had me whipped when I was seventeen,’ he admitted tightly. ‘Are the scars still so obvious?’
‘No...no, they’re very much faded,’ she mumbled awkwardly, looking up at him with appalled eyes. ‘Whipped? Literally whipped?’
Azrael jerked his chin in confirmation, clearly not a fan of pursuing the demeaning topic. Naked as a bronze god, he stalked over to the pool and stepped in, evidently expecting the dialogue to end there.
Molly hovered barefoot in the sand, wringing her hands. ‘But...why would he do such a thing?’ She tried but she could not hold the question in.
‘When Firuz married my mother, he made an agreement with Hashem that neither my mother nor I would be allowed to become the focus of any rebel activity in Djalia against Hashem’s rule. You must understand that my stepfather was afraid to anger Hashem because Quarein is a poor country with very little military capacity.’
‘Yes...?’ Molly breathed encouragingly.
But it didn’t work. Azrael stretched out in the pool on the rocks in brooding silence, long black hair tousled around his big stiff shoulders. With a stifled sigh, Molly stripped off and, fighting her self-consciousness about her own body, she padded across the sand and stepped into the pool beside him, sinking down on the nearest flat rock. ‘Yes?’ she said again, refusing to surrender to that silence.
‘From the moment Hashem executed my father, my mother became his most implacable enemy. She was a very brave woman. She raised funds for the rebels and was, until I became old enough, their de facto leader. She used Quarein as a safe house for both of us but, make no mistake, being married to Firuz was tough for my mother. He is a hard, judgemental man, who makes daily life difficult for those around him. When phone messages between his home and the rebels were intercepted by Hashem and brought to my stepfather’s attention, it put my mother in grave danger.’
Molly grimaced. ‘Of course it did.’
‘To protect her I said that I had sent the messages and Firuz had me whipped. I believe he knew the truth and he let it go because in his own limited way he did care for my mother. As long as someone was punished Hashem was satisfied.’
‘That’s one of the secrets you thought I wouldn’t want to know,’ Molly guessed, smoothing a soothing hand down a bulging bicep. He was so modest, so reluctant to acknowledge his own courage for what it was. His sheer strength appealed to her on the most basic level because she knew that no matter what happened she could depend on Azrael. He was very strong and his innate need to protect those weaker than he was ran through him like a vein of solid gold.
‘Why would you want to know such a thing?’ Azrael demanded in honest bewilderment, twisting to study her with glittering dark golden eyes.
‘I don’t know, but I do,’ Molly fielded dry-mouthed, somewhat belatedly noticing that, despite the icy temperature of the rock pool, he was fully aroused.
‘Sometimes you are a very strange woman,’ Azrael breathed thickly.
‘But the differences between us are kind of fascinating,’ Molly told him shakily, wanting so badly to touch him but afraid of doing it wrong.
Could she have but known it, there was no wrong in that line as far as Azrael was concerned. As he bent his head to claim her lush, inviting mouth, he carried her hand down his body, his breath tripping in his throat simply at the brush of her tiny fingers. Molly touched, stroked, in too awkward a position to really explore and he took care of that problem too by springing upright with a noisy splash and scooping her dripping body up to plaster it against his hot, wet body with an enthusiasm that suggested he was not as tired as she had assumed earlier.
‘We’ll get everything wet!’ she gasped as he brought them both down on the bed.
And Azrael laughed with hearty amusement, spreading her out like a feast to be savoured, gazing down at her with wondering satisfaction. She didn’t want his child, he reminded himself darkly before he sent that reality back into the burial ground at the back of his mind where he kept things that couldn’t be changed. For the first time ever, he would live in the moment, savour its sweet pleasures and look neither forward nor back. On his wedding night, he was not the Djalian King, he was only a man, a man with a voracious appetite for the warmth and relaxation and pleasure that Molly represented.
Molly pushed him back against the pillows before he could kiss her again. ‘My turn,’ she told him with a hectically flushed face.
She knelt over him, wondering just where to start and spoilt for choice, her hands finding those wide brown shoulders and smoothing down over the hard buds of his male nipples to the corrugated lean muscle of his stomach and then lower, finding him, tracing him, rejoicing in the silky, tensile strength of him and the rise of his hips in response. With those stunning heavily lashed golden eyes welded to her every move she felt as though she had him at her mercy and she liked that feeling of power.
‘I might be a little clumsy at this,’ she warned him.
But Azrael was a willing sacrifice for any form of experimentation as he watched her lower her mouth to him. It was the most erotic thing he had ever seen. She licked, swiped and stroked and then she stretched her ripe lips around him and her head bobbed, copper ringlets trailing across his thighs like teasing ribbons. He had to fight to withstand the intensity of the pleasure, and when he couldn’t tolerate it any longer he reached up and dragged her down to him to find her mouth again for his tongue, darting and exploring while his hands hungrily moulded the swollen bounty of her tightly beaded breasts and slid slower to trace the gloriously wet opening between her thighs.
‘I want you now... I can’t wait,’ he groaned hoarsely, pushing her away and startling her as he sprang lithely off the bed to stalk over to the chest by the wall and rummage within it.
He tore open the packet and put on the condom while she watched with wide, equally impatient eyes for him to return to her. Her arms opened automatically for him, the throb between her thighs like a pulsing hum of eager welcome, a deep-seated ache that only he could satisfy. He drove into her hard and fast and she wanted to cry out but she was recalling those tribesmen outside the cave and the lack of doors and his controlled silence while she pleasured him. A tiny little whimper was wrenched from her and then there was nothing in her world but a nameless fear that for some reason he might stop, which she couldn’t have borne.
Her heart thumped like an express train inside her body as Azrael reached a hard, insistent rhythm that made her buck and gasp with helpless excitement, her hips writhing, her entire skin surface burning up with the inexpressible wildness of the experience. The wicked delights of his possession went on and on and on until finally her body was thrust over the edge into climax. Delicious internal convulsions gripped her as the surge of pleasure washed over her in an unstoppable tide.
Still floating, she lay there cradled in Azrael’s arms and feeling positively sunny in mood. It was slowly dawning on her that a baby with him, assuming she wanted to keep him, might even be a development she could welcome. Why? Because he was great in bed? Hardworking, honest, noble, gorgeous? Naturally there was also the beautiful ring and the cave setting, chosen for her benefit. But most of all her heart was his because he was a hero, who had suffered horrors she couldn’t imagine, horrors he didn’t even want to talk about for fear of upsetting her! Listening had almost broken her heart as she’d pictured Azrael, young and proud and vulnerable, accepting pain and humiliation to shield his mother. Now she was also picturing a little Azrael or a little girl and her heart began to go all floaty too.
‘I was thinking...about a baby...’ she murmured,
