Читать книгу The Royals Collection - Ким Лоренс, Rebecca Winters - Страница 20

CHAPTER NINE

WHEN HANNAH WOKE it was light and she was alone.

She felt the bed beside her—it was still warm. She gave a wistful sigh. She hadn’t expected him to be there but it would have been...no, nice was not part of their relationship. Though yesterday she would have said the same about sex. It was crazy, in a good way, that the area of this marriage she’d thought would be hardest—that she had been dreading—turned out to be the easiest and the most pleasurable.

She gave a voluptuous sigh and smiled. It had been easy, natural, and totally incredible.

She sat up suddenly, her eyes flying wide in dawning alarm. She was assuming that it would be happening again soon and often. But what if last night wasn’t going to be something that happened regularly? While she hadn’t known what she was missing, celibacy had been easy—but now she did know. She gave an anxious sigh.

It would be...terrible. One night and Kamel was her drug of choice; she was a total addict.

She showered and dressed in record time, wondering if she should just come out and ask him. She was on her way to see Sarah when she literally bumped into him. He was dressed in running shorts and a tee shirt and looked so gorgeous that she was struck dumb.

‘I’ve been running.’

She nodded, and thought that there really was such a thing as being paralysed with lust. If she’d stayed in bed, would he have walked in? Her eyelids drooped as she imagined him peeling off his top and—

‘And you are...?’ he prompted.

Hannah started guiltily, the colour rushing to her cheeks. ‘I’m going to see Sarah, and Olive and the puppies.’

‘Sarah?’

‘The cook...but she’s more than that. I’ll be ready for the flight.’

‘I’m sure you will. See you then.’

He actually saw her much sooner. He had showered and was beginning to wade through his emails when he heard her bedroom door slam, quite loudly. A slamming door was not in itself indicative of a problem. He cut off the pointless line of speculation and focused on work. Luckily his ability to ignore distractions was almost as legendary as his reputation for zero patience for those undisciplined individuals who brought their personal lives into the workplace.

Five minutes later he closed his laptop, realising that in the interests of efficiency it would save time if he just went and checked she was all right.

He didn’t ask. It was obvious she wasn’t.

‘What’s wrong?’

Hannah stopped pacing and turned around. ‘Nothing.’

He arched a brow.

‘I can’t tell you.’ She pressed a fist to her mouth.

He walked over, removed her fist and said calmly, ‘What can’t you tell me?’

‘I walked in on Sarah with Dad, They were...’ her eyes slid towards the bed ‘...you know.’

Kamel blinked. ‘You walked in on your father having sex with the cook?’

She covered her ears with her hands. ‘Don’t say it out loud!’

Kamel fought back a smile. ‘It always comes as a shock to a child when they learn their parents have sex.’

‘I know my father has sex. I just don’t want to see it!’

This time he couldn’t fight the smile. ‘It’s going to be tough for him—’

‘No, they didn’t see me. That really would be awful. No, the door was half open and...’ She stopped, closed her eyes and shook her head, shuddered. ‘I backed out and ran.’

‘I imagine you did.’ His lips quivered.

‘This isn’t funny,’ she protested.

Unable to stop himself, Kamel began to laugh.

A laugh bubbled in her throat. ‘I want to delete the image from my mind. I really do.’ The laugh escaped.

Five minutes later Hannah was all laughed out, and Kamel was sprawled on the bed, one arm under his head, telling her that when he had walked in he had thought there had been some major disaster.

‘Your face! Honestly it was...’ He sat up and sighed. ‘I should get back to it. I’ve got a stack of—’

‘I’m sorry I stopped you working.’

He gave a sudden grin. ‘No, you’re not.’ He patted the bed beside him and leaned back against the pillows.

Hannah came across the room, hesitating only a moment before she manoeuvred herself to sit straddling him.

‘I like your thinking,’ he purred, his eyes flaring hot as she pulled the top over her head. ‘I like other things even more.’

* * *

‘Are you all right?’

Hannah shrugged and put down the book she had been holding. Her interest in the novel was feigned but her confusion was not. ‘With flying, you mean...?’

A spasm of irritation crossed his face. ‘Your father and the cook? It happens—the attraction between people from different backgrounds.’

Her brow smoothed and she laughed. ‘You think I didn’t know? Or that I have some sort of problem with it?’

His brows lifted. ‘You are telling me you don’t?’

In defiance of his open scepticism, she shook her head from side to side. ‘Beyond the fact that discovering that your parent has a sex life, which is a bit...uncomfortable...no, I like Sarah.’

‘And the fact she is the cook?’

‘I know you think I’m a snob. She’s probably the best thing that has ever happened to my dad. I just wish he... I wish they’d come out into the open about it. I wish...’ She caught the expression on Kamel’s face and, taking it for boredom, brought her ramble to a juddering stop.

It would be a massive mistake to assume that, because Kamel had seemed to have an endless fascination with her body, his interest extended beyond the bedroom. She knew that any woman would only ever be a substitute for the woman he had lost, Amira. Kamel must have thought nothing could be worse than seeing the woman he loved happy with another man—until he’d found out that there was something much worse.

‘You wish?’

I wish I could look at you and not ache. ‘Forget it.’

It was sex—fantastic, incredible sex—but she had to stop thinking about it.

‘I don’t want to bore you.’

He unclipped his seat belt and stretched his long legs out in front of him. ‘Don’t worry. If you bore me I’ll let you know,’ he promised.

‘I think that Sarah deserves more than to be a secret...’ She gave a self-conscious shrug.

‘Maybe this Sarah is happy with just sex.’

She looked away. Was there a message, a warning even, in there for her?

‘Maybe she is,’ Hannah agreed without conviction. She turned her head to angle a curious look at his face. ‘You expected me to be devastated to find my father in bed with the cook, didn’t you? Sarah has been my father’s mistress for the past five years that I know of. Probably longer.

‘The truth is I’ve no idea how Sarah is content to be treated like some sort of...’ She stopped, wondering whether that wasn’t exactly what she was doing. ‘We both worry about her.’

‘We?’

‘Sarah’s daughter, Eve, and I. She’s a year younger than me.’ She noticed the airstrip below and pressed her face to the window to get a better view. ‘Is it far to the villa?’

‘Not by helicopter.’

‘Helicopter?’

He nodded. ‘It beats being stuck in a traffic jam.’

That, she thought, was a matter of opinion.

* * *

As the helicopter landed Hannah closed her eyes—but even with them squeezed tightly shut she retained the stomach-clenching image of them falling directly into the ocean.

The pilot landed the helicopter smoothly but Hannah appeared oblivious, her eyes tightly shut, hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. Her lips continued to move, presumably in a silent prayer. Watching her silent but abject terror, he had felt like an inconsiderate monster for subjecting her to what had clearly been an ordeal. He wanted to be irritated with her but she looked so fragile, her big eyes reminding him of a scared child. But she wasn’t a child. She was all woman—his woman. The reminder should have made him feel resentful—after all, he was paying the price for her stupidity—but instead the thought came with an accompanying shaft of possessive pride.

‘You can breathe now.’

Hannah opened her eyes and collided instantly with Kamel’s dark, intense stare. The feeling of falling into the abyss didn’t go away; if anything it intensified as, with a thudding heart, she fumbled with her seat belt.

‘What time is it?’ she heard herself ask.

‘You have somewhere you need to be, ma belle?’ His eyes drifted to the wide, full, plump curve of her lips and he felt the barely damped fires of passion roar into life.

She was the most responsive woman he had ever had in his bed. He still couldn’t get his head around the fact that the cool, distant virgin had turned out to be a warm, giving woman who held nothing back. In the middle of figuring how long he could wait until he got her into bed again he found himself wondering about the sequence of events that had led her to hide her passionate nature behind a cool mask.

He had never felt the need to look beyond the surface of a beautiful woman, and he had no intention of looking too far now.

‘Relax.’

This struck Hannah as ironic advice from someone who, as far as she could tell, never totally switched off, someone who was never totally off duty. Duty always came first with Kamel. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t be married.

While Kamel was speaking to the pilot she took the opportunity to look through the glass without fear of gibbering. The helipad was not, as it had seemed, positioned perilously on the cliff’s edge, but several hundred feet away, and screened from the villa by an avenue of trees. Hannah could just make out through the branches the terracotta roof, but the rest of the villa was totally concealed by the lush greenery.

Above the whirr of the blades she could hear the men’s voices. She was struggling to catch what they were saying when it happened. Previously it had only occurred when she was in a small space—the lift between floors, or in the pantry in the kitchen—but now there were no walls to close in on her, just glass. Even so, the urge to escape and the struggle to breathe were equally strong.

Her knees were shaking but Hannah was so anxious to get back on terra firma that she didn’t wait. She didn’t wait for Kamel, who was still deep in conversation with the pilot; she just had to get out of there.

Hannah watched as her luggage was piled onto a golf cart by two men—one of whom she had almost flattened when she missed the bottom step in her anxiety to escape the helicopter. Both men nodded respectfully to Kamel and vanished through an arch cut in the neatly trimmed green foliage.

Hannah could feel Kamel’s disapproval—she’d sensed it before but it had upped several notches.

‘You should have said that you have a problem with helicopters.’ Seeing the surprise in the blue eyes that flew to his face, he smiled. ‘Yes, it was obvious.’ He took one of her hands in his and turned the palm upwards, exposing the grooves her nails had cut into her palms. ‘Any tenser and I think you’d have snapped. Why on earth didn’t you say anything?’

‘Why didn’t you ask?’ she countered, wishing he would release her hand, while feeling an equally strong reluctance to break the contact. His thumb was moving in circles across her palm, and each light, impersonal caress sent wave after wave of disproportionate pleasure through her body. But then there was no sense of proportion in her response to Kamel when she thought about how completely and how quickly she had given up control, and it terrified her.

She tensed as his eyes flicked from her palm to her face. ‘You have a point,’ he conceded. ‘Should I call them back?’ He gestured in the direction of the now invisible carts. ‘I thought you might like to stretch your legs, but if you prefer—?’

‘No, a walk would be good.’ A night of mind-blowing sex might be better, though. The reciprocal warm glow in his eyes made her wonder if underneath all the politeness an alternative dialogue wasn’t just going on in his own head too. But who knew what went on in the mind of a man like Kamel?

She couldn’t begin to intellectualise her response to him. How could she be standing here, thinking about him ripping her clothes off?

Shocked and more than a little excited by the thought, she lowered her gaze. ‘You don’t have to act as though this is a real honeymoon,’ she murmured. It was duty for him. And for her it was...all so new she had no name for what she was feeling. But the ferocity of it scared her. ‘I know it’s window dressing.’ It had never crossed her mind that she could want a man’s touch this badly, to the extent it was hard to think past it.

‘I like touching you.’

For a shocked instant she thought she had voiced her secret longing. ‘Oh!’

‘The sex wasn’t window dressing.’

Experiencing a wave of lust so immense she felt as though she were drowning, she closed her fingers tight around his hand. She swallowed, suddenly unable to meet his eyes, her heart thudding fast in her chest. She felt bizarrely shy. The emotion paralysed her vocal cords and brought a rosy flush to her cheeks.

‘We are expected to make a baby, so why not enjoy it?’

The glow faded. Afterwards, with his duty done, would he seek his pleasure elsewhere? His life was all duty—he would probably be glad to escape it.

‘It’s not far to the villa,’ he said as they reached the top of the incline they had been climbing.

Hannah gasped. ‘It’s beautiful, Kamel.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘So, you think you might be able to stick it here for a few days?’

How few? she wondered. And what happened after that? But then she closed down that line of thought. Better to enjoy the here and now and not think too far ahead.

‘I might cope.’ She looked at the sugar-pink painted villa that seemed to cling to the edge of the cliff.

‘I even know where the kitchen is here.’

She lifted her brows and tried to look serious but a laugh bubbled through. ‘I’m more interested in the pool today.’ She mimed a fanning gesture with her hand.

‘That sounds good.’ He withdrew the vibrating phone from his pocket and looked at the screen. ‘Sorry, I might have to take a rain check on that.’ You did not hang up on a king, even—or maybe especially—if that king was your uncle. ‘I really have to take this. Go have an explore.’

Hannah nodded, lowering her eyes to hide the irrational stab of hurt. It was crazy to mind that she was not at the top of his priorities.