by Penny Jordan
He had to make it clear to her that he had not married her out of any desire for her, Ash told himself as he caught the sound of Sophia’s indrawn breath. For Sophia’s benefit or for his own? Wasn’t it true that he had not been able to subdue the ache of need she had already aroused in him despite all his attempts to do so? And wasn’t it equally true that right now simply the sight of her and the knowledge of what was to come was accelerating the intensity of that need at a speed that he couldn’t control?
But he must control it. He must remember what this marriage was and why he had entered it.
He started to unfasten the closures to his robe—a traditional garment that had been laid out for him by his valet, and beneath which he was naked. Unable to take her gaze off him, Sophia watched with her heart in her mouth as he removed the ornate robe and then came towards her.
He was all male muscle and sinewy strength, long limbed and lean, his body possessed of all the classical male beauty of a Greek statue. She could see the scar on his thigh that she knew must be from a fall he’d had during a polo match that Alex had once mentioned to her. How she had hoarded all those little bits of knowledge about him, how she had clung to them as her own precious pieces of him, and how her sixteen-year-old self had hated herself for her weakness in doing so when he had turned his back on her to go to another woman. These were dangerous thoughts, taking her back to a time and place when all she had wanted was to give herself to Ash. Her heart started to race, the sudden surging ache deep inside her a growing wash of liquid heat that caressed her desire every bit as fiercely as she had once dreamed of Ash caressing her body. A small sound of female need strained against the taut muscles of her throat that were denying it a voice.
There was no need for her to question whether or not Ash was ready to consummate their marriage; she could see for herself that he was. Her heart was beating so fast she felt as though it might burst with her need to reach out and stroke her fingertips along the hard length of his erection in eager virginal exploration and delight.
A man—another man who was not him and who did not know that it was merely a practised gesture—would not be able to help having his male vanity aroused by the look that Sophia was giving him, Ash acknowledged. He fought against what it was doing to him, even though he knew it was a look she must have given innumerable men before him. Not that he had any right to expect a past sexual exclusivity from her, and nor did he do so. They were both adults with their own individual sexual histories. Histories, yes, but he would not tolerate infidelity from her now that they were married.
It was that thought, the thought of another man touching her now that she was his wife, that took him to her side, to untie her robe and push it from her shoulders, his hands sculpting the soft warm flesh of her body with a feather-light touch. So much lush sensuality was almost too much, Ash thought; it could overwhelm a man until he was trapped in his own desire to possess her. But that would not happen to him, he assured himself, and yet within him there was an urge, a need, to bury his face in the rich dark cloud of her hair, to breathe in the scent of her and then to change that delicate fragrance to something stronger and more elemental as he aroused her. He wanted to stroke his hands all over her, to draw the rigid peaks of her nipples between his fingers until she gasped with the urgency his touch aroused; he wanted to dip into the soft wetness of her sex and taste the juices of her desire for him, and only for him. He wanted … He wanted to possess her as no man had ever possessed her before, Ash recognised, that knowledge thundering through his mind.
He was a man, she was a woman. He had married her so that he could conceive a child with her. It was only because of that that he felt this intense desire to fill her senses and her body. Nothing more than that. It was time he did what he had come to her to do and stop listening to unwanted and illogical thoughts.
For all her lush curves, she was delicately boned and softly light in his arms as he lifted her and carried her to the bed.
His hands tightened on the narrowness of her waist as he laid her on the bed. He reached out and cupped her breast. Her flesh was silky soft and warm, her nipple immediately rising to his palm in stiff supplication.
He rolled her nipple between his forefinger and thumb, seeing her stomach go concave as she sucked in her breath and trembled.
She certainly knew all the pretty little tricks of making her partner feel desired. Well, two could play at that game. He curled the tip of his tongue round her other nipple and then teased it with darting strokes of deliberate arousal. Her whole body trembled, her thighs softening in instinctive invitation. He released her breast to stroke his hand down over her belly and then tease the vulnerable inside of her thigh with the gentle stroke of his knuckles.
Any minute now he was going to possess her. Her body knew that and wanted it, Sophia admitted, but her senses, her emotions, hungered for an intimacy that went beyond mere physical pleasure, no matter how skilled the giver of that pleasure was. She was lost, caught up in the powerful demands of a need that had its roots in the very deepest part of her sexual psyche. A longing she couldn’t hope to control forced its way past everything she had told herself this act between them must be in order for her to retain her pride. She wanted, craved, ached for more than Ash’s skilled touch against her flesh. She wanted the potency and the passion of his kisses.
Ash started to move between her thighs. As though the words were sprung from some trap deep within her, she heard herself begging him, ‘Kiss me, Ash. Kiss me.’ Reaching for him, sliding her hands into his hair, she pulled his face down towards her own, opening her mouth against his as the fiery hunger of her need spilled through her.
So much passion, too much passion. He should resist, pull back, but the sweetness of Sophia’s taste, the quick eager flicking movements of her tongue tip against his lips as though it was a hummingbird unable to survive without the nectar of his kiss, pulled him down, down into a place where his own senses couldn’t deny the savagely sensual urge she was creating within him to take her mouth and crush it beneath his own until they were one breath.
Wasn’t that dangerous? Because he was afraid that if he kissed her he … He what? He wouldn’t be able to stop? No, of course not. Could he prove that to himself? Of course he could.
‘If kisses are what you want then kisses are what you will have,’ he told her against her mouth as her lips trembled beneath his and the sweet boldness of her daring became an inferno of pulsating need that possessed every inch of her body.
Ash was leaning over her, his hands tangling in her hair as he kissed the side of her throat slowly and gently, and then nibbled on her ear, his thumb stroking the sensitive secret place just behind it.
A soft sound of delight bubbled in Sophia’s throat, her eyes wide open and dark with an arousal she made no attempt to hide as she looked at him.
She was the most sensual woman he had ever touched. Everything about her was a hot sweet tide of melting female desire that begged him to complete her. No woman had ever looked at him with such open need, turned to him with such confidence in his ability to satisfy that need. No woman had ever unleashed within him an answering torrent of unstoppable longing for her.
He shouldn’t have kissed her. But he had and now he couldn’t stop.
He cupped her head to hold her still beneath him and then plundered her mouth in a kiss that stamped her with his possession as surely as though he had penetrated her and filled her body with his sex, until her own sensuality stormed through her, demanding her submission to its needs and to him.
Sophia couldn’t contain her own aroused need and delight. Her hands were on Ash’s forearms, her fingers curling round them, her body arching up to his in a blatant offer that, driven by his own compelling need, Ash was incapable of refusing.
As the white-hot power of her unleashed passion poured through her, Sophia felt the first surging movement of Ash’s body within her own. A fiercely wild sense of joy gripped her. She moved with him, eager for his
full possession.
Ash thrust deeper into her and then stopped, in stunned shock and disbelief, as his body fought against what his brain was telling him, the effort it took him to leash his need causing his body to throb with unsatisfied desire. There was a barrier in his way that shouldn’t have been there, the barrier of virginity. His brain recognised that. His body, though, ached and pulsed, his flesh demanding that he allowed it to complete what it had started and satisfy its need. But he couldn’t. Not now. Not until he knew what was going on.
Lying beneath him Sophia was filled with the urgency of her own unappeased need. He couldn’t stop now. Not now when she needed and wanted him so much. Lost in her own desire Sophia had forgotten all about her virginity, but now with Ash pulling back from her and her body still crying out for him she realised what was happening. She had to stop him leaving her. She had to. Female determination filled her as she deliberately tightened her muscles around him.
‘You want me to conceive,’ she reminded him. ‘That’s why we’re doing this.’
It was true but more than that the movement of her body against his was destroying his attempt at self-control. Ash could feel it slipping, draining away from him as desire for her roared over him. He moved within her, intending to pull back, but somehow his body surged forward and once it had and she was moving with him, making those soft urgent cries of pleasure and need, it was impossible for him to stop what was happening. The barrier parted, the look on Sophia’s face as she cried out one of satisfaction and delight rather than one of pain.
Now she had what she had wanted for so long. Now he was hers. Truly hers in the most intimate way possible. Now he had taken what she had always wanted to give him and her body was responding to his possession with the pleasure she had always known it would, wave after wave of it, each one bearing her higher, making her want to take him deeper and deeper within her as she wrapped her legs around him and held him to her more eagerly with each urgent thrust of his possession.
The climax was swift and intense—for both of them—leaving Sophia gasping and shuddering with the intensity of her pleasure as Ash watched her and cursed himself in silence whilst the red mist of his desire for her evaporated to leave him gripped by anger and guilt.
Nothing about his coming together with Sophia had been as he had expected or as he had prepared for. He had expected the sex to be good, but controlled, a coming together of two experienced people who knew the value of sexual pleasure but who would remain free of any emotional involvement in that pleasure. It would be strictly physical, and strictly controlled, but somehow Sophia had got under his skin, and under his self-control. Because Sophia had welcomed him where Nasreen had rejected him, telling him on their wedding night that his love was the last thing she wanted? Telling him that her love had already been given to someone else and that that someone was a married man with whom she had been having a secret affair. An affair which she had no intention of ending and which she fully expected Ash to tolerate and their marriage to cover. It was the way of such things she had told him with a dismissive shrug.
It was the anger he had felt when she had revealed the truth to him that had destroyed not just his physical desire for her but, and far more hard for him to bear, his duty to feel any desire to love her. He had thought that sense of duty so strong and so much an intrinsic part of himself. He had taken pride in it and yet with a handful of words Nasreen had shown him its pitiful weakness. His heart had chilled to her. He hadn’t been able to forgive either her or himself for what his reaction to her had shown him about himself.
He had, in effect, turned his back on her, giving in to his own pride and his own feelings about the destruction of his plans for their lives together. And because of that she had died. If he had thought less about the pride he had taken in telling himself that he would love her because it was his duty to do so and instead set his personal standards lower, they could possibly have worked something out—a discreet arrangement of a marriage in which they produced an heir but privately went their own ways. If he had tried harder, been more realistic, maybe they could have salvaged something and then perhaps she would not have died. Instead, he had allowed his emotions to take control.
He deserved the burden of guilt he had to carry. It was his punishment for the pride he had taken in believing that he could create love, not just within Nasreen but within himself, when that power did not belong to him. He had no right to take pleasure in the response that Sophia had given him, and even less to feel that primitive surge of male possessive pleasure to know that he was the one to have brought her to what had obviously been her first experience of the intensity of her own capacity for sensual pleasure.
He could not allow himself to savour that achievement. Instead, he must punish himself for even allowing himself to think of it. And as for his own pleasure? The result of too much abstinence. Nothing more. He could not permit himself to feel anything more.
The darkly bitter emotions that burned inside him turned outwards seeking an escape. He looked to where Sophia lay on the bed, her gaze still awed, her body still sensually satisfied and soft with the aftermath of her climax.
If he went to her now, held her now, kept her close to him and told her of all the many ways in which their coming together had been so very different from anything he had known before, if he told her that she was different from any other woman he had known before … He was already turning towards her, already … Already what? Prepared to break a vow he knew he had to keep if he was to ensure that this marriage worked for the good of his people.
From somewhere he found the will to turn the weakness within him that he didn’t want into the anger he needed. Like Nasreen, Sophia, too, had deceived him, leaving him to discover a truth that vitally affected their marriage on their wedding night—even if his discovery that she had been a virgin was the complete opposite of Nasreen’s revelations to him. And he was grateful to have that reason to feed his anger because he was afraid that without it he might be in danger of giving in to those feelings he had already had to fight back once. Feelings of tenderness and care, feelings that … Feelings that meant nothing, were nothing, and which he would stifle and destroy, because that was the way it had to be.
Without looking at Sophia he told her coldly, ‘I want an explanation.’
The abrupt coldness of Ash’s voice and demeanour after the sweet hot pleasure of the sensuality they had just shared shocked Sophia back to reality.
What had happened to her? How and why had she reacted to him in the way that she had, given everything she had believed she knew about herself and her desires for her own emotional future? It didn’t make sense that she should have wanted Ash so immediately, so passionately and so intensely, that it seemed as though her body had been waiting for this and for him. At least, it didn’t make sense, of course, unless that was exactly what had happened, and why she had responded to him the way she had. A cold chill of fear trickled down her spine. That was not true. It couldn’t be true. She refused to let it be true. So why had it happened?
She didn’t know. All she could think, all she could allow herself to believe, was that there had been a moment—a handful of several long delicately spun-out golden moments—during which she had felt as though she had touched heaven and held a rainbow of unimaginable delight in her hands. But that had not been reality. That had been a mirage, an imaginary fantasy, that could not and did not exist, and the last dying echoes of the foolish dreams she had once had.
It meant nothing, and for her pride’s sake, for the sake of the future, she must now learn to forget about it.
‘For my virginity?’ she responded in as cool a voice as she could manage. She must not allow herself, never mind Ash, to feel that their coming together had touched her emotions, because it hadn’t. As she had just analysed, for herself that reaction had simply been a long-ago echo of something that no longer existed.
‘Yes, of course for your virginity.’
She still looked
slightly dazed, her eyes huge and dark, her mouth flushed a deep rose pink, but for all the signs of her pleasured sensuality, there was also a vulnerability about her, as though she was in need of … Comfort? Tenderness? These were things he could not give her. White teeth snapping together, he pulled on his robe and went across to the table where the maid had left her a bottle of water in a bucket of ice. He removed and opened it, pouring two glasses, one of which he brought over to her. Water, most precious gift of all to those born into a desert race, because it was the gift of life.
Sophia willed her hand not to tremble as she took the glass Ash held out to her. The water slid coolly down her throat, both reviving her and giving her new strength. Ash watched as a drop of condensation on the glass fell onto her chest and ran down the valley between her breasts. He wanted to look away but somehow he couldn’t. He wanted, he discovered, to reach out and stop its descent with his finger and then lick it from her skin with his tongue. He wanted … He wanted nothing other than a marriage of duty and mutual respect through which he could dedicate himself to his people and his responsibility to them.
Sophia pulled the sheet up around her naked body. Ash turned away, an unfamiliar feeling slicing into his gut. She was rejecting him? Why should that bring him such an immediate and intense desire to go to her and hold her, to feel her responding to him again as she had done earlier instead of retreating from him? He didn’t know. But he felt as though he didn’t know anything any more, and for a man who liked being in control of his life that was intolerable.
He turned back to Sophia. The evidence of the intensity of what had happened between them was plain to see. It was there in the tousle of her dark hair, the flush on her cheeks and the sensual exhaustion in her eyes. She looked like a woman who had been made love to and whose body had shared enthusiastically in that experience. Or did he just see that because it was what he wanted to see?