He was so gorgeous. Black hair, golden skin, stunning eyes and a mouth as wicked as it was innately sensual. Suddenly it hurt to look at him and feel the instant leap of her own possessive pleasure in him. She was in torment, emotions surging tempestuously inside her. Love at first sight. She had never believed in it and yet it had happened to her. She had fallen head over heels in love with him the first time she’d seen him and she should have known it—she should have known it long ago!
She had been in agony for him at that college dinner when he hadn’t been sure of what cutlery to use, and at each course he had watched her covertly and she had made something of a show of picking up the right utensils purely for his benefit. And when she had found it quite impossible to shoot him down in flames until the bitter end, because she was so painfully conscious of that fierce pride of his, she should have known then that Prince Razul al Rashidai Harun had a hold on her far stronger than any infatuation.
She could have wept now for her own blind stupidity. Had she acknowledged her own feelings, she was bitterly convinced that she would have had the strength to get on that helicopter.
‘Bethany...’ he prompted, shifting lithely beneath her.
She quivered, abruptly registering the hard thrust of
his masculinity against her thigh. That shook her. She knew all about the mechanics of sex but she hadn’t believed that he could be aroused again this quickly.
‘And now you go silent.’ A caressing hand curved to her sensitive jawbone. He smiled at her—the sort of megawatt-brilliant smile which clenched her heart and sent every alarm bell jangling. ‘And you look so worried but also very sexy.’
He ran a fingertip lightly along the lower lip swollen by his passionate kisses, and she collided mesmerically with smouldering green eyes, felt her pulses leap. With his thumb he prised her lips apart and softly invaded the tender interior, and in shamed disbelief she felt a surge of heat quicken between her thighs.
‘Forget the world outside these walls,’ Razul instructed huskily. ‘This is our world and nothing can threaten you here.’
Nothing but him. The acknowledgement pierced her deep. ‘Razul... ’
He leant closer and allowed his tongue to penetrate just once between her parted lips in a darting, highly erotic assault which made her every skin-cell tingle. ‘I want you again.’
‘N-no!’ she gasped strickenly, snaking away from him as if she had been threatened with violence.
He tugged her back to him with easy strength. ‘Would I hurt you?’
A tide of scarlet washed over her cheeks as she connected with the concern in that clear, candid gaze. ‘Yes...’ she lied shakily.
‘There are many ways of making love—’
‘And I don’t want to know about them!’ Bethany asserted feverishly, on the edge of panic.
Razul angled a highly amused smile at her. ‘But you will. Come on...we will go for a swim—’
‘A swim?’ she echoed, in a daze.
‘If I am to restrain my hunger for you, aziz, the equivalent of a cold shower becomes a necessity.’
‘Oh...go ahead,’ she said with helpless enthusiasm.
He threw back his handsome dark head and laughed uproariously. Before she could ask him what he found so funny, he sprang out of bed and swept her up into his arms in one powerful motion. ‘We share everything from this night on,’ he assured her.
‘I do not need a cold shower.’
‘But you deserve one, aziz. Were it not for my recollection of the ecstasy you found in my arms, I would now feel most deficient as a lover.’
‘You’re a perfect ten. Don’t worry about it,’ Bethany bit out acidly. ‘Now will you please put me down? I am not one of those women who go all weak at the knees at the superiority of male muscle-power!’
He lifted her higher and ravished her tender mouth in a hot, hungry surge that left her dizzy and wildly disorientated. ‘Now that does make you go weak at the knees,’ he told her without skipping a beat, lashings of raw amusement in the wolfish grin curving his firm mouth. ‘A perfect ten?’ he mused. ‘But who do you compare me with? Did you fantasise about me as well?’
‘I have never had a—’
‘What a little liar you are...stubborn, aggressive, sharp-tongued... It is as well I did not marry you in the hope of honeyed sweetness and flattery.’
‘You married me to get me into bed!’ Bethany spat back at him.
‘But I didn’t have to.’ He smoothly disconcerted her with that cool rejoinder. ‘I could have taken you to my bed in England but I chose not to put your powers of self-restraint to the test... You should be grateful—’
‘Grateful?’ she gasped, with clenched fists.
He gave her a sardonic glance. ‘You would have failed the test. I could have taken you the first time I kissed you.’
Enraged, Bethany took a swing at him and a split second later her overheated body was plunged into cold water. Spluttering and splashing and gasping in shock, she recoiled against the tiled wall of the pool for support and clawed her dripping hair out of her eyes.
‘I will not allow you to strike me. While you are my wife you will treat me with respect
.’
In the moonlight he was a dark golden silhouette, standing barely waist-deep in the lapping water. ‘While you are my wife’, she registered furiously. Always the time limit—not that that mattered a damn to her, for loving him did not close her eyes to the impossibility of a more lasting relationship between them. On the other hand, she bitterly resented his arrogance in believing that he could take what suited him from the institution of marriage and deviously cast aside what did not.
‘Not only do I not believe in marriage, I do not feel like your wife and I do not want to be your wife,’ she spelt out hotly. ‘I do not feel honoured...I feel used. Those ceremonies were a mockery and you needn’t think that putting a ring on my finger blinds me to that fact.’
Razul moved towards her. ‘So you feel used,’ he grated rawly. ‘But then what can tenderness mean to you? Only something more to despoil as you seek to despoil everything we share, with your narrow, closed little mind and your selfish, smug sense of superiority!’
Her whole body had turned icy cold and the angry colour had drained from her cheeks. ‘I do not feel superior,’ she whispered strickenly, devastated by the dark fury that she had unleashed.
‘But you give me your body and nothing else. It seems I am not worthy of anything more. If our marriage truly means nothing to you, I was wrong to make you put that ring on again.’ He caught her to him, splayed her fingers and wrenched off the slender band. He sent it spinning into the water in a gesture of vehement repudiation. ‘It will lie there for eternity, for you would have to come to me on your knees for me to allow you to wear it again!’
It was crazy, but the minute he took that ring from her she wanted it back with a passion as strong as his repudiation. Narrow-minded, selfish, smug, she recited inwardly, her throat thickening with tears. Was that really how he saw her? That hurt; that really hurt.
‘But I need no ring on your finger to licence me to enjoy what is already mine.’ Before she could even guess his intention, Razul planted firm hands on her hips and lifted her up out of the water onto the edge of the pool.