Forbidden: The Sheikh's Virgin Read online

  She blinked up at him and her brain shorted, with not a clue why he should be talking about bicycles, knowing only that Rafiq’s mouth was descending again, knowing that he would kiss her again and that it had already been too long since the last one.

  The touch of lips, the nuzzle of noses, the rasp of whiskered skin against her cheek—how could such simple things feel so good? Even the heat emanating from the man hovering over her warmed her soul and pleasured her senses, driving her need.

  She mewed and sighed as sensation rippled into sensation, her fingers curling into the coverlet as he kissed her throat, suckled at her flesh, turned her inside out with desire. Why had nobody warned her it could be like this?

  And then his mouth ventured lower, his lips closing over a breast, his tongue circling her aching nipple. Two thin layers of cloth were no barrier. The shockwaves were spearing down to her core.

  Or had she just forgotten how good it could be to feel?

  All those years when she’d buried everything. Her needs. Her desires. And especially her memories of a dark-haired youth who’d made her feel like a woman. Beautiful. Desirable. The woman he had promised not to take until a wedding night that would never be.

  Even then he had set her alight with his touch, just the trail of his fingers down her arm, the feel of his hand in hers. Even then, in her youth, she’d known how good one special man could make her feel.

  One special man.

  That was Rafiq.

  And he was here now.

  She shrugged off her inexperience as Rafiq peeled away the layers of her shame and his hot mouth devoured her breasts, her stomach, and then moved back to suckle at her rock-hard nipples. Gasping, breathless, she let her useless hands find a purpose after all. She reached for him, found him, felt the jolt that moved through him as her fingers spread, taking the measure of his chest and sliding down his sides before letting her fingers trail back up the sleek wall of muscled flesh.

  Air whooshed out of him as her fingers found the tight nubs of his nipples, hard as pebbles on the beach, and flicked over them with her thumb, and there was something empowering knowing that she had caused his reaction. Oh, he felt so good—the sculpted planes of his chest rippling under her hands so perfect! She thought briefly about all those wasted years when she’d felt nothing but humiliation. Nothing but shame. Then she thought fleetingly about all those wasted minutes and seconds when she’d been lying here, too tentative to reach out and touch the man above her who was making her feel again. Making her blood fizz.

  Wasted years. Wasted moments, every one of them.

  She would waste no more.

  Starting now.

  Drowning under his kisses, she let her palms follow the sculpted arch of his back, finding the band of his boxers and pressing her fingernails beneath, her fingers tracing the line that circled his firm hips, until her hands were almost between them and the only place to go was down…

  A hand snared her wrist.

  ‘Not so fast.’ She blinked up at him, wondering if she’d done something wrong, wondering if she’d just revealed the extent of her inexperience, to see eyes wild with want, his features taut with control. ‘If you’re going to touch me there, I really need you out of that dress.’

  He was just the man to peel it from her. He rocked back on his knees, his hands at her ankles before they started the slow ascent once more, each leg getting the special treatment, skimming the fabric of her gown from her skin and gathering it at his wrists as he went.

  He peeled the silken fabric away, uncovering her, exposing her inch by slow inch, and yet still his eyes never strayed from hers. When his thumbs grazed her inner thighs, and her muscles clenched and jerked, he simply smiled with satisfaction—and she understood, because of the moment her hands had grazed his nipples and he had started, and she had realised the power of her own touch.

  He wanted her to feel good. He delighted in it. There was no need to feel apprehensive or afraid. She was in safe hands.

  She lifted her hips before he had to ask, allowing the swish of bunched stone-encrusted silk to slide past her until his hands gathered at her waist, his thumbs performing lazy circles around her navel.

  Lazy circles that felt anything but. Lazy circles that turned her insides to jelly.

  He leaned over then, pressed his mouth to the physical reminder of her birth and kissed it reverently before he rose. ‘We need to get this off,’ he muttered, sounding strangely troubled, his voice as thick as the sinking sands that had swallowed her car. And then leaned down and drew her into his embrace as he kissed her again, and she let him draw the garment over her head.

  She heard a sound like a waterfall as the bejewelled gown pooled on the rug, felt one brief moment of regret for its unfair fate—and just as swiftly forgot it as Rafiq chose that same moment to look down upon her body.

  ‘I thought you were beautiful last night, in the moonlight, emerging from the sea,’ he said. ‘But tonight you are perfection.’

  Her heart swelled in her chest. She was so close to tears—but tears of euphoria and not of sadness. For he was a god and he was calling her perfect! She thanked whatever kind fortune had brought her this moment, this night. For she would remember it for ever.

  He lowered himself over her, so that their bodies met length to delicious length, their mouths enmeshed, their tongues tangled, their bodies skin to skin apart from the underwear they both wore—the underwear Rafiq was already intent on removing. He kissed the line of her bra straps, sliding them from her shoulders in the process. And then, with a skilful hand, the reason for which she didn’t want to dwell on, he snapped open the closure at her back. With a flick of his wrists, even that scrap of material was gone.

  The lamplight threw crazy shadows across the room—crazy shadows that merged with the crazy ideas in her mind and the crazy feelings in her heart. She had loved Rafiq once. He had loved her. Could he love her again?

  Then his hot tongue circled one nipple, sending spears of pleasure down to her very core, and she didn’t care what he felt.

  She loved him. She wanted him. He was here now.

  That was enough.

  His hot mouth was at her breasts, his teeth and tongue combining in their unmerciful assault against one tight nipple and then the other, and her spine was arching with the delicious pleasure, so that she was barely aware of the downward slide of her underwear, or of his.

  Until his tongue circled a nipple and she felt his hand cup her mound, felt his long fingers separate her, heat into molten heat, driving her head into the pillows with the sheer force of it. With the wonder of it. With the near agony and ecstasy when he zeroed in on that tight nub of nerves and circled it, the flick of a fingertip turning her inside out.

  ‘Rafiq!’ she cried, not entirely understanding what she was so desperate for, only knowing that his touch, her very delight, was suddenly her torture.

  ‘I know,’ he whispered, and he suckled at her throat on the way to reclaiming her mouth, ‘I feel it too.’ And he lay atop her and she felt him, naked and wanting, hard and heavy against her belly. ‘I can’t wait either.’

  And this time her stab of fear at what was to follow was blunted by his hot kisses and the knowledge of his own desire and the hot rush of moisture between her thighs. She wanted him. That thought was paramount. She wanted him more than anything in the world, wanted to feel him inside her. Deep inside her, where her body ached so very much to receive him. And she wanted him now.

  ‘Look at me,’ she heard him urge. ‘Open your eyes.’ And, when finally she had complied, ‘Keep them open. I want to see your eyes when you come.’

  He’d sheathed himself and was already between her legs, his thickness nudging at her slick entrance, and her breath hitched, the internal muscles she’d never known already participating, trying to draw him in to their own dance of seduction.

  She was burning with need, burning with fire, and the weight of him was heavy against her flesh. Heavy and yet compelling. A
nd still she could feel his control, his tension, as the muscles bunched in his arms around her head, as his body seemed drawn tighter than a bowstring, waiting to release the arrow.

  And she looked for him then—because if he was going to see her come, she wanted the very same. Their eyes connected, fused, and the circuit was complete.

  And then he moved.

  His hips swayed against hers, once and then again. She felt the push and the power, his masculine force against her feminine core, and feared for a moment the impossibility of it ever happening. But he must have read her panic in her eyes, because he slowed and kissed her. Slowly, thoroughly, soul-deep. So deep she melted into him even as he angled her higher.

  She looked up at him in that moment and loved him. With her eyes and her heart and her very soul. Loved him for waiting, for hesitating, and for not rushing her. Loved him for the youth he had been. Loved him for the man he was now.

  Loved him as he drove into her in one mind-blowing lunge that had her screaming his name.

  It couldn’t be possible. Rafiq was immobilised, buried to the hilt inside her. Buried tight.

  Surely it wasn’t possible.

  And she opened her eyes and looked up at him, a tear sliding from each eye and scampering for her hair, wonder and astonishment meeting his questioning gaze, telling him that it was.

  ‘Please,’ she pleaded, her voice husky with sex. ‘Don’t stop. I want you.’

  And even inside her he felt himself swell against the press of her tight, slick walls.

  She was a virgin. Had been a virgin.

  ‘Please,’ she repeated impatiently, tilting her hips in a way far more persuasive than any words.

  One hundred questions raced through his mind, one hundred answers eluded him, and yet he knew this was no time for explanations. The moment he had waited for in vain so many years ago, the moment he had been cheated of, was now his. Totally, exclusively, gloriously his.

  And she was glorious.

  With her black hair splayed across his pillow, her breasts firm and hard-tipped, the sensual curve of waist to hip where they joined.

  She was his. Only his. And he was glad.

  He moved inside her, testing her depths, and she cried out—this time in pleasure—her head pressing into the pillow, before he slowly withdrew, her fingers curling into the bedcover even as her inexperienced muscles clung desperately to him, as if afraid he would not return. She didn’t know him well, for there was no way he could not.

  He could take it slowly, in deference to her inexperience. He could try to be gentle. But something told him she wanted neither slow nor gentle. Whatever had been the problem in her marriage, she didn’t want pity. She wanted him, all of him, and she would have him.

  Poised at the very brink, his body screaming for completion, he wrapped her long legs around his back. ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Feel me.’

  And then he lunged into her again, felt her stretch and hug around him, and recognised somewhere amidst the shower of stars in his brain that he was a fool for even thinking he might be able to go slowly, for there was not a chance.

  Each lunge became more desperate, each withdrawal became more fleeting, and she moved with him in the dance, welcomed him, clung to him, driving him mad with the demands of her own pulsing body.

  Until her pulses turned into red-hot conflagration and she came apart around him, her eyes wild and wanton, and it was so satisfying that he had no choice but to follow her into the raging inferno.

  ‘Did I hurt you?’ She was bundled in his arms, their bodies spooned together, as slowly they wended their way down from that mountaintop.

  ‘Only for just a second,’ she admitted hesitantly. ‘But I didn’t mind. It was wonderful.’

  ‘It was wonderful,’ he agreed, remembering just how good as he pressed his lips into her hair, breathing her in deep for the space of three long breaths before asking the question that had been uppermost in his mind.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SHE stilled in his arms, suddenly so rigid it was a wonder she didn’t snap. So he had worked it out. She’d wondered when he’d hesitated, been afraid he would stop. And yet blessedly, thankfully, he hadn’t stopped, hadn’t expressed surprise or demanded explanation. Instead he’d taken her to a place she’d never been, had shown her a world where she was a stranger, a place of miracles and wonder and magical new sensations.

  But he must have been curious. The question had been bound to come. She swallowed back on the lump in her throat and sniffed.

  ‘Ten years of marriage and still a virgin. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you want to admit to anyone.’ Her voice sounded flat, even to her own ears, and the wonder and delight of her previous words was long gone. ‘It’s not exactly the kind of thing you can be proud of.’ Her voice caught, half a hiccup, on that last word, and she jammed her eyes together to stop the memories and the tears that accompanied them. But the pictures remained; the endless humiliation persisted.

  ‘Sera?’ She felt herself tugged around to face him. ‘Look at me, Sera.’ Reluctantly she prised open her flooded eyes. ‘You were wasted on him—do you understand me? A man would be a fool not to want to make love to you. Hussein was that fool.’

  But her lips remained tightly clenched. Rafiq didn’t understand. Hussein had wanted to, had even been desperate to, she was sure. Why else make her strip in front of him and make her perform like some cheap nightclub dancer as he tugged on himself futilely? And why else would he have been so angry, so bitter, when nothing worked?

  ‘He said I wasn’t beautiful enough or enticing enough. He said it was my fault that we would never have children—that because I was so undesirable my womb would remain forever empty.’

  Blood heated in his veins, reached boiling point in the time it took to take his next breath. ‘Hussein told you that? But you didn’t believe him? You couldn’t have believed him?’

  She shrugged. It wasn’t just because of Hussein, but there was no reason to tell Rafiq that. He had discovered she was a virgin and she felt she owed him some kind of explanation. But there was no need to tell him anything else. No need to reveal any more humiliating truths.

  ‘Why else could he not make love to his own wife? His own wife, Rafiq! For ten years. Why else would he say such things if they were not true?’

  ‘Because he was using you as an excuse for his own inadequacies! I swear that if Hussein weren’t already dead, I would kill him myself.’

  ‘Rafiq, you mustn’t say that!’

  ‘Why not? It would not be murder. He was not a man. He was barely a cockroach. So why do you rush to his defence when he fed you nothing but lies, when he brainwashed you into thinking it was you with the problem?’

  ‘But you were not there. You don’t know—’

  ‘I know this. That you have no problem, Sera. You are the most desirable woman I have ever met and I have had no trouble wanting you from the moment I saw you outside my mother’s apartments.’

  He kissed the last of her tears from her eyes, pushed her hair behind her ear with her fingers and followed the movement down her neck to shoulder and below, cupping one breast in his hand. She trembled, her breast already swelling, her nipple budding hard against his palm.

  ‘Why is it so hard to believe, Sera? You are a beautiful woman. A desirable woman. Can you not see what you do to me?’

  She felt the nudge of him against her belly and looked down, gasping to see him already swelling into life again. A sizzle of anticipation coursed through her. ‘You want to do it again?’

  And he smiled. ‘And again, and again, and again.’

  His words shocked her, thrilled her, confused her. ‘But I thought you… I thought this was all about revenge. Because of what you thought you’d been cheated out of. You were so angry before. You said you hated me—’

  And he pulled her to him, cradling her head against his chest, aching because she was so right, and had just cause for t
hinking it. ‘I know, and you’re right. It was revenge in the beginning. It was a desire to get even that drove me. I wanted you to accompany me to Marrash to spite you, because I could see you were afraid.’ He paused, retraced his words. ‘It was hate. I’d had more than a decade to do nothing but build a shrine to hatred, and I worshipped there every chance I got. Seeing you again brought the hatred back tenfold. In my own perverse way, making sure you came seemed the perfect way to punish you. I wanted you to suffer in my company if you hated it that much. But I had no idea how much I would suffer in yours, purely because of wanting you.’

  She looked up at him with wide eyes. Was it possible he was telling the truth? Was it possible? ‘You really did want me?’

  ‘I never stopped wanting you,’ he confessed, running his fingers through the thick black weight of her hair to cup her neck and draw her closer into his talking kiss. ‘As you know I want you now. If you feel ready.’

  Her lips tingled as she felt his words on her lips, as his teeth nipped at her for an answer. ‘If I feel ready?’

  ‘I know you might feel too tender.’

  Parts of her did feel tender. Deliciously, lusciously tender. But definitely ready. ‘Make love with me, Rafiq.’ Make love with me and blot out the memories of Hussein and his cronies and the men who looked at me as if I was dirt. ‘Make me come apart again.’

  Three more times she’d come apart before, utterly exhausted, she’d fallen asleep in his arms. Three more times he’d marvelled at her responsive body, at the way she fitted him so perfectly. She stirred in her sleep and sighed, nestling back into him like a kitten.

  But, unusually for Rafiq after a night of sex, sleep eluded him. He lay there in the dark, listening to the sound of her breathing, slow and even, wondering what it was that felt different.