Sheikh's Captured Bride

Long brown fingers lifted to the rounded perfection of pale breasts topped with distended pink nipples and he stroked the tightly beaded tips before he pushed her gently back against the pillows and bent his tousled dark head to put his sensual mouth there instead, suckling at the straining peaks until she gasped for breathe, shaken by even what she recognised to be a relatively minor intimacy. Even so, it was an intimacy that sent arrows of fire hurtling to her womb and her thighs trembled at the thought of what was yet to come. Let it be all right this time, she pleaded inside her head, snapping her eyes shut, seeking to blank out her thoughts lest the old panic take hold of her again.

Zahir couldn’t quite believe that this was Sapphire, lying there, admittedly passive but not freaking out. It felt just a little like all his fantasies rolling up in one go and that disturbed him. He didn’t know what he had expected and could only recognise how much she had changed while wondering with dark, forbidding fury which of her men had succeeded where he had so comprehensively failed. That mystery burned through his bloodstream like acid and he had to fight it, suppress it and exert iron control not to ask questions and demand answers. On the other hand, what if she was acting like a human sacrifice because that was how she felt?

He tasted her lush mouth with driving hunger, tried and failed to squash that inner question and lifted his head again. ‘If you don’t want this, tell me,’ he told her.

Consternation filled Saffy to overflowing as she registered that evidently she wasn’t putting on a very good impression of being a relaxed and experienced lover. She sat up with a start, her pale hands fixing to his smooth bronzed shoulders, blue eyes wide. ‘I want this…I want you.’

‘Then touch me,’ he growled low in his throat, his hunger unconcealed in his star-bright gaze.

And on the edge of fright and uncertainty, she did, smoothing her hands over his warm golden skin, feeling the rope of muscles beneath his hard, flat stomach and his sudden driving tension as she found him with her fingers. Hard and silky and so velvety smooth and large. She gulped at the very thought of what he was going to do with it…if she managed—and she had to manage, had to be normal for the sake of her own sanity and his.

Zahir groaned with unashamed sensuality, lying back against the pillows, his black hair in stark contrast to the pale linen, eyes half closed and screened by his outrageous black lashes. ‘Not too much,’ he warned her unevenly. ‘I’m too aroused.’

So, she stayed with the touching, her hand trembling slightly while she felt her body progressively warm in a great surging wash of desire. She needed him to touch her, needed that so badly that it hurt yet she was terrified that she might lose her nerve, her control. He hooked a long thigh over hers, nudging her legs apart, and she stopped breathing as if she were a candle being snuffed out, for this was the acid test, the one she couldn’t really call and couldn’t afford to fail. Long brown fingers smoothed down her thigh as if he knew on some level that, even hungry as she was, she was scared as no adult woman should be scared. After all, it wasn’t as though he had ever physically hurt her. She regulated her breathing, cleared her head of such dangerous thoughts, for thinking that way was surely like inviting her phobia back in. He skated through the crisp golden curls on her mound and she bit her tongue so badly she tasted blood in her mouth and she was trembling, all hyped up with expectation, wanting and not wanting in that moment to test her boundaries. New boundaries, she reminded herself resolutely.

He kissed her again and she squirmed against him, insanely conscious of that exploring hand touching where she had never been touched in adult memory, rubbing over that wildly sensitive little button that she hadn’t even known existed for more years than she cared to recall. Sensation sparked through her, startling in its very intensity, sending another cloud of heat through her quivering length. Before she even guessed what he was about to do, he eased a finger into her and she didn’t go off into a panic attack, didn’t jackknife back from him as though he had assaulted her. It felt strange to be touched like that, by someone else rather than by herself, but it didn’t hurt and it didn’t make her feel sick or frightened, and hope rose in a heady gush inside her that she was going to be all right, after all, and the scene was not set for another disaster.

With so much frantic reflection taking place inside her head, it took a minute at least for Saffy to register that she liked what he was doing, the sweet rise of sensation fanning through her lower body as his mouth toyed with an achingly sensitive nipple and his fingers delved into the tender wetness of her body. She hadn’t expected to like it, she acknowledged, had simply regarded it as something she had to get through, the mountain of her virginal state at nearly twenty-four years of age a complex challenge that had to be conquered solely for her own benefit.

‘I want you so much but you’re very tight, aziz.’ Zahir groaned, snaking down her body, and she didn’t know what he was doing and almost yelped in dismay when he put his carnal mouth between her parted thighs instead, caressing the sensitive pink folds of her femininity.

Saffy lay there like a stone dropped to the bottom of a very deep well, so far out of her depth she felt lost, indeed shattered by the gathering waves of increasingly powerful sensation that he was wringing from her untried body. The wave gathered her up and kept on pushing her higher until she was pulsing and throbbing and aching with an excitement that she had never known existed. Her hips were rising, her back was arching and then suddenly, with very little warning, the instant she had most feared was there: his bold shaft was nudging against her for penetration and she tensed, struggling not to freeze, but every skin cell in her body was gripped by nerves that her body might bottle out and let her down at the worst and most unforgivable moment.

And then she experienced the delicious friction of his entry eased by the slick dampness of her arousal. He was pushing, stretching her inner sheath with the hard, demanding pressure of his entrance and she was briefly amazed at what he felt like inside her. Instinctively she lifted her pelvis and he plunged forward and then it was done, a sharp stinging pain flashing through her so that her eyes widened and she gritted her teeth together, contriving to rein back a cry of pain. She pushed her face up into his shoulder to further conceal her reaction. He had no entitlement to the privilege of learning that, against all odds, he had become her first lover, and there was not much she would not have withstood to keep him from that knowledge. On that ungenerous thought a spasm of intense pleasure took her quite by surprise as her inner muscles tightened their grip on his intrusion.

With a low growl of satisfaction that vibrated his chest against her soft breasts, he began to move, pulling out, pushing back in. The strange seductive sensations built and she gasped, feeling her control sliding against the onslaught of a wild excitement she hadn’t anticipated. Excitement roared through her, her heart hammering while she panted for breath. He lifted her legs over his shoulders, rising up over her like a conquering god, his lean darkly handsome face flushed and taut with driving desire and uninhibited satisfaction while he drove into her hard and fast with a pagan rhythm that put her every sense on overload.

Nothing had ever felt so good or so necessary to her. Had he stopped she would have screamed. He touched the tiny button below her mound again, rubbing fast, and the golden light already expanding inside her burst through into brilliance and exploded in a series of violent aftershocks throughout her body. The waves of hot, sweet pleasure racked her with compulsive shivers of disbelief and a certain amount of awe, for she had never dreamt that he might make her feel so much. He shuddered over her with a moan of intense masculine satisfaction and then fell still, letting her legs fall back down on the bed and rolling off her to pull her close.

‘That was absolutely amazing,’ Zahir breathed, his diction ragged, his accent pronounced, his chest still heaving against her as he pulled her close, their bodies damp with perspiration and sliding against each other.

But Saffy’s sense of perfect peace lasted for only a few seconds. What struck her as most amazing at that moment was how much other women must have taught him, how much practice he must have had in other beds to have gained the sexual expertise he had just demonstrated. That fast she wanted to thump him hard and kick him out of bed and her hands knotted into fists of restraint below the sheet. Careful, she told herself in fierce and bemused rebuke, for she didn’t recognise the feelings bombarding her. He was her ex-husband, not her lover, and she wasn’t jealous or possessive where he was concerned. He meant absolutely nothing to her and she didn’t understand why he was still holding her and pressing a kiss to her delicate jaw bone as though they had shared something special. After all, she had just used him to have sex for the first time and he had been good…well, amazing, to borrow his word. But that was an acknowledgement that only made her fists knot tighter and her temper flare even higher, for nothing could have been more different from the tentative and inexperienced young husband she remembered than the uninhibited demonstration of raunchy sex he had just treated her to.

Without hesitation, indeed reacting on pure gut instinct, Saffy pulled free of Zahir and slid off the bed in one strong movement, a mane of rumpled golden hair falling round her pale slender length like a veil. ‘Do I qualify for a car to the airport now?’ she asked thinly, blue eyes cold as the polar wastes.

Raking long brown fingers through his black hair, Zahir sat up in the tangled sheets, the white linen providing a striking foil for his golden skin. He tensed and swore and, assuming his reaction was the result of her sudden exit from the intimacy of the bed, she flicked him a bitter glance. Yes, he was still unquestionably gorgeous, but she hated him, totally hated him, wanted to be gone now as fast as possible, escaping the scene of the crime. No doubt he thought he had used her but it was the other way round and she would have liked the freedom to tell him that, but was still not prepared to spill her deepest secrets to him.

‘I want you to stay until tomorrow,’ Zahir admitted in a low-pitched tone evocative of anticipation.

Her blue eyes flashed. ‘No. I’m done here. I want to go home right now.’

Zahir, gloriously unaccustomed to being in receipt of a negative female response since his divorce, stared back at her with faint but perceptible hauteur while he wondered what had gone wrong. ‘I don’t do one-nighters.’

Her lovely face without expression, Saffy dealt him an impatient glance, eyes as unemotional as stones. ‘I do and, as I said, I’m done.’

Determined not to meet his gaze, Saffy focused on the neat pile of freshly laundered clothes sitting on a chair and wondered when they had arrived, where they had contrived to get washed and ironed and when they had been returned, for all of those inconsequential thoughts were safer than thinking about the insane passion she had just shared with Zahir. She scooped her clothes up and headed at a brisk pace for the bathroom.

Zahir leapt out of bed and reached the door a step ahead of her, one brown hand bracing on the door to keep it shut. ‘There’s something I should tell you first.’

Refusing to look directly at him, Saffy grimaced. ‘What?’ she asked impatiently.

‘The condom I used broke…I suspect I was too passionate. I assume that you’re on the contraceptive pill and that there’s no risk of conception?’ he pressed with the evident belief that that was the natural order for a woman like her.

For a split second her eyes narrowed and she paled as she assimilated that shocking information, suddenly grasping what had most probably provoked his curse mere minutes earlier, and although a chill of dismay gripped her she nodded immediate agreement. ‘Of course,’ she lied, wanting him to believe that she was already taking that precaution against pregnancy because she slept with other men, for that belief best conserved her pride. And she also knew how much that belief would annoy him…for he was possessive to his backbone. At least, he had been when she knew him, she qualified grimly, but who could say what drove him now? Five years’ separation, a lot of other women and possession of a throne had changed him: of course, they had. It would be very naïve of her to think otherwise.

‘I’ll organise transport,’ Zahir breathed grittily. ‘And see that the film shot of the commercial is also delivered to you before you depart.’

‘Is that my reward?’ Saffy enquired drily, concealing her relief that he was willing to hand over the film, well aware that the film crew and her clients would be going mad over its confiscation.

His handsome features clenched. ‘If you choose to see it that way—’

‘Oh, I do,’ Saffy asserted, watching gold glimmer like a flame in his dark as midnight eyes and loving the burn of it, knowing she had annoyed him as he threw open the door for her to leave the bedroom section of the tent. ‘And while I remember it, I would advise you to look more closely into the disappearance of that five million pounds you mentioned—because I’m telling you now, I didn’t receive a penny of it!’

Zahir inclined his arrogant dark head in grudging acknowledgement. ‘I will have the matter investigated,’ he conceded, coldly formal in tone.

Was he offended that she hadn’t appeared to want a repeat of their intimacy? Saffy stepped into the shower and washed her skin clean of the scent of him. She felt sore, every movement of her lower limbs reminding her of his passionate possession. It was done. She was no longer a virgin. She had surmounted her fears. She was finally a normal young woman and now in a condition to consider a relationship as a potential part of her future. That was good, she told herself firmly. She forced her stiff facial muscles into a determined smile and had just wrapped a towel round her dripping body when a knock sounded on the door and heralded Zahir’s reappearance, his lean bronzed body still clad only in boxer shorts.

‘Yes?’ Saffy prompted tightly, not having wanted to see him again because seeing him hurt, made her think of the other women he had been with and, even though it wasn’t fair or even rational when she had been unable to consummate their marriage while they were together and they were now divorced, she hated him for having found pleasure and satisfaction when she could not.

‘I must have hurt you…there’s spots of blood on the sheet,’ Zahir informed her grimly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Hot colour flew into her cheeks like a banner of scarlet. It had not occurred to her that there might be any detectable physical proof of her innocence and she was mortified by his discovery. ‘You didn’t hurt me…er, it’s been a while for me, so perhaps that explains it,’ she muttered awkwardly through clenched teeth of discomfiture.

‘Why has it been a while for you?’ Zahir demanded bluntly. ‘You live with a man.’

Somehow he contrived to voice that statement in a manner and tone that implied she regularly sold her body on street corners. ‘That’s my business,’ Saffy responded flatly, her eyes veiled.

‘You should see a doctor,’ Zahir informed her curtly. ‘I can contact someone—’

‘No, thanks.’ Her cup of humiliation now truly running over and threatening to drown her, Saffy moved towards him and opened the door for his exit. ‘Excuse me, I’d like to get dressed.’

‘Sapphire…’ Frustration stamped on his lean dark features, Zahir glowered down at her, smouldering golden eyes alight. ‘Why are you behaving like this? Is this a habit of yours? Do you often indulge in casual sex?’

She refused to look at him and her lush mouth compressed so hard that her lips turned bloodless. ‘That would be kissing and telling, which I definitely don’t do.’

CHAPTER FIVE

SAFFY RESTED BACK in her cream leather reclining seat in Zahir’s incredibly opulent private jet, but beneath the skin her every muscle was tense and she could not relax.

Even so, Zahir had certainly ensured that she was travelling back to London in style. She frowned at the acknowledgement because she would have preferred to consign every image and conversation of the past twenty-four hours to a mental dustbin sealed with a good strong lid. She had slept with her ex, no big deal, she told herself with rigorous resolve. It was only a major event for her because having sex had been something she had, until relatively recently, been afraid she couldn’t ever do. She had used him. That was how she had to look on what had happened. If he knew that his temper would have gone nuclear because Zahir expected everything on his own terms. In that spirit he had married her and in the same spirit he had decided to divorce her again. Nothing had ever been equitably discussed: he had been happy to make his mind up for both of them.

Five years ago, they had landed in Maraban as a newly married couple and that too had been very much on his terms, with her not having the first clue about the dysfunctional royal family she had joined. His father, King Fareed, had been livid that his younger son had married a foreigner and had initially refused to even meet her. She had met Zahir’s older brother, Omar, and his wife, Azel. Omar had died in a car crash a few months after Saffy arrived. As Omar and his wife had been childless, Zahir’s importance to his father had mushroomed once he became the heir-in-waiting and Saffy had seen even less of her husband as he was forced to take on the ceremonial roles that had once been his brother’s.

Staying in the royal palace just outside the city limits, Saffy had been sentenced to a very boring and hidden existence. As her father-in-law refused to accept her as part of the family and was determined to keep the presence of a Western blonde in the palace a secret, she had not been allowed to go out and about in Maraban and explore freely. Indeed aside of a few stolen shopping expeditions in the company of her widowed sister-in-law, Azel, Saffy had barely gone out at all. Zahir had declared that eventually his father would accept her as his wife but that she would have to be patient. But twelve months living like the invisible woman had convinced Saffy that her marriage had been a major mistake, particularly when things between her and Zahir had gone badly awry as well.

‘You’re very unhappy here,’ Zahir had acknowledged the very last time she saw him during their marriage. ‘You’ve been telling me that you wanted a divorce for the past six months and now I must agree.’

‘Just like that you suddenly agree?’ Saffy had yelled at him incredulously, shock at his change of heart winging through her in sickening waves as she realised he had clearly had enough of her and their marriage. ‘But you swore that you still loved me, that we could work it out…’

‘But now I want you to go home to London as soon as it can be arranged. I want to divorce you and set you free,’ Zahir had countered as stonily as though she had not spoken.

It was true that for weeks whenever they argued she had hurled the threat of a divorce at him on a fairly frequent basis. But she had never really meant it, had simply been dramatising herself and struggling to make her young husband take her unhappiness seriously. But she had somehow still expected Zahir to continue to refuse to even consider divorce as the answer to their problems. Coming at her out of the blue like that, his volte-face had shocked her and pleading in the face of his clear determination to get rid of her had been more than she could bear. For so long, regardless of their difficulties, she had clung to her conviction that Zahir still loved her no matter what and that what they had together was still worth fighting for. Deprived of that consolation and cruelly rejected by the divorce that swiftly followed, Saffy had been heartbroken and not surprisingly had felt abandoned.

Her older sister, Kat, who had raised her from the age of twelve, had tried to comfort Saffy, pointing out that King Fareed’s opposition to their marriage must finally have worn Zahir down while reminding Saffy that neither she nor Zahir had foreseen the very real difficulties that would arise in Saffy’s struggle to adapt to life in a different country, far from family and friends. Saffy didn’t want to remember how appallingly she had missed Zahir after she left Maraban or how many months had passed before she could enjoy the freedom she had reclaimed and stop thinking about Zahir at least once every minute. She had genuinely loved him and it hurt to appreciate that he had moved on from her so much more easily than she had moved on from him. Maybe he had never really loved her, Saffy conceded painfully. Maybe it had always been about the sex and only the sex. Certainly, given his behaviour in shipping her out to the desert for seduction, that looked like the most viable explanation. It was equally agonising to admit that had she been capable of doing what she had just done with him five years earlier they might still have been together. Or would they have been? Was that just fantasy land? Perhaps all along she had only been a fling in the form of a wife for Zahir.

But didn’t she have rather more pressing concerns in the present? What about that contraceptive accident they had had? Saffy tensed, her appetite evaporating in front of the beautiful lunch she had been served as her skin chilled with complete fright at the idea of being faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Once she had believed she would never have children because she wasn’t able to have sex or even handle the concept of artificial insemination. Now she knew differently and knew her future had opened up another avenue once barred to her. So, if she did fall pregnant, what would she do about it? She had friends who would rush to request the morning-after pill after such a mishap to ensure that no conception took place, but if against all the odds new life did begin inside her, Saffy registered that she was totally unwilling to consider a termination. In that moment she was suddenly realising with a heart that felt full enough to burst that a baby would mean the sun, the moon and the stars to her and that there was nothing she would cherish more. It might be a disaster as far as her current clients were concerned, but it would only be a short-term one and surely her earning power wouldn’t die overnight. She breathed in deep and slow, both terrified and enervated by the risk she was prepared to take with her own body. If conception happened, she decided, it would happen and she would embrace it without regret.

Having dropped off the film of the shoot with the exceedingly relieved production company, Saffy caught the tube back to the two-bedroom apartment she had bought with Cameron. Cameron, a keen cook, was in the kitchen dicing vegetables, but it was the sight of the small brunette perched on the counter chatting nineteen to the dozen to him that startled Saffy.

‘Saffy!’ Topsy cried, velvety somber eyes full of warmth as she leapt off the counter like a miniature whirlwind and threw herself exuberantly into her much taller sister’s arms. At slightly less than four feet eleven inches tall, Topsy was tiny. ‘I wish you hadn’t been away this week. I wanted to go out with you to celebrate the end of my exams!’

Saffy’s eyes stung as she gratefully accepted her youngest sister’s affectionate hug. Topsy always wore her feelings on her sleeve. At eighteen years of age, having just finished school, Topsy was much less damaged by their disturbed childhood and more outgoing than her older sisters. She was also exceptionally clever and overflowing with an irrepressible joie de vivre that few could resist. Yet as Saffy studied the younger woman she saw shadows below her eyes and a tension far removed from Topsy’s usual laid-back vibe and she wondered what was wrong.