Lord of the Desert (9 page)

“Aren't you uneasy?” he asked.

She was too busy with buttons to pay much attention. “Uneasy about what? Gosh, you're hairy here. That feels…wonderful!” She frowned. “Why should I be uneasy?”

“You little fool,” he ground out. “This is dangerous. I wasn't making idle conversation when I told you I haven't had a woman in nine years!”

“Complaints, complaints,” she muttered, shifting closer. “Oh! Oh, yes…!”

He felt the sinuous caress of her body against his and he grew even more aroused. He groaned harshly and his hands gripped the pillow under her head as if he wanted to kill it.

Her legs parted to invite him closer, and her hands smoothed roughly, trembling, up and down his hair-matted chest as she drank in the scents of soap and expensive cologne and cigar smoke that clung to him, filling her nostrils.

He was there…there! She arched up provocatively, involuntarily, and felt a shudder of such exquisite pleasure that she moaned.

His hand at her hip stilled her. He shivered. “Gretchen,” he whispered.

She trembled under him as his hard mouth came back to hers and ground down into it with ardent fury. It felt as though he might devour her. Her head began to spin. Her arms slid under the shirt and around him. Her hand encountered a long, deep scar under his left arm and she stilled.

He seemed to have stopped breathing for that instant, when he felt her soft hand on the disfiguring scar that was only one of many. His head lifted. He watched her face, waiting for revulsion, distaste.

“There are others like this, aren't there?” she asked softly. Her fingers traced it to the belt line of his slacks. She looked into his eyes and began to pull the white shirt slowly out of the belt.

He hesitated, his hand going to slow the progress of hers as it reached bare skin.

She hesitated. “Is it…all right…if I touch you?”

His teeth were clenched. “Not below the belt,” he gritted.

“Why not?”

His eyes closed. “Gretchen, the scars, some of them, go all the way to the bone. Those in my groin and my left thigh are…disfiguring.”

“I'm not the swooning sort of woman,” she pointed out. “I love touching you,” she whispered. “I love letting you touch me.”

“I haven't. Yet.”

Her hand stilled as she searched his face. Her heartbeat became even jerkier. “Would you…like to?”

His face hardened. “Of all the questions…!”

She drew back her hand and matter-of-factly began to unbutton her embroidered silk blouse. She watched his black eyes go involuntarily to the lacy little bra that she uncovered.

“I hope you didn't have too many expectations,” she murmured, fascinated at her own boldness with him, “because this thing is padded. I…I'm not very big.”

He frowned. “Padded?”

She grimaced as she tugged the edges of the blouse apart and unsnapped the clasp that held the cups together. “Padded,” she said, embarrassed.

“You little fraud,” he teased, but with tender mockery as she balked at pulling the cups aside. “But why should I be disappointed?”

“Most men like their women voluptuous, don't they?”

His lean forefinger traced a path down the valley between her breasts, making little ripples of sensation work their way down her. She lifted helplessly as he trespassed lazily on either side of the valley.

He laughed in a husky, predatory way. His eyes glittered with feeling. “Men vary in their idea of the perfect woman. Personally,” he whispered as he began to move one of the cups slowly aside, “I like a breast that fits in my mouth.”

Her expression was priceless. He actually laughed. “Don't you watch movies?”

“I watch movies and read books, too,” she choked, lifting again as he traced the cup away to the hard nipple that ached for his touch. “But I never dreamed it would feel like this!”

“You make me ache to be whole again,” he breathed, watching her eyes as he brushed the cup completely away from her breast and looked down with violent hunger at what he'd uncovered. His fingers traced her breast, lingering on the dark aerole that peaked even more when he took it between his fingers and tested its hardness.

She made a high-pitched little sound and he searched her face for a few heated seconds before his head bent to her body. “What a wise move I made, to have this cabin soundproofed…!”

She writhed as if she were being tortured as he took her whole breast into the warm, hot darkness of his mouth and suckled it hungrily. Her nails bit into his broad, warm chest. Her hips twisted into his, her breath seemed suspended in limbo while he made her a sensual prisoner in his arms.

He started to lift his dark head and she clung, her mouth at his ear.

“Please don't stop,” she whispered frantically. “Oh, please!”

He renewed his efforts, moving from one breast to the other until she shivered, and then down her body to the fastening of her slacks.

He cursed the fabric as he fought with the closure, and then his mouth was on her flat belly, hard and feverish, and she began to whimper.

“That won't do,” he murmured on his way back up to her mouth. “That won't do at all.”

While she was trying to think, to make sense of what he was whispering, his lean hands smoothed her slacks and briefs out of his way and he touched her in a way she'd never dreamed a man would.

“Philippe!” she choked.

His mouth covered hers while he pleasured her in the tense silence of the cabin. He drew his lips back down to her firm little breast and he suckled her insistently while his hands explored her so intimately that she could have wept for the embarrassment. But even while she was trying to protest, he did something that lifted her completely off the bed. Her startled, horrified eyes met his glittering ones for just a space of seconds before she went over some hot, urgent precipice and began to shudder rhythmically with a pleasure she'd never experienced. Her eyes closed as she arched toward those skillful hands, inhibitions washed away by ecstasy as she felt the first climax of her life…

She wept then, clinging to him for comfort as he enfolded her against him and rocked her, pressing her naked breasts into the thick mat of hair that wedged down his broad chest. He'd satisfied her, and he was still aroused. It was more than he'd ever hoped for. If he could maintain it for even this long, there was every chance that eventually he could…have her!

He lifted his head and looked down at her faintly flushed face, her wide, secretive, shamed eyes. She was still trembling in the aftermath of what he'd given her.

He pushed back her disheveled blond hair, which was loose and flowing around her face. “When I told you that I could give you satisfaction,” he murmured, “this is what I meant.”

She swallowed, still embarrassed, but fascinated by the look in his eyes. “Is that how sex feels?” she whispered.

He smiled tenderly. “I think so. I'm not sure I remember,” he teased.

Her nails curled into his chest. “Philippe?”

He bent and brushed his mouth over her eyes. “Yes.”

“You…you're still aroused,” she whispered.

“Very aroused,” he admitted. “It comes as a surprise to me as well. I haven't been able to maintain it for this long before.”

She touched his firm chin lightly and then his chiseled, beautiful mouth. “If you want to try…”

He watched her with dark, brooding eyes. “You would do that for me? Offer me your chastity without marriage?”

She bit her lower lip. “You're a head of state,” she began. “When you marry, it will have to be someone equally important.”

His hands smoothed into her disheveled hair and spread it on the pillow. “It will have to be a woman who can live with my limitations, whatever they turn out to be,” he said quietly. “Just because I can maintain an arousal like this is no proof of my capability in bed. I have a genuine loss of sensation. It may never be possible for me to climax, Gretchen,” he said bluntly. “No, don't turn your face away. We must speak of it. I can never give you a child, regardless of whether or not I can become your lover. The damage, as I let you discover in a small way, is terrible. Even more terrible than I can show you.”

“Have you seen a doctor in the past nine years, since they made their original diagnosis?”

“I have no need to,” he said heavily. He rolled away from her, onto his back, and stared up at the ceiling. “My mirror tells me everything there is to know, when I can bear to look at myself.”

She crept up to his chest and slid an arm around him, pressing close to his side so that she could pillow her cheek on his bare shoulder. “You'd have to show me how,” she said softly, “but I'm more than willing to try to do for you what you just did for me.”

His heart stopped. His arm enveloped her and held her tight for a few seconds. “A generous offer, and one for which I am more grateful than you know. But I wouldn't subject any woman to the feel of me, much less a virgin who has no knowledge of men's bodies.” He rolled over and put a finger over her protesting lips. “I am disfigured.”

She caught his fingers in hers. “If you didn't trust me, you would never have allowed me to come in here with you in the first place.”

“I was aroused,” he corrected. “I wanted to see if I could function.”

“But you had nothing,” she said sadly. “It was all for me.”

He drew her fingers to his lips as he rolled back over and lay looking at the ceiling. “Perhaps this is all there will ever be, for me,” he said, his voice very quiet.

Her fingers tangled in the thick curling hair over his chest and her eyes closed. “Do you have any sensation there?”

“An odd sort,” he replied after a minute. “I feel it most intensely when I touch you.” He smoothed back her disheveled hair.

“Haven't you tried to make love to anyone since the accident?”

“The doctors told me it would be of no use, and I believe they were right.” His hand tightened in her hair. “The reaction I have to you is a mystery.”

“Perhaps you didn't feel anything because you wouldn't let yourself try.”

“I did, once,” he said bitterly. “With a woman in Europe.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, and she found the situation quite amusing.” His voice became grim at even the memory of the woman's contemptuous laughter. “That was when I gave up. I decided that a charade was the only option left to me, the pretense of a serious relationship to put the old gossip to rest.”

“I would never have laughed at you,” Gretchen said with anger at the nameless woman.

He wrapped her up tightly in his arms and drew her over him, so that her hips lay angled across his. “I should send you back to Texas, right now.”

“And I'd go back to my old, dismal job looking up legal precedents while somebody else gets to be the wild woman of the harem,” she said with deliberate disgust. “How could you even think of doing that to me?”

He lifted an eyebrow and studied her, drawing his gaze lazily down to the soft breasts pressed into the thick hair of his chest. He was still aroused. She made him feel stronger than he ever had in his life. As he studied her, it occurred to him that what he was offering her really was a bad reputation. His Middle-Eastern roots shuddered at just the thought of such impropriety. She was innocent. It shamed him to have even considered dishonoring her in such a way.

He traced around her full lips. “So you would prefer to live with me and play doctor, hmmm?” he teased gently.

She gave him a mock glare. “Only if you play fair. I'm not going to be the only person taking her clothes off around here.”

His black eyes danced. He felt joy as almost a tangible thing when she lay in his arms. “Pity,” he mused, drawing her gently closer. “When you look so enticing without them.”

“I suppose I'll have to learn to organize luncheons and meetings and social functions,” she sighed.

He traced her soft blond hair. “I have an entire roomful of people who do nothing except that. Your only concern will be me.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “I'll get fat.”

He smiled. “You won't have the time. I expect to be at the palace for quite some time to come. I have plans which are about to come to fruition, especially in the field of education. You can help me convince the people in the outlying tribes to allow their children to be educated.”

“I'd love to do that! But I don't speak your language,” she said.

“You can learn it. It's a dialect of Arabic, and I'll have you tutored.”

“Something else to look forward to,” she mused, searching his eyes. “A mission of my very own.”

“Something else, you said?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She reached down and drew her lips tenderly over his, nibbling first the thin upper one and then the fuller lower one.