‘I am going to take you in my arms and kiss you stupid,’ he informed her grittily. ‘I am going to strip the clothes from your body and enjoy your exquisite flesh. I will take you to my bed and avail myself of every sweet, delectable inch of you,’ he rasped with husky incision. ‘I am going to take you out and buy you a ring which will say that you belong to me. Then, and only then, I will take you with me to meet my son! You owe me this much, Melanie-of-the-sweet-face-and-lying-little-heart. You owe me for eight long years of bitterness, and seven years of never knowing my son!’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘YOU’RE crazy,’ she breathed as she strained to get away from him.
‘Maybe.’ He shrugged, but the look in her eyes told him she was captivated by the whole exciting agenda, and she was quivering against him like a trapped little bird, mesmerised and enthralled.
‘How long has it been for you, Melanie, since a man laid his hands on your body?’ he questioned darkly. ‘How long since you felt the burning thrust of a man’s pleasure zone driving you mindless with need?’
Her mouth was trembling, her eyes were bright, her skin pale with what might have been mistaken for fear if it hadn’t been for the seductive scent of her arousal sweetening the air. He knew that scent, had picked up on it at their first meeting, and it had never failed to be there every time they’d been near each other since. Eight years had not changed it; eight years had not diminished one small part of what it could do to him.
‘Sex…’ He leant close to whisper. ‘It is all around us. You can feel it. Stop pretending.’
‘If you don’t stop this I am going to start screaming!’
His response was to clasp his free hand round her nape, his eyes glittering his intention just before he lowered his dark head and took what he wanted: her mouth, her hot, dry, trembling mouth, that opened without pause to welcome him. Her fingers grappled with his shirt front; her breasts heaved against his chest. And as her beautiful thighs arched in their eagerness to make contact with his, it was Melanie who plunged into the kiss.
She groaned as his tongue caressed moist tissue. He laughed, low and throatily deep, pulsing with dark triumph that brought her nails clawing into his neck in punishment. He didn’t care. He liked those sharp nails digging into him. They let him know this could be as wild and unbridled as he wanted it to be. They made him feel alive, energised! With Serena it had been sex. With this woman it was—regeneration of every single cell he possessed!
The lift doors slid apart. Without breaking the kiss, he swung her up into his arms and carried her towards his apartment door. Opening it with the key was a struggle when he was not prepared to release her mouth, but he managed it, stepped inside, kicked the door shut behind him then, with a satisfied grunt, began walking down the hallway towards the only room that mattered right now.
His jacket slipped from her shoulders, trailed its way to the ground and was left where it fell as he walked with unerring steps into the bedroom and shut this door too. Which left only them and a giant-sized bed, standing proud with its cover of royal blue silk. No soft feathers this time, no deep eiderdown, just a firm flat mattress dressed in the perfect colour on which to lay his prize.
When he lowered her feet to the floor she was trembling so badly she could barely stand upright unaided. Her eyes were big, glazed, and the colour of the richest gold, her mouth full and red and begging for his.
‘Now tell me no.’ He laid the silken words down like a challenge.
She couldn’t answer. When all she did was reach out a hand to steady herself, he caught it and placed it onto his chest. Her eyes flickered down to absorb the fact that she was touching hair-roughened flesh. She had done it again. Without knowing it she’d unfastened his shirt during their walk down the hall!
‘Yes,’ he breathed in dark confirmation, and yanked his tie loose then tossed it aside. The last shirt button came undone at his throat and the shirt fell wide open to reveal a body built to carry the world if it was ever called upon to do so.
‘Oh, dear God,’ she managed to breathe in shaken realisation. By then his fingers were unfastening the buttons of her jacket to reveal a fitted top she had added to the ensemble that had not been there the last time.
Protection from him, or herself? The jacket slid from her shoulders; the top slipped over her head. As she lifted those dazed eyes back up to his he kissed her, fiercely, just in case she decided to try and stop this.
But Melanie was in no fit state to stop anything. She was lost in a gripping love affair with this man’s body and the power of his kiss. Every time she breathed she drowned in the scent of him; every time she moved she felt the impact of his strength. His mouth consumed her with a voracious hunger; the stroke of his hands collapsed her brain. She had no sense, no will, no desire to do anything but be here, feeling the raging torment of a need so potent it overwhelmed her. The eight years since she’d been with him like this didn’t seem to matter. Her senses remembered, desired and demanded she feed them with everything.
‘This is mad,’ she whimpered.
He didn’t answer. His hands were ridding her of her bra. The black lace drifted away from full rounded breasts with nipples already tightly distended. He touched; she groaned and simply fell against him, then fell again, into a pit packed full of sensation. Sleek bronzed skin electrified her fingers; the rasp of curling hair excited her breasts. The kiss was a seduction on its own hot merits, and as he slid down the zip of her skirt she wriggled her hips to aid its journey to the floor. The powerhouse thrust of his erection jumped as she writhed against him. His breathing was rough, his body clenched by the ferocity of his desire. But when he slid his hands beneath the final piece of black lace to tug her more firmly against him, she was the one to fall apart.
It was a complete loss of control. She cupped his face, kissed it all over, urgently, desperately touching and tasting, and forcing tight, thick sounds to rasp from his throat. He belonged to her. This man, this glorious dark-skinned giant, belonged to her. She’d believed it eight years ago and she believed it again now. Part of her might be yelling, Fool! but at this precise moment she didn’t care.
His hands spanned her hips and lifted her up against him; her arms wound around his neck. He began carrying her again, to lower her down onto the firm cool expanse of the large bed. Warm skin slid against the smoothness of silk; long limbs stretched sensually. Her eyes caught a glimpsing impression of ivory presented on a bed of blue, with her hair a golden halo as she watched him divest himself of the rest of his clothes. She watched in fascination as he drew in tight muscles in his abdomen then unclipped his trousers; her mouth ran dry as she watched him slide down the zip. Two seconds later he was naked, and her insides were curling on a mixture of excitement and stark, staring alarm until she remembered how it felt to absorb this man into her.
Then he was lowering his big frame down right next to her, reaching out to roll her against him. Skin met skin, stealing her breath away. His mouth claimed hers and his hands began to wreak magic, shaping her breasts, her stomach, the sensitive inner flesh of her thighs. She still wore silk stockings; deft fingers removed them. She still wore panties; they drifted away next. She moved and writhed to every clever stroke of his fingers. The kiss broke apart as she gulped greedily for breath. She was lost, gazing into eyes so black they drew her into them. Loving him, needing him.
‘Do we stop?’
Do we stop…? she repeated dizzily, and tried to focus for the first time. His cheekbones stood out on a face taut with passion. His mouth wore the swollen bloom of desire gone wild. His beautiful bronzed body lay half across her and a hand was gently circling her navel.
‘To continue means you accept my intentions.’
Intentions? Each time he spoke she had to work hard to grasp the words. ‘Do you want to stop?’ Long lashes blinked him a bemused look.
He touched his tongue to her lower lip. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Then why ask?’
He smile
d an odd smile, and used that tongue to circle the full pulsing beauty of her whole mouth. ‘So be it,’ he said.
She mimicked the stirring manoeuvre with an impulsiveness that for some unfathomable reason flung him over the edge. Passion roared like a lion, and the whole thing became a hot and seething whirl. He closed his mouth over one of her breasts, nipped her nipple with his teeth. As she drew in a sharp breath he sucked and played and tormented, with his mouth, with his hands. Then, with the glide of long fingers down the length of her, he descended into the cloud of gold at the apex of her thighs.
Pleasure became a greedy animal. Where he touched, she yearned for more. Her fingers dug and scraped and moulded rippling, trembling, slick male muscle. The whole thing grew like a mushroom, building pleasure on pleasure, and it made it all so much more exciting to know his breathing was ragged, that his heart was thumping madly and his body throbbing with a need as acute as her own.
I shouldn’t be doing this. One single brief glimpse at sanity attempted to spoil it. She released a small whimper of distress. Then he was invading the soft tissue of her femininity with the touch of a master, and the door slammed on sanity, along with her ability to control anything, because she was flying, or as near as, her fingers clutching at him as she gasped out his name and begged him never to stop.
The ragged sound of his breathing filled her ears; the heat of his breath moistened her face. He moved over her, hair-roughened thighs parting her smooth ones. A hand slid beneath her hips to bring them towards him and she felt the first probe of his entry, then felt another set of fingers coil into her hair. He lifted her head from the bed, bringing her eyes flying open. Black heat blazed a path of fire right through her—compulsive, compelling, it warned of what was to come. Then he made that single surging thrust at the same moment his mouth smothered her cry.
It was possession in its fullest meaning. He moved, and she responded with pleasure-wracked sounds he claimed for himself. Each thrust sent him deeper, each withdrawal set her quivering in pleasurable response, each slide of damp flesh became an exquisite torment that heightened everything. When he increased the rhythm she just hung on and let him conduct the whole concert, and her imagination helped him by offering up picture flashes of pale skin against dark skin, slender white limbs clinging to majestic bronze. Darkness and sunlight became one glorious entity. He drove her into its seething depths then snapped the last thread of her control with a kiss that claimed every gasp and quiver as they came together as lost-souls in a black cavern that held back everything but the pin-sharp song of ecstasy.
He was lying beside her with his chest still heaving out the last throes of his own fulfilment. A brown hand covered his eyes. Melanie didn’t move—couldn’t. When she eventually managed to open her eyes it was to the grey day pouring into the bedroom and the chill that was already settling on her flesh. The ivory and blue room was about as cold a place as anyone could wish to enjoy a soulless tumble upon a strange bed. The slack-limbed languid aftermath was being replaced with reality, the dawning sense of horror, the flaying sense of dismay. What had she done—what had they done?
She wanted to die here, she decided. She just wanted to close her eyes and die rather than face what had to come next.
The truth. The cold, dark hollowness of truth. She’d expected him to seek revenge in one form or other, but she had not expected anything like this.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered as her mouth began to wobble.
He stopped breathing. The hand left his face.
‘You did this on purpose. You meant to shatter me.’ On a flood of tears she scrambled from the bed.
‘In case you may not have noticed, I shattered too,’ he fed after her quietly.
‘That’s different.’ She began picking up her clothing. Every move, every grasp of her fingers shook with the agony of her distress. ‘You’re a man. You’re allowed to behave like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Animal!’ she choked, searching the floor for her panties and not seeing them anywhere. Her cheeks were hot, yet her flesh felt so cold it was almost numb. ‘Y-you look at me and see a western woman. Cheap to buy and easy to have!’ she threw at him in shaken bitterness. ‘You did this the last time. Y-you wanted and you took, then despised me for letting you!’
‘I despised you for going from my arms into the arms of your cousin.’
‘Step-cousin!’ she corrected. ‘And I am not going to discuss that with you!’
‘Why not?’ In a single lithe movement he snaked off the bed and came to stand over her. Naked, bold, so forcefully male, she almost sank beneath the swimming tide of her own response.
‘Because you had your chance to listen eight years ago and decided it wasn’t worth the effort.’ Clutching her clothes to her front, she began looking wildly around her. ‘Now hell will freeze over before I will defend myself to you—! Where’s the bathroom?’
‘Wait a minute—’
‘No!’ She swerved away from his reaching hands. ‘Don’t touch me—ever again!’ The breakdown into tears was gaining momentum and she needed to get out before it happened. ‘I adored you,’ she whispered painfully. ‘You know that I did. Y-you thought it a great hoot to relieve the besotted innocent of her virginity.’
‘Hoot?’ he repeated. His voice shook.
She made the mistake of looking at him.
He was laughing at her! It was the final humiliation. She turned and ran for the nearest door, found herself standing in a long wide hallway with a pale wood floor and walls painted pale blue. Where to now? Which door next? she asked herself frantically. Any door, she decided, and sped across the hall’s width to the nearest one, opened it, fell inside, then closed it behind her.
It was a blue and ivory bathroom. She could not believe her one bit of good luck. With fumbling fingers she pulled her skirt up over her hips and fastened the zip. No bra, she realised, no stockings nor panties. The stretchy black top covered her naked breasts. Her nipples stung as the fabric slid across them; sparks of awareness set her teeth on edge. She pulled on the jacket and tugged it ruthlessly across her front. Then she turned to leave, caught sight of herself in a mirror and was suddenly left suspended by what she saw. Her eyes were so dark she could see no hint of gold anywhere; her mouth was swollen and pulsing and red. Her hair needing brushing. She looked wild and wanton. Cheap and easy! One kiss and you fall on him, she accused that hateful face.
Now she had a son to go home to and face, knowing what she had been doing here with his father. Nausea leapt to her throat. She spun, wondering dizzily where her bag had gone. She decided it didn’t matter; she could walk home if necessary—anything so long as she could get out of here!
She tugged the door open to find him standing there waiting for her. He’d pulled on a robe, a dark blue thing that covered hardly anything. A blanket of awareness attacked each sensitised erogenous zone. ‘Get out of my way,’ she said through clenched teeth.
‘You are not going anywhere.’ A big shoulder made contact with the door frame. ‘We agreed terms.’
‘Terms?’ She blinked. Narrowed eyes held hers with a warning glint. In a vague part of her mind she remembered words being spoken. ‘Accept my intentions,’ and, ‘So be it.’ Then he’d licked her mouth and—
‘Oh, dear God,’ she breathed.
‘You remember?’ he mocked. ‘Well, that makes it easier.’
‘I want to go home.’ She was pale now; she could actually feel her skin turning cold and thin.
‘Later,’ he agreed, and a hand came out. ‘Don’t you want to put these on?’
He held her stockings, her bra and her panties, flimsy pieces of black silk and lace threaded through long, very male fingers that gave shamelessness a whole new edge.
But Rafiq hadn’t finished with her yet—not by a long way. ‘I have no objection to you choosing a ring without these on, you understand.’ His dark-toned voice was remorseless. ‘In fact I think it would be rather excitingly decadent to kn
ow that only you and I know you wear nothing beneath that smart suit. But the stockings, maybe, to protect your legs from the cold weather?’
‘Ring?’ she repeated. ‘You were serious about the ring?’
Big and dark, lean and hard, he wore the face of an Arabian warlord in no mood for compromise. ‘I was serious about everything,’ he confirmed with silken emphasis. ‘My possession of your body, the ring—my son. We will greet him as a single unit, marry with him at our side, and become a family.’
A family eight years too late. Some family, Melanie thought as the whole wretched debacle came tumbling down upon her head. Her legs went weak and she turned to lean against the inner edge of the door frame. Determined not to cry, she closed her eyes and covered her mouth with a hand.
Watching her lose the will to fight him had the odd effect of tearing at the seams of his heart. On a sigh that rid him of mockery, he tossed the scraps of silk aside. ‘I do not think you cheap and easy,’ he uttered grimly. ‘If anything I think it is I who is guilty of being both of those things,’ he admitted, with just enough bite to let his bitterness show. ‘But we will put the past in abeyance and speak for now. And now demands that we pool our resources, for our son’s sake.’
‘You haven’t even met him yet, and you’re planning his life for him.’
‘But I know him,’ he declared. ‘I know what it feels like to have only one parent. What it can do to his head to know that the other parent does not seem to care if he lives or he dies. I have been there before him.’ It was tense, tight statement of grim factuality. ‘He bleeds inside. He will bleed no longer.’
Hot-Blooded Husbands Bundle Page 42