She couldn’t argue with a smile that faded and turned to a look of almost angry possession. She couldn’t argue with the tightening of the generous mouth, the clenching of his strong, dark fist as he struggled against passion. And she couldn’t resist when he insisted on seeing her, day after day, though it was an unnamed torment to them both.
She told herself his self-control was a relief to her, that she was glad his powerful desire didn’t lead him to try to undermine her resolve. But in the long, hot Eastern nights, when she awoke in her solitary bed remembering Bari’s eyes in lamplight, or the touch of his hand as it guided her and then lifted from her skin, slowly, weighted by deep reluctance, when her body was filled with yearning and a betraying wish that he had not lifted his hand, but had tightened his hold, had insisted on possession, was here beside her in the bed, to reach for and embrace—then what she felt was something that was almost regret.
The breeze grew stronger under the shadow of the awning, and brushed her forehead with the cool promise of rain.
“Do you think the drought is really over?” she asked. It had already rained twice in two days, and the whole country was rejoicing as if this relief, too, could be laid at the new Sultan’s door.
He looked at her. “Yes,” he said, his voice creating another sensation on her skin. “The drought is over. It has been long, yes? Too long.”
There was a silence as she pretended not to understand him.
“Are you hungry, Noor?”
Noor nodded wordlessly and reached out at random to spoon something luscious onto her plate. Bari tore a piece of bread from the small, tender loaf in front of him, dipped it in spiced olive oil, lifted his chin and slipped the melting morsel between his lips.
Hunger, not for food, whipped her with a ferocity born of the long days and nights of unsatisfied desire. Days and nights when he had given her everything to build her hunger, and nothing against which to sharpen her resistance.
A smudge of oil glazed his lower lip. His upper lip pressed down to suck it off, and his eyes caught her gaze as his lips relaxed again into sensual fullness.
He lowered his lids and reached for the bread. His palm cupped and accommodated to the breastlike roundness of the loaf with deeply sensual appreciation, his long, square fingers dark against the whiteness of the loaf, sure and competent. He offered Noor a torn chunk of bread.
Her fingertips brushed his knuckles, and she winced as her wrist went weak. The little chunk of bread fell on the table between them. Noor breathed in, her eyes rising irresistibly to meet his gaze. He knew. Of course he knew. She swallowed, licked her dry lips.
“Thank you,” she murmured, reaching for the bread again.
There was cutlery in the picnic basket, but Bari ate using his fingers or bread as his only tools. Somehow, she didn’t know how, this added to the sensual impact of the moment. Then she realized that it was because he was a sensualist. Bari ate with his hands because the sensation of touch added to his pleasure in the food.
Just so, a part of her whispered, would he take pleasure in her body, if she allowed it. Touch, taste, scent…he gloried in his senses, and his senses would glory in her flesh.
He lifted a piece of chicken and tore it apart, offering her a morsel from fingers slippery with melted butter and olive oil, then watched in appreciation as her white teeth closed on the tidbit. He grunted when her lips brushed his skin and, in half-involuntary mimicry of his sensual approach, she closed her lips around his fingertip and sucked the spiced oil from his slightly raspy skin.
A bolt of electricity shot through her, all the way to her toes. Her eyes lifted as if he forced them up to lock with his gaze.
She was on very dangerous ground, but a treacherous part of her, the part that wanted to give in, kept telling her that nothing had happened. He hadn’t even kissed her, let alone got close to making love. They were only eating.
But another part of her knew that Bari wasn’t like other men, and that this attraction was like nothing she’d ever felt before, and that the point of no return was almost upon her.
The hungry part, the part that was desperate to experience Bari’s sensuality at the deepest level, won out, and in involuntary temptation she licked her lips and smiled.
His eyelids drooped, and a possessive gleam shot out from under the lowered lids to tell her that she was lost. He scooped up another morsel of food and fed it to her with one hand, while the other tenderly stroked her throat and chin.
Her skin ignited like dry brush at a lightning strike. Noor opened her eyes and her mouth, but though his face was so close, he did not kiss her.
A delicate assault on her senses began. Resting his elbows on the table, Bari leaned forward to murmur in her ear that she was beautiful, desirable, and that no man could see her and not want her. Then he made her drink from his glass. Like a child—but not like a child.
He stroked her neck, her shoulder above the pretty gauzy sarong she had tied over her bathing suit, her hand, her wrist. He poured wine into her cupped hand and sucked it out with a sexual need that she felt as a blow. He explored her palm with his tongue and lips as if she, too, were heady wine.
As they ate, one desire was sated, but another grew. She felt her body’s need for him hammer its urgent message in her blood, her brain, her skin, her breasts, her abdomen. His need for her was in his lips, his tongue, his trembling hands, and in his dark, approving eyes.
Meanwhile, across the sky, dark clouds were massing and moving closer. A rumble of thunder breached the silence now and then, and warm wind whipped at the canvas canopy that protected them from the sun. She felt that her body was like the parched earth that had longed for the sky’s blessing for long months and years, and now that he was near it would be sin and worse than sin to turn away into dryness and infertility again.
Down inside the cabin there was a stateroom, and a bed. After an endless time, Bari drew her up from her seat and led her there, pushing her down onto the soft cushions and following to stretch his hungry body out beside her. Then he took her ruthlessly into his arms and, for the first time, let slip the tight rein he had kept on his passion….
Something landed in her lap, bringing her out of her reverie. She blushed, as if Bari might have guessed her thoughts.
“And what’s this?” She lifted the little plastic envelope. She was shivering in earnest now.
“A foil blanket. It is dangerous to attempt buddy warmth with only two people in a four-man raft,” Bari said. “All the weight in one place could destabilize the raft.”
His voice was so full of contemptuous dismissal that she burned with embarrassment, as if she had been offering him sex and been rejected.
She didn’t believe what he had just said. He simply didn’t want to touch her. The rage and hurt of this morning’s discovery flooded her mind once more. She was in a ferment to shake him out of his damned supercilious contempt, his smug calm.
“What gives you the right to look at me as if—as if…I was asking for comfort!” she shouted. “When did I ever throw myself at you? You were the one! Right from the beginning—as if I were water in the desert!”
Tears stung her eyes, but she would not be so weak!
“Instead you were a mirage,” Bari said harshly, as her emotions succeeded in igniting his own.
“Me?” she exclaimed, choking on the injustice. “I wasn’t the mirage! I never lied!”
“What was it when you said you would marry me, if not a lie?”
His voice was cold with fury. In the red glow cast by the canopy he looked unfamiliar, an angry stranger.
And that was what he was. She didn’t know him at all.
“What was it when you said you wanted to marry me?” she countered hotly, the pent-up words bursting from her. “You don’t want to marry me, and never did! And before you deny it, I overheard your aunt and your cousin talking. You’re only marrying me because your grandfather wants an alliance with his old friend’s family. He ordered you to marry me,
and you were furious about it. You have to marry me to inherit the family property, isn’t that right? You don’t love me!”
He watched her steadily, one eyebrow lifted.
“Do you!” she prodded. “Do you!”
“No, Noor,” Bari replied in a slow, calm voice, not at all the voice of a man caught out. “No, I don’t love you. Why are you pretending outrage when you have always known it?”
Six
Noor’s mouth opened in slow, appalled disbelief, but Bari gave no quarter.
“I never told you I loved you. You didn’t ask to hear it. What you wanted was a wealthy, socially connected man who would cater to your desire for a life of selfish pleasure. That was what I offered you. That was your price, Noor.”
“My price!”
“So the discovery that you say you have now made—that love is not part of our bargain—will not serve as an excuse. I ask you again—why did you back out of the agreement that both of us understood from the beginning? And why did you choose such a moment, such a grotesque and offensive way to do it?”
His teeth and eyes flashed in an angry smile.
“It’s not true!” she cried, but if he heard the dismay in her voice it left him unmoved.
“What is not true? What part of what I have said do you dispute?”
“If you didn’t love me, why didn’t you tell me that when you proposed?”
“You never asked. My reasons for wishing the marriage formed no part of our bargain. You could have made it so, but you did not choose to know.”
“Only because I thought—I thought—”
“What did you think?” His eyes narrowed. “You thought I loved you?” Fierce laughter erupted from him. “You got it all, is that what you thought, Noor? I offered you wealth and social connections, and my family’s honour, and now you say you thought you had my love, too—and what were you offering in exchange? Not love, for you love only yourself.”
“That’s not true!” she cried, stunned by this battering. “Anyway, I didn’t need your wealth or social conn—”
“Your name, that was the sum total of what you brought to our agreement. That you are the descendant of a man my grandfather remembers with love and respect.”
His voice dripped with bitterness, and she knew then without a doubt that what she had overheard his cousin and aunt saying was the truth. He had been brutally angry over his grandfather’s decision.
“Why do you flinch from admitting it?”
She could feel tears burning her eyes, but not for the world would she let Bari see how affected she was, her skin crawling with humiliation and shame.
“You pretended!” she accused him, her voice hovering on a sob. “Try and deny that! Don’t call me a fool when you know perfectly well you acted as if you were besotted with me!”
He lifted a hand, a shoulder, in an expressive shrug. “You are a sexually attractive woman. But if you had really wanted my love, Noor, you would have acted like a woman who wants to be loved, not like one who knows she can do no wrong. When did you concern yourself with my good opinion? With the regard of my mother and sisters? With anyone’s well-being but your own? Nothing is as important to you as your own wishes, it seems. Whose opinion matters to you? Whose feelings do you consider?”
“That’s a lie!”
“So sure are you of your worth that you didn’t notice I never spoke of love! Yet—you tell me now—all the time you were assuming that I loved you passionately. Is that the attitude of a woman with a heart? To take love for granted?
“And if you had ever believed you loved me, you would have told me so. Even when there is nothing but sex a woman will say I love you. But not you. Oh, Bari, isn’t it wonderful! That is what you said. But no word of love.”
Anger and humiliation scorched her. She had never been so insulted, so bitterly condemned.
“I was a virgin! Why do you think I waited all that time, if not for love?”
He smiled. “You waited for a husband. You said to me, only with my husband, or my future husband, not only with the man I love.”
“It went without saying. Of course I expected to love the man I married!”
His black eyes fixed her, as if with pins to a board. “And did you love him, the man you nearly married?” Her heart fluttered a protest.
“I—” Her mind seemed to stumble.
“Go on, Noor. Tell me you love me,” Bari challenged mockingly.
Was he right? Was it the image she had loved, and not the man at all? What was love? She hesitated, and he laughed outright.
“You can’t expect me to say it now!” she cried.
“If you imagine love is so easily killed, then you know nothing of love. You are suffering from bruised pride, and you imagine you have been crossed in love!”
“That is so untrue!”
He eyed her coldly. “And is this truly why you ran from our wedding ceremony minutes before it was to begin, leaving all our guests, without a word of explanation to them or to our families or to me? Because of an insult to your pride? Because of a conversation you overheard?”
Noor could hardly take it in. How could he be throwing her accusation back in her face like this? She had been on a rock, and with a wave of words he had changed that into shifting sand.
This isn’t really happening! her brain kept insisting. This is a dream!
How had she gone from being an excited, beautiful bride, wearing the most exquisite dress in the world and a diamond worth a sultan’s ransom, waiting for her wedding to a man who was crazy for her, to this—having flown through a terrifying storm in fear for her life, and crash-landed at sea, she was now lying in a storm-tossed life raft waiting for rescue that might not come, her makeup streaked, her nails broken and torn, her hair in rat’s tails, wet, naked and shivering, and squashed into a tiny space with that same man who now despised her?
But worst of all was what she was hearing about herself. Did she act like a woman so used to being loved she took it for granted?
It wasn’t true. If she had believed Bari loved her it was because of the way he had treated her, not because that was her first assumption.
“I don’t take love for granted!” Noor felt another chill sweep through her and, suddenly reminded, she sat up and tore the plastic bag from the tiny packet he had thrown her. She unfurled a sheet of rustling gold foil that glowed and glittered even in the dimness.
“Silver side in for warmth,” Bari said, and began working a small air pump.
She wrapped herself in it. Whatever the strange foil was, it had an immediate effect on her chill. But it offered poor protection against Bari’s accusations. They had already hit home.
“It looks like the Sultana’s robes at the coronation,” she muttered, tweaking the folds around her, trying to dispel her own gloom, trying to prevent herself hearing what he had said, what he really thought of her.
Could it be true? People had always loved her. Everyone she knew loved her. And not just her mother and father and her brothers and Jalia and her friends. At school she had been popular with everyone—except for a few girls who were jealous, she amended carefully…but no one was loved by everybody in the world! You couldn’t be human and not have some enemies! Some girls were jealous of her because her family spoiled her, she’d always known that. She’d had lots of spending money and the freedom to do what she liked, and of course people hated that….
Bari’s family had been cool with her, some of them. But she couldn’t have cared less what they thought of her. Why should she? Bari was right about that—she’d taken no trouble to make them like her, not Noor! If they didn’t like her as she was, that was their problem. Anyway, she’d told herself, it was only jealousy because Bari had fallen for her so hard.
But if it turned out Bari hadn’t fallen for her, and they knew it, what did that mean?
That they disliked her for herself?
What had she ever done to deserve dislike? When had she ever hurt anyone?
; As if in answer, her brain suddenly conjured up the scene her flight must have created. Jalia and the bridesmaids coming to the door of her bedroom, one of the women going to the bathroom to call her…had they gone searching through the house? And when she was nowhere to be found—what would they have thought? Her parents—what had they imagined? What were they going through now?
She thought of the guests, and what bewilderment they must have felt—were probably still feeling. What she had done was a personal insult to them all. She had treated them as if they didn’t matter in the least. Bari was right—she had thought her own concerns of overriding importance. Some of their guests had flown halfway around the world to celebrate with her, and she hadn’t even done them the simple honour of telling them that she had changed her mind and the wedding wouldn’t take place.
As if that understanding unlocked a door in her heart, a host of other visions suddenly flashed through her unwilling mind, one after the other. Moments in her past when she had acted selfishly, even cruelly. Girls at school whom she had cut, or insulted, or laughed at when they tried to be popular, or wore the wrong clothes. Friends she had dropped without explanation, a boy she had mocked when he asked her out…
All the time believing she was in the right. Noor Ashkani could do no wrong. She brooked no criticism. Dare to doubt Noor’s actions and you were out of the charmed circle before you took another breath.
All her life she had acted as if she were the person who mattered. She hadn’t believed that consciously, but she could see with painful clarity now that it had been the unconscious basis of her actions.
The discovery that Bari didn’t love her had cut to the quick her self-importance, and she had reacted with pure arrogance. She had hurt and insulted everyone.
Noor looked up. Bari’s expression was grim, but even if it hadn’t been, she couldn’t tell him what thoughts and what painful self-realization poured through her. Not Bari, of all people, who sat in such harsh judgement and had never loved—probably didn’t even like—her.
Sheikh's Castaway Page 5