Fascinated

His hands tightened, squeezing, kneading-her right breast, her left hip. A textured swirl of scalding heat encompassed her nipple; at the same time sharp teeth sank into her aureola. Her womb contracted-in pain, in pleasure.

She leaned forward, fingers fisting in his hair, lost in the erotic sensations he was engendering and the memories he had invoked…

'I asked him to touch me between my legs,' she whispered. In her thoughts. In reality, she had merely begged him to love her, to need her as she had needed him.

Heat grew inside her breast, there where Muhamed suckled her, an inescapable knot of truth.

He had not loved her. Needed her.

Warm air feathered her stomach. Gentle fingers touched Megan, a whisper of sensation.

Arabic fingers, not English.

A small, inelegant pop pierced the darkness-his mouth releasing her nipple. The shock of cold air was replaced with a gust of hot breath. 'Your pubis is covered with hair.'

It took a moment for the meaning of his words to register. Every nerve in her body was focused on her fingers that throbbed against his scalp and his fingers that combed through her private hair.

'Yes.' Her breathing accelerated-too fast, she would surely faint, she who had never before fainted. 'Of course.'

Scalding heat punctuated his words. 'Muslims remove their body hair.'

His leg that had briefly impacted her knee, while hard with muscle, had been silky smooth…

'Do you remove your body hair?' she asked unbidden.

'I have done everything that the Muslim law commands,' he said rawly.

Scattered thoughts flitted through her mind: did his religion forbid him to touch a woman? Was that why he was still a virgin at fifty-three years of age?

Was his pubis bare of hair?

'It is written that a woman's vulva grows moist with her arousal, and that at her moment of enjoyment, her flesh rises hard like the comb of a cock,' he said gruffly. 'Are you moist with need, Megan?'

Moist. Swollen.

She felt as if she were drowning in the scent of spice and the heat of his body.

'Yes,' she said unsteadily. 'I am moist.'

'And when you reach your moment of enjoyment, does your flesh rise hard like the comb of a cock?'

'You may touch my vulva'-Meg cringed at the bold words, a whore's words, surely; Megan spread her legs in brazen invitation, a woman shamelessly opening herself to a man.-'and discover for yourself what a woman's flesh feels like.'

Night air rushed up, chilling that part of her body that was swollen like overripe fruit, the original sin-a woman's sex. The cold was immediately displaced by pulsing heat.

He cupped her, shaped her, weighed her.

Megan held perfectly still: wanting approbation, fearing aversion.

Her husband's fingers had grazed her only in passing, when he guided his manhood to her portal. He had not lingered when he brushed against her.

What had he thought when he accidentally touched her?

What did this man think, now touching a woman for the first time?

'You're dripping with moisture.'

'I'm sorry,' she said quickly, defensively, body tensing, preparing for his rejection of her womanhood.

'Why do you apologize?' His breath branded her stomach-he was looking down, as if he could see her in the dark. And perhaps he could. 'Do you not get this wet when you are with other men?'

A long finger sank between the slippery wet folds of her vulva.

It was hard. Callused.

She abandoned Muhamed's head for the more secure anchor of his shoulders. They were tensed, as she was tensed. Strong. Solid. Utterly masculine.

Megan waited: for his next observation, for his next exploration.

His finger burned her. His breath burned her.

The very air was ablaze with sexual heat.

'The opening to your vulva is very small.'

Gently, he prodded.

Steadfastly, her body resisted.

'Is this where you wanted to be fondled, when you asked to be touched between your legs?'

Megan squeezed her eyelids closed, blocking out the darkness that was his hair and the pain of the past. 'No,' she said, more a sigh than a word.

Slowly, he drew his hand back, parting her, tunneling through her slick nether lips until he touched the very tip of her femininity with the very tip of his finger.

It was hot. Wet.

His heat. Her moisture.

A pulse wildly leaped inside her to greet the pulse of his finger. She locked her knees to prevent them from collapsing.

'Did you ask to be touched here?'

'I simply… asked to be touched,' she said unevenly.

'You're already hard.' His breath matched the pulse that beat inside her nether lips, her toes, her breasts. 'It is like a small bud. Is it fulfilling, when a man touches you here? When you are brought to release by the manipulation of your clitoris, is it not a male member that your body yearns to feel, rather than a man's finger?'

Clitoris. Megan had never before heard the word; there was no mistaking what he referred to.

She sank her fingernails into his skin, impervious to the pain she might inflict, completely absorbed in the heat and the hardness of his finger 'I do not-' know. 'I am sure most women appreciate…' The truth refused to be denied. 'No man has ever brought me to release with just his finger.'

He gently defined the hardened kernel of flesh that was the most sensitive spot on a woman's body, measuring its size, outlining its shape, his touch a slippery rasp of sensation.

'But you have gained release when a man's verge penetrated you,' he insisted.

White dots danced behind her eyelids; white-hot sensation danced along her skin. 'Yes.'

'When you touch yourself, here'-he pressed hard on the bud of her femininity; a jolt of pleasure hurtled through her womb-'do you not yearn for more?'

'There is a difference between a man's touch and a woman's hand,' she said in a parody of his earlier response.

'Arabic women cut off the genitals of young girls.'

Megan's eyes snapped open. All she could see was darkness.

Horror shot through her. Her muscles clenched-denying the truth of his statement, resisting her gathering orgasm.

'Why?' she asked involuntarily. 'Why would any woman do that to a young girl…?'

How could a woman survive without a means of gaining feminine satisfaction?

'It is tradition,' he replied.

His callused fingertip lightly rubbed first the left side of her clitoris, then the right.

'It is a rite of passage.'

Fire ripped through her.

'It makes women subservient to men rather than their own desires.'

His finger radiated heat. His voice was bleaker than a winter-shrouded moor.

Megan listened in mounting horror while her own pleasure licked higher and higher, hotter and hotter.

In Arabia, the men who guarded harems were called eunuchs. They, too, were reputed to have their genitals cut off.

So that they remained subservient to men… rather than their own desires.