Was it any wonder she was jumpy and unsettled? Zakari wouldn’t be going out in the winds today. She could hear him now. Normally he went outside at sunrise and returned for his fatir, but this morning he was silent and thoughtful and just dizzied her brain more.
‘Good morning, Your Highness.’ Effie lowered her head as he entered the dining area. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘No.’ Zakari’s voice was surly. ‘Did you?’
‘No,’ Effie admitted, then flushed, remembering the reason she hadn’t been able to sleep. ‘The winds kept me awake.’
‘The winds only started half an hour before dawn…’ His eyes never left her burning face as he outed her. ‘Perhaps there were other reasons you could not sleep.’
A screech shot from the desert, so loud it made her jump.
‘When the wind hurtles through the canyons it makes these noises,’ Zakari explained. ‘Forget the tales you have been told.’
‘It sounds so real, like a woman screaming…’
‘Some winds sound like children laughing,’ Zakari said, ‘some like cats fighting. Do not let it play tricks with your mind. Don’t even think of going out to investigate. You are only safe here.’
Except she didn’t feel safe, but it wasn’t the wind or Zakari she feared.
It was herself.
‘I will take my breakfast in bed this morning…’ His eyes left her face, then flicked down, only low enough to register the nervous swallow in her throat, then back up again, a glint of triumph in his eyes. ‘You will serve it to me there.’
As Effie walked in with the tray they both knew that the one time she’d seen him on this bed, he’d been naked. And, even though he was covered to the waist now, Effie knew what lay under his silk sheets.
The tiny jewelled cup was rattling loudly on the tray as she lowered it, sick almost with terrified arousal as she placed the tray in his lap.
He could smell her want as she walked towards him, could taste it in the air he breathed. Zakari rarely bothered with kissing. It was boring and pointless and served no real purpose. Women wanted kisses, kings wanted sex…
Yet as she leant over to remove the coffee from the tray to place it at the bedside she was so jittery, if he told her to take off her dress, to join him, Zakari knew she would turn and run.
So, Zakari mused, he would deign to kiss her.
The bliss of his beard on her face was unsurpassed. It was just bliss, bliss, bliss. The soft weight of his mouth on hers didn’t even make her jump, just this faint relief that caused tears to sting at her eyes as her mouth moved with his. She didn’t know what to do with her breath, though, holding it in her mouth till she dared open it to let it out, her lips parting…and then she felt his tongue.
Cool and shocking in her mouth.
Deliciously shocking, though.
This wedge of muscle that stroked, that teased a little, then teased her some more. At first it was almost still, slipping slowly inside, and then it mingled, tasting her, stroking her, till finally she relaxed, till her mouth fully accepted him in a deep moist kiss that she never wanted to end.
And then he stopped.
Abruptly he stopped and looked at her. He had given her a taste; it was up to her to ask for more.
‘Your dream is not so foolish.’
‘No?’ She shivered with indecision by his bed, part wanting to leap in, part wanting to run out.
‘For one day at least we can make it real…’
‘But, Your Highness…’
‘You can call me Zakari if you return for my tray within five minutes…’ His eyes glittered as they delivered his offer. ‘If you do not return, Your Highness will leave the tray outside, and then I will remain here in bed, but then…’ the image he conjured made her stomach tighten ‘…I am not to be disturbed.’
She fled to her bedroom and sat rocking with indecision on the bed. The banshees were screaming their warning outside, only she didn’t want to listen, yet they wailed at her to be careful, not to be foolish, not to give herself to a man who could promise her nothing more than a few hours in his arms. Effie was suddenly acutely aware of her mother’s jewel between her breasts, warning her, just as Zakari had, that this man would take her, then discard her.
But what a man!
Today, for one day, she could be a princess, could live the fairy tale.
With shaking hands she took off her necklace, like turning her mother’s photo to the wall.
Zakari would never admit to sleeping with someone so lowly—and what future husband, if he did one day appear, would ever believe she had slept with a king?
He had given her five minutes to make up her mind.
She was back within three.
‘Take off your dress,’ Zakari ordered as she entered.
Only that wasn’t how she wanted it to be.
She wanted his kiss again, wanted him to undress her slowly beneath the safety of the sheets, but then, what did she know? Effie thought. What man would want her in her heavy white dress?
‘Take off your dress!’ Zakari said again, his impatience evident this time.
Each button she undid was humiliation itself, purgatory visited, but, dropping her dress to the floor, she was plunged straight into hell. Standing pale and big as his eyes roved her body, she was bitterly ashamed of her generous flesh, her arm moving to hide her flimsily covered breasts, her other hand trying to more suitably hide herself than did her panties.
But Zakari was entranced—she was more beautiful than he had ever imagined.
Magnificent actually.
Yet so painfully shy, so visibly, acutely awkward that something shifted inside him. The voice that had ordered her to undress delivered words more softly now.
‘Effie, there is nothing more beautiful to a man than the flesh of an innocent woman…’
‘Forgive me if I differ,’ Effie responded in a shaking voice. ‘Innocence is not always considered fetching these days.’
There was an element of truth to her words. She would be a clumsy, unskilled lover, not what he had considered he needed, his time too valuable, his needs too urgent, but, Zakari realised, today Effie and her precious innocence were exactly what he wanted.
‘I will teach you.’
Sex had been his intention, but, seeing her so shy, Zakari was consumed almost by a sense of responsibility, the same sense of responsibility that greeted him each morning, that he lived with each waking moment. Only it was a responsibility he had never felt towards a woman, yet he felt it keenly now, wanting for Effie, this day, this time, this moment to be special. Deciding that for today at least her dreams would be made real.
He rose from his bed, and walked towards her.
Naked, erect and so potently beautiful, he stood in front of her as she wept in fear and lust and shame.
He took her by the hand and led her to his sleeping area—the bed was unmade, his bath not even run, the morning routine just gloriously abandoned. He could feel her shaking. Breathing in the intoxicating mixture of terror and want, he laid her down on the bed, then lifted the sheet over her, hoping it made her feel safer, watching her relax a touch as the silk fabric covered her, and he swore to himself that he would not be the one who removed it.
That it would be Effie herself.
This low thrill of excitement building as he made in that moment a decision that she, Effie, would be made love to as only a master in the subject could.
He gazed at her trembling mouth, could feel her clumsy, rigid in his arms, and instead of irritating him it excited him. There could be no gifts, no shows of affection after this day, but he would give her a greater gift instead—the thrills and secrets of her own body.
His finger traced her round cheeks, his thumb grazing her bottom lip, pulling down the plump flesh and releasing it. Then he lowered his noble head and his lips met hers, this mesh of flesh that for Effie was, at first, nothing but awkward.
His lips nuzzled hers, waiting for her to relax, waiting for the woman he had glimpsed a few moments ago to show herself again, impatient that she held back, then checking himself—this was Effie.
Zakari reminded himself.
His little silver bird.
His arms swept her right into him, wanting not just to arouse her, but to calm her.
He liked kissing her…as his mouth mingled with hers Zakari felt a surge of surprise.
All his life from childhood he had believed he hadn’t liked apricots, and yet one day, inadvertently, he had taken one from a lavish fruited display as he worked, and he had found to his mild surprise as he bit into the velvet flesh and tasted the ripe fruit that he did like them after all. There was no mild surprise here though, just pleasure, supreme pleasure as on and on he kissed her, as he licked at her tongue, and as later he rained kisses on her face and felt her wriggle and curl in his arms.
Here in the magical desert, with no one but them, he initiated her to the secrets of her body and for Effie it was nothing short of wondrous.
Her hands at first had been clamped by her side, yet in moments they shot upwards, her fingers knotting into his silky hair as he kissed her. The scratch of his beard on her cheeks as his mouth pressed into hers hurt, yet it was a luscious hurt as his lips pressed harder.
Oh, and she learnt, how she learnt—that a kiss, that just a kiss could inflame her so, could inflame him too. That a kiss could have her wriggling out of the safe cocoon of the sheet because she wanted her skin next to him, that a kiss would have him pressing his heat into her stomach. That the thrill of a man’s arousal just pressed against her could have her damp and have her pressing her own engorged flesh to his in a bid to calm him.