Читать книгу Midnight in the Desert Collection - Оливия Гейтс - Страница 70

THAT was how it began, with his hands skimming up her calves, peeling the damp silk from her legs as he pressed kisses to her ankles, to the backs of her knees, to the inside of each thigh.

And, just when she was gasping in anticipation and expectation, he lifted himself and eased the bunched fabric over her hips, sliding his hands up either side of her waist and past her sensitive breasts, freeing her of the gown, before raining kisses on her eyes, nose and mouth, her shoulders, breasts and every part of her. With every silken touch of his fingers, every magical glide of his hands on her skin, every hot kiss of his mouth, her fever built, until a tear slipped unbidden from the corner of each eye.

The moment was as poignant as it was bittersweet. For she had dreamed of a night like this so very many times. She had dreamed of him returning to her, of admitting he had made a mistake, of begging her forgiveness, and in a thousand different ways, in a thousand different scenarios, she had welcomed him back.

She had dreamed of a magical night when he would return and say he was sorry, that he had been wrong and that he loved her. And she would take his hand, place it on her ripe belly and tell him that it was his child inside her, created in an act of love.

Until finally she would realise that he was never coming back, that he would never seek her out. That it was finished.

And yet, even though she knew nothing ultimately would change, he was here now—and even if it wasn’t what she had longed for, even if it would never be enough, it was something.

‘You are the beauty,’ she heard him say, and she opened liquid eyes to see him kneeling back and staring down at her, his eyes filled with what looked like worship. Yet still she waited, breathless with wondering if he might still notice the changes to her body since they’d last lain together, the changes that motherhood to his child had wrought. ‘So beautiful,’ he repeated.

She held out a hand to him to pull him down and end this desperate need. ‘Please make love to me, Bahir.’

He surprised her by taking her hand, turning it in his and kissing her palm, saying, ‘I will. But first …’ before he let her hand go to skim his hands up the inside of her legs, parting them, pushing them apart to dip his head lower.

She gasped when she realised his intention, and not only in anticipation of the pleasures to come. But they had so very little time and she had expected him to take his pleasure as many times as he could. She had not expected him to want to spend his time giving it. Besides, as much as she had missed the pleasures his wicked mouth could bring, it was the feel of him inside her that she craved.

‘Bahir,’ she cried as he wrapped his arms around her thighs and opened her to him. ‘Please.’

But her pleas were answered by the heated swipe of his tongue along her cleft, and the arch of her spine in response. ‘Oh God,’ she cried as his tongue made magic with every flick, sending her senses reeling with no time to recover before his lips closed on that tiny nub of nerves, drawing her into his mouth and teasing her senseless with the skill of an artisan—a man who knew exactly what she needed and when.

‘Please!’ she called, knowing she was already lost, not knowing what she called for.

But he knew. At the hitched peak of her pleasure she felt his fingers join his mouth, pleasuring her inside and out and sending her over the brink.

And that was how it ended, in a million shattering ways, in a million different colours. Years of ecstasy foregone forged into one shattering rainbow moment as she climaxed all around him.

He had always been the best, she thought as the tremors rolled away. Nothing had changed, it seemed, she registered in the pleasure-filled recesses of her mind.

He pulled her into his kiss as she returned to earth. She tasted herself on him, tasted hot sex, heated desire and his burning need, and that need fed into hers, needing him inside her now more than ever.

‘God, you look sexy like that,’ she heard him say as he drew back. ‘Do you have any idea how much I want you?’

She smiled up at him and thought through flickering eyelids about protection, was just about to say something, but he was already reaching across her to retrieve his wallet from a side table, extracting a packet that he tore open impatiently with his teeth. ‘Just as well one of us is responsible.’

She blinked, the fog in her blown-apart world clearing. ‘What did you say?’ she asked, not sure she’d heard him right, not sure she’d understood what he’d meant if she had.

He rolled the condom down his length, his erection bucking and protesting its latex confines in his hand. ‘I said …’ he dropped back over her, nuzzling a pebbled nipple with his hot mouth as he moved his legs between hers ‘… it’s lucky one of us can think straight.’

She stilled, the magic his mouth producing negated by the toxic content of his words. ‘You think I’m irresponsible.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ he said, before finding her other breast with his teeth, angling his hips for her centre.

‘You did,’ she said, squirming her hips up the bed and away from his attempts to join her. ‘That’s what you meant—that you were responsible because you thought about protection. You said I was lucky you’d thought of it.’

‘It’s not important!’

‘It is important, if that’s what you think.’

‘Marina, don’t do this. I didn’t mean anything.’

‘But you did! You think I’m irresponsible, don’t you? Just because you mentioned protection before I did. You assume I was never going to ask.’

‘Come on, Marina, you’re hardly the poster girl for safe sex.’

‘And you’re the poster boy, I suppose?’

‘I’m not the one with two illegitimate children. I would have thought you’d be happy not to be lumbered with a third.’

Blood rushed to her head at the sheer injustice in his words, pounding in her temples, a call to war. ‘How dare you?’ she cried, twisting her body underneath him, pushing at him with her hands and pounding him with her fists, desperate to get away. ‘How dare you talk about my children and say that I’m irresponsible? Get off me!’

‘Listen!’ he said, grabbing one wrist before it could find its target on his shoulder. ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

She glared up at him, her eyes blazing. ‘That’s too easy. You’re what’s wrong with me. I told you this was a mistake. I knew it was. I’m just sorry I didn’t realise how big a mistake until now.’

‘I wouldn’t worry on that score,’ he said through gritted teeth as he rolled away and let her go so that she could clamber from the bed and swipe up her gown from the floor. ‘It won’t happen again.’

She tugged the gown over her head, shrugging, uncaring when she realised that the seams were on the outside, already heading for the door. ‘You better believe it.’

If the flight thus far had been unbearable, the flight to Pisa was torturous, the atmosphere so strained that this time even the cabin attendants sensed the tension in the cabin and left them alone as much as possible. The lack of distractions was no help at all. Marina put her book down again in frustration, wondering if this flight would ever end. She’d tried to read the same passage at least a dozen times now and still the words didn’t stick.

But how could anything stick in a mind already overflowing with self-recrimination and loathing? She hated that she had let herself fall under Bahir’s heated spell last night. She hated that he had peeled away every shred of logic, accumulated wisdom and life experience that she possessed, just as easily as he had peeled her nightgown from her body.

She hated herself that she had let him.

And when she remembered the way she had come apart in his bed, she wanted to curl up and die. Oh God, how could she look at herself in the mirror? But one thing she knew. She would not bring herself to look at him.

Oh, she could hear him across the aisle, shifting in his seat, grumbling and muttering from time to time. She could feel the anger rolling off him in waves—even his warm, masculine scent was infused with resentment—but she refused to look his way. She could not face him knowing what she had let him do.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Still her muscles buzzed with the memories, her tender tissues still pulsing, still anticipating the completion that would now never come.

God, she thought, squeezing her thighs together in an effort to quell the endless—the pointless—waiting, but she was every kind of fool. Maybe Bahir was right. Maybe she was irresponsible after all. But not in the way he imagined.

Of course, their arrival into Pisa was delayed, the airport busy trying to catch up after the storm disruption of the previous day, the tarmac crowded with charter planes and passenger buses all jockeying for space.

So, by the time they landed, her nerves were strained to breaking point and she no longer cared that he was the father of her child or that she had agreed to tell him so. She just wanted him to be gone.

‘I’m good from here,’ she said without looking at him, as her luggage was stowed into a waiting car outside the busy airport. ‘I have a driver. You might as well go.’

She was dismissing him? His lip curled, and it was nothing to do with the smell of diesel in the air or someone’s pizza remains lying discarded and sweltering in the gutter. ‘That’s not the way it works, princess.’

She glared sharply up at him then, probably the first time she’d looked at him since storming out of his room early this morning, and he knew he’d rubbed her up the wrong way by reverting to her title. Tough. The less personal they kept this, the better for both of them. ‘The deal was to see you safely home.’

‘I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.’

‘It’s not up to you,’ he said, tossing his own overnight bag into the trunk alongside her bags, before nodding to the driver to close it. ‘And it’s not up to me. I made an agreement with Zoltan and that agreement stands.’

‘There’s no need …’

He pulled open the back door for her. ‘Get in.’

‘But I don’t want you …’

He leaned in close to her ear, close enough so that anyone sitting at the outdoor tables nearby might even think he was whispering sweet nothings into her ear. ‘You think I want you? You think I want to be here? But this isn’t about what I think of you right now. This isn’t personal. This is duty, princess, pure and simple. I said I’d do this and I’ll damned well do it.’

He drew back as she stood there in the open door for what seemed like for ever, looking like she might explode, her eyes filled with a white heat, her jaw so rigidly set it could have been wired in place.

‘Any time this year would be good, princess. I know how you’re in such a hurry to be reunited with your precious children.’ Not to mention how much of a hurry he was in to be done with her for good.

Her sorceress’s eyes narrowed then, and something he’d swear looked almost evil skittered across their dark surface while her lips stretched thin and tight across her face. ‘You’re right, this is all about duty,’ she said. ‘I had forgotten that for a moment. Just don’t tell me later that I didn’t warn you.’

He didn’t bother to ask her what she meant. He didn’t want to know. He slammed the door behind her, and after a few words, giving the driver a day off, took the keys and the wheel. There was no way he was sharing the back seat with her. At least driving along Italy’s frenetic autostradas would give him something relatively sane to think about.

It sure beat thinking about her.

He headed the car north towards Genoa and the exit that would take them into the northern Tuscan mountain region where she lived, while she sat glowering behind her dark glasses behind him. Such a different woman than the one who had graced his bed last night.

What had that been all about? What was her problem? Had that been some perverse kind of pay-back, a kind of getting even for him cutting her off all those years ago?

Was she still so bitter that she would seek any chance at revenge, including finding any justification that she could to stop him mere moments from plunging into her?

What other reason? Because she could hardly take umbrage at being thought irresponsible. God, the entire world’s media had used that word in reference to her at one time or another, and with good reason. It could hardly be considered an insult. One didn’t have to look further than not one, but two illegitimate children to prove that.

The traffic was heavy on the autostrada, but the powerful car made short work of the kilometres through the wide valley to the turn-off onto the narrower road that led towards the mountain region where she lived. Discovering that had been a surprise. He’d figured she’d still be living somewhere close to a city, somewhere she could party long into the night before collapsing long into the day. But she had children now. Perhaps she left them with their nanny while she partied. Maybe she was responsible enough to do that. That would be something.

The pace slowed considerably after they’d left the autostrada, the road wending its way along a fertile river valley flanked by looming peaks and through picturesque villages, where the corners of buildings intruding on the road, and blind corners that left no idea what was coming towards you, became the norm.

He dodged yet another slow-moving farm tractor. This was clearly an inconvenient place to live. But maybe she didn’t come home too often.

He glanced in the rear-view mirror to see her leaning back against the leather upholstery, her eyes still hidden under those dark glasses. But nothing could hide the strain made obvious in the tight set of her mouth.

So she was tired. Who wasn’t after last night?

He had no sympathy. None at all. At least she’d enjoyed some measure of relief. Unlike him, who had burned unsatiated all the hours till daylight, and then some just thinking about her spread out on his bed, wanton, lush and, oh, so slick.

He had been just moments from the place he had longed to be ever since she had appeared like a sorceress on the terrace, gift-wrapped in a transparent layer of silk …

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ she said from the back. ‘You have to turn left here.’ He had to haul the car around or he would have missed the turn completely.

‘How far?’ he said as the road narrowed to little more than a one-lane track up the side of a mountain and a snow sign warned of winter hazards.

‘A few kilometres. Not far.’ He wanted to snarl at the news, more anxious than ever, the closer they got to her home, for his duty to be done.

On the autostrada, with the power and engineering excellence of the car at his disposal, those few kilometres would have taken no time at all. On this narrow goat’s track, with its switchback bends and impossibly tight, blind corners, it was impossible to go fast, and the climb seemed to take for ever. Longer than for ever, when all you wanted was for it to be over.

The tyres squealed their protest as he rounded another tight bend, pulling in close against the mountainside as a four-wheel drive coming the other way spun its wheels just enough to the right that the two vehicles slid past with bare millimetres to spare.

He took a ragged breath, relieved at the near miss. What the hell was she doing all the way up here? It would be hard to find somewhere more remote, and there was no way he could reconcile the Marina he knew—the high-living girl who was as wilful as she was wild and wanton—with somewhere so rustic.

Though he could see why anyone not enamoured of the party world would want to live here. For, as they scaled the mountain, the vistas grew more and more impressive, of ridge after ridge, valley after valley framed by even higher peaks to one side of him and a range of grey-green mountains in the distance.

‘Just on the next bend,’ she said at last. ‘The driveway on the left.’ And there was the next surprise as he pulled into the gravel driveway—he wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it sure hadn’t been this.

The stone villa sprawled down the side of a ridge, its windows looking out to what had to be magnificent views in every direction. Climbing bougainvillea up the walls trailed bright vermilion flowers, a brilliant contrast against the painted yellow walls. He stepped out and looked around, feeling the Tuscan sun on his shoulders. Kinder than the desert sun, he registered, even in the early afternoon when it was at its most potent. Or maybe it was always cooler at this height.

She didn’t wait for him to finish his appraisal and open her door, or maybe she was just as impatient as him for this ordeal to be over.

‘This is where you live?’ he asked as he pulled her bags from the trunk.

She reached for them but he held them firm and her lips tightened again. ‘It’s my home, yes.’ She sighed with the resignation of one who knew he was going to see his duty to the bitter end, and led the way down a set of stairs on one side of the house that led to a crazy-paved terrace and covered pergola. From here the views were even better. Across a valley between the ridges, a small village clung in colourful array against the dense green of orchards and forest, and before them the land slipped away, lush and green, fading through to grey with each successive range.

Then from the house he heard footsteps, squeals and cries of ‘Mama, Mama!’ before a door flew open and two dark-haired children exploded from the house shrieking and laughing.

‘Mama!’ cried the first, a boy that collided full force against her legs, a tiny girl behind packing no less a punch as she flung herself at her mother.

He felt a growl form at the back of his throat as she knelt down and wrapped her arms around them, felt his gut twist into knots. So these were her children? It was one thing to know about them—it was another to see them.

He looked away, waiting for the reunion to be over. He didn’t do families. He certainly didn’t want to think about the implication of hers, of the men she had fallen into bed with so quickly after expressing her undying love to him. So much for that.

‘You’re home at last, thank the heavens,’ he heard someone say. And he swung round to see an older woman of forty-something, wiping her hands on a flour-covered apron, standing at the door, not looking at the tableau in front of her, but squarely at him. She raised a quizzical eyebrow at the visitor before turning to Marina. ‘Lunch is almost ready. Shall I set another place?’

Marina kissed each of her children and rose, taking their hands in hers. ‘Bahir, this is Catriona, my nanny, housekeeper and general lifesaver. And these,’ she said, looking down, ‘are my children, Chakir and Hana. Bahir was nice enough to make sure I got home safely,’ she said to them. ‘Say ciao to our visitor, children.’

Nice enough to see her home safely? Not really. But this time he had no choice but to look down at them—such a long way down, it seemed. Neither child said anything. The girl clung to her mother’s skirts, her eyes wide in a pixie face, her thumb firmly wedged in her mouth and clearly not impressed.

But it was the boy who bothered him the most. He was looking up at him suspiciously, eyes openly defiant, as if protective of his mother and prepared to show it; eyes that looked uncannily familiar …

‘I’m not staying,’ he said suddenly, feeling a fool when he realised he was still holding her luggage like some stunned-mullet bellboy. He set the cases down by the door and took a step back. She could no doubt manage them from here herself.

‘You—should stay,’ Marina said, her words sounding strangely forced, as if she was having to force them through her teeth. ‘Stay for lunch.’

‘No, I …’ He looked longingly up the stairs to where he knew the car was parked.

‘You should …’ she said tightly, trailing off. There was no welcome in her words, but rather an insistence that tugged on some primal survival instinct. Some warning bell deep inside him told him to run and keep right on running.

But he couldn’t run.

The nanny-cum-housekeeper was watching him. Marina stood there, looking suddenly brittle and fragile, and as though at any moment she could blow away, except that she was anchored to the ground by the two sullen-looking children at her hands—the wide-eyed girl and the boy who looked up at him with those damned eyes …

And with a sizzle down his spine he realised.

His eyes.

The high, clear mountain air seemed to thicken and churn with poison around him, until it was hard to breathe in the toxic morass. ‘No,’ he uttered. ‘Not that.’

And he was only vaguely aware of Catriona ushering the children inside and closing the door, leaving Marina standing as still as a pillar of salt, her beautiful features gaunt and bleached almost to white.

‘It’s true,’ she whispered. ‘Chakir is your son.’