The Sheikh's Baby Omnibus

by Penny Jordan

  However, the Emir, being the wily manipulator that he was, would, Vere knew, use this alteration from the original to stir up trouble for them if he could, by hinting that if one supposedly innocent change had been made, and never revealed, what was to stop another, less innocent change being made and kept hidden.

  How much had he paid Sam McLellan? However much it had been, the Emir would no doubt think he had got a real bargain. Vere had few doubts that initially all the Emir had hoped for at the very best would be to bribe the cartographer into dropping hints that the original borders had been tampered with. That would have been easy enough for her to do, given the changes that so many years of shifting desert sands had had on the landscape. But with the right kind of spin on it any change could quite easily be promoted as suspicious and underhand. Even if the allegation was retracted at a later date, the damage would have been done and Dhurahn’s own reputation tarnished.

  This matter of the change in course of the river put a whole new complexion on everything, and would add far more weight to any claim the Emir chose to make.

  It would be easy enough for them to offer Sam more than the Emir had paid her, to ‘forget’ what she had discovered, but he and Drax had talked it over and they were both agreed that this was something they did not want to do. For one thing it ultimately weakened their truthful claim that the course of the river had had no effect whatsoever on their boundaries, and for another that was not the way they wanted to run their country.

  Vere stood up and walked to the exit to his tent, stepping through it to breathe in the cool freshness of the night air. He stopped when he saw that there was a light on in Sam’s tent.

  What was she doing? Surely she ought to be asleep? He had already told her they had an early start in the morning. Could she have gone to bed and left her lamp on? Old habits died hard, and Vere and Drax’s father had taught them when they were very young about the dangers of unattended oil lamps left in tents. Even though logically there was no need for him to be concerned, since a small generator was providing them with electricity, Vere was soon striding over to Sam’s tent and flicking back the flap.

  Once he had done so, the sight of Sam seated with her back to him, staring into a computer screen, had him walking towards her.

  This time Sam was oblivious to his presence. She was staring at the screen without really seeing it as she battled against the reality being forced on her. She couldn’t love him. It was—

  The shadow falling across her computer screen made her react immediately and instinctively, turning round in alarm. The colour left her face and then returned in a surge of guilty heat as she tried to reach for her mouse to close the open window before showing what she had been viewing.

  Vere was too quick for her, though, reaching out to stop her, his fingers curling round her wrist, the cool white crispness of his sleeve brushing against her. She saw that he had removed the plain white headdress he wore, secured by a black plaited rope, and that his hair beneath it was thick and dark, clean with health, and cut close into his neck at the back. She had an absurd longing to reach out and trace the line where it was cut so neatly against the strong muscles of his neck, and then to trace kisses along his collarbone whilst...

  Frantically she wrenched her thoughts away from the sensual images forming inside her head and tried to focus instead on the grimness of the tight line around his mouth, rather than the shape of his mouth itself as he studied the information on her screen.

  Sam’s face burned as she realised that she had actually highlighted his own name.

  ‘Why?’ he demanded, after giving the screen a comprehensive look.

  Sam understood perfectly well what he was asking her.

  ‘I wanted to...to know now more about you...to understand why you are behaving towards me in the way that you are,’ she answered him bravely. ‘I didn’t even know your full name.’

  He looked back at the screen, indicating where she had highlighted his name and title.

  ‘And you believe you have found it there?’

  Sam was confused.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Those are my formal names. Vere is the name those closest to me know me by. It was my mother’s choice—’ Vere stopped sharply.

  What was he doing? What had got into him? Why was he letting himself imagine how her lips might form the shortened version of his name, how her tongue-tip might taste, how it might sigh against his skin in a soft sound of pleasure.

  ‘Vere,’ Sam said, gasping a little when he released her wrist and then took the mouse from her to close down the site so fiercely that she started to overbalance.

  As she struggled to stop herself from falling Vere moved faster, grasping her upper arms and hauling her to her feet. He was breathing rapidly, his fingers biting into her flesh. Sam thought that he might have cursed her under his breath, but she couldn’t hear anything above the frantic pounding of her own heartbeat. She could smell the heat of his flesh and of their shared tension. It closed in around them, an invisible net of arousal and need meshing so tightly together that it was impossible to break free.

  ‘No...’ Sam heard the sound her lips had framed, but it was more a low moan of longing than any kind of denial, and the hands she had lifted to his chest weren’t pushing him away.

  ‘A thousand curses on you for doing this, and on me for wanting it,’ Vere whispered harshly against her mouth, as she opened it for him with the inbuilt sensual knowledge of a woman who loved a man whose pride could only be humbled by his own need.

  Feverishly their lips met and parted, only to meet again and again, until they were pressed body to body. Somehow Sam realised she had managed to open the buttons securing the front of his kandora, and her palms were now pressed flat against his chest. Her own robe had slipped from one shoulder, revealing the silky gleam of her pale skin and the curve of her breast, and the fabric was only kept from sliding down further because Vere’s hand was on her, shaping the soft female texture of her flesh.

  Her sensory receptors had gone into overload, her body a melting, swirling, frenzied mass of longing. A hundred thousand separate and acutely intense sensations filled her.

  Now she could fulfil that earlier urge to touch her fingertips to his skin in awed delight and wonder. She pressed them against his collarbone. His flesh felt warm and sleek, the bone beneath it hard and solid, and her gaze fastened on the spasmodic pulse jerking against the flesh just beneath his jaw. Tenderly she kissed it, lost in her own loving pleasure before being flung tumultuously into sharp, agonised passion when he responded in kind, kissing her throat and then her shoulder. A swift shudder of pleasure flowed through her at the touch of his hand freeing her breast from its covering, followed by another that racked her more visibly when his palm took the weight of it and the pad of his thumb rubbed erotically over her eagerly swollen nipple.

  By the time they kissed their way to her bed both of them were naked, and Sam’s body was so erotically charged by the touch of Vere’s hands that she was already engulfed by fierce shivers of pleasure.

  The lamp was still on, casting its illumination over their bodies, causing Sam to suck in her breath when the movement Vere made to lift her away from himself and onto the bed revealed in clear detail every strongly muscled line of him to her. His flesh was warmly golden, and his chest was sleek with fine dark hair that made an erotic pathway down his body, drawing her eager gaze to the stiff thickness of his erection.

  Was love always
like this? she wondered dizzily. Did every woman who fell in love feel this mixture of tenderness and awe, this desire to see and touch and taste this male uniqueness? To feel this surge of need to know that no other woman would ever share his intimacy?

  She was looking at him as every man wanted the woman he desired to look at him, Vere acknowledged, as he fought against the surging heat of his physical response to her. She was looking at him as though she had just seen the world’s rarest and best treasure.

  She was a very good actress, that was all, he warned. But his body wasn’t listening to him and it was too late now to make it listen. Her skin was the colour of milk, spread against the soft coffee colour of the bedding. The honey blonde curls on her head were matched by those that nestled against her sex, providing a covering that served more to draw attention to the soft flesh beneath than conceal it. He lifted his hand and laid it over her sex, cupping it and feeling the heavy kick of heat that punched through him as she arched upwards. Her nipples were flushed a dark rose colour against her paleness, and when he softly pinched one of them she cried out in longing, and gripped his shoulders as she urged him down to her.

  He could feel the bite of her nails against his skin like a goad, the slight pain they were inflicting underlining and enhancing the ferocity of his own passion. Like a dam newly breached it surged and boiled, flooding through him to sweep aside anything and everything that tried to stand in its way. It knew no master other than itself, and it dictated where he placed his lips, his hands, and the words of encouragement and enticement he whispered so passionately.

  He tasted of musk and sweat, sharpened with salt where the cool night air touched the warm, nude male flesh that wasn’t heated by her own body, and Sam knew that his scent would be with her for ever, just like every precious breath of time they were now sharing.

  All the reasons she should not be doing this had been left behind, abandoned and unwanted. In the lamplight she could see the small indentations left on his skin by her nails. The sight filled her with an almost primitive surge of female triumph. He was hers now, his flesh bearing her mark of possession just as all the places of sensuality on her were receiving the brand of his touch.

  He was bending his head, running his tongue over her nipples, first one and then the other. Both were now swollen and tight, gleaming damply from his caress.

  He covered one with his mouth and tugged delicately on it, causing a burst of violent pleasure to galvanise her whole body as she felt the soft, deliriously erotic grate of his teeth against her sensitive flesh.

  She must have cried out, because she could hear the echo of her longing shuddering round the tent. His every touch was a dizzying new pleasure previously unknown to her and unexplored. Nothing in that youthful fumble long ago had prepared her for this. It was all so new, like stumbling upon an unsuspected secret hoard of priceless treasure. She wanted to linger over every individual piece, taking her pleasure in it and from it, but at the same time she was being driven by an ever-increasing sense of urgency that would not rest.

  Vere could feel the thundering jolt of his heart slamming into his chest. Why was he reacting like this? Like a boy with his first woman—all trembling hands and pounding heart, half afraid that his body was so out of control that he might end up disappointing her and shaming himself. The ability to be a considerate and accomplished lover was a skill he had set himself the task of learning as part of his journey along the road to manhood, along with many other things. His goal had been to gain that skill, not to take pleasure for himself, and now he was being overwhelmed by needs and sensations that were totally new to him.

  He wanted her so badly. More than he had ever wanted anything or anyone. He wanted her, bone and soul deep, burned into him and branded on him in such a way that she would forever be a part of him. Like a fever, even when the desire left him it would be inside him, and he was powerless to stop that.

  He reached out to cup her sex with his hand, his fingers trembling slightly as she yielded to his caress.

  Sam moaned, her body trembling beneath the intensity of her need. She curled her fingers into her palms, silently willing him to touch her more intimately, and then realising when he did that even that was not enough to satisfy the hunger gnawing at her.

  She was so soft, so wet, and his body wanted her so badly. He wanted her so badly, Vere admitted. And that need pushed aside all the barriers he had shored up against that admission and the full extent of his own subjugation to it swept over him. He had tried to avoid this, had even tried to stop it, but now, in a final moment of true knowledge of himself and his fate, Vere was face-to-face with the truth, heart to heart with the woman who had brought him to it, and there was no going back.

  Vere positioned himself over her, unable to deny himself the pleasure of caressing her as he prepared to enter her. Her body welcomed him and embraced him so sweetly that it was like coming home to a place that was his and his alone. Each stroke, each thrust of their bodies as they came together, was a perfect meeting of two halves of one whole. This was his fate and he welcomed it.

  This was it—this was what she had yearned and ached for, what she had been made for. Sam shivered with excitement as she felt each firm thrust of Vere’s body within her own. How could anything be so perfect, so uplifting and emotionally intense that it filled her eyes with tears and made her throat ache with the sounds of her own joy? She could feel every movement of him within her, every particle of him, as though her own flesh was so extraordinarily sensitive to his that she was aware of even the smallest pressure of male muscle against the female flesh that contained him. It had been so long that this might as well have been her first time. But of course it was not. Then she had—

  Sam tensed, horrified, as she suddenly remembered what neither of them had done and ought to have done.

  ‘Stop!’ she told Vere urgently.

  He hadn’t heard her, Sam recognised. He was so lost in his own desire and in her own... She struggled to do what her conscience was urging her to do, but it was far too late. She was as powerless as he was to resist the swift tide of ecstasy he was driving her to ride. If she had to stop now... But she couldn’t. Instead she clung to him as she cried out when the pleasure became too intense and took her to the stars, then gasped and wept tears of joy whilst the final pulse of the satisfaction he had given her met the forceful surge of his completion.

  The heat of their mutual desire had cooled now, and yet Vere was still here with her, still holding her—surely in a parody of the tenderness she secretly longed for and knew she could not expect. It was lust that had driven him to have sex with her, that was all. How could it possibly be anything else after the things he had said to her and the way he had behaved towards her?

  He should go. Vere knew that—just as he knew he should never have come here in the first place. Had a part of him realised even before they had left the main camp that this would happen? Had he deliberately planned for this? He had certainly wanted it—and her. Everything about their coming together had been wrong, and yet everything about it and her had felt so very right—more right than he could ever possibly have imagined sexual intimacy to be for him. Lying here now, with her in his arms, for the first time since the death of his parents he felt at peace and complete.

  What was this? He wasn’t the kind of man who needed a woman to make him feel complete. He was the ruler of a small and vulnerable state: a man whose energies were needed to keep the delicate balance of power they s
hared with their neighbours.

  Maybe so, but he was also a man, and right now all he wanted was to be that man and be with this woman. This woman who was causing him so much trouble—a woman who had been bought by another man. Vere knew that he should reject her and leave her, but somehow he couldn’t. His emotional need to be with her surmounted what his head was telling him to do.

  He lifted his hand to cup her face, feeling his heart turn over inside his chest when she turned her head to press a small fierce kiss into his palm. It was as though the sexual release of their lovemaking had opened a door into his emotions, allowing them to spill out from the place where he had locked them away. He had wanted her like this from that first heartbeat of recognition, that first look and touch. It was too late now to deny it. Something about her compelled and commanded him, overturning every barrier between them.

  Sam looked at Vere with helpless adoration. He was being so tender, so very much the lover she had dreamed he would be from that first moment of seeing him. The awkward experience that had dealt with her physical virginity had done nothing to change the status of her emotional and sexual virginity—that was something she had only experienced now, in Vere’s arms.

  Sam knew without him having to say so that Vere wanted them to make love again—but she had no excuse this time. The practicalities had to be discussed and dealt with.

  ‘No,’ she told him gently, staying his hand as it moved down her body.

  Immediately Vere withdrew slightly from her, the old wariness taking the place of his earlier mood. She was rejecting him, pushing him away, and he could feel the pain he had always dreaded tightening its grip on his heart.

  ‘No?’ he queried sharply.

  ‘We shouldn’t have done what we did the first time without taking proper precautions,’ Sam told him.