The Royal House Of Karedes Collection Books 1-12. Кейт Хьюит

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СКАЧАТЬ strangely her question did not trouble him as much as protocol demanded. Now why was that? Was it because women always asked about these marks—only he was usually naked when first they noticed them? And the scars on his back were much worse—making these seem almost trifling in comparison.

      Sometimes he explained them away by saying that an over-enthusiastic partner had got slightly carried away during a sex-game. Sometimes they believed him—depending on their own experience and worldliness. Even when they clearly didn’t believe him they rarely challenged him—because they were too busy clicking into whichever fantasy they thought he wanted from them. They tried to be everything he wanted in order to please him—and in so doing they ended up being nothing.

      But Eleni was different. Probably because she was low-born. Did she not realise how preposterous it was for a humble stable girl to have tenderly stroked the raised weals at his wrists?

      But perhaps your kiss made her think that all such contact was appropriate.

      He studied her as suddenly her inexplicable refusal to allow him more than a kiss made sense. ‘Are you a virgin?’ he demanded.

      She shrank back against the silken cushions. ‘Highness!’

      His black eyes glittered like jet. ‘You asked me an impertinent question and now I am asking you one in return. What do you say—shall we exchange intimate knowledge, lizard? That seems only fair to me.’

      Eleni bit her lip. It seemed a terribly personal thing for him to want to know—but perhaps if she told him then he might not try to seduce her again as he had done this evening.

      Even if you want him to? taunted a voice in her head. Even though the touch of his lips made you feel more alive than you’ve ever done in your life?

      Swamping down her rogue thoughts, she nodded her head reluctantly. ‘Yes, I am a virgin, Highness,’ she said quietly, her cheeks flaring scarlet.

      Kaliq seized on the information with a feeling of triumph. So that was why she had done the unthinkable and resisted his advances. But he could feel the renewed beat of excitement, too. A virgin. A sweet, green-eyed virgin. How the gods must be looking down on him—and how good it would be to enjoy such a gift for his own.

      ‘I cannot believe that you have never known a man’s love,’ he observed, his mouth drying at the thought of initiating her into the art of love-making. Of piercing through her tight maidenhood. Of having those soft breasts in his hands and those firm thighs wrapped tightly around his back. ‘I thought that you country girls sometimes took lovers out of wedlock.’

      ‘Perhaps some of them do, Highness, but not me,’ said Eleni disapprovingly.

      ‘Yet you might die and never know the pleasures of the body.’

      ‘Then I will gladly accept my fate,’ she answered fiercely.

      He laughed at her feistiness. ‘Ah, but you are missing out on a great deal, Eleni—one of the greatest wonders of life,’ he said softly. ‘More than you will ever know if you do not try it for yourself.’

      His eyes had softened, as well as his voice, so that they were more like molasses than jet and again Eleni was reminded with shocking clarity just how potent his kiss had been. And that strange and bewitching sensation of the sheikh’s tongue entering her mouth and… and…

      ‘Perhaps what you say is true, Highness—but I will not attempt to control my own destiny by lying with a man. To seek to shed my virginity simply for the sake of it is not how a well-brought-up girl should behave!’

      ‘And you are a well-brought-up girl, are you, Eleni?’

      She heard the mockery in his voice and she wanted to tell him not to confuse her with her father—that her mother had brought her up to behave as much like a lady as was possible when living in such basic conditions. But, of course, she could not boast about her own qualities at the expense of her father’s reputation.

      ‘Yes, Highness, I am. I know the difference between right and wrong and if it is not meant to be, then I accept that. After all, no-one can possibly have everything in life,’ she answered carefully. ‘And since I’ve answered your question—is it not fair to now answer mine, Highness? How did you come by these terrible scars?’

      How bold she was, he thought admiringly with a renewed kick of lust at his groin. And how outrageous of her to interrogate him in the light of her refusal to let him bed her. He could order her to go to hell…

      But how long since he had talked about that terrible day when his world had changed for ever? It was a subject off-limits, even with his twin who shared the awful guilt. A dark secret which had been hushed up by the palace apparatus like so much else. A stain on the family of Al’Farisi.

      Yet secrets became burdens which could grow in weight until they became intolerable—and suddenly the innocent and green-eyed young stable girl seemed as welcoming and as unthreatening as a newborn falcon chick.

      ‘You know about my brother?’ he demanded.

      The royal family of Calista was an endless source of fascination to its people. Even without mass communication, gossip about the ruling clan was always available—it was swopped in the market place or spoken of outside the school gates, just as it was the world over.

      Eleni knew that there had been five brothers—one of whom was his twin, Aarif. And she knew too that there was some terrible tragedy surrounding the youngest. Hadn’t he gone missing—when he was just a child?

      ‘You mean… Zafir?’ she ventured nervously.

      Kaliq flinched. She was one of his subjects, simply answering his question—yet it resonated painfully to hear Zafir’s name spoken aloud and a pang of remorse shot through him. How long since he had thought of his black-eyed little brother?

      Had he, and the palace, been guilty of airbrushing from their lives the tousle-haired young sheik who had disappeared at the age of six, lost without trace and never to be seen again? Was it because the painful reality had become too much for them all to bear—or were they emotional cowards who simply pushed away the darker sides of life?

      Yet Kaliq was not a man usually given to soul-searching and he stared at the young stable girl angrily, blaming her for the sharp stir of memory.

      ‘What do you know of Zafir?’ he demanded.

      Eleni wondered what had caused his hard black eyes to cloud over with such terrible pain that she wanted to take his injured wrist in her hand and rub it again, as she would a horse who had been pierced by a deep thorn—but she did not dare for all kinds of reasons.

      ‘I know that something terrible happened to him,’ she answered with slow truth.

      Black eyes pierced into her. ‘But you do not know what?’

      ‘Our history lessons at school… they were very basic, Highness.’ Eleni remembered one of her father’s card-playing companions—a wild poet who had drunk an entire flagon of Zelyoniy by himself during a game of poker. What had he said? That the people knew only what the palace wished them to know. Censorship, he had called it—but Eleni remembered thinking at the time that keeping the dark stuff secret was just being private, surely? The sort of thing that any family might do—especially for a family in the spotlight СКАЧАТЬ