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‘Inside...’
Clemmie knew she sounded breathless but it wasn’t the climb that had made her that way. She was burning with frustration as the long robes that Karim wore came between her demanding hands and the need to touch his skin, to feel the heat of his flesh.
‘Clemmie...’
The door slammed back against the wall, the sound reverberating round the silent palace. Clemmie tensed, hearing Karim’s shaken voice, fearful that it was now when he would say that this had to stop. She had barely survived his rejection once before. She didn’t know if she could endure it over again.
But Karim’s hands were on her arms as he whirled her into the room and kicked the door to behind them. The spinning motion carried them part way across the floor, heading almost to the huge silk-covered bed that stood on a small dais in the centre of the room.
Almost but not quite. Somehow Karim took hold of the crazy dance that had caught them up. He stopped the careering path across the marble floor, almost stumbled, almost lost his footing. Almost.
But then he had a hold of himself, and of Clemmie. With a hasty adjustment, he brought them both to a halt, holding her upright while her head still spun with disorientation and desperate need, the room swinging round her so that she would have fallen if it was not for that powerful grip on her arms, hard fingers digging into her flesh so that she could almost feel the bruises forming under the pressure.
‘Stop!’
The single word was both a command and a threat, bringing her to a halt even more strongly than his hold on her. She blinked hard, trying to clear her eyes, to meet the powerful glare of his, and shivered as she saw herself reflected once more in the polished jet depths as she had been on the night in the cottage. A night that seemed like a lifetime away.
‘Karim...’
He couldn’t be doing this again, could he? He couldn’t be so cruel—so dishonest! Because to insist on her stopping now could only be a lie. It had to be, with the burn of arousal scoring the knife-edges of his cheeks, the furious beat of his heart under the powerful ribcage. He was still hard and hot against her so why the hell was he...?
‘Karim...’
She wriggled frantically in his hold, managed to raise her hands to his face, wincing as she felt the granite hardness of the muscles that tightened against her caress, the furious jerk of his chin as he repelled her touch. Surely this couldn’t be happening, not when he had been the one who had been kissing her, caressing her in the room below.
‘Karim—please...’
If he wouldn’t let her touch him, then perhaps she could reach him some other way. Her slippers had been lost somewhere along the crazy journey up the stairs so that she had to stand on tiptoe to reach, but somehow she managed to reach up and press a soft and, she hoped, enticing kiss in the hard plane of his cheek. Her mouth lingered just for a moment as the tang of his skin burned against her tongue, the intensely personal flavour of his skin scalding her senses. The moment was a singing delight and a terrible torment all in one as she felt the hardness of him against her, her breasts crushed to the rigidity of his chest, the thunder of his heart a physical sensation against them. The scent of his body surrounded her, enclosing her in a cloud of warm sensation, and that taste on her lips...
‘No!’ Karim’s voice was a rough animal growl in her ear, the snarl of a savage cat that faced an intruder into its territory. An alien, unwelcome intruder.
‘But...’
‘I said no!’
Suddenly the room was spinning round her again, more sickeningly this time. She wasn’t aware of just what had happened, wasn’t aware of anything at all until she hit the side of the bed, landing with a gasp of shock on the silken covers where he had flung her with force, away from him.
For a moment as she looked up into his eyes Karim looked as stunned as she felt, some wild force glazing his eyes, making them look like polished black glass. But then he blinked and the movement wiped away every trace of emotion.
‘I do not want you,’ he stated flatly.
But that was too much. She had felt the tension, the heat in his long body. She had known the taste and pressure of his kisses. Her body still burned and stung where his hands had moved over her skin, the pressure urgent with need.
‘Liar,’ she said softly, then repeated more strongly, conviction giving her voice added force. ‘You are a liar and that is the most impossible untruth. You could at least be honest.’
Karim’s proud head went back as if he had been slapped in the face, dark eyes narrowing violently. For a moment Clemmie thought that he was going to fling something at her, verbally if not physically, or at least that he was going to spin on his heel and stalk out of the room. But then he drew in a deep breath, his nostrils flaring as he did so, and nodded, slow and controlled. And it was the control that worried her.
‘And what, precisely, would that achieve?’
It would mean so much to her. It would give her something to hold on to in the dark, arid future that lay ahead of her. It would leave her with one happy memory to know that one man—this man—had actually wanted her for her and not because of the money, the power, the treaties that came with her. He had wanted her solely because she excited him. Because she was a woman and he was a man.
But she couldn’t say that. It would be like ripping her soul from her body and laying it out in front of him for him to scorn, or, even worse, to ignore completely.
‘It would be the honourable thing,’ she flung at him and knew a bittersweet sense of triumph as she saw the tiny, almost imperceptible twist to his beautiful mouth that told her dart had hit home.
‘Oh, would it, Princess?’ he questioned and her heart seemed to turn to ashes inside her.
Princess, he had said. And that single word put her right in her place, telling her exactly what he thought about her. He might be attracted to her physically, he might even hunger for her as much as she did him, but she was still just the ‘mission’ he had been sent on. The runaway bride he had been sent to collect. The would-be queen he had to ensure would reach the throne.
So that his honour could be satisfied.
‘It would be honourable to take this situation and make it even worse than it is?’
Karim prowled closer to where she lay in the middle of the bed, the fine material of his robe whispering across the marble floor. Clemmie shifted restlessly, pushed herself up on to her knees to face him.
‘I—don’t understand.’
‘You wanted honesty—well, here’s honesty...’
Suddenly she didn’t want him to say anything. That frankness she had wanted now seemed so dangerous, so threatening. Yet she had pushed him to say it and she couldn’t find the words to stop him. But it was too late.
‘I do want you.’ Karim’s black eyes burned down into her wide amber ones, searing right into her thoughts. ‘I want you like hell. Never doubt it.’
His hand flashed out, caught hold of hers, held it for a moment against his body, his fingers flattening hers against the swollen heat of his erection under the fine material. Just for the space of a couple of jerky heartbeats but then he released her and took several steps back, away from her.
‘I want you so much that it’s tearing me to pieces not to have you. But what does that do for us?’
There was a hard band around her skull, across her forehead and digging into her temples and it was tightening with every heartbeat, twisting cruelly. What was that saying about being careful what you asked for? Karim had given her what she wanted—what she had thought she wanted. She had forced it from him. He had said the words she had claimed, to herself, she wanted to hear.
And all that it had done was to put an even greater distance between them.
‘It... You know it was an arranged marriage. One I had no part in, no agreement given. I was just a child. My father sold me!’
‘The agreement is still binding. You are here to become Nabil’s Queen.’
But I don’t want to be Nabil’s anything! The words burned on the edge of her tongue but she knew the danger they would bring if she spoke them. It was bad enough to know that they were inside her head but if she heard them spoken aloud, between her and Karim, then there was never any going back. How had she managed to live her life, get this far, without ever really facing up to the nightmare that her future was going to be? She knew now why she had made herself keep so much to herself. She had known instinctively that if she had come out from the glass dome she had built around herself she would never be able to go through with this.
But Karim had walked into her life, shattered that glass dome beyond repair. He had forced her out of her seclusion and let the real world in, and, like the story of Pandora opening that box, there was no chance of ever getting anything back inside again. There wasn’t even that one tiny little thing called Hope left to offer her anything.
‘But not yet...’ she said.
Clemmie uncoiled herself from the bed and pushed herself to her feet, needing to be able to look him in the eye, not stare up at him from where she was. His height already gave him too much of an advantage.
