not bear to consider the prospect of giving up this man.
He touched parts of her no other living being had ever touched.
Liquid gold eyes held iced blue in challenge. A hand with long, lean brown fingers that knew how to be cruel if the moment presented itself came up to take hold of her tilted chin.
‘Word of warning,’ Raschid murmured softly. ‘I am in no mood for temperament tonight. So be wise, my darling, and drop the disgruntled act.’
‘But I am disgruntled.’ Evie immediately defied the warning. ‘You treat me like a lackey and I don’t like it.’
‘Because I arrive late once in a while?’
‘You arrive late more often than you arrive early,’ she grimly pointed out.
To her annoyance, his mouth twitched, an unexpected dash of wicked amusement entering the battle. ‘And aren’t you ecstatic that I am such a latecomer, hmm?’ he countered lazily.
It took her a few moments, but when his meaning did manage to sink in Evie sighed, wrenching her chin from his grasp as a wave of pink ran into her cheeks. ‘We weren’t talking about your sexual prowess!’ she admonished.
‘Ah,’ he sighed. ‘That is a great shame.’
‘Raschid!’ Evie flashed him a look of irritation. ‘I’m not—!’
In the mood for this, she had been going to snap at him—but he silenced her with a kiss, his arms snaking around her body and crushing her against him while his arrogant mouth took burning possession of hers.
But the real crime here was that she didn’t attempt to make a protest—didn’t even pretend to struggle but simply dived right in there with him. She couldn’t stop herself. For Raschid tapped a hunger inside her that had not abated in two long years of being fed exclusively by him.
Two years involved in a relationship that had kept their two families pulsing in the background in simmering disapproval, and had kept the world’s tabloids waiting with bated breath to see which one of them would eventually end it.
Because it had to end some time, everyone knew that. The heir to a wealthy sheikhdom was expected to marry one of his own one day. While Evie had already blotted her copybook once by turning her back on a marquis to be where she was now. But the pressure was still on for her to do the right thing and marry into her own class—outdated, outmoded and in danger of extinction though that class might be.
But it was the undisputed knowledge that the end was as inevitable as night following day that helped keep their relationship this hot and this fevered.
‘So, do we eat or do we continue to fight?’ Raschid murmured as his kiss-warmed mouth lifted away from hers.
For ‘fight’ read ‘love’, Evie ruefully translated, and knew without a single doubt which one she wanted tonight.
Needed, she thought tragically—oh, how she needed him tonight!
She needed his strength, his dark and driving sensuality. She needed to soak herself in him, drown herself in him—die in him. For this one night she needed to pretend that nothing was different between them. Be the woman he knew and loved so that he could be the man she loved so desperately.
For he was truly all man, this Arabian lover of hers. A man who could make love with just his eyes—as he was doing to her right now. Teasing, knowing, lazily seducing, and so indolently aware of his power over her senses that he didn’t need to read the darkened look in her eyes to know how much she wanted him.
‘Are you wearing anything at all underneath this?’ she asked, playing for time by stroking her palms along the lean, tight contours she could feel beneath the smooth white tunic.
‘Why don’t you open it and take a look?’ he invited, and began nibbling at the corner of her mouth in encouragement while his fingers played tantalisingly with the thin straps that were holding up her dress.
‘And have the world and his wife witness your strip show?’ she mocked, referring to the fact that they were standing in front of a sheet of well-lit glass through which anyone with reasonable eyesight from Battersea to Westminster would be able to see what they were doing.
His solution to that was to reach over her shoulder. A moment later heavy gold silk brocaded curtains came swishing across the glass, smoothly closing down her options so she had nothing left but a straight choice between demanding he feed her stomach or feed her desire.
Evie would have had to be really stupid not to know what his preference was since it was pushing so prominently against the tingling wall of her stomach, but she also knew he was going to leave the final choice to her. He knew she was angry with him for keeping her waiting. He knew that if he tried to make love to her now without her say-so she was likely to start spitting all kinds of accusations at him about the way he used her.
He also knew that, starving for food or not, in the end she would not be able to resist his seduction. For her own body was also showing the signs of a craving it had never been able to suppress in his vicinity.
‘You are so arrogant,’ she complained in a last-ditch attempt to hold on to some pride.
He just grinned, all flashing white teeth and pure male confidence. ‘Say it,’ he prompted, ‘or I shall call for Asim to bring the car round.’
On a driven groan of angry frustration, her hands came up between their bodies and took hold of two fistfuls of his blue outer robe. She used it to tug his mouth back to her own. But she punished him by sinking her teeth into his lower lip before she gave him her complete surrender by fusing her hungry body to his.
An hour later Evie came out of a thoroughly satiated daze to find Raschid lying beside her in an indolent sprawl of naked limbs. His eyes were closed, his mouth slightly parted, his breathing a steady rise and fall of a smooth dark gold breastplate liberally smattered with crisp black body hair.
Evie smiled to herself, enjoying the opportunity to lie here like this simply feasting herself on him while he didn’t know she was doing it. In fact, looking at a naked and sleepy Raschid had to be one of the best pastimes she had ever experienced. He had a way of lying there that she found unbearably sexy. Arrogant in his nakedness, conceited about his own beauty, so uninhibited in his presentation of his silky dark self that if an army of reporters had suddenly burst into this room he wouldn’t have dreamed of covering himself up!
‘I need food,’ she announced.
‘Pick up the phone and call Asim,’ he advised, refusing to lift himself out of his satiated stupor.
On a sigh Evie levered herself up on an elbow then stretched across him for the telephone. Her hair, so carefully worked into a sleekly sophisticated pleat not long ago, was now hanging in a curtain of silk that trailed across his cheek as she talked to his personal servant.
‘Just a cold sandwich will do,’ she was saying when Raschid’s hand came up, reaching for the trailing hair to gently comb it behind her ear. ‘No. He will eat what I choose to order since he kept me waiting so long,’ she said, glancing down to send Raschid a defiant smile. ‘And I may just die, Asim, if I have to wait until you cook me something,’ she concluded before replacing the phone.
Those liquid eyes were looking at her in a way that had
