awoken. Melanie watched with increasing wariness as the long fingers slid away from his ankle and his shoulders began to tense. She lost every scrap of colour and spoke without thinking. ‘Anyone would think you were jealous—’
He moved like lightning, catching hold of her nearest wrist and pulling her across the gap separating them. She landed with a thud against his shirt front; her silk skirt slithered up her thighs as he hauled her onto his lap. Her fingers clawed at his shoulders; her breath panted into his face. His eyes had turned silver; she had never seen them do that before.
‘Start talking,’ he gritted.
She trembled all over, but held onto this one promise she had made to herself. ‘Jamie is not up for discussion between you and me.’
‘He was your lover eight years ago. I will not be betrayed by you twice!’
She struggled against him. ‘Let go of me. You’re hurting!’
To her absolute surprise he set her free. She slithered onto the seat beside him, too shaken to notice the new expression in his eyes. ‘I apologise,’ he said curtly. ‘I don’t usually forget my own strength. Where did I hurt you?’
‘My wrist.’ She was rubbing it, though it didn’t really hurt. It had been the fear that he was close to hurting her that had made her tell the white lie.
Careful fingers took the wrist from her; very gently he began stroking the pink area with the smooth pad of his thumb. It was a stupid thing to react so badly to, but her pulse suddenly went crazy. He felt it happen and the thumb-pad stilled; she released a strangled little sigh. The mood flipped from anger to electrified awareness so quickly that it threw her into a state of confusion.
But not him—not him. He simply accepted the change with a shrug and a grimace, then lifted the wrist to his mouth and stroked the pink area with his tongue.
‘So we’re back to the sex again.’ It was a supposed to be a withering condemnation, but it didn’t quite come out like that.
‘Blame yourself,’ Rafiq murmured, and in the next moment she was pulled back into his lap.
‘Don’t!’ she protested.
‘Scared?’ he drawled. ‘Because you know your defences will not hold through one small kiss? Or is your pulse beating so fast because you are afraid that I won’t kiss you?’
‘No.’
He tested that denial with devastating consequences: the moment her lips clung he removed his own and watched her stare at his mouth like a hungry woman. One of his hands began to stroke her silk-covered thigh, left provokingly exposed by her slippery skirt. She moved against him, breasts searching for contact with his chest, her hips pressing into the cradle of his pelvis where the thrust of his erection was making itself known.
‘You don’t play fair,’ she groaned helplessly.
He just laughed low in his throat, then gave her back his mouth. It stayed this time, seducing with lazy dips of his tongue, while he undid the jacket buttons and removed it altogether. Beneath she wore a creamy white body. One light touch and he knew she was wearing no bra. ‘Interesting,’ he murmured as the hand began to follow the clinging outline of Lycra. When the waistband of her skirt stopped his progress he merely switched attention to the other hand and finished the journey via her thigh.
A single smooth slide between her thighs and he had released the tiny poppers that held the body in place.
‘Oh,’ she whimpered, when he discovered for himself how warm and moist she was. For the next few dizzying minutes she just hung on and let him work his seductive magic. She moved, she stretched, she curled herself around him, she moaned into his hungry mouth. He broke the kiss on a hiss of tension, caught her chin between his teeth and bit, then her throat, then her breasts, first one then the other, sucking at them through the Lycra. She clutched at his neck, his hair, the hair-roughened wrist attached to the tormenting hand. She begged, she pleaded, he growled something and came back to pester her mouth again at the precise moment she was threatening to topple headlong into the kind of orgasm that didn’t belong in this situation.
‘We can’t do this here,’ she whispered anxiously.
With a growl of impatience he pressed his body forward, taking hers with him as he reached for the in-car phone. A few husky words in Arabic and the car was sliding to a standstill. Ten seconds later, Melanie heard the thud of a car door and realised that the driver had left them alone.
Embarrassed heat flooded her cheeks. ‘He will know what we’re doing!’
He was way beyond the point of giving a care. His mouth claimed hers again; his hands claimed her hips. ‘Release me,’ he commanded in a throat-hoarse murmur.
‘I can’t.’
‘You can.’ Capturing one of her hands, he pressed it against himself. He was trembling as badly as she was, and maybe it was those tremors that stopped any more protest. A minute later she was straddling him, her mouth devouring his hot mouth while her body slowly took him in. She had never felt so wickedly wanton, had never thought she could behave like this. She moved while he held her slender hips steady; she copied the movement with her tongue. His breathing was ragged; the car filled with the scent of heat from their bodies. As she began to rise towards the edge, her inner muscles closed so tightly around him that he had to stop kissing her to throw back his dark head and close his eyes.
Pleasure like this could never be repeated, she found herself thinking as his hands reached up to frame her face and black eyelashes lifted to capture her eyes. She drove; he let her. It was a powerful, powerful aphrodisiac. When she leapt she cried out. When he followed he pulled her face into his shoulder and held her there throughout the ragged, pulsing finish until the weakness of exhaustion made her feel boneless.
They did not speak. Not then—not later, when eventually he gently eased himself from her and set her down on the seat at his side. Clothes rustled as shaking fingers replaced them into some semblance of dignity. Melanie kept her head lowered so her hair hid her hot face. She could sense the gravity shrouding Rafiq.
Cool air hit the interior as he let down the window. A minute later the car was moving again. The window remained open, though, circulating the hot air of seduction out of the car.
They turned in through a pair of high gates and began driving down a lane between a tunnel of trees with gnarled naked branches reaching out to tangle across the gap.