Khalim found that he wanted to touch her for ever, to run his fingertips over the creamy satin of her skin, to explore her body until he knew every curve and every dip of it. It was a new sensation for him—the wish to prolong the waiting, until it reached such a fever-pitch that neither of them would be able to resist it.
‘Khalim!’ gasped Rose, as his skilful touch took her down erotic pathways she had never encountered before, so close to the edge that if he didn’t…‘Khalim!’
‘Mmm?’ What exquisite pleasure it gave him to see his Rose lying there, her hips in frantic grind, powerless to resist him. The sight of a woman yielding to him had never before had the power to make his heart thunder as though it really were the very first time. He knew then that he could make her beg for him, and knew also that it would leave a bitter taste in his mouth. For he was as much in her thrall as she was in his. ‘It is time,’ he whispered against her hair.
He moved to lie above her, dark and dominant and utterly, utterly in control as he parted her thighs, smiling as he felt her honeyed moistness.
And he entered her not with the powerful thrust of that first time in the desert—as though he would die if he didn’t join with her as swiftly as possible. No, this, thought Rose as an unstoppable warmth began to unfurl deep within her—this was a long, slow movement which seemed to pierce at the very heart of her.
They moved in conjunction, in perfect synchrony, her pale, curving flesh complementing the hard, lean lines of his. Each lingering thrust set her trembling, until her whole body seemed to shimmer with some unexpected light.
Khalim felt as though he were enveloped in some dark, erotic enchantment, and he had to use every once of self-restraint he possessed to hold back. Until he saw the sudden arching of her back, the inevitable stiffening and then indolent splaying of her limbs as rapture caught her in its silken net.
And only then did he let go, with a moan which seemed to be torn from his soul itself.
Only then did he shudder with the pleasure of fulfilment, until he came to a perfect stillness—and allowed his head to fall upon the cushioned splendour of her breast.
They dozed on and off for most of the afternoon, and then he made love to her again. And again. Until she sat up in bed with her blonde hair all tousled and falling in disarray around her shoulders, while he sucked erotically on her fore-finger.
‘Khalim?’
‘Mmm?’ He loved the salty-sweet taste of her skin.
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Hungry?’ The thought of food had not occurred to him, not with such a feast here in his arms, but then he had taught himself to transcend hunger. When reaching puberty he had been sent into the desert with his tutor and taught to go without food for days. Existing on a little water and what few berries were available. It was the simple code of the desert: that you should learn to do without, because you never knew when you might need to.
‘Yes, starving, actually!’ complained Rose.
He released her finger and lay back on the pillow, the sheet rumpled by his ankles, his dark body gloriously and proudly naked. ‘You want that we should ring out for some food?’
She opened her mouth to say yes, when she remembered, and shut it again. They were trying to be ordinary, weren’t they? And if they were an ordinary couple who had just moved into their first home, then they would certainly not have an excess of cash to throw about.
‘No. Let’s have something here,’ she said and tossed her hair back over her shoulder. ‘I brought a load of groceries with me, remember?’
Khalim shrugged, and gave a satisfied smile. ‘Whatever you wish to prepare will taste like manna, Rose.’
She was about to get out of bed when she frowned at his easy assumption that she would cook. ‘Why don’t you make us something to eat, Khalim?’
‘Me?’ he questioned. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, you! I’m not asking you to run naked up and down Park Lane—just make us a cup of tea and a sandwich!’
‘A cup of tea and a sandwich,’ he repeated, on a low growl, damned if he was going to admit to her that he hadn’t ever had to prepare a meal for himself in his adult life! He swung his long legs out of bed and stood naked in front of her, a mocking question in the dark eyes as he saw her unconscious little pout. He put his hands low on his hips, in a gesture of pure provocation.
‘Sure?’
Rose licked her lips. So he was trying to use his sexuality to get out of making her a sandwich, was he? What place equality now? ‘Quite sure,’ she answered primly, but immediately turned over to lie on her stomach so that he wouldn’t see the sudden tightening of her breasts.
He returned after so long that Rose was certain he must have fallen asleep in the kitchen, carrying a loaded tray with him. And he still hadn’t bothered to get dressed!
But to her surprise, the sandwich was creditable.
‘That looks really good, Khalim!’ she exclaimed.
He sizzled a look at her. ‘Don’t patronise me, Rose,’ he warned.
‘I wasn’t!’
‘Oh, yes, you were!’ His eyes glittered. ‘Just because I haven’t had to fend for myself doesn’t mean I don’t know what to do, if I need to—and you wouldn’t need to be a culinary genius to be able to cut off two slices of bread and wedge a little salad between them.’
Round one to Khalim, thought Rose with unwilling admiration as she bit into the most delicious sandwich she had ever eaten.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LIVING with a prince wasn’t a bit as Rose had expected—though, when she stopped to think about it, what had she expected? It wasn’t exactly the kind of situation where you could rummage through your life’s memory box and come up with a comparable experience, was it?
But there was only one word she could use to describe it. Bliss. Sheer and utter bliss.
She had never lived with a man before—had never felt any desire to make such a commitment to anyone before Khalim—and she was amazed at the way they just kind of slotted together as though this had always been meant to happen.
To her astonishment, the same things made them laugh—though for all the wrong reasons. Television game shows and badly made sitcoms, for example. And corny jokes which Khalim had apparently never grown out of since his schooldays.
‘It is enjoyable to have someone to share them with,’ he murmured to her one morning, when she was about to leave for work.
She heard the trace of wistfulness in the deep timbre of his voice. ‘What an isolated life you have led, Khalim!’
He shrugged. ‘Of course. It goes with the territory.’
And the territory in his case was real, not imagined.
And the other aspect of their life which was as close to perfection as Rose could imagine was their love-life. Their sex-life, she corrected herself automatically.
Just because Khalim sometimes astonished her with amazing tenderness during the act of love, didn’t mean that he actually felt love. Sex was sometimes tender, just as some times it was fast and furious, or deliciously drawn-out. In fact, it had a hundred different expressions, and Khalim seemed intent on exploring each and every one with her.
On the downside, there was no doubt that Khalim had been spoiled—both physically and spiritually. There was often a tussle as to who got their own way, with Khalim often expecting her to accede to his wishes, simply out of habit.
‘No!’ she protested one evening, when she walked into the kitchen to find that the breakfast cups and plates still hadn’t been stacked in the dishwasher. ‘It’s your turn to sort out the kitchen, Khalim!’
Khalim’s eyes narrowed. This was fast turning into the farce of a camping trip he had been forced to endure at school at the age of thirteen! ‘Haven’t we taken this living a normal life to the extreme?’ he demanded fiercely. ‘Surely even normal couples get someone in to do the housework!’
‘Yes, they do,’ said Rose patiently. ‘But that doesn’t include general tidying up, does it? And anyway—’ she looked up
at him in appeal ‘—isn’t that more of the same of what you’re used to? People waiting on you, so that you don’t live in the real world at all?’
Khalim gave an impatient little snort. Didn’t she realise that when she opened those great big baby-blue eyes at him like that, he would agree to almost anything? He walked over to where she stood, like some bright and glorious vision in a short white skirt and a clinging scarlet T-shirt, and pulled her into his arms.
‘Khalim, no!’
‘Say that like you mean it!’
‘I do!’ she said, half-heartedly.
He shook his head as he lifted her face to his. ‘Oh, no, you don’t, my beauty,’ he murmured, and bent his lips to hers.
She responded to him the way she always responded—with complete and utter capitulation, opening her mouth greedily to the seeking warmth of his, and tangling her fingers luxuriantly in the thick, black hair.
He gave a groan as he cupped her T-shirted breast, thinking how he had longed to hold her in his arms like this all day. She was like a fever in his blood, a fever he must purge before too long. He must. ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he demanded heatedly.
‘No!’
‘No?’ His black eyes glittered. Why was she saying one thing, while her body was saying the precise opposite? ‘You mean you want me to do it to you here, standing up?’
Rose felt the instant pooling of need. He was outrageous! Irrepressible! She loved him—oh, how she loved him. ‘No,’ she said again, and with an effort disentangled herself from his arms, knowing in her heart of hearts that she was going a little bit over the top about this. But for heaven’s sake—there was a principle at stake here! ‘Well, really I mean yes—but not until after you’ve stacked the dishwasher!’
‘If you think I’m going to allow domesticity to start dominating the important things in life, then you have made a very poor judgement, Rose,’ he’d said, with a silky and sexual threat, and kissed her again, very soundly.
She lost that particular battle—but the crazy thing was that she didn’t particularly care. She didn’t care about anything, she realised.
Except for her dark lover with the soul of a poet, who would never truly be hers.
They went out—of course they did—just like any other couple. Except that they were not—and excursions into the outside world brought that fact crashing home. For trips to restaurants or the theatre were always shadowed by the discreet but ever vigilant bodyguard, who was never more than a few steps away from Khalim. Several times they ate with Sabrina and Guy, and Rose found herself glancing at Sabrina’s shiny new wedding band with more than a little envy.
And each morning they both left for work, just like any other couple.
‘Do you have to go to work?’ Khalim demanded sleepily from their bed one morning, when the thought of having her in his arms for the rest of the day was just too much to resist. Philip could deal with all the most urgent matters, he thought hungrily. He threw her a sizzling look. ‘I mean, really?’
‘I most certainly do!’ she replied crisply, steeling herself against the promise in those night-dark eyes. ‘Why, are you offering to “support” me from now on, Khalim?’
He smiled, knowing that her challenge was an empty one. That his feisty, independent Rose would sooner sweep the streets than accept money from him! ‘Any time you like,’ he mocked. ‘Any time at all.’
And it said a lot about her emotional state for Rose to realise that the offer actually tempted her for a moment. She spent one heady moment thinking how wonderful it would be to be ‘kept’ by Khalim, before swiftly taking herself out of the flat and heading off for her offices in Maida Vale.
Each day, Khalim went to his suite at the Granchester to join Philip Caprice where he locked himself into matters of state affecting Maraban, settling down to study the papers which had been sent for his attention.
And lately there were more and more of them, he acknowledged as he began to accept that the burden of his inheritance began to creep ever closer.
The heady, pleasure-filled weeks crept stealthily by. Each night he received reports on his father’s health, and the physicians assured him that he was weak, but stable.
But one evening he replaced the telephone receiver with a heavy hand, tension etching deep lines on the dark, beautiful face, and Rose’s heart went out to him, even as a cold feeling of the inevitable crept over her. ‘Don’t you want to go out to see him?’ she asked softly. ‘Shouldn’t you be there, with him?’
He met her troubled gaze, her foreboding echoed in his own eyes as he saw their fantasy life coming to an end. He nodded. ‘I shall go at the weekend,’ he told her. ‘Once I have concluded the American oil deal.’
Her heart began to pound as she heard something new in his voice. Something she would have preferred not to have heard. Distance. She had heard it once before in Maraban and it had frightened her then.
Distance.
She stumbled over the words. ‘And you may…you may stay there, I suppose?’
There was a long pause. ‘That depends—’
‘Please be honest with me, Khalim! Otherwise what good will this whole…’ she couldn’t think of a single word which would sum up the magic of their weeks together, and so she plumped for the prosaic ‘…affair have been, if the truth deserts us when it really counts?’
‘Affair?’ he echoed thoughtfully and then nodded slowly. ‘Yes. I may have to stay. And I won’t be able to take you with me, you know, Rose.’
‘I know that. I never expected you to.’
‘No.’ She had placed no demands on him whatsoever, apart from a stubborn determination for him to do his share of the household chores. Would it have made him happier if she had broken down? Wept? Begged him not to go, or to smuggle her back to some anonymous house in Maraban? Because that at least might have given him some indication of her true feelings for him.
Never before had he encountered a woman who didn’t demand words of love and commitment—particularly in the aftermath of love-making. But Rose had not. Did she not want emotional reassurance from him, then? Or was her eminently practical side simply telling her that such words meant nothing. That actions were what counted—and that soon he would have to leave.
‘Then we’d better make the last of these two days,’ she said unhappily.
He nodded, wishing that he could take the sadness from her eyes. ‘Let’s start right now.’ And he pulled her into his arms and kissed her, dazed by the emotional effect of that sad, sweet kiss. ‘A kiss like there was no tomorrow,’ he murmured.
I wish tomorrow never would come, thought Rose as she kissed him back with a hunger which verged on desperation, a desperation which grew into a storm of passion which left them shaking and helpless in its wake.
They were slavish in their attention to detail, to try to make their last hours together as perfect as possible. The meals they cooked were their favourite meals; the music they played the most poignant.
And their love-making took on an extra dimension—the sense of inevitable loss they both felt making it seem more profound than it had ever done before.
She played with his body as she would a violin, fine-tuning every single one of his senses until he would moan with helpless pleasure beneath her hands and her lips.
The night before he was due to leave, they ate a sensual supper in bed and she was just licking off the strawberry yogurt which she had trickled on the dark matt of hair which sprinkled his chest when the phone rang.
‘Leave it to the machine,’ he instructed, his eyes tight shut with the pleasure of what she had been doing with her tongue.
She shook her head and sat back on her heels, wearing nothing but an exquisite wisp of scarlet silk he had bought her and then fought to make her accept. ‘It might be Maraban,’ she whispered. ‘It might be news of your father.’
Guilt evaporated his pleasure instantly and Khalim reached his hand out and snatched up the phone.
‘Khalim!’ he said.
As soon as he started speaking in rapid Marabanese, Rose knew that something was very wrong—even if the dark look of pain which contorted his features hadn’t already warned her.
He spoke in an unfamiliar, fractured voice and nodded several times, and when he put the phone back down Rose knew without being told that the worst had happened.
‘He is dead?’ she asked, in a shaking voice.
He didn’t answer for a moment, shaking his head instead. The inevitable. The expected. And yet no less hard to bear because of that.
‘Yes, he is dead,’ he answered, in a flat, toneless voice. ‘He died unexpectedly an hour ago.’
‘Khalim—’ she went to put her hand out to him, but he had already swung his long, dark legs over the bed and begun to dress. ‘Can I do anything? Do you want me to phone Philip?’
‘Philip is already on his way over,’ he said, still in that strange, flat voice. ‘The plane is being fuelled—and we will leave for Maraban immediately.’
Rose bit her lip. ‘I’m so sorry, Khalim.’
He turned then and she was shaken by the bleak look of emptiness on his face.
‘Yes. Thank you.’
He looked forbidding, a stranger almost, but Rose didn’t care. She couldn’t stop herself from moving across the room and putting her arms around him in a warm gesture of comfort. His body felt stiff, as if it was trying to reject the reality of what he had just heard, but she hugged him all the tighter.
‘I should have been there,’ he told her brokenly. ‘I should have been there!’
‘You couldn’t have known! You were planning to leave first thing! It was unexpected, Khalim. Fate!’
‘Fate,’ he echoed, and tightened his arms around her waist.
Let it go, she urged him silently. Let it go.
And maybe her unspoken plea communicated itself to him in some inexplicable way, for she heard him expell a long, tortured breath and then his arms came round her, his head falling onto her shoulder, and she felt his long, drawn-out shudder.
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