‘Do…do you want a drink?’ she questioned. ‘Or to have a look around—check things out?’
‘No.’
She wished he wouldn’t stare at her that way, and yet she never wanted him to stop doing it. Pull yourself together, Sienna, she told herself. Remember who he is.
‘I’m afraid that the staff have gone off on an extended break,’ she said, trying for something light, something to dispel the atmosphere which was fraught and heavy—building into something she didn’t recognise nor even want to acknowledge.
And maybe that was why she relaxed and didn’t see it coming. But even if she had would she honestly have been able to stop it? Or wanted to stop it?
Because Hashim suddenly pulled her into his arms without warning and anchored her firmly against the full length of his body. His smile hardened.
Don’t, she told herself weakly as she felt the musculature and the power. Fight him.
But she did not fight him. She trembled.
And Hashim briefly closed his eyes as one arm encircled the slender column of her waist, sighing with soft triumph as he felt the instinctive flowering of her breasts crushed to his chest. What he had desired for so long would soon be his. It was going to be easier than he had even dared anticipate.
He tilted her chin with the tip of his finger, his black eyes glittering with an inner fire, and she smouldered beneath his scorching gaze. ‘Who cares about the staff?’ he drawled, and his lips began to move towards her as if a magnetic force compelled them to.
‘But—’
‘Shh.’ His lips grazed hers, touchpaper-sure. ‘There are a thousand things I wish to do and show to you, and we must waste not a second.’
Time froze. Her heart seemed to thump out a million beats in those few seconds. His face swam before her, shifting in and out of focus, and she drifted her eyes over it greedily, drinking in the hard, flat planes, the thin, jagged line which ran down the side of his cheek and scarred it.
But most of all it was the mouth which tempted her—the voluptuous cushion of the lower lip contrasting so markedly with the cruel hard line of the upper one. She could see the gleam of his white teeth and the soft pink of his tongue. It was as if all the time in between had never happened, as if nothing existed nor ever had except for what was here and what was now. In this room, in his arms, in the heightened and fragile atmosphere, with the unsteadiness of their breathing and the scent of the flowers.
‘Hashim,’ she whispered, but she never knew what it was she intended to say, for his eyes had hardened in tune with his body and he bent his head to blot out the world.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A KISS could be a question and an answer. It could take or give. But Hashim’s kiss robbed Sienna of everything except her own helpless response to it. Somewhere at the back of her mind a thousand voices screamed out their protest, but she silenced them as ruthlessly as if they had been her enemies. Instead, she opened her mouth beneath the hard, seeking warmth of his lips. And was lost.
Hashim gave a low laugh of delight at the ease with which she pressed her lips so eagerly against his—it grew in the back of his throat and came out like the small groan of a playful lion cub.
‘Oh, yes,’ he murmured into her mouth, and she murmured back, something muffled and incoherent— the mindless sound women sometimes made when they were ready for sex.
But Hashim was careful, and although he felt his heart pounding, desire hardening him with its exquisite torturous heat, he knew that this seduction must be a cold-blooded one. One wrong move and she might flee from his arms. One incautious word and all would be lost.
He knew which buttons to press—for his experience of women was encyclopaedic. He knew when to cajole and when to demand. When to lead and when to follow. But with Sienna it was different. She had stated her resistance to just this act, and while her body might be responding at the moment the mind could be a powerful deterrent. Particularly in a woman’s case.
It was, he realised, as he drifted his mouth away from her neck and began to kiss softly at the line of her jaw, the very first time in his life that he’d had to actually seduce a woman. Normally he had to fight them off. Vaguely he remembered something he had read when schooling himself in the art of love, as royal males of Qudamah did when they reached the age of fifteen. That when a woman was uncertain, you must take it slowly. Very slowly. You must make her believe that you do not have love in mind until it is too late for her to stop. And women did not so easily reach that place of no return as men did.
His mouth was featherlight—provoking and enticing —and Sienna’s head fell back. ‘Hashim,’ she breathed, and all her hopes and longings were focused on that one little word.
He leapt on the spark of assent and sought to fan the fire with sweet words of his own. ‘What is it, sweet Sienna? Sweet, sweet Sienna,’ he whispered. His lips touched the base of her throat, teasing it with the tip of his tongue—an erotic and neglected area, or so he had been told—and her little moan told him that his information had been correct. At the same time he began to stroke his fingers down the curve of her hips, taking great care to avoid the obviously erogenous zones. ‘That pleases you?’
She felt the pulsing of her blood, felt the words spill from her mouth as if she had no control over them. ‘Oh, yes!’ she gasped. ‘Yes!’
Unseen, he smiled, now risking the flat of his hand lightly skating over her bottom, and in silent answer to the unspoken progression of his movements he felt her squirm against him. The smile disappeared as he let it skate right back again, to cup the pert globe with possessive fingers. Of course she was responsive! Was he forgetting what kind of woman she was? But he dampened his anger down, for it made him harden even more. And it was not his wish to just rip her panties off and drive into her. He would make her eat her defiant words of the other day in the most delicious way possible.
And she would beg him to do it to her!
He teased her and excited her, drifting his fingertips along her thighs, skittering them over the hungry fork of her, but, like a man spoilt for choice at a feast, he deliberately stayed away from her breasts. His mouth hardened. Those he was saving until last.
‘Hashim!’ she gasped in wonder, as he tiptoed sensation all over her skin, ignited it where he touched, leading her down a path so unbearably sweet that she could scarcely believe this was happening.
His mind worked more quickly than his fingers. If he sought out the classic place of seduction—a bed— then it might allow time for reality to snap into focus and break the spell. He felt himself grow taut, tense, tight, hard as he realised that it was going to have to be here. Here! Like a schoolboy with no place to go—but the thought of that, too, excited him. Making do was not something he had ever encountered before, and as always the novel had an intoxicating power all of its own.
When he touched her leg she made no objection. He could feel her impatience and he rewarded it with the slow slide of his hand beneath the filmy layers of her delicate dress, circling the cool satin of her inner thigh to the sound of a tiny moan made at the back of her throat.
‘You like that?’
What could she say? Especially as his fingertips were now skating over the moist silk of her panties. Her skin was blazing, her heart was thundering, and warmth and longing overwhelmed her. For only Hashim could make her feel this way—this alive— this wonderful. Like one of those statues brought to life at the end of a play, able to live properly at last. ‘Y-yes.’ She shuddered. ‘You know I do.’
‘Then hold me, Sienna,’ he urged. ‘Hold me.’ And as her hands fluttered up to catch hold of the broad bank of his shoulders he gave a grim kind of smile. That was not exactly what he had meant, but for now it would have to do.
Exulting in the freedom of actually touching him again, Sienna was aware that the