‘Of course a woman like you will not be able to go very long without hungering for the feel of a man between her legs.’
She did not deserve so cruel and cutting an insult. ‘A woman like me?’ Natalia’s eyes flashed a stormy petrol-blue-green.
‘You know nothing about women like me. How could you? Zahra is your image of what a woman should be; everything about her is fake, from her dyed hair, through her faked submissiveness, to her no doubt faked orgasms,’ she threw at him passionately, and then stopped as something in his silence told her that she had gone too far.
‘Keep away from me,’ she protested apprehensively, backing away from him. ‘Don’t touch me.’
‘I am your husband. I have the right,’ Kadir reminded her silkily.
‘Keep away from me,’ Natalia repeated. ‘You…you stink of her scent,’ she told him wildly. ‘It makes me feel sick.’
‘With what? With jealousy?’
There it was again; that accusation that made her heart jump around so painfully inside her chest.
‘No! Why should I be jealous of a relationship I would not want, and will never want, even if you went down on bended knee and offered it to me? I am your wife and it is my duty to have sex with you.’
‘Your duty? You mean like it was your duty in Venice,’ he taunted her.
He was circling her like a hawk circling its prey, Natalia acknowledged. Even the unmoving air in the room felt heavy and weighted with the promise of implacable determination to make her back down. She had pushed him too far, Natalia admitted, dangerously too far, and for what reason? Because Zahra had got under her skin?
‘So let us see then—again—just how good you are at separating duty from desire, shall we?’ Kadir told her softly.
No woman had ever aroused him to such passion and fury, to such a fierce, consuming need to make her take back the lies with which she had ripped apart his pride. Right now the only thing that would salve his wounds would be her tears of regret and shame as she begged him to forgive her. And then begged him to possess her?
‘You will take back each and every one of those insults before tonight is over,’ he told her savagely as he reached for her.
CHAPTER NINE
NATALIA lay still on the wide bed, her heart thumping visibly heavily within her naked body. She would not demean herself by trying to resist. Physically his strength was the greater, and all that she wanted now was for him to leave her alone, even if to have that she had to allow him to inflict his hunger for punishment on her first.
Kadir could feel his heart hammering against his ribs. In the lamp light her skin was the colour of clear warm honey. Just seeing her was awakening an unsteady mental flash of jumbled images of the last time he had seen her this intimately; images he had had no idea until now that his brain had even recorded, never mind put to a sound track of his own arousal and spliced with the scent and the feel of her until the images sprang to unwanted three-dimensional life inside his head in a way that undermined his self-control and fed his hunger for her.
She had challenged his maleness in a way he could not leave unanswered. And that was the reason he was doing this. The only reason. There was no other. She herself meant nothing to him.
Kadir’s hands shaped her body, mercilessly seeking to expose its weaknesses, Natalia sensed. His touch was light and gentle and far too knowing. It skimmed her throat and then her breastbone, the curve of her waist, the shallow dip of her belly and then began again. She badly wanted to draw in a huge lungful of air, but she dared not let him see that need in case he took it as a sign of weakness. His fingertips stroked the delicate flesh just behind her ear. A shudder racked through her body. Because of the chilling night air coming in from the courtyard, Natalia assured herself, nothing more. And that heavy, expectant weight of sensual awareness mushrooming low within her body? It was nothing. Nothing at all. Less than nothing. She could quite easily pretend she couldn’t feel it. Quite easily. Couldn’t she? She could feel his mouth against her skin, the tip of his tongue sliding expertly against the sensitive ridges of her ears. Why did he have to do that to her? How did he know…? Her whole body shuddered as though it had been electrified as she tried to fight her own pleasure and failed. She put out her hands to push him away, but he caught hold of them, forcing them back onto the bed, his fingers locked around her wrists, leaving his mouth free to torment her agonised flesh as he trailed slow, fiery ribbons of unbearably erotic stimulation from one sensitive point to the next and then the next, each tug on those ribbons drawing the ache between her legs tighter.
When his tongue-tip flicked against the tight heart of her nipple she cried out like someone in mortal agony, begging him to stop.
‘Are you sure? Wouldn’t you rather I did this?’ he tormented her, brushing her nipple with his lips, releasing her wrists so that he could cup her breasts and then tug rhythmically on her flesh making her whole body respond to that rhythm.
Tears of disbelief and despair stung her eyes. How could she have let this happen so easily? She wasn’t a girl to be overawed by her own body’s needs. She had felt like this before.
Had she? Had she, or was the truth that she had never known anything like this, or anyone like this? No! She would not let herself think like that.
If it was the truth then she could not and wouldn’t admit it, and never wanted to know it again, Natalia told herself as she fought desperately to stave off her own defeat. Never!
He should be celebrating winning; he should be exulting in his victory over his ability to bind Natalia physically to his will, Kadir knew as he felt her losing her self-control and being forced to submit to her desire for him. Only he wasn’t celebrating, Kadir acknowledged; he could not do so because with every touch, every stroke, every kiss, every breath of his body, his senses were playing out too much of the reel of his own self-control. He was no longer controlling her sexual desire, instead it was controlling him. As if they were two finely opposed and equally balanced powers, all that was supporting the edifice he had built out of her desire and his own fury was the counter weight between them; if that broke he would be plunged into the abyss of his own desire for her. He must stop now, withdraw from the field, leaving her punishment for her offence incomplete even if that meant that he had to go without the full taste of her complete surrender on his lips as she begged him for his possession of her—and he withheld it. She must never know he felt like this, ached like this and needed like this. It broke all the rules of what he was, so carefully constructed to protect him. The rules he’d created as he’d grown up with a father who had rejected him and a mother who had seemed not to care, a first young love to whom he had given his trust and his infatuated adoration and who in turn had betrayed him; they had taught him not to be ruled by his emotions and not to trust those who tried to touch those emotions.
Now unexpectedly all that was in danger of being undermined by a woman who had the power to move him to such anger, to excite him to such desire, to wound him to such depths that all of him that was male clamoured within him to compel her to sacrifice herself to him in payment for that sin in every way that there was. But somehow things had rebounded on him.
He would stop now before it was too late. Now, after just one more touch, just one more kiss, just one more heartbeat imagining the shuddering, gut-wrenching pleasure of her hands on his body, and then…
Natalia clung to him, her nails biting into the smooth warm flesh of his upper arms, her head falling backwards as she arched up in sensual sacrifice.
The scent of her would live with him for ever, ever constant and yet ever changing with each breath she took, one minute cool and aloof, another hot and charged with her arousal. It filled his senses colouring even the taste of her when he folded back the swollen lips of her sex to draw from her the fierce pulse that lay within the moist heat of her body. Now of its own accord that hard bead of flesh pulsed and throbbed, her body eagerly opening to the stroke of his fingers. He could do it now, stop and walk away letting her know the price she must pay for what she had said. He could do it, but the feverish movements of her body were more than his own could bear. The ache he had thought controlled had become a raging, savage, primal male call he couldn’t silence or ignore.
Had it been like this before? If so she couldn’t remember it, Natalia thought feverishly as her clitoris quivered with orgasmic shudders of moist urgency and the muscles within her flexed helplessly against their own emptiness. She had never wanted like this before; must never, ever want like this again. It was killing her, destroying her, taking her down to a dark place she was afraid she might never come back from out of fear for what it was doing to her and what it might turn her into. She heard a raw moan. Her own?