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‘What exactly are you saying, Arkim?’ Sylvie didn’t like the unpalatable questions being thrown up by his choice of words. ‘I need more time with you...’ It sounded finite. Definitely finite.
‘I want you to move in with me. Stay with me for as long as...’
‘For as long as what?’ she asked sharply, tensing all over. Because she very badly wanted him to say, For as long as you want. For ever.
‘For as long as this lasts...this crazy, insatiable desire.’
Finite. Definitely finite.
She pulled away from Arkim and stood up before he could see how raw she felt. The puppy sniffed around her feet and she picked him up and held him against her, almost like a shield. How could Arkim manipulate her like this? Give her a reminder of the exquisite pleasure he could wring from her body...tell her he regretted the way he’d behaved...the puppy...and now this. When her defences were down.
Because this is the man who all but kidnapped you and held you in his castle at his pleasure when he wanted revenge.
She pushed aside the memories crowding her head. She needed to lay it out baldly for herself. ‘So you’re asking me to become your mistress? Is that it? And the dog is meant to sweeten the deal?’ She made a sound of disgust and turned round to face the window. How could she have been so stupid...so—?
She was whirled around again to face Arkim, looming tall and intimidating.
‘No...it’s not like that. I mean...yes, I want you to stay—but as my lover...not as a mistress.’ He sounded almost bitter. ‘Believe me, I know by now that you would never languish idly at someone’s beck and call. And the dog... I hadn’t even consciously realised I wanted him for you, but I got your address from Sophie and I brought him with me. I don’t take mistresses,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d know me well enough by now to know that I don’t indulge women like that. I don’t do frills or niceties.’
No. He didn’t. He could tear a woman’s heart and soul to shreds just by being him. Raw. Male. Uncompromising. Tortured, but with a deep core of emotion that made her heart break.
‘You were right, you know,’ he said heavily.
Sylvie finally found her voice. ‘About what?’
Arkim grimaced. ‘About my motivations for agreeing to marry Sophie. She represented something to me—something I’d always craved. A respectable family unit.’
And that just confirmed for Sylvie what she’d already guessed. Some day Arkim would find a woman worthy of being his perfectly respectable wife, and then he would do frills and niceties. She didn’t doubt it.
The hatred she felt for that future woman shocked her. But it also made her see her own weakness. She wanted more too. She wanted to take every atom of what Arkim was offering and gorge herself before he cast her aside again. Or—if she had the strength—gorge herself so that she could walk away before he could do it for her.
She lifted her chin. ‘If I stay with you and we...we do this, I won’t give up my job.’
Arkim was very still. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’
Sylvie felt a spurt of relief mixed with pain. As long as she stayed in her ‘job of ill repute’ she’d remember who she was—and so would he. There would be no dangerous illusions or dreams, no fantasies that things could be different. Because they never could be. She was not the woman who would share Arkim’s life and mother his children. And she needed to remember that.
She forced a lightness to her voice that she wasn’t feeling and said, ‘Well, then, if this dog is really mine I’d better think of a name.’
* * *
‘That’s a good boy, Omar...’
Arkim stood at the door and watched Sylvie hand the puppy a treat from her pocket as she lavished him with praise, rubbing him behind his floppy ears. As far as he could tell the dog wasn’t doing anything that vaguely resembled obeying commands, but Sylvie was too besotted to care.
He recalled the spontaneous urge he’d felt to take the dog with him when he’d been leaving the oasis, obeying some irrational impulse because it had been the last thing Sylvie had touched. And then he’d spent a month tripping over the damn thing in London, talking to it as if it could understand him.
An alien lightness vied with a familiar surge of arousal just to see her sitting on the floor, her hair in a plait down her back. She was obviously just back from work, still dressed in leggings and a loose top. Arkim was used to women in couture creations and the latest ready-to-wear casuals. Yet Sylvie would blow them all out of the water with her inherent grace and elegance, dressed just like this.
She insisted on taking the Métro every day, refusing his
offer of a driver and car. And he hadn’t even realised that his kitchen functioned until he’d come in one evening and found Sylvie taking a Boeuf Bourguignon out of the oven. Far from making him break out in a cold sweat at the domesticity, he’d found it surprisingly appealing. He’d never known what it was to come home to a cooked meal, and he’d found himself laughing out loud at Sylvie’s wry tales of learning to cook when she’d first arrived in Paris.
When she’d told him that she regularly baked for the members of the revue, he’d found his conscience smarting at the thought of how badly he’d misjudged her from that first moment he’d laid eyes on her. Because at first glance she’d epitomised everything he’d grown up to despise in a lewd, over-sexualised world.
In fact she was anything but. He’d been wrong about her. So wrong.
It had been two weeks now since she’d moved in...and just like before, the more Arkim had of her, the more he wanted her. It made him nervous. This...this lust he felt was too urgent. Desperate, even. He couldn’t let her go. Yet.
