The harshness of his rejection shocked through her. Her heart was thudding in uneven beats.
‘You may have stolen from the other men you have shared your body with their right to be in control of your pleasure, but you will not do so with me,’ he warned her. ‘Where I come from it is the man who leads and the woman who follows, not the other way around. It is the man who takes and the woman who gives.’ His hands were on her body, stroking far too slowly upwards towards her breasts, causing her breathing to become an uneven, jagged sound of repressed need.
Her breasts had become so engorged with arousal that the ache of her tightly stretched nipples had almost become a physical pain. When he touched one, cupping her breast and rubbing the pad of his thumb-tip over it, she cried out in raw need.
‘Your flesh is the colour of almond milk brushed with sunset and gold. It demands the homage of a man’s touch and it seeks to enslave him. But I will not be enslaved.’
Natalia could barely focus on his poetic words. She was on fire with the intensity of her own aching need. She reached up and placed her hands either side of his face, drawing him down towards her body, driven by her longing to feel his mouth against her flesh, and already ready to cry out with disappointment when he refused her.
And then to her disbelief he did something she had never in her wildest dreams imagined any man doing. He picked her up bodily in his arms and carried her over to the bed. She was just under six feet, and, whilst narrow-waisted, she was voluptuously curved and yet he was carrying her as though she were a size 00 and skin and bones. It was ridiculous to feel so thrilled and awed by such a basic display of masculinity, but yet she still was.
‘Now,’ he told her as he placed her on the bed and leaned over her. ‘Now I shall take from you what you are so willing to give me, even though my intellect tells me that it is a worthless offering worn thin by the hands of all the others who have possessed you before me.’
He was insulting her, but she was too aroused to check him and to retaliate that of the two of them she suspected his tally of past intimate partners would be far greater than hers. He was an adult male, after all, nearing forty, she suspected. A very sexual adult male, whereas she was a woman who had been celibate for what she now knew to be dangerously too long. Instead she arched up in obedience to the touch of the male hands shaping her, learning her, and then whilst she cried out and moved urgently against him he knew her with their touch, stroking open the secret places of her sex with the art a skilled perfumier might bring to drawing the most precious essence from deep within the heart of a rose. Somehow it was as though by his touch he were in some elemental way taking her apart and rebuilding her to fit his own desire, a sensual al-chemist using the dark power of his sexuality to transmute her flesh into his creature. And she knew she would not have had it any differently. Her senses revelled in every small nuance of her own arousal and response, the lips of her sex swelling and opening eagerly to give him the glistening sweetness of her pleasure. Through just the touch of his fingertip he drew from her the sweet agony with ecstasy she had tried to hold at bay, earlier.
‘No,’ he commanded thickly, ‘don’t close your eyes.’
Obediently she gave him the eye contact he was demanding, holding nothing back as she allowed him to look past her barriers and share with her all that she was experiencing. Never, ever had she known such a powerful sense of being possessed. It consumed her utterly, leaving only the shell of her previous sexual self.
Her gaze heavy with her retreating pleasure, she watched as he parted her legs and positioned himself between them.
From somewhere he had produced the necessary means of protection, the rustle of its packaging striking a distant note of reassurance, even whilst a part of her still mourned the accompanying loss of the sensory pleasure of skin-to-skin, flesh-to-flesh intimacy with him.
From his first thrust within her Natalia knew what she had not wanted to let herself imagine; that this man was so perfectly physically formed for her that every particle of her responded to that knowledge. Her body opened softly and moistly for him, still sensitised by the pleasure he had already given it, holding him and gripping him, glorying in the width and the strength of him, tiny quivers of pre-orgasmic pleasure rippling through her as she lifted her hips and wrapped her toned body around him, wanting to draw him as deep within herself as she could. She could hear the thunder of their mutual heartbeat, shaking both their bodies; she could taste the warmth of his breath, smell the aroused heat of his flesh as it mingled with her own scent. With each thrust he took her deeper and higher, and with each counter movement she urged him on until there was no more climbing to be done, only that final leap together into eternity itself.
Natalia drew a shuddering breath of shocked disbelief. From the bathroom she could hear the sound of the shower running. She slid from the bed, pulling on her underwear and her shift with clumsy fingers. What had she done? No one must ever know about this. No one! Her anger against herself clawed at the back of her throat. How could she have been so reckless and so foolish? And for what? To have sex with a stranger? How sleazy that sounded. How against everything she believed about her own respect for herself.
The shower was still running. She had to get out of here before he came back. She was dressed now and, with no reason to stay and any number not to do so, why was she delaying?
Go, go now, she urged herself, before he comes back and humiliates you even more. Even more? Could there be any deeper humiliation than those words he had said to her as the final surges of her pleasure had subsided.
‘Right,’ he had told her tersely, as he had withdrawn from her and got up off the bed. ‘You’ve had what you wanted, now go.’
What she had wanted! He had wanted it—her—too, hadn’t he? Of course he had. But she had initiated it, hadn’t she? And that was certainly something she had never done before.
She opened the door into the corridor, relieved to see that it was empty, and then hurried towards the lift that would take her down to her own room on the floor below. Thank God Maya had said he was leaving first thing in the morning. What had happened between them was a secret she would keep to herself for the rest of her life. For her own sake and for Niroli’s. And thank God, too, for that safety-ensuring rustle she could hear echoing inside her head. At least that meant that the only repercussions from her uncharacteristic behaviour would be her ones she would carry within her senses and her conscience in secret.
How could she not feel conscience-stricken? After all, she wasn’t just feeling guilty and suffused with shame because her behaviour w
ent against her own personal moral code. There was also her awareness of her additional responsibility to the role she was about to play and the fact that she was about to become the wife of Niroli’s future King. How could she have been so lost to all sense of what was right and proper and responsible as to have transgressed against the code she knew her agreement to marry Prince Kadir automatically enforced on her? As a royal bride, a royal wife, it would be of paramount importance that she was seen to be beyond any kind of moral reproach. She knew that King Giorgio would more than likely have had discreet enquiries made into her sexual past and had no doubt been reassured by her long-standing period of celibacy.
She must not dwell on what had happened. She must put it right out of her mind now. Either that or she must go to King Giorgio and tell him that she could not marry Prince Kadir. The surge of emotion that gripped her appalled her. So what if she was free? That did not mean that he…this Leon Perez would want her again. No, what she was thinking was crazy. So crazy that it scared her. And besides, she had her duty to think of, her already-given commitment. No, her mind was made up, her future decided, and it would not be a future filled with the sickness of longing for a man who had already made it plain just how he felt about her.
Like someone fearing drowning, Natalia clung to the knowledge that she was committed to marrying Prince Kadir. What she had done was dreadful, unforgivable, appalling—a form of madness. She must learn to accept and then forget it as some last-minute form of prenuptial panic that her senses had sprung on her. Something that was now over and done with and in the past, whilst she must look towards her already-planned future.
CHAPTER THREE
KADIR looked grimly round the now-empty bedroom. She had gone. Good. The music she had left playing was still on and the dimmed lights were far too evocative a reminder of what had happened, but nowhere near as compelling as the scent of her, which seemed to cling to his own flesh despite his shower. It was an unusual blend of sensual warmth spiced with something he couldn’t name, and it had insinuated itself into his awareness in a way that infuriated him.
What was he doing wasting time thinking about her? She was nothing to him. Nothing, just a woman who was a sexual opportunist. He wouldn’t have gone near her if it hadn’t been for the fact that a near deathbed promise wrung from him by his dying mother that he end his relationship with his mistress had resulted in a period of celibacy far longer than he was used to. That was the only reason for what had happened, the only explanation there could be.
After all, it hardly suited the new roles he was about to take on, of both King-in-waiting and newly married man, for him to be having sex with a stranger; a masseuse, for heaven’s sake. What had happened to his self-control? He normally found it easy to control his sexual appetite. She hadn’t even been his type—he liked petite women, not sensual Amazons with lush curves and demanding sexual appetites. Yet he had allowed his loins to rule his head.
Well, it certainly must not happen again—not with any woman.
Kadir had no intention of being one of those rulers who pretended to have a certain moral stance in public whilst freely indulging in the most salacious of habits in private. There had never been a time in his life when sensual promiscuity had appealed to him. There had been women, yes, especially during his years on the professional polo circuit, but those were long behind him now and the only women to share his bed these last years had been a modest succession of discreet mistresses, of which Zahra had been the latest.
He had known her for many years, but they had only become lovers after her husband’s death. From his point of view it had been a very convenient and practical arrangement. Kadir liked such arrangements; emotions weren’t something he wanted to bring into his relationships, and an over-emotional mistress was the last thing he wanted. Or had been. Surely now the last thing he wanted was an emotional new wife.