Читать книгу The Sheikh's Last Gamble - Trish Morey - Страница 8

THE plane touched down somewhere on the coast of western Turkey at a small airport not far from where the rocky shoreline met the sea. It was almost dark now, although still only mid-afternoon, and they emerged from the plane into a howling wind that tore at their clothes and sucked the words from their mouths. A waiting car whisked Marina and Bahir through the immigration formalities before surprising Marina by heading away from the airport.

She flicked her windswept hair back from her face and looked longingly back at the airport. ‘Shouldn’t we stay with the plane?’ she asked, concerned. ‘So we’re ready to take off when the weather clears?’

Was it the lashing from the rain that had eroded her harsh demeanour and left her softer, almost vulnerable? Whatever. With her long black hair in wild disarray around her face, and with her eyelashes still spiked with the air’s muggy atmosphere, she looked younger. Softer. Almost like she had when she’d woken sleepily from a night of love-making. All that was missing was the smile and the hungry glint in her eyes as she’d eagerly climbed astride him for more.

‘Didn’t you hear the pilot’s last announcement, princess?’ Bahir asked, dragging his thoughts away from misspent days and nights long gone. This was the reason he’d never wanted to see her again. Because he knew she’d make him remember all the things he would never again enjoy. ‘Airports all over Europe are closed. We are not going anywhere tonight.’

‘But my children … I promised them I would be home tonight.’

Bahir looked away. He wasn’t taken in by her sudden maternal concern for her children. It was the first time she had even mentioned them and, if they meant so much to her, why had she left them at home in the first place? Maybe in hindsight it might have been the right thing to do this time, given how she had lumbered into the path of Mustafa, but she could not have known that would happen. And surely they had deserved to be at their own aunt’s wedding if not the coronation of Zoltan himself?

‘We leave at first light,’ he said, already looking forward to it. ‘You will be home soon enough.’ Though never soon enough for him.

She was silent as they passed through a small town that was seemingly abandoned as everyone had taken cover from the storm, the shutters of windows all closed, awnings flapping and snapping in the wind.

‘So where are we going now? Why couldn’t we stay with the plane?’

‘The crew are staying with the plane. It is, after all, Al-Jiradi property. They will not leave it.’

‘So we must?’

‘There is a small hotel on the coast. Very exclusive. You will be more comfortable there.’

‘And you?’

‘This is not about my comfort.’

If there was comfort in this hotel, it was proving elusive to find. There was luxury, it was true: the plushest silk carpets, the finest examples of the weaver’s art. The most lavish of fixtures and fittings, from the colourful Byzantine tiles to the gold taps set with emeralds the size of quails’ eggs.

But comfort was nowhere to be found. Just as it was impossible to sleep. Even now, when it seemed the worst of the storm had passed, lightning still flashed intermittently through the richly embroidered drapes, filling the room with an electric white light and bleaching the room of colour. But the atmosphere in the room remained heavy with the storm’s passing, and the soft bed and starched bed-linen felt stifling. She looked longingly at the doors that led onto the terrace overlooking the sea.

Ever since they’d arrived she’d locked herself away in her suite, wanting desperately to find distance from that man. He’d been impossible on the plane, sullen and resentful at first, openly explosive when the news had come of their flight’s delay, as if it had been all her fault.

Maybe it was. She had been the one to agree to him seeing her safely home, but it wasn’t for the reason he was thinking—that she somehow imagined that he might change his mind, that he might take her back.

What kind of arrogance led a man to believe a woman would want him back after the things he’d said to her?

Did he think she had no pride?

No, the man was unbearable.

So she’d taken refuge in her room, savouring her privacy and her time alone to call Catriona and explain about the delay. She took her time to talk to each of her children and tell them she would soon be home to hug and kiss them and tickle their tummies until they collapsed with laughter again.

It had seemed such a good idea to lock herself away like this while the storm had raged all around. But like the worst of the storm, hours had passed, and still she could not sleep. Still, she could not make sense of the war going on inside herself.

For she hated him, didn’t she? Hated him for the way he had amputated her from his life as quickly and decisively as if he’d been slicing a piece of fruit—as if she had never meant more than that to him. Yet still one sight of him and some primal, some base, bodily response kicked in and she had been wet with wanting him. Even now her body ached with need, as if he had flicked some kind of switch and turned her heartbeat into some kind of pulsing drumbeat of desire.

What kind of woman did that make her?

Was she mad? Or simply wanton? The party princess out for nothing but a good time and not caring who it was who gave it to her.

God, it was hot! The mattress seemed to cocoon her, trapping the heat of her thoughts and slowly roasting her in them. She pushed herself up and a bead of sweat trickled from her hair down her neck.

So much for a refuge. All she’d succeeded in doing was exchanging one kind of prison for another. And, in a few short hours from now, she’d be back on the plane—with him—and the torture would continue.

Another flash of lightning lit up the room, and her gaze went to the doors again. There was a chance they could be opened now, without being blown off their hinges or she being blown away herself. And maybe it would be cooler outside on her terrace. Maybe the wind would tear away some of the heat from her overheated skin, and maybe the air might have a chance to cool her sheets while she was gone.

She slid from the bed and reached for her gown, only remembering then that it was still tucked somewhere deep in her luggage because she had thought the weather too warm to need it. She thought for a moment of the hotel robe waiting neatly on a hanger in the closet, but the thought of towelling against her skin when she was already so hot …

She hesitated only a fraction of a moment. She didn’t really need it. It was three in the morning, and she was only stepping onto the darkened terrace. She wouldn’t be outside for long, and she so craved the feel of cool air and rain on her skin.

The wind had dropped but still she had to hang onto the door lest it slam open. She snicked it firmly closed behind her, knowing the sound would not carry over the waves crashing on the nearby shore, the wind already whipping her hair around her face and sending swirls of air up the slit in her long nightie, brushing against her legs and fanning against her heated core.

She shivered, not with cold from a sprinkling of rain, but with the wind’s delicious caress against her skin, and she turned into the onshore wind, pushing against it until she reached the balustrade overlooking the sea.

This was more like it. The shoreline was thick with dancing foam, bright white against the inky black of sea, the tang of salt heavy in the moisture-laden air. In the distance the storm rumbled and lit up the world for an instant at a time.

Then a wild wave crashed on the rocks below and she was hit with the spray, the wind turning the droplets icy on her skin.

She gasped as it hit, her body electric and alive from her head to her toes, and she flung her arms out wide and laughed into the wind with the sheer thrill of it. It was wild. It was exhilarating. And she felt free, just like she’d always yearned to be.

Like she had been once, before Bahir had stolen her heart.

He watched her from his doorway, where he had been standing for more than an hour watching the storm boil and simmer away. At first he had not heard her, whatever sound she made whipped away by the wind or lost under the crash of the sea, but then he had caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, a vision of a woman in a long white nightgown. But not just any woman. Marina. A ghost from his past, moving across the terrace with bare arms and bare feet while her black hair followed, untamed, blowing riotous and free.

He watched and grew hard as the nightdress was plastered against her body by the wild wind and the rain, against her lush breasts and the slight swell of her belly, against the sweet curve of her mound. Plastered hard against all the places he remembered, and plastered so close that she might not have been wearing anything at all.

The wind tore at her gown, peeling the fabric high around her legs, and he grew still harder wondering if she still never wore anything under her nightgown.

He growled. Why would she wear a white nightgown? So very virginal and innocent.

Who was she trying to kid?

She was nowhere near a virgin. She was a sorceress. She was wanton in bed, hungry and insatiable. She was sinuous and lithe, moved and twisted with a dancer’s grace, and he knew he should go. He should leave now, while he had the chance, before he was tempted to do something he might regret.

But he could not force his feet to move. He could not turn away. Instead he stayed and watched while she was hit by the spray of a wave crashing below; watched while she flung her arms out wide and laughed as brazenly as the weather, watched while her damp white gown turned transparent—and he knew that he had no choice.

Knew he had to go to her.

Her gown was soaked with spray and clinging to her, her hair blowing wild where it wasn’t stuck to her scalp and skin, and she knew that soon she would feel sticky with salt and think herself insane for doing something so utterly reckless when she should have been trying to sleep.

But for now she felt more alive than she had in months. More awake. More liberated.

She spun around, lifting her sodden hair high to cool the back of her neck as another wave sent spray flying, when lightning illuminated the terrace and told her in a chill bolt of realisation that she was not alone.

‘Bahir,’ she said, dropping her arms and backing away into the spray, the sound wrenched from her mouth before even she could hear it. But her body needed to hear no alarm. Her body was already on high alert, her breasts straining and peaked against the fine wet fabric of her gown, her thighs tingling with urgency and her feet primed to flee.

She might have tried to run, but his expression stilled her feet, his face a tortured mask, as if he’d battled his inner demons and lost. His eyes held her spellbound, dark and fathomless in a shadowed face, while his white shirt clung to him in patches, turning it the colour of the golden skin that lay beneath.

She swallowed, tasting the salt of the sea, or was it of his flesh? For even here she could feel the heat rolling off him as his body called to hers, in all the ways it had done in the past, promising all the pleasures of the past and more.

‘Why?’ she asked softly in a lull in the wind, wanting to be sure, wary of trusting the chemistry between them.

‘You can’t sleep either.’ He answered with a statement, without really answering at all.

‘I was hot.’

His eyes raked over her, slowly, languidly, and the heat she saw there stoked a fire under her skin that even the effect of the night air on her wet gown could not whip away. As she looked at how his white shirt clung to his skin, moulding to one dark nipple, she realised how she must look to him—exposed. As good as naked. She wrapped her arms around her torso in a futile attempt to cover herself.

She had never had reason for modesty with Bahir. There was perhaps no reason for modesty now. He had seen it all before and more. But she was different now. She was a mother, and pregnancy had left its inevitable marks on her body. Would he notice? Would he care? He had no right to care and she had no need to wonder—yet still …

Then his eyes found hers again and he simply said, ‘I feel it too. Hot.’ And she knew he wasn’t talking about the weather.

He took a step closer, and then another, so she had to raise her face to look up at him.

‘You should go,’ he said.

‘I should,’ she agreed, because it was right, and because to stay would be reckless. The last thing she needed was to be trapped outside on a storm-tossed terrace with a man she had never stopped lusting after, even when she had tried to hate him so very much. Even when she knew she should.

But her feet didn’t move, even when the wind pushed at her back, slapping the wet gown against her legs, urging her to get out while she still had time.

‘You should go,’ he repeated, his voice gravel-rough against her skin. ‘Except …’

She tilted her head up at him, her senses buzzing, every nerve in her body buzzing. ‘Except what?’

‘Except, I don’t want you to.’

She swallowed and closed her eyes, one part of her wishing she’d already left so she’d never have heard him utter those words. The other part of her, that wanton part of her that belonged to him for ever, rejoicing that he had.

‘I want you,’ he said, and she started and opened her eyes as she felt his hands lift her jaw and cradle her face.

Suddenly it was much too late to run, even if she could have recalled a fraction of all the good reasons why she should.

When she looked up at him it was to see him gazing down at her with such a look of longing that it charged her soul, for it had been so long since someone had looked at her that way, and that person had been Bahir. Nobody had ever looked at her the way Bahir had.

But that was before …

‘This is a mistake,’ she said, some remaining shred of logic warning her as his hand drifted towards her face.

‘Does this,’ he said as his fingers traced across her skin and she forgot how to breathe, ‘feel like a mistake?’ And she sighed into his touch, for electricity accompanied his fingers, leaving a trail of sparks in its wake, just like his touch had that moment on the plane when he had reached out to her brow and left her sizzling with the contact.

Maybe not right now, she thought, in answer to his question. But tomorrow or next week or even next month she would realise this was all kinds of mistake.

And then his hand curved around her neck, gentling her closer to his waiting mouth. Some mistakes, she rationalised, were meant to be made.

The wind pounded at her back, and she let it push her closer to him, meeting his lips with her own and sighing into his mouth with that first, precious touch.

It was like coming home, only better, because it was to a home she’d never expected to find again. A home she’d thought lost for ever.

‘Bahir,’ she whispered on his lips, recognising the taste and scent and texture of him, welcoming him.

For one hitched, exquisite moment the tenuous meeting of their mouths was enough, but only for a moment. Until he groaned and pulled her against him, his mouth opening to hers, sucking her into his kiss.

She went willingly, just as her hands went to the hard wall of his chest, drinking in his hard-packed body with her fingers, pressing her nails into his flesh as if proving he was real, as if proving this was really happening.

He was real, her fingers told her, joyously, deliciously, delectably real.

And so very hot.

His breath, his mouth, his lips on her throat, the flesh under her hands—all of him so hot. Yet when his hand cupped her breast it was she who felt like she would combust with his fingers kneading her flesh, his thumb stroking her hard, straining nipple.

Then his mouth replaced his hand, drawing her breast into his mouth, laving her nipple through the thin gown, and silk had never felt so good against her skin.

A burst of sea spray shattered over them. The clouds parted to a watery moon and she clung to his head in order to stay upright and not collapse under the impact of his sensual onslaught.

But when his hands slid down her back and cupped her behind, his fingers perilously close to the apex of her thighs and the heated, pulsing core of her existence, she knew her knees would not last much longer. ‘Bahir!’ she cried, but he had already anticipated her need, knowing what she asked and what she needed instinctively, as he always had.

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her long and hard, until she was dizzy and his own breathing ragged when he pulled himself away enough to speak.

‘One night,’ he said, his voice thick with want. ‘Just this night. That’s all I ask.’

She knew what he was telling her—that he hadn’t changed his mind, that he didn’t want her as a permanent fixture in his life and that he would never want her love—but he was offering her this night. Or, at least, what was left of it.

Would she take it?

If she were stronger—if she was more like her younger sister, Aisha, who had tamed her own potent sheikh—she’d tell him what he could do with his one night. But she wasn’t that strong. And the choice was so unfair.

She could have this one night with him, and sacrifice her principles and her pride, or she could have none. But her pride and her principles would never make her heartbeat trip with just one glance or one gentle touch. They could not take her to paradise and back and all the wondrous places in between. And what were pride and principles when compared to paradise?

One excruciatingly short night of paradise. A few short hours before they had to rise and return to the airport and continue their flight.

Was it worth it?

Oh yes.

And tomorrow she would tell him about their son—and it wouldn’t matter if he never wanted to see her again, because she would have this one stolen night to remember.

She looked up into his eyes and could see the impatience there, the urgency and the crippling, demanding need that so echoed her own.

‘Just one night,’ she agreed, and felt herself swept up into his arms as if she were weightless.

He carried her to his suite at the opposite end of the terrace from hers, and laid her reverentially on a bed that looked just as storm-tossed as the one she had left. The covers were piled in disarray on the floor, the pillows thumped to within an inch of their existence. It thrilled her that she might be responsible for at least some of the heat that had kept him from sleep.

He stood at the side of the bed, his eyes never leaving her as he purposefully unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it to the floor, his damp, golden skin glowing in the thin moonlight. She held her breath as his trousers soon joined it, then even the scrap of silk he called underwear was gone, and he was gloriously naked before her, his erection swaying proud and free.