‘You drive me wild,’ Tariq said raggedly while she struggled to catch her breath.
But even breathing was a challenge with his expert hands on her and his mouth tugging at her tender nipples. The excitement built so fast, she was lost in it, moving against him, parting her thighs with a sighing cry at his first touch. The wanting had never been so strong before, had never absorbed her so utterly. Her heart was racing, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t wait, couldn’t focus on anything but…
As Tariq sank into her in one forceful thrust, she rose against him with a driven moan of delight and what followed was the wildest pleasure she had ever known. Her heart pounding, she gave herself up to the raw excitement, wanting, needing, burning with greedy impatience and then surging so high she thought she might touch the sky in the grip of sweet ecstasy.
She surfaced back to the real world feeling glorious. Tariq was hugging her so tight, she didn’t know where she began or he ended and that felt good. Even better was the way he was looking at her with tawny eyes that had a slightly dazed quality. She smiled.
‘You are very special,’ he murmured intently.
‘So are you—’
‘I might never let you go free…’
She smiled like the Sphinx, all woman and smug.
‘Where do you think I am?’ Tariq purred on the phone.
There was something so very sexy about Tariq on the phone, Faye reflected in a state of blissful abstraction, something so very sexy about Tariq even when he was saying the most ordinary things. He had given her the portable phone so that they could talk during the day when he had to be away from her and arrange meetings like secret lovers. It never left her side. It was her substitute for him, her instant hotline to reassurance that she was the most desirable woman in Jumar. Only two weeks ago, she had been calling him a frog, she recalled sunnily, but her frog had turned back into a prince.
‘On the way home…?’ she prompted eagerly.
‘No.’
‘How long are you going to be?’ She sighed, face having fallen a mile.
‘Where are you?’
‘Outside…you’ll have to look for me.’
‘Could you doubt it?’ he murmured in a husky tone of promise that sent a quiver of response down her spine.
Faye set down the phone, her attention returning to the children. It was just about nap time, she decided. Having enjoyed a long and leisurely picnic lunch, they were sitting on the carpets spread beneath the shade of the trees. Hayat clutched at Faye’s arm to steady herself and planted a big soppy kiss on her cheek. Basma was already on her lap along with Rafi. When Tariq wasn’t around, Faye was always with the children. She knew he spent time with them early mornings and evenings and, being painfully conscious that Basma, Hayat and Rafi were really none of her business, she never, ever intruded at those hours in the nursery section of the palace.
Indeed, she had wondered once or twice if Tariq had any idea just how many hours a day she passed in their company, but as he had not chosen to open the subject she was wary of doing so herself. She could not forget the way he had cut her off the couple of times she had tried talking about Rafi, but she was sure that Rafi must have mentioned her to his big brother on at least a few occasions.
In any case, when she and Tariq were together, nothing else in the world existed. They were locked into an affair of passionate, single-minded intensity and she just felt plain and simple happy. True, if she let her mind stray in the direction of the dark cloud of future foreboding threatening in the back corner of her mind, she got scared because she was more in love with Tariq than she had ever been. But all the rest of the time, she was content to let tomorrow take care of itself.
In the dreaming mood she was in, it was a shock when the two servants clearing up the picnic debris suddenly dropped down on their knees. She glanced up and was astonished to see Tariq poised about ten feet away. He had said he wasn’t on his way home but he had been teasing her, she realised. What he had not said was that he had already arrived.
As he took in the tableau she made with the children gathered round her, Tariq could not conceal his astonishment. He dismissed the servants from his presence with a snap of his fingers. ‘Exactly when did you all become this friendly?’
Without the smallest warning, Rafi leapt off her lap and shouted something in Arabic that made Tariq freeze.
‘Stop it, Rafi,’ Faye urged in dismay.
Rafi flung himself back at her sobbing as if his heart were breaking.
‘It would appear that you have made yourself quite indispensable,’ Tariq pronounced with sardonic bite, watching the twins burst into tears in concert and clutch at Faye for security. ‘Accident or design?’
And with that cutting conclusion, Tariq swung on his heel and strode off.
‘What did you say, Rafi?’ Faye whispered shakily.
‘You’re my secret mama and if he takes you away, I’m going with you!’ Rafi sobbed into her shoulder, turning her face to the colour of milk.
CHAPTER NINE
FAYE found Tariq in one of the ground floor reception rooms.
‘Tariq…?’ she whispered apprehensively, stilling just inside the doorway.
Tariq swung round, lean, powerful face expressionless. ‘Did you contrive to soothe the mass hysteria my appearance provoked?’
Faye flushed miserably. ‘They’re all down for a nap now. Tariq…I never dreamt that Rafi was keeping the time I’ve been spending with him and the twins a secret from you and certainly not that he’s been thinking of me as his new mother.’
‘I can’t say I enjoyed being treated like the big bad wolf,’ Tariq murmured wryly. ‘Even by Basma and Hayat who usually greet me with smiles and giggles.’
‘And so they would have done this afternoon if they hadn’t been overtired and in the mood to be easily upset,’ she assured him. ‘This is all my fault.’
‘That is not how I would describe the situation.’ Tariq surprised her with a rueful laugh. ‘I had naturally noticed the pronounced improvement in my little brother’s behaviour but I had assumed it to be the result of the removal of his previous carers—’
‘No, that just left him more unhappy and confused and I think that may have been why he turned to me—’
Tariq sighed. ‘And then suddenly Rafi got happy and stopped his screaming tantrums and constant whinging practically overnight. To be frank, I was so deeply relieved by that development, I did not question the miracle. His behaviour had been a source of very real concern to me but I was hampered by the fact that he was brought up to fear me—’
‘And you were always having to tell him off too…I know and I understand. But now I can see that I’ve been horribly thoughtless and selfish,’ Faye muttered unevenly, her face taut with guilty regret. ‘I’ve let the children become too attached to me and that wasn’t fair to them.’
‘It’s quite amazing how well you have all bonded behind my back.’ His expressive mouth quirked.
‘If I’ve damaged your relationship with Rafi, I’m sorry.’
‘No. Rafi has been much more relaxed with me since he got his hooks into his secret mama—’
‘He’s a very affectionate child.’
‘And you’re a very affectionate woman. It is just most ironic that I should have been the last to find out that you were so fond of children.’
Accident or design? he had demanded out in the gardens. But what design could she have had in befriending the children? And then her colour climbed. Did he suspect that she was angling to be considered as a wife yet again? By weaseling her sneaky way into the children’s hearts and making it hard for him to end their relationship? She stiffened at that humiliating suspicion.
‘Even more ironic that I would never have dreamt of wheeling out Rafi as he was a few weeks ago and expecting any woman to warm to him,’ he commented, reaching for her curled tight hands and carefully smoothing her fingers straight to link them with his. ‘In fact, most women would have run a mile at t
he threat of Rafi as he was then but you have great heart—’
‘But not always a lot of sense…I didn’t take a long-term view.’
‘I don’t believe you have ever taken a long-term view of anything.’ Tariq stood there staring down at their linked hands as if they had become a source of deep and absorbing fascination to him. ‘I, on the other hand, tend to be very decisive in most fields but most fortunately not when it came to divorcing you…’
‘Divorcing me? When…when did you get around to it?’ she muttered tightly.