Ela stood before him in all her imperious beauty, her lips still open from having spoken his name. He didn’t move. Was he really going mad? Had his desperate need for her summoned up her image, too?
“Xander.” She smiled. “Aren’t you going to say something? Even if it’s to ask how I managed to persuade your guards to allow me entry?”
If she’d only said his name, he would still have doubted his sanity and her reality. But the fact that she spoke and stepped closer toward him banished the last ideas that he was living a dream. But there was only one way to be certain.
He stepped forward and took hold of her outstretched hands in his own and squeezed them tight. “Ela! Is it really you?”
“Of course it is. Unless there’s an Elaheh impersonator somewhere who has equal powers of persuasion with your guards.”
He brought her hands to his lips and kissed them. Then he sighed and allowed his gaze to rove over her lovely features. “I was just thinking of you.”
Her face, which had worn an almost hesitant expression, broke out into a big smile. “Really? Nothing bad I hope.”
He shook his head. “No, nothing bad. I was just imagining…” He faltered, unwilling to tell her the exact directions of his thoughts.
“Just imagining… what?”
If he told her and she was merely here to finalize some matter of state he’d forgotten, he’d look a fool. He needed to know.
“Ela, why are you here?”
Her gaze faltered and she licked her lips, opened her mouth, closed it, and then looked up at him with a firm smile as if forcing herself forward. “I’m here because you never gave me something I wanted.”
He frowned. “I didn’t?” His mind raced over what he possibly had withheld from her. There was nothing that he could think of. He’d even given her his heart, even if she didn’t know it.
“No.”
“And what was that?”
He hadn’t realized that watching a woman swallow nervously could be so alluring.
“You didn’t make love to me.”
And with those words his world tilted on its axis, finding a firmer footing.
“Ah. So you don’t call it sex anymore.”
“No. Maybe with other people—”
A blast of jealous anger shot through his body. It must have shown in his expression because she moved closer to him, brushing her hand across his chest before looking up to him once more, her lips close to his body.
“Not that I’ve tried with other people, because I’m not interested in sex. Only making love. Only with you,” she added in an undertone.
Xander hadn’t realized he was holding such a tight knot inside of him. He must have grown accustomed to it and now only knew it was there when it relaxed, as if Ela had plucked away the knot of an elaborate silky bow and it had slithered away to the ground, leaving him free for the first time in forever.
“Is that right?” he said, slipping his hands around her waist. “And why, Ela, have you decided to wait this long before asking me again?”
She pouted and it was all he could do not to press his lips against those full sensual lips immediately. But he wanted to know her answer.
“I asked you once before and you refused.”
“And yet you’ve come again. I wonder why. I wonder what’s changed.”
“Me. I have.”
Her words were simple, but their meaning was anything but. He needed to know. “In what way?”
She was less sure now. Her eyelids flickered as her mind raced, trying to put her thoughts into words. “You asked me once to surrender myself to you.”