The Desert Bride

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‘I could never marry you,’ Bethany informed him tightly.

‘Do not say never to me...I will not accept it’

‘I insist that you call a car to take me to the airport!’

‘I refuse.’ Razul sent her a raw, shimmering glance of gold.

‘You are thinking of the loss of face...’ Bethany assumed, suddenly wishing that she did not understand his culture to the degree that she did. If he had informed his family that he intended to marry her and she refused, it would be a humiliation for him. A public humiliation. There was undoubtedly not a woman in Datar who would deny herself the great honour of becoming one of his wives.

‘Again you go out of your way to insult me.’ Razul slung her a look of wrathful reproach, his hands clenching into fists by his sides. ‘What lies between us runs too deep to rest on something so superficial as what you term a “loss of face”!’

Bethany was paper-pale, but rigid with a strength of will every bit as unyielding as his own. ‘There is nothing between us and there never will be. You must accept that. In my opinion my sole attraction in your eyes is the fact that I said no two years ago! Your ego can’t live with the startling concept that there exists one woman in the world who wants nothing to do with you!’

‘When you speak such barefaced lies I lose all patience with you!’ Razul blazed at her with such explosive suddenness that she flinched. He closed the distance between them in one long, panther-like stride and reached for her. ‘These lies are naked provocation!’

As he hauled her into his arms Bethany stiffened in shock. Glittering golden eyes roamed over her startled face with a scorching heat that made her skin tauten over her bones. ‘You burn for me as I burn for you—’

‘No!’

‘I saw your hunger last night.’ Razul lifted a shapely hand and knotted long fingers very slowly into the fiery tumble of her long hair. ‘I hold you and your heart beats as madly as that of a gazelle hunted down in the desert. It beats for me and for no other man. Yet I have never touched you,’ he breathed, in a throaty undertone of frustration which sent taut quivers rippling down her rigid spine. ‘Never... How many men in your world could say that of the woman they longed to possess? How many men would treat you with such unquestioning respect?’

His thumb was rubbing against the lobe of her ear. A tiny little shiver ran through her, fracturing her breathing. Eyes as keen as those of a hawk in flight scoured her hectically flushed face, beating down on her with merciless insight. She trembled, a whirling tide of dizziness assailing her, the hiss of her indrawn breath shatteringly loud in the stillness. ‘Razul, I—’

‘You trust me to observe the boundaries...why?’ Razul demanded roughly, yet the long forefinger he lifted to trace the tremulous fullness of her lower lip was tormentingly gentle, brushing across the tender skin with innate eroticism. ‘In the mood I am in your trust is a step too far. Perhaps I have been too honourable...I made it too easy for you to drive me away in England, but I will not make it easy this time.’

‘Let go of me,’ Bethany mumbled thickly, her slender length slipping from rigidity into sudden, shivering weakness as that expert finger slid against her trembling mouth. A tide of sexual awareness strong enough to wipe out her every defence was infiltrating her now.

‘Have other men not held you...touched you?’ Unhidden anger harshened his rich dark voice. ‘Why do you expect me to be different?’

Her breasts rose and fell, heavy, swelling, her nipples peaking inside the gossamer-fine covering of her bra. A languorous heat was uncoiling between her thighs, making her shift like a cat arching its back in the sunshine, but in the depths of her unthinking mind lurked an equally animal fear of her own responses. ‘Don’t!’

‘But your eyes say do...and if I had behaved as a man of your world you would not have shunned me two years ago. I allowed you to stay free,’ Razul intoned with mesmeric intensity. ‘Do you know why an unmarried woman is not left alone with a man in Arabia? A man is expected to sin and a woman is deemed too weak to resist temptation, for was she not fashioned to be the greatest pleasure of a man’s existence? As you will be mine, heart, soul and body...for that I promised myself in England and I will fulfil that promise more sweetly than you can believe...’

‘Airport!’ Bethany said jerkily, as if he had yanked a string and that was the best her blitzed reasoning powers could come up with by way of a contradiction.

Razul laughed softly. A lean hand sank to the shallow indentation of her spine and pressed her closer as he slowly lowered his arrogant dark head. ‘The image of a jet taking off...the heavens opening as the gates to your secret garden...most fitting, but then you are an extraordinarily sensual woman,’ he murmured thickly. ‘Did I not sense that from the first?’

A violent shudder snaked through her as his warm breath fanned her cheek. He took her mouth in a hot, hungry surge of possession and dragged her down so deep and so fast into a world she didn’t know, she was lost. He prised her lips apart with the tip of his tongue and probed the moist, tender interior that she instinctively opened to him. With a strangled moan Bethany caught fire in a surging blaze of passion.

Excitement, raw, wild and overpowering, took her by storm. With every fevered kiss she hung on the edge of desperation for the next, crushing her thrumming body into the hard, lean heat of him for the closeness that every fibre of her femininity greedily craved. Her hands swept up and found his broad shoulders, dug in there briefly to trace the hard stretch of his taut muscles beneath the rich fabric of his jacket before convulsively linking round his strong brown throat, her seeking fingers flirting deliciously with the luxuriant black hair at the nape of his neck.

With a stifled groan he suddenly tightened his arms around her as he lifted her up against him, kissing her breathless with an intense urgency that stoked the flames of her arousal to unbearable heights. She clutched at him, knotting her fingers into his thick, silky hair, for he was the only stable influence in a whirling vortex of violent passion. He muttered something rough against her swollen mouth, momentarily stiffening as if to withdraw, but she held him there, kissed him again with the same raw, answering hunger that he had chosen to awaken in her.

He drew her down, down onto softness and support, crushing her quivering length just as swiftly beneath his superior weight. As he sealed his long, muscular body to hers the heat of desire washed over her with such strength that she burned, her hips arching up, her legs torturously confined in the clinging cloth of her caftan. His hand closed round her breast and she gasped, shocked by sensation, instinctively straining her swollen, seeking flesh upwards to meet that possessive hold.

Razul dragged his lips free of hers, staring down at her with blazing golden eyes, his cheek-bones harshly delineated beneath his smooth, sun-bronzed skin as he snatched in a ragged breath. He loosened his grip, ran a torturous fingertip over the shamelessly distended nipple poking against the fine silk barrier, sending fire shooting to the very centre of the throbbing ache between her thighs. She closed her eyes in an agony of excitement and shuddered as if she were in a force-ten gale.

‘I cannot do this,’ Razul breathed with subdued ferocity, abruptly pulling back from her and yet carrying her with him, his strong hands grasping her arms as he tugged her upright again. ‘To do this is to shame you, and I will not have regrets between us. You will come to me as my bride or you will not come at all!’

He settled her down like a doll onto a low divan. Bethany didn’t know what had happened to her. Her entire body felt as though it had acquired a life of its own, and right now it was screaming with a clamouring dissatisfaction which was cruelly unwelcome. In short, she ached—ached for a physical completion which she had never desired in her life before—and she sat there, struck dumb by sheer horror as her mind fumbled up out of the darkness of complete shut-down to reason again. And yet she did not want to think...