And Sera’s beautiful dark eyes shut down, her face as bleak as the deepest, coldest winter’s night. ‘She said that I had poisoned her son. That he would not be dead but for me, a barren woman with a poisoned womb, who had been like poison to his very soul.’ And her tears came, at first silently, her body buckling against his with the pain, but then giving way to sound as her sobs found voice.
And even as he held her, even as he comforted her, his anger boiled and raged inside him. Hussein’s mother. He turned to his own mother then, his desire to find this woman and ram home a few home truths about her precious son paramount. ‘Where will I find this witch?’
‘No, Rafiq,’ said his mother, putting one hand to his forearm and one to Sera’s hair. ‘I will find Akmal and ensure the woman leaves immediately. You are needed here, with Sera.’
She was at the door, almost gone, when he called to her. ‘Make sure she is told, when they find her, that there is recorded in history just the one virgin birth, and that if she dared to look more closely she would find that any poison was the product of her own fetid womb.’
His mother did not blink. She looked from Rafiq to the woman nestled against his chest and nodded, before slipping silently from the room.
‘You told her,’ Sera said much later, after he had carried her to his room and laid her down on his wide bed, after he had kissed her hurt away with a thousand tiny kisses as he stripped her bare, after making slow, deliberate love to her. ‘With that message for Cerak you told your mother about us.’
And he shrugged as he ran one finger down her arm, relishing the way she shivered into his touch, her glorious dusky nipples peaking once more. ‘She would have found out soon enough. She was already wondering when you didn’t reel from my arms.’
‘Yes, of course.’
He leaned over, unable to resist, his tongue circling that budded temptation, ‘Besides, even if that hug had never happened she would have put two and two together when she found out I was planning on staying a few extra days and spending them and the nights that followed in your company.’
A pause. ‘You’re staying longer?’
He heard the delighted note in her voice, how it rose at the end, her words delivered just a fraction faster, and it pleased him. ‘I was thinking about it.’ He targeted the second nipple, feeling spoiled for choice, loving the way she gasped as he suckled, drawing her in tight. ‘But I changed my mind.’
‘Oh.’ Exit delighted note.
He slid first one leg between hers and then the other, pressing his lips to her softly curved belly and then lower, his hand sliding down, parting her, circling that tight bundle of nerve-endings that knew only his touch and which was guaranteed to have her arching her spine.
‘I had a better idea.’
He dipped his head, working his teeth around a nipple, gnawing, nipping, laving with his tongue while his hand worked his magic below. She was panting now, her breath coming in ragged, frantic breaths as her fingers clutched at his hair, his shoulders, her nails digging into his skin. But some part of her brain must have still been functioning.
‘Which was?’ she asked. And he had to switch gears in his mind to work out what he’d said before.
Although his first priority right now was not with words but with actions. She was ready for him, and he could not wait. He sheathed himself in an instant and waited at her very cusp, his muscles bunched and readied as he sought her eyes. Only when he had them did he answer. ‘I want you to come back to Sydney with me.’
Her eyes opened wide. With pleasure? Or shock? But the time for conversation was long gone, his ability to converse gone the same way, his focus required elsewhere.
He lunged into her, filling her in that heated way he did, and her mind swirled to get hold of the words he’d uttered, battling to hold onto them even as he lunged again, deeper this time, faster, more ferocious. And then his mouth was on hers, his slick body bucking into hers again and again, and she was lost. She spun away, or so it seemed, wild and out of control and weightless, his cry of triumph her trophy.
‘Come back with me,’ he urged through breath still uneven, after they’d collapsed together, heavy-limbed and exhausted.
‘I can’t,’ she replied, confused and unsure, and not knowing what it was he actually was asking of her, what it meant. ‘Your mother—’
‘You cannot stay now. Everyone will know the truth—that you have been with me. In Australia it would not matter, but here in Qusay…’
She put a hand to her head. He didn’t have to finish the sentence. He was right. Here she would pay for her recklessness, in sly looks and whispered innuendo. Hussein’s mother alone would guarantee there was a steady stream of gossip about her failed daughter-in-law after the humiliation of her ejection from the palace. But Australia?