His Queen by Desert Decree(32)

‘Lesson one,’ he ground out. ‘Do not shout at me when I am tired.’

He kicked open the bedroom door and dropped her down on the bed. ‘Lesson two, do not call Djalia primitive or backward—’

As her lips parted furiously to add even less welcome adjectives to the line-up, Azrael laid a hand across her mouth. ‘Be quiet,’ he told her without hesitation. ‘When you insult my country, you offend me. Stop doing it.’

Rigid with rage, Molly jackknifed in an effort to throw him off her because he had her pinned to the mattress by his superior weight. He knelt over her, her arms held still by his hands, and he was much too strong for her to fight.

‘I may well be a primitive man because I have had to do many primitive things in my life but I would never treat a woman as a piece of property or physically hurt her. And no, you know I am not hurting you at this moment,’ he growled, lean, darkly handsome features grim with warning as he made that point.

Molly dragged in a steadying breath. ‘I will not insult your country again,’ she conceded quietly.

‘Thank you...’ Azrael freed her arms and sprang off the bed, giving her a fleeting view of his taut behind in denim that roused unfortunate memories of her glimpse of his naked back view in the cave.

Molly’s face suffused with burning colour. She watched him lean back against the stone wall by the window like a panther lounging in sunlight. He was so incredibly sexy. Something clenched at her core and she dug her hips into the mattress as if she could squash that feeling, but it filtered up through her in a hot liquid surge, a hungry awareness that refused to die.

‘We can work on the shouting. There are ways of learning better control,’ Azrael told her helpfully.

‘Wanting to slap you won’t help me learn better control,’ Molly told him.

‘You are my wife—’

‘Stop it!’ Molly reared up against the tumbled pillows. ‘Stop saying that!’

‘What is the point of arguing with the truth?’ Azrael murmured sibilantly, his entire attention welded to her as her glorious hair shimmered in the sunlight like highly polished copper. ‘Would you truly strike me in anger?’

Molly shook her shoulders and pursed her lips. ‘Probably not. I’m not the violent type, but you do enrage me.’

‘I am trying to be reasonable,’ Azrael confided, scorching dark golden eyes still locked to her.

‘Your reasonable isn’t like anyone else’s reasonable,’ Molly framed abstractedly, her veiled gaze resting on his sculpted lips as she relived the taste of them.

‘Look on being my wife as a job. I will pay you for your compliance,’ Azrael spelt out softly. ‘I will make it well worth your while to stay here for a few months.’

Molly was mesmerised by his presence and his dark silky voice. He could have been reciting the numeric tables and she would not have reacted. He was offering her the role of wife as a job which paid a salary. That would take care of all her problems at home, she acknowledged reluctantly, but accepting money from him in such circumstances seemed utterly wrong to her.

‘I’m not sure,’ she muttered in bemusement as Azrael approached the side of the bed and settled down on the edge of it within reach.

‘You can trust me,’ Azrael intoned. ‘I will keep my side of the bargain.’

Her brow furrowed into an anxious frown. ‘It’s very expensive keeping Maurice in that care home, but I do only pay weekly top-up fees. The authorities cover most of his costs because he had very little money of his own,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘He’s happy at Winterwood. I sold my mother’s jewellery to pay the extra charges but I have only enough funds left to cover next month’s bill.’

‘I will take all that responsibility from your shoulders,’ Azrael purred, brushing a stray ringlet back from a delicately flushed cheek to gaze down at her. ‘I would be honoured to help you care for your only living relative, but I think it is very sad that you were forced to sell your mother’s jewellery to meet the obligation.’

‘It was only a ring and a brooch that belonged to my grandmother,’ Molly muttered shakily.

The brush of his fingertips across her cheekbone made her want to reach up a hand and touch him back, but she knew, meeting the burning dark gold of his eyes, that what she wanted would only encourage the kind of dangerous intimacy that neither of them should want. There was a burn at the junction of her body, a hot, liquid throb of awareness that made her achingly conscious of a part of her body she had always ignored, and she shifted her hips uneasily. Her breasts were swelling in the cups of her bra, the nipples pushing forward. She sucked in a ragged breath, entrapped by the overwhelming power of what she was feeling.