‘But he’s still so young…how can that be?’
‘His mother’s unpleasant reputation went before him. She was very unpopular.’ Tariq loosed a rueful sigh and let his fingers rise to cover the rosy pink nipples involuntarily straining for his attention.
As an electrified shiver of helpless response ran through Faye and her eyes squeezed shut on the intensity of the sensation, Tariq continued talking in a slightly roughened undertone. ‘Were anything to happen to me in the near future, my people might not accept Rafi as my successor. For that reason and others, I will soon have to take a second wife and father a son of my own.’
Emerging from the sensual haze provoked by his most minor foray over her shamelessly wanton flesh, Faye jerked rigid when that casual announcement finally sank in. Her shaken eyes opened very wide, pain biting into her very bones without warning. A second wife? Did that mean that, however briefly it had lasted, their marriage had been a true marriage a year ago? But what did that matter now when Tariq had long since divorced her?
‘A second wife…?’ Faye parroted, although she had waged a mighty battle with her impulsive tongue and tried very hard not to comment.
‘I have had enough of the water…but not enough of you,’ Tariq countered with a ragged edge to his sexy drawl, beginning to rise from the water and carrying her with him to lift her out of the Jacuzzi again.
Dazed and devastated by the unbelievably agonising idea of Tariq marrying another woman, Faye stood there streaming with water while she was wrapped in a huge fleecy towel like a small child. There was something extremely disorientating about the way Tariq just reacted with split-second timing and switched channel and subject, something decidedly terrifying about the totally offhand manner in which he had mentioned his plans to marry again.
Here she was naked within an hour of his becoming her first lover, her body still singing under even his most light and impersonal touch, and yet here he was treating her like a casual bed partner, a sex object who had no value beyond the fleeting physical pleasure she might give. An object without any apparent right to have vulnerable feelings of her own. Well, a little voice said inside her head, just what did you think becoming the mistress of an Arabian prince would entail?
‘Another w—?’ she began shakily again, gazing up into glittering lion-gold eyes, voice failing altogether as he released his hold on the towel and let it drop round her ankles instead.
‘I want you all over again,’ Tariq confided thickly. ‘But then that is only to be expected when it has been so long since I have been with a woman—’
‘So long?’
As if that was a rather stupid question, a slight frownline furrowed his imperious brows as he drew her to him with purposeful hands. ‘For the whole of the past year, I have naturally been in mourning for the tragic deaths in my family.’
His father, his stepmother, she assumed absently. Official mourning to show respect for the departed? What did she know about that? Yet she respected him for that self-denial. Or was it just that the knowledge that there had been no other woman for him since he had first met her gave her a much-needed sense of not being merely one more in a long line of available female bodies? For women, certainly in the West, would always be available to Tariq. When she had been seeing him, she had been painfully aware that he attracted her sex without even trying.
‘Faye…so hungry am I for you, I could devour you where I stand,’ Tariq admitted in a charged undertone.
Her lashes lifted, sensible thought snatched from her. She gazed up at him, jolted by the primal fire in his eyes, the hard male clenching of his superb bone structure. He knotted his fingers slowly into her hair, drawing her inexorably to him, anchoring her to his big, powerful frame. The hard, potent proof of his hunger brushed her quivering tummy and her legs turned hollow and her mind went blank and she could not drag her mesmerised eyes from the savage lure of his. The wanting was back with a vengeance, hotter and even less controllable than before. She could feel a damp, pulsing ache between her thighs, an ache that was becoming frighteningly familiar.
He swept her up and strode out of the bathroom. Like a doll without will or voice she didn’t object but shame touched her deep for the fastest route back to the bed was all that mattered to her. Just that ragged note in his voice, just a touch, just a scorching look of raw hunger and something in her melted, reducing her to reckless, mindless surrender to his dominance, all defences forsaken. How could she fight herself?
‘I meant to have you only once tonight.’ Tariq groaned. ‘But the once was only the breaking of a fast, not sufficient…I could have taken you in the Jacuzzi, I could have taken you on that hard floor, against the wall…the dawn is far away but it threatens me for tomorrow I must spend all day in talks with the sheikhs—’
Enervated and intimidated by that series of earthly declarations of intent, Faye mumbled shakily, ‘The wall?’
Tariq gave her a shimmering smile of pure blazing assurance. ‘Anywhere you want, any way you want.’
‘I only know one way…’
Tariq spread her across the bed. On some dim level of awareness her nostrils flared in vague surprise at the scent of freshly laundered sheets. Evidently even in the space of their brief absence the bed had been changed.
‘That was basic,’ Tariq husked. ‘Think steep learning curve…’
Her feverish gaze welded to him, her face hot with embarrassment but her wanton body secretly burning. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. The sexual heat he emanated filled her with helpless excitement. You’re going to spend the rest of your days regretting this, her conscience warned. You’re going to hate yourself…
‘Think pleasure beyond your wildest fantasies…’ Tariq lowered himself down over her inch by sexy inch, trapping the breath in her throat, charging her quivering length with the most intense anticipation. Well, maybe she could learn not to hate herself…fate, he had called it, no point fighting fate…no point denying that that wicked smile of sensual promise slashing his lean, dark, devastating face bereft her entirely of her wits.
‘Thinking…’ she conceded weakly.
‘Feeling…’ Tariq traded, sliding between her parted thighs with the slow carnal expertise of a male who liked to tempt and incite. ‘Until you don’t care what day it is or what time it is and hunger and need for me controls your every thought, your every action…’
A chill of foreboding touched her deep down inside. ‘You want me to love you…’
‘Yes…’ Tariq studied her with dark, deep-set eyes of unutterable calm.
‘So that you can throw me away again,’ she framed unevenly.
‘If you please me enough, I may only throw you as far as my villa in France,’ Tariq breathed with lazy cool. ‘Then I could visit you when I wanted to and the tables would be truly turned for you would be jumping every time the phone rang, praying it was me and you would never ever dare to be unavailable…’
‘That’s some agenda you’ve got,’ Faye muttered with forced amusement. ‘No harem but complete enslavement.’
‘The only game player would be me…’
‘Well, there wouldn’t really be room for anyone else with that ego of yours.’
He threw back his proud dark head and laughed with rich appreciation and then he brought his mouth down on hers and kissed her breathless. Until all she was conscious of was the feel of him, the taste of him and her own deep, endless hunger…
Faye shifted in the dawn light, waking slowly, conscious of a myriad sensations: Tariq holding her close, the weightless feel of her own limbs and a level of sweet contentment beyond anything she had ever imagined.
‘Happy, aziz?’ he murmured, easing her back into the hard heat and shelter of his lean, powerful frame, pressing his lips against a pale, slim shoulder, sending an evocative shiver winging through her awakening length.
‘Blissful…’ The hand he had splayed across her tummy melded her even closer and she felt his hair-roughened chest graze the skin of
her back, the flex of his long, powerful thighs against her slender hips. A sheet of paper could not have squeezed between them and, at that instant, that was her definition of bliss.
Erotic images of the night they had shared assailed her mind, images that shook her but still filled her with an intoxicating heat she could not resist, any more than she could resist him. Now she understood what had once prompted her to make an utter fool of herself around him. Not just his devastating good looks or his powerful personality but the excitement, the sheer charge of physical excitement he evoked just walking into a room. That white-hot sexuality, that volatile charge of innate sensuality was as much a part of him as the cool self-discipline which cloaked it. So what was it like being an Arabian mistress? she asked herself, in a dizzy state of delight that had nothing to do with intellect. It was the passport to the sensual heaven of another world for she did not want the night to end, she did not want the light fingering through the tent room to rise to the strength of the full morning sun.
‘Good…’ Tariq let his hands glide up over her breasts in the lightest of caresses and she arched her spine, instinctively pushing her swelling flesh into his palms, driven by the tingling demands of her own sensitised body.