only wanted her—badly—and if they had to fight in order to light that spark between them … he was happy to fight.
He was almost smiling in anticipation when he swung into the master suite, expecting to find her once again tucked away in the small sitting room she preferred. But instead he stopped dead, his heart hammering against his chest in a manner he refused to examine too closely.
She was curled up on the far side of the great bed, fully dressed, her hands beneath her cheek. From the doorway, he could see only the shape of her in the low lights that spilled from the dressing room. That perfect hourglass that called to the male in him, that delectable shape that had inspired artists and lovers throughout the ages. The beauty of a woman’s curves—his woman’s curves—nearly took his breath.
He moved to the side of the bed and looked down at her, aware that he was scowling again, though he could not have said why. In sleep, she appeared younger than she ought to, and infinitely more fragile. He saw not a scheming tramp who’d set out to ensnare him, but an exhausted, beautiful woman. His gaze shifted to her mouth, that wicked, deliciously carnal mouth.
His hand reached out of its own accord and he watched it as if it belonged to someone else, watched his fingers trace a pattern over the flushed, warm satin of her cheek. She murmured something in her sleep, incoherent and soft, and then settled against the bed.
He should not have felt that clutching sensation in his chest, as if his heart were involved in this. He should not have felt the quiet of the room and the blanketing silence of the snow outside as some kind of sacrament. The lust that had spurred him into coming here melted into something else, something far more dangerous.
But he could not seem to help himself. He crawled onto the bed beside her, yielding to a compulsion he did not dare study too closely. For a while he lay next to her, soaking in the peace of it. The quiet sense of belonging that he now admitted had always existed, no matter what betrayals were piled on top of it.
And still she slept. Even when he moved closer and pulled her into his chest. Even as he held her, stroking her hair and freeing the wild golden curls from the tight bun she’d kept them in. Even when his lips gently brushed the crown of her head. And even as he drifted off himself, holding her as if the only thing that had ever been between them was this.
Lucy was deliciously, impossibly warm. She woke slowly, savoring the heat, and it took her long time to realize where it was coming from. She was sprawled across Rafi’s chest like a cat in a sunbeam.
Gasping, she reared back—to find Rafi wide-awake and watching her.
“Let go of me.” But her voice was the barest thread of sound. His fascinating mouth quirked.
“I am not holding you,” he pointed out, entirely too rationally. Very nearly amused. “You are lying on me.”
“I only lay down for a moment,” she began, but then he shifted beneath her. The slide of his body against hers made her shiver, as a heat of a different kind washed over her, humming into something molten and incandescent. Nor was he immune. She could feel the evidence of his desire, hard between them. She could see the flare of passion in his dark gray gaze.
It would be so much easier if she didn’t want him, too. If she didn’t love him.
“I cannot divorce you,” he said then, his hands moving to tangle in her hair. “I cannot let you leave. Qaderis keep their vows. They do not bow to the whims of modernity and merrily divorce.”
Lucy couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She couldn’t seem to pull away. She felt caught in his eyes, suspended. Her breasts were too full, pressed against the hard wall of his chest.
“What do you know about vows?” she asked. “You keep yours in name only from as far away as possible, don’t you?”
“I am not far away now,” he said quietly, his gaze intense. Searing into her. “With my body, I thee worship.” His lips crooked. “If you’ll let me.”
She shuddered as one of his hands traveled down her back, spreading fire down the length of her spine, making her yearn to move against him. With him. It had always been like this. He need only touch her, and she was his. She had followed him out of the nightclub, into his hotel room and then all the way across the planet to this tiny little country. She should hate him for it, for this power he wielded over her treasonous body, but she didn’t. She couldn’t.
She loved him.
She stared down at his beautiful face, so male and arrogant and uniquely Rafi, and she could not even manage to berate herself for that weakness as she had over these last months.
He had treated her terribly, there was no denying it. The parts of her he’d hurt still ached with it, and she thought sometimes they always would. But that didn’t change the man she knew was there, beneath all that, beyond what had happened between them. She still believed in that man. The honorable person who had vowed to protect her—and he had done so. Just not from himself.
“Lucy …” The way he said her name, with the faintest touch of his Alakkulian accent and that fire in his eyes, still undid her. Just as it always had.
She had lost so much and been so alone. She loved him. Tonight he was her husband. He would no doubt leave again as if he had never been, and she would return to England and reality—so what harm was there in treating this like all those dreams she’d had in all the lonely months she’d languished here, by herself?
She didn’t want to think anymore. She didn’t want to wonder and worry and rip herself to pieces trying to understand what had happened to this marriage, what had stolen this very connection away from them. Here, now, she just wanted to feel.
No matter how much she might live to regret it.
She bent her head and kissed him.
The fire between them blazed white hot. He pulled her closer, angling his mouth for a deeper fit, and then rolled her over, his hands moving to learn her curves anew.
And Lucy could do nothing but delight in it. In him. At last.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE snow fell all through the night, and into the next day. It cocooned them, Lucy thought sometime the next morning, gazing out at the drifts of white. It softened the reality of their fractured marriage, let them concentrate instead on what they had at that moment.
This connection. This fire. The insatiable wildness of their passion that nothing seemed to dim.
She shut off her mind and pushed away all the darkness of the past months, choosing to bask in Rafi as she had so long ago on that trip to Paris.
Through the day, they fed each other in the great four-poster bed. They tasted each other again and again. And they talked. About the world, about the small, inconsequential things that made up their lives. He was funny, intriguing. And so impossibly sensual.
If she had not already been in love with him, Lucy knew, this little interlude would have sent her head over heels.
But there was so much left unsaid, so much pain and heartbreak, that even a stolen day or two surrounded by the snow could not keep it all at bay. Perhaps it was her knowledge that this bliss could not—would not—last that made the idyll that much sweeter.
