The Arabian Mistress

‘Everything’s good,’ she mumbled, jolted by her own instant response, shaken by the ever-ready heat he could ignite at will, wondering for a split second if she was insatiable, wondering anxiously if it was quite normal to want any male as much as she now seemed to want him. Constantly.

‘Then I’m happy too…’ He let his fingers encircle the swollen prominence of her nipples, stroking, tugging, teasing the tender tips.

She jackknifed back against him, a long sobbing breath escaping her throat, and just closed her eyes tight, letting the pleasure cascade through her like a drug she craved, for long, endless moments totally lost within its grasp.

‘Although “happy” is something of an understatement,’ Tariq husked above her head, the dark, smouldering rasp of his voice sending tiny shivers down her taut spine. ‘You are very passionate.’

She was not capable of speech. There was no yesterday, no today, no tomorrow, she told herself feverishly, no reason why she had to think if she didn’t want to, for to think might be to let go of the happiness singing through her veins like a heady intoxicant.

‘Indeed you might have been fashioned at birth solely for me.’ A faint bitter edge harshened his tone and then he buried his mouth with sensual force in the extended length of her throat. As he hit on a tiny pulse spot with devastating accuracy, she moaned in response.

No longer did she have to tell herself not to think as the slow burn of desire flooded her with mindless heat. He was moving against her, letting her feel his hard, potent arousal, and she lay back against him, quivering, waiting, anticipating, every skin cell alight. He rearranged her with a care that was as tender as it was teasing. He pushed up her knees, drew her back again, sought with deft fingers the damp, swollen centre of her and played there until tortured moans sobbed in her throat.

‘Tariq—’

‘Wait—’

‘I don’t want to wait…I can’t!’ But she knew why there was the need for that slight hiatus, knew he was ensuring that their lovemaking would not result in a pregnancy.

‘Yes, you can…’ Tariq pulled her back to him and entered her all too willing body with surging force.

The sensation was so delicious, she arched her back in helpless pleasure. But one thing he had already taught her: there was no end to the pleasure, no boundaries either. He caught her chin and tugged her face around so that he could possess her mouth in a hot, demanding kiss that branded her. As he took her with agonisingly slow, deep thrusts, she lost herself in the rising, burning excitement of her own hunger. It was as if he were all around her for she felt totally possessed by him and she moaned his name, driven by every invasive shift of his lean, hard body to a greater height. And then the roaring in her ears came like a great wave and she felt him shuddering against her in the grip of a hungry satisfaction as powerful and uncontrollable as her own…and that was even more of a joy to her than the aching, drowning flood of her own release.

In the aftermath, Tariq rolled her back against the pillows and stared down at her. He brushed the wildly tumbled pale blonde hair from her damp brow. She noticed his hand was unsteady. Hawkish golden eyes gazed down into hers, stubborn dark-stubbled jawline clenching hard. ‘Surely you are sore now…I didn’t mean to take you again. Your pleasure should not be less than mine.’

Faye reddened to the roots of her hair, turned her head away, for there was no denying that after a night of constant lovemaking she was tender, but she could no more resist him than she could have resisted water after a week in the hot sun. ‘It wasn’t,’ she mumbled.

‘I don’t believe you.’ Long brown fingers drew her discomfited face back to his keen scrutiny. ‘No woman has ever wanted me as much as you. If I keep you here, I don’t believe you’ll be fit to rise from this bed and walk by tomorrow, aziz.’

With that mortifying and earthy assurance, Tariq released her and sprang out of bed.

‘So you’re not keeping me here?’ Faye prompted before she could bite back that startled question.

‘I think it would be best if you returned to the Muraaba.’

Slight effort at diplomacy in implying she had a choice when she so evidently did not have a choice if he did not want her around. After the night they had shared, she reeled in shock from that rejection.

‘In any case, I’ll be engaged in talks for the next few days and too busy to give you much attention,’ Tariq completed.

Attention? Like a child or a pet might hope to receive? That particular word seemed to reduce her to a very low level of importance. Super-sensitivity to his every spoken word had now afflicted Faye. The harem might have been abolished but she could not help thinking of his father who had sent for a concubine whenever he’d felt like one. After only one night, she was to be dispatched back to the palace.

‘I hope you won’t mind travelling back by car, rather than by air. It will be a lengthy journey.’

‘And why should you spare a helicopter for little insignificant me?’ Faye flipped over onto her tummy and pushed her hot, mortified face into the pillow, cringing at how immature that response had made her sound.

‘It is not like that,’ Tariq responded with grave quietness. ‘I do not believe in unnecessary flights being made merely to save time.’

No woman has ever wanted me as much as you. She shuddered with shame that he should have recognised that and confronted her with that reality. How attractive did men really find the women who found them irresistible? A too willing woman would not challenge or excite the essential hunter in any male. She had just spent the whole night being overwhelmed by how fantastic he was in bed.

‘Faye…you’re taking this too personally.’

‘Maybe you’d like to tell me how not to take it personally,’ she said jaggedly.

‘Sex is a seductive force. I walked in paradise with you last night,’ Tariq murmured coolly, ‘but I have other responsibilities to meet.’

That cool reminder bit like a whip into her unprotected skin. But then she already felt that during the long, passionate hours of the night she had lost an entire layer of protective flesh and somehow turned into someone else, for she no longer knew the woman she had become. He was sending her away and she was arguing about it. She could not believe that she was letting herself down to such an extent. And Tariq had a wonderfully evocative turn of phrase and tone. He had made walking in paradise sound like a giant, hugely wicked taste of the forbidden, to be treated with extreme caution, possibly even rationed.

‘If you stay here, you would be too great a distraction. I could turn a coffee break into an excuse for a private orgy,’ he murmured darkly, undertones churning up the atmosphere around him.

A distraction? Her image of herself had already sunk lower than the soles of her own feet. Numbly, she lifted

her head and focused on his lithe, powerful physique in profile. The hard, clean planes of his high cheekbones were fiercely taut, the set of his strong jawline decidedly aggressive. He was pulling on riding breeches. The long brown sweep of his once satin-smooth back bore scratch marks from her nails. He had a bruise from her teeth on one muscular shoulder—maybe more than one.

Tariq looked as if he had had a run-in with a sex-starved woman, possibly even a whole bunch of them. But even unshaven and with his hair tousled by the all too frequent clutch of her greedy fingers, he was staggeringly beautiful to her stricken gaze. Her heart now felt as if it were in the palms of his lean hands, already crushed, soon to be dropped and maltreated in the worst of ways. And as she watched him dress with that easy, silent grace that was so much a part of him she could no longer pretend to herself, no longer hide from the truth of her own feelings or, even worse, her own wounding insight into his mood.

‘You wish you had never set eyes on me again…’ Faye said painfully.

‘Do not presume to know what is in my mind,’ Tariq urged with chilling immediacy, glancing up and transfixing her with brilliant golden eyes. ‘Once you taught me regret but you will never do so again. Once you had the power to make me ignore common sense. No more.’

As a message for the immediate future it was not encouraging.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SILENCE and mute misery ruled the breakfast at which Faye shredded croissants and ate nothing for she had no appetite for food. The servants kept on bringing ever more tempting dishes to the table but she still could not eat. Soon she would be leaving the tent palace.

It was only two hours since she had woken up in Tariq’s arms. Two hours since she had made the mistake of believing that she was more necessary to Tariq than she was. His seemingly insatiable hunger for her had somehow made her feel secure. But she had deceived herself into thinking what she wanted to think, she conceded strickenly. Tariq had set ruthless limits to their relationship and there was no longer any danger of her weaving fantasies. She was the light entertainment in the bedroom, nothing more.