Once. Bitterness threatened to rip Faye in two. She wanted to scream and shout. Justice that he should become her first lover? How was it justice? Wasn’t it wonderful how he could seek to justify the most barbaric of bargains? His right to use her body in return for her brother’s freedom. Or, as he himself had put it even more bluntly, sex in return for money, trade mark of the oldest profession in the world. She was a tramp now, she had even enjoyed being a tramp for him. She should have lain there indifferent, unresponsive, silent, maybe even smothering the occasional yawn. And what had she done? Humiliating recollections of her own begging, moaning and clinging engulfed her and she shuddered. No harem odalisque could have massaged a guy’s ego more effectively than she just had!
Tariq caught her back to him so that she could no longer avoid his scrutiny. He smiled down at her with a charismatic warmth that made her feel as though he were crushing her tender heart between cruel, casual fingers and released her from his weight. ‘I’m far too heavy for you…’
‘As I dare say that’s not the only drawback of being a concubine,’ Faye stated in a tight little voice, face stiff as a frozen mask, ‘I didn’t like to complain.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
TARIQ sat up with a start. ‘That joke has worn out its welcome. What is this stupid, trashy talk of being a concubine?’
‘Forget it,’ Faye said stonily, wrenching violently at the bedspread, hauling it round her and sliding off the bed in a series of fierce and jerky movements.
‘Come back to bed,’ Tariq ground out in a lethal tone of command, lean, strong face etched with cool exasperation.
Faye looked at him, all tawny and gorgeous and sexy as he was against the white bed linen, and her fury with herself, with him, with the whole wretched situation rose like a red mist in front of her. It was past time she reminded him that she was not one of his adoring subjects. ‘Get stuffed!’
For the longest second of her life, Tariq simply stared at her in disbelief and then he was out of that bed faster than the jump jet her brother had once likened him to in his relations with her sex. ‘Such abuse would infuriate me but for the fact that you sound like a truculent teenager…’
Shot down in flames, she conceded with infuriated acceptance, her colour rising.
‘What is the matter with you?’
‘The matter with me…?’ she repeated on a rising note of volume.
Tariq stood there, naked and quite unconcerned by the fact, and focused censorious golden eyes on her. ‘Tell me what is wrong.’
Wrapped in the iridescent spread, Faye flung her head high. ‘Why should anything be wrong? Are you expecting me to fawn on you now like some harem slave thrilled to death by your attention?’
‘Hardly,’ Tariq said very drily, lean, strong features sardonic. ‘Harems have been against the law in Jumar since the first year of my mother’s marriage to my father.’
Confusion assailed her. ‘But you said—’
‘I was teasing you.’ Taking advantage of her bemusement at that admission, Tariq lifted her up into his arms and strode, not back to the bed with her, but straight out of the room again.
‘Where on earth are you taking me?’ Faye gasped.
With a vibrantly amused smile at her disconcertion, Tariq strolled into a splendid green marble bathroom and shouldered shut the door. Lowering her, he extracted her from the cloaking folds of the bedspread. Before she could fully react to that new development, he had caught her up again and settled her down into the foaming waters of the Jacuzzi bath.
The water enveloped her overheated skin in an initially cooling surge that dragged a yelp from her. Then, becoming hugely conscious that she was as bare as a newborn baby and in full view of fiercely appreciative dark deep-set eyes, she sank her quivering body as far below the rippling water surface as she could.
Tariq joined her with all the cool and grace of a male to whom such inhibitions were unknown. He leant over her in a fluid arch, draping her hair over the pillowed rim so that it would stay mostly dry. Momentarily engulfed by his sheer male magneticism that close again, her instinctively raised hands accidentally brushed down over his hard male flanks as he stretched, her cheeks scorched and she dropped her hands again as if she had been burnt.
‘Harems…’ Tariq recalled lazily, sinking down like a lithe, tawny predator into the water to survey her highly embarrassed face. ‘Although you were right in saying that I am above the law, there would be great unease in Jumar if I was to demonstrate any desire to veil my woman or lock her away from all male eyes. Harems now feature only in our history books in the chapter devoted to the emancipation of women.’
‘Really…?’ Even to Faye’s own ears, her voice sounded slightly strangled, but she had never been in a Jacuzzi in her life and was already nervously wondering what might happen next.
‘In the whole of our history, our women were never veiled. Berber women do not cover their faces. The harem was a foreign concept as well, imported into Jumar by my great-grandfather, a man whose appetite for your sex is a living legend.’
‘Oh…?’
‘But my own father simply knew no other way of life until he met my mother, Rasmira.’ Reclining opposite her in complete relaxation, Tariq looked reflective and his expressive mouth quirked. ‘She was the daughter of a Lebanese diplomat, highly educated and sophisticated. She would not agree to marry my father until the royal harem had been emptied and closed. It was a long and stormy courtship.’
Her interest fairly caught now, Faye said, ‘But he must have been madly in love with her—’
‘She was a special woman and my father chose wisely for she had a great impact on our culture. She opened up schools for girls. She drove a car. She flew a plane. It is thanks to her influence that our society became more liberal and just.’
Faye was even more intrigued. ‘So when did your mother pass away?’
His lean-boned features shadowed, his sculpted mouth tightening. ‘Ten years ago. She was bitten by a rare poisonous snake. She was given the wrong antidote and by the time the mistake was recogn
ised it was too late to save her. My father went half mad with grief.’
‘How awful…’ she whispered with a shaken look of sympathy for, when it came to the loss of a loved one, accidents and mistakes which might possibly have been avoided had to leave the most bitter taste of all.
‘Come here…you’re too far away,’ Tariq urged, matching the complaint to immediate action by leaning forward and reaching for her with both hands to tug her up and across into the circle of his arms.
Faye was totally taken aback to find herself first kneeling over him and then flipped over in a careful rearrangement that left her lying on top of him and feeling very exposed. With her back turned to him, her bottom pinned between his hard thighs and her head resting back against his shoulder, she said with jerky stress in an effort to keep the conversation flowing, ‘So…er…how many brothers and sisters do you have?’
‘Only Rafi…’
‘But…’ She bit her lip uncertainly, concentration already challenged by the intimate contact of their bodies and the seemingly casual sweep of Tariq’s hands sliding down over her smooth, taut ribcage, sending her treacherous heartbeat haywire. ‘Your father…all those concubines…?’
‘As a teenager, my father caught mumps. He believed he would never father a child. My arrival was greeted as being in the realms of a miracle and Rafi was conceived only with fertility assistance and my late stepmother’s iron-willed determination,’ Tariq admitted wryly.
‘That doesn’t…er…make Rafi less of a brother,’ Faye said breathlessly as those lean brown hands came to rest just below the heaving swell of her breasts. She fought to keep oxygen in her lungs, sensual tension winging through her slender, trembling length like a storm warning she could not suppress. ‘You should…er…think of your father when you look at him, not of your stepmother…whom I gather wasn’t an awfully nice person.’
Above her head, Tariq loosed a grim laugh. ‘Unhappily, Rafi is already labelled the length and the breadth of Jumar as being of a similar nature.’