‘Oh, you know…tea, a bath, music.’
A smile edged the hardness away from his mouth. ‘No, don’t go. Stay here. You’ve just done the most important thing a woman can do for a man.’
There was another silence, and Sienna tried hard not to read too much into his words. Just because he had sounded uncharacteristically tender it did not mean anything. He was basically applauding her rapidly improving skills as a lover and thus his own skills as an expert tutor—that was all. Or he was being slightly more affectionate because they hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks. There were any number of reasons.
But the shadows were still beneath his eyes; the weariness still outlined his mouth. She thought about what he had taught her, and about her refusal to just jump when he snapped his fingers. Hashim respected that, she knew. What he would not countenance was fear or timidity.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’
He shifted position a little, so that he was lying gazing into the huge green glitter of her almond-shaped eyes. The breasts he had once been so obsessed with now seemed just a part of the beautiful whole of her, but still their pert rosiness reminded him of how she had used them, how that could never be undone—at least not for him.
‘Just tired. It’s nothing,’ he murmured—which was true, though only part of the story. There was growing opposition in Qudamah to his Western lifestyle—a demand from some factions that he settle down and embrace completely the culture of his ancestors. There had been views expressed that his trips abroad should be curtailed, with all his energies focused on his homeland.
And didn’t Sienna herself exemplify everything that the more traditional elements in his country loathed about the West? Hadn’t Abdul-Aziz increasingly been hinting that the liaison was damaging his credibility? That things would blow up if some resolution were not reached? And Hashim knew what that resolution should be.
‘It’s nothing,’ he repeated firmly.
Sienna did her best not to let her face crumple with disappointment. She had asked him and he had closed up—she could tell from the shuttering of his face. Well, that was up to him. It had been her choice to ask and his not to tell her. Asking was one thing, and perfectly acceptable. Prying was something completely different.
She took his words at face value, as he clearly wanted her to. ‘So, when did you last have a holiday?’
‘A holiday?’ he questioned, as surprised by the choice of topic as by her sudden change of subject.
She laughed, pleased to have perplexed him. ‘Yes, a holiday. That’s the thing that most people do when they’re tired and they want to relax.’
He screwed up his eyes. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.
‘No recent bucket and spade job in Spain?’ she teased.
‘Bucket and spade job?’ He frowned.
‘Have you never built sandcastles, Hashim?’ she questioned.
He laughed. ‘Sand is not a big deal in Qudamah—not with so much of it around. We tend to escape from it rather than build our leisure time around it,’ he added drily.
‘I’d never thought of that.’ She snuggled up to him. ‘So what kind of holidays did you have when you were a child?’
He frowned. ‘You don’t really want to know.’
Which meant he didn’t really want to tell her. But a woman could not exist on sex alone, no matter what her status. ‘Oh, yes, I do!’ she said firmly.
And Hashim found himself smiling as he allowed himself a rare dip into nostalgia. How long ago a childhood could seem, and yet how astonishingly clear the memories if you opened the floodgates on them. ‘My male kin and I used to take our falcons up into the forests, where we trained them to kill.’
‘Nice!’
Idly, he circled the pad of his finger around one of her nipples, feeling it instantly point and peak, and he felt the heavy stir of desire returning. ‘There we learned to be men,’ he said dreamily.
‘No women?’
‘Not one.’
‘But what about your mother? Didn’t she want to go along?’
He remembered the very first trip, being torn from his mother’s arms. He had been just five years old and had cried his eyes out. How remorselessly the others had teased him! And his father had told him that the painful separation was all part of the process of learning to be a man. He could imagine what a Western psychologist would say about that!
‘Females were not part of the endeavour,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Their place was at the Palace.’
‘And didn’t they mind?’