He smiled. ‘So could you. What say we make a living of it together?’
It was an outrageous fantasy, tinged with a poignancy produced by that elusive word ‘together’. But she lost the sadness as he climbed into bed to join her, and pulled her into his arms, his warm, living flesh making her feel on fire where they touched.
‘Just you and me,’ he murmured, and cupped her breast in his hand, feeling the nipple thrust and jut against his palm in instant reaction. ‘How do you like that?’
‘What—that?’ She jerked her head jokingly towards her breast, where his hand looked so shockingly dark against the whiteness of her skin.
But he shook his head, a rare kind of tenderness filling his voice. ‘No,’ he demurred. ‘I meant the you and me bit.’
‘Oh, that!’ She was about to make a flippant comment, the kind of comment which would keep her safe from hurt. But she read in his eyes an elemental truth—that right at that moment he was holding nothing back from her. And didn’t such a truth deserve another? ‘Oh, that is a prize beyond rubies,’ she told him huskily.
He groaned as his mouth replaced his hand, locking his lips hungrily against the rosy nub which sustained all life. He wondered if these breasts would ever suckle a child.
A child that could never be his!
‘Rose,’ he groaned again, and the slick lick of his tongue made her feel almost weak with longing, so weak that she gave into her most primitive desire and slid her hand down between the muscular thighs until she had found what she was looking for.
‘Rose!’
Her wanton capture of him made him feel as weak as water in her hands. And so did the way she was touching him, her hands lightly caressing the rock-hard shaft of him. His eyes closed and his head fell back against the pillow. Never, since that first induction to the pleasures of the flesh, had he allowed a woman such freedom with his body.
‘Stop, Rose,’ he begged.
‘You don’t like it?’ she asked him innocently.
‘I like it.’ He said a single word in Marabanese he hadn’t realised he knew, and then gently closed his hand over hers to stop her. ‘Too much.’
She realised how much she had enjoyed seeing him look as dreamily helpless as that. To see him fighting for control. It made her feel strong. Equal. ‘Well, then?’ she whispered close to his mouth, so close that he touched his lips to hers.
‘This is intended to be traditio
nal love-making, Rose,’ he told her sternly.
‘And no demonstration that I have a certain amount of experience—and that you aren’t my first lover?’
There was no flippancy in her voice now, Khalim recognised—with a flash of insight which dispelled the black clouds of his jealousy. Nothing but a wistful trace of insecurity, as though he would be judging her and finding her wanting. He tipped her chin upwards, so that their eyes locked on a collision course.
‘You push me far, Rose,’ he told her. ‘Sometimes too far, I think.’
‘You went mad when you found out I was on the pill!’
He had to force himself to stay calm and drew a deep breath. ‘My harsh words on the subject in Maraban were based on…jealousy,’ he grated, spitting out the unfamiliar word. ‘Jealousy that I was not your first lover—’
‘And I was jealous that you weren’t mine,’ she said softly, filled with a sudden boldness—because what was to be gained by hiding the truth from him?
Khalim expelled a long, low breath, remembering the newness, the vitality and sheer power of their first encounter, and he sought to honour it in some way. ‘I felt like your first,’ he said.
‘And I yours,’ she whispered back.
‘You are more my equal than any woman I have ever met, Rose. You live by different rules to the women in my country, and the life you have lived makes you the person you are today. And I like the person you are today.’
A person who could get him running halfway around London to find a place for them to live, much to Philip Caprice’s bemusement and his bodyguard’s outrage!
‘So don’t you like your women to be subservient?’ she asked him teasingly, wondering what she had said that was so wrong, because his face darkened with a simmering look of bitterness.
He thought of the unknown woman who would one day become his wife. And his eyes flickered down to where Rose lay—so pale and so beautiful—her hair spread like a moonlit fan across his pillow.
He shook his head. ‘I never want subservience from you, Rose,’ he whispered. ‘Never from you.’