The last time she had touched him for that so-called massage... Casablanca had been forgotten, their pizza had gotten cold...
The same knowledge glittered in his languorous gaze, stoked over her, a whisper of sinful promises and sensual delights. She ran a hand over her neck, feeling wound up pretty tight.
“Find yourself a damn masseuse, Zafir. Isn’t Behraat crawling with women ready to serve His Royal Highness?”
He grinned. His uncut hair falling over his forehead, he looked like a carefree rogue. But he wasn’t. The more she learned of him, the more she realized that New York had been a taste of the forbidden for both her and him.
“I did have two proposals of marriage this past week from the fathers of two beautiful, young, traditional Behraati girls. Every man’s dream.”
And just like that, any goodwill she had cultivated vanished, the very thought of Zafir with his bride scouring her in a place she desperately wanted to erase.
She leveled a breezy smile at him while she felt brittle inside. “They sound perfect for you, Zafir.
“Women ready to do your bidding without a word of protest, ready to please you in bed when you want to get laid, willing to fade into the background when you forget their existence,” she said bitchily, offering up a silent apology to the women in question, “why not take one of them up on their offer and let me be?”
He was next to her in two seconds, his rock-hard thigh wedged sinfully against hers.
She strove to hold herself still, but with his hand behind her, she had nowhere to go on the couch.
He pushed a lock of hair from her forehead, the simple touch evoking a fierce need within her. His breath caressed her lips, the scent of him, rich musk breathing under exotic sandalwood, drugged the very air she breathed.
“It would make life easy for me. But I don’t want any of them.” His hands kneaded the stiff muscles in her shoulders turning them into liquid mush. “I want you, the one I shouldn’t want. The High Council fears it right, I think.”
“What do they fear?”
“That somehow you have bewitched me.”
She closed her eyes to shut out the image of him, digging deep within herself to find the strength to fight. There was none.
Only memories lingered, memories that shifted and shaped themselves into coherence now. As though she needed to look through this lens to understand the full significance of her relationship with Zafir.
She caught his hand with hers, intending to push him away, instead, he linked his fingers with hers, the little hairs on his forearm rubbing against hers.
Her gaze drifted downward to the bulge in his trousers and she was on instant, incinerating fire. “You ignored me for three weeks. You’re stressed again now and you want sex. Just like in New York.” There it was, the common denominator. “So you decided to pay me a visit. Like I was a hooker who knows your special needs. Like you were a junkie and I your fix.”
A growl fell from his mouth. “You’re determined to cheapen yourself, aren’t you?”
She shrugged. “Calling it like I see it.”
Gripping her arms, he forced her to look at him. “Yes, every time, I received news about another atrocity committed by Tariq, every time I felt rage run feral in my veins, every time I thought I would die a little more inside if I didn’t seize Behraat from him, every time I thought I wouldn’t see my father again... I came to you...
“I came to you and I lost myself in you until my sanity was back, until I had control over myself again, until that powerless rage cleared.
“But it was not cheap.”
Hoarse and powerful, his words demolished her fragile defenses in one fell swoop. “Zafir,” she protested, sinking sinuously deep into his spell.
One long finger traced the seam of her lower lip, pressed it, sending fresh shivers spewing into her skin. He lifted her toward him until she sat astride him. The soft silk of his trousers or her cotton leggings were no barrier to the hard length of his arousal fitting so perfectly against her core.
She was like putty in his arms, her will nonexistent.
A whimper wrenched from her and he caught it with his mouth, his lean frame shuddering around her.
If he had used that honed body to seduce her, if he had used those skillful hands to wrench her response, she would have resisted him, somehow. But instead, his gaze blazing with such depth of hunger, he pulled her down to meet his mouth.
Jagged and desperate, his words were a lash against her senses. “Do not deny us this, Lauren...”
It was the closest he’d ever come to saying please and the most she would ever amount to in his life.
She turned away at the last second, need and agony twisted together into a rope that bound her to him.