The Ice Maiden's Sheikh (6 page)

A
rrogant or not, he had been speaking nothing but the truth. Latif went over the deep gullies the rains had gouged into the road with an ease and a balance that terrified her, while Jalia could only inch her way with his help.

When they came to a terrifying drop, an ugly, massive gouge in the road that fell away to nothing, he took her piggyback, and the sheer power and strength beneath her knees had a rhythmic, muscled beauty that carried to her animal brain a deep, pure erotic message, so that her legs' sudden tightening around him caused him to lose his hold for a second, almost pulling them to their doom.

On the road again her body was lazily reluctant to get down.

Panting with the aftermath of sharp fear and sudden
desire, Jalia straightened her clothes fussily, irritated with herself for that uncontrolled response. If she didn't get a grip, she'd find herself married to the man, for no better reason than to experience his lovemaking.

A truth suddenly dawned on her, as stunning as a clap of thunder—every time she had argued with Noor about her foolish attraction to Bari, she had been talking to herself. She might not have allowed the information into conscious awareness, but unconsciously she had recognized how wildly attracted she was to Latif.

What a fool she had been, blind and smug: because if she had allowed herself to see the real problem, she could have taken much smarter action to avoid Latif.

And she wouldn't be where she was right now—dependent on him for her survival, and hoping against hope that he would crack and make love to her before she cracked and promised him whatever price he asked.

“Why won't you make love to me?” she asked, before she could stop herself, as they picked their way past the boulders strewn in the road.

Latif glanced at her without surprise, so he must have felt that deep connection, too. “I will,” he said.

“Oh!” She couldn't stop the smile that played over her mouth, nor the delighted surge of anticipation in her blood, and as if he were powerless in the face of such evidence of her desire, his arms went around her and he pulled her against him.

Fire burned up around her, and with a gasp she parted her lips and tilted her chin to invite his kiss.

“When you have my ring on your finger instead
of the one you now wear,” he continued, and then his lips came down on hers with a power of masculine demand that sent sensation whipping into every nerve.

Her arms wrapped him, her body fitted against his as he bent her back over his arm, twined his fingers into her hair, and the hard, pushing response of his arousal pressed against her to produce a fierce melting that buckled her knees like butter on a stove.

Her head was caught in the crook of one arm, his other hand was hot and hard against the back of her waist, and she felt how easy it would be for him to overwhelm her, because he was strong, much stronger than she had guessed, and her blood soared with the knowledge.

He lifted his mouth and stared at her from green eyes almost black with need. She had never seen so deep a green, and she could have stayed there all day just exploring the magic of that emerald pitch, that glinting hunger, feeling her danger and her safety in his hold, feeling how the world held its breath.

“It will be difficult,” he admitted, with a hoarse exhalation. “Which of us will be the winner?”

Jalia took a deep, calming breath. It was impossible to make love here on the road, but she had lost track of time and place while his mouth was on hers.

Around the next mound of fallen rock they met a team working to mend the road. With only manpower and a couple of donkeys they were gathering up the rocks that had come down from the ridge above and were packing them into the gullies that the rains had gouged: backbreaking, dangerous work, but the men and boys seemed cheerful enough.

When Latif and Jalia appeared suddenly on the
road they all looked up and gave the Bagestani greeting of a fist to the heart. A moment later someone recognized Latif.

“You come in a good time, Lord!” they cried in formal greeting.

“May your shadow never grow less!”

“You come to sit on the council, Lord?” said another anxiously. “I have a petition….”

No one kowtowed to him, Jalia saw, though he was the man they called their
Shahin
: they had too much self-respect, it seemed. Between Latif and the men there was a mutual exchange of respect. And yet it was clear they would accept his judgement.

After a few moments Latif said, “I escort the Princess Jalia on a search for her cousin, Princess Noor,” and explained about the downed plane for the fiftieth time since they had begun this quest.

She exchanged nods with the men. In her jeans and desert boots and shirt, she must have been a somewhat unusual sight, but none of them stared at her, a fact she was getting used to after so many days in the mountains.

As her father had told her in endless stories during her childhood, the mountain people of Bagestan were a ferociously proud people, but they were also hospitable and polite, and they would never stare at a strange woman.

Some of the conversation that now ensued was too quick for her to follow, more so since several people were talking at once, but she understood that no one had seen or heard anything resembling a plane in trouble or crashing.

Then it seemed they were urging Latif to remain
in the valley for a day or two to sit with the village council for some important cases. After a while, one man left the team and accompanied Latif and Jalia down the mountain.

The man led them to his own house, where his wife and daughters smilingly produced lunch for them. As usual, they ate in silence, and it wasn't till after the meal was over that Latif said, “There are several urgent matters before the council. It's important that I sit to hear them. But it means that we will not leave the valley tonight.”

Jalia nodded her acceptance of the situation.

“Some of the younger boys will go and bring what you need from the truck. What do you need?”

“Only my backpack.”

Later, while the members of the council gathered at one of the houses in the village, greeting Latif with loud welcome, the women led Jalia up the hillside to an isolated house set in a walled, terraced garden, whose profusion of flowers and greenery she had noticed from their campsite this morning.

“What house be this?” she asked in her archaic, textbook Bagestani.

“Lady Jalia, this is the home of your future husband.” The women smiled. “If you do not know it now, you will soon be familiar with it, if God wills!”

Jalia's smile stiffened a little. This was a dilemma, for if she denied being Latif's fiancée, she would have to be housed somewhere else. She knew enough of the country traditions to understand that.

And she didn't want to sleep anywhere else; she wanted to sleep with Latif. Was she going to turn her
back on the possibility that he had cracked, that he had decided to make love to her?

Not a chance. And if this arrangement left Latif in future explaining to his tribe just why Princess Jalia did not return to the valley as his bride, that was his problem, wasn't it?

So in the split second she had to choose, Jalia chose to say nothing. The women smiled and nodded and led her inside.

“The ways of the outside world are strange,” one of them observed on a note of laughter. “Here in the valley no man takes his bride to his home before the ceremony has been concluded. How will you negotiate a good dowry, Lady Jalia, if you give up your jewel to his keeping before he pays for it?”

“Even a noble lord like Lord Latif—do not all men dream of capturing a woman's prize, giving nothing in return?”

“For shame, Amina! When a man like Lord Latif declares himself before witnesses, that is as good as a marriage contract!”

They were laughing the way women laugh who are leading the bride to her new husband's bed, and to her amazed dismay, Jalia felt her cheeks growing warm.

“When the time comes, Lady Jalia, will you come to the valley, and let us marry you?” asked one young, pretty woman who, it was obvious from certain joking comments, was only recently married herself.

“Foolish Parvana! The ceremony will take place in the palace, of course….”

So the laughter and banter went on, while the
women showed her around the pleasant house and garden that was Latif's family home. It was bigger than many in the village, but not out of scale: it had two domes, when many of the houses it overlooked had only one, and a very large enclosed garden, and a high wall.

“Because in times of trouble the women and children of the valley came here with the animals,” someone explained. “Then the chief and the men would ride out to fight.”

“When Ghasib's men came, we did not fight. We had heard that it was more dangerous to fight. Once the tunnel was built, we knew, he could bring as many soldiers as he needed….”

“Many of the treasures of this house were buried, Lady Jalia,” someone explained, pointing to the bare walls and floors and niches. “That is how we protected ourselves from Ghasib's looting. We knew that his men would steal all our treasures if they saw them. We hid and buried many, and left out only a few, so that they would not be suspicious. That is why the house is so empty. Do not fear that Ghasib got the treasures of our Shahin.”

“No, the earth holds them!”

That seemed to be a joke, too, but no one explained, and with so much going on, and the language so difficult for her, Jalia let it go.

“We had word that Lord Latif would come, but not that he brought his bride! Look how the chamber is not decorated, Lady Jalia, but we will bring perfumes and lamps….”

She didn't protest. Why shouldn't they set up the bedroom for seduction, though they completely misunderstood who would be seduced and who seducer?

T
he women, young and old, began the ritual decoration of the bedchamber.

It seemed as if, in order to cope with this invasion of outside moral laxity, they had simply decided to rewrite the agenda. Lord Latif had said that he intended to marry the Princess—therefore he had married her. This was their wedding night.

So the afternoon was spent preparing and bringing special foods for the couple, and creating a bed of flowers and scented boughs, in the ancient tradition, and enacting a few other little rituals that Jalia knew her colleague at university, whose field was the early history of the area, would give his eyeteeth to watch.

Someone gave her beautifully embroidered pyjamas to wear, in soft jade silk, the trousers caught at the ankles, the jacket closed over the breasts with one
delicate embroidery frog. Jalia knew it must be something that had been worked on and treasured up for the girl's own wedding, but they insisted, and it was impossible to refuse the gift. All she could do was make a mental promise to herself to find something as beautiful to send back to the valley as soon as she returned to al Bostan.

They bathed her, and rubbed her skin with a curious perfumed salve, and plaited special love knots into her hair, though grieving that it wasn't long enough, not even to the shoulders!—how strange things must be in the outside world, if a woman voluntarily cut off her own glory!

They marvelled at the paleness of her hair, straight and almost white, when every woman in the valley had black, thick curls. Just so, they had sometimes heard, was the hair of the Kamrangi tribeswomen, a marvel someone's grandfather had seen many years ago, when he had accompanied some foreigner as guide into many strange places…

Jalia was falling more and more under the spell of the women and their beautiful valley. Their values were plain and true, their laughter infectious, their collective beauty and wisdom astounding. Whenever she tried to claw back a sense of her own world, it rang false in this pure environment, like a toxin in the fresh mountain air.

She mentioned, for example, the village council that was sitting—weren't the women annoyed that they were not members, that they didn't decide such matters along with the men?

There were smiles and shrugs all around the circle—yes, it was true that in the ancient days in the
valley the council had been all women instead of all men, and that was as it should be, for women were much better judges of human nature than men, and everyone knew it.

But men were good judges of the law. Most petitions to the council now were legal matters—who owned a piece of land, who was entitled to inherit—and were both uninteresting and unimportant, though of course the men could not be expected to think so.

The serious work of the tribe—who should marry whom, for example, and when, decisions about planting and harvest and festivals—was still carried on by the women.

And eventually Jalia simply gave up trying to connect the two worlds, and enjoyed being with the women and seeing life from their point of view.

When the sun was setting beyond the walls of the beautiful but neglected garden, their work finished, the women declared that the council would have broken up by now. They left Jalia in the lamp-lighted, sweet-scented bedroom, wearing the silky jade tunic and trousers, and went off, promising to send Latif to her.

And within the hour he was there, bathed, oiled and perfumed in his turn, and wearing a white outfit, beautifully embroidered, whose flowing silk only underlined his powerful masculinity.

He was unbelievably gorgeous as he entered the room, a bemused smile playing over his dark falcon's face.

He stood for a moment looking down at her in the soft shadows cast by the candle lamps, and Jalia's
heart leaped at the expression that came into his eyes—possessive and hungry and determined.

With a curious shifting the atmosphere grew thick around them, and he gazed at her with green eyes gone black, a signal her body already understood directly. It responded with melting hunger, and she tossed her head in the way he knew so well, pressed her lips together, and let her eyes smile at him.

“The…the women left food for you,” she murmured.

But he didn't hear. He was gazing at her, smelling her, almost tasting her across the room.

She was hauntingly beautiful now, in the traditional bridal robes of his tribe, which breathed across her body, hiding and revealing the curve and length, the softness and strength of her. Her hair was woven with flowers and shimmer, her skin oiled and scented, so that the least move announced itself to his desperately hungry senses.

His woman, prepared as a bride is prepared, in silks and perfumes, her eyes kohled and inviting, prepared as he had longed to see her since that first moment of glancing into cool slate-green eyes…

In two strides he was across the room, and he lifted his hands to cup her head and hold her face up, a flower, a perfect flower with two wide green centres so full of sweetness that his heart stopped.

“You are mine,” he said, his voice rough with feeling. “You have promised. You have told the women.”

Before she could protest that it was not so, he bent his head, and tenderly, tastingly, his mouth stroked
hers, as a man might kiss a delicate bloom, to absorb its perfume through his lips.

The touch trembled against her mouth, and a thousand nerve endings sent shimmers of delight all through her. She shivered, and her lips parted. Her hands pressed his shoulders, and his mouth moved more and more hungrily against her, seeking the sweetness it tasted, as if the more he tasted, the more his need was fed.

Then his hand slipped under the silken shirt she wore, and she felt its heat and strength push along the length of her back, drawing her slowly, determinedly in against his body in a curving arc as he bent over her, lifting her almost off her feet. Her head he wrapped in the crook of his other arm, and she lay supported in his embrace, breast to breast, mouth to mouth.

With the flick of his thumb her jacket fell open, and he stroked her stomach, her chest, her breasts.

From every contact honeyed electricity poured through her, body and soul, setting fire to her mind, igniting her blood. Fever burned her, the fever of a deep hunger that was all new to her. When he lifted his mouth, his eyes, black with passion and intent, devoured her with answering hunger, and her throat of its own accord murmured its need.

With a directness that shook her, his hand left her back and moved between her thighs, and the million nerve endings there leaped to obedient awareness, and she swooned.

She lay helplessly arced in the air, supported between her feet on the floor and her head in his arm, and his mouth kissed her lips, her ear, her throat,
while his other hand slid to her waist and unerringly found the tie of the pyjama trousers. Then she felt the whisper of silk over her stomach and down her thighs, and a moment later her lower body was naked and exposed. A sense of her own vulnerability charged through her.

He lifted his mouth from its exploration of her throat to look down at her body, and the expression on his face poured fuel on the fire of her hunger so that she gasped, and when his hand cupped her mound with possessive firmness, the small gasp was overtaken by a hoarse cry of surprise, hunger, and anticipation. Then she submitted to her own openness, to her vulnerable nakedness, to her admission of sexual hunger.

His hand moved unerringly against her thighs, drawing them apart to give him better access, and then returned to the soft nest of his intent. His hand clasped her again, and his eyes burned into hers, as if to declare his right to do so. Then, hot and sensuously tormenting, it began to move against the nested, humming nerves that waited there.

Under his rhythmic stroking a burning heat quickly built up in her, and she pressed hungrily against him, arching, tensing and seeking, until the pleasure burst under his touch, like a rivulet of lava whispering down a mountain slope.

Her thighs trembled, her breasts tightened, all her body awoke to song.

“Oh!” she cried softly. “Thank you!”

She sighed and tried to straighten, but he kept her there, kept his hand where it was, still moving, so that
the burst of pleasure was overtaken by the promise of more.

“Do you thank me for so little?” he asked hoarsely. His eyes glowed the deepest green she had ever seen, and he smiled his falcon smile, hungry and intent. “There is more than this, I think.”

A moment later, more pleasure zinged out from under his touch, shivering through her so that her back arched, and her hands gripped his shoulders. Her eyes squeezed shut, as if to concentrate on the path the liquid heat was taking through her blood.

Now her legs opened wider of their own accord, her feet planting on the floor, and he saw what he had wanted to see—an unashamed demand for her body's delight. He bent his head and devoured her mouth with his kiss, the better to taste the pleasure as it sang through her again.

“Oh!” Jalia whispered when he lifted his mouth again. “Doesn't it stop?”

He smiled. “No, Beloved. It doesn't stop.”

He watched her face for the marks of the delight he gave her as he stroked her body, and sometimes he watched her body, and she saw the marks of her pleasure on his own face.

She had never before met such blatant determination to create sexual satisfaction for her, such open intent. Never had she felt so free to demand and enjoy her body's bliss. Never had she been so lost to her surroundings, her awareness limited to her body, his touch. Never had she felt she might faint with sheer sexual joy.

Her cries shuddered to the ceiling again, and then for a moment the stroking stopped and her hand was
drawn into the light to expose the trio of opals on her finger.

Dark, dark eyes came close to hers, and even that was somehow lost in the haze. As was his voice.

You still wear his ring?

“Oh!” she cried softly.

She felt his fingers clasp her finger, felt electricity jolting through her.

Tell me to take it off. Tell me you break this engagement.

She half smiled, her mind reeling, for he had truly made her drunk with pleasure. “I can't do that,” she murmured.

His dark frown came between her and the light.
Not? Shall I stop loving you, my Jalia, my woman, my wife? Shall I let you go to this man, my perfect bride?

“Because we were never engaged,” she continued dreamily, only dimly aware that she was throwing away her most potent armour and now nothing would protect her from the fierce wind of his love. “We just pretended, so I'd be safe. Michael's a friend at the university.”

She felt the ring leave her finger, felt it in the burning stroke of his fingers as they drew it off her supersensitized skin, heard it bounce from a carpet and skitter across the tiled floor, and then she was falling.

Down, down he dragged her, to that sweet-smelling bed of boughs and blossoms so lovingly created by the women. His kisses grew wild and wilder, over her face, her throat, her ear, back to her swollen, starving mouth.

Now he stripped off her shirt, exposing her breasts
to the warm lamplight, and slipped out of the white silk that hid his dark body from her hungry gaze. He knelt between her thighs, his eyes moving over her beautiful body as his hands did, creating burning delight in their wake; and where he stroked, he knew her, and where he knew, he owned.

She shuddered as desire abruptly made the leap to passion in her, and groaning, she reached hungrily to pull him into the hot, moist nest of need between her thighs.

He resisted for a moment, and placed his mouth there instead, and as his strong tongue drove her higher up the peak of pleasure, with a last release of the invisible bonds that had constrained her, Jalia twined her fingers into his hair and pressed him against her flesh. His mouth obeyed, a rush of paralysing pleasure engulfed her, and she cried out with utter abandon and fell back against the bower spent and exhausted.

Then he knelt between her legs again, and she saw the engine of his own pleasure, hugely engorged, push its way into her body. Dimly she felt there was nothing more to give or to feel. But her throat opened on a high wild cry, for a deeper pleasure invaded her being now, and the promise of yet more.

She never afterwards knew how much time passed in that scented ecstasy of passion, with Latif's hands and mouth and body stroking her, body and soul, and calling up the deepest, most charged pleasure of all her life. There was a thrilling passion in every part of her being, a yearning and a delight, so that she lost track not merely of time, but of herself, not knowing where she ended and lamplight began, where she
ended and pleasure began, where she ended and Latif began….

It was passion, and joy, and soaring, utter perfection. And now a roaring, burning pleasure began to build in her, unlike anything that had come before. She cried and whimpered, and moaned and called to him, as it built to a crescendo in them both, and his voice crying out his own hot urgency added to her delight.

Then she understood that the trickles and rivulets and rivers of heat and delight that came before had been only the foretaste of a deeper, richer, unimagined joy. And now it erupted in and through them both, as if they two—body and soul—were the conduit by which joy and delight and happiness and perfect union burst into the world to feed the starving multitudes.

And so Latif Abd al Razzaq Shahin took his beloved and made her his wife.