by Lynne Graham
‘I do not believe in coincidences of that nature. And if you have not the courage to admit that you were involved right up to your pretty throat in your stepfather’s intrigues, we have nothing more to discuss.’
‘But—’
Tariq lifted his hands. ‘I will not hear any more. I gave you the chance to tell me the truth and you wasted the opportunity. Your stepfather is a crook and he raised you without principles. Yet it is pointless for you to plead innocence in face of the facts as we both know them.’
Hurt resentment filled Faye. Here she was telling the truth but he would not accept it. He refused to believe that she could have had nothing to do with Percy’s sudden appearance at the worst possible moment that awful evening. She was willing to admit that the facts did make it hard for her to argue a convincing case in her own defence but, nevertheless, she was telling the truth. Her stepfather had always insisted that his arrival that night had been pure coincidence and how was she to prove otherwise? Only Percy knew the whole story and, Percy being Percy, he was unlikely to stage a confession.
Eyes strained, Faye lifted her head again and then froze. While she had been lost in thought, Tariq had been discarding his clothes. How could she have forgotten for even one moment what was about to happen between them? Well, there was little chance of her forgetting a second time, she conceded in shock, violet-blue eyes now wide on the sight of Tariq shorn of his shirt.
Her shaken scrutiny roamed over his wide brown shoulders, strong arms and broad, muscular chest. A triangular haze of curling dark hair emphasised his powerful pectorals and then thinned into a silky line that arrowed down over his taut abdomen and disappeared beneath the low-slung waistband of his black briefs. Warmth prickled up from the very heart of her, making her shift on the bed and suddenly clasp her hands round her upraised knees. An enervating mix of fascination and embarrassment had her in its grip. She watched him stroll over to the dresser and discard his watch, every movement fluid with natural grace. He had the most extraordinary predatory sex appeal. Her breathing started to seize up at source at just the thought of him getting into bed with her.
Lowering her knees again, she grabbed at the sheet already turned back in readiness for them and pulled it up over herself. Her whole being was humming with raw tension. Wanting…but still seeing what a trap the wanting was, how it would ultimately smash her pride and hurt her. Yet when she focused on the stunning lure of those hawkish tawny eyes, she could hardly breathe, much less think.
He came down on the bed, all dominant male, steely contours and hard muscle. He was very much aroused. Mouth dry, pulses racing, Faye’s startled gaze skittered over him and off him again double quick. His virility was not in question. Panic and wicked excitement combined as he reached for her.
‘We have all the time in the world,’ Tariq asserted softly. ‘I’m not a selfish lover.’
He captured her mouth with a passionate thoroughness that took her by storm, only to linger with the knowing eroticism of restraint and let his tongue delve into the tender interior and, with a smooth flicker, imitate a far more intimate penetration. She shivered with helpless anticipation, her heartbeat racing. He made her want more, with effortless ease he made her want so much more.
He lifted his head, his hair already tousled by her fingers. She stared up at him, wholly absorbed in the hard planes and angles of his lean, dark, devastating face. For a split second, nothing existed but the rising swell of her own unguarded emotions and her fingertips smoothed along a sculpted cheekbone, dropped to stroke in wonderment along his beautiful mouth.
‘What?’ Tariq husked.
‘Nothing,’ she framed, her voice the merest thread of sound, for in that moment she recognised the strength of her own feelings and felt terrifyingly vulnerable.
He tugged her up to him and kissed her again. Her eyes slid shut, all thought suspended for the potent hunger was more powerful. Heart hammering, her eyes flew wide as he drew back from her again, smouldering golden eyes pinned to her as he cast aside her bra. She gazed down in abstracted surprise at the swell of her own bare breasts.
‘You are even more beautiful than I imagined…’ Tariq curved his hand to the pouting flesh he had revealed, catching a pert pink nipple between stroking fingers, sending such a shard of sensation through her that a muffled moan was wrenched from her.
Face burning but every skin cell alive and begging for his touch, she fell back on her elbows against the pillows, one feminine part of her glorying in his unconcealed appreciation of her body, some other tiny part of her standing back in shock at the growing completeness of her own surrender. ‘Tariq…’
Her voice died in her throat as he bent his arrogant dark head and teased at a prominent peak with his lips and his tongue. Seductive pleasure stopped her breathing and tensed her every muscle. He laid her down again with sure hands. As he employed greater sensual force on the tender buds, exploring the firm contours of swollen flesh, her teeth gritted and her fingers clenched, tiny cries of response escaping her parted lips. Nothing mattered but that he continue that sweet torment which was so totally addictive.
‘This was meant to be,’ Tariq told her with husky satisfaction. ‘This was meant to be the first day I saw you. Inshallah, we say…as God wills.’
She collided with the burning gold of his eyes, aware of him with every thrumming skin cell in her body. There was no room for pride or principle in what he could make her feel, what he already knew he could make her feel. He wound long brown fingers into her tumbled pale blonde hair.
‘Fate…’
‘But you like to tempt fate. Why else did you run into the desert?’ Tariq let the tip of his tongue trace her reddened lips, part them, dip, tease, making love to her mouth, his breath fanning her cheekbone. ‘Don’t you know that had you got anywhere near the airport I would have closed it and grounded every flight…don’t you know that, when I set my heart on anything, I will stop at nothing until I achieve it?’
‘But I didn’t want this…’ Even in the grip of a desperate hunger that mounted higher with his every caress, she knew that. Even as she opened her mouth, turned it under his, driven by an instinct she could not resist, she knew that. But as he drove her lips apart with electrifying passion, she refused to think.
‘You do now.’ Glittering golden eyes rested on her as if daring disagreement.
‘Yes…’
He swept her up to him and tugged off the panties clinging to her damp skin. She trembled. He ran his hands over her, toyed with the straining sensitivity of her nipples, traced the taut curve of her quivering stomach and parted her thighs to let his expert fingers trace the infinitely more tender and private place below the soft pale curls. Her heart slammed suffocatingly fast inside her, her excitement intense. His touch controlled her, made her writhe and moan and sob for breath. She twisted her head into his shoulder, drowning in the hot male scent of him, the power of every sense heightened. Her fingers tangled with his hair, clutched restively over a brown shoulder, clenched there.
Tariq groaned something in Arabic.
‘English,’ she begged.
Fierce dark golden eyes held hers in an almost aggressive gaze. ‘You excite me more than any woman I have ever known…’
The restive burning heat inside her was like a twisting, spiralling ache she could no longer withstand. ‘Please…now.’
Without hesitation, his strong-boned face feverishly intent, he pulled her under him, pushed up her thighs and came down on her. As she felt the hard satin probe of his arousal against her softest flesh, she tensed. He smoothed her hair back from her damp brow. ‘I’ll try not to hurt you but you are very tight…’
And then he was there where she most ached for him to be. He eased himself just barely inside her, the sensation of his bold shaft stretching her, enthralling her, seeming to promise that nebulous fulfilment she so craved but had yet to experience. Then his hands lifted her and he tipped her back, shifting his lithe hips and thrusting deep. Sudden burning pain jolted her
but almost as swiftly the hot, heady rush of pleasure returned and blanked out the memory of the first sensation.
‘Assuredly paradise must be like this…’ Tariq growled.
And she had no argument to make, indeed was so lost in the intoxicating world of scorching physical enjoyment, she could not have strung two sensible words together. She moved under him, skin flushed and damp, heart pounding, head thrown back, out of control and not caring as the wild surge of excitement built. She caught the age-old rhythm she had not known until he’d taught her it. She gloried in the raw dominion of his powerful body over and inside hers. She clung to him, reached a climax with a startled cry, soaring to a breathtaking peak and then writhing in the timeless ecstatic release of satiation.
Afterwards, Faye was just in shock. In shock at her own body’s capacity for that much pleasure. In shock at her own hot, frenzied abandonment. In shock at the incredible sense of intimacy she felt still lying in the circle of his arms. His heart was still thumping at an accelerated rate against hers and he was struggling to catch his breath. She kept her arms wrapped round him, wanting the silence and the lack of eye contact to continue for ever, so that she could pretend that everything was bliss, everything normal…loving?
Loving? Faye stiffened at that impossibility, ironically provoking what she had wished to avoid. Tariq lifted his tousled dark head, lustrous golden eyes lingering on her as though magneticised. ‘I am very pleased to be your first lover.’
Faye tensed even more and said nothing.
‘But then that is justice.’ With an appreciative hand, he touched the long silky streamers of her hair where it trailed across the pillow. ‘Your hair is the same colour as the moonlight.’
‘How romantic…’ Something tight and painful knotted inside her, making her feel all kinds of a fool and she responded in a wooden tone, twisting her head away.
‘Once you made me feel very romantic…’
Once. Bitterness threatened to rip Faye in two. She wanted to scream and shout. Justice that he should become her first lover? How was it justice? Wasn’t it wonderful how he could seek to justify the most barbaric of bargains? His right to use her body in return for her brother’s freedom. Or, as he himself had put it even more bluntly, sex in return for money, trade mark of the oldest profession in the world. She was a tramp now, she had even enjoyed being a tramp for him. She should have lain there indifferent, unresponsive, silent, maybe even smothering the occasional yawn. And what had she done? Humiliating recollections of her own begging, moaning and clinging engulfed her and she shuddered. No harem odalisque could have massaged a guy’s ego more effectively than she just had!
Tariq caught her back to him so that she could no longer avoid his scrutiny. He smiled down at her with a charismatic warmth that made her feel as though he were crushing her tender heart between cruel, casual fingers and released her from his weight. ‘I’m far too heavy for you…’
‘As I dare say that’s not the only drawback of being a concubine,’ Faye stated in a tight little voice, face stiff as a frozen mask, ‘I didn’t like to complain.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
TARIQ sat up with a start. ‘That joke has worn out its welcome. What is this stupid, trashy talk of being a concubine?’
‘Forget it,’ Faye said stonily, wrenching violently at the bedspread, hauling it round her and sliding off the bed in a series of fierce and jerky movements.
‘Come back to bed,’ Tariq ground out in a lethal tone of command, lean, strong face etched with cool exasperation.
Faye looked at him, all tawny and gorgeous and sexy as he was against the white bed linen, and her fury with herself, with him, with the whole wretched situation rose like a red mist in front of her. It was past time she reminded him that she was not one of his adoring subjects. ‘Get stuffed!’
For the longest second of her life, Tariq simply stared at her in disbelief and then he was out of that bed faster than the jump jet her brother had once likened him to in his relations with her sex. ‘Such abuse would infuriate me but for the fact that you sound like a truculent teenager…’
Shot down in flames, she conceded with infuriated acceptance, her colour rising.
‘What is the matter with you?’
‘The matter with me…?’ she repeated on a rising note of volume.
Tariq stood there, naked and quite unconcerned by the fact, and focused censorious golden eyes on her. ‘Tell me what is wrong.’
Wrapped in the iridescent spread, Faye flung her head high. ‘Why should anything be wrong? Are you expecting me to fawn on you now like some harem slave thrilled to death by your attention?’
‘Hardly,’ Tariq said very drily, lean, strong features sardonic. ‘Harems have been against the law in Jumar since the first year of my mother’s marriage to my father.’
Confusion assailed her. ‘But you said—’
‘I was teasing you.’ Taking advantage of her bemusement at that admission, Tariq lifted her up into his arms and strode, not back to the bed with her, but straight out of the room again.
‘Where on earth are you taking me?’ Faye gasped.
With a vibrantly amused smile at her disconcertion, Tariq strolled into a splendid green marble bathroom and shouldered shut the door. Lowering her, he extracted her from the cloaking folds of the bedspread. Before she could fully react to that new development, he had caught her up again and settled her down into the foaming waters of the Jacuzzi bath.
The water enveloped her overheated skin in an initially cooling surge that dragged a yelp from her. Then, becoming hugely conscious that she was as bare as a newborn baby and in full view of fiercely appreciative dark deep-set eyes, she sank her quivering body as far below the rippling water surface as she could.
Tariq joined her with all the cool and grace of a male to whom such inhibitions were unknown. He leant over her in a fluid arch, draping her hair over the pillowed rim so that it would stay mostly dry. Momentarily engulfed by his sheer male magneticism that close again, her instinctively raised hands accidentally brushed down over his hard male flanks as he stretched, her cheeks scorched and she dropped her hands again as if she had been burnt.
‘Harems…’ Tariq recalled lazily, sinking down like a lithe, tawny predator into the water to survey her highly embarrassed face. ‘Although you were right in saying that I am above the law, there would be great unease in Jumar if I was to demonstrate any desire to veil my woman or lock her away from all male eyes. Harems now feature only in our history books in the chapter devoted to the emancipation of women.’
‘Really…?’ Even to Faye’s own ears, her voice sounded slightly strangled, but she had never been in a Jacuzzi in her life and was already nervously wondering what might happen next.
‘In the whole of our history, our women were never veiled. Berber women do not cover their faces. The harem was a foreign concept as well, imported into Jumar by my great-grandfather, a man whose appetite for your sex is a living legend.’
‘Oh…?’
‘But my own father simply knew no other way of life until he met my mother, Rasmira.’ Reclining opposite her in complete relaxation, Tariq looked reflective and his expressive mouth quirked. ‘She was the daughter of a Lebanese diplomat, highly educated and sophisticated. She would not agree to marry my father until the royal harem had been emptied and closed. It was a long and stormy courtship.’
Her interest fairly caught now, Faye said, ‘But he must have been madly in love with her—’
‘She was a special woman and my father chose wisely for she had a great impact on our culture. She opened up schools for girls. She drove a car. She flew a plane. It is thanks to her influence that our society became more liberal and just.’
Faye was even more intrigued. ‘So when did your mother pass away?’
His lean-boned features shadowed, his sculpted mouth tightening. ‘Ten years ago. She was bitten by a rare poisonous snake. She was given the wrong antidote and by the time the mistake was recogn
ised it was too late to save her. My father went half mad with grief.’
‘How awful…’ she whispered with a shaken look of sympathy for, when it came to the loss of a loved one, accidents and mistakes which might possibly have been avoided had to leave the most bitter taste of all.
‘Come here…you’re too far away,’ Tariq urged, matching the complaint to immediate action by leaning forward and reaching for her with both hands to tug her up and across into the circle of his arms.
Faye was totally taken aback to find herself first kneeling over him and then flipped over in a careful rearrangement that left her lying on top of him and feeling very exposed. With her back turned to him, her bottom pinned between his hard thighs and her head resting back against his shoulder, she said with jerky stress in an effort to keep the conversation flowing, ‘So…er…how many brothers and sisters do you have?’
‘Only Rafi…’
‘But…’ She bit her lip uncertainly, concentration already challenged by the intimate contact of their bodies and the seemingly casual sweep of Tariq’s hands sliding down over her smooth, taut ribcage, sending her treacherous heartbeat haywire. ‘Your father…all those concubines…?’
‘As a teenager, my father caught mumps. He believed he would never father a child. My arrival was greeted as being in the realms of a miracle and Rafi was conceived only with fertility assistance and my late stepmother’s iron-willed determination,’ Tariq admitted wryly.
‘That doesn’t…er…make Rafi less of a brother,’ Faye said breathlessly as those lean brown hands came to rest just below the heaving swell of her breasts. She fought to keep oxygen in her lungs, sensual tension winging through her slender, trembling length like a storm warning she could not suppress. ‘You should…er…think of your father when you look at him, not of your stepmother…whom I gather wasn’t an awfully nice person.’
Above her head, Tariq loosed a grim laugh. ‘Unhappily, Rafi is already labelled the length and the breadth of Jumar as being of a similar nature.’