‘K-Kadir.’
He didn’t like it when she said his name like that—yet he liked it way too much. It sounded... He shook his head. It was hard to define because nobody had ever spoken to him that way before. As if his name were a prayer. Or a plea. But words didn’t matter—not when she was doing something far more distracting. His mouth dried to dust because suddenly Caitlin was sliding to her knees before him, almost as if she were supplicating herself to him. But she wasn’t. She was reaching between his thighs and curling her fingers around his arousal—an erotic and possessive cradling of his manhood. With her other hand she had begun playing with his balls and the sensation was so good it was almost unbearable...
‘Caitlin!’ He shuddered as she lowered her head onto his aching shaft, her tongue tantalising him with feather-light licks before she took him fully into her mouth. He clenched his fists and resisted the desire to close his eyes. It was certainly easier not to orgasm without any visual stimuli but it was also intensely erotic to watch the bobbing movement of her bright hair as she sucked on him. He wanted to tell her to stop and he wanted her to keep doing exactly what she was doing, but it was all pretty academic anyway because, no matter how long he tried to ward off the inevitable, he was soon jerking helplessly into her mouth, his fingers tangled in her hair as his seed spilled onto her lips.
For a long moment he felt completely defenceless—a sensation so disturbing that it threatened to eclipse the last sweet echoes of his orgasm. But as she raised her flushed face to his, he reasserted his mastery by lifting her up and carrying her over to the divan.
‘That was...unexpected,’ he observed, once she was prone on the golden sheet.
‘I wanted to do something special for you.’ She hesitated as he brushed his lips over her neck. ‘To take the initiative for once, if you like. I mean, I know I’ve been involved in all the wedding planning, but sometimes this week I’ve felt a bit...’
The progress of his lips halted. ‘A bit what?’
‘Passive, I guess,’ she admitted. ‘As if I have no control over what is happening to me.’
‘But isn’t it sometimes a good thing, to feel passive?’ he mused, his voice now muffled as he moved his mouth towards her belly. ‘Like now, for example?’
‘Oh, Kadir,’ she breathed.
‘You like that?’
‘No, I’m hating every second of it. Can’t you tell?’
He thought about tasting her until she was crying out beneath the quick flick of his tongue. But his current need was more basic than that. He just wanted to be inside her—and something about the elemental urgency of that need disturbed him.
This time there were plenty of condoms to hand and when he entered her—feeling as hard as he could ever remember—she came almost immediately, as if she had been teetering on the brink for too long. As her body spasmed around him Kadir felt the instant pump of his seed. And this time his orgasm seemed as if it were never going to end.
For a while they lay in silence until the hard pound of his heart slowed. Until the sweat which sheened his brow had begun to cool. He opened his eyes to find her looking at him and suddenly he wanted—no, needed—to assert his mastery. To feel more like the man he usually was, rather than someone who he was beginning not to recognise. Shaking off his inertia, he stirred.
‘I’ve bought you a present,’ he said. ‘Look. It’s right beside you.’
She turned her head and for the first time appeared to notice the fancy beribboned box lying there. ‘Gosh,’ she said, blinking very rapidly.
‘Well, don’t just stare at it. Open it.’
Caitlin began to untie the ribbon and pulled out a box from within the fancy paper. Inside was a camera. The kind of camera she’d always dreamed of owning but had never imagined she would. Top of the range and eye-wateringly expensive, she turned it round and round in her hands as if she couldn’t quite believe she was holding it. But the gratitude which rushed over her was nothing to do with the money he must have spent—because when had anyone ever bought her a gift which felt so right? She felt the sudden unexpected prick of tears at the backs of her eyes. So thoughtful?
‘Do you like it?’
Still overcome, she nodded.
‘There’s a printer to go with it back at the palace.’
She put the camera down and touched her fingers to the rough graze of his jaw. ‘Thank you.’
‘Just let one of my aides know if you need any more accessories and they can get them for you.’ He flickered her an indecipherable stare. ‘Like I said, you’ll need something to do alongside your charity work. Something which keeps you from getting bored, or from feeling quite so passive.’
She told herself it was only gentle mockery. That nobody would give you a beautiful gift one minute, then turn around and make a veiled criticism the next. But Caitlin realised that Kadir was doing that thing he always did straight after they’d had sex.
He was distancing himself.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
COLD DREAD WAS mounting inside him as the plane began its final descent and Kadir stared out of the porthole window without really seeing anything.
He should be experiencing a sensation of quiet satisfaction. The honeymoon had been a success. Not even he, the world’s greatest cynic, could deny that. It had been easy—ridiculously so. By day, he had shown his new bride the desert he knew so well, and by night they had enjoyed long feasts of the senses which had blown his mind. Caitlin had been thrilled by his wedding gift of a new camera, and he had watched her busily snapping images of the stark terrain whenever time allowed.
But now the honeymoon was over. He’d sent his servants back by camel train, while he and Caitlin had commandeered the royal flight. Any minute now they would be touching down at the royal palace and seeing their son after a week’s absence. He couldn’t have asked for a better outcome to the marriage he had so carefully engineered, and yet...