‘Cat.’ The word came out like a husky plea. ‘I have missed you. By all the flowers that bloom on the Mekathasinian Sands, I have missed you.’
She pulled away from him then, her eyes searching his face with a curious kind of intensity. ‘Have you?’
‘You really need to ask a question like that?’
She nodded in response, but not before he had seen a sudden cloud pass over her features.
‘Yes, Murat. I do. Sometimes...’ Her voice faltered. ‘Sometimes a woman needs to hear these things.’
‘Then let me tell you all the things you need to hear, and more. I have missed you very much.’ He buried his lips in the thick lustre of her hair. ‘I have ached for you. Each time I galloped across the desert sands, I thought of nothing but you. During those long and sometimes tedious meetings of state affairs, I longed for one glance from those green eyes and to feel the silk of your skin, gliding beneath mine. I wanted to lie on top of you. I wanted to be inside you. To plunge into your molten heat and lose myself deep in your body. So come with me, my dark-haired beauty. Let me take you to bed, before I go out of my mind with frustration.’
Catrin stared into black eyes which had grown smoky with desire, but the same doubts which had been niggling away at her all week were refusing to go away. He was turning her on the way he always did, but a small voice in her head was asking whether he might not want to talk to her first. It had been weeks since they’d seen one another and something about his attitude was making her feel like an object on which he clearly wanted to slake his lust. Surely for once he could go through the motions of actually wanting to do something other than instantly have sex with her.
You’re nothing but a rich man’s whore.
She swallowed as her mother’s drunken words came echoing back. What would Murat say if she offered him coffee first—or coolly told him she needed to take a shower after rushing back from Wales this morning?
But somehow her body wasn’t listening to these silent objections—it was listening instead to the fierce sexual hunger which Murat had liberated. So she hesitated for no more than a second before letting him lead her towards the master bedroom, as helplessly as a moth to the flame.
Her doubts began to dissolve as he peeled the T-shirt over her head and dropped it to the ground. And soon all her uncertainties were vanquished by the simple action of the mighty Sultan tugging at her jeans and saying something in his native tongue before pushing her down onto the bed.
She was wearing the more practical underwear she tended to opt for when Murat wasn’t in town, because the thongs he favoured tended to ride up between the crack in her bottom and weren’t terribly practical when she was running around. Today she had on plain white panties without a frivolous element in sight.
He stared down at the sensible piece of lingerie for a long moment before reaching down to touch it, his hand brushing over her searing heat before moving aside the moist white panel to gain more intimate entry. He prised apart her molten flesh and she writhed a little as he pleasured her, before he withdrew one glossy finger and started licking it—with a slow eroticism which set her senses sizzling.
‘Oh,’ she said, her disappointment evident as he moved away from the bed.
‘Be patient, my little pussy Cat. And let me lose this damned suit.’
Catrin squirmed with anticipation as she watched him undressing, revealing the magnificent body beneath. The olive-skinned perfection of his torso was marred only by a scar which arrowed across one side of his abdomen. When she had first seen it, she had run wondering fingers along the raised ridge and asked him whether he had sustained a wound in battle. And he had responded rather drily that it was the legacy of a childhood appendectomy, performed at the children’s hospital in Qurhah’s capital city of Simdahab.
The rest of his clothes were quickly discarded and she saw just how aroused he was—his erection completely dominating her line of vision as he joined her on the bed. She could feel its hardness pushing against her belly as he leaned over her and ripped open her brassiere with a hunger he didn’t bother to hide.
She told herself she should be despairing that yet another costly piece of lingerie would now be unwearable—but right then she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything except feeling him inside her again.
What did he do that made her feel like this?
What did he do that made her love him so?
‘Murat,’ she moaned, brushing her mouth over his jaw and feeling its rough graze beneath her lips. ‘Oh. Murat.’
‘What is it, my sweet?’ His deep voice shuddered with undisguised pleasure. ‘Tell me.’
She wondered what he would say if she told him the truth. If she told him she wished he would confound the gloomy expectations of her mother and make a decent woman of her. She wondered how he’d react if he knew that night after lonely night, when he was back in Qurhah and she was lying alone in this great big bed—sometimes she allowed herself to fantasise about marrying him. About him taking her back to his desert country as his bride...his Sultana—where she would learn to speak his language and bear him fine, strong sons and live with him to the end of her days.
She guessed that he would probably recoil with horror—and then she wouldn’t see him for dust. Because after more than a year of her being Murat’s mistress, any sign of commitment was just as distant as it had been when he’d plucked her from the valleys and brought her to London, quivering with passion and innocence and a fierce sexual hunger.
He’d said from the start that there was no future in this relationship and that marriage was never going to happen. She’d known that when he took a bride, it would be one as unlike her as it was possible to be. And even though she’d told herself she was fine with that, sometimes she wondered if she was just kidding herself. Lately, she had found herself longing for some kind of commitment. For the comfort and security she’d never really had.
But that was a waste of time and energy.
‘Would you like me to tell you how much I missed you?’ she said eagerly.
‘You may tell me whatever you please, my beauty—just as long as you let me reacquaint myself with these magnificent breasts of yours,’ he said, disposing of the now tattered brassiere with a careless flick of his fingers. ‘For I have been dreaming about licking them like this.’
Catrin stifled a moan. ‘So have I.’
‘Shall I play with your pretty nipples?’ he continued. ‘Shall I lick them and suck them and make you wet in lots of different places?’
‘Oh, yes, please,’ she breathed.
‘And is there anything else I should do?’ His hand began to move down over the concave dip of her torso. She felt the exploratory caress of his palm as it skated over her belly, a forefinger briefly circling the faint dip of her navel before it continued its journey. ‘Anything else I can tempt you with?’
‘Can’t you...guess?’ she whispered.
‘I can try. I think you might want me to slide down these rather schoolmistressy panties you’re wearing...’
‘You don’t like them?’
‘They are a fantasy I didn’t realise I had until now. I just want to get the damned things off.’
His finger hooked inside the garment to give action to his words, but then it stilled. Lifting her head to see why, Catrin looked into his face and she saw something in his eyes she didn’t recognise. Something which made her screw her face up in confusion because...was it sadness she read there?
‘What is it?’ she whispered. ‘Murat—is