Captive of Kadar

She tugged at her wrists, straining against her bonds, wanting to pull him to her, needing to be free, but her bonds held. And then she needed something else more, and he gave it to her, in one long, heart-stopping thrust that drove her head back against her pillow, and that made her forgot about her bound wrists because it was a different kind of freedom her body now craved.

For every thrust, every evocative slide of flesh against flesh took her closer to that place. Feeling his legs nestled between her thighs. Feeling the driving surge of his hips. Feeling his hot breath against her throat as he dropped to his elbows to surge into her.

There was nowhere to go but with him.

In the end, there was nowhere to go but everywhere.

Her release came gift-wrapped in a scream and with Kadar’s name etched into the ribbon that tied it into a bow, and from the depths of beyond she thought she heard someone crying out her name, and that was the greatest gift of all.

It took a long time for her body to pull the fragmented pieces of itself together, and to hum down from that amazing place.

But then, it was bound to take a while.

Because he was an amazing lover. He was a magician at the love arts. He could conjure an orgasm from thin air with one heated look and the press of a fingertip.

No doubt even less.

And she could understand why he’d want to make love with her in a way her hands couldn’t reach around to touch his back and remind him of his scars.

She could understand completely.

But she should have let him keep making love to her that way. She should never have insisted on him making love to her face to face.

Because she’d just lost a tiny seed of resentment against him, right there, and instead found a whole new reason to wish he might keep on making love to her.

And she could do with a reason to resent him, if she was to think about going home.

But how could she forget that this was Kadar, who’d already branded her a thief and was happy to tell others the same? She didn’t need to look for reasons to resent him. How could she forgive him that?

She dragged in air, her body slowly spinning, coming down from the dizzy heights he’d taken her to. She couldn’t. But still, right at this moment, feeling boneless and replete, the only resentment she felt was that her time with Kadar was already ticking down.

A fact that should not make her feel half as sorry as it did.

CHAPTER NINE

MORE THAN ONE THOUSAND kilometres from Istanbul’s busy streets, the town of Burguk could have been on another planet. The valley in which the town nestled ringed with mountains topped with snow while the landscape was lunar, rocks the colour of sand, carved into strange shapes by the weather.

The stone buildings of the town hunkered into the land as if the wind had carved them out too, as if they were part of the landscape. As if they belonged.

It was a harsh landscape, but with a kind of stark beauty that drew the eye. Snow had filled the streets the week before and promised to again before too long, but for now the melting snow was piled in dirty heaps on the roadsides and skinny trees pointed bare branches towards the sky, as if begging for warmth from the thin sun.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said as their car topped a rise that gave them a view over the entire valley and Kadar asked their driver to pull over.

The wind whipped and tugged at her hair and at the hem of his cashmere coat as they walked to the edge of the ridge overlooking the valley, set out before them like a shallow, wide basin edged in low hills and ringed with snow-topped mountains. The wind could be nothing but icy cold.

‘It’s not dissimilar to Cappadocia,’ he said, ‘just not on so grand a scale.’

‘My tour was supposed to spend two days there.’

‘I am sorry you were forced to miss some of the places your tour was supposed to cover.’

She wasn’t. Not now. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t come back some time, find a tour agency that was accredited and reputable and visit the places she’d missed. Besides, if her tour agency hadn’t folded, she wouldn’t be here now, in this man’s presence, discovering a part of Turkey that she’d never known existed.

Hell, she wouldn’t be here with this man, period. And to think she’d once resented his insistence that he watch over her.

How could she be sorry when her days were filled with adventure and her nights were filled with the discoveries of the flesh?

Something had changed last night, when he’d made love to her face to face. Something had subtly shifted in the balance between them.