‘I want you to remember our wedding night for ever,’ he murmured silkily.
And much, much later, she knew she would never forget it. He began at her feet and she discovered that places that had never previously been erogenous zones had surprising possibilities, not one of which he overlooked in his devotion to detail. By the time that her heart was racing and every inch of her was damp and wildly sensitive to the skilled caress of his mouth and his hands, she knew her honeymoon was going be a sensual delight from start to finish because he seemed to take so much pleasure from her eager response.
Her entire skin surface was tingling, her straining nipples moist from his attention when he finally deigned to touch her where she was most desperate to be touched. He commented on the waxing that had left her bare and sensitised and she was so excited by that stage that she couldn’t even find her voice. Her excitement was growing and growing at an uncontrollable rate. He parted the plump swollen lips that were slick and moist and she gasped out loud, squirming and rocking against him in frustration for more. The hollow ache between her thighs had become unbearable.
‘Jasim…now!’ she pleaded.
He closed his hands to her ankles and tipped them back and took her willing body with all the urgency, strength and passion she yearned for. He plunged hard and deep into her tender core and waves of intense pleasure claimed her with his every thrust. It was gloriously passionate and primal and exactly what she needed. When contractions were rippling through her he groaned as her body tightened round him. She cried out when the explosive ecstasy of climax engulfed her and held him tight while he shuddered and reached his own shattering release in her arms. There were tears in her eyes in the aftermath and a new willingness to face her deepest emotions. She was still crazy about him, she acknowledged. Love had bitten her deep and there was no longer any hope of her escaping its bonds.
Elinor pressed her lips to a smooth brown shoulder, drinking in the warm familiar scent of his skin with intense appreciation and a sleepy smile of contentment. ‘Being married definitely has its compensations,’ she told him with satisfaction…
CHAPTER NINE
‘WERE you in love with Sophia?’ Elinor asked, tossing out the question in haste before she could lose her nerve.
Jasim dealt her a look of consternation, as well he might have done at that sudden intimate question. Previously they had been discussing his recent decision in a boundary dispute causing trouble between local Bedouin tribesmen.
Mortified by her own lack of diplomacy, Elinor went pink. ‘I’m just curious,’ she told him as lightly as she could manage and she was lying through her teeth. In truth she wanted to know every tiny detail of every relationship he had ever had with a woman, which was more than a little sad in her own estimation and likely to leave her disappointed since Jasim was not given to chatting freely about such things.
The early morning silence was broken only by the crunching footfall of their horses’ hooves in the sand. They often went riding at dawn when Elinor found the heat easiest to handle. The sun had risen and the peach and pink splendour of the skies was colouring the sand to shades of ochre and red. The arid landscape of stony plains broken by rocky outcrops and vast sloping dunes had become familiar to her, as had the surprising number of animals and the wide range of fauna that survived there.
‘Why do you want to know?’ Jasim enquired.
Primed to find significance in his every word and hesitation, Elinor said instantly, ‘So, obviously you did think you were in love with Sophia—’
‘No, I did not—’
‘But you were thinking of marrying her!’ Elinor exclaimed in disbelief.
‘I was not brought up to regard love as a necessary component of marriage,’ Jasim imparted grudgingly. ‘She was beautiful, elegant, well educated and spoke several languages. I saw those as important qualities.’
Elinor turned shocked eyes on him. ‘I can’t believe how cold-blooded you can be!’
‘I am not cold-blooded, but love can cause a lot of grief,’ Jasim declared in what she could see she was supposed to accept as the closing argument of the discussion. ‘A wise man chooses a wife with more than love on his mind.’
‘My goodness,’ Elinor sighed heavily. ‘You’d never have picked me in a million years!’
‘But I’m delighted with you now that I’ve got you, habibti.’ With those irreverent words, Jasim sent her a wicked slanting grin that made her heart hammer hard inside her. It was a grin that, like his laughter, she was becoming increasingly familiar with and it transformed his invariably serious demeanour. Three weeks of privacy at the villa had given them the chance to discover a lot about each other and had laid a firm foundation for a much deeper relationship than she had ever hoped to have with him.
‘Did your parents have an arranged marriage?’ she asked with a frown as she struggled to understand his outlook, which was so very different from hers.
His dark gaze narrowed, his whole face freezing, and then he swiftly looked away, murmuring in a taut response, ‘No, but my father’s first marriage to Murad’s mother was arranged and it was happy, as well as lasting almost thirty years.’
‘You know,’ Elinor commented in a tone of discovery, while wondering why on earth her question should have created so much tension, ‘you never ever mention your own mother.’
Jasim vented his breath in a pent-up hiss of impatience. ‘And you are only just noticing? It is considered bad taste to mention her. She ran off with another man when I was a baby and I don’t think my father has ever recovered from the disgrace of her desertion.’
Elinor blinked in shock and then shut her eyes in mute discomfiture. The unevenness of his usual quiet, steady drawl told her what an emotive subject she had stumbled on and also how very unaccustomed he was to having to make such an explanation. She said nothing just then. She could only imagine how horrific a scandal must have been caused by his mother’s behaviour in so old-fashioned a society. She had seen Jasim’s shame as he told her and compassion stirred in her that he should still feel so strongly about something that had happened so long ago, particularly when it was an event he could have had no influence over. But that new knowledge added another telling dimension to her awareness that he found it hard to trust women. At the same time her mind overflowed with questions that she was too tactful to ask him to answer.
‘I believe my father is considering another visit today,’ Jasim imparted. ‘His interest in Sami is heartening.’
‘Yes.’ Elinor, however, did not find it that easy to sit on the sidelines of those visits. The King and Jasim walked on verbal eggshells in each other’s presence and extreme politeness ruled until Sami did something silly and broke the ice. She had often wondered and never dared to ask why the older man and his second son treated each other like strangers.
‘I’ve been surprised by the amount of interest my father has taken in Sami,’ Jasim shared with the abruptness of a male striving to reward her with a confidence in gratitude for her not having pursued the more controversial topic of his mother.
‘I think your father is trying to get to know you better as well,’ Elinor admitted.
‘Nonsense…why would he do that?