‘All right … I’ll take a sofa,’ Ruby pronounced, determined to stick to her guns. It was her belief that if she reinforced their separation they would both soon forget those boundaries they had unwisely crossed and return to their original agreement.
Raja elevated a deeply unimpressed and sardonic black brow and stripped off his boxers to walk fluidly into the bathroom. As nude exits went it scored an impressive ten in the cooler-than-cool stakes. While the shower was running, Ruby made up a bed on a sofa for herself, donned her pyjamas, doused the lights and climbed in. Hermione snuggled in next to her feet.
A little while later, a wild burst of barking drove her from the brink of slumber.
‘Call off the dog or I will put her out to the kennels,’ Raja growled, his face grim in the light spilling from the bedroom.
Ruby leapt off the sofa, snatched the snarling Hermione up into her arms and attempted to soothe her overexcited pet. ‘What are you doing in here?’
‘Retrieving my wife,’ Raja traded in a wrathful tone of warning.
‘I’m not your wife, not your proper wife!’ Ruby launched furiously back at him, inflamed by that insistence and the label.
‘So you’re not a real princess or a proper wife. Then what are you?’ Raja challenged impatiently, bending down from his considerable height to haul her up into his arms while she clutched Hermione frantically to her chest. ‘My sex buddy? A friend with benefits?’
He then went on to employ a third term of description, which was crude enough to make Ruby’s soft, full lips fall open in shock and her big, brown eyes flame. ‘How dare you?’
Raja settled her down on the bed with a good deal more care than she had grounds to expect from an angry man. Hermione tried to bite him. Composed in the face of that attempted attack, he scooped up the animal and put Ruby’s pet out of the room. From the other side of the door Hermione whined and scraped the wood.
‘Are you planning to do the same to me if I stand up to you?’ Ruby enquired furiously. ‘I am not sleeping with you again—’
‘I’m not very interested in sleeping right now either.’ At least six feet three inches tall and magnificently male, Raja threw back the sheet and slid into bed beside her.
‘I am not your sex buddy or that other thing you mentioned!’ Ruby proclaimed in a rage.
‘No, you’re my wife,’ Raja repeated again, immovably stubborn on that point.
Ruby was taken aback when he got out of bed again and crossed the room to reach for his jacket and retrieve something from a pocket. He returned to bed and reached for her hand.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded apprehensively.
‘I’m replacing your wedding ring.’ And this time the ring on her finger was a perfect fit as well as being very different from its predecessor. The first ring had been a plain gold band but the second struck her as a good deal more personalised for it was a slender platinum ring chased with ornate decoration.
‘Don’t call me your wife again,’ Ruby muttered helplessly, twirling the ring round her finger with a restless hand. ‘It makes me feel trapped.’
This time Raja did not hide his anger. His nostrils flared and his dark golden eyes scorched hers like burning arrows, leaving her feeling alarmingly short of breath. ‘You should be proud to be my wife,’ he told her without hesitation.
Her breath rattled in her tight throat. She had not meant to insult or offend. Without warning things had become terrifyingly personal. ‘I’m sure I would be proud if I loved you,’ she whispered in a response intended to soothe.
‘Love!’ Raja loosed a derisive laugh of disagreement. ‘What need have we of that with the fire that burns between us?’
Well, so much for the emotional angle, she was thinking irately, for clearly she had not married a romantic guy, when sure fingers trailed across her cheekbone and captured her chin. His other hand curving to her waist, Raja lowered his proud, dark head and claimed her full, pink mouth hungrily with his. There was a split second when she might have pushed him away and her slim body braced and her hands rose in protest against his broad shoulders to do exactly that. But the moist slide of his tongue between her lips and the hand rising below her pyjama top to curve to the plump swell of her breast sent a flood of damp heat to the tender flesh between her thighs and a surge of such hunger that she shivered in shock. The dark force of desire took her by storm, every fibre of her being sitting up, begging and clawing for more.
‘WE SHOULDN’T do this!’ Ruby gasped in a last-ditch attempt to reclaim control of the situation while she mustered sufficient self-discipline to drag her tingling mouth from the unadulterated magnetic allure of his.
Having already whisked her free of her pyjama bottoms, Raja threw back his tousled dark head and angled his lean hips to let her feel the hard evidence of his erection against her stomach. She quivered, fighting her desire for him with all her might, for at that instant desire had as much of a hold on her as a powerful addiction in her bloodstream.
‘You mustn’t get me pregnant!’ Ruby exclaimed in a sudden panic, anxiety gripping her at the thought of suffering such a far-reaching and serious consequence. Just for a moment she could barely credit that she had ever been stupid enough to run that level of risk.
A hand spread below her hips to raise her to him. ‘We took no precautions in the desert,’ Raja reminded her with a frown.
‘But we don’t need to run that risk now. I take contraceptive pills but I missed some when we were there so for the rest of the month I need to take extra precautions.’
Raja found it deeply ironic that the potential pregnancy from which she was so keen to protect herself would have been a source of much rejoicing in both their countries. He suppressed that knowledge, for once uninterested in the bigger picture and concentrating on his own reactions for a change. As he studied her stunning oval face with burnished golden eyes of anticipation, he was startled to discover that he was willing to want whatever would make her happy. ‘It’s OK. Don’t worry about it. I will protect you—’
‘We can’t be sex buddies … it’s indecent—’
‘I like indecent,’ Raja confided huskily, trailing provocative fingertips very gently along the tender skin of her thigh so that she became even more painfully aware of the awesome strength of her own craving. ‘In fact I could live beautifully with indecent.’
To silence the argument he sensed brimming on her lips he tasted her sultry pink mouth with the lingering eroticism that came so naturally to him, sensually teasing the soft fullness of her lower lip before penetrating her mouth in a smooth, explicit thrust. And while he kissed her he was skimming the ball of his thumb against the most sensitive spot on her entire body with a shocking expertise that made her stifle a scream while she writhed and gasped her response.
Before she could catch her breath from that onslaught, Raja leant back from her to rip open a foil packet and make use of a condom. Her heart thudded violently up tempo. She would not let herself think about what she was doing. She was rebelling against everything she knew because she had never wanted anything so much as she wanted him in that moment. And without a doubt she was ashamed of it, ashamed of the wild seething longing that controlled her, befuddling her brain and enslaving her body.
Raja sank into her in a long, slow surge, stroking her tender flesh with his. It felt so indescribably good that she cried out and her inner muscles clenched and convulsed around him. In the throes of extreme pleasure, he shuddered violently, as entrapped in that hunger as she was. ‘It’s never been like this for me before …’ he confided.
Or for her, her brain echoed