A Mediterranean Marriage

Tension would not allow Rauf to reach the same rewarding climax. He withdrew and stared down at her happy, innocent face and it was like having a knife plunged into him to the hilt. Releasing her from his weight, he rolled over. Lily scooted back into connection with him, dropped a kiss on the bunched muscles of one wide shoulder, drank in the sexy scent of his damp, hot skin with dizzy satisfaction and the heady sense of being a real woman. Rauf flipped back, curved an arm round her slight length and drew her close again.

‘I feel so…so happy,’ Lily finally admitted, still on a self-preoccupied high unlike any she had ever experienced. The world at just that moment encompassed Rauf and there it stopped. She was in his arms. She loved him. She had finally made it into bed with him and been rewarded beyond her wildest hopes.

‘I need a shower…’ Rauf breathed grittily.

And as Lily opened her eyes to watch Rauf stride towards the door on the far wall she noticed, really could not have helped noticing, that he was still…unsatisfied. The sheer extent of her own alarming ignorance of why that should be preoccupied her. Her sunny sense of achievement died there. Only then did she recall that in the aftermath of their lovemaking he had initially pulled away from her, had not spoken, had indeed only put his arms round her after she had swarmed all over him first.

A hollow, sick sensation in her tummy, Lily sat up and hugged her knees, anxious eyes dark with pain and mortification. Obviously, Rauf hadn’t got much of a thrill from taking her to bed and, even though he had still been aroused, he hadn’t wanted to continue either. That latter fact seemed the lowest blow of all. The shower seemed to exert more charisma than she did. Why, though? What had she done wrong?

CHAPTER FIVE

RAUF was having a very long cold shower.

Lily had been a virgin. Rauf was still transfixed by the shock value of that discovery. In fact, he was so stunned by that revelation and by the equally disturbing experience of having been proven wrong in his every convi

ction that it was an intellectual challenge just to surmount that and move on into more practical mode of what to do next. He would have to be honest with her. That was his first decision.

He then attempted to picture a scene in which he would tell Lily that he had once believed that she was sleeping with her sister’s husband. What was more, he had believed that of her right up until he had shared a bed with her himself. Rauf grimaced. No, he definitely didn’t want to run with the unvarnished truth. She would be horrified and offended beyond forgiveness. How could he distress her by admitting that he had credited the existence of such a very sleazy affair? That he had ditched her because of that same belief? That he had believed she had betrayed not only his trust, but also her own sister’s?

And all the time, Lily had been all that she herself claimed to be, everything she had seemed on first acquaintance and everything he had once accepted her as being. So, when she came off with things like, ‘Can’t we still be friends?’, she really, truly meant it. In the cleanest sense. That had not been a subtle sexual hint that this time around she was willing to spread herself on his bed.

At that point, Rauf groaned out loud, raked long brown fingers through his wet black hair. A dozen once strictly censored and cynically dissected and despoilt memories bombarded him in their restored and original form. Memories of Lily that summer before they broke up. In all of those recollections, Lily featured as being especially nice, especially soft-hearted and especially unmaterialistic.

For a start, she just adored little children and lavished phenomenal patience on even the irritating yappy ones. She was a pushover for every tramp or homeless person that came within twenty feet of her and she had cried when he’d told her about his dog dying when he was eleven. She had even worried that he was spending too much money on her and had kept on making up picnics so that they could eat alfresco. It was getting very cold in the shower but Rauf was looking back three years in time with an unfamiliar sense of appalled bewilderment at the colossal depth of his own misconceptions about Lily. Shivering, he finally grabbed a towel.

The more he examined his own behaviour, the worse it seemed. He got no brownie points on any score. At every juncture, he had assumed worst-case scenario and treated her accordingly. Therefore, candour really wasn’t a viable option. Off that particularly challenging hook, Rauf breathed again. She never had known the way his mind had worked and now he knew that he never, ever wanted her to find out. He was a ruthless, cynical guy with, it seemed, a mind as naturally given over to intrigue and seething suspicion of his woman as that Shakespeare character who had done away with his wife. He didn’t want any living soul knowing that and Lily, who scared easy, least of all!

Just one small inconsistency continued to nag at him. What had she been doing in that hotel with Brett Gilman? And why had she lied about being there? Furthermore, why had she stopped being so nervous around him? What miracle had brought about that refreshing change? Quit wondering stuff like that, Rauf’s new caution control centre warned him. He strode through the connecting door to the dressing-room and yanked out fresh clothes. Lily looks like an angel, she is an angel, stop doubting your good fortune at landing the one woman you do not deserve to have!

As Lily listened to Rauf’s shower running, she told herself that she would get up and get dressed in just a minute. Lying in his bed naked now felt shameless and all her intoxication with her own daring had shrivelled on the vine. Foolish love and even sillier hopes had led her astray and she hadn’t had to wait long to pay a price for her stupidity. Why didn’t she just face it? All Rauf had ever wanted from her was sex and, having finally got it, he had been disappointed.

But then, one way or another, hadn’t she always disappointed him? Her mind roamed back to when she had first met Rauf Kasabian…

The glorious flowers he had sent in apology for the fracas over the red wine being spilt had merely heralded Rauf’s reappearance at the bar later that same day. He’d wasted no time either in making his intentions clear. Throwing back his handsome dark head, he had treated her to that riveting smile of his and murmured, ‘I think we both know I’m only here to see you again.’

‘But you have a girlfriend—’

‘No…I don’t date women who scream at other women in public. I’ll wait until you finish your shift.’

Never had she met a male less aware of the possibility of rejection. Automatic refusal trembled on her lips but remained unspoken, for when she met his gorgeous dark golden eyes the thought of him walking away and never coming back just silenced her. When she had to serve the table beside Rauf’s, a drunk put his hand on her bottom and she brushed it away. When the drunk then asked her who the hell she thought she was, Rauf intervened.

‘She’s mine,’ Rauf drawled with perfect equanimity. ‘So hands off…’

He took her back to her apartment in a taxi to get changed and Annabel followed Lily into her tiny bedroom to snipe, ‘All right, so you’re not gay and you’ve snagged him. But that guy will expect more than a hug at the end of the night, so don’t say you weren’t warned!’

‘Meaning?’ Lily was apprehensive enough without that assurance.

‘He’s a real sexy stud. It’s written all over him. Enjoy yourself tonight because you won’t see him again,’ Annabel forecast. ‘You’ll say no. He won’t waste any more time on you…after all, why should he? Girls always come across for guys like him.’

He took her to dine in a wonderful Turkish restaurant and they talked for hours. Well, mostly he talked and she listened. He was working on the launch of a news magazine and he would be in London all summer. That first night he didn’t even try to kiss her but he booked her every free hour for the entire week ahead.

The second night he did kiss her but she coped because it was broad daylight and in a public place and she did not feel threatened in any way. She also discovered that she liked it when he kissed her. The third night, he asked her to come back to his hotel and spend the night with him, as if sharing her body with a male she had only known a couple of days was the most natural thing in the world.

‘I don’t do stuff like that,’ she told him.

‘Of course you do,’ Rauf traded. ‘You’re only trying to play that time-honoured female game…make him desperate before you say yes. But I was desperate within seconds of first laying eyes on you.’

‘I haven’t ever slept with anyone,’ Lily finally mumbled.