Khaled knew he wasn’t even going to get his jeans unbuttoned at this rate. He was going to disgrace himself like a fifteen-year-old boy with his first girl.
He had to slow this down. He wanted to take his time.
But he had to have her.
But not in the damn kitchen. Gigi deserved a bed.
He carried her up two flights of stairs and into his room. Khaled realised his mistake, but it was too late. Gigi was looking around his bedroom with a rapt look on her face.
‘Holy Mary, it’s the Arabian Nights.’
He’d forgotten the impression it made.
The keyhole doorway...the vast bed low to the ground...the gallery above where he kept his books. It had been copied from an etching of an old Muscovite terem. He supposed to a non-Russian it did look like an eastern fantasy.
For him it was an excellent use of space and the existing architecture.
He couldn’t say she was the first woman he’d brought here, but she was one of only a few. This was his private realm, and he guarded that privacy, but his usual sense of needing to distract and create distance didn’t come.
Gigi could sense a little tension in him as he lowered her feet to the floor. Her hair swung around her shoulders. He framed her face and kissed her. It was a deep, soul-stirring, come-and-let-me-show-you-things kind of kiss—the sort Gigi imagined she wasn’t ever going to get enough of.
To her surprise he turned her in his arms and said her name against her throat—a rough whisper that shimmered down her spine as his hands skimmed over her unbearably sensitised breasts to curve round her jutting hips and spread across her belly, only to move up again and cup her breasts.
His breathing was gratifyingly heavy, his mouth hot against the back of her neck, and Gigi thought the backs of her knees weren’t going to hold her.
‘Khaled...?’ She needed to say his name.
‘Vechno—that’s how long I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘Vechno?’ she breathed.
‘For ever. I thought you were a hallucination,’ he said into her hair, his voice rough as sandpaper. ‘Tell me I’m not still in the desert.’
Her heart lifted.
‘No—thank goodness! Imagine where the sand might go.’
Laughter rumbled in his chest, and it felt so good against her that she wanted to stay there for ever. Sparks and sensations were cascading through her like the most beautiful waterfall as he continued to circle her nipples with his thumbs, teasing them into points of unbearable sensitivity. He fondled her breasts and stroked her body as if touching her like this was all he wanted, and Gigi thought she might die of it.
But what a way to go.
She made a soft sound of relief as his mouth slid over the sensitive nape of her neck, and then she felt his kiss on the tip of her spine right down the centre of her to her molten core, where she simply combusted.
‘Is this what you want, Gigi?’
She felt her heart spike at the thickly worded question, thrilled that he would still ask.
She turned in his arms and sought his mouth, and kissed him with all the sensuous passion he drew out of her.
This, this, this.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said against his mouth.
It was his turn to make a deep, gratified groan as he cupped her bottom and brought her up against him. She wrapped her long legs around him and he feasted on her mouth.
He carried her over to the bed, lowering her onto her back. He knelt over her and undid the button at the top of her trousers, deftly rolled them down the length of her legs, taking his time to enjoy the milky, satin-smooth limbs he was uncovering, smoothing the way with his hands.
‘Don’t stop now,’ she warned.
‘Dorogaya, Hannibal’s army couldn’t stop me now.’
She was still wearing the tiny glittery G-string she’d worn onstage, and he ran his thumb under the string that held it around her hips, all the way to the heart-shaped piece of satin that preserved her modesty.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is indecent.’
Gigi’s breath hitched as he stroked beneath it, his thumb finding her clitoris all plump with need.
Kneeling over her, he looked as wild and untamed as he had when he’d come for her across the stage, his shoulders massively broad. Only this time he was stripped. His bare chest was covered in dark hair, arrowing down to an abdomen as taut as a drum and a deeply cut pelvis where the hair grew thicker.
Gigi’s eyes were drawn to the thrust of his heavily erect penis. It was beautiful—like the rest of him.
She began to explore him with her hands, but Khaled was soon moving out of her reach, and any further attempts to pleasure him as he was pleasuring her exploded into a thousand inconsequential pieces as he snapped the string and bared her to his gaze.