Her hands crept to his shoulders, and then higher still. She had to stretch to reach his hair, so her breasts pressed against his chest, and she was so sensitive from his ministrations that the hint of texture on his chest made her moan low and soft in her mouth.
She tangled her fingertips in his hair, pulling it loose from the bun. She hadn’t actively wondered how he styled it, but she discovered that it was simply coiled together, wrapped in on itself and held in place by its own coarseness and obedience to the sheikh’s will.
“Enough,” he growled, but there was a plea in the word.
“Why?” She wriggled closer to the edge of the table and wrapped her legs around his waist. “Are you allowed to come and take what you want and not let me do the same?”
“You want to play with my hair?”
She tilted her head to the side, pretending to consider it, then, she sobered. “I want to touch you all over. Starting here.” She tapped a finger to his forehead. “And here,” she ran her finger down his chest in a wiggling line before tapping his impressive manhood so that it jerked beneath her.
“And here,” she ran her fingers around to his buttocks, her eyes lifting back to his face.
She could see a war taking place inside of him. He was implacable and arrogant, and yet somehow, Chloe understood him on a cellular level. She could look at him and know what stirred within him, perhaps even when he didn’t know himself.
“You haven’t eaten,” he said finally, easily pushing her legs from his waist and stepping back. There was a hardness in his expression, a determination to separate from her.
He was going to go away again. To make love to her on his terms and then push her from him.
“How do you know?”
“It’s my business to know.”
She pulled a face. “So? You’re leaving again?”
He looked away from her. “No, Sheikha. You’re upholding your end of the bargain. I intend to do the same.”
6
“WHAT IS THIS PLACE?” she exhaled on a soft sigh of wonderment, her eyes moving quickly to discover the intricacies of the building to which he’d shown her.
“The Nasin-pithak,” he said the unfamiliar word, and she repeated it, wanting to taste it on her tongue, to feel it in her mouth.
His eyes remained on her face, watching her perfect the accent.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s from the ancient dialect,” he confirmed with a nod, moving deeper into the space. It was a shell of a building, but not a ruin. It had been designed with these large openings and the circular hole in the roof giving her, in that moment, a perfect view of the crisp, star-lit sky.
“It was built in the sixth century, a temple then. Over time, it’s become a place for reflection. My great grandfather sat here before going to war with the Imali province. My father spent most days for a year here, after my mother …” he clamped his lips together, the look he sent Chloe cold, despite the raging emotions she felt emanating from him.
Confusion stirred within her. She knew very little of her husband’s mother, except that she’d died in a car accident many years earlier. “After the accident?” She prompted, taking another step into the ancient building. The ground beneath them was mosaics, though she couldn’t make out any discernible image from the tiles. The only light was cast by the moon, and two lamps on opposing sides of the space.
“Yes.” It was a crisp answer that hid a wealth of information, she knew. There were secrets within him – secrets that she wanted to tease out and know, and she couldn’t have said why.
“Apollo once told me that he’d never seen a man as devastated as your father at the funeral,” she murmured softly, goading him to share, willing him to open a small part of himself to her.
A table had been set in the middle of the floor, but it was low to the ground, with bright orange and purple cushions scattered around it, inviting them to lounge comfortably and eat rather than to sit formally at a dining table.
“Did he?” Raffa waited for Chloe to sit and then took the space opposite her, his long legs stretched out in front of him, one ankle crossed over the other.
He was stalling her; dissuading her from continuing. Well, that might have worked with someone else, but not Chloe. Not now. He’d stirred something to life inside of her – an intimate knowledge of his body, and the knowledge that he had made love to her, that he wanted her with such primal abandon, gave her a confidence he couldn’t erode, no matter what he tried.
“They married for love?” She prompted, cutting to the heart of what she wanted to know.
He expelled an angry breath. “Yes. And it was the undoing of them both.”
He poured two glasses of wine, a rich mulberry purple in colour, but didn’t touch his.
“In what way?”
His eyes lingered on her face for so long that goosebumps danced along her spine. “You want to speak of my parents?” He’d left his hair down, after she’d run her fingers through it, and now he pushed it back from his forehead. A gesture that showed his frustration but didn’t deter her for even a moment.
“They would have been my child’s grandparents,” she held his gaze. “If we’re to bring a baby into this world, don’t you think I should know about his heritage?”
He frowned, and she knew why. That same instinctive understanding she had passed through her once more. It was strange for him – as it was her - to think beyond a pregnancy – to imagine an actual baby and then, one day, a child. An adult. A being that would bind them for all time, that would
