The Sheikh's Princess Bride

It was an aberration.

She threaded her fingers together. ‘I told you I don’t trust myself with sex and love. I don’t—’

‘You think sex and love are the same?’ His brows crunched together.

‘I...’ She tilted her chin up. She mightn’t have Tariq’s vast experience but she had enough. ‘For me they are. I never slept with a man I didn’t love.’ Which meant she’d had one lover and he’d been the biggest mistake of her life. ‘Sexual attraction makes you vulnerable. It blinds you to the truth, so you see only what you want to see.’ It had been her mother’s great weakness and her own. But she’d learned her lesson.

‘Oh, Samira.’ Tariq shook his head, his hand touching her chin in a fleeting caress that sent shock waves zinging through her. ‘You’re so inexperienced.’

She huffed out a gasp of mirthless laughter. ‘You’re the only one to think so.’ There was an element of the press, and the public, that insisted on wondering whether she’d been to bed with every man ever photographed with her.

‘Believe me, you don’t need to be in love to enjoy sex.’

Samira supposed he was thinking of the many beauties who’d warmed his bed before his first marriage and, if rumour was right, in the period since his first wife’s death. None had lasted long enough to make a claim on him.

‘I know that.’ She wasn’t a complete innocent. ‘But it was like that for me and I can’t afford for it to happen again.’ She couldn’t survive such disillusionment a second time.

‘You don’t love me, do you?’

‘No.’ She clenched her jaw.

‘Yet you feel this?’ This was the graze of his knuckles across her breast, lingering at her nipple, making it harden. Her breasts seemed to swell and an arrow of fierce heat shot directly to her womb.

Samira jerked back against the table, shock skittering through her.

‘Don’t touch me like that!’

‘Why not, when you enjoy it?’

She opened her mouth to deny it but he continued. ‘I can see the flush of arousal at your throat so don’t pretend I’m not right.’ His gaze dipped from her neck. ‘Your breasts are burning up, aren’t they? Is there heat lower too? Deep inside, do you feel empty? Needy?’

Samira gasped as the muscles between her legs clenched greedily, responding to Tariq’s words. He knew her too well. Better than she knew herself.

‘I can fill that emptiness, Samira. I can make it good for you. For both of us.’

He could too. Instinctively she knew it. Certainty gleamed in those penetrating eyes. Her body was inching forward, eager for his expert touch.

Samira grabbed hard at the table behind her. ‘I don’t want that.’

Slowly he shook his head. ‘Of course you do. So do I.’ His face was taut with a hunger that should have dismayed her, yet instead intrigued her. She imagined them together, here in this room, his big, capable hands gentle yet demanding on her flesh. She wanted...

No! She’d made that mistake once.

‘I told you, Tariq, it’s not for me. Intimacy and love are bound up together. I won’t go there again.’

‘You speak with such experience. How many lovers have you had?’

‘One.’ She jutted her chin. ‘That was one too many.’

His gaze narrowed. His words, when they came, held a contained savagery she’d not heard from him before. ‘You had your heart broken by a bastard who shouldn’t have been allowed even to touch the hem of your dress.’

Samira blinked, taken aback by the depth of Tariq’s anger.

‘Take it from me, little one, sex can be quite, quite separate to love.’ He paused and she sensed he chose his words carefully. ‘That makes us an ideal match. I don’t want love from you and you don’t want it from me. We’re on a level playing field. Neither of us will fall for some grand romantic illusion about this marriage.’

Was that bitterness in his voice?

Samira bit her lip. No doubt he was thinking of Jasmin and the fact no other woman could take her place in his heart.

‘We have the marriage you wanted,’ he continued. ‘But we can have more. We can enjoy each other. It’s only natural, you know.’ This time his touch wasn’t at all sexual, a mere brush of fingertips against her hair, yet she felt it all the way to her toes.

‘Desire is a part of life. Why not enjoy it? After all, neither of us is in danger of falling in love.’