The Sheikh's Baby Omnibus

by Penny Jordan

  Mariella was lying fast asleep in the middle of the bed, where she had curled up in exhaustion like a small child. The white robe she was wearing was Xavier’s and it drowned her slender body. She had lit one of the lamps, which illuminated her face, showing her bone structure and the thick darkness of her silky eyelashes. In the enclosed heat, Xavier could smell the scent of her, and of his own instant reciprocal desire for her.

  Xavier’s hand tightened convulsively on the cord that fastened the curtain to the bedroom’s entrance, whilst his heart tolled in slow, heavy beats. If he had any sense he would pick her up and carry her straight out to the Jeep and then drive back to the city with her without stopping!

  He let the heavy curtain drop behind him, enclosing them both in the sensual semi-darkness.

  Standing next to the bed, he looked down at Mariella.

  * * *

  SOMETHING, SOME INSTINCT and awareness, disturbed Mariella’s sleep, making her frown and stir, her eyes opening.

  ‘Xavier!’

  Relief...and longing flooded through her. Automatically she struggled to sit up, her arms and legs becoming tangled in the thick folds of Xavier’s robe as she did so.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Xavier demanded harshly.

  ‘Waiting for you,’ Mariella told him. ‘Waiting to tell you how much I want you, and how much I hope you want me.’

  She watched as his eyes turned from steel to mercury and recognised that she had caught him off guard.

  ‘You drove all the way out here to tell me that!’

  His voice might be curt and unresponsive, but Mariella could see the way his jaw tightened as he turned his head away from her, as well as feel his betraying tension. Tiny body-language signs, that was all she knew, but instinctively she knew she had an advantage to pursue!

  ‘Not to tell you, Xavier,’ she corrected him boldly. ‘To show you...like this...’

  Standing up, she went to him, letting the robe slide from her body as she did so. She had never envisaged that she would ever feel such a pride in her nakedness, her femaleness, such a sense of power and certainty, an awareness of how much a man’s still silence could betray how very, very tightly leashed he was keeping his desire.

  She was standing in front of him and he hadn’t moved. For a moment she almost lost her courage but then she saw it, the way he clenched his hand and tried to conceal his involuntary reaction.

  Quickly she raised herself up on her tiptoes and cupped his face with her hands. Never in a thousand lifetimes could she have behaved like this simply for her own gratification, for the indulgence of her own sexual or emotional feelings, but she was not doing it for them, for herself, she was doing it for the child she so desperately wanted to give life! Silently she looked up into his eyes, her own openly reflecting her desire. Very deliberately she let her gaze drop to his mouth. There was no need for her to manufacture the sharp little quiver of physical reaction that pierced her, tightening her belly.

  She brushed her lips against his—slowly, savouring the delicate sensual contact between them, refusing to be put off by his lack of response, drawing from her inner self to focus totally on the pleasure it was giving her to explore the shape and texture of his mouth. Very quickly her senses took over, so that it was desire that led her to stroking his bottom lip with her tongue tip rather than calculation, the same desire that drove her to trace tiny kisses along the shape of his mouth and then draw her tongue lightly along that shape.

  Xavier couldn’t endure what she was doing to him! Mentally he willed her to stop, but instead she opened her mouth over his and started to kiss him properly! Lost in what she was doing, what she was enjoying, Mariella took her time, putting her whole self into showing him just how hungry for him she was.

  And then sickeningly, she could feel the rejecting hostility of his body, and for a heart-rocking second when he raised his hands she thought he was going to push her away. She suspected that he had thought so too, because suddenly in his eyes she saw both his shock and his raw, burning hunger.

  He could never be a man who would be a passive lover, Mariella recognised on a deep shudder of pleasure as his hands imprisoned her and his mouth fought hers for control.

  How little he realised that her surrender was really her victory, she rejoiced as his tongue thrust urgently between the lips she had parted for him.

  ‘I can’t believe that you’ve done this,’ she heard him saying thickly.

  ‘I had to,’ Mariella whispered back. After all, it was the truth. ‘I had to be with you, Xavier...like this...as a woman.’

  He had released her to look at her, and now he lifted his hand to her face. Instantly Mariella caught hold of his wrist and turned her head to run her tongue tip over his fingertips.

  She saw the way his skin stretched over his cheekbones, running hot with colour, his chest lifting and falling as savagely as though he had been deprived of oxygen. His forefinger rubbed over her bottom lip, and when she sucked on it his whole body jerked fiercely.

  ‘I want to see you, Xavier,’ she told him softly. ‘I want to touch you...taste you...I want. I want you to take me to bed and pleasure me, fill me.’

  Taking his hand, she placed it against her naked breast.

  ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please now, Xavier. Please...’

  ‘This is crazy. You know that, don’t you?’ she heard him mutter. ‘You are not your sister, you do not... I have not... I am not prepared...’ His voice had become thick and raw as he bent his head to kiss the exposed curve of her shoulder, her throat, his hands sliding down her back to pull her urgently against him.

  ‘There is nothing for you to worry about,’ she told him.

  She felt light-headed with the intensity of her own longing—but she only felt like that because she wanted his child, she was quick to reassure herself. That, after all, was what was driving her, motivating her, even if that motivation was manifesting itself in an increasingly urgent need to touch him and be touched by him, to allow herself to luxuriate in the slow and delicious exploration of every bit of his skin, absorbing its heat, its feel, the essence of him through the sensitivity of her own pores. So that her child, their child could be impregnated through her with those memories of his father he would never otherwise be able to have?

  Ruthlessly she stifled that thought. Her child would not need a father to be there. He or she only needed a father to provide that life.

  What he was doing was reckless to the point of insanity, Xavier knew that, but he also knew that he couldn’t resist her, that he had ached for her, yearned for her too long to deny himself the soft, sweet, wanton feel of her in his arms...his bed...

  But once he had held her, loved her, he also knew that he would never be able to let her go. Could she accept his way of life...adapt to it? Would she?

  She was kissing him with increasing passion, stringing tiny, delicately tormenting little kisses around his throat, her tongue tip carefully exploring the shape of his Adam’s apple, her fingers kneading the flesh of his upper arm with unconscious sensuality. Xavier recognised his senses on overload from her deliberately erotic seduction.

  Mariella gave a small startled gasp as Xavier suddenly lifted her bodily in his arms, so that her mouth was on a level with his own as he took it in a hotly demanding and intimate kiss.

  Helplessly she succumbed to it, feeling the desire he was arousing inside her run through her veins as sweetly as melting honey. He lifted her higher, kissing her throat, his lips moving lower to the valley between her breasts, before trailing with heart-hammering slowness and delicacy to first one eagerly waiting, quivering crest and then the other, and then back again, this time to lap tormentingly at her nipple with his damp tongue tip; the leisurely languorous journey repeated again and again until her whole body was crying out in agonised frustration.

  Unab
le to stand the sensual torment any more, when his lips teased delicately at her nipple she buried her hands in the thick darkness of his hair and held his mouth against her body.

  Surely he must feel the fierce rhythms pulsing through her flesh; surely he must know how much she wanted him?

  Her hands tugged at his clothes, her voice whispering a soft torrent of aroused female longing that swamped Xavier’s defences.

  His hands helped hers to quickly remove the layers of clothing that separated them.

  When she finally saw the naked gleam of his flesh in the lamp-lit room, Mariella sucked in her breath on a small sob of shocked pleasure.

  In wonder she studied him as tiny but openly visible quivers betrayed her body’s excited reaction to him. So compulsively absorbed in gazing at him, she was oblivious to the effect her sensual concentration was having on Xavier himself.

  ‘If you are deliberately trying to torment me and test my self-control by looking at me like that, then I warn you that both it and I have just about reached my limit,’ he told her thickly.

  ‘Now! Are you going to come to me and put into action all those dangerously seductive promises your eyes are giving me, or do I have to come to you and make you make good those promises, because, I warn you, if I do have to then I shall be demanding payment with full interest penalties,’ he added huskily.

  For a moment Mariella couldn’t do anything. Xavier was watching her as she had been watching him. Excitement exploded inside her. She took a step towards him and then another, measuring his reaction as best she could, but it wasn’t easy given the extent of her own intense arousal.

  She was only a breath away from him now, close enough to reach out her finger and draw the tip of it recklessly down his body, teasing the silky body hair.

  ‘You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to do this,’ she breathed truthfully.

  ‘No? Well, I certainly know how much I’ve wanted you to do it,’ Xavier responded throatily, ‘and how much I’ve wanted to...’

  He gasped and shuddered as her fingertip stroked lower, and suddenly in the space of one single heartbeat she was lying on the bed, with Xavier arching over her.

  ‘Play with fire like that and you’ll make us both burn,’ he told her, his eyes darkening as he groaned. ‘Do you know what seeing that look in your eyes does to me? Do you know how much I’ve wanted to see just what colour they turn when I touch you like this?’

  Mariella hadn’t realised just how ready she was for his intimate caress until she felt his hand stroke softly over her quivering belly, his fingers gently touching the swollen mound of her sex, his gaze pinioning hers as he parted the lips of her sex and began to caress her.

  Mariella knew that she cried out, she knew too that her body arched to his touch actively seeking it, eagerly opening to it, but it was only a vague, distant knowledge, at the back of her awareness. Her self was concentrated on the mind-exploding battle to accept the intensity of her own feelings.

  Frantically she reached for Xavier. Touching him, holding him, wrapping herself around him as she pressed passionate kisses against his skin, willing, aching for him to complete what he had begun.

  And when he did enter her, moving into her, filling her moist sheathed muscles, filling her with such a soaring degree of pleasure that they and she clung to him, wanting to wring every infinitesimal sensation of pleasure from him, it was like nothing she had ever imagined feeling, a pleasure beyond any known pleasure, a sensation beyond any experienced sensation, a driven need that shocked her in its wanton compulsion as she urged him to drive deeper, harder, breaching every last barrier of her body until she knew instinctively that he could not and would not withdraw from her without giving her body the satisfaction it now craved.

  They moved together, his thrusts carrying them both, delivering a pleasure so intense she could scarcely bear it, crying out against it at the same time as she abandoned herself to it.

  She heard his guttural cry of warning and felt her body open up completely to him, the first tiny shudders of her orgasm sensitising her to the pulse of his, to the knowledge that she was receiving from him what she had so much wanted.

  Was it that knowledge that made her orgasm so intense, so fierce that she felt almost as though she could not endure so much pleasure?

  Long after it should have been over, the aftermath continued to send little shudders of sensation through her, shaking her whole body as she lay locked in Xavier’s arms.

  She had done it, instinctively she knew it. Her child, of the desert and of a man who was equally compelling, equally dangerous, had been given life.

  * * *

  RELUCTANTLY, MARIELLA OPENED her eyes. She could hear a shower running, and her whole body ached with an unfamiliar heaviness.

  ‘So you are awake!’

  She stiffened as she saw Xavier coming towards her, his hair damp from his shower, a towel wrapped carelessly round his hips.

  Leaning towards her, he bent his head to kiss her. He smelled of soap and clean, fresh skin and her body quivered helplessly in reaction to him.

  ‘Mmm...’

  He kissed her again, more lingeringly, his hand stroking down over her bare arm.

  The quivers became open shudders of erotic pleasure as he pulled the bedclothes back.

  She had got what she wanted, and so surely she shouldn’t be feeling like this now that there wasn’t any need for her to want him!

  The towel was sliding from his hips, quite plainly revealing the fact that he most definitely wanted her.

  A sharp and unmistakable thrill of female excitement gripped her muscles.

  It was just nature’s way of making doubly sure, Mariella told herself hazily as his hand cupped her breast, his thumb and forefinger teasing the already eagerly taut crest of her nipple. That was all, and, since nature wanted to be doubly sure, then obviously she must give in to her urgings. Urgings that were demanding that she experience the pleasure Xavier had given her the night before, and right now...

  His hands were on her hips, holding her, lifting her. Already Mariella was anticipating the feel of him inside her, longing for it and for him. Needing him.

  * * *

  ‘THERE WILL BE things we shall need to discuss once we return to the city.’

  ‘Mmm...’ Mariella agreed, too satiated to lift her head off the pillow as Xavier turned to brush a kiss across her mouth.

  She looked so tempting lying there in his bed, her face soft with satisfaction and her eyes heavy with their lovemaking, he acknowledged, ruefully aware of the way in which his senses were still reacting to her.

  It would be all too easy to let the desire between them flare into life again, but there were practicalities that had to be considered.

  ‘Mariella.’ The abrupt note in his voice caught her attention. ‘Because of my position as leader of our tribe, I have always believed that I do not have the...freedoms of other men. I could never commit myself to a relationship with a woman who might not be able to understand or accept my duties and responsibilities to my people. Nor could I change my way of life, or...’

  ‘Xavier, there’s no need for you to say any more,’ Mariella checked him swiftly. Her heart was pounding heavily, a sharp, bitter little pain, piercing her even though she was fighting against admitting to it, stubbornly refusing to listen to the message it was trying to give her.

  ‘I would never ask you or any other man to do any such thing! And I can assure you that you need have no fear that I might misconstrue what’s happened. I shan’t. I am most definitely not looking for any kind of commitment from you.’

  Only the commitment of conceiving his child, she admitted inwardly.

  ‘In fact, commitment is the last thing I want.’ Assuming a casualness that defied everything she had always inwardly believed in, she gave a small shrug and
told him, ‘We are both adults. We wanted to have sex. To satisfy a...a physical need... And...now that we have done so, I don’t think there is any purpose in us holding a post-mortem, and even less in getting involved in needless discussions about the wherefores of why neither of us want a committed relationship. Truthfully, Xavier, I don’t want to marry you any more than you want to marry me! In fact, I shall never marry.’ Mariella delivered the words in a strong voice underpinned with determination.

  ‘What?’

  Why was Xavier looking at her like that? Where was the relief she had expected—the cool acceptance of her claim that they had come together merely to slake their sexual appetite for one another? Xavier was looking at her with a mingling of barely controlled fury and bitterness.

  ‘What are you saying?’ she heard him demanding savagely. ‘You are not your sister, Mariella! You are not one of those shallow, surface-living women who think only of themselves; who give in to their need to experience what they want when they want, who go from man to man, bed to bed without...whose whole way of life—’ He paused and shook his head.

  ‘You are not like her! You don’t even know what you are talking about! Mere physical sex is not something...’

  Mariella could see and feel the intensity of his growing anger, and she could also feel her own increasingly disturbing reaction of panic and pain to it, but she refused to allow herself to be intimidated by them.

  ‘I am not going to argue with you, Xavier. I know how I feel, and what I do and don’t want from life.’

  Well, that was the truth, wasn’t it? She did know what she wanted, and she had every hope that last night had given her...

  ‘Do you really expect me to believe that you drove all the way out here just because you wanted sex?’

  ‘Why not?’ Mariella shrugged. ‘After all, I could hardly have come to your room at the villa, could I?’ she pointed out, trying to make herself react as though she were the woman she was trying to be—a woman who thought nothing of indulging her sexual appetite as and when she wanted to do so!