Sheikh's Woman. ALEXANDRA SELLERS

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СКАЧАТЬ Anna bit her lip. What would it be like, love with a man who seemed like a total stranger? Would her body instinctively recognize his touch?

      She realized that she wanted him to make the demand on her. The thought was sending spirals of heat all through her. But instead of drawing her into his arms, he turned his back to toss her shirt onto a chair.

      “What will I remember about loving you, Ishaq?” she whispered.

      He didn’t answer, and she turned away, dejected, overcome with fatigue and reluctant to think, and lifted her arms behind her to the clasp of her bra. She winced as a bruised elbow prevented her.

      Her breath hissed with the pain. “You’ll have to undo this.”

      She felt his hands at work on the hook of her bra, that strange, half electrifying, half comforting heat that made her yearn for something she could not remember. She wondered if they had been sexually estranged. She said, “Is there a problem between us, Ishaq?”

      “You well know what the problem between us is. But it is not worth discussing now,” he said, his voice tight.

      She thought, It’s serious. Her heart pinched painfully with regret. To think that she had had the luck to marry a man like this and then had not been able to make it work made her desperately sad. He was like a dream come to life, but…she had obviously got her dream and then not been able to live in it.

      If they made up now, when she could not remember any of the grievances she might have, would that make it easier when she regained her full memory?

      As the bra slipped away from her breasts, Anna let it fall onto the bed, then turned to face him, lifting her arms to his shoulders.

      “Do you still love me?” she whispered.

      His arms closed around her, his hands warm on her bare skin. Her breasts pressed against his silk shirt as her arms cupped his head. He looked down into her upturned face with a completely unreadable expression in his eyes.

      “Do you want me, Ishaq?” she begged, wishing he would kiss her. Why was he so remote? She felt the warmth of his body curl into hers and it was so right.

      A corner of that hard, full mouth went up and his eyes became sardonic. “Believe me, I want you, or you would not be here.”

      “What have I done?” she begged. “I don’t remember anything. Tell me what I’ve done to make you so angry with me.”

      His mouth turned up with angry contempt. “What do you hope to gain with this?” he demanded with subdued ferocity, and then, as if it were completely against his will, his grip tightened painfully on her, and with a stifled curse he crushed his mouth against her own.

      He was neither gentle nor tender. His kiss and his hands were punishing, and a part of her revelled in the knowing that, whatever his intentions, he could not resist her. She opened her mouth under his, accepting the violent thrust of his hungry, angry tongue, and felt the rasp of its stroking run through her with unutterable thrill, as if it were elsewhere on her body that he kissed her.

      Just for a moment she was frightened, for if one kiss could do this to her, how would she sustain his full, passionate lovemaking? She would explode off the face of the earth. His hand dropped to force her against him, while his hardened body leapt against her. She tore her mouth away from his, gasping for the oxygen to feed the fire that wrapped her in its hot, licking fingers.

      “Ishaq!” she cried, wild with a passion that seemed to her totally new, as the heat of his hands burned her back, her hips, clenched against the back of her neck with a firm possessiveness that thrilled her. “Oh, my love!”

      Then suddenly he was standing away from her, his hands on her wrists pulling her arms down, his eyes burning into hers with a cold, hard, suspicious fury that froze the hot rivers of need coursing through her.

      “What is it?” she pleaded. “Ishaq, what have I done?”

      He smiled and shook his head, a curl of admiring contempt lifting his lip. “You are unbelievable,” he said. “Where have you learned such arts, I wonder?”

      Anna gasped. He suspected her of having a lover? Could it be true? She shook her head. It wasn’t possible. Whatever he might suspect, whatever he might have done, whatever disagreement was between them, she knew that she was simply not capable of taking a lover while pregnant with her husband’s child.

      “From you, I suppose,” she tried, but he brushed that aside with a snort of such contemptuous disbelief she could go no further.

      “Tell me why you won’t love me,” she challenged softly, but nothing was going to crack his angry scorn now.

      “But you have just given birth, Anna. We must resign ourselves to no lovemaking for several weeks, isn’t it so?”

      She drew back with a little shock. “Oh! Yes, I—” She shook her head. He could still kiss her, she thought. He could hold her. Maybe that was the problem, she thought. A man who would only touch his wife if he wanted sex. She would certainly hate that.

      “I wish I could remember!”

      He reached down and lifted up the silky white pyjama top, holding it while she obediently slipped her arms inside. He had himself well under control now, he was as impersonal as a nurse, and she tasted tears in her throat for the waste of such wild passion.

      Funny how small her breasts were. Last time, they had been so swollen with the pregnancy…hadn’t they? She remembered the ache of heavy breasts with a pang of misery, and then reminded herself, But that’s all in the past. I have a baby now.

      “Do you think I’ll remember?” she whispered, gazing into his face as he buttoned the large pyjama shirt. It seemed almost unbearable that she should feel such pain for a baby who had died two years ago and not remember the birth of the beautiful creature who was so alive, and whose cry she could suddenly hear over the subdued roar of the engines.

      “I am convinced of it.”

      “She has inherited your birthmark,” she murmured with a smile, touching his eye with a feather caress and feeling her heart contract with tenderness. “Is that usual?”

      He finished the last button and lifted his eyes to hers. “What is it you hope to discover?” he asked, his hands pulling at her belt with cool impersonality. “The… Ahmadi mark,” he said. “It proves beyond a doubt that Safiyah and I come of the same blood. Does that make you wary?”

      “Did you think I had a lover?” she asked. “Did you think it was someone else’s child?”

      His eyes darkened with the deepest suspicion she had yet seen in them, and she knew she had struck a deep chord. “You know that much, do you?”

      Somewhere inside her an answering anger was born. “You’re making it pretty obvious! Does the fact that you’ve now been proven wrong make you think twice about things, Ishaq?”

      “Wrong?” he began, then broke off, stripped the suede pants down her legs and off, and knelt to hold the pyjama bottoms for her. His hair was cut over the top in a thick cluster of black curls whose vibrant health reflected the lampglow. Anna steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder and stifled the whispering desire that melted through her thighs at the nearness of him.

      They СКАЧАТЬ