Sheikh's Woman

She was deeply, desperately tired, she was sick and hurt, and she wanted to believe she was safe with him. The alternative was too confusing and too terrible.

The engines roared up and the jet leapt forward down the runway. In a very short time, compared to the lumbering commercial aircraft she was used to, they had left the ground.

As his hold slackened but still kept her on his lap, she turned to Ishaq Ahmadi. Her face was only inches from his, her mouth just above his own wide, well-shaped lips. She swallowed, feeling the pull.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Home.” His gaze was steady. “You are tired. You will want to lie down,” he murmured, and when the jet levelled out, he helped her to her feet and stood up. He took her arm and led her through a doorway.

They entered a large, beautifully appointed stateroom, with a king-size bed luxuriously made with snowy-white and deep blue linens that were turned down invitingly. There were huge, fluffy white pillows.

It was like a fantasy. Except for the little windows and the ever-present hum you would never know you were on a plane. A top hotel, maybe. Beautiful natural woods, luscious fabrics, mirrors, soft lighting, and, through an open door, a marble bathroom.

“I guess I married a millionaire,” Anna murmured. “Or is this just some bauble a friend has loaned you?”

“Here are night things for you,” he said, indicating pyjamas and a bathrobe, white with blue trim, that were lying across the foot of the sapphire-blue coverlet. “Do you need help to undress?”

Anna looked at the bed longingly and realized she was dead on her feet. And that was no surprise, after what she had apparently been through in the past few hours.

“No,” she said.

She began fumbling with a button, but her fingers didn’t seem to work. Even the effort of holding her elbow bent seemed too much, so she dropped her arm and stood there a moment, gazing at nothing.

“I will call the hostess,” Ishaq Ahmadi said. And that, perversely, made her frown.

“Why?” she demanded. “You’re my husband, aren’t you?”

His eyes probed her, and she shrugged uncomfortably. “Why are you looking at me like that? Why don’t you want to touch me?”

She wanted him to touch her. Wanted his heat on her body again, because when he touched her, even in anger, she felt safe.

He made no reply, merely lifted his hands, brushed aside her own feeble fingers which were again fumbling with the top button, and began to undo her shirt.

“Have you stopped wanting me?” she wondered aloud.

His head bent over his task, only his eyes shifted to connect with hers. “You are overplaying your hand,” he advised softly, and she felt another little thrill of danger whisper down her spine. Her brain evaded the discomfort.

“Did you commission work from me or something? Is that how we met?” she asked. She specialized in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern designs, painting entire rooms to give the impression that you were standing on a balcony overlooking the Gulf of Corinth, or in the Alhambra palace. But what were the chances that a wealthy Arab would want a Western woman to paint trompe l’oeil fifteenth-century mosaic arches on his palace walls when he probably had the real thing?

“We met by accident.”

“Oh.” She wanted him to clarify, but couldn’t concentrate. Not when his hands were grazing the skin of her breasts, revealed as he unbuttoned her shirt. She looked into his face, bent close over hers, but his eyes remained on his task. His aftershave was spicy and exotic.

“It seems strange that you have the right to do this when you feel like a total stranger,” she observed.

“You insisted on it,” he reminded her dryly. He seemed cynically amused by her. He still didn’t believe that she had forgotten, and she had no idea why. What reason could she have for pretending amnesia? It seemed very crazy, unless…unless she had been running away from him.

Perhaps it was fear that had caused her to lose her memory. Psychologists did say you sometimes forgot when remembering was too painful.

“Was I running away from you, Ishaq?”

“You tell me the answer.”

She shook her head. “They say the unconscious remembers everything, but…”

“I am very sure that yours does,” Ishaq Ahmadi replied, pulling the front of her shirt open to reveal her small breasts in a lacy black bra.

She knew by the involuntary intake of his breath that he was not unaffected. His jaw clenched and he stripped the shirt from her, his breathing irregular.

She wasn’t one for casual sex, and she had never been undressed by a stranger, which was what this felt like. The sudden blush of desire that suffused her was disconcerting. So her body remembered, even if her conscious mind did not. Anna bit her lip. What would it be like, love with a man who seemed like a total stranger? Would her body instinctively recognize his touch?

She realized that she wanted him to make the demand on her. The thought was sending spirals of heat all through her. But instead of drawing her into his arms, he turned his back to toss her shirt onto a chair.

“What will I remember about loving you, Ishaq?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer, and she turned away, dejected, overcome with fatigue and reluctant to think, and lifted her arms behind her to the clasp of her bra. She winced as a bruised elbow prevented her.

Her breath hissed with the pain. “You’ll have to undo this.”

She felt his hands at work on the hook of her bra, that strange, half electrifying, half comforting heat that made her yearn for something she could not remember. She wondered if they had been sexually estranged. She said, “Is there a problem between us, Ishaq?”

“You well know what the problem between us is. But it is not worth discussing now,” he said, his voice tight.

She thought, It’s serious. Her heart pinched painfully with regret. To think that she had had the luck to marry a man like this and then had not been able to make it work made her desperately sad. He was like a dream come to life, but…she had obviously got her dream and then not been able to live in it.

If they made up now, when she could not remember any of the grievances she might have, would that make it easier when she regained her full memory?

As the bra slipped away from her breasts, Anna let it fall onto the bed, then turned to face him, lifting her arms to his shoulders.

“Do you still love me?” she whispered.

His arms closed around her, his hands warm on her bare skin. Her breasts pressed against his silk shirt as her arms cupped his head. He looked down into her upturned face with a completely unreadable expression in his eyes.

“Do you want me, Ishaq?” she begged, wishing he would kiss her. Why was he so remote? She felt the warmth of his body curl into hers and it was so right.

A corner of that hard, full mouth went up and his eyes became sardonic. “Believe me, I want you, or you would not be here.”

“What have I done?” she begged. “I don’t remember anything. Tell me what I’ve done to make you so angry with me.”

His mouth turned up with angry contempt. “What do you hope to gain with this?” he demanded with subdued ferocity, and then, as if it were completely against his will, his grip tightened painfully on her, and with a stifled curse he crushed his mouth against her own.

He was neither gentle nor tender. His kiss and his hands were punishing, and a part of her revelled in the knowing that, whatever his intentions, he could not resist her. She opened her mouth under his, accepting the violent thrust of his hungry, angry tongue, and felt the rasp of its stroking run through her with unutterable thrill, as if it were elsewhere on her body that he kissed her.

Just for a moment she was frightened, for if one kiss could do this to her, how would she sustain his full, passionate lovemaking? She would explode off the face of the earth. His hand dropped to force her against him, while his hardened body leapt against her. She tore her mouth away from his, gasping for the oxygen to feed the fire that wrapped her in its hot, licking fingers.

“Ishaq!” she cried, wild with a passion that seemed to her totally new, as the heat of his hands burned her back, her hips, clenched against the back of her neck with a firm possessiveness that thrilled her. “Oh, my love!”

Then suddenly he was standing away from her, his hands on her wrists pulling her arms down, his eyes burning into hers with a cold, hard, suspicious fury that froze the hot rivers of need coursing through her.