Daughter of Hassan & Heart of the Desert(16)

He was openly smiling now, laughter lighting the dark depths of his eyes, but Danielle was white and rigid with shock, her eyes enormous in her small pale face.

‘You can’t mean it.’ she stammered wildly, forgetting caution in her anxiety to be assured that she had misunderstood. ‘You don’t want me… It was just to get the oil company…’

‘Which I have to keep,’ Jourdan said coldly, his laughter banished. ‘You are my wife, Danielle, and by the time dawn pearls the morning sky you will be in deed as well as word.’

‘No!’

The word was ripped from Danielle’s throat, panic flaring hotly through tensed limbs as she turned frantically towards the door, but once again Jourdan had anticipated her, his fingers tightening painfully around her wrist as she tried to pull away.

‘You will behave from now on as befits my wife,’ he gritted against her ear, ‘and not as the foolish child you undoubtedly are. A room has been prepared for us. Come…’

A tiny whimper of protest broke past Danielle’s compressed lips as Jourdan’s grip tightened, but she remained steadfastly glued to the floor, determination giving way to fear as he turned, and with one swift, lithe movement swung her up into his arms.

‘Your bones are as fragile as those of the gazelle who graze by the oasis,’ he murmured mockingly as he carried her out of the room and up a flight of narrow stairs into a chamber whose magnificence would, in other circumstances, have completely taken Danielle’s breath away.

As it was, the rich draperies in crimson and gold embroidered brocades; the brilliant Persian rugs and the overall masculinity of the apartment, combined with the heady fragrances of sandalwood and incense, completely overwhelmed her.

She was placed on a low divan, amongst a nest of silken cushions, Jourdan’s lithe frame between her and the imposing bed to which her eyes were unwillingly drawn.

‘So very apprehensive,’ Jourdan mocked, following her glance, ‘Never mind, mignonne, before morning streaks the sky you will have learned to look upon the place where you entered the doorway of womanhood with different eyes.’

‘Those of hatred,’ Danielle confirmed bitterly. ‘If you had the slightest scrap of compassion or civilisation you would never even dream of doing this…’

‘You think not? How very naïve you are, mignonne,’ Jourdan mocked softly. ‘There cannot be many men who have looked upon you and not dreamed of enjoying exactly what I shall be enjoying tonight.’

The room whirled dizzily about her as Danielle tried to moan another anguished protest. She saw Jourdan coming towards her and flinched beneath both his presence and the icy lash of his tongue as he swore vehemently.

‘Drink this.’

The command could not be ignored, but even as she took the first mouthful of hot sweet mint tea, warning bells flashed through Danielle’s mind. She tried to pull back, but the pressure of Jourdan’s fingers on her neck prevented her, just as his steely determination prevented her from refusing to drink the hot tea, which she was sure was drugged, just as her earlier cup had been. Now with hideous clarity she remembered Zanaide telling her that it relaxed the mind and the body. She shivered violently, her over-active imagination conjuring up pictures of what she was going to be called upon to endure, her will weakened by the drug she had been given. She longed to sob and plead to be set free, but pride would not let her.

‘So much fear and trepidation,’ Jourdan murmured softly, his fingers closing on her throat. ‘Will it help you, I wonder, daughter of Hassan, if I tell you that not so many days from now you will welcome with open arms that which you now fear?’

‘Impossible!’ Danielle choked out fiercely.

The anguished thudding of her heart was blotted out by Jourdan’s spontaneous laughter, as his hands slid from the warm flesh of her throat to the cold girdle encircling her waist.

‘All things are possible, Danielle,’ he drawled laconically. ‘And if you are honest with yourself, you will admit that this is so.’

Danielle’s head dropped back against his shoulder as he lifted her in his arms and carried her over to the enormous bed. Her eyes squeezed tightly closed, her body tensed against his touch, Danielle lay there hardly daring to breathe. One by one she heard Jourdan extinguish the lights which had illuminated the room, and then he was beside her on the bed, his hands making short work of the intricate girdle, his breath against her cheek as he reached for the first of the pearl buttons.





CHAPTER SEVEN


AS Danielle froze beneath the questing fingers, she squeezed her eyes closed, unable to bear the sight of the lean brown fingers against the paleness of her flesh.

The night air lay like silk against her skin. Her heart seemed to be pounding with a heavy insistence outside all her previous experience. She felt the warmth of Jourdan’s breath against her cheek and purposefully turned away, her lips tightening, only to part on a shocked gasp as she felt the cool brush of his mouth not against her own trembling lips but in the pale vee of flesh exposed by the unfastened buttons at the neck of her caftan.

As the deft fingers slid more pearls from their looped fastenings, Jourdan’s mouth moved downwards, until it rested in the valley between her breasts, her heart racing beneath the male hand covering it.

As though the wild urgency of her thudding heart conveyed a secret to Jourdan she could not share, Danielle saw him raise his head and watch her through the darkness, his eyes glinting like a cat’s and silvered by the moon.

‘There is nothing to fear, daughter of Hassan,’ he told her in a voice as soft and sweet as honey. ‘Come, give me your hand and together we shall walk the paths of the Garden of Eden.’

Like someone in a trance Danielle found herself responding, even though it was against her will. Her trembling fingers were taken and spread against the heated warmth of Jourdan’s chest, beneath the robe he had worn for the marriage ceremony.

‘Your fingers flutter like the wings of a trapped bird,’ he said softly. ‘I am only as other men, mignonne, my flesh much as theirs…’

But he wasn’t like any other man she knew, Danielle thought wildly. They did not demand that she touch them so intimately, so that her fingers could not help responding to the vibrant male life beneath them. Nor did they hold her so close that her soft breasts were crushed against hard muscles and scraped by crisp, dark body hair, whose touch was doing strange things to her tensed stomach muscles, causing them to relax into a melting weakness which made it impossible for her to do anything but murmur a small protest as her caftan was removed completely, along with the dubious protection of Jourdan’s arms as he turned her sideways so that the full moon silvered the slender length of her body, revealing how it trembled nervously beneath his lazy scrutiny.

Confused and disturbed by the hitherto unknown sensations awakening within her, Danielle moved, gasping faintly as she realised that Jourdan was as naked as she was herself, the same moon which had silvered her tender flesh highlighting the broad shoulders and tautly muscled male outline, her eyes lifting fearfully to those of the man watching her so impassively, mutely begging for a stay of sentence.

‘It is too late, Danielle,’ Jourdan muttered in a voice alien to his normal laconic tone. ‘Even if my mind did not urge me to this course, my flesh does. You are beautiful beyond belief; as slender as the young gazelle who flees the hunter, and just as provocative. One lean finger touched her cheek, turning her towards him, where he surveyed the silver streaks of tears dispassionately. ‘You weep like a child, frightened of the unknown, but already womanhood beckons you, although you will not admit it. I will not leave the fruit which is rightfully mine ripening on the tree for other hands to pluck.’

Danielle’s anguished protest was lost beneath the mouth that plundered and then softened, coaxing her stubborn lips into parting in tremulous wonder.

No one had ever kissed her like this before, she acknowledged half deliriously as Jourdan’s hands slid down her back, moulding her yielding body to the hard warmth of his, his lips continuing to tease and coax until her hands went pleadingly to his shoulders, surrender in the huge, bemused eyes she lifted in shaken supplication to his.

It must be the drug she had been given, she decided muzzily, there could be no other reason for this strange, melting need to yield herself completely to the heady persuasion of Jourdan’s lips and hands. Her mouth parted automatically, her head falling back over his supporting arm, her senses reeling as he probed and explored the sweet softness she had previously withheld from him, and as though he knew that the kiss conceded defeat his hand stroked firmly over her breast, arousing sensations that made Danielle reel in fresh astonishment. Somewhere deep down inside her a small voice warned her that later she would regret this heady intoxication which told her to respond blindly to the sensations Jourdan was arousing, but his hold on her was so strong that even had she heeded it it would have been impossible for her to break away from him.

Her hands moved instinctively from his shoulders over the hard muscles of his back and downward, drawing a muttered protest from the lips exploring the pulsing softness of her throat, and were redirected along paths she had never in her wildest dreams imagined—or wanted to imagine—taking.