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A heavy ache stirred low within her own body and she was taken aback by the recognition that seeing Raja aroused, and knowing that her body was responsible for that development, excited her. And it was the first time ever that a man had had that astounding effect on Ruby. Indeed as a rule she felt uneasy and apprehensive when boyfriends became too enthusiastic in her arms. But then Ruby had never been comfortable with either her body or her own sexuality. How could she have been? During the years that had seen her steadily transform from child to young woman she had been forced to live with her stepfather’s obscene comments and the lecherous looks he had constantly aimed at her developing body. While being careful to ensure that her mother neither heard nor saw anything amiss, Curtis Sommerton had taught his stepdaughter to be ashamed of her femininity. His barely concealed lust had made Ruby feel soiled. Although he had never managed to unleash that lust on her, he had taught her an aversion to the male body and the kind of crude sexist comments that some men found amusing.
The prince draped the damp towel carefully round Ruby’s bare shoulders. ‘Your skin is very fair. Sit in the shadows while I finish here.’
And because Ruby was getting too hot under the sun and her confusing thoughts preoccupied her she did as she was told in most un-Ruby-like silence. She watched him peer into the tiny compact mirror she had produced for his use and shave and then clean those perfect, even white teeth. Her curiosity about him on a personal level was leapfrogging up the scale at an embarrassing rate. Had she had access to the Internet she would have been searching out information about his social life. He had to have one. As much of a pin-up as a movie star, rich as sin and obviously possessed of a healthy male libido, Raja al-Somari had to have women in his life. Did he enjoy discreet affairs? He would have to be discreet because Najar was a conservative country just like Ashur. Did he seek out lovers only when he was abroad? Or did he have a lover stashed away somewhere more convenient? The intimate aspect of her thoughts mortified her. What was it to her, for goodness’ sake? Even if he had a constant procession of women eager to provide him with an outlet for his sexual needs, it was none of her business!
Having replaced the long tunic, his black hair curling back damply from his brow, Raja approached her. ‘We should eat now.’
He showed her the ancient refrigerator operating off a car battery in the back of the tent.
‘You understand this way of life,’ Ruby remarked.
‘When I was a child my father often sent me to stay with my uncle in the desert. He is the ruling sheikh of a nomadic tribe,’ he explained. ‘But in Najar there are few true nomads left now. The bedu have settled so that their children can attend school and they have easier access to jobs and medical facilities. But the nomadic way of life is still quite popular in Ashur.’
There was only fruit, some vegetables, meat and bread in the refrigerator and several tins of indistinguishable supplies. ‘I assume we’re not expected to be here for very long,’ Raja commented, handing her a cup of coffee.
Ruby frowned up at what looked like a red flag rippling on top of the cliff. ‘What’s that up there?’
‘A blanket I tied to a stick. It will be easily visible from the air and unusual enough to attract attention—’
‘You climbed up there?’ Ruby exclaimed, aghast, for the cliff rose to a pinnacle of almost vertical rock.
‘It was not so difficult.’ Raja shrugged a broad shoulder that dismissed the risk involved in so dangerous a climb. ‘I went up to take advantage of the view and see if there was any sign of human habitation but there is nothing within sight.’
‘Obviously this particular place was chosen because it was isolated,’ Ruby said wryly. ‘At least I don’t have any family to worry about me—what about you?’
‘A father, a younger brother and two sisters and a whole host of other relatives. But I’m most worried about my father. He is not strong. The stress my disappearance will cause will endanger his health,’ he proffered, his wide sensual mouth compressing, his handsome features taut with concern. ‘But there is nothing I can do about it.’
Her generous heart was troubled by his apprehension. ‘I have no relatives in Ashur, have I?’
‘None close that I’m aware of. Distant cousins, certainly.’
His ability to efficiently feed them both set Ruby’s teeth on edge. He could cook on an open fire with very limited ingredients and produce an edible meal while she would have been challenged to do so even in a modern kitchen. Her mother had been a poor cook and Ruby’s own repertoire was limited to the making or heating of simple snacks. While she lived with Stella, a very competent cook, her lack in that field had not seemed important but somehow in Raja’s presence it annoyed the hell out of her.
Feeling helpless stung Ruby’s strong pride. She hated feeling reliant on Raja and was painfully conscious that to date she had proved more of a burden than a help. That sense of inadequacy drove her into ceaseless activity that afternoon. She tidied up her clothes, ashamed of the fact she had left the garments lying in a tumbled heap beside her suitcase. She folded the quilts, shook the sand off the mats and took care of the few dishes and then she wandered round the grove of date palms busily gathering twigs and dried foliage to keep the fire going. The heat sapped her energy fast and she was filled with dismay at the prospect of what the much higher summer temperatures had to be like to live with. Her hair sticking to the back of her neck, she headed up to the pool to cool off again. The cold water felt glorious. Wrapped in the sarong, she sat down wearily on a rock in the deep shade to knot her hair and hold it off her perspiring face, wishing she had something to tie it back with. She looked across the pool to see her desert prince approaching, all six feet plus of his leanly muscled commanding figure pure poetry in motion, and she pursed her lips.
There he was drop-dead gorgeous and rich and he could cook, as well. She marvelled that he had stayed single so long. Of course that authoritarian streak might be a problem for some. He knew best…always. Her shoulders were pink and slightly burned as he had warned before lunch and she wasn’t one bit grateful that his forecast had come true but she knew that she ought to be grateful that he was so well able to cope when she was not. He was also equally keen to protect her from her own mistakes.
‘Watch out for—’
Ruby lifted her hands in a sudden silencing motion, brown eyes lightening with temper. ‘Just let it go, Raja. I’ll take my chances against whatever it is! You’re just about perfect and you know everything and you could probably live out here all year but I’m afraid I’m not cut from the same cloth.’
‘The desert is home to my people and yours,’ the prince contradicted in a tone of reproof. ‘We design and maintain beautiful gardens and parks in Najar but when our people want to get back to basics they come out into the desert.’
Ruby snatched in a sustaining breath and she kicked a rock with a sneaker-clad foot to expel her extreme irritation.
‘Ruby!’
As the rock rolled over and something moved and darted from beneath it Raja almost leapt forward in his haste to haul her out of harm’s way. From several feet away, plastered back against the solid support of his hard muscular frame, Ruby stared in horror at the greenish yellow insects rushing out.
‘Scorpions. They shelter in dark places during the day. Their sting is very painful,’ Raja informed her as she went limp against him, sick with repulsion at how close she had come to injury. He removed her to a safe distance.
‘I don’t like insects either,’ Ruby confided in a shaken rush. ‘Especially ones that size and anything that stings—’
‘There are also poisonous snakes—’
‘Shut up…shut up!’ she launched at him fiercely. ‘I’m not on an educational trip. I don’t want to know!’
Raja turned her round and stared down at her, eyes shimmering with reluctant amusement.
‘I don’t care what you say either,’ Ruby added truculently. ‘Give it a rest—stop trying to train me into bei
ng a stuffy royal who never puts a foot wrong!’
This time Raja al-Somari laughed out loud, his ready sense of humour finally breaking free of his innate reserve, for Ruby was very much an original and not at all like the women he was accustomed to meeting. She didn’t flirt—at least if she did, she didn’t bother to do it with him. Indeed she used no feminine wiles that he could identify. She staged no enticing poses to draw attention to her body. She made no attempt to appeal to his ego with compliments or to pay him any especially gratifying attention and she had not told him a single story calculated to present her in a flattering light. He had never in his entire life met a woman as uncomplicated as she was and the more he was exposed to her frank, fearless style, the more he liked it.
‘So, you do have a sense of humour after all. My goodness, is that a relief!’ Ruby exclaimed, shaking her head in emphasis, a wealth of damp strands escaping her loose knot and spilling across her shoulders.
Raja stared down at her stunning face and the teasing smile on her ripe rosy lips. He lowered his handsome, dark head almost jerkily as if he were being yanked down to her level by some mysterious but very powerful outside force. He found her soft, sultry mouth with his and although that kiss started out gentle and searching it heated up at supersonic speed. Desire rose to gush through Ruby in a floodtide. Nothing had ever felt so necessary as the hard pressure of that sensual mouth on hers and the taste of him drowned her senses like a shot of alcohol on a weak head.
Without a word, Raja released her with startling abruptness and pressed a hand to her spine to urge her back down the slope towards the tent.
Ruby had never experienced such a charge of hunger before and, suddenly deprived of that connection with him, she was in a daze. The tip of her tongue snaked out to explore the reddened and swollen contours of her lips and all she could think about was how much she wanted his hot, hungry mouth back on hers again. The strength of that craving shook her. Her nipples were tight and tingling and her legs felt shaky. Putting one foot in front of another was a challenge. And at the same time, gallingly she was desperate to know what he was thinking.
Outside the tent Ruby shot Raja a sidewise glance brimming with curiosity. His hard profile was taut and he skimmed a look back at her, eyes brilliant with a wealth of stormy emotion. That shook her and in response her heart started beating very, very fast. ‘Don’t play games with me, Ruby,’ he spelled out in a roughened undertone.
Games? Ruby was offended by the suggestion and she lifted her chin in denial. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—you kissed me—’
‘But you made no objection. When you have said that you don’t want me to touch you what else is that but a game?’
‘I don’t calculate things to that extent. You are so suspicious,’ Ruby condemned, flushed and flustered by the reminder and by the embarrassment of her own un-characteristic behaviour. ‘It’s being in this situation…I simply forgot and got carried away for a moment.’
‘Every action has consequences,’ Raja pronounced, rigid with the pent-up force of arousal he was restraining, his lean hands clenching into fists, for his body was not one half as disciplined as his quick and clever brain.
Ruby sank down on a mat inside the tent. It was hot but nothing was as hot and disturbing as the hum of unnatural warmth at the centre of her body, which was shockingly new and demanding. She could not relax. She lifted a hand, watched it tremble and tried and failed to laugh at the state she was in. One kiss and it had been earth-shattering, even more so than the last. Now she felt cheated. She wanted more, she wanted to know what it felt like to make love with a man who attracted her to that extent. The hurricane-force potency of that attraction was certainly a first. She had not experienced anything comparable with other men when intimacy had often felt like more of a threat and a nuisance than a potential source of pleasure. More than once her un-enthusiastic response had led to her being asked if she was frigid or gay. She had often had to fight her way out of over-keen encounters. She had had to shout, she had had to defend and justify her boundaries because the easy availability of sex was often taken for granted in relationships. But not once, not once in the five years since she began dating had she actually wanted to make love.
And now what was she doing about it? Here she was taking refuge in the tent and avoiding Raja as if she were ashamed of herself or afraid when she was neither, she conceded uncertainly. It was not as though she could fall pregnant either, she reminded herself squarely. Some months earlier her doctor had advised her to agree to a course of contraceptive pills in the hope of correcting an irregular menstrual cycle. Although she had no supply with her in the desert she assumed she would still be protected for some time against conception. She lifted her head high. She had not been playing some sexual game with Raja, she was not a tease and didn’t want him thinking that she was. In an impatient movement she scrambled upright again.
Raja was staring into the dying embers of the fire, black lashes lowered and as spectacular even in profile as glossy black fringes, his high cheekbones prominent, sculptured mouth clenched.
‘I wasn’t playing games,’ Ruby declared defiantly.
He flung his proud dark head back and looked straight at her. ‘I want you so much I ache…’
And his admission sizzled through Ruby like a hot knife gliding through butter. His confidence shocked her, for she had believed that she was being bold but his words made hers meaningless and little more than a sulky expression of innocence. Indeed almost a lie, she adjusted uncomfortably, jolted by her sudden unexpected collision with the scorching challenge of his gaze. Just at that moment she knew that she had sought him out again quite deliberately and that he was experienced enough to know it.
‘A woman hasn’t made me ache since I was younger than you are now,’ Raja told her huskily, vaulting upright with an easy grace of movement that tensed every muscle in her slim body. ‘You’re very beautiful…’
So was he, but she was too wary and proud to tell him that that lean dark-angel beauty of his had taken up residence in her brain and dug talon claws of need and desire into her very soul. When he kissed her she felt as dizzy and uncoordinated as though she had drunk too much alcohol. He made her feel out of control and she didn’t like that but, regardless of that fact, every time she looked at him it was a tougher challenge to look away again. She moved closer and somehow he met her in the middle, a possessive hand closing on her slight shoulder to hold her in place, his mouth or was it her mouth eagerly melding with the temptation of his again. And that crushing kiss was good, so good, her bare toes curled and her nerve endings sang. Her arms went round him, her fingers spearing into his hair, and with her eager encouragement his mouth got rougher and harder, his lean, powerful length sealing more forcefully to her softer curves.
It was too much: she couldn’t breathe, broke her mouth free to pant for breath and yet immediately sought him out again with renewed hunger and blindly impatient hands. In the midst of it he eased back from her to haul off his robe but just as quickly he pulled her back into his arms. The sarong fell at her feet but she didn’t notice because Raja was already lowering her down on the quilts while pressing taut open-mouthed kisses along the slender expanse of her neck. She squirmed helplessly as the tip of his tongue scored the pulse there and then he nipped at her responsive flesh with his strong white teeth. Need was driving her now, all the while the heat in her pelvis was building and building into a furnace.
Her bra fell away. His palm closed over a small, pert breast and she gasped, back arching as he plunged his mouth down to the swollen pink tip and let his teeth graze the straining nipple. She dragged him up to kiss him again and ran an appreciative palm down over the hair-roughened expanse of his superb torso. He caught her hand in his and brought her fingers down to the rampant length of the shaft straining against his hard flat stomach. A shudder ran through his big frame as she took that invitation and stroked him, moulding the smooth hard heat and promise of him with re
verent fingers.
He moved her beneath him and again put his carnal mouth to her tender nipples. He was gentle at first but still she writhed and when he got a little more ardent she cried out, struggling to find herself again in the thunderous, greedy surge of the hunger he had awakened.
‘Very beautiful,’ Raja groaned in reply. ‘And wonderfully passionate…’
The hollow ache between her thighs had her hips shifting back and forth. He traced the tender pink flesh there and she shivered, violently and with longing, driven by feverish want and need. He slid a finger into her and she was hot and wet and tight and he groaned with masculine appreciation, capturing her lips with his again, letting his tongue dart into the sensitive interior of her mouth with a skilful flick that made the blood drum insanely fast through her veins.
He teased the tiny bundle of nerve endings that controlled her entire body and she writhed in the storm of intoxicating sensation. ‘Don’t stop…whatever you do, don’t stop!’ she warned him through gritted teeth, reacting to an overload of pleasure that wiped out every thought and consideration and left frantic desire in charge.
Black hair tousled, golden eyes hot as flames, the prince rose over her. ‘After this, there is no going back.’
In the merciless grip of unsated need, Ruby could barely focus on his darkly handsome features. ‘No going back?’ she repeated blankly.
Raja, as eager for completion as she was, was already pressing back her thighs and impatiently splaying his hands below her hips to raise her to him. As he positioned himself and pushed into her a sharp pain arrowed through her and she cried out. He stopped moving to gaze down at her with a bemused frown. ‘What’s wrong?’
