the pouting mounds of her breasts, fingers grazing her tightly beaded nipples and tugging them before he put his mouth there with hungry urgency. Her back arched, arrows of flaming need slivering through her quivering length to the heart of her. Sweet sensation tugged at her with every suck of his lips, every lash of his tongue, and then he kissed her again and her fingers knotted in his black hair. Tiny little sounds broke in her convulsing throat as he tugged off her panties and traced the swollen flesh between her thighs. A single finger pierced her and she cried out, already so hot, so ready she was wet and oversensitive.
‘Don’t wait,’ she heard herself mumble, wanting, needing, strung on a high of anticipation.
But Jaul never had been a male prone to following instructions in bed and he teased her first, toying with the tiny button of her desire so that she gasped and her hips jerked and her legs flailed and what remained of her control was ruthlessly wrenched from her. He shimmied down the bed and used his mouth and his tongue on her most tender flesh. From that point, she no longer knew what she was doing, was positively enslaved by the wanton hunger beating like an angry drum inside her, pushing her responses higher and higher until her whole body convulsed on a bitingly fierce climax, wave after wave of almost forgotten intense pleasure pounding through her weakened length.
‘That’s one,’ Jaul husked with his unforgettable confidence, dark eyes shimmering gold pools of hunger as what remained of his clothing went sailing across the room. He tore the corner from a small foil pack with his teeth and came down to her, lean brown powerful body arching over hers with balletic grace and all the hard, driving promise of extravagant pleasure she had learned to expect from him.
I’m not doing this, I’m not really doing this, she reasoned crazily with herself, still intoxicated by the physical gratification she had denied herself for too long. The long, slow, torturous glide of him into her damp sheath was irresistible, stretching sensitive tissue before sinking deep in a deliriously energising thrust. She strained up to him and she couldn’t help it because excitement was powering her and he was moving, hard and fast, sending ripples of deliciously dark erotic sensation travelling through her lower limbs. His rhythm was the blinding white heat of passion and she was lost and defenceless against the erotic moves of his lithe, strong body, caught up in the moment and reaching desperately for the highest peak with every sobbing, gasping breath. And then the scorching, blinding heat splintered into ecstasy as potent as an explosive charge and she cried out as the voluptuous, spellbinding pleasure expanded and flooded her with sweet sensation in the aftermath.
Afterwards, Chrissie wasn’t even quite sure where she was because Jaul was still holding her close and that felt both familiar and strange and she didn’t know how to react to it. Instead she lay there like a stick of rock, barely breathing, under attack from a roaring grip of discomfiture. On the very edge of the divorce that she had told him she wanted she had slept with him again. Humiliation engulfed her and powered her into pulling free and rolling over in silence to the other side of the bed.
Powered by no similar onslaught of self-consciousness and regret, Jaul got the message and sprang out of bed. ‘We start again,’ he pronounced with decision as he stretched, his long brown back rippling with muscle in the sunlight.
And somehow the very fact that it was still daylight and that her innocent children were napping somewhere in the huge house made Chrissie feel even more guilty and conflicted than ever. In that turmoil of uneasy emotion she almost didn’t notice the scarring on Jaul’s back as he strode towards what she assumed to be the bathroom. Striated silvery lines marked his spine and she frowned, momentarily sidestepping her other anxieties to say abruptly, ‘How did you get the scars on your back?’
‘In an accident...car,’ Jaul told her flatly.
As he stood there, naked and brown and gorgeous, his perfect profile turned towards her, she wondered if he had always had the scars and she simply hadn’t noticed them. How observant had she been of his back view? she asked herself wryly, dismissing her momentary concern to let the other feelings of confusion and self-loathing engulf her again.
‘I still want the divorce,’ Chrissie told him stonily.
His strong jawline clenched. ‘We’ll discuss it after I have a shower.’
‘OK.’ Like someone desperate to pull clean linen over a mistake, Chrissie was eager for him to get dressed and leave her free to do the same.
‘There’s another shower off the room next door,’ Jaul remarked tautly. ‘I’ll use it.’
‘Your bodyguards aren’t standing outside the door, are they?’ Chrissie checked.
‘They’ll be downstairs.’ Jaul sent her a perceptive appraisal from grave dark eyes. ‘It is not their business to monitor or discuss my private life and they know it well.’
Chrissie was scarlet to her hairline, could feel her very cheeks throbbing with unwelcome heat. ‘I’ll use the other shower,’ she said quietly.
‘We are married. There is nothing to be embarrassed about,’ Jaul murmured soothingly.
He strode into the bathroom releasing Chrissie from paralysis and she fled from the bed, snatching up clothes, pulling them on any old way before creeping from the room and literally tiptoeing into the bathroom next door to make use of the facilities. But washing didn’t noticeably make her feel any better. She had insisted that she wanted a divorce and then fallen into bed with him again and now he thought he had her exactly where he wanted her. Was that so surprising?
Chrissie would not have put it past Jaul to have deliberately set out to get her horizontal. He was no slowcoach with women, no fool when it came to what mattered. His passion was irresistible but he would know perfectly well that she would feel tormented by what had just happened between them and he probably felt quite self-satisfied because he had proved his point: she did still want him and crave him in the most basic of ways.
That meant more to Jaul than it meant to her though. When she had first met Jaul he had been a sexual predator, programmed to take advantage of willing women even though he had not behaved that way with her. In fact, although they had hit astonishing highs in the lesser intimacy stakes, Jaul had married her before he actually had full sex with her, making her appreciate even back then that in some ways Jaul was much more anchored in his own culture than she had ever properly appreciated. It had also made her wonder in low moments after he had disappeared if she had won Jaul purely by saying no for so long and thereby acquiring all the glorious lustre of a challenge and a worthwhile trophy. Was that the simple explanation of why the heir to a Gulf throne had chosen to deem an ordinary Yorkshire girl special enough to marry? But then had he ever planned on it being a permanent marriage?
But that past was long gone and she was over it, Chrissie reminded herself as she got dressed again. Just not as over him as she had thought she was, a little inner voice reminded her deflatingly. Jaul would think he had won now, would assume she would become his wife again. It probably was just that basic for him, his belief that if she had sex with him again it meant he had her back.
And whose fault was it that he would now be thinking that? Chrissie boiled with regret inside herself. Pure naked lust had overwhelmed her. It was a fallacy to believe that only men could react like that, she ruminated unhappily, a nonsense to assume that a woman couldn’t feel the same way. She had never been with anyone other than Jaul but she had learned a lot about that side of her nature even in the short time they had actually lived together and knew that she was a passionate woman. And the only reason she hadn’t slept with anyone else since Jaul was that she had yet to meet any male who had the same highly charged sexual effect on her that he did.
* *
