The Desert Bride. Lynne Graham

drew her down, down onto softness and support, crushing her quivering length just as swiftly beneath his superior weight. As he sealed his long, muscular body to hers the heat of desire washed over her with such strength that she burned, her hips arching up, her legs torturously confined in the clinging cloth of her caftan. His hand closed round her breast and she gasped, shocked by sensation, instinctively straining her swollen, seeking flesh upwards to meet that possessive hold.

      Razul dragged his lips free of hers, staring down at her with blazing golden eyes, his cheek-bones harshly delineated beneath his smooth, sun-bronzed skin as he snatched in a ragged breath. He loosened his grip, ran a torturous fingertip over the shamelessly distended nipple poking against the fine silk barrier, sending fire shooting to the very centre of the throbbing ache between her thighs. She closed her eyes in an agony of excitement and shuddered as if she were in a force-ten gale.

      ‘I cannot do this,’ Razul breathed with subdued ferocity, abruptly pulling back from her and yet carrying her with him, his strong hands grasping her arms as he tugged her upright again. ‘To do this is to shame you, and I will not have regrets between us. You will come to me as my bride or you will not come at all!’

      He settled her down like a doll onto a low divan. Bethany didn’t know what had happened to her. Her entire body felt as though it had acquired a life of its own, and right now it was screaming with a clamouring dissatisfaction which was cruelly unwelcome. In short, she ached—ached for a physical completion which she had never desired in her life before—and she sat there, struck dumb by sheer horror as her mind fumbled up out of the darkness of complete shut-down to reason again. And yet she did not want to think...