Кейт Хьюит – The Desert Lord's Love-Child: The Desert Lord's Baby (страница 22)

God. This was too huge. Could he be pulling her leg?

One look into his eyes told her he wasn’t. It was probably bigger than her malfunctioning mind could fathom at the moment.

Which gave her hope. “So staying in your quarters is to keep up appearances, right?”

His expression dulled with boredom. “If it pleases you to think that, by all means, go ahead.” The boredom evaporated as his pupils engulfed his irises like a black hole would the sun. “But I won’t be keeping up appearances and it won’t be for an audience’s benefit that I’ll take you, feast on you, ravish you every night.”

Her heart almost fired from her rib cage. “But—but that isn’t why we got married.”

He inclined his head at her, goading, relishing shredding her nerves. “Why did we get married?”

“Spare me the rhetorical questions, Farooq,” she quavered.

“Zain. I’ll answer them for you. We married for Mennah. And pray tell how did she come into being? Isn’t she the living, glorious proof of how much we enjoyed each other’s bodies?”

A harsh sound tore open her shutting down lungs. “Sorry to disillusion you but enjoyment doesn’t have much to do with conceiving.”

“Granted.” He moved toward her with the leisure of a cat that had all the time in the world to give his kill a nervous breakdown, putting her out of her misery not even on his mind. “But Mennah’s conception was a product of absolute pleasure.”

She backed away a step for each of his. “That was then.”

“And this is now. You dare tell me you don’t want me now?”

“I dare all right. Tell you I don’t want … this. I don’t know what you want.”

“How can I possibly be more blatant about what I want?”

“You don’t want me.”

His stare lengthened in the wake of her impassioned cry. Then he picked up her hand, dragged it to him, and this time, he pressed it to his erection. “How do you explain this then?”

She quaked in his hold, her depths gushing in response, unable to muster strength or coordination to snatch her hand away. Not wanting to. Wanting to cup him, map the hardness she wouldn’t come close to encompassing, go down on her knees before him, expose him, feel him, taste him, worship him. Only him.

But for him, it wasn’t and would never be only her.

The knowledge bled out of her. “You just want sex. Any good-looking woman would do.”

“So I’m indiscriminately promiscuous and terminally shallow.” Before she could define his reaction as mocking or insulted, he went on, his pupils fluctuating, giving his eyes the look of flickering flames. “But if sex with any ‘good-looking woman’ will do, and we both know I can take my pick of the best-looking who exist, why do I want it with you?”

“Why indeed.” And that was a legitimate question. She had no solid theories why he had before, beyond the lure of her total eagerness for him and the why-not factor. Now, she could think of one reason. She said it out loud. “Maybe it’s the novelty of a woman you can’t have.”

“Ah, a challenge to jog my jaded senses.” He took the pillow she was holding like a shield, swung it with an effortless flick to the sofa, reached out a hand to her hair, wound a thick lock over and over his fingers, then tugged. Gentle enough not to hurt her, inexorable enough to show her where he wanted her. Against him. He had her there, from breast to calves, his erection pressing into her hip, one leg between hers, rubbing, sawing, until all she wanted was to open them, beg him to end the torment, do all the things he’d threatened, all the things he’d promised. Then his whisper poured into her brain. “I already had you. I have you again. And I’ll have you again. And again. And all the time.”

She pushed against him, her breath burning, everything shaking out of control. “No. You won’t.”

He let her go, left her to stumble with the force of her unopposed struggle, smiled at her. “Are you sure about this?”

“I won’t let you have me. Not like this.”

“Like what? In total hunger, giving you ecstasy?” His certainty, its truth, sent response surging like lava inside her. “Is this what you’re objecting to? Too much satisfaction? Maybe you want something a bit … racier, riskier? Maybe some domination, a tinge of danger, of pain? I can oblige you. I probably will, after all this time. I’m not feeling anywhere near gentle. But then, I’m sure you won’t want me to be.”

She sank deeper in the mire of desire and desperation. “No, Farooq, I don’t want this.”

The translucency of his eyes fogged, his lips stretching to reveal teeth perfect but for too-sharp canines. “You want nothing more than this. You want nothing but this.”

She couldn’t deny his verdict. But she had to know. “What changed your mind? You were cold, angry …”

His lips remained frozen in that smile that filled her with dread and lust and anticipation. “I’m still cold and angry. It will probably make it all the more explosive.”

She raised her hands, an attempt to dilute his convictions, stop her capitulation from being total. “If you think I’m riling you, if you think I can enjoy force …”

He barked a laugh. “Force? The only force I ever used was what I needed to unlock you from around my body.”

“That was when there was only goodwill between us, not this—this malice. Don’t make it change your mind about the marriage in name only you proposed.”

He raised his eyebrows in mock bafflement. “Were we in the same scene back there in your apartment? When did I propose or even imply that ‘in name’ bit? We were tearing at each other within hours of meeting, and now that we’re married, you think it a possibility to keep our hands off each other?”

“We only got married for Mennah.” She tried again, desperate to hang on to her separateness, knowing that this time, if she surrendered, there’d be nothing left of her.

“That we married for Mennah, that I would have never married you if not for her, has nothing to do with the fact that I’ve been burning for sixteen months, needing to feel you underneath me, writhing and screaming your pleasure as I pound into you. No matter how we came to be married, we are. I’m your husband. And I want you. You will share my public life as my wife, and you will be my mistress again in private. And I will do everything to you, with you, for you. Everything, Carmen. And then more.”

Her legs gave out. She went down like a demolished building, missed the sofa, ended up on the floor leaning on it. She looked up at him, fighting the urge to beg him, if not for the tenderness he’d lavished on her before, then for some assurance what he felt wasn’t a cold lust that would consume her to ashes.

“I would have stayed and made you beg for everything you’re pretending not to want, but I have to meet my uncle now. I won’t be coming back, so you have our bed for yourself for the night. I won’t see you again, as is our custom, until the ceremony.”

He turned away, strode to the hall. At the connecting arch, he tossed over his shoulder.

“Get all the rest you can. You’ll need it.”

Nine

Carmen lay on her face on the massage-table, staring at her hands. Her skin had turned into reddish brown lace of extreme intricateness, a different design on each hand. It was as if she was turning into an alien species. A very pretty one, though.

“This is my best mehndi henna ever!” Ameenah exclaimed, marveling at her handiwork. She raised shining black eyes to Carmen, her smile displaying her lovely teeth and nature, deepening her dark beauty. “But then it’s your input that turned it into a masterpiece. It is ingenious, how you designed those patterns made of somow’el Ameer Farooq’s name in all the languages you know.”

Yeah. She’d gone all-out, to borrow a word of his.

Ameenah rose from her kneeling position before her. “I so hope he’ll decipher your homage without being told.”

Carmen only smiled. She was hoping he wouldn’t notice.

Writing his name all over her body was something she’d done for herself, on an unstoppable impulse, as if she’d feel closer to him this way, say all the things she couldn’t and had never been able to say out loud, make all the confessions he had no use for.

She rose, put on her clothes, marveling at how she’d been able to strip almost naked in Ameenah’s presence to get her henna done. Just like her husband, Ameenah made her, and Mennah, feel they’d known her forever, could depend on her. She already had in so many things during the day. Her wedding day.

After Farooq left her last night, she was too agitated to do anything, let alone sleep. But Ameenah breezed in, all smiles and welcome, bearing the list Farooq had given her to perform on Carmen in preparation for the wedding. And the wedding night.

After her first pensiveness and reluctance, Ameenah’s cheerfulness and enthusiasm infected her, made everything feel so much better, even fun.

She threw herself into the spirit of things, surrendered to Ameenah’s mastery of coddling as she carried out her crown prince’s directives. With the help of Salmah and Hend, her daughters, she sorted through her things for Carmen, got her acquainted with the mind-boggling facilities in the palace. Then, while Carmen fed Mennah dinner and answered e-mails, they went out, returned with a rack of clothes from which to choose a wedding outfit.