I did not wait for him to claim the kiss from my lips but took what I wanted from his. I had spent the last decade fending off rather than initiating kisses, but he had already shown me what he liked. And I was ever a quick study.
I was amazed at my own temerity. Though my heart beat wildly, I marshaled my resolve. Without prelude or the least sign of timidity, I darted out my tongue and licked it slowly across the smooth, soft, sensitive seam of his mouth. I then sucked his lower lip between mine, catching it between my teeth and biting down gently, relishing the feel of this pliant little piece of his flesh, but this tiny bite only sharpened my hunger for much more of him. I was dizzy with the pure headiness of being in control—or at least with the brief illusion of it, as he quickly demonstrated.
My sheik, for I had already decreed that he would be mine in precisely the same degree that I would be his, opened his mouth and ravaged mine, invading with his hot, wet tongue. With it he swept my mind clean of every thought but his body and mine. His hands came around me roughly, sliding down my back to squeeze my buttocks and then jerking me hard against him. There was no question of his arousal. It surged between us thick and hard.
"You have had a change of heart, ma belle?" His tone was rough and guttural. There was an equally savage flicker in his gaze. "It is a dangerous thing to tempt the beast." With his hands on my arse, he guided me, ensuring that I felt the full length and breadth of his erection. "I would have been patient and gentle with you, but it appears the tigress has come out to play."
My teeth scored over my lower lip. He would not be gentle with me.
But when had I ever done anything in my life gently? Or genteelly? The thought was almost laughable. I rode hell-for-leather, never shirking the highest fences. I hunted big game. I set out alone in the Sahara. I was no longer the cowering creature I had recently become. She was someone else, someone I despised. No, I was fearless. I was Diana Mayo.
"No, not a tigress, but a huntress," I corrected him with a seductress' smile. "I was named for Diana, the goddess of the hunt."
"And you seek a trophy now, my huntress?" He fell easily into the game.
"Yes. Only the biggest and the best for me, only game with strength and stamina, or there is no pleasure in it.
"Yes," he agreed, eyes and voice heavy with lust. "The hunt must always present a challenge."
I was breathing rapidly. My heart was palpitating in an erratic rhythm in my chest. Suddenly, my hands flew to his shirt, tearing at the linen, ripping away the buttons in my desperation to feel the heat of his bare flesh to mine. Before I could finish, his hands were beneath my thighs, lifting me, wrapping me around his body, bringing my hot, wet core in full contact with his rigid staff. I wrapped my legs tighter around him and locked my ankles. He squeezed my arse and moved me up and down on his shaft.
I bit down hard into his shoulder with a muffled cry of pleasure. "Don’t. Stop." I moaned, feeling as if I would do anything for him to continue the sweet torturous friction.
"No, ma belle." His chuckle rumbled through my entire body. "There is no stopping tonight." He laid me on the bed, and I watched him undress, eagerly eating him up with my eyes.
His chest was big and powerful and dusted with crisp, dark hair that met in a peak at his midline. I followed the dark trail over his sculpted abdomen and lower yet to where his manhood jutted, imperious and proud, much like the rearing young stallion. Yes, very much like a stallion, I thought wryly, but I was not intimidated.
Perhaps I should have been, but I understood the mechanics of coitus even if I had never performed it. Moreover, I had never seen either a bitch in heat or a mare in season shy away from what she most wanted regardless of its size.
And yes, I wanted him with the same wild animalistic abandon.
Had I had my pick of any man I have ever seen to deflower me, I would have chosen him. Only him. He was the only man I had ever known who had fired any passion in me, and I was most definitely on fire. Burning like an inferno as my gaze tracked even lower from where it had rested on his magnificent instrument to his iron-hard thighs, wrought from countless hours in the saddle.
My gaze slid back up again to his harshly handsome face and the mesmerizing eyes that had fascinated me from the very beginning, even before I knew who he was. Yes, I wanted him deep inside me and moving between my legs. I wanted him with a fiery passion I hadn't even known I possessed.
"You do understand?" he asked as he came to me, and came over me, dominating my body with his, and caging my head between his elbows.
"Yes. I understand. You will drive your cock into me continually until you have achieved your satisfaction."
His mouth twisted. "Such a vulgar word from such beautiful lips."
"I know well enough what the Englishmen call it." My own mouth quirked. "Do you prefer I use another nom de guerre? I've been with enough gentlemen in their cups over the years to have heard them all."
"Verge," he answered me. "It is so much more…elegant."
I smiled. "And you would have an elegant verge?"
"But of course, ma chère." He brought my hand down between us and wrapped it around him. My fingers could barely touch for the breadth of him. I gasped. The hardness and heat had stolen the air from my lungs. He moved my hand slowly up and down. It was a rod of steel gloved in silk.
"Do you not think it so?" he asked.
"Yes, very elegant," I responded breathlessly.
"And this has an elegant French name as well, ma belle. He stroked his fingers thorough curls that were growing damper with every breathless beat of my heart. "The English names are far too coarse for an object of such delicacy and refinement."
"You think so?" I whispered.
"I know so, my dove." He dipped his mouth to my ear. His breath was hot and moist and sent ripples of pleasure down my neck, ripples that echoed all way to the place he was describing in such minute detail. "I have made a long study of this, finding it an object of unparalleled complexity." He stroked between my legs, exploring my wet folds. He moved his head to my breasts, kissing and biting. He took a nipple into his mouth and suckled hard before releasing it with a pop. "Indeed, my fascination with it knows no bounds."
He continued to stroke, filling me with a coiling tension and a growing impatience with his leisurely conversation and tantalizing exploration. His head moved lower down my body, no hovering over the very thing he still refused to name for me.
I licked my lips and snapped, "Tell me then, what is this name?"
"The chatte. The pussy." He plied his mouth to me, kissing my wet curls before delving inside. He raised his head to display a blue gaze drugged with lust. "And you, ma belle, have the most delightful one of all." He made a long and leisurely swipe of his tongue that made me arch into him with a cry.
"I thought you weren't going to be gentle." I gasped, almost accusingly.
He cocked a brow. "Perhaps this is not for you, but for me. Enjoy it well, my dove, for I intend to take my pleasure precisely as I choose. Before I am done, I will have you any way and every way that I wish."
Rather than feeling threatened, his words filled me with excited anticipation. Whether he intended it or not, I would find my own pleasure in whatever erotic torture my wicked desert lover chose to mete out—and at the moment it was his wonderful mouth stroking and lapping my contentedly purring chatte.
I was a virgin but not a complete innocent, not a stranger to my own body. I thought I understood it and was simply indifferent to corporeal pleasure, as I had touched myself many times out of idle curiosity. I knew how to incite within myself the tiny breathless ripples that gave way to bigger trembling waves, but this activity had always left me somehow dissatisfied and wanting.
I now understood that what I had believed to be the climactic experience of sexual pleasure was but a preliminary, an hors d'oeuvre, so to speak. I certainly felt like one as he devoured me— licking, tasting, nibbling with lips, teeth, and tongue. His bearded jaw tickled and teased as he fe
asted on me as if I were an endless banquet of erotic delights. I reveled in it, writhing beneath him and clawing his head with my raw and aching want—until I became frenzied with the need to be filled.
"It is not enough!" I cried and yanked his hair. "Take me," I demanded.
His face came up. "Are you quite certain, ma chère?" He wiped his mouth and chin with a feral smile. "I am far from satisfied, and there are many things I have yet to do that would make it easier on you." All sign of playfulness vanished. "You should enjoy your chance for pleasure now, for there is pain soon to follow."
"I don't care! Take me now."
He came over me again with hot breath that was scented of me. "I warned you about tempting the beast, Diane." He spread my legs wide and positioned the smooth, broad head of his verge deep into the folds of my chatte, moving up and down in my wetness. I knew what he did and why and that it was too late to turn back. But I did not recoil. I was the brazen huntress.
I moaned for more.
His gaze widened in surprise when I rocked my pelvis to increase the sweet, slick friction that was burgeoning between us and mushrooming in intensity. We were already damp and panting when I coiled one leg around his flank, followed by the other. He ground another warning through his teeth, "I will not be gentle."
"What makes you think I want gentle?" I arched a brow in challenge. "Perhaps I will not be gentle either."
He froze for just an instant, as if I had shocked him, and then made a savage show of sharp white teeth. "If the beast is what you wish, the beast is what you will get." He reared back and plunged into me hard and deep, tearing what remained of my despised maidenhood. It stung and burned. I was stretched and filled to bursting. I cried out, but he didn't stop.
Ruthlessly, he thrust again, harder, impaling himself deeper. I thought he desired to relieve me when he slid himself slowly out of my sensitive sheath, but it was only to slam himself back into me again, this time so hard my teeth jarred. He took no heed of me at all. His eyes were closed, his head thrown back. His mouth stretched in a rictus of intense concentration. A sheen of perspiration beaded his forehead and coated his beautiful body.
His lips pulled back in a snarl as he drove into me again, and again, his eyes snapping open as I arched my back and bucked my hips up to meet him. There was pain, but there was also pleasure in his brutality. Pleasure that excited, thrilled, and exhilarated me. It was like nothing I had ever known. Wrapping my thighs tightly about his waist, I ground my pelvis into his. His gaze narrowed, he gripped my hair and sucked fiercely on my neck. I reciprocated by scoring my nails into his back while he mercilessly pounded his massive verge into me.
I threw my head back onto the pillow with an almost-hysterical laugh.
I knew damned well what I had unleashed—it wasn't the beast in him as much as the devil inside of me.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next morning I awoke to a blood smear and a soreness between my thighs that made me wince and then laugh. The pillow beside me still bore the impression of his head, and the sheets were stained and heavily scented from our…nocturnal revels. I could not think of a better phrase for our fierce coupling. We had become lovers in truth and deed, though there were no words of "love" exchanged between us. Still, I was loath to use such a banal, lackluster, and sadly insufficient word as sex.
My imperious will had bowed to his greater determination, and his mastery over me had provoked a fierce craving for recompense in kind. My surrender had been no common one. The feminine weakness that I had despised and fought against my entire life had triumphed over me unexpectedly and thoroughly. Pure and unadulterated passion had overthrown all my preconceived notions about the repugnancy of coition. Under the influence of my sheik's raw and robust masculinity and his compelling and dominating personality, the womanly instincts that Aubrey's training had suppressed had surged to the surface with startling profundity.
Yes, I had ultimately done what I had sworn never to do. But in surrendering my body to him, he had unknowingly succumbed equally to me. I knew the fiery nature he hid under his impassive exterior—so strong, so vigorous, so intensely alive. I had felt it even more acutely as he moved inside me—gave himself up to me. I smiled. My passionate sheik had opened my jaded eyes to many things.
I rose and took a leisurely bath, this time allowing poor Zilah to do her best for me. I smiled and even gave her words of encouragement, for I was strangely devoid of my prior restlessness and short temper. When I came out of my bath, I found awaiting me a lovely gandoura in finely embroidered saffron-colored silk.
She salaamed. "Monseigneur will be pleased if you wear it."
Two days ago I would have flung it in his face, but now I only nodded my approval when Zilah looked from me to the garment with her wide doe eyes. Yet to my growing irritation "Monseigneur" was nowhere about. I don't know what I had expected when I awoke—maybe it had only been a dream after all. Of course, it was easier to tell myself that than to let feelings of rejection and dismay overtake me. Why should I care if he was gone the whole day? Good riddance to him and may he never return!
I drank my morning tea and hours later partook of a light noontime repast, yet he still did not make any appearance. With his absence, ennui came back upon me with a restless fervor. I took up some magazines and flung myself onto the divan, determined to shut out from my sight the remembrances of him present in all the barbaric luxury of my surroundings.
A while later a hand on my shoulder made me start with a cry. Usually my nerves were in better control, but I had not expected him until dinner. He had been out since dawn and had been much occupied, but didn't expound as to what had detained him so late past his usual time. He had come in desirous of a belated siesta. I wondered if he would ask me to join him in the bedchamber. My face flared with heat, and my thighs dampened with thoughts of the night before. Yes, I wanted him again. I was eager to learn from him and experience more carnal delights.
He dropped onto the divan beside me and lit a cigarette. He was lying with his head thrown back against the cushions, idly blowing smoke rings and watching them drift toward the open doorway. I studied his long length stretched out on the couch, the steely strength of his limbs patent even in the indolent attitude in which he was lying. My gaze fixed on his handsome bronzed face, inscrutable as it always was to me, and I wondered about his thoughts that seemed so far away…so unaware of me.
Who was this volatile and capricious man? The longer I watched him, the more puzzled I grew. How could this cool and aloof stranger be the same passionate man from only last night? Surely this was not my desert lover!
Perhaps this was one of many taciturn fits to which I must grow accustomed—periods in which he simply would ignore me altogether. It was the sheik's egoism, his complete indifference to everything beyond his own will, that stung me most. Even my wild paroxysms of rage made little impression on him. He accorded them a shrug or regarded me with cold and detached curiosity, his lips parted in a mocking little smile. Careless indifference seemed only another facet of his cruelty. Did he care that he was able to torture me by expecting all from me but giving back only as suited his mood?
He noticed my scrutiny, and his gaze met mine with a cocked brow, compelling me to give voice to my thoughts. "Have you never felt pity for a thing that was weaker than yourself? Have you never been moved to compassion? Have you never loved?"
As soon as the last word was out of my mouth I wished to take it back. Only days before I had professed my own incapacity for tender feelings. It seemed cruelly ironic to me that I desired a form of regard from him that no one had ever received from me.
"Love?" He shook his head with a harsh laugh. "Connais pas! But of course," he added with his swift mockery, "I love my horses."
"When you don't kill them," I retorted.
"I am corrected. When I don't kill them."
"Why would you shoot your own horse?" I asked uncomprehendingly.
"Do you know so little of me yet? Do yo
u think that I will let anything stand between me and what I want?"
"You had better have shot me." I laughed bitterly.
"Perhaps. You would have been easier replaced. There are plenty of women, but that mare was almost unique." I winced at the cold brutality of his tone, a quality that made me reckless, that made me want to somehow hurt him back.
"If you do not love the women whom you bring here, do you give your love to your harem? You keep a harem locked away somewhere, I suppose?" I braved him with a scornful voice, but I had only set myself up for more of his contempt.
He reached out his hand and dragged me down into his arms with a laugh. "And if I have, are you jealous? What if the nights I spend away from you are passed in my harem—what then?"
He had struck a nerve. I lashed back at him, "Then may Allah put it into the heart of one of your wives to poison you so that you never come back."
"Allah! So beautiful and so bloodthirsty." He strained toward me hungrily, as if my impassioned reproof had awakened the sleeping fires within him. He tried to kiss me, but my resentment burned equally hot. I averted my head and struggled against the pressure of his arm.
"So cold?" he chided. "Kiss me, little piece of ice." Part of me, the perverse and passionate part, longed to kiss him back, but I knew he would only despise me for it, so I forced indifference into my eyes and a mutinous pout to my lips. "Still disobedient?" His black brows drew together slowly. "I thought you understood."
He was reminding me of the horse and that his will would always prevail—one way or another. I responded to his command with the dumb obedience he demanded, but without passion. No, I would never allow him to command my passion in such a tyrannous manner. Did he wish me to crawl abjectly to his feet so he could take pleasure in his contemptuous spurning of me? I paid the merest lip service instead, brushing his tanned cheek with a swift, cold kiss.
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