In all his life, Rauf had never heard a female voice in the hamam and he could only be shocked. Some tourists might be willing to bathe in mixed-sex groups, but his own people were a great deal more inhibited and would not have dreamt of using even a private bath house at the same time as a member of the opposite sex. ‘What are you doing in here?’ he demanded, shaking out the towel and securing it round his lean hips in angry, instinctive circumspection.
Her legs uncertain supports, Lily sank down on the side of the warm central platform. ‘I needed to talk to you about what you said…and explain—’
‘And that could not have waited?’ Rauf fired back at her.
‘OK…once I lied to you but I want you to understand the situation as it was back then,’ Lily persisted, her hands closing together in a taut movement. ‘The first time I saw Brett with another woman, I was only fifteen. I told Dad about it but Dad made it quite clear that he didn’t want to know and he was very angry with me—’
Taken aback by that statement, Rauf strode forward and came down by her side. ‘With you? Your father was angry with you? But how could he be angry with you?’
‘Think of how things were in our family by then,’ Lily urged him heavily. ‘Dad liked and trusted Brett. He’d already signed over our home to Brett and Hilary. He had allowed Brett to take on more and more responsibility at Harris Travel—’
‘Your father was afraid to rock the boat,’ Rauf slotted in with instant grasp of why the older man had embraced such an attitude.
‘Dad believed that their marriage was their private business,’ Lily confided with a helpless sob catching at her throat as her overwrought emotions threatened to get the better of her. ‘Maybe to some degree he was right about that because Hilary was happy with Brett. She just worshipped him…she thought he was perfect but he was never faithful to her!’
Angry that he had not appreciated the complexity of the situation and that Lily should have been exposed to Gilman’s sleazy habits when she was still so young and vulnerable, Rauf closed a supportive arm round her slight frame. Lily had been caught up in a sordid family secret and taught that she had to keep it quiet. That her father could have laid such a burden on her outraged Rauf, but that she should have continued to blindly respect that embargo even at the age of twenty-one and lie even to him in her efforts to cover up for Brett continued to trouble him.
‘With us all still living in the same house and me feeling guilty at what I knew and what Hilary didn’t know, it was horrible… I hated Brett and once I got away to college I hardly ever went home because I couldn’t bear to be anywhere near him!’ Suddenly, Lily was sobbing incoherently against Rauf, her slim figure shaking with the force of her disturbed emotions.
On the brink of asking why, if that was true, he had, prior to ever meeting her family and without even realising who the man was at the time, himself once seen Brett Gilman leaving h
er London apartment building, Rauf almost groaned out loud at the analytical precision of his own keen brain. So there were a few minor inconsistencies still to be cleared up, but he could not doubt the genuine pain that his angry accusation had caused and it would be cruel to probe deeper.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lily exclaimed raggedly. ‘I’m sorry I lied to you—’
Rauf framed her distraught face with firm but gentle hands. ‘It doesn’t matter now…it’s not worth your tears. Nothing that bastard Gilman did is worth a single tear!’ Keen to distract her from the unhappy memories he had roused, Rauf lowered her down full length onto the heated navel stone and a slow smile curved his wide, sensual mouth as she looked up at him in surprise. ‘Now since you are here and the rest of the household is still asleep, you might as well stay and enjoy the hamam.’
Lily pressed her palms down onto the surface of the marble platform beneath her and finally realised why she had been getting so warm. ‘It’s like a sauna…’ she remarked with a soft laugh of appreciation. ‘In fact this entire place is just amazing!’
Rauf lay down several feet away.
‘Do the whole family bathe here together?’ Lily asked.
At the ignorance inherent in that question, Rauf drew in a startled breath. ‘Men and women don’t usually share the facilities. But this once, we’ll break with the rules and relax together.’
Good, clean, wholesome relaxation, Rauf told himself at the exact same time as he recalled how he and his friends as young boys had once fantasised about what might happen if a sexually adventurous woman were ever to enter the hamam when one of them was there alone. A ridiculous fantasy, for as a rule attendants were present and no such event could ever have taken place. But even so, at that point, his golden eyes flared and zeroed in on Lily’s prone length of their own seeming volition. Tiny beads of perspiration already mantled the satin stretch of delicate skin below her throat. Where his libido was concerned, even looking at Lily was a mistake and all the effects of the cold dip he had enjoyed minutes earlier evaporated fast.
With a stifled groan, Rauf flipped over onto his stomach and endeavoured to control an imagination that for all his maturity was outrageously keen to zoom to the forbidden heights of male fantasy. Served him bloody well right, he told himself as his aroused sex ached with the hunger she stirred in him with such ease. Lily had said he was always totally wrapped up in himself and he could now be tormented by the knowledge that, while telling himself he only wanted to take her thoughts off the distress he had caused, he had for an inexcusable instant considered an erotic bout of passion in the hamam as a cure. A cure for what or whom? Where was his respect?
Lily turned over and stretched out uncertain fingers to touch his. ‘You’re very quiet.’
‘I am only hot.’ Making that charged admission, Rauf barely lifted his proud dark head.
His own family would be ashamed of him. That he had treated an innocent young woman, who had once loved him, as though she were one of the many practised lovers who had slept with him to sate a desire as basic and fleeting as his own. Lily was different. Lily had always been different, yet he knew that even three years ago he had fought that truth with every fibre of his being.
Disturbed by his tension, Lily sat up and whispered worriedly, ‘You do believe what I told you about Brett?’
‘Yes,’ Rauf ground out, struggling to achieve mastery over a wild tide of imaginative excesses and concentrate on less dangerous and more important issues.
Shifting to within inches of him, Lily studied him and tingled. His sleek brown back was taut with male power and muscle and the smooth, powerful expanse glistened with moisture. A wicked pulse stirred at the heart of her and she pressed her thighs together in mortified acknowledgement of the fierce hold he had on both her heart and her body and rested back down again by his side. In the rushing atmospheric silence, only broken by the soft sound of running water, she snatched in a shaken breath for already her breasts felt languorous and heavy, the tender buds stiff and sensitive. He had taught her to want him and now the wanting came on its own and she could not control it.
‘Maybe I should go back to bed…’ Lily muttered shamefacedly.
Rauf glanced across at her, shimmering golden eyes encountering hers and reading a guilty longing there that smashed his own self-command. In the space of a moment, he reacted with all the fire of his passionate temperament. One hand closing into her tumbled hair, he brought his mouth crashing down on hers with a fierce, driving hunger that made her gasp in surprise and then in helpless pleasure.
‘I can’t resist you…I look at you and I burn,’ Rauf breathed thickly, his desire for her a fiery blaze in his possessive gaze.
Her heart hammered as lean brown fingers flicked loose the end of the towel she had tucked in and spread the two sides apart to bare her body for his appreciation. Quivering, Lily watched his heated gaze drop to the wanton sight of her straining nipples, and then he ran his tongue over the prominent buds at the same time as he stroked apart her thighs and touched her where she was so very desperate to be touched.