The Sheikh's Christmas Conquest

by Sharon Kendrick

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘No ideas?’ he mocked as he reached out to curve his hand over her breast. ‘Such a shocking lack of imagination, Livvy.’

  And he bent his head to kiss her.

  She started to speak but he shook his head.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ he warned softly. ‘I feel that you and I have done enough talking to last a lifetime.’

  ‘A lifetime? Well, that isn’t something that is ever going to be relevant in our case, is it?’

  Saladin heard the unmistakable sadness behind her defiance and wondered if she was hoping for reassurance. Perhaps thinking that because he was about to start making love to her in the palace, there was now the potential for longevity. His mouth hardened. But there wasn’t, and hypocrisy and raising false hope would be an insult to a woman like Livvy. He wouldn’t whisper sweet words that meant nothing, or tantalise her with glimpses of a future that could never be theirs. Nor would he torture himself with the certainty that this was wrong, and that he was tarnishing the memory of all that was honest and true.

  Ruthlessly he blocked the voice of duty, which had been a constant sound in his head since he’d been old enough to comprehend its meaning. And concentrated on touching Livvy instead, wondering how her petite body could make him almost incoherent with lust.

  The ragged moan he gave as he eased himself inside her sounded unfamiliar. Just as the feeling in his heart was unfamiliar—the sense of growing and explosive joy. He said something fervent in his native tongue and her eyes flew open in question.

  ‘What was that you said?’

  ‘I said that you feel as tight as one of the drums played by the Karsuruum tribe.’

  Her pupils dilated still farther as she bit back a smile. ‘And is that...?’ There was a sudden intake of breath as he thrust deeper inside her. ‘Is that supposed to be a compliment?’

  ‘Yes,’ he ground out. ‘It is.’

  He wanted to come immediately but he forced himself to wait. He teased her to a fever pitch—until she was whispering his name in something that sounded like a plea. And still he held back—until he felt her convulsing around him, her soft cries muffled by the pressure of his kiss as he cried out his own ragged pleasure.

  Even afterwards, he didn’t want to let her go. He didn’t move from his position inside her, his palms possessively cupping her buttocks to maintain that sweet contact. He could feel her breath warm against his neck and the pinpoint thrust of her nipples and he thought he could have stayed like that all night.

  Eventually she spoke, her voice muffled against his neck.

  ‘I thought we weren’t going to do this.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘Making love in the palace. That’s what you said.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You know you did.’

  ‘Maybe when I had the chance to think about it, it seemed a little short-sighted.’ He stroked her hair. ‘It suddenly occurred to me that I have much experience while you have barely any at all. It seemed to make sense that while you are here you should learn from me. We are harming no one provided that we keep our liaison discreet—and I am very good at being discreet, habibi.’

  She lifted her head and her amber eyes were suddenly serious. ‘You mean, I’m to be your pupil? Like a novice rider who comes to the stables and needs to be taught everything about horses?’

  ‘In a way, yes. But you are more to me than that.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Indeed you are. You are also a temptation I find myself unable to resist.’ He saw the hope that died in her eyes as he took her hand and moved it down between his legs. ‘See how you arouse me so instantly, Livvy?’

  She looked down. ‘Oh,’ she said, but her voice trembled a little.

  ‘Yes, oh. Now stroke me,’ he instructed softly. ‘Whisper the tips of your fingers up and down my length. Like that. Yes. Only lighter. Oh, yes. Just like that.’

  He came suddenly, his seed spilling over her fingers, and then he stroked her moist flesh until she was writhing beneath him and he had to muffle the cries of her orgasm with the pressure of his kiss.

  And only when her eyelids had grown heavy and her breathing had slowed into the steady rhythm of sleep did Saladin slide from her bed and, after pulling on his robes, slip silently from the room.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BE CAREFUL WHAT you wish for.

  Livvy stared up at the ceiling, aware of the minutes that were ticking away, knowing that soon Saladin would rise from her bed and leave her room—like a ghost who had never been there.

  She’d told herself that she would be contented with what she had. That making love with Saladin was sublime—and she should make the most of the sexual pleasure they enjoyed, night after night.

  But it was not enough—and she didn’t know why.

  During the day he treated her with a polite neutrality. He ate his meals with her and chatted to her, and came to the stables to watch her working with Burkaan whenever he had space in his schedule. It was hard to believe that this very formal sheikh was the same man whose touch always brought her to life in bed, leaving her sighing with pleasure as she snuggled up to him. But once the pleasure had worn off she was increasingly aware that he always kept something back. That there was a darkness at his core that he wouldn’t share, something hidden from her and the rest of the world.

  It left her feeling incomplete. As if she was getting only half the man. She knew that what they had couldn’t last—but she couldn’t bear to leave Jazratan without having known her lover as completely as possible. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask.

  So why act like his tame puppet who just accepted whatever he was prepared to dole out? Surely sexual relationships allowed for all kinds of discovery, other than the purely physical?

  She rolled over on the bed and ran her fingertips along the rough rasp of his jawline.

  ‘Saladin?’

  There was a pause. ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  Beneath the rumpled sheet, Saladin stretched his legs, and as he did so his thigh brushed against the softness of hers. She really did have the most beautiful thighs, he thought as he yawned.

  As usual, he had come to her bed once darkness had fallen, driven by a fierce sexual hunger that showed no sign of abating. He knew it was a risk to his reputation—and hers—to persist in his nightly seduction, but it was a risk he was prepared to take. Because he was beginning to realise that the qualities that made her such a consummate horse whisperer were the same qualities that made her such a superb lover. She was intuitive and curious—gentle yet strong. He’d thought that the innocence that had stayed with her until a relatively late stage might have made her cautious, or wary. But he had been wrong. There had been no variation on the act of love that Olivia Miller hadn’t embraced with an enthusiasm and sensuality that easily matched his own.

  He tried not to react as her fingertips made dancing little movements across his chest, but he could feel the renewed throb of desire at his groin. ‘You can ask me anything you wish, habibi—although whether or not I choose to answer it is quite another matter.’

  Seemingly undeterred, a single fingertip now made a journey upwards to drift along his chin—its progress slow as it scraped against the new growth there.

  ‘Why have you never married?’

  The question came out of the blue and hit him like a slap to the face. He stilled and moved away from her. Had he been too quick to commend her? Too eager to think the best of her—his perfect lover—when deep down all she wanted to do was to probe into matters that did not concern her?

  ‘It never ceases to amaze me,’ he breathed, ‘how you can be in bed with a woman and all she wants to do is talk about other women.’
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br />   He felt her stiffen beside him.

  ‘Are you trying to change the subject?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  She clicked on a small lamp and stared at him. ‘I think you are.’

  ‘Well, then. Take the hint. Don’t ask.’

  ‘You’re not the only one who doesn’t do hints.’ She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and kept her gaze fixed steadily on him. ‘I’m not asking you because I’m angling for some kind of permanent role in your life. I know what my limitations are. I know this is just sex—’

  ‘Just sex?’ he echoed, the taunt too much to resist as he reached for her breast.

  She pushed his hand away. ‘I’m only asking because I’m curious,’ she said doggedly. ‘Your single status doesn’t seem to sit comfortably with a man who adores his country, but who seems to care more about the bloodline of his horse than his own. And I can’t work out why that is.’

  ‘Maybe you’re not supposed to.’

  ‘But I want to.’

  Saladin didn’t speak for a moment. This was intrusion, unwanted and unwarranted—a question she had no right to ask. Yet something tugged at him to tell her, and he couldn’t work out what that something was. Was it an instinct she possessed—the same instinct that made angry and injured horses respond to her, which perhaps she extended to humans?

  He hesitated, feeling the momentary sway of his defences as she surveyed him with that air of quiet stillness and determination. Was this why Burkaan had let her pet him, why his viciousness and pain had been temporarily forgotten in her company—because she exuded an air of healing reassurance, despite her occasional spikiness? He told himself not to confide in her, because keeping his own counsel wasn’t just a matter of privacy, it was one of power. The unique and lonely power of a monarch who must always stand apart from other men.

  But suddenly the weight of his guilt and his own dark secret felt heavy—too heavy a burden to carry on his own, and for the first time in his life he found himself sharing it.

  ‘Because I have already been married,’ he said.

  She was shocked; he could tell. For all her bravado in saying this was just about sex, it wasn’t that simple. It never was. Not where women were concerned. They always had an agenda; they were conditioned by nature to do so. They always wanted to bond with a man, no matter how much they tried to deny it. He watched as she tried to cultivate just the right blend of nonchalant interest, but he could see that her eyes had darkened.

  ‘Married?’ she said unsteadily. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Why should you? It happened a long time ago, when I was very young—in the days before these wretched twenty-four-hour news channels existed. Those distant days when Jazratan was a country without the world looking over its shoulder.’

  ‘And your...wife?’

  He could hear the tentative quiver in her voice. What did she expect him to say—that Alya was locked up in a tower somewhere, or that she was just one of a number of wives he kept hidden away in a harem while he entertained his foreign lover?

  ‘Is dead.’

  She didn’t respond at first. If she’d come out with some meaningless platitude he probably would have got out of bed and left without saying another word, because nothing angered him more than people trying to trivialise the past. Instead, she just waited—the same way he’d seen her wait when Burkaan angrily stamped his hooves in his box before letting her approach.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said at last, her voice washing like cool, clear balm over his skin.

  ‘Yes,’ he said flatly.

  ‘She...she had something to do with the Faddi gate and the rose garden, didn’t she?’ she asked tentatively.

  He nodded, but it was a moment before he spoke. ‘She was designing it to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, only she never got to see its completion. I had landscape designers finish it, strictly adhering to her plans, but...’

  ‘But you never go in there, do you?’ she said, into the silence that followed his words. ‘Nobody does. It’s always empty.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he agreed.

  Perhaps it was the fact that she said nothing more that made Saladin start telling her the story, and once he had started the words seemed to come of their own accord—pouring from his lips in a dark torrent. Maybe because it was so long since he’d allowed himself to think about it that he’d almost been able to forget it had ever happened. Except that it had. Oh, it had. He felt remorse pierce at his heart like tiny shards of glass, and following remorse came the guilt—always the guilt.

  ‘Alya was a princess from Shamrastan, and we were betrothed when we were both very young,’ he began. ‘Our fathers wanted there to be an alliance between two traditionally warring countries and for a new peace to settle on the region.’

  ‘So it was—’ she hesitated ‘—an arranged marriage?’

  His eyes narrowed and he felt a familiar impatience begin to bubble up inside him. ‘Such an idea is anathema to Western sensibilities, is that what you’re thinking, Livvy?’ he demanded. ‘But such unions are based on much firmer ground than the unrealistic expectations of the romantic love. And it was no hardship to be married to a woman like Alya, for she was kind and wise and my people loved her. She was beautiful, too—like a flower in its first flush. And I let her die,’ he finished, the words almost choking him. ‘I let her die.’

  She tried to touch him but he shook his head and rolled away from her, turning to stare at the flicker of shadows on the walls—as if it were a betrayal to even look at her while he was speaking of Alya.

  ‘What happened?’ she said, from behind him.

  He could hear the thunder of his heart as he dragged his mind back to that terrible morning—and, despite his having locked it away in the darkness, the memory seemed as vivid and as painful as ever. ‘I had to leave at dawn,’ he said heavily. ‘For I was due to ride to Qurhah to negotiate with the sultan there, and I wanted to get away before the sun was too high.’ He swallowed. ‘I could have flown—or even driven—but I wanted to visit some of the nomadic tribes along the way and it is better to take a camel or a horse into these regions, for they are still suspicious of modern transport. I remember Alya waking up just before I left, because she always liked to say goodbye to me. She was screwing up her eyes against the morning light, but we had been awake for some of the night and I thought she was just tired.’ His voice cracked. ‘So when she complained that her head ached, I told her to go back to sleep and to see how she felt when the maid came to wake her for breakfast.’

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  He stared straight ahead. ‘I remember she smiled at me and nodded, looking at me with all the trust in the world as I bent over to kiss her. She told me to take care in the desert. And that was the last time I saw her alive.’ His words ground down to a painful halt, because even now they were hard to say. ‘Because when her maid came to rouse her, she found Alya lying dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  He heard the shock in her voice and he turned over to see that same shock reflected on her face. ‘Yes, dead. Cold and lifeless—her beautiful eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Struck down by a subarachnoid haemorrhage at the age of nineteen,’ he said, his voice shaking with loss and rage and guilt. ‘Lost to us all and let down by the one man who should have saved her.’

  ‘Who?’ she questioned. ‘Who could have saved her?’

  He shook his head incredulously. ‘Why, me, of course!’

  ‘And how could you have done that, Saladin? How could you have possibly saved her?’

  He clenched his fists together, so that the knuckles turned bone white as they lay against the sheet. ‘If I’d thought about her, instead of being wrapped up in my own ambition. If I hadn’t been so full of triumph about the impending agreement with Qurhah, I might have realised the seve
rity of the situation. I should have delayed my trip and called the doctor, who would have been there by the time she started to vomit copiously. I might have been able to help her, instead of being halfway across the desert when news reached me.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ protested Livvy. ‘That’s pure conjecture.’

  ‘It’s fact,’ he snapped. ‘I could have taken her to hospital.’

  ‘And all the intervention in the world still might not have helped,’ she said. ‘But you’ll never know—because that’s just the way life is sometimes. We have to accept that we have no control over it. You have to cherish all the beautiful memories you had with Alya and let go of the bitterness and the blame.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘So suddenly you’re an expert on relationships, are you, my little virgin horse whisperer?’

  She flinched a little as if she had only just registered the harshness of his words. ‘It’s always easier to diagnose someone else’s problems rather than your own,’ she said stiffly. ‘And presumably you told me all this because deep down you wanted my opinion.’

  He wasn’t sure why he had told her. He wondered what had possessed him to open up and let her see his dark heart. Was it to warn her off the tenderness that had started to creep into their nightly lovemaking, even though he had warned her against such tenderness at the very beginning? And now he regretted his impetuous disclosure. He wanted to rewind the clock. To take back his words—and his secrets—so that she would become just another anonymous woman in his bed. So what inner demon prompted him to voice his next question? ‘And what is your opinion?’

  Livvy sucked in a deep breath, knowing that what she wanted to say required courage, and she wasn’t sure she had enough within her—not in the face of so much sudden hostility. Yet wasn’t it better to live your life courageously? To face facts instead of hiding away from them? Saladin might be a sheikh who ruled this wealthy land, but in this moment he needed the words of someone who wasn’t prepared to be intimidated by his position and his power. Who would tell it the way it was—not the way he wanted to hear it. She drew in a deep breath. ‘You once accused me of allowing the fact that I’d been jilted to affect my life negatively—and you were right. But haven’t you done exactly the same with Alya?’