Tariq walked in and she closed the front door behind him. It was the first time he’d ever been there, and he walked into the sitting room and looked around. It was a small room, and much less cluttered than her country cottage. A couple of photos stood on the bookshelf. One was of her standing in a garden aged about eight, squinting her eyes against the bright sunlight. One of those images of childhood you saw everywhere. But he had no such similar pictures of his own. There had been no one around with a camera to record his growing up. Apart from official ones, the only photos he had been in were those big group ones from school—when his darkly olive complexion and powerful build had always made him stand out from the rest of his year.
He turned round as she walked into the room behind him. Her thick red curls had been scraped back and tied in a French plait, and her eyes looked huge. She looked so fragile, he thought—or was that simply because he hadn’t seen her for so long?
He frowned. ‘I thought you’d have been back at work by now.’
How formal he sounded, she thought. More the time-watching boss than the man who had shown her such sweet pleasure. ‘You did say that I could take three weeks. And it’s only been two.’
‘I know exactly how long it’s been, Izzy.’
They stood facing each other, as if trying to acclimatise themselves to this new and unknown stage of their relationship. It felt weird, she thought, to be alone with him and not in his arms. To have a million questions tripping off the edge of her tongue and be too afraid to ask them.
Tell him.
But the words still refused to be spoken. She told herself that she just wanted to embrace these last few moments of peace. A couple more minutes of normality when she could pretend that there was no dreaded truth to be faced. Two minutes more to feast her eyes on the face she’d grown to love and which now made her heart ache with useless longing.
‘Did you find your cousin?’ she questioned, raking back a strand of hair which had flopped onto her cheek.
Tariq watched as the movement drew his attention to the lush swell of her breasts, and he felt the first twisting of desire. ‘Eventually,’ he said.
‘And was she okay?’
‘I haven’t come here to talk about my damned cousin,’ he said roughly.
‘Oh?’ Her voice lifted in hope. ‘Then what have you come here to talk about?’
He looked at the soft curves of her unpainted lips and suddenly wondered just what he was fighting. Himself or her? ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ Her eyes were wide with confusion. ‘Then why are you here?’
‘Why do you think?’ he ground out, his black eyes brilliant as temptation overpowered him and he pulled her into his arms. ‘For this.’
Isobel swayed as their bodies made that first contact and she felt the sudden mad pounding of her heart. Conscience fought with desire as he drove his mouth down on hers, and desire won hands down. Her lips opened and she made a choking little sound of pleasure as she coiled her arms around him. Because this was where she wanted to be more than anywhere else in the world. Back in the arms of Tariq. Because when she was there all her problems receded.
‘Oh, yes!’ Her helpless cry was muffled by the hard seeking of his lips. His urgent hands were in her hair and on her cheeks, and then skating down the sides of her body with a kind of fevered impatience, as if he was relearning her through touch alone. And greedily she began to touch him back.
Tariq groaned as she began to tug at his belt. She was like wildfire on his skin—spreading hunger wherever her soft fingertips alighted. He could have unzipped himself and done it to her right there. But he’d spent too many nights fantasising about this to want to take her without ceremony—and too many days on horseback not to crave the comfort of a bed.
‘Where’s the bedroom?’ he demanded urgently.
Tell him. Before this goes any further, you have to tell him.
But she ignored the voice of protest in her head as she pointed a trembling finger towards a door. ‘O-over there.’
Effortlessly he picked her up, as he’d done so many times before, pushing open the door with his knee and going straight over to the bed, putting her down in the centre of it. Isobel felt the mattress dip as he straddled her, one knee on either side of her body. With fingers which were not quite steady he began to unbutton her dress, and Isobel held her breath as he pulled it open. But he seemed too full of hunger to study her with his usual searing intensity, and maybe he wouldn’t have noticed even if he had, for his black eyes were almost opaque with lust. Instead, he was unclipping her bra and bending his head to capture one sensitised nipple in his hungry mouth.
‘I feel as if I have been in the desert,’ he moaned against the puckered saltiness of her skin.
‘I th-thought you had?’
‘Not that kind of desert,’ he said grimly.
‘What kind, then?’
‘This kind,’ he clarified, his lips on her neck, his fingers hooking inside her little lace panties. ‘The sexual kind. A remote place without the sweet embrace of a woman’s arms or the welcome opening of her milky thighs.’
Even if they lacked emotion, the words were shockingly erotic, and Isobel lifted her head to give him more access to her neck, her fumbling fingers reaching for the buttons of his shirt and beginning to pull them open. He had come back, hadn’t he? And he still wanted her. It was as simple as that. Had he found it more difficult than he’d anticipated to simply let her go?
Hope began to build in time with the growing heat of her body. She helped him wriggle out of his jeans and then the silken boxer shorts, which whispered to the ground in a decadent sigh. His shirt joined her dress on the floor and she looked up at him, strangely shy to see his powerful olive body naked on her bed. He seemed larger than life and more magnificent t