by Kim Lawrence
Suddenly Gabby was furious—her temper going from stationary to sixty in the blink of an eye. Shaking with the force of her emotions, she stabbed a finger in the direction of his broad chest. ‘Don’t you dare suggest you’re this angry because your brother used me. You’re such a hypocrite, Rafiq! This sudden concern for my welfare is totally phoney. This is about the fact that for once you can’t control everything!’
‘Control?’ The irony struck him forcibly. He had never felt as out of control in his life!
‘You’re a control freak. And you know something? You’re the idiot!’ She stopped and laughed at his stunned expression, barely conscious of the tears running down her cheeks. ‘You’re so busy preparing for after you’re dead—’
She stopped, her voice cracking emotionally as she pulled her hand from his and angrily brushed the moisture from her cheek with the back of her hand.
‘You’re so busy preparing that you’re not bothering to live the rest of your life. It’s an utter waste!’ she finished on a resentful quiver. ‘You should be extracting every last ounce from—’ Shaking her head, she turned away, her teeth drawing blood from her quivering lower lip.
There was silence as Rafiq looked at her slender shoulders shaking.
She started as he laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m fine,’ she sniffed defensively, before he could say anything. ‘I’m not the one dying,’ she added thickly.
Oh, God, why had she said that?
CHAPTER TWELVE
RAFIQ, his stern features set like stone, allowed his hand to fall from her shoulder.
‘I suppose I’ll be going home now?’ Gabby said in a small voice.
‘Home?’
Gabby turned, tilting her head and looking him directly in the face. She took a deep breath. Had she imagined it? The sizzle of electricity when their hands brushed? The gleam of hunger she had glimpsed in his face when she had felt his eyes on her? Was the entire sexual tension thing a figment of her imagination?
Was it all one-sided?
You’ll never know if you don’t ask, Gabby. So ask, girl.
‘Well, there’s no reason for me to stay around here any more—is there?’
He met her steady regard with a look that held about as much promise as a wet Monday morning. Gabby felt the metallic taste of humiliation and utter loss in her mouth as she pinned on a smile and gave a jaunty shrug.
‘I’ll just chalk this up to experience. I got what I came here for—Paul is free—and I’ve had a nice little holiday thrown in.’
‘You are going home?’ he said, in the oddest voice.
‘Yes, I’m going home!’ she yelled in exasperation. ‘Haven’t I just been saying that for the past—?’ She sniffed and blinked back the warm tears welling in her eyes.
The evidence of tears shimmering in her blue eyes drew a curse from his lips. ‘You want to go home?’
His throaty drawl rasped across her nerve-endings like sandpaper. ‘Never mind about what I want. For goodness’ sake, Rafiq, what about what you want?’ Her mouth twisted into a bitter smile when he looked at her blankly. ‘You act as though I’m talking a foreign language…Well, I suppose I am in a way—not that your English isn’t actually better than mine, and—’
His voice cut across her rambling dialogue. ‘A man cannot always have what he wants,’ he said heavily.
‘Just for one minute pretend you can,’ she suggested. ‘Forget you’re a prince, forget duty and family.’ She looked at his face, stopped and shook her head. ‘There’s no point, is there? You can’t. You’ll always be a prince first and a man second.’
He swallowed. ‘Do you think I do not wish it otherwise at times?’ he asked harshly.
Her eyes, blue as cornflowers, flew to his face and clung. ‘Then wish now,’ she begged huskily. ‘Forget your brother. You’re the one,’ she reminded him, ‘who always says you don’t waste time and effort over things outside your control.’
‘I had no idea you had listened to what I say.’
‘I hang on your every word,’ she drawled sarcastically.
‘Your logic is questionable.’
‘So is my sanity, when I’ve been talking to you for more than thirty seconds. You know I’m right,’ she claimed shakily. ‘You just can’t admit it. So try to stop being a control freak for two seconds. Forget about your family. I do know this is sacrilege I’m talking…’
‘Since when has that stopped you?’
It wasn’t the dry insert but the flash of amused warmth that for a brief moment lightened the tension in his features, making Gabby stumble over her words as she continued. ‘Forget—f…forget about Zantara,’ she recommended. ‘Zantara will be here long after we are all gone. Think for once in your life about you.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, think about Rafiq,’ she said, her blue eyes earnestly scanning his face. ‘What do you want? And I don’t mean duty. I mean what do you want? If you could have whatever you want at this minute what would it be? I bet you haven’t even thought about it.’
In a world where nothing was the way it should have been this was one thing she was determined to achieve. Rafiq was for once in his life going to do something selfish.
A nerve in his lean cheek jumped as his restless dark glance touched the soft curve of her full mouth. He had gone to sleep seeing her mouth, imagining tasting the sweetness within. He had woken up and the mental torture had continued.
The words were dragged from his throat against his will. ‘Oh, I have thought about it.’
‘You have? Great!’ she enthused, offering him a smile of gentle encouragement. ‘So what is it?’
There was a long, dragging silence as his heavy lids came down. Through the mesh of his lashes as they lay against his slashing cheekbones it was impossible for Gabby to read his expression, and he evinced a great interest in his hand-tooled leather riding boots before rising to his feet.
Gabby’s soft features hardened into a mask of determination as she followed his example, and stood toe to toe with him. She planted her hands on her softly curved hips and angled her face up to his.
‘I’m not moving until you tell me.’
Rafiq’s heavy lids lifted. The intensity of his stare burned into Gabby as their eyes met. She was suddenly overwhelmingly conscious of his sheer physical presence as he towered over her. She had no control over the shiver of illicit excitement that trickled down her spine.
‘This.’
Gabby’s eyes flew wide in startled shock as he bent his dark head towards her. He’s going to kiss me. The shocking realisation sent a wild rush of heat through her body.
Without thinking—why think about something she had been genetically programmed from birth to do?—she turned her mouth into his, shivering with anticipation at the first firm touch of his lips. A deep sigh shuddered through her body as her lips parted of their own volition under the firm pressure. Her lashes fluttered like trapped butterflies against her flushed cheeks as the kiss deepened and grew more intense, and a fractured lost moan was dragged from somewhere deep inside her.
The heat inside Gabby built as Rafiq continued to kiss her, deepening the intimacy by slow, sensual increments as he explored the soft, sweet moistness of her mouth like a starving man who had found sustenance.
She was burning up from the inside out, and the flames of desire were searing away the last threads of common sense from her brain. She knew it was only sex for him, and he thought it was just as casual for her—he believed she had slept with his brother the previous night—but that didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
If this was his way of blanking out the cruel cards fate had dealt him, his way of forgetting what must haunt his every waking moment, she didn’t care. Gabby wanted to give what comfort she could and take whatever came her way.
Finally Rafiq’s head lifted, but he stayed close—close enough for her to be able to feel his warm breath on her face, to see the network of lines radiating from around his eyes.
Gabby looked up at him through half-closed eyes, the hot summer blue almost swallowed up by her dilated pupils. She was trembling, and she could feel the febrile shudders that ran at irregular intervals through his greyhound-lean frame.
She felt a hot, heavy lethargy as he tangled his fingers deep in her hair and ran a finger softly along the curve of her cheek, lingering over the indentation of her dimple.
‘I have thought about it a lot,’ he slurred thickly.
Gabby was intoxicated by the startling admission. ‘Then why on earth didn’t you do something sooner?’ she wailed, standing on her tiptoes to plant a kiss at the corner of his fascinating mouth. He responded with a growl, and kissed her with a ferocity that sent her senses spinning.
‘You were marrying my brother,’ he reminded her, when he had kissed her into a state of blissful, aching submission.
Gabby looked up at him. Who would have guessed that surrender to her own needs and those of someone else could feel so perfect?
‘And now I’m surplus to requirements?’ Bless Hakim, she thought, smiling.
‘Not my requirements.’
Rafiq turned a deaf ear to the voice in his head that told him he ought not to be doing this. Every fibre in his body told him he had to do this—he could no more not do this than he could stop his body dragging in its next breath. His brain supplied a plausible cover story that allowed him to go on. This was just sex.
The expression in his eyes made the heat in her blood pool low between her legs. ‘Those requirements,’ she admitted, with an uncharacteristic boldness she was actually getting the hang of quite quickly, ‘are the only ones I’m actually concerned with right now.’
A sudden frown tautened his strong-boned features. ‘You are offering yourself up as a sop to a dying man…?’
She reached up and took his face between her hands. Tears stood out in her eyes as she fixed him with a fierce glare. ‘I don’t want to talk about that!’ she breathed. ‘I’ve never seen anyone as alive as you are—and, for the record, there is nothing at all selfless about what I’m doing.’
Rafiq searched her face, and from the expression of predatory satisfaction that slowly spread across his bronzed features she could only assume he was satisfied with what he saw reflected there.
By some miracle he managed to keep his passion on its leash, though the immense effort made him shake like a highly strung racehorse in the slips.
‘You know that I can offer you no future?’ He refused to allow himself to think of what might have been. ‘This is…’
‘Sex,’ Gabby inserted, stealing his earlier line. It was easier to say it herself than hear him do so.
Even so, the surgically stark pronouncement had instantly brought an emotional lump the size of a boulder to Gabby’s throat. She struggled to speak past the aching occlusion.
‘You think a woman cannot want uncomplicated sex?’ she asked, thinking Not this woman. But there was no need to tell him that.
Her response should have eased his mind, but he looked less than pleased. Maybe he saw through her lie?
‘All my relationships have been with women who wanted uncomplicated sex.’ And that was the way he had wanted it. But now he wanted more, and he had no right to ask for it. He had no future. If she wanted the here and now he would give it to her—he didn’t have the strength not to!
His admission had sent a jealous jab through Gabby.
‘Then I’m no different.’ Except for the style, elegance, sexual experience…The list of the things she didn’t possess which they no doubt had was depressingly long.
Rafiq found himself responding without even thinking. ‘You are different.’ And so was he—very different from the man who had once wanted low-maintenance mistresses.
‘I knew you’d realise eventually that I’m not royal material.’
He blinked, astonished at her interpretation of his words.
‘But does that matter when there are just the two of us?’
He made no response, and she thought, Hell, do I have to beg? The knowledge that she would if need be was deeply shocking.
‘You don’t wear a crown in bed, do you?’
‘I wear nothing in bed.’
The colour flew to her cheeks.
‘And as for the future—nobody can predict what the future holds, Rafiq.’
‘I have a better idea than most.’ His mobile lips curled upwards in a smile that as far as she could see held no trace of self-pity. But while Gabby could admire his ability to find humour in this the blackest of situations she could not smile with him.
‘I’m not interested in the future,’ she claimed, trying not to think about life without Rafiq stretching dismally into the distance. ‘I’m thinking about the present. You can give me the present, Rafiq.’
His eyes appeared illuminated from within as he began to speak in his own tongue. Gabby didn’t have the faintest clue what he was saying, but the husky erotic flow and the glow in his eyes mesmerised her into a state of breathless compliance.
When he kissed her, bending her body back in an arc with the force of his onslaught, she melted. And when he lifted her into his arms she moulded herself fluidly to him, revelling in the strength of his muscular, masculine hardness, crooning things that under normal circumstances she would have blushed even to think in his ear.
Rafiq was breathing hard as he laid her on the low divan. His rapid, laboured inhalations registered at some level in her hormone-mushed brain. She struggled to raise herself on her elbow to ask anxiously, ‘Are you all right? Should you be doing this?’ The total selfishness of her actions suddenly struck her like an unwelcome splash of ice water. ‘Your doctors—will they allow—?’
‘I do not seek anyone’s permission for my actions,’ he declared, with the hauteur that she had come to associate so closely with him. His manner softened as he conceded with a negligent shrug, ‘I might die…’ His eyes slid over her slim body before returning to her lips, still wet and cherry-red from his kisses. ‘But what a way to go!’
He responded to her gasp of horrified outrage with a white grin that was unapologetically devilish.
‘How can you joke—?’
He slid his hand under the hem of her shirt and skimmed his fingertips along the soft curve of her stomach and her protest terminated in a husky moan.
It felt like a long time since he had been this close to a woman. ‘Your skin is like silk,’ he said thickly. ‘You’re so soft and warm and…’ I’m as selfish as hell. He started to shake his head as a wave of self-disgust washed over him. He was worse than Hakim. ‘I can’t do this.’
Every muscle in Gabby body’s clenched in silent agony at the suggestion of rejection. ‘Why not? What’s wrong with me?’
His eyes snapped open. ‘Nothing,’ he declared, his fierce eyes sliding greedily over her supine form. ‘You’re perfect.’
‘So,’ she retorted thickly, ‘are you. Rafiq, I don’t know if this is a good idea or not, and I don’t care, but I’m perfectly willing to argue about it later. Not now—please, not now…’
The room was blotted out as he bent his head.
‘Thank God,’ Gabby breathed, as she lay shaking with feverish anticipation. Through the mesh of her lashes she saw a golden corona of sunlight around his dark head, and then he kissed her, and it wasn’t just the room that was blotted out but everything that wasn’t Rafiq.
Her entire world was filled with the sight, sound and smell of him, and desire, a deep primal need, roared in her veins like all-consuming fire.
Gabby, drowning in heavy, hot sensual languor, was not even conscious that he had unfastened her shirt until she felt the stir of air on her scalding hot skin as he peeled it aside.
One knee on the low divan and one foot braced on the floor, he arched over her, while his hands moved over the curves of her hips, drawing her up, moulding her body to his, letting her feel how much he wanted her as he kissed her as if he would drain the life from her.
She shivered a
s his lips slid wetly down her throat, his tongue tracing the line between her quivering breasts. He flicked the front fastening clasp of her bra and the fabric parted.
To cover the fact she was suddenly desperately self-conscious, scared stiff he’d find her wanting, she adopted a painfully awkward joky manner and laughed.
‘You seem to know your way around women’s underwear.’ And around women too, she thought struggling against the compulsion to cover herself.
Rafiq seemed to see through her bravado—possibly because her jaw was clamped so tight it felt in danger of fracturing and her eyes were squeezed shut.
He curved his long fingers around her jaw and tilted her face up to him. ‘Open your eyes.’
She did, and he smiled down at her, the tenderness in his dark face tinged by a fierce predatory hunger that made the liquid fire pooling low in her belly concentrate in a throbbing ache between her legs.
She wanted him so much that nothing in the world mattered.
She shifted restlessly, and caught her breath when, still holding her eyes, he cupped one small high breast in his hand, his thumb following the firm, gentle outer curve towards the rosily engorged nipple.
A cry was drawn from her throat as he ran his thumb back and forth across the ruched peak.
‘You should be proud of your body. It is beautiful—all of it,’ he growled thickly, and he lowered his head and took first one trembling nipple and then the other into his mouth. His tongue lashed the sensitised peaks, drawing a series of hoarse gasps from Gabby.
When he lifted his head there were dark lines of colour scoring the slashing angles of his high cheekbones.
‘You should take pleasure in your body and from it—I do. See how much pleasure…’
Before Gabby realised his intention he took her hand in his and fed it onto his body, then curved his hand across hers, holding it there.
Her mouth opened in a startled O as she felt the hard, pulsing swell of his confined arousal through his clothes.
He laughed at her expression and released her hand, bending his head to kiss her. ‘Do you believe now that I like what I see?’