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‘But sometimes you have to go with the flow,’ Claire muttered tautly.
Raif had never gone with the flow in his life. He worked to schedules based on a routine from which he rarely deviated, yet the concept of simply relaxing and following his own inclinations for even as long as an evening had immense appeal. ‘Yes,’ he conceded with a slow-burning smile of agreement.
‘Nobody’s waiting for you to return?’ Claire prompted, her mouth drying at that possibility.
‘Nobody.’ A faint flush lined Raif’s sculpted cheekbones, because the yacht had a crew of over sixty, not to mention his security team and admin staff. He knew very well what it was to be alone in a crowd of people, but he really didn’t know what it was to be physically alone because from childhood there had always been domestic and security staff surrounding him.
Embarrassed by the tears she had let momentarily overpower her, Claire stacked the dishes busily and moved out to the kitchen with them.
Raif set the glasses uncertainly on the sink drainer. ‘Leave them for now.’
‘Tidy house, tidy mind,’ Claire quipped. ‘That was how I was brought up.’
‘Does it make a difference?’
‘No, it just keeps you constantly busy.’
Claire settled the dishes into the sink and began washing them and setting them on the drainer.
Raif hovered and then swept up the tea towel somewhat uneasily, vaguely recalling a woman drying dishes in one of the homes he had visited for the weekend while he was at boarding school.
‘You don’t have to help.’
‘I can’t stand here doing nothing.’ Raif felt that he already spent far too much time doing nothing. He took care of Quristan’s investments while running his development empire on the side. He had often been called a workaholic and saw no reason to disdain the label. He took pride in working to advance his country’s interests and wealth. Or at least he had done so when he’d still believed that he could do a good job without infuriating his father. The recollection of his predicament made him bite back a groan. Well, he had never been a favoured son and now he never would be.
He reached for a plate and began to dry it with care, determined not to plunge himself into pointless self-recriminations. The Quristani government was pleased, the locals were ecstatic, and his father was outraged. There was nothing he could do about that. Many, many things in the modern world outraged King Jafri, who wished to remain a feudal ruler like his ancestors in a country with a democratically elected government. His father had been raised to be domineering, what he saw as ‘strong’. But such methods only worked for an absolute monarch with unfettered power, such as his own father had been. And shorn of that power, forced to accept government interference and advice, King Jafri had seethed with frustration and the belief that he was not being awarded the royal respect he saw as his due.
Raif set down the plate, just as Claire twitched the drying cloth from his fingers and took over. He lounged back against the fridge while she finished and stacked the china back in a cabinet. As she passed by him again, he propelled her gently backwards into his arms and pressed his mouth to the slope of her shoulder, drinking in the warm, lemony scent of her, and was almost lost to the steady pulse of arousal at his groin. No woman had ever had such an effect on him, but then he rarely allowed himself to get close enough to be tempted. Claire, however, had an indefinable quality that both relaxed and enticed him. She was so honest, so natural, so much what he needed in a woman to be attracted.
With a compulsive shiver, Claire leant back into the heat and strength of him. She had never been so intensely drawn to a guy in her life and while in one sense it was scary, in another it was wildly exciting. She knew what she was inviting but she had no doubts. It was her decision if she chose to go to bed with someone, nobody else’s. Her last boyfriend had tried to guilt her into sex and she had dug her heels in hard, needing more of a connection than she had found with him. It had never felt right with him. How was it that a stranger could connect with her so easily? How was it that she found Raif absolutely irresistible?
Squirming round in his light hold, Claire stretched up to find his mouth again and hunger ignited like a flame low in her tummy as his lips engulfed hers. It was what she had always sought and never found with a man: that crazy, uncontrollable surge of need to continue, to explore, toexperience. It warmed the chill of loss inside her, gave her hope that her usual zest for life was within reach again.
Raif drew her back into the sitting room. ‘Don’t stop,’ she told him, pausing the kiss only to refill her lungs.
‘Where’s your room?’
Claire laced her fingers into his and walked him into the first room off the sitting room, a freshly painted space her mother had had decorated for her in bright Mediterranean colours and fluttering, fringed arty drapes in advance of her arrival. It was the perfect backdrop for the unconventional, artistic daughter Jo had imagined Claire would be because Jo had liked to paint and make jewellery and pottery. Sadly, Claire was a girlie girl, who liked flowers and pastels, and she didn’t think she had a single crafty, creative bone in her body. She liked to garden and she loved to cook, but she had never wanted to make stuff or wear anything bohemian that might make people raise a brow.
Sadness pulled at her and she pushed it away to the back of her mind. She wanted to celebrate life, seize it by the throat and go for it instead of following every careful cautious rule she had been raised with because that merely made her feelscared. Only in rebelling against those restrictions had she found her mother and begun to find out who she really was...
‘I could do with a shower,’ Raif confessed abruptly. ‘I’m covered with salt from my swim.’
‘I never thought of that,’ Claire muttered, showing him into the bathroom next door and pulling out a clean towel for his use.
She returned to her room and hovered. She wondered if she should tell him that he would be her first while also wondering whether he was deliberately giving her a chance to change her mind. No, why would he do that? Men didn’t do that when a woman seemed confident, did they? Determined to commit to her decision, she stripped and dropped her clothing in the laundry hamper before scrambling into the bed. For the very first time, she felt she was with the right man. There was a connection, an understanding she couldn’t explain but it was a great deal more than she had ever felt before.
Raif stood under the slow flow of lukewarm water in a daze. He was nervous. He knew that he wasn’t supposed to be, but he was. He was about to ditch a lifetime of celibacy and he was about to do it in the heat of a reckless moment. But Claire made himfeelreckless, and that was an indulgence he had never tasted before, and he wanted more of that feeling. She gave him a sense of pure freedom and joy, a feeling that was equally rare in his world. She wanted him and he wanted her. It was straightforward and simple. There was no need to make it into something more challenging or meaningful than it was. Once he had thought that he would save the experience for his bride and now he questioned that he had ever been that naïve.
Raif strode into the bedroom, the damp towel wrapped round his waist. ‘Still think I’m beautiful?’ he teased.
Just looking at him, Claire ran out of breath all at once. He was like a lean, mean fighting machine out of an action movie, his abdomen laced and indented with hard muscle, biceps flexing below smooth brown skin as he tossed the towel aside. ‘Yes,’ she said without hesitation.
Laughing, Raif swung into the bed beside her and closed her into his arms. His mouth caressed hers and his tongue pried between her lips, darting and delving and sending a rush of splintering energy through her. Hunger was a hot pool of liquidity at the centre of her, a pulse point of growing desire. Her hips squirmed into the mattress as his hands came up to cup her full breasts, thumbs brushing her swollen nipples.
‘You’re the beautiful one,’ he murmured, pressing her back into the pillows, staring appreciatively down at her as her honey-blonde hair tumbled across the dark linen, her cornflower-blue eyes wide with disconcertion against her flushed cheeks, her lips swollen from his kisses. He drank in the warmth in that scrutiny like a starving man.
He lowered his mouth to a rosy peak and sucked strongly, every fantasy fulfilled because she was the most glorious mix of soft and firm, silky and luscious. Her hands ran up over his corrugated abdomen to his shoulders in exploration and he shifted with sensual pleasure thrumming through him like an intoxicating drug, his spine bowing as she trailed her hands down over his back.
