Her green eyes flew wide. ‘Several hundred?’ she repeated in disbelief, clashing with shimmering dark golden eyes that made her feel oddly light-headed and even more oddly detached from her brain. ‘But how did you get me to the fortress yesterday?’
‘By helicopter, of course,’ Azrael explained. ‘We fly in and out. The cars pick us up at the landing site and drive us the rest of the way—’
‘But there must be a road somewhere nearby—’
‘No. Beyond the oil fields we do not yet have a country-wide network of roads, nor will we have until our construction engineers embark on that project,’ Azrael admitted, faint colour lining his sculpted cheekbones. ‘This part of the desert has always been fairly inaccessible.’
Molly experienced a sudden startling desire to smooth her fingers gently across one of those exotic cheekbones and so foreign was that forbidden prompting that her face began to flush as she questioned it. She had never before wanted to touch a man of her own volition. Her fingers fluttered and her nails bit into her palms, her breathing struggling in the new tightness of her chest. A kind of craving was snaking through her like a wildfire that burned everything that stood before it, and it shook her because that craving was so powerful it swallowed all common sense.
A drumming boom sounded outside the cave and she flinched.
‘It is only the storm,’ Azrael breathed tautly when a crashing roar seemed to shake the very rock walls of the cavern protecting them.
‘I would have hated being caught outside in that,’ Molly admitted shakily, ultra-conscious of the smouldering silence enclosing them and speaking in a deliberate attempt to shatter an atmosphere that was becoming suffocating. ‘I didn’t realise it would be so violent.’
‘The elements in our climate are often violent and perverse,’ Azrael declared huskily, reaching for her hand and tugging her closer, knowing that what he was doing was wrong but utterly unable to continue battling the urge to touch her. ‘Just as you make me feel things I don’t want to feel...’
Her hand engulfed in his, Molly looked up at him, knowing she should back away, knowing that she should be listening to the voice of reason inside her head. But that close to Azrael she couldn’t think, she could only feel. And what she felt just then was the incredibly seductive sensation of being thrillingly alive, her heart thumping fast while adrenalin raced in her veins.
‘Tell me not to touch you,’ Azrael urged thickly, brilliant dark deep-set eyes shimmering like gold ingots across her hectically flushed face.
CHAPTER FOUR
AND MOLLY COULDN’T tell Azrael that because she didn’t want to. Even the innocent word, touch, awakened a storm of seething curiosity and volatile awareness inside her. Her body felt as primed as though a detonator were ready to set it off. She was on the very edge of that fierce craving and, without the smallest hesitation, her hands came up to reach into the front of his robe to bring him closer.
That fast Azrael’s mouth came down hard on hers, driving her lips apart for the savage plunge of his tongue. Molly shuddered, excitement leaping high as flames flared inside her, the hot liquidity at the heart of her swiftly becoming a burning, unbearable ache. Within seconds she wanted more than she had ever wanted before in a man’s arms and she was locked to every long, virile line of him on tiptoe, her hands lacing into the silky depths of his luxuriant black hair. More, more, more, her body seemed to scream with single-minded purpose as the raw hunger threatened to consume her. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think of anything but her instinctive fear that he would let her go.
Azrael tried to let her go but because he had supressed the attraction so hard one tiny taste of Molly’s yielding mouth unleashed a ferocious surge of lust. He was utterly aroused, throbbing close to the edge of pain. She was plastered to him so that he could feel every soft feminine curve but it was nowhere near enough to satisfy his hunger. Her lips were open but he wanted all of her open. He wanted her spread under him naked and eager. He wanted to surge into the warm, wet welcome of her body and sate the need riding him as hard as the storm outside rode the land.
He lifted her high against him, her hands dropping to clutch at his shoulders for support. ‘I want you, aziz,’ he growled, settling her down on the worn Persian rug that she had slept on earlier.
And Molly wanted him as she had never wanted a man before. She was already wondering if such strong feelings were what she had always subconsciously waited and hoped to find. Outside the storm rumbled while, inside her, her heart thudded and raced and she angled up ecstatically to the sudden welcome weight of Azrael’s body as he ground down on her. The piercingly sweet, sharp arousal thrumming through her pelvis was unbearable.