Читать книгу Summer Sheikhs: Sheikh's Betrayal / Breaking the Sheikh's Rules / Innocent in the Sheikh's Harem - Эбби Грин, Marguerite Kaye - Страница 19

HER heart leapt with yearning, her body melted into instant need. But she looked at him for a moment, resisting, remembering his harsh words earlier in the day.

‘Tell me what it means to you, that you want me,’ she said quietly.

‘It means you are a beautiful, sensual woman.’

‘Not good enough. Next answer.’

‘What do you want to hear?’

‘You’ve thought yourself too good to talk to me for something like ten years. Now you’re sleeping with me. Have you looked at that fact?’

‘Is this why you came? To prove something to me?’ he asked.

‘My interest in proving anything to you runs in the minus figures, Salah. I find that when a person makes an accusation, he’s usually talking to a mirror. Are you trying to prove something to me?’

‘You forget that I did not go to your country. You came to mine.’

‘You forget that I did not go to your bed. You came to mine.’

‘Why did you come out to me? You came to me. You knew I was waiting.’

‘I think we’ve agreed the old sexual fire still has live coals amongst the ashes,’ Desi said. ‘Still, I don’t call stepping out of my room to get some air “coming to you”, exactly.’

‘You called my name. You knew I was there.’

‘I didn’t, actually. Why were you there?’

‘You know it,’ he said.

‘Closure, you say. What do you need closure on, exactly, Salah? Because you look as though you’ve had closure on everything in life. You look as if you’ve shut down everything except the food intake. What’s left?’

He put out one hand to catch her chin and turned her head. For one tremulous moment his eyes met hers.

‘You know what is left.’

Honeyed sweetness flooded up her body, making her neck weak.

‘You stirred up what was frozen, Desi. Until you came, I had forgotten how much I once loved you.’

‘Salah!’ she whispered.

‘And how little you loved me.’

‘You think?’ she said bitterly.

‘You did not love me at all. You said so, and you were right.’

‘I was sixteen!’

‘Yes. You were young. I also was young, too young for such powerful feelings. I could not control what I felt. You said I was like the Kaljuks, and my only thought, Desi, was to prove to you that I could never be like them.’

‘Is that why you joined Prince Omar?’ she breathed, horrified.

He shrugged. ‘I was running across a rocky ledge, looking for a way down to a Kaljuk gun emplacement that had been shelling a mountain town for a week.’ Unconsciously he stroked the scar that ran across his cheekbone to above his ear. ‘There was an explosion of light in my head, that’s all I remember. I woke up in the hospital.

‘You were there with me day and night, Desi. You were my solace and my torment, in one. I dreamed of you, sleeping and waking. I wanted you more than anything in the world. I begged you to come to me. You did not come.’

‘I tried, but Leo…’ Immediately she wished she hadn’t pronounced the name.

‘Yes, Leo,’ he said in a different tone. ‘Sami sent me a letter with pictures of you in your new life with this old man. Then I understood. You did not love me, you could never be mine. I wrote you the letter to tell you I knew it.

‘But I could not defend myself against the knowing. It went straight into my heart. The pain was like the end of the world, Desi. I did not recover, not even after I told myself I did. When you love someone the way I loved you…Every day and every night I yearned for you. In the bed of other women, I dreamed of you.’

Suddenly she had to choke back tears.

‘Why did you never tell me? Never try to get in touch?’ she demanded. ‘It was up to you, wasn’t it? After that letter did you expect me to try to contact you again?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I expected nothing. You were with Leo. My love died, a terrible, painful death that I thought had killed my heart.

‘One day, I awoke from the pain. But still I was not free of you. Then it was the memory of love itself that haunted me. Fool that I was, I wanted to find this feeling again, with another woman. I thought you could be wiped from my memory forever and I would feel alive again.

‘But that is impossible, I learned that. I can never feel such an impact again. I don’t know why it is so, but it is. I was ten times a fool to wish it. Such love is weakness. An addiction.’

He paused, but she had no words.

‘I thought it was dead, Desi. Before you came I thought there was nothing left, not even ashes. When my father told me he would let you come, I was angry, that was all. I thought, it is over. What business does she have, to come to me now?

‘Then you came, and it was not what I expected. Anger was only the first of many feelings. I understood things I did not understand before.

‘Our love and its death has affected every decision of my life from that moment, every breath I took, every woman I rejected as a wife. I understand it now.’

‘God,’ she whispered. Her heart was choking her.

‘I want to free myself, Desi. My parents urge me to get married—for ten years they have wanted this. Now even I see it is time. But I can’t go to my future wife with such a burden of the past. Not now that I feel its weight.’

Her mouth opened in a soundless gasp as she took in his meaning.

‘It is time to leave this behind. We have a few days together. I want to finish with these broken hopes. I want to bury the past once and forever. I want to go to my new wife with a heart free and ready to accept her.’

She was silent, struggling with feeling. A sound like gunshot startled her as one of the flaming torches fell to be extinguished in the sand, and its dying spark shot skyward like a soul going home.

‘And how will sleeping with me for a few days free your heart?’ she asked at last.

‘I have been haunted by you, Desi, by the memory of lovemaking that moved the earth. Nothing has matched it, but it is because nothing can match it. You can’t match a dream. It is a fantasy, I know it, born from the fact that you were my first experience of love.’

She wanted to tell him how it had been for her. The tearing grief, the bottomless yearning for that souldeep connection, the determination to forget. Then Leo’s terrible betrayal, and afterwards, the emptiness, the feeling that that part of her had died. And the terrible shock, seeing Salah again, to discover that it might still be there.

‘I want that haunting to stop. Can you understand this? And I think—to put out my hand and know that it is you, and that the sex is what it is and no more—then I can close the book. I want to close it, Desi.’

‘You’re going to marry my best friend, feeling like this?’ she protested.

‘Don’t you see, it is not feeling? It is a memory, that is all.’

‘What if it worked the other way? What if this revived your love? Then what?’

Salah shook his head. ‘Do not fear for me, Desi.’

‘And what about my feelings? They don’t matter?’

He was silent, his eyes meeting hers. He didn’t believe she had any feelings to be hurt, that was obvious. And she just could not open her mouth to tell him. What would he do with such knowledge?

‘You’re sure this is not a disguised desire to punish me?’ she pressed.

‘How would this punish you?’

‘You might think I’m vulnerable. You suspect me of coming here to see you. What did you imagine I wanted?’

An odd expression crossed his face in torchlight. ‘What power do I have to hurt you?’

Before she could answer, one of the Bedouin came and spoke to him.

‘Our tent is ready,’ Salah said. ‘Come to bed.’

And in spite of everything, her heart kicked with cell-deep anticipation.

The interior of the tent was softly lighted in the glow of two hurricane lamps. The earth was covered with reed mats and carpets, the space was divided into two sections by curtains of mosquito netting. On one side there was a large basin and two jugs of water behind a curtain. The other side held cushions and a thin mattress spread with a clean striped cloth.

A small spade was placed discreetly by the entrance, and Desi picked it up and went out to walk into the dunes. When she returned Salah had washed and was behind the netting, zipping their sleeping bags into a double. He turned and looked at her, and suddenly she was remembering the night they had spent in a little cabin on the island. Then, too, they had lit hurricane lanterns.

Then, too, the air between them had been thick with anticipation, and her limbs had been heavy with it.

They did not speak. He got up and went out.

Desi got out her sponge bag and went into the little space to bathe. She had packed unperfumed soap, to avoid enticing insects, but now she wished she could risk using some scent. Nor could the cotton pyjamas she had packed be called anything but plain.

She knew she was being a fool. She was storing up heartbreak for herself.

But if for Salah lovemaking was a necessary way of coming to terms with the past, for her it was thirst in the desert.

All those years of telling herself it had been nothing to him. That if he had truly loved her, he could never have written what he did. What he told her this evening was like a firestorm in her. He had loved her.

If she had known that, would she have had the courage to write back, to shout at him for his despicable attitude? To fight?

But how could she have been happy with a man who harboured such alien, archaic views? Would he ever have treated her as an equal? A man makes love to a virgin and then calls her a slut? When she looked at it squarely, she knew she had had a lucky escape.

If only it felt like that.

When Salah returned to the tent, she was lying in the sleeping bag reading by the light of one of the lanterns. She looked up.

He stood gazing at her from the other side of the heavy netting, a shadowy silhouette, tall and powerful in a flowing robe, perfectly still. For a moment, as they stared at each other, the world stopped. There was no past between them, no future, the silence whispered, there was only the moment. Then he lifted the netting and stepped inside her little cocoon.

The little slow intake of her breath as she watched him was perfectly audible in the silence. Rivulets of anticipation coursed through her. She put down her book.

Lamplight caressed his curling black hair like melted gold. His desert cloak was open. She took in the vision of a flat, hard stomach, snug boxers, legs that were powerfully muscled. So different, and yet still there was the shadow of the eager young body that she had first seen so long ago.

A thin pale mark ran from his abdomen, over one hip and down his thigh almost to the knee. That was the line that marked the frontier between then and now: his battle scars.

He had a light dusting of hair on his forearms as well as a neat mat of chest hair. A delicate line of black curls tracing the middle of his abdomen gathered momentum as it reached his shorts. His flesh stirred as he looked at her.

It was unmistakably, primitively male.

And primally, powerfully erotic. She could not remember a time when the mere sight of a man’s body had affected her so deeply, drawing her irresistibly.

Salah shrugged off the robe and dropped it on the carpet. His shoulders looked even more powerful now. He sank down onto his haunches, and then he was beside her, his mouth searching for hers, his heat enveloping her.

Her hand went of its own accord to the flesh at his groin, and she stroked him hungrily as it turned to marble, drunk on the knowledge that her touch had such power over him. She had seen statues of gods with erect sex, and tonight she understood the primitive urge to worship such flesh.

His head fell back at the assault of pleasure, and she slipped her fingers inside the elastic of his waistband, to draw the black fabric down and off his body. Then he lay naked in glowing lamplight, his eyes watching her with a black fury of need that stirred her to the depths. Her hand enclosed him again, and she bent down over him and almost without conscious volition, because in some deep part of her she was compelled to it, took him into her mouth.

His breath caught, and the sound shivered over her skin. She closed her eyes and gave herself up to the pleasure of giving pleasure. She felt his hands in her hair, cupping her head, felt the intensity of his need.

‘Too much,’ he said hoarsely after a few moments. His hands moved to catch her shoulders, and he drew her up into a fierce embrace. ‘Too much.’ He leaned away from her for a moment, she heard the puff of his breath, and then the tent was in darkness.

In another moment, she was wrapped in his embrace.