answer in the hot gleam of his eyes and the immediate response of his body!
‘Hold me, Rashid,’ she commanded him boldly, shuddering violently as he did so, tightening his arms around her so that they were body to body, so that she could feel the heavy, exciting thud of his heart.
‘Love me!’ she whispered passionately against his hot skin, knowing that he could not hear the betraying words, only feel the warmth of her breath.
She heard—and felt—the low growl of sound he made deep in his throat! Frustration? Longing?
Her body responded to it immediately, her lips parting eagerly for the savage sweet pleasure of his kiss.
Instantly she was plunged into a spiral of aching need, a swift descent into the thick velvet heat of her own most primitive longings. Her hand pressed to the back of Rashid’s head, she urged him to increase the pressure of his mouth against her own, until all rational thought was suspended beneath its bruisingly passionate heat.
Petra knew that she should have been horrified by and contemptuous of her own behaviour, that she should have totally resisted her own desire. But instead she could feel her heart turning over inside her chest and then slamming heavily into her ribs as shockingly elemental and savage emotions exploded into life inside her. She had wanted this so much, she recognised dizzily. She had wanted, needed him so much!
‘Petra,’ Rashid groaned against her mouth. ‘This isn’t…’
He moved, his hand accidentally brushing against her breast, and Petra froze. In the darkness she could feel his gaze searching the distance between them, penetrating the moon-silvered darkness and then fixing unerringly on the betraying peak of her nipple, where it pouted with deliberate invitation so dangerously close to his stilled hand.
‘Petra?’ This time when he said her name it held a different note, a male huskiness and timbre that her sensitive female ears interpreted as an open acknowledgement of his desire for her.
She could feel the power that his desire for her gave her. She was all Eve, a wanton temptress, holding her breath whilst she willed him to reach out to her, for her, already knowing the pleasure he would give her.
Very slowly his hand moved back towards her breast. Petra exhaled shakily, and then closed her eyes as he stroked her skin with the lightest of touches—so light that it was little more than a breath, and yet so sensual that her whole breast seemed to swell and yearn towards him.
‘Petra.’
This time her name was muffled beneath the slow, lingering kisses he was threading around the base of her throat like a necklace. A necklace that reached down between her breasts and was then strung from the upper curve of one breast to the other.
At some stage Petra had started to tremble. Tiny little inner secret tremors at first, but by the time Rashid was cupping one breast in his hand, laving the delighted pink-flushed crest of the other with his tongue, they had turned into galvanic shudders of uncontrollable mute delight. And then not so mute, when Petra was forced to bite down hard on her bottom lip to prevent herself from crying out aloud.
When Rashid saw what she was doing he lifted his mouth from her nipple to watch her, and then slid his finger into her mouth, freeing her bottom lip whilst he told her thickly, ‘Taste me instead, Petra!’
Her whole body reacted to his words, swept with a molten need that burned openly in her eyes.
‘Yes! Yes!’ he told her savagely, even though she had said nothing, spoken no question. But Petra knew that he had heard the silent hungry longing of her body, seen her need for him in her eyes.
‘Yes,’ he repeated more softly. ‘Whatever… However… Every which way you want, Petra. Every way, until you beg me to end our mutual torment.’
As he was speaking he was kissing her. Tiny slow kisses that were a torment in themselves as his hands shaped her body, effortlessly drawing from it everything that it ached so wantonly to give him and everything that she herself did not.
Her need, herself, her life. Her love…
She cried out in shocked denial under the touch of his tongue against her sex, and then cried out again in a low, guttural woman’s cry of acknowledgement of the pleasure he was showing her. But when he moaned in response, and placed her hand on his body, her reaction caused him to lift his head and demand rawly, ‘Did you think you are the only one to have pleasure in what I’m doing, in the feel of you, the heat of you, the taste of you? I’ve hungered for you like this Petra, for this intimacy with you… this possession of you.’
As he stopped speaking he turned his head and kissed the inside of her thigh. Petra trembled and then moaned as he kissed her again, more intimately. Her longing for his physical possession of her overwhelmed every other emotion she felt surging through her in an unstoppable, undammable torrent.
Petra didn’t know if she had actually reached for Rashid or if he had simply known how she felt, how she ached… how she loved and needed. But suddenly he was there, where she most wanted him to be. Where she most needed him to be. Filling her with surge after powerful surge of exquisite sensation and unparallelled ecstasy.
She wanted it to never end. And yet she knew she would die if she did not reach the summit, the frantic crescendo of her completion. She thought she already knew the sensation, the pleasure, the fulfilment, but when the spasms began and she felt the hot sweet thickness of Rashid’s own release within her she knew that all she had known had been a pale remembered shadow of real pleasure.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘PETRA, are you sure you are all right?’
‘Grandfather, I am fine,’ Petra fibbed as she turned away from him to prevent him from seeing her tears.
He had arrived unexpectedly that morning, just after Rashid had left to visit the stables, anxious to find out how Petra was for himself.
‘No, you aren’t,’ he insisted, coming up to her and turning her towards him. ‘You are crying. What’s wrong?’ he asked sternly.
Petra bit her lip. She still felt seared, scorched, shamed by her memories of the previous night! And there was no point in her trying to mentally blame Rashid! She had been the one to instigate things… even if he had carried them… and her… to a point… place… she had never imagined existed!
She was furious with herself for her weakness, unable to accept her own behaviour. How could she have been so weak-willed as to give in to temptation? Why couldn’t she make herself stop loving him? Especially when she knew there was no future for them; when she knew she couldn’t trust him.
He didn’t love her. He might have returned early from his business trip. He might have made love with her last night… he might even have stayed with her until she had fallen asleep. But he had never made any attempt to talk to her, to tell her…
To tell her what? That he loved her? But she already knew that he did not, didn’t she? She already knew that he had been forced to marry her!
They were trapped in a marriage which could only cause them both misery. And now, thanks to her behaviour last night, there could be additional complications. What if this time she had conceived his baby?
‘You are not happy,’ her grandfather was
