A Royal Bride at the Sheikh's Command

‘Your flesh is the colour of almond milk brushed with sunset and gold. It demands the homage of a man’s touch and it seeks to enslave him. But I will not be enslaved.’

Natalia could barely focus on his poetic words. She was on fire with the intensity of her own aching need. She reached up and placed her hands either side of his face, drawing him down towards her body, driven by her longing to feel his mouth against her flesh, and already ready to cry out with disappointment when he refused her.

And then to her disbelief he did something she had never in her wildest dreams imagined any man doing. He picked her up bodily in his arms and carried her over to the bed. She was just under six feet, and, whilst narrow-waisted, she was voluptuously curved and yet he was carrying her as though she were a size 00 and skin and bones. It was ridiculous to feel so thrilled and awed by such a basic display of masculinity, but yet she still was.

‘Now,’ he told her as he placed her on the bed and leaned over her. ‘Now I shall take from you what you are so willing to give me, even though my intellect tells me that it is a worthless offering worn thin by the hands of all the others who have possessed you before me.’

He was insulting her, but she was too aroused to check him and to retaliate that of the two of them she suspected his tally of past intimate partners would be far greater than hers. He was an adult male, after all, nearing forty, she suspected. A very sexual adult male, whereas she was a woman who had been celibate for what she now knew to be dangerously too long. Instead she arched up in obedience to the touch of the male hands shaping her, learning her, and then whilst she cried out and moved urgently against him he knew her with their touch, stroking open the secret places of her sex with the art a skilled perfumier might bring to drawing the most precious essence from deep within the heart of a rose. Somehow it was as though by his touch he were in some elemental way taking her apart and rebuilding her to fit his own desire, a sensual al-chemist using the dark power of his sexuality to transmute her flesh into his creature. And she knew she would not have had it any differently. Her senses revelled in every small nuance of her own arousal and response, the lips of her sex swelling and opening eagerly to give him the glistening sweetness of her pleasure. Through just the touch of his fingertip he drew from her the sweet agony with ecstasy she had tried to hold at bay, earlier.

‘No,’ he commanded thickly, ‘don’t close your eyes.’

Obediently she gave him the eye contact he was demanding, holding nothing back as she allowed him to look past her barriers and share with her all that she was experiencing. Never, ever had she known such a powerful sense of being possessed. It consumed her utterly, leaving only the shell of her previous sexual self.

Her gaze heavy with her retreating pleasure, she watched as he parted her legs and positioned himself between them.

From somewhere he had produced the necessary means of protection, the rustle of its packaging striking a distant note of reassurance, even whilst a part of her still mourned the accompanying loss of the sensory pleasure of skin-to-skin, flesh-to-flesh intimacy with him.

From his first thrust within her Natalia knew what she had not wanted to let herself imagine; that this man was so perfectly physically formed for her that every particle of her responded to that knowledge. Her body opened softly and moistly for him, still sensitised by the pleasure he had already given it, holding him and gripping him, glorying in the width and the strength of him, tiny quivers of pre-orgasmic pleasure rippling through her as she lifted her hips and wrapped her toned body around him, wanting to draw him as deep within herself as she could. She could hear the thunder of their mutual heartbeat, shaking both their bodies; she could taste the warmth of his breath, smell the aroused heat of his flesh as it mingled with her own scent. With each thrust he took her deeper and higher, and with each counter movement she urged him on until there was no more climbing to be done, only that final leap together into eternity itself.

Natalia drew a shuddering breath of shocked disbelief. From the bathroom she could hear the sound of the shower running. She slid from the bed, pulling on her underwear and her shift with clumsy fingers. What had she done? No one must ever know about this. No one! Her anger against herself clawed at the back of her throat. How could she have been so reckless and so foolish? And for what? To have sex with a stranger? How sleazy that sounded. How against everything she believed about her own respect for herself.

The shower was still running. She had to get out of here before he came back. She was dressed now and, with no reason to stay and any number not to do so, why was she delaying?

Go, go now, she urged herself, before he comes back and humiliates you even more. Even more? Could there be any deeper humiliation than those words he had said to her as the final surges of her pleasure had subsided.

‘Right,’ he had told her tersely, as he had withdrawn from her and got up off the bed. ‘You’ve had what you wanted, now go.’

What she had wanted! He had wanted it—her—too, hadn’t he? Of course he had. But she had initiated it, hadn’t she? And that was certainly something she had never done before.

She opened the door into the corridor, relieved to see that it was empty, and then hurried towards the lift that would take her down to her own room on the floor below. Thank God Maya had said he was leaving first thing in the morning. What had happened between them was a secret she would keep to herself for the rest of her life. For her own sake and for Niroli’s. And thank God, too, for that safety-ensuring rustle she could hear echoing inside her head. At least that meant that the only repercussions from her uncharacteristic behaviour would be her ones she would carry within her senses and her conscience in secret.

How could she not feel conscience-stricken? After all, she wasn’t just feeling guilty and suffused with shame because her behaviour went against her own personal moral code. There was also her awareness of her additional responsibility to the role she was about to play and the fact that she was about to become the wife of Niroli’s future King. How could she have been so lost to all sense of what was right and proper and responsible as to have transgressed against the code she knew her agreement to marry Prince Kadir automatically enforced on her? As a royal bride, a royal wife, it would be of paramount importance that she was seen to be beyond any kind of moral reproach. She knew that King Giorgio would more than likely have had discreet enquiries made into her sexual past and had no doubt been reassured by her long-standing period of celibacy.

She must not dwell on what had happened. She must put it right out of her mind now. Either that or she must go to King Giorgio and tell him that she could not marry Prince Kadir. The surge of emotion that gripped her appalled her. So what if she was free? That did not mean that he…this Leon Perez would want her again. No, what she was thinking was crazy. So crazy that it scared her. And besides, she had her duty to think of, her already-given commitment. No, her mind was made up, her future decided, and it would not be a future filled with the sickness of longing for a man who had already made it plain just how he felt about her.

Like someone fearing drowning, Natalia clung to the knowledge that she was committed to marrying Prince Kadir. What she had done was dreadful, unforgivable, appalling—a form of madness. She must learn to accept and then forget it as some last-minute form of prenuptial panic that her senses had sprung on her. Something that was now over and done with and in the past, whilst she must look towards her already-planned future.

CHAPTER THREE (#u316e6733-88ac-530b-941f-81ee74ecb5fe)

KADIR looked grimly round the now-empty bedroom. She had gone. Good. The music she had left playing was still on and the dimmed lights were far too evocative a reminder of what had happened, but nowhere near as compelling as the scent of her, which seemed to cling to his own flesh despite his shower. It was an unusual blend of sensual warmth spiced with something he couldn’t name, and it had insinuated itself into his awareness in a way that infuriated him.

What was he doing wasting time thinking about her? She was nothing to him. Nothing, just a woman who was a sexual opportunist. He wouldn’t have gone near her if it hadn’t been for the fact that a near deathbed promise wrung from him by his dying mother that he end his relationship with his mistress had resulted in a period of celibacy far longer than he was used to. That was the only reason for what had happened, the only explanation there could be.

After all, it hardly suited the new roles he was about to take on, of both King-in-waiting and newly married man, for him to be having sex with a stranger; a masseuse, for heaven’s sake. What had happened to his self-control? He normally found it easy to control his sexual appetite. She hadn’t even been his type—he liked petite women, not sensual Amazons with lush curves and demanding sexual appetites. Yet he had allowed his loins to rule his head.

Well, it certainly must not happen again—not with any woman.

Kadir had no intention of being one of those rulers who pretended to have a certain moral stance in public whilst freely indulging in the most salacious of habits in private. There had never been a time in his life when sensual promiscuity had appealed to him. There had been women, yes, especially during his years on the professional polo circuit, but those were long behind him now and the only women to share his bed these last years had been a modest succession of discreet mistresses, of which Zahra had been the latest.

He had known her for many years, but they had only become lovers after her husband’s death. From his point of view it had been a very convenient and practical arrangement. Kadir liked such arrangements; emotions weren’t something he wanted to bring into his relationships, and an over-emotional mistress was the last thing he wanted. Or had been. Surely now the last thing he wanted was an emotional new wife.

It had been some financial business connected with his late mother’s estate that had brought him to Venice, and he was glad now that he had without thinking booked into the hotel using his alias from his polo-playing days.

From what he had learned about King Giorgio his father might have enjoyed a pretty varied sex life himself, but he had very strict views on the conduct of current members of the Nirolian royal family, especially his own heir.

Kadir’s frown deepened. Should she discover who he was and try to make use of that information, he might be forced to defend his behaviour to his father and the thought of that was totally unpalatable. How could he have put himself in such a situation? And with such a woman; the very antithesis of everything he personally wanted to see in a woman—especially one who shared his bed.

It was lucky that he had had the means of protection to hand, otherwise…Otherwise he would have stopped; there was no question of that. How could there be? He had a responsibility, after all, not just to himself, but to the woman he was committed to marrying. Was he really so sure that he could have stopped? Kadir swore inwardly as he ground the taunting inner voice into silence.

It was too late now to wish that he hadn’t come to Venice. His mother had loved the city. ‘It is like a miracle to those of us born of the desert to live in a city of water,’ she had once told him.

Kadir’s mouth hardened with bitterness. He had thought he had known his mother; had believed he shared a special closeness with her, but he had been deceiving himself just as she had deceived him. The last thing he had expected in those final days before she had finally succumbed to the fatal illness that had stalked her all summer was to hear her tell him that the man he had always thought of as his father had been no such thing and that, instead, he was the result of a youthful affair she had had with a European. And not just any European, but King Giorgio of Niroli, the head of what was reputed to be Europe’s richest royal family. Not that money was of any primary concern to him. Kadir had turned the million-plus inheritance he had received from his maternal grandfather into a billion-figure empire before he had reached his thirtieth birthday, thanks to his own financial and entrepreneurial skills. No, he had no need of King Giorgio’s wealth, and no real need either of the title he would inherit from him, but what he did need was to find out if this new persona his mother’s revelations had given him fitted him more comfortably than the one he had always previously worn. And if didn’t? If he felt as alien and apart from those he lived amongst as King Giorgio’s son and heir as he had done as Hadiya’s sheikh, then what? Then he would just have to live with it. He was forty now, after all, not an untried boy who knew nothing of himself. Niroli would give him the chance to stretch himself, to prove himself in many ways that ruling Hadiya could not. Besides, it was too late now for him to change his mind. He had given his commitment to his brother, Ahmed, to support his claim to become Hadiya’s new sheikh and he had also given his commitment to his as yet unmet father to become Niroli’s next King.

But whilst the outcome of his mother’s revelations might ultimately be to his benefit, Kadir could not overcome his sense of betrayal that his mother could have kept something so important to him a secret.

She had begged him to understand and to forgive her, telling him that she had already been promised in marriage to her husband when she had met King Giorgio. She’d stopped off on the island of Niroli on her way home to Hadiya. According to her, theirs had been an intensely passionate and equally intensely brief affair, and her marriage to her husband had taken place before she had realised she was carrying King Giorgio’s child.

‘So why tell me now,’ he had demanded angrily, ‘since you have not seen fit to do so before?’

‘Before I was afraid for you,’ she had told him. ‘Everyone assumed that you were the legitimate heir to the sheikdom and I could not bear to be responsible for taking that from you. But now…I am close to death, my son, and I have watched you these last weeks since your uncle died. For all that you are ready to assume your responsibilities to Hadiya I can see that you do not have the heart to do so. You have always yearned to be free of the restrictions our small kingdom has imposed on you. Where your brother is content to go and count the revenues from Hadiya’s oil wells and listen to the state advisers, you could never exist beneath the yoke of another’s rule.