Page 82 of Defiant in the Desert (Desert Men of Qurhah 1)

‘And was she okay?’

‘I haven’t come here to talk about my damn

ed cousin,’ he said roughly.

‘Oh?’ Her voice lifted in hope. ‘Then what have you come here to talk about?’

He looked at the soft curves of her unpainted lips and suddenly wondered just what he was fighting. Himself or her? ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ Her eyes were wide with confusion. ‘Then why are you here?’

‘Why do you think?’ he ground out, his black eyes brilliant as temptation overpowered him and he pulled her into his arms. ‘For this.’

Isobel swayed as their bodies made that first contact and she felt the sudden mad pounding of her heart. Conscience fought with desire as he drove his mouth down on hers, and desire won hands down. Her lips opened and she made a choking little sound of pleasure as she coiled her arms around him. Because this was where she wanted to be more than anywhere else in the world. Back in the arms of Tariq. Because when she was there all her problems receded.

‘Oh, yes!’ Her helpless cry was muffled by the hard seeking of his lips. His urgent hands were in her hair and on her cheeks, and then skating down the sides of her body with a kind of fevered impatience, as if he was relearning her through touch alone. And greedily she began to touch him back.

Tariq groaned as she began to tug at his belt. She was like wildfire on his skin—spreading hunger wherever her soft fingertips alighted. He could have unzipped himself and done it to her right there. But he’d spent too many nights fantasising about this to want to take her without ceremony—and too many days on horseback not to crave the comfort of a bed.

‘Where’s the bedroom?’ he demanded urgently.

Tell him. Before this goes any further, you have to tell him.

But she ignored the voice of protest in her head as she pointed a trembling finger towards a door. ‘O-over there.’

Effortlessly he picked her up, as he’d done so many times before, pushing open the door with his knee and going straight over to the bed, putting her down in the centre of it. Isobel felt the mattress dip as he straddled her, one knee on either side of her body. With fingers which were not quite steady he began to unbutton her dress, and Isobel held her breath as he pulled it open. But he seemed too full of hunger to study her with his usual searing intensity, and maybe he wouldn’t have noticed even if he had, for his black eyes were almost opaque with lust. Instead, he was unclipping her bra and bending his head to capture one sensitised nipple in his hungry mouth.

‘I feel as if I have been in the desert,’ he moaned against the puckered saltiness of her skin.

‘I th-thought you had?’

‘Not that kind of desert,’ he said grimly.

‘What kind, then?’

‘This kind,’ he clarified, his lips on her neck, his fingers hooking inside her little lace panties. ‘The sexual kind. A remote place without the sweet embrace of a woman’s arms or the welcome opening of her milky thighs.’

Even if they lacked emotion, the words were shockingly erotic, and Isobel lifted her head to give him more access to her neck, her fumbling fingers reaching for the buttons of his shirt and beginning to pull them open. He had come back, hadn’t he? And he still wanted her. It was as simple as that. Had he found it more difficult than he’d anticipated to simply let her go?

Hope began to build in time with the growing heat of her body. She helped him wriggle out of his jeans and then the silken boxer shorts, which whispered to the ground in a decadent sigh. His shirt joined her dress on the floor and she looked up at him, strangely shy to see his powerful olive body naked on her bed. He seemed larger than life and more magnificent than ever—like a Technicolor character who had just wandered into a black and white film.

He moved over her, and she drew in a deep breath of anticipation. She knew his body so well, and yet she was a stranger to his thoughts. Should she tell him now? When they were physically just about as close as it was possible to be without—

‘Oh!’ she moaned as he entered her. Too late, she thought fleetingly, as sweet sensation shot through her body and the familiar heat began to build. Take this pleasure that you weren’t expecting and give him pleasure in return. Let him see that there can still be sweetness and joy. And then maybe, maybe...

‘God, you’re tight,’ he moaned.

‘It’s because you’re so big,’ she breathed.

‘I’m always big,’ came his mocking boast.

‘Bigger, then.’

But words became redundant as he began to move inside her, his mouth on hers as she met his every powerful thrust with the welcoming tilt of her hips.

It was the most bittersweet experience of her life. Amazing, yes—because sex with Tariq always was—but tinged with a certain poignancy, too. She was aware that things were different between them now, that nothing had been resolved. Aware too of what she still hadn’t told him. And all those facts combined to heighten every one of her senses.

She felt her climax growing. The beckoning warmth which had been tantalisingly out of reach now became a blissful reality. She felt the first powerful spasm just as he gave his own ragged cry, his movements more frantic as her arms closed around his sweat-sheened back. And she was falling, dissolving, melting. Past thinking as the world fell away from her.

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