and doubts immediately attacked Elinor again. Everything was going too fast for her and she was trying to work out how she could have allowed matters to go so far without seriously questioning what she was about to do. After all, sleeping with a man for the first time was a very big deal on her terms. Elinor stared at her first daunting view of a man unclothed. He seemed endowed out of all reasonable proportion to her untried body. The shameless burn at the heart of her felt as scary as it was exciting and she wondered feverishly if she was doing the right thing or simply letting passion and the joy of attracting so superlative a male go to her head.
Jasim looked down at her with an amount of pleasure that took even him aback. She looked like a goddess, he decided in awe, the fiery abundance of her hair the perfect complement to her full creamy curves. Never before had a woman made him ache with such ravenous hunger … no, not even Sophia had had that power. But he would never be vulnerable with a woman again or allow desire to overwhelm his judgement, he told himself with fierce confidence.
‘I want you now,’ Jasim confessed, coming down on the bed beside her, his lean powerful body taut with sexual impatience. Overwhelming desire made it an effort for him to recall that his primary motivation in taking her was to ensure she lost the power to lure his brother into an affair.
Just looking at his lean bronzed features, which were compellingly handsome and strikingly serious, Elinor felt her mouth run dry and her heart threatened to drum its way out of her chest. ‘I’ve never felt this way before,’ she whispered unevenly and held back the craven admission that feeling as she did just then was distinctly intimidating.
Immediately discarding that ingenuous assurance as a pre-planned sop voiced to stroke his male ego, Jasim bit back an appreciative sound of amusement and ravished her soft mouth afresh. Against her will, Elinor felt herself melt again. Her insecurities ebbed while every nerve ending leapt in helpless response to the scent and touch of him. He felt like living hair-roughened bronze next to her, hot and hard and strong. She had a delirious image of what it would feel like to have him inside her and was shattered at the leap of her body and the newly wanton direction of her thoughts.
Jasim rubbed the tiny bud below her mound and listened to her cry out her pleasure. She was swollen with arousal and as slippery as wet silk. With a forefinger he probed the delicate cleft and discovered that she was deliciously small and tight within. She gasped and winced and he marvelled at her theatrical ability. Of course, just like Sophia she most likely assumed that an Arab male would only properly value her if she pretended to be a virgin. Sophia had paid a small fortune to have her hymen surgically restored and he had been absolutely fooled by her masquerade, he remembered with deep bitterness.
‘What’s wrong?’ Elinor exclaimed, glimpsing the dark shadowed look in his brilliant eyes at the breathless peak of a rippling wave of almost torturous pleasure. His lovemaking enthralled her, but now she wondered if he had finally registered her lack of experience. Was that a turn-off for him?
‘Nothing could be wrong …’
‘I’ve never slept with anyone else,’ Elinor admitted awkwardly. ‘Is that a problem?’
‘How could it be, when you are about to honour me beyond all other men?’ The sardonic light in his gaze hardened at her careful last-minute assurance of her sexual innocence. Afraid that he might not get the message, she was leaving nothing to chance. He was wild for the hot, tight satisfaction of her body under his, but he would have preferred the cool self-restraint to tell her that she was a liar and that her shoddy, foolish pretence didn’t fool him for a moment.
He settled into the cradle of her thighs and he was so eager for her that little tremors were racking his lean, muscular frame. He pushed into her moist, warm entrance and revelled in the taut feel and softness of her silky inner passage. Driven by a ferocious sense of need, he thrust back her thighs to deepen his penetration and at the same instant that he ensured she stretched to accommodate all of him she vented a sharp cry of pain. He froze, not having expected her to go to town on the virgin act to this extent.
Elinor was mortified. ‘I’m sorry, it just hurt a bit … it’s all right,’ she muttered, her mortification so great that she wanted the bed to open up and swallow her.
‘It is for me to apologise. I should have been more gentle,’ Jasim breathed, marvelling that he could match her masquerade, all the while inching his aching shaft into the velvet-smooth honeyed welcome at the heart of her.
As her discomfort receded the excitement came back in steady increments that were stoked by every skilled move he made. Elinor gasped and wrapped her arms round him and discovered he could once again be the giver of such energising sensation as she had never dared to dream existed. The pace quickened to a hypnotic tempo and she was swept away by the erotic excitement of his sensual rhythm. The sweet surges of pleasure ran closer and closer together, driving her to the very peak of an explosive climax and then tipping her off the edge into a blissful weightless fall and satiated indolence.
Jasim stared down at her in the aftermath, his dark eyes blazing gold with passionate appreciation. ‘You took me to paradise and I have never been there with a woman before.’
As he held her to him, his heart pounding against hers, Elinor blinked back sudden tears, for she felt very emotional. She also felt incredibly tender towards him and strung a line of kisses across a broad brown shoulder. She fiercely fought off the sense of shame and awkwardness that she guiltily knew was waiting to pounce on her. He made her feel special and she was desperate to hold on to that reassuring sensation.
‘I should go back to my own room,’ she mumbled, however, a few minutes later.
Jasim’s arms tightened like bars of steel round her. He had every intention of fully satisfying his desire for her. ‘Tonight you are mine and you stay here with me,’ he spelt out thickly.
And she was his now, he reflected in male triumph, his hungry body already quickening against hers again. One stolen night, however, was all he could dare to take beneath a roof that also housed his niece. Anything more would be an insult.
Elinor wakened in the early hours of the next morning when light was filtering with increasing strength through the curtains and illuminating the magnificent unfamiliar room. In that first instant of reason after a very eventful night, she knew only pure terror when she thought of the unknown that faced her.
What the heck had come over her? Complete insanity? It was barely thirty-six hours since they had met and she had spent the night in Prince Jasim’s bed, letting him make love to her over and over again. In truth she wasn’t sure she would be able to walk if she got out of bed, since he had proved a very demanding and seemingly tireless lover.
She lay watching him in the half-light, dreamily, tenderly admiring the strong classic bones of his profile and the way blue-black stubble enhanced his wide stubborn mouth. While her body might ache from his attentions, familiarity had not bred contempt. He was beautiful. He still took her breath away and that scared her, because she had never believed in love at first sight.
But what else was she to make of the powerful emotions assailing her? He had not been out of her mind for a second since they’d met and she felt remarkably comfortable with images and reflections of him fully occupying her every waking thought. On a horse and in bed he was her every dream come true. Yet she hardly knew him and surely he could only think less of her because of the ease with which she had fallen into his arms?
Content to be the full focus of her admiration, Jasim was wondering if he dared take her one more time. He couldn’t get enough of the sweet, tight release of her warm, willing body. But the servants would be up and about soon, and a lifetime in a royal palace had taught him how fast scandal hit the household
