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He took his hand away from her mouth.
‘That’s not because of you.’ His forehead touched hers as his fingers gripped the silk of her dress. Reaction shuddered through him and echoed through her. Powerful and unstoppable. ‘I should not have ridden through the pain for three days to get to you,’ he murmured, his lips touching her earlobe.
He had ridden for three days to follow her? Risking his health in the process? Agony and ecstasy echoed through her body. Why did his actions seem romantic, instead of foolhardy or simply insane? Maybe because no man had ever cared about her enough to do such a thing?
His lips closed over her earlobe. She arched against him, instinctively encouraging the contact, her whole body revelling in the response as he buried his face in her neck. The remembered ache became real and vivid again and a tortured moan escaped her lips.
‘It was madness and I paid for it,’ he said, his warm breath sending shivers down her back, his palms rubbing her waist, the silk feeling like sandpaper against too-sensitive skin. ‘I’m not here for an apology.’
She pressed her palms to his jaw to draw his head up. His dark gaze was tortured, as tortured as she felt.
‘Then why are you here, Raif?’ she asked, around the knot of fear and joy in her throat.
‘Because I still want you, dammit. And I can’t make it stop.’
It wasn’t what Raif had meant to say. Not even close. But once the words left his lips, he knew they were true.
He’d spent the last week—after finally managing to convince his brother and his brother’s doctor and his brother’s wife that he was fit enough to travel again—catching up on the million and one things that had been neglected during his illness while also planning this event.
He’d wanted to lure her to London. Had used the promise of funding a scholarship programme to control the interaction and had settled on a public meeting to ensure he didn’t lose his temper with her. Where Kasia Salah was concerned, he already knew his ability to be rational had deserted him long ago. Why had he seduced her, why had he tried to bully her into marriage—a knee-jerk reaction that he had regretted after the week spent in his brother’s home with far too much time to think—and why had he put his pride and dignity and his health in jeopardy by pursuing her to the Golden Palace like a lunatic?
But as soon as he’d seen her again, the fury, the desire for revenge had turned into something a great deal more volatile.
In a grubby T-shirt and shorts she had been exquisite; in the silky red dress, which clung to her slender body, accentuating her high, full breasts and subtle curves, she was irresistible. Her amber eyes, the lids smudged with glittery make-up, had met his and all he’d wanted to do was feast on her again, and make her moan. His tongue had thickened at the thought of licking the side of her neck. His fingertips had itched to find the pins holding the waterfall of curls on top of her head and pull them out until the vibrant mass fell into his palms. And the blood had surged straight to his groin, the desire to pump into her tight heat all but unbearable.
But more than that, and somehow worse, when she’d searched his face a moment ago, her eyes filled with shame and remorse, he had wanted to take her distress away. To protect her, to hold her, to take all the blame, when this situation was more her fault than his.
He’d made some stupid knee-jerk decisions, but she’d made more.
Her gaze widened with shock at his revelation, but the flare of desire told him all he needed to know.
Why was he complicating this? He had planned this meeting precisely to take this yearning, this longing away.
This was about sex—it had always been about sex. Maybe it had become complicated by her virginity and his illness. But now he was here, in London, and fully recovered, why should they be bound by an ancient ritual that meant nothing outside their homeland?
He’d tried to do the right thing, to honour his culture and to honour her—and to show her the respect due to her after some warped reading of what he had discovered about his mother’s situation with his father several years ago.
But this situation was not the same as what had happened to the woman who had died giving birth to him. A woman who he had refused to think about, until Zane had insisted he read his father’s journals.
Given his overreaction to Kasia’s virginity, he wished he had never read the damn journals. Never discovered the truth. What did the circumstances of his birth have to do with who he had become anyway? He had never known the girl his father had exploited and his father had never acknowledged him, her child.
The truth had messed with his head, his sense of self, or he would not have made that stupid declaration about his honour, about having to marry Kasia. And even if an elemental part of who he was and had always been made him feel responsible for her virginity, and the loss of it, surely the point was that her virginit
y had no bearing on where they were now.
They were both a continent away from their culture, those rituals. The Law of Marriage of the Sheikhs did not apply in London, even if it ever had in that tent.
Kasia Salah had chosen to leave Narabia five years ago. After four years of living—and succeeding—in this world as well as his own, he knew how it worked, too. So why should he not treat her as he would any other woman he desired? She certainly looked the part in that provocative dress and her high heels.
She wasn’t a virgin any more. And they weren’t in the desert now.
He cradled her cheek, traced with his thumb the spot where her pulse fluttered against her collarbone and adjusted his stance so she could feel the thick erection and know exactly what she still did to him.
‘The only question I need an answer to is do you still want me, Kasia? If not, you can leave now, and I will never seek you out again.’
It was a promise that it would kill him to keep, if he had read the flare of arousal, her passionate response to him wrong. But he would keep it. Because he wasn’t the barbarian she had assumed he was. And he’d debased himself enough already to have her—not just travelling across a desert in his frenzy, and leaving himself at the mercy of his brother, but travelling across an ocean, across continents. He hadn’t been able to get her out of his head for a whole month; his whole damn life had been thrown into turmoil because of his association with her.
But he didn’t need Kasia, he just wanted her.
