by Penny Jordan
‘So let us see then—again—just how good you are at separating duty from desire, shall we?’ Kadir told her softly.
No woman had ever aroused him to such passion and fury, to such a fierce, consuming need to make her take back the lies with which she had ripped apart his pride. Right now the only thing that would salve his wounds would be her tears of regret and shame as she begged him to forgive her. And then begged him to possess her?
‘You will take back each and every one of those insults before tonight is over,’ he told her savagely as he reached for her.
CHAPTER NINE
NATALIA lay still on the wide bed, her heart thumping visibly heavily within her naked body. She would not demean herself by trying to resist. Physically his strength was the greater, and all that she wanted now was for him to leave her alone, even if to have that she had to allow him to inflict his hunger for punishment on her first.
Kadir could feel his heart hammering against his ribs. In the lamp light her skin was the colour of clear warm honey. Just seeing her was awakening an unsteady mental flash of jumbled images of the last time he had seen her this intimately; images he had had no idea until now that his brain had even recorded, never mind put to a sound track of his own arousal and spliced with the scent and the feel of her until the images sprang to unwanted three-dimensional life inside his head in a way that undermined his self-control and fed his hunger for her.
She had challenged his maleness in a way he could not leave unanswered. And that was the reason he was doing this. The only reason. There was no other. She herself meant nothing to him.
Kadir’s hands shaped her body, mercilessly seeking to expose its weaknesses, Natalia sensed. His touch was light and gentle and far too knowing. It skimmed her throat and then her breastbone, the curve of her waist, the shallow dip of her belly and then began again. She badly wanted to draw in a huge lungful of air, but she dared not let him see that need in case he took it as a sign of weakness. His fingertips stroked the delicate flesh just behind her ear. A shudder racked through her body. Because of the chilling night air coming in from the courtyard, Natalia assured herself, nothing more. And that heavy, expectant weight of sensual awareness mushrooming low within her body? It was nothing. Nothing at all. Less than nothing. She could quite easily pretend she couldn’t feel it. Quite easily. Couldn’t she? She could feel his mouth against her skin, the tip of his tongue sliding expertly against the sensitive ridges of her ears. Why did he have to do that to her? How did he know…? Her whole body shuddered as though it had been electrified as she tried to fight her own pleasure and failed. She put out her hands to push him away, but he caught hold of them, forcing them back onto the bed, his fingers locked around her wrists, leaving his mouth free to torment her agonised flesh as he trailed slow, fiery ribbons of unbearably erotic stimulation from one sensitive point to the next and then the next, each tug on those ribbons drawing the ache between her legs tighter.
When his tongue-tip flicked against the tight heart of her nipple she cried out like someone in mortal agony, begging him to stop.
‘Are you sure? Wouldn’t you rather I did this?’ he tormented her, brushing her nipple with his lips, releasing her wrists so that he could cup her breasts and then tug rhythmically on her flesh making her whole body respond to that rhythm.
Tears of disbelief and despair stung her eyes. How could she have let this happen so easily? She wasn’t a girl to be overawed by her own body’s needs. She had felt like this before.
Had she? Had she, or was the truth that she had never known anything like this, or anyone like this? No! She would not let herself think like that.
If it was the truth then she could not and wouldn’t admit it, and never wanted to know it again, Natalia told herself as she fought desperately to stave off her own defeat. Never!
He should be celebrating winning; he should be exulting in his victory over his ability to bind Natalia physically to his will, Kadir knew as he felt her losing her self-control and being forced to submit to her desire for him. Only he wasn’t celebrating, Kadir acknowledged; he could not do so because with every touch, every stroke, every kiss, every breath of his body, his senses were playing out too much of the reel of his own self-control. He was no longer controlling her sexual desire, instead it was controlling him. As if they were two finely opposed and equally balanced powers, all that was supporting the edifice he had built out of her desire and his own fury was the counter weight between them; if that broke he would be plunged into the abyss of his own desire for her. He must stop now, withdraw from the field, leaving her punishment for her offence incomplete even if that meant that he had to go without the full taste of her complete surrender on his lips as she begged him for his possession of her—and he withheld it. She must never know he felt like this, ached like this and needed like this. It broke all the rules of what he was, so carefully constructed to protect him. The rules he’d created as he’d grown up with a father who had rejected him and a mother who had seemed not to care, a first young love to whom he had given his trust and his infatuated adoration and who in turn had betrayed him; they had taught him not to be ruled by his emotions and not to trust those who tried to touch those emotions.
Now unexpectedly all that was in danger of being undermined by a woman who had the power to move him to such anger, to excite him to such desire, to wound him to such depths that all of him that was male clamoured within him to compel her to sacrifice herself to him in payment for that sin in every way that there was. But somehow things had rebounded on him.
He would stop now before it was too late. Now, after just one more touch, just one more kiss, just one more heartbeat imagining the shuddering, gut-wrenching pleasure of her hands on his body, and then…
Natalia clung to him, her nails biting into the smooth warm flesh of his upper arms, her head falling backwards as she arched up in sensual sacrifice.
The scent of her would live with him for ever, ever constant and yet ever changing with each breath she took, one minute cool and aloof, another hot and charged with her arousal. It filled his senses colouring even the taste of her when he folded back the swollen lips of her sex to draw from her the fierce pulse that lay within the moist heat of her body. Now of its own accord that hard bead of flesh pulsed and throbbed, her body eagerly opening to the stroke of his fingers. He could do it now, stop and walk away letting her know the price she must pay for what she had said. He could do it, but the feverish movements of her body were more than his own could bear. The ache he had thought controlled had become a raging, savage, primal male call he couldn’t silence or ignore.
Had it been like this before? If so she couldn’t remember it, Natalia thought feverishly as her clitoris quivered with orgasmic shudders of moist urgency and the muscles within her flexed helplessly against their own emptiness. She had never wanted like this before; must never, ever want like this again. It was killing her, destroying her, taking her down to a dark place she was afraid she might never come back from out of fear for what it was doing to her and what it might turn her into. She heard a raw moan. Her own?
No. It was Kadir’s male voice savage with a need that her own senses recognised as he moved over her and stroked into her, full and hard, momentarily satisfying the greedy contracting of her muscles as they clung avidly to him, relaxing into helpless pleasured obedience when he commanded their movement. The pleasure running swiftly through her was now gathering pace, climbing swiftly, mounting the plateau and going way way, beyond it, taking her with it.
Kadir’s breathing was a harsh litany of command and demand against the ear, her body tightened fiercely around him in a series of sharp contractions. She could feel him starting to withdraw, instinctively she clung to him, until she could feel the hot, wet pulse of him inside her.
Too late…too late! He had left it too late, but Kadir couldn’t see any sign of triumph in the glazed darkness of Natalia’s open-eyed gaze as he looked down into her eyes.
CHAPTE
R TEN
THERE WAS NO denying the fact that Natalia had a way with her that people responded to, Kadir admitted as he watched from a distance whilst she thanked the suddenly shy school children who had gathered in the square outside the palace of Niroli to welcome them back. He had seen it in Hadiya when she had talked to the women there, communicating with them despite their inability to speak one another’s language. Somehow she had reached out to them and made them laugh and respond to her, just as the children were doing now. His mother had had the same gift. His mother!
Kadir withdrew from his own thought as though it had physically burned him. Natalia had had no right to speak to him about his mother as she had done. She knew nothing of their relationship or of his childhood. And as for her gibe about him wanting to prove himself to his mother’s husband, the sheikh—that was so much rubbish. What did he have to prove? He had chosen voluntarily to hand Hadiya into his brother’s care after all.
He had not slept with Natalia for the last two nights they had spent in Hadiya. To punish her or to prove to himself that he controlled his desire for her and not the other way around?
‘My son—I have missed you! It is good to have you back.’ King Giorgio’s greeting was warmly emotional as he welcomed Kadir with these private words during the formal reception ceremony to welcome them back. Was it his imagination or was his father’s handshake really not quite as strong as it had been? Kadir felt an unexpected pang of emotion grip his heart as he looked at the older man. There was nothing to link them together other than their blood; no shared past, no shared history, and yet his father’s words touched a place deep within his heart.
‘We have so many years to catch up on,’ the king was saying. ‘May God grant me enough time. What I wish for more than anything else now, Kadir, is to hold your son in my arms; the next generation. Niroli’s future King, born here of my blood and of the blood of the island through Natalia.’
The king looked across to where Natalia was still talking to the children. ‘Kings cannot always marry where they wish, but in Natalia you have a wife perfectly suited to her role. When I look at her I see both my gentle first wife Queen Sophia and your own mother, she has qualities that belonged to both of them.’
One of the smallest of the children surrounding Natalia was accidentally jostled by some of the others and started to lose his balance. Kadir watched as Natalia saw what was happening and acted promptly, scooping the little boy up to give him a cuddle whilst exchanging a few words with his mother. Immediately the child’s threatening tears turned to shy smiles, and it was obvious to Kadir how at home he felt in Natalia’s arms, and how easily she had diffused what could have been a difficult situation. But it wasn’t her unintentional display of her skills as his future consort that was causing that sharp shaft of pain to lance through his heart, was it? A sense of something breaking open inside him under intense pressure filled his body and his senses. It was a physical pain accompanied by a surge of melancholy; a feeling of loss and aloneness and angry antagonism and a profound sense of longing.
He had no need to ask himself what was happening to him. He knew all too well that the protective shield he had thrown around his emotions had cracked apart. Because of Natalia? Because she was making him both see and feel things about his own behaviour and his own reactions that he couldn’t ignore? He didn’t want this. He didn’t need it and somehow or other he was going to make sure he found a way not to let it happen.
‘Now,’ he could hear the king saying, ‘whilst you have been in Hadiya our Chief Minister has been putting in hand the arrangements for your formal ascension to the throne. There is much we need to discuss.’
Although she was refusing to look at him, Natalia knew the minute Kadir left the square with his father. She could almost feel the empty space where he had been just as she could feel the emptiness beside her in bed at night where he should have been. Had he shared Zahra’s bed in Hadiya when he had left her alone in hers? The violence of her own jealousy filled her throat with nauseous bile.
What was happening to her? This was not the way things were supposed to be. She and Kadir were supposed to have a calm, adult, businesslike relationship based on mutual respect and awareness, on a shared desire to work towards an acknowledged logical goal, a relationship within which there was trust in their commitment to that goal, and trust too in their mutual awareness that nothing outside their relationship should prejudice it. Their marriage was supposed to be one where both of them retained the right to their own emotions and ultimately to their own freedom sexually—so long as they were discreet—where they wished. So how had this happened, how had she been turned into a seething mass of furious female jealousy at the mere thought of Kadir so much as looking with desire at another woman? Was Zahra’s accusation true? Had she fallen in love with him? If so, no wonder she was feeling so sick and dizzy.
‘And the funds we receive from the charitable trust set up by Prince Marco and his wife enable us to provide the very best kind of neonatal care, and to attract top experts in their field to our hospital.’
The young Chief Administrator was beaming with pride as he showed Kadir and Natalia over the newly opened wing of Niroli’s maternity hospital, which they were visiting.
As she listened to the administrator Natalia risked a brief glance at Kadir, wondering how he was reacting to this mention of King Giorgio’s eldest grandson whom he had not as yet met and who should have been the one to step onto the throne when the old King stepped down. She could not, though, see any hostility in Kadir’s concentrated expression of interest as he listened attentively to the young administrator. No, it was more her sex—or at least certain members of it—that aroused him to anger, she acknowledged as she stifled a small yawn. Not because she was bored, but rather because she was feeling so unusually tired for some reason.
‘Thanks to the charity donations, we have been able to acquire for our maternity unit two of the world’s most up-to-date foetal scanners. These machines are capable of taking three-dimensional pictures of the unborn child—thus enabling doctors to pinpoint any potential problems far earlier than was previously possible.’ The administrator showed them some example images.
Natalia was reluctantly being forced to admit that Kadir was handling his new role with far more sensitivity and diplomacy than she had expected. At no time during the last few hectic days of tours around government institutions, factories, vineyards and the like had he ever by so much as the flicker of an eyebrow displayed anything other than complete understanding of and respect for the obvious pride of his new subjects in their country; never once had he mentioned Hadiya or offered any comparisons between the two countries, never once had he risked offending the pride of the old guard, whose stiff formality on first being introduced to him had quickly melted into open respect for him once he had listened to them. And yet he still showed them what kind of King he was going to be with informed questions, and crisp forthright answers to those questions they put to him once he had broken down the natural barrier of their reserve towards him as a stranger.
‘He is King Giorgio all over again and more,’ Natalia had heard one of the village headmen saying approvingly. ‘He is a true man and not afraid to say what he thinks. Mark my words, he will rule Niroli as it should be ruled.’
‘And the young people of Niroli are saying that it will be a true new beginning for them and that we shall no longer be left in the past when our new King takes the throne. King Giorgio has been a good king, but he is the king of our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers, he’s getting old and he no longer goes out amongst the people as Prince Kadir is doing, talking to them and learning how they feel,’ one of her young maids was telling Natalia excitedly as she helped her to remove the heavy formal gown she had worn for the evening’s reception to introduce Kadir to the most influential of Niroli’s citizens and some from the international community of the very rich who owned property on Niroli, along with the resident diplomats from other countries.
Kadir needed no help from her in speaking with such people nor in subtly using his skills in diplomacy to persuade them that the future of Niroli was one they would be privileged to both invest and share in, Natalia had recognised. She felt a small pang of regret as she felt her own role was diminishing in a direct ratio to Kadir displaying his leadership skills. After all, the whole purpose of her agreeing to marry Kadir had been her belief that she was doing so for the benefit of her country. Now it seemed that Kadir might not need her help as much as she had believed, and that he was perfectly capable of winning the love and the respect of the people by himself.
And, as though that weren’t enough, to judge from the snatches of conversation she had overheard, the evening’s event had secured a large number of pledges from the super wealthy to assist Kadir in his plans to take the island into the kind of future that would benefit, not just those who invested money in this, but also the people of Niroli themselves.
‘The greatest investment of all will not be the money you pledge to the island, but rather the investment made by the people of Niroli when they return your investment to you tenfold with the skills our young people will be able to learn with your financial support and co-operation.’
Natalia was not surprised that Kadir had received a standing ovation for his speech.
‘Everyone is saying how fortunate we are to have such a handsome Crown Prince,’ her maid confided as she removed Natalia’s heavily beaded gown. ‘They say that you will make very beautiful children together.’
The Crown Prince might be handsome, but what she longed for was a true marriage. Her new life might be busy, but right now it was leaving her feeling hemmed in and restless, she admitted as she thanked her maid and dismissed her. Because she envied Kadir the many challenges that lay ahead of him? Because tonight she had seen so clearly the breadth of the vision he had described so well to those listening, and she had longed so fiercely to be his true partner in that vision? His true partner in every single way?