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‘Of course it is,’ he said. ‘I’m not in the habit of seducing virgins. Their dreams are still intact.’
‘Too late,’ she teased, her mouth trailing over his hair-roughened chest.
He did it to her again. And again. And the third time she lay trembling in his arms, kissing the same spot on his shoulder, over and over again. He was stroking her hair and when she spoke, her voice was dazed.
‘That was...amazing.’
‘I know,’ he said, running the tip of his tongue over her ear. ‘They say it takes a little practice for a woman to orgasm.’
‘Then I think it’s very important I keep practising,’ she said solemnly and he laughed.
‘You are a curious mixture,’ he observed slowly, ‘of the unworldly and the seasoned.’
‘And is that a good thing or a bad thing?’
‘I can’t quite decide,’ came his answer. ‘All I know is that I find you quite enchanting and I’m not sure that I’m prepared to let you go.’
She snuggled up to him. ‘Then don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Keep on holding me, just like that.’
They were both talking about different things, of course. As someone who had learnt never to project, Catrin was thinking about the glorious present, while—unusually for him—Murat was speculating about the future. She said goodbye, telling herself that she would probably never see him again—but to her astonishment he returned the following week, when she had two whole days off.
‘You see,’ he said lightly. ‘I just can’t keep away from you.’
She made no attempt to hide her delight as he pulled her into his arms. For the first time in her life she understood the meaning of the expression walking on air. She found herself thanking some unknown fate, which had brought her to the other side of Wales, leaving her to conduct her love affair without fear of her mother turning up and creating a scene.
But that was something else she liked about Murat. He wasn’t interested in her family, or her background. Why would he be, when this was never meant to be anything but temporary? It meant that she didn’t have to go through the agonising torture of explaining what her home life had been like.
They booked into the same hotel overlooking Bala Lake and for two whole days they scarcely left the bedroom. She wondered how she was going to cope when he went back to his other life. His real life. His desert life, which he’d told her about and which had no room for someone like her.
She tried not to think about it, but it was impossible not to. It was hard to equate her fierce lover with a man who ruled a vast kingdom and rode a black stallion over hot and arid sands. She ran her fingertips through the rich silk of his ebony hair and tried not to think about losing him.
Did he guess at her thoughts, or did he read it in her eyes? Was that why he came out with his extraordinary proposition on that last afternoon, before he was due to drive back to London for a business dinner?
‘Come away with me,’ he said, pulling on the jacket of his elegant Italian suit.
She blinked. ‘Where?’
‘To London. I have an apartment there. You could live there.’
‘With you?’
He gave a funny kind of smile. ‘Well, sometimes.’
If only she hadn’t been so naïve. If only she’d realised what she was getting herself into, and that women like her were never offered permanence. The only permanence in Murat’s life was his palace and his busy schedule in Qurhah. The trips he made to England were fleeting and irregular and he certainly wasn’t offering her a conventional relationship.
But she wasn’t used to convention—or relationships. She was a stranger to commitment and she told herself she didn’t do emotion. Emotion brought chaos—and she’d had enough chaos to last a lifetime.
She thought of turning him down and then asked herself why she would do something that insane. And really, what alternative did she have, when the thought of him walking out of her life made her feel as if someone were trying to hack open her heart with a blunt chisel?
That was when and how she had become a rich man’s mistress. She had gone to London to be with Murat and slowly but surely her independence had begun to ebb away. The job she’d found at a big hotel soon proved incompatible with her new life, because quickly she learned that was the first rule of being a mistress.
You always needed to be available.
Murat told her that his world was full of pressure and that she—uniquely—soothed his frazzled nerves. He liked her being there when he arrived in England and didn’t want her working shifts and wasting precious time when she could be with him. He waved aside her initial protests that she couldn’t possibly use his charge card. He told her that he had more than enough money for both of them. That she was, in effect, acting as his housekeeper since she made his apartment feel like a home.
So she had let him slide that plastic card into her brand-new designer wallet. Just as she’d let him kit her out in silks and satins and started having her hair done regularly at one of London’s most exclusive hair salons.
She hadn’t thought about how long it would last. She hadn’t thought beyond each glorious day. But she had started to like him more and more. And that was when she had started trying to make it perfect. The perfect relationship to make up for her very imperfect childhood.
