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‘Please,’ she said again in a voice that took all his strength from him.
He was lost.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘IF YOU PROMISE to go to sleep...’
‘I promise.’
Surely this was hell, Karim told himself as she scooted over and he eased himself into the small space that she had left for him. Hell was not eternal fire or demons torturing you. Hell was a cosy nest in a too-small bed with a woman he ached to possess but was forbidden to touch. He could only pray that she would go to sleep fast.
‘How am I supposed to sleep with you sitting there like you have a broom handle for a spine?’ Clemmie protested, the warmth of her breath shivering over his skin.
‘There’s not much room...’
‘Then curl up closer...’
She suited actions to the words, her movement building the heat in their little cocoon to boiling point. Damn it, was she really that naïve or—his heart skipped a beat with a heavy thud—was she doing this deliberately?
‘Sleep!’ he growled roughly, his lips brushing the silky hair on the top of her head, fine strands catching on his skin, on the roughness of his day-old stubble as they did so.
Sleep!
Clemmie barely caught back the word of protest as she let her face rest against his chest. How was she expected to sleep like this? Her whole body was wildly awake, her heart pounding, her breathing suddenly raw and heavy in her lungs. The strength of the arms holding her were at once a source of comfort and dangerous excitement and the hard bones of his ribcage seemed to be made specially to support her head. The heat of his skin had turned the comfort she had been looking for into an inferno of need that pulsed between her legs in a way she had never known before.
This then was desire. This was what it felt like to want a man—this particular man—in the way that a woman was meant to feel.
She wanted—needed—to feel more of him. One hand stroking across the white cotton of his tee shirt, she could feel the thud of his heart under her fingertips, the smoothness of skin, the...
The movement stilled, her head lifting slightly, at the unexpected thickening and roughness where everywhere else there had been smooth skin.
‘What’s this?’
‘Clemmie—’
She caught the note of warning but ignored it. Her fingers brushed against the swollen hardness of his lower body as she pushed at the hem of his tee shirt at his waist. It almost made her pause, the realisation of what it meant sending shockwaves of reaction through every inch of her. But the new and very different tension in the powerful body beside her told her that she was touching on something that mattered, something that came close to the innermost part of this man, and she was not to be put off.
‘What’s wrong?’
She pushed the white cotton aside, bunching it up around his shoulders and then caught her breath in shock at what she had exposed.
‘Damn it, Clemmie...’
With a muttered curse, Karim twisted sharply, catching hold of her wrists and imprisoning them in the strength of his hands. But not before she had registered what was there. Even in the dim light from the fire, the disfiguring ridges and lines were plain to see. The scars that marked one side of his chest, marring the sleek beauty of the bronzed skin, untouched by the haze of crisp black hair that covered so much of his torso.
‘But what happened? When?’
He was only relatively newly healed. The scars were still pink and new, not yet easing into the silvery lines that followed the softening effects of time.
‘How?’
He wasn’t going to answer; she could see it in the set of his face, the way that his beautiful mouth was clamped tight shut, the red burn of the fire throwing shadows on and off the hard planes of his cheeks.
She’d seen that sort of tension once before. When he had spoken of his brother and the fact that he had died. The scars were connected with that incident; she had no doubt of that. Karim didn’t need to say a word; the emotional truth was etched on to his face, no matter how much he might want to dodge away from her seeking eyes.
He didn’t try, though. Instead he met her questioning gaze head-on, the light of challenge flaring in the darkness of his eyes. His grip on her wrists had softened now, letting her ease herself away, and Clemmie let her fingertips drift over the damaged skin, her breath catching as she saw the change in his face, the way his eyelids dropped briefly to shut himself off from her.
‘What happened to your brother? I mean—I know he died in a car crash, but—you were there, weren’t you?’
‘I was in the car behind.’
He sounded as if the words had been dragged out of him. If it hadn’t been for the darkness, the silence of the night, she wouldn’t have caught the words, they were so low, so soft.
‘He wanted to see a woman—not the woman he was betrothed to marry. So he’d dismissed the security detail, but I couldn’t let him go out without any protection. I followed him.’
A long pause, another obvious effort to make himself go on.
‘I made the mistake of letting him see me in the mirror so he drove too fast to get away from me. He took a bend carelessly... By the time I reached them his car was on fire.’
‘And you tried to get him out.’
It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. She knew without any sort of doubt that that was how he had been injured, scarred.
‘I...’
Whatever he had been about to say was choked off as she bent her head to press her lips to his wounded skin, acknowledging silently the way he must have tried—the horror of having failed as the fire had driven him back. Softly she kissed her way over the long scar, acknowledging the courage it must have taken to earn it.
‘Clementina...’
Her name hissed in between his teeth but she barely heard it. She was lost, drugged on the taste of him, the scent of his skin. Her tongue slid over the ridges of the scar, tasting the slightly salty tang of his skin, and she heard the beat of his heart quicken and deepen, sounding like thunder in her ears. Her own heart was racing, primitive feelings, sensations she had never known before stirring deep inside her, pulsing between her legs. She wanted to crawl on top of Karim, hold him, lose herself in him.
This was what sexual hunger was all about; why it was spoken of in those tones that had made her feel it could never be as powerful or as intense as it was implied. But the way she was feeling now told her that she had underestimated its force, its potential for wild abandonment. The room had faded into blackness, the faint crackle of the fire barely audible in her ears. There was only her and this man...this man who made her feel what it was really like to be a woman.
‘Clemmie...’
It was raw and rough, a sound of protest or surrender and she couldn’t tell which. But then his hands tangled in her hair, yanking her face up to his.
The mood in the room changed totally in the space of an uneven heartbeat. This wasn’t warm or gentle or even considerate. It was dark and harsh and dangerous. Everything about Karim was hard. His facial features seemed to have been carved from stone. His mouth was clamped into a tight forceful line, his chest and arms were like rocks against her cheeks. And the erection that she was crushed up against was like burning steel, threatening to brand her as his.
‘Damn you, woman!’ he muttered again and the last word came out harshly against her lips as his head swooped and his mouth took hers, crushing her lips back against her teeth as he plundered the softness between them.
His hands were tighter in her hair now, holding her head, twisting it till it was in the perfect position where he wanted it. The perfect position for his kiss. A kiss that was like nothing she had ever known before.
Their mouths fused and everything Clemmie had thought she had known about male and female interaction, about sexual interest or excitement was obliterated from her mind in one explosive moment. This was nothing like the tentative clumsy, or even the pushy secret kisses of the few boys she had met at college. There was nothing boyish about this at all. It was all male, the hunger of a fully grown man, and it roused all that was woman in her. It had such force and power, such heat, that it was like being kissed by a volcano. It was the kiss of a man who knew what he wanted and was determined to take it.
And what he wanted was her.
Clemmie’s mind was spinning, whirling, her ability to think spiralling off into the darkness somewhere so that she could no longer keep track of it. Somewhere under the molten lava in her mind, created by Karim’s kiss, firing her blood, was a warning thought that she should not let this happen; that she should say no and push him away. Push herself away. But that weak protesting thought was drowned out by the stronger, fiercer need that thundered along every nerve, pounding at her temples, driving away any other sort of awareness.
It was wild and carnal, primitive in the extreme, but it was what she wanted now. It was all that she wanted. Karim was all that she wanted. Karim and his kiss, hot and heavy on her mouth. His touch on her skin, searing a path over her legs, her hips, her waist, heading inexorably upwards, towards her aching breasts, the hardened nipples hungry for his caress.
