Michelle Reid Collection. Michelle Reid
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‘Turn around,’ he commanded, ignoring the taunt. ‘So I can release you from this exquisite creation.’
Evie did as he bade her. ‘I feel I must inform you that as a full-blooded Arab I am feeling very cheated at this precise moment,’ he said lightly as his deft fingers dealt with the long zip that ran down the length of her spine. ‘I was expecting those seed-pearls decorating your front to be my one hundred and one buttons—as is the traditional way Arab women drive their new husbands crazy while they are forced to unwrap their prize inch by painful inch.’
‘But you don’t want what’s beneath this gown,’ Evie pointed out. ‘So why bother to mention it?’
‘Is that what you really think?’
The dress was eased away from her shoulders, and allowed to slither to the floor. Evie reached up to pull off the skullcap while kicking off her white satin slip-ons at the same time. She felt Raschid’s fingers at the clasp of her smooth satin bra, and quivered slightly as his warm flesh touched her flesh.
‘Yes,’ she said.
She heard his soft laugh as he bent down to deal with the only piece of clothing she had left. Seconds later, she was naked, and his hands were gently clasping her slender hip bones. The brush of his mouth against the curving cheeks of her bottom made her spine arch in stinging response.
‘Liar,’ he drawled. ‘You know I adore every single inch of this delectable body.’
Then he was turning her to face him, his hands still holding her there in front of him while he continued to squat at her feet. In a slow, slow, agonisingly sensual drift of his heavy eyelids, he inspected her from bare toes upwards.
Her legs turned to liquid, her thighs began to burn, that hidden place between them pulsing out its needy message. He inspected the pale-skinned flatness of her stomach where their baby was not yet making its presence felt, drifted those hooded eyes up over her rib-cage to her breasts where a new firm fullness was most definitely evident.
‘Every inch,’ Raschid repeated huskily.
Evie dragged in a constricted breath of air, her hand snaking up to cup his lean cheek so that she could make him look at her. His eyes changed colour, darkening on a swirling tempest of craving. Her thumb moved, brushing across his lips to gently part them. The moist inner heat lining the recess of his mouth drew powerfully on some inner heat of her own that had her folding to her knees in front of him.
‘I don’t really need to rest, you know,’ she told him softly. ‘But I do need you.’
‘Ah…’ he sighed sorrowfully. ‘But—’
Evie smothered the ‘but’. She crushed it right back into his mouth with the hungry press of her own. What was absolutely glorifying was the fact that he didn’t attempt to fight her. He let her deepen that kiss to a bone-melting intimacy that made her feel alive and happy for the first time in weeks.
He still held her hips tightly between his two hands; Evie used her own hands to begin urgently dealing with his clothes. As far as she was concerned, he was wearing too many; impatient fingers tossed the nightdress to one side then began pushing his jacket from his shoulders before yanking at his tie.
In all their two years she had never longed for him as much as she was longing for him right now, and it showed in the small growl of triumph she made against his mouth as the tie came free.
Shirt buttons then began popping without a care to how they came free. He wasn’t helping her—which only incited her urgency. The shirt came to rest around his elbows with his jacket, trapped there by the hands he still had clamped to her hip bones.
Evie didn’t care; she had warm, tight skin to touch at last, and a wonderful hair-roughened breastplate to reacquaint herself with. Her mouth wrenched itself away from his so it could go and taste that newly exposed flesh.
On a tormented groan, Raschid suddenly burst into action. He freed his arms from his trailing clothes, reached for her, pulling her hard against him, his hot mouth homing in on tight, tingling nipples that set her whole body singing.
How long had it been since they’d been together like this? Five weeks?
It showed in the violence of their breathing, in the urgency with which they began to devour each other. He sucked so hard on one of her nipples that she actually whimpered—then laughed because she had missed his mouth on her like this so very badly.
Breathing gone haywire, bodies hot, emotions locked into a raging frenzy. When he dragged himself to his feet, Evie rose up with him, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck.
His mouth found hers again; she clung to him, her breasts pressing against him in open provocation. But when she dropped her hands to the waistband of his trousers his reaction was so unexpected that it thoroughly stunned her. Picking her up in his arms, Raschid turned and dumped her on to the bed.
‘No!’ he ground out, jerked right away from her, then spun on his heel to bend and snatch up the discarded nightdress, which he tossed at her before bending to snatch up his shirt.
‘Wh-what do you mean—no?’ she gasped, barely able to believe he really meant what he was implying here!
‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I didn’t mean to become so carried away. But we must not,’ he added tautly. ‘I made a vow…’
‘A vow?’ Evie repeated shrilly, beginning to shake all over in reaction. ‘What kind of vow?’
‘Cover yourself,’ he commanded roughly.
Having recently devoured her with his eyes, he was now looking anywhere but at her, his dark face a mask of bone-gripping tension. Evie knew that look. He was hurting, and at this precise moment she was glad he was hurting!
‘What kind of vow?’ she angrily insisted.
‘A vow to Allah,’ he confessed. ‘That I would treat you with respect.’
‘I’ve got news for you, Raschid,’ Evie informed him, grimly dragging the nightdress over her trembling flesh. ‘This doesn’t feel like respect, it feels like rejection!’
He winced as if she’d hit him, but it didn’t stop that wonderful chest Evie had just eagerly exposed for herself from disappearing behind snowy white linen.
‘That is because you misunderstand my motive,’ he explained, bending to retrieve his jacket and his tie next. ‘For too long I have undervalued your importance to me. It is a sin I am determined to put right.’
‘What sin?’ she demanded bewilderedly. ‘The sin of wanting to make love to me?’ She sounded so damned offended that his mask of a face seemed to turn to iron.
Yet he nodded his dark head in sombre confirmation. ‘And the sinful lack of understanding as to what our relationship was doing to your pride, your self-esteem and your reputation.’
‘Is this explanation supposed to make me feel better?’
‘It will, when I’ve finished,’