by Various
‘Perhaps, what? You’re going to offer to sleep there instead? Is that it, bella?’
She eyed the vast space beside her nervously. ‘Well, it’s a big bed. Maybe…’
His black eyes narrowed. Was she really that naïve? ‘You think so? No bed is big enough for a man and a woman if they are trying to deny themselves something they both want.’
‘What are you saying, Raffaele?’
His mouth hardened. ‘I’m saying that I won’t touch you. At least not intentionally—not if that is what you have decided you now want. But if you press yourself close to me in the middle of the night and then claim you were ‘asleep’—or if you clutch at me and afterwards assert that you were having some kind of bad dream—well, I cannot guarantee that I will respond in the way that a gentleman might.’
Beneath the Egyptian cotton her body shivered at the vivid images his silken words created.
‘Wh-what are you saying, Raffaele?’ she repeated shakily.
His black eyes were suddenly as hard and as obdurate as his body, and he wondered whether she was staring at him closely enough to see his arousal.
‘I’m saying that I’m going to make love to you,’ he said harshly. ‘Unless you tell me emphatically that you don’t want me to.’
There was a silence broken only by the faint cacophony of the distant sounds of the city.
Their eyes met. He didn’t love her. He would never love her. A servant girl, the mother of an illegitimate child. Theirs was a relationship—if you could call it that—forged out of necessity. Only now it was threatening to spill over into desire…
Heartbreak, she kept telling herself over and over again—repeating it like a magic spell, like a mantra. Heartbreak.
Yet his dark eyes and hard body held a far greater lure than any spell, no matter how powerful it was—and all Natasha could think about was that she would never get another opportunity like this. That he would not ask her again. And could she honestly live the rest of her life knowing that she had been so close to the realisation of years of wistful daydreams and then turned her back on it?
‘So, tell me you don’t want me and let that be an end to it,’ he asserted starkly.
There was silence for a moment.
‘I can’t do that.’ Her voice was soft.
But he needed to be sure. He did not want her railing against him tomorrow morning simply because her conscience had got the better of her.
‘Say it,’ he commanded throatily.
Was this his victory, then, to make her beg? She swallowed. ‘I want you.’
The ache within him intensified, but it was the honesty in her voice which moved him—so that the walk over to the bed where she lay felt somehow significant.
He shook his dark head very slightly, like a man emerging from the water and trying to rid himself of the last few drops. He really had been without a woman too long if that was the kind of bizarre interpretation he was putting on something so simple as having sex.
Yet it had been a long time; he could not deny that.
Why?
Because he had been working hard?
Well, yes—but that was nothing new.
Because there had been no one suitable?
Hardly. At any given moment of any given day Raffaele could have snapped his fingers and any number of beautiful women would have come running to him.
Maybe that was why. Because it all came a little too easily to him and he was bored, his appetite jaded by the inevitability of it all.
Yet Natasha hadn’t exactly been unforthcoming, had she? As soon as he’d waved a credit card in her direction she had dazzled him with the green light. No one in their right mind could really accuse her of playing hard-to-get. So what was it?
He stared down at her, at where the shiny fall of her hair lay like a layer of honey-blonde satin over the crisp white pillow. Her eyes were the clear blue of an Italian spring morning and her skin like freshly poured cream.
Reaching down, he pulled the sheet away from her. She lay trembling in a satin nightgown as pale as her face, and he touched a little shoestring strap.
‘Shall we take this off?’
Was this how clinical it was going to be? she wondered wildly. He’d strip her off and then presumably himself? So…so mechanical? She shook her head and saw him frown. ‘No.’
‘No?’
Would she sound ridiculously needy if she said it? But suddenly Natasha didn’t care what she sounded like. This wasn’t about her image, for heaven’s sake, but the craving of her heart.
And if this was to be the night she had long dreamed about then she wasn’t going to be shy about conveying what her needs were.
‘Kiss me first,’ she whispered. ‘Please. Just kiss me.’
‘Kiss you?’ Unexpectedly, he smiled then. ‘Is that all?’
He bent down towards her, almost as if he was moving in slow motion, so that it seemed like an eternity before their lips connected. And when they did—well, for Natasha it was as all the books said it should be. A soft explosion, the awakening of a desire so immediate and so intense that she gave a cry of surrender and looped her arms around his neck, pulling him down to her, his hard chest crushing against the soft cushion of her breasts.
And Raffaele was startled by her sudden fervour, excited by the contradiction she presented—reserved and then passionate—and he found himself kissing her back with a fervour which matched hers, pulling her into his arms and tangling their limbs together. Only the slippery satin of his boxers and her nightgown lay between their nakedness and, yet, for once, he revelled in these sensual barriers.
Luxuriously, he ran his hands experimentally down over the silk-covered lines of her body, heard her gasp her pleasure.
And Natasha touched him back in a way she had never touched a man before—with a kind of delicious freedom and inhibition—and she rejoiced in the feel of his skin, the decadent sensation of hard muscle beneath honed flesh. Tracing the line of his arms and his thighs, she stroked the flat planes of his belly and the hard curves of his ribs.
Raffaele shuddered—because this felt almost too intimate. This was Natasha, for Dio’s sake.
Sweet, reliable little Natasha—who, it seemed, had become a sensual dynamo in his bed!
He groaned as he peeled the nightgown from her, tossing it aside as his gaze raked over her naked body and, as the night air washed over her skin, he saw her purely instinctive gesture of trying to cross her arms over her breasts. He stopped her.
‘No, mia bella,’ he husked softly. ‘Do not be shy—for shyness has no place between a man and a woman. Let me look at you. Si. Let me look at you. You are beautiful, do you know that?’ he breathed. ‘Very, very beautiful.’
Her skin was pale—so pale—and her breasts large, rose-tipped and, oh, so inviting. He gave an odd little cry as he bent his head to one and teased the tip with the soft graze of his teeth, and he heard her cry, felt her buck with pleasure beneath him as she clutched him even closer.
And then it was like performing an old, familiar dance but in a completely different way—as if someone had just shown him some brand-new moves. Was it because he knew her that it seemed so strange…so distinctive? Or because she knew him? For once, he could not hide behind the image he wanted to present to the particular woman who lay beneath him—
because Natasha knew him through and through. She had seen him angry and sad—even vulnerable. She had seen him all ways.
He felt a stab of something—was it ire?—because in a way she was now seeing him stripped bare in every sense of the word. She would watch him lose control at the moment of orgasm—that one time when a man was as weak as he would ever be other than at the moment of death.
And Raffaele revelled in that sudden anger, because it meant that he could do what he was best at—giving a woman pleasure. He knew so well how to entice and to tantalise, when to advance and when to retreat. He knew all the places where she would be most sensitive.
He pleasu
red her with his hands and then with his mouth—a virtuoso at what he was doing—
and it was with a kind of grim satisfaction that he heard the first of her cries as it ripped through the night air before he had even entered her.
But still he held back on his own satisfaction.
In the aftermath of orgasm Natasha lay reeling, her senses exploding—but she sensed tension in Raffaele, and she didn’t know why. From being the man who had clearly wanted her—still wanted her—so badly, he had suddenly become shuttered, almost restrained.
Raising her dazed eyes to his, she brushed his mouth with her fingers and then she followed with her lips, coercing him into a deep and drugging kiss, willing him to let go, to relax. She felt the sigh and the breath and the tension leaving his tightly coiled body—heard the exclamation he made, something in Italian, and not something she recognised from years of hearing fragments of the language at odd moments.
Moving on top of her, he lifted his head and stared down at her for one long moment and then he held her face in his hands, as if he were framing a picture.
‘Tasha,’ he said simply, and entered her.
It was like nothing she had ever experienced. Ever.
It felt…right. Complete. As if the vital part of a jigsaw had just been found. Hadn’t Raffaele said that himself earlier? But, of course, he had meant it purely in a physical sense, while, for Natasha, this was emotional. More than emotional. She opened her eyes to look into his before great waves of pleasure began to engulf her.
‘Raffaele!’ she sobbed, and then she felt him tense and begin to shudder within her.
His orgasm seemed to go on and on—tearing him apart with sheer delight—and afterwards he found himself gathering her into his arms and kissing the top of her head almost indulgently—as if she had done something special.
It was only when something unknown woke him in the night that Raffaele was able to come to his senses. Silently, he slipped away from her, carefully disentangling the leg which was snuggled between his and then held his breath to see if she would waken. But she didn’t. He pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and slipped out of the suite, noiselessly climbing the marble stairs to the terrace where they had eaten dinner the evening before.
It was one of those unforgettable panoramas which made you want to just rejoice in the very fact of being alive to see it—no matter how preoccupied you were. The stars were being swallowed up by the rose mist of the dawn sky, and he could see the dark blots of some unknown birds as they circled around a city which was still sleeping.
Raffaele stared out at the startlingly exotic skyline, where the tall, slender towers of the minarets rose up to gleam in stately splendour against the growing gold of the sunrise.
Well. He had done it. He had slept with Natasha and had probably had the most fantastico sex of his thirty-four years. He had gotten what he wanted—as he always did.
And now?
He leaned against the balustrade, barely noticing the faint chill of the early morning air, or the coldness of the unforgiving marble against his bare feet.
Now—for the first time in his life—he wasn’t sure. Had he been wrong to pursue something which he knew they had both been longing for? Should he have used his wider experience to call a halt to it before it had reached this stage? How was Natasha going to cope with what had happened?
Natasha.
Who would ever have imagined that she could be…
Shaking his head in slightly dazed disbelief, Raffaele gave a ragged sigh. Was it not just one of the exquisite ironies of life that a woman with the potential to be the perfect lover should be the one woman with whom it would be impossible to pursue a relationship?
But just thinking about her soft, scented body was enough to make him start hungering for her once more. He felt…insatiable around her. Or was that simply because he recognised that this particular affair had an exceptionally short shelf life?
Snaking his tongue around his bone-dry lips, he moved towards the stairs.
Decisions would wait. Everything would wait. And in the meantime he would wake her—in the most satisfying way possible.
Chapter 12
Natasha stretched lazily, dreamily, indulgently—allowing herself a warm nestle into the mattress and an even warmer recollection of the night before. A warm, Moroccan night….
She blinked open her eyes and looked around, but there was no sign of Raffaele so, yawning, she sat up in bed and picked up her watch. Ten o’clock! Could she really have slept for that long?
Of course she could’ve. There had been very little in the way of sleep during the night itself.
In fact, the whole weekend seemed to have gone by in a blur of slow, sensual nights and lazy, erotic mornings. And after breakfasting late they would set out to explore the city with Zahid and Francesca, and Natasha had wondered if there would be a tremendous fuss attached to being out and about with a royal personage. To her surprise there was not. But that was mainly on Zahid’s insistence.
True, there were always a couple of bodyguards hovering discreetly nearby—and they never had to queue!—but Zahid’s flowing robes allowed him to blend easily into the background of the exotic city. Natasha wondered what the average tourist would say if they realised that a real-live sheikh was walking among them!
Drums and snake-charmers had provided background music as she had marvelled at the Badi Palace and the Saadian Tombs—at the souks and the astonishingly lush gardens which were unexpectedly dotted around the city. It was a place of smells and sounds and colours where Africa met an Arabian culture, all set against the backdrop of the snow-capped Atlas mountains.
After lunch they would return to the riad, where she and Raffaele would retire for their siesta—there seemed to be something so decadent and so wonderful about going to bed together during the afternoon so freely. And not just bed, either. The cushions which lay heaped in velvet and satin piles on the low divans provided soft havens for the slow thrust of their bodies, just as the cool marble of the floor contrasted so erotically with the heated softness of aroused flesh.
Why, once she had been leaning over to peer into the mirror and she had heard Raffaele move behind her. Jerking her head up, she had caught his look of sensual intent, had felt him exploring her, freeing her flesh. And, just like her, he had watched her reflection in the mirror, seen her pupils dilate in delighted pleasure as he had entered her.
Under his masterful tutelage Natasha had become bold, too—flowering beneath the exquisite fingers of her lover, feeling free and uninhibited enough to touch him as she had longed to for almost as long as she had known him.
What delight it brought her to see that hard and autocratic face soften beneath her lips. And to see him momentarily lose himself in that one sweet moment of release was quite something. I could get quite used to this, she thought.
A clatter shattered her indulgent reverie, and she looked up to see Raffaele walking into the room, carrying a tray with juice and coffee. He was already dressed and shaved, she noticed, his black hair still damp from the shower and a cream silk shirt clinging to the hard torso beneath. Natasha’s heart turned over with love and longing.
Had this weekend changed anything? Did he feel what she felt—that they had forged something between them, something real and unconnected to the reason which had initially brought them together? Was he ready to acknowledge it?
‘Good morning,’ she said shyly.
There was a pause. ‘Hi.’ He recognised the tone without surprise as he put the tray down just as he recognised the look on her face and, inwardly, he felt his heart sink. This was what women did. They were like fierce and demanding tigers in your bed, and then they turned coy. They wanted reassurance that you liked them just as much in the morning. That you wanted to take things to a different level.
But he knew from experience that he must be very careful. Too much reassurance always gave them the wrong idea—and he couldn’t afford to do that. Not with Natasha—for
hadn’t he already broken every single rule in the book with her in these few days?
He put the tray down. ‘Like some coffee?’
‘I’d rather you came back to bed,’ she said softly.
He gave a brittle smile, forcing himself to stay right where he was, even though his body was yearning for a little more of her sweetness. ‘Well, I’m afraid you’re going to be unlucky—I have a few phone calls to make before we leave for the airport,’ he said obliquely.
It was as if reality had made an unexpected appearance ahead of schedule—the glass carriage becoming a pumpkin again before midnight had even struck.
‘Phone calls?’
His eyes narrowed as he heard the note of objection in her voice, and he wondered if spending the weekend with a sheikh had somehow turned her head. What the hell did she think this was—some kind of honeymoon? Had she forgotten that this was all an elaborate ruse which just happened to have run away with itself because of a little sexual chemistry which he had foolishly encouraged?
His voice became stern. ‘Actually, I do have to work, Natasha.’
‘Of course you do,’ she said quickly, and could feel herself slipping straight back into her old role. Obedient Natasha. Compliant Natasha.
Yet some cool new distance in his black eyes made her heart lurch with a nameless kind of dread. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Not after what had happened between them.
Because, surely, even Raffaele wouldn’t deny that they had been amazing together? That what had started out as play-acting had become something quite different. Why, last night, in bed he had made her feel as if she was the only woman in the universe But it was dark in the night, mocked a voice in her head, and you couldn’t see his eyes then, could you? All you could feel was his body, and all you could hear were the things he was murmuring to you as he thrust into you—things he probably says every time he goes to bed with a new woman. What makes you think you’re so different, Natasha? So special?
Taking the cup he brought over to her, she put it down quickly on the inlaid table beside the bed before he could notice that her hand had started trembling.