Taken by the Sheikh

He was holding her as he had done earlier, his hands sliding beneath the capped sleeves of her top to grip the rounded curve of her shoulders. But this time he wasn’t just holding her, he was kissing her as well—possessing her mouth, forcing her lips to part for the demanding thrust of his tongue. She knew she ought to stop him, to push him away and insist that he listen to her, to demand an apology and a retraction of his accusation, but the need inside her was powering through her, obliterating reason and conscience, ruthlessly silencing every warning voice that would have spoken against it, filling her until there was nothing else—nothing else but his kiss and no one else but him.

What was happening to him? Somehow Sadie had taken the kiss he had begun as a savage indictment of her duplicity, allowing a safe escape for his own anger, and turned it into something different—something so sensually sweet and magical that his desire for her was drawing him under like a swimmer caught in a powerful undertow. He could neither resist it nor escape it. It called out to him with a siren song that lured him into waters so treacherous that he was already lost.

When he let go of her she reached for him and drew him closer, encircling him with her arms around his neck, tangling her tongue with his in a slow dance of rebirth from which they would emerge not as two separate people but as one. He slid his hand beneath her shirt, spanning her back and then letting his fingertips trace the narrow sharpness of her collarbone. She felt so fragile, as though he could crush her in his hands, and yet she was so strong—strong enough to overpower him with her sensuality. Her tongue-tip touched his mouth quickly and delicately, retreating as though shocked by its own boldness, and then returned to taste him again, almost compulsively. His hands slid to her breasts. Inside his head he could see himself touching them whilst she arched back in his hold, her throat tightly corded with desire, the heels of her palms pushing on his shoulders. Another minute and he would be pushing her top out of the way to taste her willing flesh…

Sadie quivered with emotion as Drax’s hands tightened on her breasts. It felt so good to have him holding her like this, to feel his touch burning away the loathsome memory of Jack Logan. She wanted to beg him to take away all the barriers between them, to hold her so that from now on when she closed her eyes and thought of today all she would be able to remember was him. She didn’t know how they had got to this level of intimacy so swiftly, and she didn’t want to know. All she wanted was to be burned clean and purified by the fierce heat of their mutual passion. Her ability to think logically was wholly suspended, overridden by the demands of a new command centre. All she wanted was for Drax to take her to bed…No, all she wanted was for Drax to simply take her, she amended dizzily. To take her completely and totally—here, now, at once. Eagerly she pressed herself into his hands and his body, lifting her own hands to hold his head while she kissed him over and over again, whispering to him how much she wanted him.

This was madness, Drax knew. But why should he not have her? She was offering herself to him, he wanted her, and with what he knew about her now she could never marry Vere. Why shouldn’t he have her? Why shouldn’t he take her as she was begging him to do?

There were a thousand reasons why he shouldn’t—but they weren’t enough to outweigh the one compelling, compulsive reason why he must. So he lifted his hands from her breasts, swung her up into his arms and carried her into his bedroom. Sadie wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed his jawline and his throat, then pushed aside the neck of his robe to kiss his collarbone, so that by the time he had reached the bed she was so high on his scent and taste that no power on earth could have matched the intensity of her desire for him.

Drax lowered her onto the bed, pausing only to shrug off his robe, and Sadie gazed up at him, marvelling at his male beauty as he arched over her. With her fingertip she traced the corded sinews of his arms, wondering at their male strength beneath the satin heat of his skin. His chest was dark with fine hair which arrowed downwards, causing her heart to leap high inside her chest and then beat unsteadily and too fast as she remembered the way she had felt that morning when she had watched him emerging from the pool. The water had run from his chest straight down that dark line, and she had followed its journey and seen, as she could see now, the base of the stiffening evidence of his desire for her. Sadie trembled as she leaned forward and kissed the base of his throat.

Drax arched against the caress of her mouth, not knowing why that kiss and this woman should affect him so immediately and so fiercely that he could feel his reaction right down to his toes.

As she kissed him he undressed her, feeling her slip eagerly and easily from her clothes and into his hands. Even now her mouth was still pressed against his skin. She had fantasised about this, Sadie acknowledged dizzily, and now somehow Drax was lying on his back and she was above him, instinctively straddling him. The reality was a hundred—no, a thousand times more erotic than her imaginings, and if she closed her eyes how much more intense would the sensation of Drax’s hands on her body be? But she couldn’t bear not to see him, not to watch him as he touched her and she touched him. And she wanted so much to touch him…so desperately had to touch him.

She leaned forward until her hair swung down to shield her face and stroke Drax’s body. But he could still see her expression. She touched him in a way that no woman had ever touched him before, eagerly and yet unknowingly, as though everything about what she was doing was new to her, as though she was following her instincts rather than her experience. When her fingers touched him and then curled around him he felt her hesitate. She looked at him as though seeking reassurance, and then, when he gave it, he could see her confidence grow—and with it her need. It was as though she hungered desperately for him—as though the touching filled her with intense delight and yet fed her need for more of him.

In her eyes was a look of wondering and amazed delight. It curved her mouth and somehow filled the air between them, so that he could almost taste it himself. Nothing he had done before had been like this. Or like her…Whatever magic spell she had cast it had pulled him under its influence, he admitted, as he caught hold of her free hand and lifted it to his mouth, kissing each finger in turn and then licking her soft palm. He watched as her nipples tightened and her belly quivered, and beneath her closed eyelids welled tears of intense arousal.

He reached for her, his hands on her waist, lifting her and steadying her, his fingers digging into her flesh when he felt her hesitation.

She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue, her voice husky and uncertain as she said, ‘I’m not…I don’t…Oughtn’t we to…?’

He was tight and hot and hard with a surging need that didn’t want to wait.

‘Oughtn’t we to what?’ he demanded.

‘You know…use something. For…for safe sex and…’ She was blushing now. She could feel the heat burning her skin. ‘And to make sure that I don’t…I mean…I’m sorr

y,’ she told him simply, ‘but I haven’t done this before.’

How could he feel such anger and yet still want her? He pushed her away and sat up in the large bed,

‘What on earth are you saying? We both know that is a lie,’ he said savagely. ‘No woman your age hasn’t “done this before”,’ he told her scornfully, mimicking the soft uncertainty of her voice. ‘I wouldn’t believe it even if I hadn’t seen you letting your lover maul you with my own eyes.’

‘Letting him…I wasn’t letting him do anything!’ Sadie said, filled with shocked disbelief that he should speak to her that way after the intimacy they had been sharing. ‘For your information—not that you’re going to believe me, and it’s obvious that you don’t want to believe me—’

Her voice had started to tremble poignantly, and she had to fight to control it. ‘He grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. And he isn’t my lover. He never has been. That’s why he did it. For revenge. He told me that.’

Even now, having heard the antagonism and rejection in Drax’s voice, seen it in his eyes, she still couldn’t fully take on board what was happening. She had heard the emotion and felt the tears threatening to break through into her voice as she’d tried to deal with Drax’s verbal attack. How could things have changed so quickly? Was this what men did when they took you to bed and then changed their minds about wanting you? Did they seize on some imagined shortcoming instead of being honest? He had left behind their shared intimacy, abandoning it as speedily as he had abandoned her; she was still struggling to release herself from it. Her mind and her emotions might be trying to deal with the hurt Drax had caused her, but her body was still aching for satisfaction. Her pain was still mercifully at the brutally numbing stage, when she knew that it was going to hurt but the shock of it was still too great for her to feel it.

Sadie couldn’t be what she was claiming to be. It just wasn’t possible. But there was something about the look in her eyes that shamed him. And his body was reminding him of how innocent and untutored her touch had been.

Innocent? he taunted himself. After the intimacy she had shown him? Intimacy, yes, but an intimacy full of desire and longing—the kind of intimacy that was devoid of skilled experience but which reached right to the heart of the man being shown it. And wasn’t that why he was feeling the way he was? Torn apart by a toxic mix of anger, rejection of what his heart was telling him, and the fear of having gone too far in a direction he couldn’t afford to take?

Why didn’t Drax say something? Anything to show that he was listening to her, really listening to her and absorbing what she was saying.

In desperation Sadie said fiercely, ‘Jack Logan is the kind of man who thinks that every women he meets ought to find him attractive. When I made it plain to him that I didn’t he started to see me as some kind of challenge.’

She had tugged free some of the bedding and was now holding it protectively in front of her, to hide herself from him. The shame inside him drove deeper. For some reason her need to cover herself touched something sharply painful inside him. He wanted to go to her, and hold her, take the look of bleak pain and hurt pride from her eyes. He wanted to take her back in his arms and tell her how precious and rare what they shared was.

He wanted to finish what they had started. But how could he now? Her reminder about the need for them to practise safe sex had brought him back to reality. If she wasn’t lying, if she was as untouched as she was claiming, then that meant…

That meant she was Vere’s.

The choice was his. He could take her back to bed, find out for himself if she was speaking the truth and then face the consequences. Or he could question her companion before he left the country. There was a sour, bitter taste in his mouth. His pride jerked against the thought of humbling himself enough to do such a thing. But he had to do it. He had to know. Not for his own sake, and not even for hers, but for Vere’s. The loyalty he owed his brother came before anything and anyone else.