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It was an escape to think of them rather than the bombshell that Rafiq had dropped on her! Marriage? That didn’t fit in with her plans or expectations at all. Rafiq was out of touch. Women didn’t have to get married simply because they were pregnant these days, she soothed herself. Although being forced to take Rafiq to bed for the rest of her life could be an encouragement, she conceded guiltily, shocked and then amused by her drowsy reverie.
But then the bedroom door opened again and Rafiq strolled in, dark golden eyes widening a little when he saw her still awake, sapphire eyes rounding above the sheet with surprise, her hair tumbled across the pillow like a copper question mark.
‘It’s after midnight,’ Izzy pointed out a little unsteadily. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘This is my bedroom.’ Rafiq dropped the news without apology because he had a campaign to mount. Like it or not, freely choose it or not, he had tomakeIzzy marry him and he would do whatever he had to do to achieve that end result.
Izzy was so taken aback, she sat up against the pillows in a sudden movement. ‘Yourbedroom? Why was I put in your room?’ she gasped.
‘Because everyone thinks we’re married.’
‘But we’renot!’ she protested vehemently.
‘We know that,’ Rafiq conceded. ‘But to make a major announcement of the truth that you are pregnant and we arenotmarried would kick off a huge scandal and I’m not prepared to do that.’
‘Oh...’ Izzy kind of saw his point, which only infuriated her. Unfortunately, it washerfault that everyone knew that she was pregnant.
‘I owe Prince Jalil, my uncle and the Regent, more than that scandal after the hard work he has done to ensure that the Zenarian royal family is viewed with affection and respect again.’
‘Again?’Izzy queried and then she shifted a hand, dismissing that mystery to concentrate on the here and now, which seemed rather more important. ‘Couldn’t you use another bedroom with the excuse that I’m pregnant and you don’t want to disturb me?’
‘No. Although it has been assumed that we were married in the UK, everyone also knows that we must have been apart for many weeks and to sleep anywhere butwithyou would look strange.’
Izzy breathed in very deep and compressed her lush pink lips. ‘Then it looks like we’re stuck with this sharing but it’s not as though I’m planning to stay long, so I’m sure we can cope until I leave again. Then you can say we’re divorced, can’t you?’
Rafiq said nothing at all because therewasnothing to say to that unwelcome suggestion. If it hadn’t been for the twins she was expecting, they could have taken that road, but then they wouldn’t have been in the situation in the first place had it not been for her pregnancy. His brain, which until that moment had been very much preoccupied with the prospect of becoming a father, took a sudden jolting hike in another direction as Izzy stopped hugging the sheet as though he were a potential rapist and let it fall to her lap. She was sporting something made of thin white cotton, the material so fine it outlined the ripe curves of her unbound breasts and displayed the darker circles of her pouting nipples. Rafiq went instantly hard as a rock and turned away lest she notice the desire his neatly tailored trousers could not conceal.
Izzy shifted over to what she had chosen as her side of the bed and told herself that she wasnotgoing to watch Rafiq undress. But she did, while for the entire space of each nail-biting second assuring herself that she would naturally close her eyes and stop peeking,pervingon him like some sort of sex-starved woman.
After all, she was no longer that naïve any more, she told herself briskly. Unhappily, for some inexplicable reason, having seen Rafiq naked before didn’t seem to be enough to satisfy her renewed curiosity or her fresh interest. The shirt dropped to the floor and her gaze hungrily roamed over his muscular brown torso as if she had never seen a man’s chest in her life. A sort of invasive heat source entered her pelvis at the same moment as she appreciated the corrugated musculature lining his eight-pack, not to mention that Adonis belt of a vee that magically appeared as he began removing the suit trousers. Her nipples peaked and her body shifted restively below the sheet as she noted the dark arrow of hair disappearing below the waistband of his boxers and the sizeable bulge still covered there. And that was the point where shame made her shut her eyes tight, castigating herself for her inability to do so earlier.
Was it her fault that he was so absolutely magnificent naked that she wanted to put her hands all over him? Explore, touch, trace,tease? She buried her burning face in a pillow, praying for her composure to return before he registered how ill at ease she was simply sharing a bed with him again. After all, been there, done that, got more than a T-shirt out of it, why should sleeping with him in the same bed seem so much more dangerously intimate?
Rafiq went for a shower, a freezing-cold one, keen to dispel the treacherous pulse of arousal in case his condition gave her the impression that he wanted more.Ofcourse, he wanted more of the best sex he had ever had, he scoffed at himself, but he wouldn’t do anything about it or make any kind of approach. He might have taken advantage of her once, but he wasn’t about to repeat that mistake. The mother of his unborn children deserved better than that; she deserved his respect, his consideration. And the streak of dark, highly sexed wildness in him that he always kept chained up and suppressed would not get a single chance to escape, he swore inwardly.
Taut with discomfiture from her most recent reflections, Izzy waited until she felt his weight depress the mattress before stretching out a hand to switch off the light. She couldn’t expect him to sleep with the light on all night as she had planned to do because she didn’t like waking up anywhere strange when she was half-asleep. She wasn’t a kid any more. She could sleep fine in the dark in an unfamiliar place, she told herself irritably.
Even so, it seemed to be taking her a very long time to fall asleep because she was so very aware of his presence in the bed. The bed was wide, long, the perfect fit for a wide-shouldered, long-legged male, but he put out heat like a furnace and she swore she could feel that unwelcome heat warming her back and it made her all twitchy and uneasy, a tightening deep inside her nagging at her nerves.
‘Go to sleep, Izzy,’ a voice murmured in the merciful darkness. ‘I’m not about to jump you.’
In silence, her teeth gritted and she wouldn’t let herself screech something back. He thought she was afraid of him now, did he? How dared he? She wasn’t a scared little kid! She compressed her lips and, cursing him thoroughly, lay as still as a corpse and eventually that did the trick and she drifted off to sleep.
Feeling too warm woke her up again. Moonlight was casting a little clarity into the room and she could see that it was still dark but that was the least of her problems, she registered, because she was welded up against a very masculine body like a second skin and, yes, he was too hot but, on another level, he feltincredible. Yet again her teeth clenched together even as a tiny little quiver thrummed through her. It was a case of mind over matter. It was perfectly normal to be attracted to him but, in the circumstances, it would be totally wrong to do anything about it. So, even though she wanted to flip over and investigate that warm hair-roughened, sun-darkened skin with all the wanton attention of a complete pervert, she wasn’t about to do it, was she?
Even if she wasn’t theonlyone of them with that kind of idea and physical urges at play? After all, she wasn’t stupid. His arousal was aggressively firm against her hip. In fact, she felt rather smug about the truth that he wasn’t impervious to her either. Why should she be the only one suffering?
‘If you don’t stop twitching and shifting, I’ll...’ Rafiq ground out in frustration.
‘You’ll what?’ Izzy positively snarled as she flipped up into sitting position. ‘Go on! Threaten me with some ghastly medieval punishment for breathing!’
‘I was not about to threaten you but you’re certainly not making this easy!’ Rafiq snapped back thickly.
‘Oh, excuse me,’ Izzy said snarkily, flipping back the sheet to slide off the bed, the nightie flipping up to reveal the stretch of shapely legs for his bemused appraisal. ‘You’re the one who had an arm round me!’
‘I thought that if I held you, you might stop moving around so much and keeping me awake!’ Rafiq grated. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not used to sharing a bed with anyone.’
‘You were married for ten years,’ Izzy threw back at him. ‘How is that possible?’
