Kadir gave a soft groan as he cupped the swell of her breast, revelling in the dark contrast of his fingers against her fair skin. ‘I want you, my Queen,’ he said, unsteadily. ‘I wonder if you have any idea just how much?’
‘K-Kadir.’
He didn’t like it when she said his name like that—yet he liked it way too much. It sounded... He shook his head. It was hard to define because nobody had ever spoken to him that way before. As if his name were a prayer. Or a plea. But words didn’t matter—not when she was doing something far more distracting. His mouth dried to dust because suddenly Caitlin was sliding to her knees before him, almost as if she were supplicating herself to him. But she wasn’t. She was reaching between his thighs and curling her fingers around his arousal—an erotic and possessive cradling of his manhood. With her other hand she had begun playing with his balls and the sensation was so good it was almost unbearable...
‘Caitlin!’ He shuddered as she lowered her head onto his aching shaft, her tongue tantalising him with feather-light licks before she took him fully into her mouth. He clenched his fists and resisted the desire to close his eyes. It was certainly easier not to orgasm without any visual stimuli but it was also intensely erotic to watch the bobbing movement of her bright hair as she sucked on him. He wanted to tell her to stop and he wanted her to keep doing exactly what she was doing, but it was all pretty academic anyway because, no matter how long he tried to ward off the inevitable, he was soon jerking helplessly into her mouth, his fingers tangled in her hair as his seed spilled onto her lips.
For a long moment he felt completely defenceless—a sensation so disturbing that it threatened to eclipse the last sweet echoes of his orgasm. But as she raised her flushed face to his, he reasserted his mastery by lifting her up and carrying her over to the divan.
‘That was...unexpected,’ he observed, once she was prone on the golden sheet.
‘I wanted to do something special for you.’ She hesitated as he brushed his lips over her neck. ‘To take the initiative for once, if you like. I mean, I know I’ve been involved in all the wedding planning, but sometimes this week I’ve felt a bit...’
The progress of his lips halted. ‘A bit what?’
‘Passive, I guess,’ she admitted. ‘As if I have no control over what is happening to me.’
‘But isn’t it sometimes a good thing, to feel passive?’ he mused, his voice now muffled as he moved his mouth towards her belly. ‘Like now, for example?’
‘Oh, Kadir,’ she breathed.
‘You like that?’
‘No, I’m hating every second of it. Can’t you tell?’
He thought about tasting her until she was crying out beneath the quick flick of his tongue. But his current need was more basic than that. He just wanted to be inside her—and something about the elemental urgency of that need disturbed him.
This time there were plenty of condoms to hand and when he entered her—feeling as hard as he could ever remember—she came almost immediately, as if she had been teetering on the brink for too long. As her body spasmed around him Kadir felt the instant pump of his seed. And this time his orgasm seemed as if it were never going to end.
For a while they lay in silence until the hard pound of his heart slowed. Until the sweat which sheened his brow had begun to cool. He opened his eyes to find her looking at him and suddenly he wanted—no, needed—to assert his mastery. To feel more like the man he usually was, rather than someone who he was beginning not to recognise. Shaking off his inertia, he stirred.
‘I’ve bought you a present,’ he said. ‘Look. It’s right beside you.’
She turned her head and for the first time appeared to notice the fancy beribboned box lying there. ‘Gosh,’ she said, blinking very rapidly.
‘Well, don’t just stare at it. Open it.’
Caitlin began to untie the ribbon and pulled out a box from within the fancy paper. Inside was a camera. The kind of camera she’d always dreamed of owning but had never imagined she would. Top of the range and eye-wateringly expensive, she turned it round and round in her hands as if she couldn’t quite believe she was holding it. But the gratitude which rushed over her was nothing to do with the money he must have spent—because when had anyone ever bought her a gift which felt so right? She felt the sudden unexpected prick of tears at the backs of her eyes. So thoughtful?
‘Do you like it?’
Still overcome, she nodded.
‘There’s a printer to go with it back at the palace.’
She put the camera down and touched her fingers to the rough graze of his jaw. ‘Thank you.’
‘Just let one of my aides know if you need any more accessories and they can get them for you.’ He flickered her an indecipherable stare. ‘Like I said, you’ll need something to do alongside your charity work. Something which keeps you from getting bored, or from feeling quite so passive.’
She told herself it was only gentle mockery. That nobody would give you a beautiful gift one minute, then turn around and make a veiled criticism the next. But Caitlin realised that Kadir was doing that thing he always did straight after they’d had sex.
He was distancing himself.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
COLD DREAD WAS mounting inside him as the plane began its final descent and Kadir stared out of the porthole window without really seeing anything.
He should be experiencing a sensation of quiet satisfaction. The honeymoon had been a success. Not even he, the world’s greatest cynic, could deny that. It had been easy—ridiculously so. By day, he had shown his new bride the desert he knew so well, and by night they had enjoyed long feasts of the senses which had blown his mind. Caitlin had been thrilled by his wedding gift of a new camera, and he had watched her busily snapping images of the stark terrain whenever time allowed.
But now the honeymoon was over. He’d sent his servants back by camel train, while he and Caitlin had commandeered the royal flight. Any minute now they would be touching down at the royal palace and seeing their son after a week’s absence. He couldn’t have asked for a better outcome to the marriage he had so carefully engineered, and yet...
Yet...
Now he wondered if he had been incautious. If he had given too much of himself to his new bride and fed dreams he had not intended to feed. If he had let his guard down a little too often during the preceding week.
A sigh left his lips. He had a problem. A problem which could no longer be ignored, even though he’d been loath to address it. He certainly hadn’t wanted to ruin their short honeymoon and he hadn’t wanted to confront it in an environment where he would be unable to escape from his new wife.
A wife he suspected was falling in love with him.
He felt his mouth twist as familiar faint echoes of fear and cynicism washed over him in a dark tide. His own experience had fanned his determination to never fall victim to love’s capricious wiles, but he had been on the receiving end of unwanted devotion often enough to recognise the telltale signs when he saw them. The tender eyes and lingering glances. The shy biting of the lips followed by a gentle smile.
Yet because he had never been intimate with anyone before Caitlin, the problem had only ever been academic. Women had adored him from afar. He had never put himself directly in the firing line before because he hadn’t had to. He’d been able to walk away.
But he couldn’t walk away from his new wife and neither did he want to, because she came as part of a package and that package included his son. A son he needed to continue the Al Marara line for which he had worked so tirelessly.
His vision clearing a little, he stared down at the gleam of golden turrets as the jet circled the palace and a sense of resolve made him tighten his jaw. He liked Caitlin and enjoyed her company—he wasn’t going to deny that. But that was all it could ever be. He wasn’t going to start reaching for the stars, or reciting poetry to her.
She was going to have to learn to manage her expectations. He didn’t want her love distracting him and making demands on him. He didn’t want to talk about feelings. He didn’t want to engage in any kind of cloying emotional dependence. His jaw firmed. And as his wife, she needed to understand that.
‘Are you looking forward to getting back?’ he questioned, though from the brightness of her answering smile, you’d think he’d just lassoed the moon for her.
‘Of course I am. I can’t wait to see Cameron again. But I’m going to miss those nights, alone in the desert with you. And the days, come to think of it. I hope...’ She hesitated, before reaching across to squeeze his hand. ‘I hope things won’t be terribly different when we’re back at the palace.’
‘I think it will be difficult to maintain that same level of intimacy,’ he said, carefully removing his hand from hers. ‘The nature of my work is such that I cannot guarantee being available for you with such frequency.’
‘Oh.’
He flicked her a glance. ‘But you understand what it’s like, don’t you, Caitlin? You understand the demands of my role?’
Caitlin forced herself to nod, telling herself that was what an understanding wife would do and that was what she was determined to be. The words she had spoken before and during the marriage ceremony she’d meant from the bottom of her heart. More than anything, she wanted to make this marriage of theirs work and the honeymoon had given her hope that such a thing was possible. A honeymoon which had been...
She leaned back against the comfy airline seat and sighed.
It had been magical; there was no other way to describe it. Totally and utterly magical. She had seen a much softer side to Kadir than he’d ever revealed to her before. During those hot, desert days and icy-cold nights some of the unremitting layers which could make him seem so unapproachable had been peeled away. Beneath a huge and silvery moon, she had caught glimpses of the man who had first stolen her heart.
He had taken her riding on one of the hardy Akhal-Teke horses which had accompanied them on the trip—just the two of them—his bodyguards keeping a discreet distance. He had shown her some of the secrets of the desert and the life which hummed beneath the seemingly unforgiving landscape. She had been remarkably un-spooked by the zig-zagging track of a sidewinder snake and had captured the slow progress of a desert tortoise with her camera. She remembered marvelling at the incredible baswa tree, which survived the barren conditions against all the odds, whose leaves could be boiled to make an invigorating tea and whose sap produced a delicious syrup.
And by night... Her heart pounded with erotic recall. Kadir was the most amazing lover—she’d known that before, of course, but somehow their marriage seemed to have strengthened the bond between them. At least, it had from her point of view. Sometimes when he was deep inside her, she wanted to cry because it was so beautiful. It was just like all those romantic novels and corny songs. It was like the first time she’d met him, only more so—because this time she knew him.
And she had fallen in love with him.
Was that so wrong? She stared down at her giant diamond ring, still glinting rather aggressively on her finger. How could it possibly be wrong, when he was her only lover and the father of her child? It wasn’t as if she were demanding he love her back, because Kadir had told her he could never do that. But she was convinced she could be contented with things as they stood, because she’d never felt this happy before. As if she were floating on air. As if she could conquer the world, if only the world would let her!
She turned to look at him, her gaze resting on his hawklike profile and the jet-darkness of his thick lashes. My husband, she thought lovingly. My brave and beautiful husband. ‘Shall we have dinner tonight, as a family?’ she asked.
He turned his head to meet her eyes and Caitlin wondered if she had imagined the sudden steely glint which had penetrated his his black gaze. For a minute he had looked... Her heart began to race with something which felt like fear. It was almost as if he were looking through her, rather than at her. As if the powerful connection which had existed between them all week had suddenly been snapped.
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ he said, his apologetic shrug seeming a little half-hearted.
Caitlin was unable to keep the disappointment from her voice. ‘Oh?’
‘I must meet with my advisors after so long away. Naturally, I’ll come and say hello to Cameron as soon as we arrive and spend some time with him, but after that you will have to excuse me.’
She waited for the placating kiss, for the smile which would reassure her that nothing had changed, but neither of these things happened and as the plane touched down she couldn’t shake off her faint feeling of panic.
And wasn’t it funny how panic could grow? A bit like a blemish on your face which nobody else could really see, only you kept touching it and touching it until suddenly it was livid and red and enormous. Because that was how it was with them. That was what her relationship with Kadir suddenly became. One minute she’d been kissing him beneath a canopy of stars—and the next she was left wondering whether the whole honeymoon had been as insubstantial as a desert mirage.
She tried her best to be pragmatic. She told herself that maybe her expectations had been unrealistically heightened by the emotion of the wedding, and she must be prepared to accept a less heady lifestyle now they were back in the palace. But even before their honeymoon, Kadir used to spend every night in her bed, even if he had slipped away before the rest of the palace had woken up. Whereas now he was absent for one, sometimes two nights in a row. He’d been busy with work, he said. He was making up for lost time, he said. And there was plenty of space for him to sleep in his office. Even though they had their own enormous section of the palace, she sometimes awoke in the lonely hours before dawn to find the space beside her still empty.
She tried to reassure herself about that too—because when he was in bed with her, it was as heart-stoppingly good as it had been before. And if she thought that sometimes he was only pretending to be asleep—well, that was just her imagination, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
At least the Sheikh’s attentions towards their son remained constant and Caitlin was able to derive comfort from that. Each morning she joined them in the stables and watched as their son grew more confident on his new pony—now called Bunni, which apparently meant brown and had nothing to do with rabbits.
With her new camera, she took hundreds of photos of Cameron with his father but she captured plenty of other images, too. Arty pictures of gilded arches, the misty blur of a fountain glimpsed through a curtain of flowers—and the snow-capped peaks of the Zeitian mountains. One shot she was particularly proud of—taken of Kadir as he walked through the wide palace corridors, his shoulders appearing to carry the weight of his destiny.
But these creative endeavours only went so far in providing her with a feeling of satisfaction, before her thoughts inevitably ran into the brick wall of fear. With each day that passed, it became harder to deny the sense of being the outsider in this gilded new home of hers. She became more and more certain that Kadir was pushing her away from him and one morning, her worst fears were confirmed.
Imagining her husband to still be occupied with the visiting Maraban Ambassador, Caitlin had been in her husband’s office, a room to which, as Queen, she now had unfettered access. The light in there was particularly good and she wanted a shot of the rose garden before the sun was too high.
She wasn’t snooping. Most definitely she wasn’t snooping. She just happened to be walking past his desk. And what would anyone else do in the circumstances if they saw their own name on a sheet of paper, which was lying right next to a golden-framed photo of Cameron?
Without touching it, she quickly scanned the handwritten note, which had the name of a London legal firm embellished on the top. She remembered Kadir once telling her that all legal matte
rs were conducted in English, because that meant they could be enshrined in international law and also because not many people spoke Xulhabian. It had made perfect sense at the time and Caitlin supposed she should be glad of it now because it meant she could understand what she was reading, but she almost wished she didn’t understand. Her disbelieving mind skated past the formal greeting of ‘Majesty’ as she tried to absorb some of the letter’s contents, because it was about her. Or, more specifically, it was about Cameron. Her throat felt raw and her eyes burned as one sentence branded itself on her brain and, despite its stuffy legal phraseology, it was easy to understand.
The marriage obviously confers legitimacy and inheritance rights on the young Prince, but also the mother will now be unable legally to remove the child from Xulhabi without your consent.
Suddenly it all made sense. The softening of Kadir’s attitude towards her and the clever wooing. The way he’d made her feel stuff she’d never been expecting to feel. The sense that something tangible and wonderful had been within her reach, only to have it snatched away at the last moment. Caitlin’s fingers tightened around her new camera. She wanted to hurl the expensive piece of kit to the ground and smash her foot down on it, but that would be the behaviour of a hysteric and she needed to be calm. Because everything she held dear depended on staying in control. She sank down on the window seat as she forced herself to focus on one single, comforting fact.
The Sheikh's Royal Announcement Page 13
