tree, while I do this.”
“Do what?”
But he was kissing her body, just like he’d promised he would, taking her nipples in his mouth and rolling them with his tongue, tormenting each in turn with the kind of pleasure that was so foreign and so pronounced it was almost unbearable.
“Ra’if,” she arched her back, and he smiled, bringing his mouth lower to her flat stomach. He traced her stretch marks with his tongue, seeing them as she did – as added perfections and marks of her feminine power – before drawing his mouth lower. The second his tongue connected with the most sensitive folds of her skin, she cried out and scrambled to push up on her elbows. She swore, and bit down on her lip, but he didn’t stop, and she was too weak from sensation to do anything but enjoy. She fell back against the floor, not caring when her head hit the timber with a clunk.
She writhed beneath him, but before long, her body was flushed with a new kind of heat. One that seemed like liquid gold pouring over her, as pleasurable as it was frightening. She dug her nails into his shoulder as everything she’d known about sex and sensation was thrown out the window, leaving only this. Sublime, weightless, floating, wild, drowning in need, relief. She cast herself over a wave, soaring in her mind, across the ocean, feeling the world’s secrets open before her.
She was crying out, over and over again, she heard her fevered voice and couldn’t silence it. Her voice was the waves, coming from her soul, into the room. The wave broke and crashed, slowly dragging her back to earth, to the here and now, to the sublime ordinariness. She blinked her eyes open, all of the feelings she had to process jumbling through her. Her body was weak; yet it was strong. It was filled with a new kind of power. And a need to learn more.
Her breath was strained as though she had run a marathon. She pushed up on her elbows once more, her eyes locked with his. He was smiling at her, a smile that made everything hot again.
“What was that?” She said with a roll of her eyes.
He laughed. “Don’t tell me you have not experienced this before?”
She shook her head, too shell-shocked to dissemble; to protect her innocence. “That is not like anything I’ve ever felt before.” She bit down on her lip, her smile bursting through anyway.
“You liked it,” he dragged his body higher, so that his powerful legs straddled her and she could feel the strength of his arousal through his pants.
And she wanted that. She wanted more.
Her hands at his belt buckle were insistent, but he shook his head, kissing her lightly on the top of her head.
Doubts began to nudge aside the complete, blind pleasure of a moment ago. “What is it?”
“I want that, believe me,” he rushed to reassure her. “But I think you need to … acclimatise … to this.”
“I’m acclimatised,” she promised.
His laugh made her tummy flip. She arched her back and lifted her knees towards the ceiling, so that his erection was tantalisingly close.
“And I’m not finished with you yet.”
“I want everything. All of you.”
His eyes widened; a muscle jerked in his jaw. She reached a finger to it and felt its firm pulsing.
“Yes,” he nodded slowly. “But not tonight.” He kissed her forehead again. “Tonight is just for you.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Isn’t mulled wine supposed to have the alcohol heated out of it?”
Tara grinned over the cup, her hair made wild by the ice cold wind that had buffeted her on the walk home earlier that evening. “Only if you’re not very careful and clever, like I am.”
“Well, it’s delicious.” Melinda sipped it again, catching a piece of orange rind.
“I don’t have any other friends who appreciate my talents for Christmas cocktail making.”
Melinda pulled a face. “I don’t know if this counts as a cocktail,” she pointed out. “Though it is delicious.”
“Hey, careful there, or I won’t top you up.”
“That’s a good thing! Half of this and I already feel woozy.”
“You’re such a lightweight.”
Melinda’s cheeks flushed. “I know.” A buzzing sound vibrated from the kitchen and she uncurled her legs from beneath her and moved towards it, placing her wine on the bench beside her phone. Tara was right behind her.
“Booty call?”
Melinda laughed but her heart was accelerating wildly. “No way.”
Conscious of her friend’s eyes locked on her face, she opened her phone and read the message.
It was from Ra’if.
I can’t stop thinking about you. X
She smiled, holding the phone close as she digested the words.
“Well?” Tara prompted.
“Nothing exciting.”
“Yes, I can see that, from the way your cheeks are flu
shed and your eyes are all gooey.”
“They are not gooey!”
“Oooh, Melinda’s in looooove.”
“Shhh!” Melinda pushed her friend playfully, nodding towards Jordan’s bedroom. “The last thing I need is for Jordan to wake up.”
“Sorry,” Tara laughed, muffling the sound with the palm of her hand.
But Melinda wasn’t seriously annoyed. I can’t stop thinking about you. She put the phone down, but his words were with her all night.
He was under her skin; but she couldn’t let him be. This was casual. That’s all she wanted. She didn’t reply to the message; and she closed off the part of her heart that wanted to jump for joy.
* * *
His voice over the phone, without the distraction of his beautiful face and sexy body, was husky and spiced. She pushed back a little from her desk, her eyes watching snow dance beyond her window, her mind completely held by him.
“Did you have a good night?”
A smile was on her lips. She nodded, then realised he couldn’t see the tell-tale gesture. “Yeah. It’s sort of a thing Tara and I do. A routine. We catch up whenever her husband’s home and she can have a night off from the kids. I’m lucky to have a neighbour like her.” Stop babbling, she moaned internally, almost zipping her lips in an effort to bring the rambling discourse to an end.
“Yes,” he agreed, not seeming bored by the chatter. “She seems very protective of you.”
“Yeah?” She pressed her lips together. Tara had mentioned that she’d run into Ra’if. “I’ve known her a long time.”
He was quiet for a moment. “What time do you take lunch?”
“Take lunch?” She arched a brow. “I get a break around one. Why?”
“Meet me.”
Her heart turned over. “I only have an hour,” she murmured, her stomach clenching in anticipation already.
“That should be enough time.”
“Enough time? For what?”
“I’ll pick you up downstairs from your office.”
“Oh. Right.”
He disconnected the call before she could tell him where she worked, yet when she emerged from her office onto the ice cold street a little before one, he was waiting for her. He was dressed in a thick wool coat over his suit.
The Sheikh's Christmas Wish Page 5