Elizabeth evaded his too-knowing gaze. “Ahlan wa sahlan. What does it mean?”
“Roughly translated, it means that it is nice to meet you. Do you love your husband?”
She stepped on his instep—hard. “If I did not, I would not have come to you.”
“Does your husband love you?”
“That is none of your business.”
“I intend upon making it my business.”
Surely he could not mean—
“I think perhaps it would be best if we cancel our lessons, Lord Safyre. I will have your book returned to you.”
“It’s too late, taalibba.”
Alarm feathered Elizabeth’s skin. “What do you mean?”
“We have an agreement.”
Dawning comprehension flared in her eyes. “I blackmailed you, so you are going to blackmail me.”
“If need be.”
It was what she had feared that first morning; therefore, she should not feel so . . . hurt.
“Why?”
“You want to learn how to give a man pleasure . . . and I want to teach you.”
Elizabeth felt incandescent with anger. “You want to humiliate me.”
His lashes created hollow shadows underneath his eyes. “As I said before, you know very little about me. Do you remember the story of Dorérame in Chapter Two of The Perfumed Garden?”
“He was killed,” she retorted grimly. Quite gruesomely, she recalled.
“The king who killed him freed a woman from his clutches.”
“A married woman.”
“Then the king took the woman and freed her from her husband.”
“This is absurd.” She did not want to think about a married woman being “freed” from her husband. “I do not see the purpose of this conversation.”
“Simply this: A woman in Arabia has certain rights over her husband. Among them is her right to sexual union. She has the right to seek divorce if her husband will not satisfy her.”
Mortification exploded inside Elizabeth’s chest. Only women of loose morals were not satisfied in marriage.
How dare he—
“For your information, my husband does satisfy me,” she hissed.
“There will be no more lies between us, taalibba. You had the courage to ask me to tutor you; now have the courage to face the truth.”
“And just what do you think the truth is, Lord Safyre?”
“Look to your husband. When you see what he is and not what you want him to be, you will have your truth.” Suddenly, he dropped her hand and released her waist. “The dance is over, Mrs. Petre. Let us promenade.”
Elizabeth jerked her left hand down, away from his shoulder. “I will not be blackmailed.”
“I think you will. You love your children but you know nothing about your husband . . . or yourself. I will expect to see you tomorrow morning.”
She nodded at an acquaintance, her mind busily digesting and analyzing his words. “You know who my husband’s mistress is.”
“No.”
“Then, why are you doing this?”
“Because I think you are a meritorious woman.”
“I do not have a male member, Lord Safyre,” she retorted frigidly.
The harsh line of his mouth eased. Mischief danced in his eyes. He looked like the impish schoolboy he must have been when he was twelve, spurned by his mother. “We will see.”
“I will not be there tomorrow morning.”
“You will be. Just as I will be waiting for you.”
For the first time in her life, Elizabeth understood why Phillip used to stomp his foot in anger. She stared across the ballroom . . . directly into the eyes of her husband.
A man joined him—a fellow Cabinet member. Edward turned to the older man and walked toward the card room.
Edward had seen Elizabeth, she realized numbly, and dismissed her.
She met the Bastard Sheikh’s turquoise stare. He had seen Edward’s dismissal, too.
The smell of gas from the chandeliers, of women’s perfumes and men’s macassar, rushed to her head. Elizabeth firmed her lips and straightened her spine. “I will not lie to you if you will not malign my husband.”
“Very well.”
“And if you insist upon the truth, you must be prepared to give it.”
His thick, dark lashes created jagged shadows on his cheeks. “I am here to tutor you, taalibba, not the other way around.”
“Perhaps we will both learn.”
“Perhaps.” He offered her his arm.
She tentatively rested her fingers on his sleeve. Underneath the silk, his muscles were whipcord taut.
Heat washed over her chest—it came from his gaze, staring at her breasts. She drew her shoulders back, corset creaking, too late realizing the motion pushed her breasts up and out.
He lifted his lashes; laughter shimmered in the depths of his eyes. “Rule number three. Starting tomorrow morning, you will not wear one single article of wool in my house. You may wear silk, muslin, velvet, brocade, whatever you wish so long as it is not wool.”
“And you, Lord Safyre,” she asked rashly, brashly, “what will you wear?”
“As little or as much as you wish me to wear.”
Elizabeth’s mouth went dry, imagining warm brown skin capped by red-hot desire.
She abruptly remembered who he was and who she was not.
A man like him did not lust after a woman whose hair was touched by silver and whose body had thickened from the birth of two children.
“We are engaged in a tutelage, Lord Safyre, not a burlesque.”
Heads turned to see who dared laugh with such unadulterated enjoyment.
Elizabeth bit her lips to keep from joining in with his mirth.
It was pure nervousness, of course. There was nothing even remotely humorous about society witnessing the Bastard Sheikh’s uninhibited laughter, especially when she held his arm and also came underneath their scrutiny. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not keep her lips in a straight line.
Emerald-green eyes caught Elizabeth’s.
Her mother’s eyes.
They were not amused.
Elizabeth jerked her hand away from the Bastard Sheikh’s arm.
His laughter abruptly died.
Elizabeth turned, giving him the cut direct.
And felt as if something inside her died, too.
Chapter 7
Elizabeth Petre wore a heavy brown velvet gown and cold English civility. Last night she had smiled at him . . . and then she had cut him directly as if he were a gutter dog.
“Sabah el kheer, Mrs. Petre.”
“Good morning, Lord Safyre.”
A reluctant smile crooked his lips as she methodically removed her black leather gloves. He poured steaming coffee into a blue-veined porcelain demitasse cup, then added a splash of cold water before handing it to her.
Clearly, she was reluctant to accept it. It was equally clear that her rigid English manners decreed she not offend her host by not accepting it.
Ramiel studied her through the veil of his lashes, willing her to take the coffee.
The exultation that surged through him when she accepted the Turkish beverage was a throwback to his Mogul heritage.
He wanted her.
He wanted her to acknowledge her physical needs.
He wanted her to want him, the Bastard Sheikh, a man born in the West who had become a man in the East and El Ibn, a man who had tasted the bitter dregs of human sexuality and still yearned for more.
Turkish coffee was a good place to start.
Hot mist enveloped Elizabeth’s face; she blew into the cup before taking one sip, two, three.... Sliding the cup and saucer onto the edge of his desk, she pulled a sheath of papers out of her reticule.
“Your choice of textbook is confusing, Lord Safyre.” She raised her head and caught his gaze. Sexual awareness briefly glimmered in her clear hazel eyes and was quickly buried. “The sheikh gives very little inst
ruction on how to give a man pleasure.”
Ramiel refreshed his own cup of coffee, inhaling the thick, sweet aroma, a bittersweet reminder of what he had once taken for granted. “ ‘O you men,’ ” he murmured, “ ‘prepare her for enjoyment, and neglect nothing to attain that end. Explore her with the greater assiduity, and, entirely occupied with her, let nothing else engage your thoughts.... Then go to work, but, remember, not till your kisses and toying have taken effect.’ ”
He deliberately raised his cup to his lips and drank. The thick brew was hot and wet, exactly the way she would feel when he was lodged deep inside of her.
She watched him, outwardly calm and sedate. Her nipples stabbed at the soft velvet bodice.
Last night they had stabbed his chest when they danced.
Ramiel returned his cup to his saucer. “You do not think that men need preparation, Mrs. Petre?”
Indecision warred with propriety in her clear hazel eyes. The need to know won.
“Are you saying that men and women are excited by the same types of caresses?”
“We both have breasts, lips, thighs. . . .” He lightly rimmed the warm porcelain cup with his finger. “Yes, that is exactly what I am saying.”
“Then you believe that a man becomes aroused when a woman kisses his cheeks . . .” A pulse beat erratically at the base of her throat. They had irrevocably crossed the boundaries of tutor and student—he knew it, she knew it. He had planted doubt in her mind about her husband—and himself. “. . . and nibbles at his nipples?”
Ramiel’s groin tightened. “I know that a man becomes aroused by kisses and nibbles, Mrs. Petre.”
She evaded the heat in his gaze. “I can understand that it might be pleasant for a man when a woman titillates his lower body, but I do not see why a man would enjoy having his navel and his . . . his thighs kissed.”
Ramiel knew exactly how much pleasure a man derived from a woman kissing his navel and thighs. Erotic sensation pulsed in his groin, the memory of harem pleasures, a woman’s tender explorations, legs spread, manhood glistening with need as he wound silky-soft hair around his hands and gave himself up to the primal ecstasy of a hot, wet mouth.
He wanted that—he wanted to experience again the innocent joy of sex . . . with Elizabeth Petre.
She must acknowledge her needs.
“Do you not enjoy having your navel and thighs kissed?” he asked in a low, sultry voice.
“I—” Ramiel’s eyes dared Elizabeth to tell the truth. She did not let him down. “I don’t know. I have never been kissed there.”
“Does it excite you, thinking of being kissed there?”
An ember exploded in the fireplace.
She tilted her chin, daring him to mock her. “Yes, it does. Does it excite you, thinking of being kissed there?”
Ramiel’s breath rasped in his throat. “Yes, it excites me.”
“And does a man like a woman to bite his arms?”
The sizzling sexuality building between them abruptly dissipated.
“Bite at his arms, Mrs. Petre,” he said dryly. “The sheikh is not suggesting that a man or a woman engage in cannibalism.”
“I beg your pardon. Does a man like a woman to bite at his arms?”
A cynical smile curled Ramiel’s lips, other memories surfacing, more recent memories, Western memories. “Pain has its moments.”
“When?”
“When is pain pleasurable for a man . . . or when is it pleasurable for a woman?”
Her English reserve firmly fell into place. “For a man.”
“When a man brings a woman to her pea—”
“Excuse me. I would like to take notes. May I borrow your pen again, please?”
Elizabeth was running.
From him. From herself.
She knew how to be a mother, but she was terrified of being a woman.
Edward Petre’s neglect of his wife at the ball the previous night, coupled with his dismissal, had told Ramiel everything he needed to know about the sixteen-year marriage. The look on Elizabeth’s face had told its own story.
Edward did not care—Elizabeth did.
He wondered how long she had lain awake when she went home, alone, waiting for her husband.
He wondered what her reaction would be when she discovered her husband’s secret.
Ela’na. Damn. Her entire household knew about Edward Petre’s sexual predilections. How could she be so naive?
Ramiel retrieved his pen from inside the top drawer. She stared at the gold instrument.
Or perhaps she stared at his fingers, remembering the span of his hands and wondering how he would fit inside her.
Would she accept him easily or would he stretch her to the point of pain? Would he give her an orgasm or would he leave her aching with frustration as Edward Petre had no doubt left her?
Squaring her shoulders, Elizabeth plucked the pen out from between his fingers. “Thank you.”
How long had it been since she had taken a man inside her?
Ramiel scooted the brass inkwell across his desk.
Elizabeth dipped the steel nib into ink and poised the pen over her paper, eyes trained on the white vellum. “You were saying?”
“Have you ever had a climax, Mrs. Petre?”
Her head snapped up.
“No lies, no evasions,” Ramiel warned gravely. “That was our agreement.”
Her expression of shocked outrage turned to frigid disdain. “Yes, Lord Safyre, I have experienced a climax.”
Jealousy coiled inside his stomach like a cobra preparing to strike.
“Then you are aware that just before climax the ability to distinguish between pleasure and pain diminishes. When a woman reaches her peak, she sometimes scratches or bites her lover. The pain can be the impetus he needs to reach his own climax.”
The steel nib busily scratched its way across her paper.
He watched the play of light and shadow on her hair, dark wine-red and golden fire. And pictured her head solemnly bent to take her husband into her mouth.
Ramiel did not know what disturbed him the most, the fact that at the end of their lessons she would use his knowledge to please another man or the fact that using it to please her husband would destroy her.
“Now I will tell you what a woman sometimes needs to reach her peak.”
The scribbling stopped.
“I have known women who like their nipples to be bitten or pinched.” His description was bluntly sexual. “Other women enjoy it when I throw their legs over my shoulders and ram them so hard and deep that I can feel their womb contract around me.”
She gripped the pen in a stranglehold and stared at what she had written down. “What do you prefer?”
He ached for her ignorance . . . and for her needs that she so valiantly tried to hide.
“Whatever the woman prefers.”
Whatever you prefer, Elizabeth Petre.
But it was so painfully clear that she did not know what she wanted, just that she wanted.
Her voice was low. “Do you really like a woman to nibble on your nipples?”
A bolt of heat shot through Ramiel’s testicles. “Yes, Mrs. Petre.”
Body tensed, he waited for her next question.
Her breasts underneath the brown velvet dress rose and fell in time to her breathing. She raised her head. The pupils in her eyes were dilated with arousal.
“Do you . . . do you derive pleasure from nibbling on a woman’s nipples?”
“Kissing. Licking. Suckling. Nibbling,” he said harshly. “Yes, I take pleasure in a woman’s breasts.”
“What about your . . . member? Yesterday you said that when a woman wraps her fingers around a man she holds his life in her hand. How do you like to be . . . held?”
A hiss of breath whistled in the air. Ramiel vaguely identified it as his.
“I like a woman to pump and squeeze my manhood until the crown is no longer capped by the foreskin.”
Elizabeth did not mov
e, not even a flicker of an eyelash.
Ramiel could sense the blood rushing through her veins underneath her alabaster skin, a statue waiting to be sexually awakened.
“Muslim men are circumcised.”
Silently, viciously, he cursed himself. Why had he said that?
“The Arab women must have found you fascinating.”
Her appreciative response was not what he expected.
Warmth brushed Ramiel’s cheekbones, his first blush in twenty-five years. “Yes.”
The women had found him fascinating but foreign. A concubine would not mate with a man like him, an infidel, when their tenure in the harem ended, not even at the price of freedom.
“Have you ever encountered a woman who was not pleased by you, Lord Safyre?”
Arab. Bastard. Animal. In bed, out of bed, the names did not stop.
“If you are asking if I have ever failed to give a woman an orgasm,” he said roughly, “the answer is no.”
Paper crackled—the crumpling of her notes. “Never?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I do not claim to be a martyr, Mrs. Petre. There have been times when I climaxed before a woman. But there are other ways of providing release. Fingers. Hands. Lips. Toes. Almost any part of a man’s body can be used to satisfy a woman.”
He had shocked her. Again. “Toes?”
“Toes.”
Disbelief flitted across her face. It was followed by intrigue, then that, too, was hidden away.
She glanced down at her lap and smoothed out the paper that she had crinkled, the gold pen thick and shiny between her fingers. “Perhaps you carouse with women of ill repute who respond differently than do respectable women.”
Elizabeth so obviously repeated what she had been raised to believe as opposed to what she herself knew to be true that he wanted to shake her.
“Do you honestly believe that respectable women and women of ill repute are anatomically different?”
She wanted to lie; he could feel it. Just as he could feel the passion in her that she so desperately strove to hide, bubbling and chuckling like an oasis in arid desert land.
Several seconds passed before she had smoothed the sheath of papers to her satisfaction. “No, of course not.”
“Then why do you think that respectable women are incapable of sexual pleasure?”
“Perhaps it is the wanting, or the acknowledgment of her baser nature, that makes a woman not respectable. She may outwardly appear to be virtuous, but if she craves sexual pleasure, surely that makes her no better than a . . . a woman of the streets.”
Robin Schone Page 9