‘You like horses,’ he murmured in a tone of discovery.
‘Very much, but I’ve only ridden a few times in recent years,’ she confided. ‘So I’ll be a little rusty.’
‘Did you have a pony as a child?’
It was an unlucky question. Her beautiful face shadowed and stiffened. ‘Once...briefly. She was a real little beauty too. I had one wonderful season on her with the pony club.’
‘I sense that I have roused an unhappy memory. Did an accident take her from you?’
Her mouth compressed and she shrugged. ‘No...my father took her from me. He said he was only loaning her out to a very good friend for a week or two but I never saw her again.’
‘He sold her?’ Razul frowned with immediate sympathy. ‘Perhaps the expense had become too much?’ he suggested.
Bethany uttered a wry laugh and swung herself up agilely into the saddle, wishing very much that she had kept her mouth shut. ‘No, it wasn’t that. The very good friend was an actress he was chasing at the time. She had a little girl too. He wanted to impress her with an extravagant gift, and why go the expense of buying another pony when he could take mine?’
Razul surveyed her in clear disbelief. ‘You are not serious?’
‘Look, he bought the pony in the first place. Can we drop this subject?’ she said tautly.
‘No, we cannot. Could your mother not prevent him from such an act?’
She expelled her breath in a charged hiss. ‘My mother has never tried to prevent my father from doing anything in her life...and if it was unpleasant she just ignored it. At the time she pointed out that it was his pony, not mine.’
Before he could press her further Bethany moved off, directing the glossy little mare at the gates that led out of the stableyard. Beyond the walls she reined in, her troubled thoughts put to flight by the view before her. The sun was a great globe of rising fire, sending shimmering ribbons of glorious colour trailing across the dawn skies. Fingers of light fell on the sands, turning them peach and scarlet and gold, dancing off stark outcrops of rock and casting mysterious shadows. The desert landscape, so brutally drained by the merciless heat by day, had an eerie and glorious beauty at sunrise.
‘You were right,’ she marvelled as Razul drew level with her. ‘It looks fantastic at this hour.’
‘I could show you beauty here at any hour,’ he asserted with immense pride and confidence.
His world, his heritage, and he was so much a part of it—as untamed as a land at the mercy of harsh elements that could not be controlled. She searched his hard profile with softened eyes and an aching understanding. ‘You didn’t like the English climate much, did you?’
‘It was a change...but it was very cold. Come on,’ he urged.
But she took her time in following him on that gorgeous Arab thoroughbred he rode. The sleek stallion raced across the sand, rider and horse enviably fluid and at ease. She liked watching him and smiled, feeling like a burden when he came back to her. He looked guilty too. ‘I forgot that you had not ridden for a while.’
And he wouldn’t take off again on his own, no matter how often she told him that she was perfectly happy to pad along at her own unexciting speed until she found her confidence again. Eventually she stopped telling him, for she could hardly help noticing that he was in a wonderfully good mood, that quick, spontaneous smile breaking out with quite devastating frequency. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. He cast a spell over her and no longer did she feel threatened by that. Tomorrow, next month, indeed the end of the summer, suddenly seemed a lifetime away. One day at a time, she promised herself.
‘We will breakfast outside and I will make coffee for you,’ Razul announced on their arrival back at the palace.
‘The proper way?’
He grinned. ‘The only way.’
Taking time out from the quick shower that she had promised herself, she headed down to the old harem quarters, stripped down to her bra and briefs on the edge of that ancient marble pool and climbed in.
‘Great minds...’
She spun round and her cheeks flamed pink as she saw Razul smiling down at her from the side of the pool. Tugging off his gleaming riding boots, he went in still clothed. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘No joy yet.’
‘It’s a big pool,’ he sighed ruefully.
She started to giggle, and once she started it was very difficult to stop.
‘I could buy another ring,’ he suggested hopefully as he waded through the water.
‘I want that one,’ she insisted, sitting down on the steps and hugging her aching ribs. ‘Another one wouldn’t be the same.’
‘Well, then, don’t sit there being lazy!’ Razul shot at her in exasperation. ‘Help!’
So she searched too, but it was Razul who literally struck gold with a relief that was highly entertaining. He snatched it up, grabbed her hand and threaded it on her finger with a lack of romantic ceremony which nearly sent her off into whoops again. He looked down into her laughing face and his stunning eyes flared golden in the sunlight, an expression of such intense hunger stamping his strong features that she blinked up at him in sudden stasis.
‘You are so very beautiful...and so very undressed,’ he murmured thickly.
As the sweep of his appreciative appraisal took in the flimsy bra and briefs which were all that interrupted his view of her gleaming body, only then did she actually recall that she was half-naked. Her cheeks warmed at the awareness but she made no move to cover herself. Indeed there was a wicked delight, she discovered, in standing there in the glow of his very masculine admiration.
He lowered his tousled dark head and pressed his mouth against the corner of hers, teasing, playing. The front snap of her bra gave beneath his deft fingers and her breath caught. In sensual shock she watched her breasts spring free, wantonly bare and full, her pink nipples pouting into taut buds even before he raised a hand to touch her.
‘Don’t you dare stop...’ she whispered shakily.
He laughed softly, found her mouth and tasted her as if they had been apart for a century and he could not believe the joy of finding her again. Her knees wobbled beneath the onslaught. She strained forward, the throbbing tips of her swelling breasts rubbing with delicious friction against the wet roughness of his polo shirt, and he caught her to him with suddenly impatient hands, pinning her to him as he strode up the steps out of the water and swiftly to her bedroom.
The tip of his tongue flicked against the roof of her mouth, twinned hotly with her own in a highly erotic assault that made her senses swim. She dug her hands into his thick hair and kissed him back wildly, all the pent-up passion of her fiery temperament bent on entrapment.
It was like setting a torch to a bale of hay. With a savage groan he lifted her high against him and curved her thighs round his lean hips. Electrified by that primitive response, she did it again. He reacted with quite devastating enthusiasm.
He brought her down on the edge of the bed and rip
ped off his polo shirt.
She rested back breathlessly on her elbows, excitement snaking through her in a shameless surge, an even greater excitement than that which she had experienced on their wedding night for it was infinitely less one-sided. This time there was no fear of the unknown and no terror of her own responses, only an aching, tender need for his pleasure to match hers. She wanted to tell him how much she loved him without saying it out loud.
So she rammed back her own shyness and curved forward to unsnap the waistband of the skin-tight riding breeches he still wore. The palm of her hand rested against the hard, swollen bulge of his manhood as she struggled with the zip in sudden embarrassment over her own lack of expertise.
‘I will die of frustration,’ he swore, with a sound between an agonised groan and reluctant laughter, and then his patience gave and he brushed aside her inept fingers, dealing with the problem in one second flat.
She flung herself back on the bed like a willing sacrifice, every tiny muscle taut with helpless anticipation. Razul surveyed her with slightly dazed eyes, as if he was not quite sure that this was really happening to him, but he dispensed with the shrunk-fit breeches with remarkable speed and fervour, hauled her back to him and kissed her breathless.
He captured an urgently sensitive nipple in his mouth and her whole body jerked, a stifled gasp dragged from her as an arrow of clawing heat flamed through her, making her hips rise and her thighs tremble. Her own response was shatteringly intense. Her restive hands skimmed in torturous circles over the smooth skin of his back and then sank into his hair tightly as her temperature rocketed.
A hot fever of excitement seized her as he wrenched off her briefs. Never in her entire existence had she dreamt of wanting anything as desperately as she now wanted him. Her heart was slamming against her ribcage, the blood pulsating wildly through her veins. As he caressed an engorged pink bud with the flick of his tongue and the teasing graze of his sharp teeth, he found the most sensitive spot of all with skilful fingers and made her jerk and quiver and moan, thrown helplessly out of control, her teeth clenched, her throat extended as the hot wire of sexual tension tightened and tightened until she was convinced that she was in mortal torment.