When he awoke it was to see Sienna lying propped on one elbow watching him, her hair spilling down all over the rosy flush of her breasts, and in that hazy moment between sleep and waking he gave an instinctive smile—for this was the place in which he most liked to find himself.
She thought that he looked like a lion who had temporarily sated his huge appetite. A fleeting look of contentment before the relentless and ruthless search for sustenance once more. He drove himself, she had realized, more than most men would even be capable of doing. And, whilst he had a huge capacity for hard work and long hours, she had never seen that weary tinge to his smile before.
She touched his lips with a gentle finger. ‘So, is it jet-lag?’
‘Maybe.’ He kissed the finger. She was so easy. So perceptive. Sometimes it was hard not to tell her the things on his mind, but he rarely gave voice to his innermost thoughts. For a ruler it was preferable to keep your own counsel, but sometimes—in the aftermath of making love to Sienna—he found himself wanting to offload his problems, as other men apparently did. He wondered what had changed, and when it had happened.
Something had crept up on him unawares. Maybe it was like the shadow on your jaw. You didn’t notice it—and it wasn’t until your chin was grazed with the dark rasp of stubble that you remembered it was well on its way to becoming a beard.
Sienna brushed away a lock of the dark hair which had tumbled onto his forehead. Against the white sheets his body looked so golden and erotically dark—like a rich oil painting brought into vibrant and glowing life before her eyes. ‘You don’t usually suffer from jet-lag,’ she observed quietly. ‘No.’
There was silence for a moment, and Sienna knew that she could do one of two things: she could get up and go into the plush kitchen of the hotel suite and make them both a cup of the iced jasmine tea he so loved and which she had learned to love, too. She could put on soft and soothing music and run him a deep, deep bath and then join him in it. And later they would make love again. And again. That was what a mistress would and should do.
Or she could venture onto the always precarious path of finding out just what was going on in that clever, quick mind of his. Six months ago she wouldn’t have dreamed of contemplating it—but hadn’t Hashim been softer of late? Didn’t the enigmatic and formidable side of his nature sometimes seem less dominant, so that sometimes he seemed much moreaccessible ?
‘So, do you want to tell me what’s wrong, or do you want me to run away and do womanly things?’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, you know…tea, a bath, music.’
A smile edged the hardness away from his mouth. ‘No, don’t go. Stay here. You’ve just done the most important thing a woman can do for a man.’
There was another silence, and Sienna tried hard not to read too much into his words. Just because he had sounded uncharacteristically tender it did not mean anything. He was basically applauding her rapidly improving skills as a lover and thus his own skills as an expert tutor—that was all. Or he was being slightly more affectionate because they hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks. There were any number of reasons.
But the shadows were still beneath his eyes; the weariness still outlined his mouth. She thought about what he had taught her, and about her refusal to just jump when he snapped his fingers. Hashim respected that, she knew. What he would not countenance was fear or timidity.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’
He shifted position a little, so that he was lying gazing into the huge green glitter of her almond-shaped eyes. The breasts he had once been so obsessed with now seemed just a part of the beautiful whole of her, but still their pert rosiness reminded him of how she had used them, how that could never be undone—at least not for him.
‘Just tired. It’s nothing,’ he murmured—which was true, though only part of the story. There was growing opposition in Qudamah to his Western lifestyle—a demand from some factions that he settle down and embrace completely the culture of his ancestors. There had been views expressed that his trips abroad should be curtailed, with all his energies focused on his homeland.
And didn’t Sienna herself exemplify everything that the more traditional elements in his country loathed about the West? Hadn’t Abdul-Aziz increasingly been hinting that the liaison was damaging his credibility? That things would blow up if some resolution were not reached? And Hashim knew what that resolution should be.
‘It’s nothing,’ he repeated firmly.
Sienna did her best not to let her face crumple with disappointment. She had asked him and he had closed up—she could tell from the shuttering of his face. Well, that was up to him. It had been her choice to ask and his not to tell her. Asking was one thing, and perfectly acceptable. Prying was something completely different.
She took his words at face value, as he clearly wanted her to. ‘So, when did you last have a holiday?’
‘A holiday?’ he questioned, as surprised by the choice of topic as by her sudden change of subject.
She laughed, pleased to have perplexed him. ‘Yes, a holiday. That’s the thing that most people do when they’re tired and they want to relax.’
He screwed up his eyes. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.
‘No recent bucket and spade job in Spain?’ she teased.
‘Bucket and spade job?’ He frowned.
‘Have you never built sandcastles, Hashim?’ she questioned.
He laughed. ‘Sand is not a big deal in Qudamah—not with so much of it around. We tend to escape from it rather than build our leisure time around it,’ he added drily.
‘I’d never thought of that.’ She snuggled up to him. ‘So what kind of holidays did you have when you were a child?’
He frowned. ‘You don’t really want to know.’
Which meant he didn’t really want to tell her. But a woman could not exist on sex alone, no matter what her status. ‘Oh, yes, I do!’ she said firmly.
And Hashim found himself smiling as he allowed himself a rare dip into nostalgia. How long ago a childhood could seem, and yet how astonishingly clear the memories if you opened the floodgates on them. ‘My male kin and I used to take our falcons up into the forests, where we trained them to kill.’
‘Nice!’
Idly, he circled the pad of his finger around one of her nipples, feeling it instantly point and peak, and he felt the heavy stir of desire returning. ‘There we learned to be men,’ he said dreamily.
‘No women?’
‘Not one.’
‘But what about your mother? Didn’t she want to go along?’
He remembered the very first trip, being torn from his mother’s arms. He had been just five years old and had cried his eyes out. How remorselessly the others had teased him! And his father had told him that the painful separation was all part of the process of learning to be a man. He could imagine what a Western psychologist would say aboutthat !
‘Females were not part of the endeavour,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Their place was at the Palace.’
‘And didn’t they mind?’
He hesitated. ‘My motherdid mind, as it happens,’ he admitted. ‘And she made vocal her concerns. It caused a great deal of conflict between her and my father—but she was determined that the women of Qudamah should make some of the changes which women over the world were initiating at the time. Nothing like burning their bras, of course,’ he added hastily.
Sienna laughed. ‘Well, no.’
‘But through her efforts the women of Qudamah were gradually granted small freedoms.’
‘Such as?’
He shrugged. ‘Oh, they were allowed to walk in the capital unaccompanied by a man—though many still prefer not to.’ He saw her face. ‘To you this probably means nothing—a woman who has grown up with personal freedom and takes it for granted probably cannot comprehend that in my country it was a kind of revolution.’
‘She sounds like an amazing woman,’ she said.
‘She
is.’ The wordsI should like you to meet her hung unsaid on the air. For, no matter how true they were, how could he possibly utter them in the circumstances?
Sienna was quiet for a moment. She had heard the deliberate omission and she wouldn’t have been human if it hadn’t hurt her. What a different world he painted, and how his words emphasised the huge gulf between their cultures. If she had never understood his extreme reaction to her calendar shoot she certainly did now. If it was considered a mighty advance for a woman to go out on her own, then how must the baring of her breasts for an erotic calendar have seemed to a man of such a traditional upbringing?
But if ever she succumbed to the hopeless temptation of thinkingwhat if —then all she had to do was remind herself of the insurmountable differences which had always been there and always would. No matter what they did—it wasdoomed .
And Sienna had realised something else, too—Hashim might have been bordering on the brink of love all those years ago, but his feelings—and hers—had been nothing but a violent rush of emotion which had nothing to do with their real lives. Even now nothing had really changed. Their brief time together was spent in a vacuum.
He saw the clouds which had shadowed her eyes, but he did not enquire what had caused them. He had a pretty good idea, and some things were best left unspoken. Why go out and find hurt when it waited like a shadowy figure just around the corner? Instead, he touched her cheek. ‘And when didyou last have a holiday?’
‘Last year. I went to Australia to visit an old schoolfriend. She’s settled down there—married an Aussie.’ The spark of an idea began to form in her mind. ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a break together, Hashim?’ She looked around at the lavish yet soulless bedroom. ‘Somewhere that wasn’t in a hotel?’
He played along with her fantasy as she had played along with so many of his. ‘And where would we go?’
Sienna put her head to one side and considered. ‘I guess we’d stay in England. Travelling abroad would be too much hassle, and you travel too much anyway. It would be somewhere you could be completely incognito—completely free.’
‘Does such a place exist?’ he mocked.
Sienna nodded. ‘I know of a beautiful old converted farmhouse—it’s right in the middle of nowhere. I hired it once for a rock star’s fortieth birthday and everyone was raving on about it.’
‘But where would my bodyguards stay?’
‘There’s a cottage in the grounds. Not too far and yet far enough…’
Her voice tailed off and he read the erotic promise in her eyes. An unbearable temptation crept over him. Something was going to have to give in his life soon, and he knew that it was going to be his relationship with Sienna. But before it did…
Couldn’t he have the briefest taste of what it was like to be ‘normal’? Just an ordinary man taking a holiday with a woman who excited and calmed and provoked and stimulated him in dizzying succession? Someone who was part of his past and now his present, but could never be part of his future…
‘Can you arrange it?’ he questioned suddenly.
Sienna blinked. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Yes.’ He did a quick calculation in his head. ‘I can manage next weekend, if that fits in with your job?’
She was too excited to notice the faint sarcasm in his voice. Or to question whether two weekends on the trot was not pushing their luck.
She nodded. ‘Well, yes—of course I can. If we can get it. It’s quite short notice—but it should be fine. I mean—who in their right mind wants to holiday in the English countryside in the middle of February?’
‘Well, I do.’
They looked at one another and Sienna started giggling.
‘So do I.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THEREwas a huge fireplace, an ancient-looking kitchen, and a bed in the main upstairs room which looked exactly as it must have done a century before.
The bodyguards were settled in the cottage by the main gate, with a widescreen TV and the promise of a huge, no-questions-asked bonus, and Sienna and Hashim were finally on their own.
‘It is like stepping back in time,’ Hashim murmured, his black eyes fascinated as he glanced around him. ‘And it’s freezing.’
‘Yes, it is.’ She turned to him. ‘Can you light a fire?’
His smile touched on the arrogant. ‘Naturally.’
‘Well, then—over to you. I’m going to make us something to eat.’
But he shook his head. If they were playing honeymoon—which he rather imagined that they were—then there was something far more pressing than food or fuel on the agenda. ‘You want to eat food?’ he murmured. ‘Or to eat me?’
‘You are outrageous!’ she protested, but only halfheartedly, for his hands had slithered underneath her sweater and were making her nipples grow very hard indeed. ‘We…we ought to draw the curtains,’ she said breathlessly.
She went and yanked across the faded chintz and he came up behind her, skimming his hands down over her hips. ‘Mmm. I am pleased to see that you are wearing a skirt.’
‘Because my Sheikh does not like jeans,’ she said demurely, and closed her eyes as she felt him reach beneath it to graze his fingers over her searing heat.
‘You are ready,’ he observed, on a slight note of surprise.
‘I’ve been ready for hours,’ she admitted, hopping and almost stumbling in her eagerness to help him take off her panties.
‘So have I,’ he admitted huskily.
They only made it as far as the big, old-fashioned sprung sofa, where Hashim kicked off his trousers and then pulled her down onto his lap, guiding her slowly over his aching shaft before plunging deep inside her.
‘Oh!’ she moaned, as he filled her completely, moving her up and down until she thought that she could bear it no longer. Almost before she could believe it to be happening she felt herself begin to dissolve.
And Hashim felt it, too—shatteringly and simultaneously—and as her body began to convulse out its pleasure so did his follow, in almost complete harmony. And in those few last seconds before the power of it temporarily obliterated consciousness their eyes met, locked and held.
‘Sienna!’ he gasped as she began to shudder around him, and her name seemed to be torn from his soul.
‘Hashim!’ she breathed brokenly, her fingers digging into the rich silk of his skin.If only I could tell you how much I love you.
For a while they stayed just like that, Sienna still astride him, gazing down and stroking her hand along the rugged outline of his jaw.
‘What are you thinking?’ he questioned softly.
That what should never have happened had done so. That the falling in love was complete. That it was too late to stop herself and protect herself. And it had happened just at the time when she suspected it was all coming to an end.
‘You should never ask a woman something like that after making love to her.’
Not when she’s vulnerable enough to tell you something you won’t want to hear. She shivered a little as the flush of passion on her skin began to fade.
‘Better get that fire going,’ she said lightly, and climbed off him.
Escaping into the kitchen while he built the fire, she made soup from organic vegetables and served it with chunky wholemeal bread, and cheese which had come straight from the nearby farm. They quenched their thirst with elderflower water and then drank scented tea, sitting on a furry rug in front of the gradually roaring fire.
‘Do you like that?’ she asked.
‘Perfect,’ he said, but there was a sudden heaviness in his heart.
They watched a video of Sienna’s favourite film—an old musical which soon had her sniffing like a hay-fever sufferer.
‘You’re crying!’ he accused.
‘No, I’m not—it’s just a corny old film,’ she said crossly.
‘Come here,’ he said.
And, even though it made her heart ache, she went.
They spent their time doing simple thi
ngs. Wrapping up warm before walking over the crunchy morning frost which hardly had time to melt before a setting crimson sun turned the fields into fire every afternoon.
His bodyguards seemed quite content to be doing their own thing, and there wasn’t a peep out of his phone. Once they even ventured into the small local pub for lunch, and if anyone wondered why there was a big, dark car sitting gleaming in the car park, no body bothered asking.
Exposed The Sheikh’s Mistress Page 11