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It had nearly killed him to ease her out of his arms as the red light of dawn had shone through the fabric of the Kholadi tent nearly a month ago now. It had taken every ounce of his self-control to dress in the darkness and leave her
succulent and responsive body lying naked on the sheets. To resist the intoxicating scent of sex twisting his guts into knots.
He’d done the right thing. He couldn’t stay. Couldn’t risk falling asleep in her arms. He’d already come perilously close to revealing the truth about what had happened the night before he’d been snatched by his father.
But in the weeks since he’d waited for the need—and that terrifying sense of connection—to fade.
Even though he hadn’t told Catherine everything, he had told her things he had never confided in anyone, an impulse that had made him deeply uneasy the following morning.
But despite his desperation to create distance between them in the weeks since... The need to see her, to speak to her, to touch and taste her hadn’t died. If anything it had got worse. And now this? He had not expected her to contact him. Certain that she must realise absence was the only way to curb their hunger for each other.
Even if it hadn’t curbed it up to now.
He should ignore the note. He would be returning to the palace in two days. She hadn’t said the problem was urgent. Whatever it was. And it would send entirely the wrong signals if he rushed back to see her simply because she’d asked him to.
But still the sense of urgency and anticipation tightened around his larynx, threatening to strangle him as he remembered the silken softness of her hair against his fingertips, the brush of her breasts shivering against his chest, as she told him of the mother who had abandoned her.
He wasn’t the only one who had made themselves vulnerable that night.
‘Your Majesty, the Crown Prince would like to show you to his stables. He has a fine stallion to offer you as a gift.’
Zane’s head rose at the whispered prompt from one of his diplomats.
So Prince Dalman had finally finished talking.
Crumpling up the note, he shoved it into the pocket of his robe. And before he could think better of it, he said what he had wanted to say as soon as he had read it.
‘Tell the Prince I am very sorry, but I have urgent business and must return to Narabia.’
The advisor looked surprised, probably because he had transcribed the note and knew its contents, but he covered it well. ‘Yes, Your Divine Majesty.’
The advisor made their excuses to Dalman, who looked suitably affronted at the abrupt change of plans.
As Zane left the palace and climbed into an SUV to take him to the nearby airfield, the obvious reason for Catherine’s request occurred to him and a dropping sensation turned the need in his stomach into a hollow ache.
Of course, she had wanted to see him to tell him any chance of a pregnancy was now off the cards.
He rubbed a hand across his jaw, staring blindly at the jet as the airfield came into view and he recognised his reaction for what it was. Not relief, but disappointment. Bone-crushing disappointment.
‘Damn it,’ he cursed viciously under his breath. All the frustration and irritation of the last few weeks, which he had kept locked so carefully inside, finally coming out in the open.
What the heck was happening to him? This was madness. He didn’t want Catherine to be pregnant. He didn’t want her to have his child. Quite apart from anything else, if she became pregnant—and the news got out, which of course it would—he would have to force her to marry him. The way he suspected his father had once forced his mother.
History would repeat itself. Because how exactly was he supposed to explain to her that he would not be able to let her leave the country? That her free will would no longer be her own?
He didn’t love Catherine, could never offer her that, because he knew he could never allow himself to be that vulnerable again.
But even knowing that, a part of him—that dark, selfish part of him that had abandoned his mother without a backward glance—had hoped she would be pregnant. So he could make her stay. And the only possible reason for that was the hunger that had refused to die.
Need and desire reverberated through his body.
He imagined her kneeling in front of him, the way she had all those nights ago in Kasim’s camp. Taking his swollen penis into her mouth, tentatively licking around the engorged head, her eyes dark with arousal and excitement as she concentrated on driving him to orgasm.
As he shifted in his seat, trying to relieve the pounding ache before he had to leave the car and get on the jet, he realised he had never been any better than the man who had hurt him. But even that wasn’t enough to curtail the need.
‘Ravi tells me you wished to see me.’
Cat tried to contain her nerves—and her shock at being summoned to Zane’s office only three hours after she’d requested a meeting that morning. After her nausea attack yesterday, and another one this morning, she’d become more and more convinced she might actually be pregnant.
