To her complete and utter shock, he kicked off his shoes and sat down beside her, straddling the bath. One jean-covered leg went in the water, the other remained outside. He didn’t even blink. “You don’t have that look in your eyes anymore,” he murmured. His hand began to play with a strand of her hair that had come undone from the knot on top of her head.
She slapped his hand away. “What look? And don’t try to get back in my good graces. I want to enjoy my bath without my bad-tempered husband.” Turning away, she scooped up water in her hands and let it run over her legs.
If he wanted to watch, that was fine. She refused to be hurried just because her body reacted like wildfire to his. She could control herself, she thought grimly. She would not give in to the urge to rip open his shirt and lick her way up to his lips. She would not! Why was he still sitting there? A woman only had so much self-control, even when she was using anger to fuel it.
“Aren’t you wondering why I’ve been acting like I have?” Marc finally asked, scooping up water in one hand and dripping it over her thighs.
She sniffed to fight off a shiver at the intimate act, pressing her thighs together to still the ache in between her legs. It only intensified. “I don’t know what it is that I did, but clearly, I’ve done something wrong. You’re merely trying to reinstate your rights over me by showing me this coldness.” She made a face at him. “I will not be treated so!”
At that instant her American did something she’d never expected. Putting both hands on her shoulders, he pulled her toward him and planted a hard kiss on her startled lips. “To hell with my rights!” Wild hunger raged in his eyes, but this hunger was deeper than the body, so deep that she thought she could see his soul in the suddenly piercing quality of those always-well-guarded eyes.
“The reason I’ve been acting like a wounded bear is because I worship the ground you walk on. Being here reminds me too much of how we started this marriage, how I killed all hope of love between us with the way I claimed you without courtship. I love you, princess, and I can’t stand it that you’ll never love me back.” He kissed her again, strong and swift. It felt like a brand on her heart.
“Heck, love doesn’t begin to describe what I feel for you—This emotion’s like a fire inside of me that refuses to go out. It’s passion that stuns me when you smile and tenderness I didn’t even know I could feel. It’s not roses and moonlight, it’s lightning and forever.”
Hira was stunned speechless by Marc’s defiant declaration. Her proud, inflexible husband had to know that by acknowledging his love, he was giving her a weapon over him, and surely he’d never give such a weapon to a woman like he’d once believed her to be, a mercenary beauty like that bitch Lydia. He wasn’t finished, either.
“I love your smile and, yes, I love your face. How could I not, when I adore the woman you are? I love the way you talk to the boys and let each of them feel as if he could win your hand if he were old enough. I love the way you’re so generous with your body and your affection.”
His voice was raw; painfully, powerfully intimate. “I love the way you try to love the bayou because I love it. I love you, and I’ve had it with trying to hide what I feel.”
Powerful and passionate, it was her first true glimpse of the intensity of her husband’s feelings. His love would be wild, an inferno that would demand everything from her.
Trembling, she raised her hand to his cheek and leaned close. “Marc, husband, I c-can’t…” Her voice was an emotion-choked whisper.
“Hush. I know.” There was something bleak in his gaze. He’d given her his heart with no expectation that she’d reciprocate. How much strength did that take for a man who’d never been loved? How much courage? How much love?
Her heart felt so big in her chest, Hira didn’t know how it remained inside her body. “Did you know my father has never once told my mother that he needs her? Not once. Yet he relies on her for so many things.”
“I need you more than you’ll ever know.” It was a rough acceptance, another glimpse into his proud heart.
This hunter of hers had far more depths than she would’ve believed when they’d married. Dropping her hand, she moved closer and began to unbutton his shirt. “What about when I’m old? When I have wrinkles? Or lines from bearing children?”
“I want to grow old with you. I want to put laugh lines on your face, and I want the birth of our children to change your body. Imagine a lifetime of change, cher. A lifetime of learning each other anew.” His eyes were liquid silver but shadows still hovered in the background, remnants of the neglected child, the final pieces of the vulnerability he hid so well. “What’s the fun in remaining the same?”
His shirt was open under her hands. She pushed it off his shoulders and to the floor. Her hands went to his belt. A big male hand stopped her.
“No, sweetheart. You don’t have to…give me anything. My love’s free. And it’s for always.”
It was his tenderness that shattered any remaining doubts she might have harbored. He sounded so very careful, so very worried that she might feel obliged to him, so very concerned about her, when he was the one who’d taken the risk of stripping his soul bare.
Swallowing, she raised her head and looked into those ghost-gray eyes. “Marc, husband, I once told you I could tell lies very well.”
“I’d rather have honest affection than a dishonest avowal of love,” he said, mistaking her meaning. There was an intensity in his gaze that challenged her. This man would never settle for gilt when gold was his goal.
She bit her lip. “No, I mean to say that I once told you a lie. I didn’t plan to, it just came out that way.” She’d been panicked and afraid, and it had been the only thing she could think of to keep him at a distance.
His face hardened. “Oh?”
“I said I wouldn’t have picked you if I’d had a real choice. I said that the only reason I married you was because there was no way for me to refuse my father’s commands.”
“Yeah.” Marc had tried to get over that, but it continued to torment the bayou boy inside of him. The one who’d never been chosen for love. The one who was so madly in love with his wife that her lack of feeling for him hurt him with every breath. But he would never let her know that because as he’d said, honest laughter and affection were better than dishonest love.
“Did you know that my father had a marriage offer for me almost every week?” Hira confided softly.
He stared at her, his mind immediately beginning to holler questions.
“Marir was just one of many. I could’ve picked one of the others, because there were several with businesses that would’ve complemented my father’s. And of course they had impeccable family links.” She was talking really fast, as if trying to get something past him.
His mind and heart refused to let her off that easily. “Would Kerim have let you?”
“Oh, yes, for if I was an unwilling wife to you or any other man, it would’ve jeopardized his business. Far better to have me be a willing wife whom he could mold, even if that meant I was married to someone less influential.
“At the time that my father ordered me to marry you, I told myself I didn’t put up a fight because I was hurting from Romaz’s rejection, but that rejection had come many months previously. I’d had over eight offers for my hand since then. One was from a prince in another desert country, another from a British millionaire who is considered a very eligible bachelor.”
Something hungry deep inside Marc, went very, very quiet. “Eight?”
She nodded and gave him a guilty look. “None of which I had trouble rebutting, though my father drove me crazy with his orders for me to agree. He kept threatening to throw me out on the street. Marir was his attempt at scaring me when I refused all the suitors after barely a single meeting. He would never have wasted me on a lecherous old friend. Don’t be angry with me.”
She was fiddling with the button on his jeans, even as she explained. Her lashes hid her eyes but he could tell s
he was giving him surreptitious peeks to see how he was taking the news.
He narrowed his eyes. “You made me feel like I was the best of a bad lot.” His tone was light, his heart buoyant as he finally understood what his proud princess was confessing.
She’d preferred the scarred bayou beast over every other man who’d asked for her hand.
Looking up, she made a face at him, a smile flirting with her eyes when she saw that he wasn’t angry. “You were. Except for you, every other male was bad. Then I saw you, and suddenly I had no resistance. I could no longer fight my father—all my will was gone, lost the moment you smiled at me. You were just the best. Compared with anyone. So, you see, I wished you for my husband. Only you.”
Her unknowing echo of his thoughts only made her confession more poignant. He felt his throat lock as the power of what she was saying roared through him.
When he didn’t answer straight away, she said, “Do you understand, Marc? You’re the love I waited for all my life, though when you came, it took me a while to recognize you. You see, I didn’t expect you to be so blatantly male.” The teasing light in her eyes made him kiss her.
After he set her free, she continued to speak. “I feel so much for you, I don’t know if I can find the words to tell you. In Zulheil, there is a saying—Ul al eha makhin. Makhin al eha ul. Lael gha al aishann.” Her voice was full of so much passion, he could almost see her love in the air.
“What does it mean?”
“You belong to me. I belong to you. Together we are complete.” Her voice shook.
It was perfect, saying what he’d wanted to but hadn’t been able to. “Princess, I promise you that that will never change. Never.”
“Until I loved you, I didn’t know the whole of the woman I could be.” Her eyes were huge and wet. “That woman’s love will only grow stronger with time.”
Leaning forward, he sealed their pact with a kiss. When she sighed and melted into him, he couldn’t help but stroke that golden skin of hers, now almost dry. “You didn’t finish your bath,” he whispered against her lips.
“Ummmm.” Giving him a sultry smile that was full of a joy he’d never before seen, she slipped out of his arms and into the water, beckoning him with her finger.
Grinning, he stood from his straddling position and went to work on his jeans. There was more than enough room in the huge marble bath for one crazy-in-love ex-thief. He could almost feel the tantalizing coolness of the water; it would be a sensual pleasure on its own after the unrelenting heat of the desert. But the most pleasurable aspect of the pool was currently looking at him with a distinctly feminine proprietariness in her tawny gaze.
Every male instinct in him was aroused and alert. This was his woman, and he was at once proud of her and ravenous. She was so sexy she was a fantasy and yet it was the very human softness of her that he found the most enticing. His ice princess had turned out to be a woman of hot blood, and he couldn’t have been more pleased.
Holding that dark gaze, he undid the buttons on his jeans and stepped out of them and his underwear at the same time. Her throat quivered as she swallowed.
Aware of the ways his wife’s body betrayed her arousal, he looked at her thighs. Beneath the water, they were pressed tight together. Her body was flushed with heat that hadn’t been present a moment before, her lips parted as if waiting for him.
He walked into the bath, conscious that her eyes had dropped to his erection. He was huge with desire for her, and he was proud of his passion. This was something no other man had ever given her and no other man ever would. He reached her as that possessive thought crossed his mind. He could think of a hundred things he could do to his princess and she to him on this slow desert evening, but first he just wanted another kiss. A kiss that was given joyously by the woman who loved him.
“Marc,” she murmured against his lips. “Husband mine.”
He went to kiss her again, but, with a mischievous smile, she slipped away and into the water. He followed, stalking her into a corner. “Princess, come here.”
“Why do you call me that?” she murmured, letting him trap her.
He winced. “At first it was because you made me so mad when you went all icy.”
She chuckled and kissed him, telling him he was forgiven for those early taunts. “And now?”
“Now, I feel like the hero in some fairy tale who got the girl.” His hands began to slide over her body. “I beat the dragon and won the princess.” The timbre of his voice dropped, becoming husky and intimate.
When Hira thought he would pull her into his lap and take her, he put strong hands around her waist and lifted her to the edge of the bathing pool. She gasped as cool marble met her bottom.
In front of her, he spread her legs to position her as it pleased him. Very aroused, she let him stroke her thighs apart, fingering her own hands through his hair. “Husband,” she whispered. “Why do you do this?”
His laugh was hoarse. “Baby, you know I like the taste of you.” Against her sensitive skin, his breath was a hot caress, a lover’s kiss. Moving closer, he put her legs over his shoulders.
She gulped as his hands stroked her flanks, as if leading up to a taste of her. “But you wish to come inside me now. This isn’t what you wish.”
His grin seared her. “Cher, have you got a lot to learn about your husband. But don’t worry, I have a lifetime in which to teach you the finer points.” There was such sheer delight on his face that she found herself laughing with him. “Lesson number one—what I wish is for you to be screaming when I take you.”
That was all the warning she got before he dipped his head. Hira shuddered and tried to keep her control, but it was futile. Before long she was clutching her fingers in his dark hair, moaning her desire and asking him for more. He gave her more, took more, demanded more. And at last she screamed.
When he finally pulled her down, the water lapped over her in a cool caress that soothed her sensitized flesh but did nothing to quench the boiling cauldron inside of her. She wrapped her legs around him and, with a sigh of exquisite relief, welcomed him into her body, even as their eyes locked in an even more intimate dance.
Her American hunter took her and she let herself be taken. It was far too late to fight, because at last she knew that she was conquered territory, marked with the stamp of this one man alone.
Perhaps it might’ve made a weaker woman angry to be considered as such, but Hira wasn’t weak. Belonging to Marc allowed no half measures. But, she thought with a smile as the stars exploded around them, Marc wasn’t a man who loved by half measures. He’d given her all his passion, all his strength, all his heart. If she’d been conquered, then her conqueror had surrendered into her loving arms.
“People treasure their dreams,” Marc whispered into her ear, as they floated down from the pinnacle of pleasure. “Let me treasure you for the rest of my life.”
It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her. Contrary to his own beliefs, her hunter of a man knew exactly what words to give his wife. “We will treasure each other,” she managed to whisper, holding her perfect prince of a man to her.
The Millionaire's Virgin Mistress
By Robyn Donald
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER ONE
‘MARK, do you think she’s one of the strippers? Or…’ a significant pause followed by a little laugh ‘…do they parade her now and then as a horrible example of what can happen if you aren’t careful?’
Heat stung Paige Howard’s skin, although she acquitted the speaker of deliberate rudeness; the woman couldn’t know that a trick of acoustics carried every cut-glass syllable from th
e foyer of the old hotel to the top of the staircase.
And the posters for the club on the upper floor, offering lap dancing and massage, were too blatant to miss. It was an understandable mistake to assume that Paige was one of the women who offered their services to any man with the money to pay for them.
However, she wasn’t going to tell them that she’d never seen the inside of the strip bar! She had more important things to worry about than a momentary humiliation. Frowning, she glanced at the baby in her arms, worried by his increasingly flushed little face.
The woman and her Mark would be tourists on one of the routes that showed off Napier’s stunning collection of Art Deco buildings, built after a devastating earthquake seventy years previously. The small city on the sweep of New Zealand’s Hawke Bay was now a destination for pilgrims who enjoyed both the architecture and the superb wines of the region.
Paige knew she’d never see this couple again, and she didn’t care a five-dollar note what they thought of her.
Although five dollars, she thought grimly, would come in handy right now. She had been made redundant a few weeks previously, and her meagre savings had almost disappeared.
When baby Brodie’s temperature had got to the worrying stage she’d had to break the strip club’s rules and contact his mother, who worked there. Sherry had thrust money for the doctor into her hands, and gone back to dancing with tears in her eyes.
Brows pinching together, Paige smoothed the shawl back from Brodie’s crumpled little face, checking it with real fear building beneath her ribs. Dusky patches darkened the skin around his eyes and he was panting between pale, dry lips.
How could a baby—perfectly normal an hour ago—deteriorate so quickly?
At that moment he jerked in her arms, his face screwing up in pain although he made no noise. Increasing her speed as fast as she dared down the stairs, she pitched her voice to a low soothing murmur.
Best of Virgins Bundle Page 151
