Tair’s jaw jutted. “You’ve forgotten my horse.”
“I have.” Her chest rose and fell with each rapid breath. “But one horse doesn’t make a kingdom, Sheikh al Tayer—”
“It’s el-Tayer. You’re in NorthernAfrica not the Middle East.”
She gestured impatiently. “The point is, where’s Aladdin when you need him? Where’s my genie to make everything beautiful? Because you might be a sheikh,el -Tayer,but this isn’t my fantasy. Not even close.”
“Enough,” Tair ground out, dragging her toward him. “This may not be your idea of paradise, but I’ve had it with the running away, and pulling knives, and putting your life in danger. It’s stopping. Now. Understand me?”
But he didn’t give her a chance to answer. Instead he pulled her into his arms, fitting her against his body so that her softness curved against his hardness, her hips cradling his, her thighs caught between his own, her breasts crushed to his chest.
Heat flared in her cheeks, heat and awareness as well as shame. She wanted him, wanted this contact with him and yet everything about him was lethal, destructive. “Let me go,” she begged.
His hand wound through her hair, forming a rope of the thick brown strands. “No.”
She tried to push away from him but couldn’t, not when he held her so securely. His head lowered, and fire flashed in his dark eyes. She felt her knees start to buckle as she realized that he was going to kiss her—whether she wanted him to or not.
His mouth covered hers hard, a fierce kiss of possession. She stiffened at the touch of his mouth on hers, stiffened from shock as well as pleasure. His lips made her own mouth feel hot, sensitive, alive and she shivered as his lips moved over hers, drawing a response.
He was warm and his beard rough and yet his lips were cool, firm, teasing. They teased her now and her lips parted beneath his, allowing him in and she arched helplessly against his heat, her lower body tingling as desire coiled in her belly, tight and hungry.
She wanted him. Oh God she wanted him and yet going to bed—making love—wasn’t an option. She had to know that. She had to be smart enough to know she couldn’t ever give herself to this man. And even knowing that, she couldn’t end the kiss, couldn’t break free.
It was Tair who finally lifted his head, his hands slipping from her hair to frame her face. “Tell me, when is this foolish, dangerous behavior going to end?”
CHAPTER SIX
TALLYcould barely draw a breath, her heart pounding fast and furious, her pulse unsteady.
She heard his question but couldn’t speak, not when her brain was too busy analyzing everything happening. Like the way he held her face, and the way his fingers curved to fit her jawbone and the almost tender way he plucked a hair from her eye and smoothed it back from her face.
She fought to steady her breathing.
“This must stop,” he continued. “You’re putting not just your life at risk, but mine as well as my men.”
“Then let me go.”
“That’s not an option—”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re mine now,” he answered simply.
Tair’s answer cut through her haze of emotion and sensation. She pushed his hands away and took one step back, and then another. She was his.
He said she was his…
She’d never been anyone’s. Not even Paolo’s, not even when she gave her body to him. Paolo hadn’t been the marrying kind and she knew there’d be no settling down with him, no house, no children, nothing like that.
But Tair. Tair. He was so different. He was so strong, so intense, so possessive. From the moment he’d hauled her onto his horse he’d acted as though she were his and there were times it infuriated her and then times it did something to her, touched her, undid her.
She hadn’t really felt like anyone’s in so long.
Tally put a hand to her temple, tried to clear her head. “I’ll keep running away, Tair.”
“And go where, Woman?” He rarely raised his voice but it was loud now. “You’re in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Doesn’t that mean anything? Or maybe you truly have a death wish, and if that’s the case, tell me now and I’ll stop rushing after you.”
All fuzziness in her head disappeared, all tenderness and ambivalence vanishing in the face of his insensitivity and arrogance. “Rushing?” she spluttered.“Rushing? I wouldn’t say you rush. It seems to me you enjoy waiting until the last possible moment to do the big rescue.”