A Whisper of Disgrace

She pushed the blanket of mussed hair away from her face and yawned. ‘But I might have been asleep,’ she objected.

He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘It’s nearly midday.’

‘And it’s Saturday. Or are you saying that it’s impossible for someone to be asleep if it’s nearly lunchtime?’

‘I knew you weren’t asleep because you’ve been wriggling that delicious bottom—’ he smiled as his arm snaked around her waist and he turned her around, so that his erection was pressing hard against her belly ‘—against me for the past half-hour. So it was a toss between going for a cold shower, or seeing if I might be able to get you to do something more interesting than sleeping.’

She leaned forward, brushing her mouth against his and feeling the instant shimmer of lust which flamed over her skin. ‘You can always get me to do that,’ she said, her voice sounding almost shy as he cupped her buttocks to pull her closer. But wasn’t it insane to feel shy, when in the few short weeks since their marriage Kulal had stripped her bare in just about every way there was?

He had taught her so much. He had shown her that sex was something to be enjoyed and savoured, not something furtive and shameful. In short, he had liberated her from a lot of her own hang-ups and all she was trying to do now was avoid getting too dependent on a man who was never intended to be anything other than a temporary fixture. ‘In fact, you can get me to do just about anything,’ she finished softly, and saw his eyes darken.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘And I’d be happy with pretty much anything you’d care to do to me right now.’

‘Oh, Kulal.’

‘Oh, Rosa,’ he murmured back, and lowered his head to kiss her. He thought that her lips felt cool and tasted of the peppermint tea she’d brought back to bed when they’d first woken. Her arms tightened around him and the desire he felt grew stronger—his heart beating out a crazy rhythm as he pushed one hard thigh against the fleshy softness of hers. He thought how perfect she was in his arms, how their lovemaking just got better and better and pretty much took his breath away every time. And he thought how their honeymoon had surprised him in all kinds of ways.

At first, they had barely left the apartment—with only the occasional trip to a theatre or a restaurant punctuating their lazy days and long nights of sexual exploration. For the first time in his life he had cleared his diary and turned off his phone—because he never took a holiday. Never. He told himself that it would be a useful experiment to see if his charitable foundation could function well without him, but deep down he knew that wasn’t the real reason. The truth was that he didn’t want to leave Rosa’s side. He couldn’t get enough of her; he couldn’t seem to keep his hands off her. And when they had ventured out, he had felt like a tourist in his adopted city. She’d made him do things he would normally never have dreamt of doing, like climbing as far as it was possible up the Eiffel Tower—with his bodyguards trailing behind them. And when he had remonstrated that he did not wish to join in with other sightseers, she had halted his objections simply by kissing him.

‘You’re never too cool to see the whole of Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower,’ she’d giggled against his lips. And later that week they had taken a riverboat down the Seine and she had looked up the name of all the bridges in her guidebook and recited them to him. They’d sat and drunk coffee incognito at the famous Café de Flore and made two similarly unrecorded trips to the theatre. In fact, they’d managed to avoid a single press photographer capturing any honeymoon images and to Kulal this had felt like a small triumph—especially when he’d realised that she actually hadn’t been interested in being photographed with him.

He’d even taken her shopping—something he’d never done before, although he’d picked up plenty of inflated bills in his time. But with Rosa it was different. She didn’t seem bothered about the cost of things and he enjoyed dressing his new wife with clothes which befitted a princess. Just as he enjoyed buying—and removing—the outrageous scraps of silken underwear which could barely contain her luscious curves.

He still couldn’t get his head around it. What was the appeal of lying next to her and just watching her—as if the sight of the slow inhalation and exhalation of her breath was the single most fascinating spectacle in the world? Usually he absented himself pretty early, because he didn’t like women hanging around him in the morning. He liked his space and his privacy. He liked the feeling of being alone—the way he’d always been.