Tariq groaned as she began to tug at his belt. She was like wildfire on his skin—spreading hunger wherever her soft fingertips alighted. He could have unzipped himself and done it to her right there. But he’d spent too many nights fantasising about this to want to take her without ceremony—and too many days on horseback not to crave the comfort of a bed.
‘Where’s the bedroom?’ he demanded urgently.
Tell him. Before this goes any further, you have to tell him.
But she ignored the voice of protest in her head as she pointed a trembling finger towards a door. ‘O-over there.’
Effortlessly he picked her up, as he’d done so many times before, pushing open the door with his knee and going straight over to the bed, putting her down in the centre of it. Isobel felt the mattress dip as he straddled her, one knee on either side of her body. With fingers which were not quite steady he began to unbutton her dress, and Isobel held her breath as he pulled it open. But he seemed too full of hunger to study her with his usual searing intensity, and maybe he wouldn’t have noticed even if he had, for his black eyes were almost opaque with lust. Instead, he was unclipping her bra and bending his head to capture one sensitised nipple in his hungry mouth.
‘I feel as if I have been in the desert,’ he moaned against the puckered saltiness of her skin.
‘I th-thought you had?’
‘Not that kind of desert,’ he said grimly.
‘What kind, then?’
‘This kind,’ he clarified, his lips on her neck, his fingers hooking inside her little lace panties. ‘The sexual kind. A remote place without the sweet embrace of a woman’s arms or the welcome opening of her milky thighs.’
Even if they lacked emotion, the words were shockingly erotic, and Isobel lifted her head to give him more access to her neck, her fumbling fingers reaching for the buttons of his shirt and beginning to pull them open. He had come back, hadn’t he? And he still wanted her. It was as simple as that. Had he found it more difficult than he’d anticipated to simply let her go?
Hope began to build in time with the growing heat of her body. She helped him wriggle out of his jeans and then the silken boxer shorts, which whispered to the ground in a decadent sigh. His shirt joined her dress on the floor and she looked up at him, strangely shy to see his powerful olive body naked on her bed. He seemed larger than life and more magnificent than ever—like a Technicolor character who had just wandered into a black and white film.
He moved over her, and she drew in a deep breath of anticipation. She knew his body so well, and yet she was a stranger to his thoughts. Should she tell him now? When they were physically just about as close as it was possible to be without—
‘Oh!’ she moaned as he entered her. Too late, she thought fleetingly, as sweet sensation shot through her body and the familiar heat began to build. Take this pleasure that you weren’t expecting and give him pleasure in return. Let him see that there can still be sweetness and joy. And then maybe, maybe...
‘God, you’re tight,’ he moaned.
‘It’s because you’re so big,’ she breathed.
‘I’m always big,’ came his mocking boast.
‘Bigger, then.’
But words became redundant as he began to move inside her, his mouth on hers as she met his every powerful thrust with the welcoming tilt of her hips.
It was the most bittersweet experience of her life. Amazing, yes—because sex with Tariq always was—but tinged with a certain poignancy, too. She was aware that things were different between them now, that nothing had been resolved. Aware too of what she still hadn’t told him. And all those facts combined to heighten every one of her senses.
She felt her climax growing. The beckoning warmth which had been tantalisingly out of reach now became a blissful reality. She felt the first powerful spasm just as he gave his own ragged cry, his movements more frantic as her arms closed around his sweat-sheened back. And she was falling, dissolving, melting. Past thinking as the world fell away from her.
Minutes passed, and when she opened her eyes it was to find Tariq leaning on one elbow, his hooded eyes enigmatic as he studied her.
‘Amazing,’ he observed after a moment or two, a finger tracing down the side of her cheek as she sucked in a deep breath of air. ‘As ever.’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t ring me, Izzy.’
‘I could say the same thing about you.’ She looked straight into his eyes. ‘Did you think I would?’
His mouth quirked into an odd kind of smile. He’d thought that her cool evaluation of their relationship having run its course had been a clever kind of bargaining tool. Had she realised that no woman had ever done that to him before? That the tantalising prospect of someone finishing with him was guaranteed to keep him interested? ‘Of course I did,’ he replied truthfully.
Isobel shifted restlessly. The warmth was ebbing away from her body now, and she knew she couldn’t put it off much longer. Yet some instinctive air of preservation made her want to gather together all the facts first. ‘Why did you come here today, Tariq?’
He smiled. ‘I thought I’d just demonstrated that—to our mutual satisfaction.’
Her own smile was tight. So that had been a demonstration, had it? In the midst of her post-orgasmic glow, it was all too easy to forget his arrogance. ‘For sex?’ she queried. ‘Was that why you came?’