Fascinated

'Yes.'

'He was the man you loved.'

'Yes. I thought he loved me, too, but he could not have, could he? A man cannot love a woman if he does not respect the needs of her body.'

She rapidly blinked back tears.

Of pain. Of anger. Of betrayal.

Megan, too, knew loneliness.

Memories of their joining washed over him: the hot core of her vulva; the silky-soft hardness of her feminine bud; the prickle of her pubic hair grinding into his pelvis while she swallowed him whole and did not once judge either his inexperience or his lack of testicles.

'Women in Arabia use vinegar-soaked wool-plugs,' he said abruptly.

'I beg your pardon?'

Heat crawled down his neck. 'As a prophylactic,' he explained shortly.

'I see.'

Tension thickened the air.

Any moment now she was going to get up, dress, and leave. Never knowing what the night had meant to him.

He desperately strove to divert her. 'Is Megan your true name?'

Even as the words left his mouth, he realized the incongruity of his question. He asked a truth from her that he was not willing to give in return.

'Yes,' she said, terse as he had been terse. 'If you will allow me a few moments of privacy-'

'Don't,' he grated.

He could feel the stiffening of her body. 'Don't what?'

Don't leave me.

'I am not an easy… man.'

Megan's silent agreement was decipherable in any language.

He persevered, as he had persevered the last forty years.

'I do not know how… to talk to women.' He spoke carefully, trying to soften his severity, to be what she would want a man to be. 'I do not know what pleases them-'

'I have told you-'

'But I would please you, Megan,' he interrupted, the harshness kicking in to block out her pending rejection. 'If you would let me.'

Her expression remained inscrutable. 'I do not understand what it is that you want from me.'

Last night she had uttered similar words.

His needs had not changed.

He wanted to know what other men knew.

He wanted to be what other men were.

'I would have no more pretense or illusions between us,' he said, reigning in hope, harnessing fear.

'Are you asking me to… to spend more time with you?' she asked guardedly.

He would never have another chance to experience a woman's honest sexuality.

'I am asking you to spend another night with me,' he said tautly.

'And if I did?'

His spine felt ready to snap. 'I will do whatever you wish.'

'My husband…' Megan shifted; the squeak of the bed-springs scraped across his skin. 'I did not ask him to do the things I said to you last night.'

'You did not ask him to touch you?' he asked, heart pounding, verge stirring, hope thickening his tongue.

Megan held his gaze, suddenly seeming far younger than her years. 'I did not ask him to… to kiss my breasts.'

'Did you ask him to touch you between your legs?'

'I did not have the courage to,' she admitted.

But she had possessed the courage to come to him. To tell him what she wanted.

A eunuch had no right to feel exultation at hearing that a woman sought intimacies with him that she had not sought from a man. But he felt that rush of possessiveness now for Megan, knowing he could give what her husband had not.

He remembered her closed lips when she kissed him. Her uncertainty at how she should move on his verge when she straddled his lap.

Her blatant curiosity. Her uninhibited response.

He was inexperienced, but he was not ignorant of sexual practices.

She was both ignorant, he realized, and inexperienced.

'Would you like me to kiss your clitoris?' he asked abruptly.

'What?'

Megan's shock was not feigned.

'Men kiss women on their clitoris,' he said, deliberately enticing her with the lure of her sexuality. 'They lick them. They suckle them.'

Until they reached a peak of enjoyment.

Awareness shimmered between them, he standing before her naked, vulnerable, she covered neck to toes with blankets, equally naked and vulnerable.

'You would… you would do that?' she asked, not quite as composed as before. More like the woman she had been last night when darkness had been their alibi and she had freely admitted her desires.

'I would,' he affirmed.

'How do you know that men do that?'

How did a virgin eunuch who had never touched a woman know that men did that? was what she really asked.

He could tell her that many Arabic treatises described the act of cunnilingus, just as those same books described a woman's arousal…

'I have watched them,' he replied baldly.

There would be no more sexual deception between them.

'You have watched… men and women together?' she asked, trying to conceal her surprise, but failing.

'I have watched women and eunuchs together.'

The condemnation he anticipated did not come.

'You said Arabic women did not have a clitoris.'

'Many women who are sold as concubines are not Arabic.'

She frowned. 'These concubines… they perform in front of an audience?'

'There is little privacy in a harem.'

Not when there were so many men who lusted after the very thing they were denied: the pleasure of a woman's body.

'Other eunuchs…' She did not finish her sentence, that other eunuchs had touched women. Pleased women. 'But you did not.'

'I did not,' he admitted, anticipating her next question: Why not?

'These women you watched'-understanding flickered in her eyes-'did they reciprocate the caresses they received?'

His throat tightened. 'No, they did not.'

Concubines were slaves, but eunuchs were… eunuchs.

A rustling of bedclothes pulled him out of the past.

'I am in a quandary, sir.'

For the first time he saw true embarrassment on Megan's face.

'Why?' he asked, dreading her response.

'Either you must dress, or I must. Either way, one of us has to leave.'

A band tightened around his chest.