The Sultan's Choice (12 page)

She wondered for a moment if she was in fact dreaming, because she’d never been given to dreamy introspection before, but the tenderness between her legs told her otherwise. Just then Sadiq emerged naked from the bathroom, walking towards the bed with singular intent and a wicked gleam in his eyes. If this was a dream Samia knew she didn’t want to wake up just yet.

Before she could draw breath he’d plucked her up off the bed into his arms and was striding back towards the bathroom. The steam of the huge shower enveloped them like a luxurious warm mist. Within minutes of stepping under the powerful spray Sadiq was soaping her body with a thoroughness that had a visible effect on him, and Samia was all but begging him to take her, right there.

She’d obviously spoken aloud, because he tipped her head back, cocooning her from the spray with his big body. ‘Believe me, I want to,
habiba,
but you’re still tender. And we need to use protection. But don’t worry … I won’t always be so considerate.’

It was only then that Samia realised that Sadiq
had
been careful and used protection. But before she could ask him
about it Sadiq was turning her around and rinsing off her back. She felt him go still behind her.

Sounding completely shocked, he said, ‘You have a tattoo.’

She’d forgotten all about the tattoo across her lower back, just above her buttocks. Something rebellious rose up within her at his shocked tone and she turned around. ‘Yes, I have a tattoo. Is that so hard to believe?’

Sadiq looked at her and she found the indignant look on his face slightly funny. She could well imagine that when he’d been vetting her for her suitability he wouldn’t in a million years have dreamt she’d have a tattoo.

‘Where did you get it done?’

‘In New York with my friends, before we sailed across the Atlantic. We all got different ones which meant something personal to us.’

Sadiq switched off the shower with an abrupt move and grabbed a towel, wrapping it around Samia.

‘What is it?’ she asked, more hesitantly than she would have liked. ‘Are you really so shocked?’

Sadiq tried to school his features as he busied himself rubbing Samia dry, which of course was entirely too distracting in itself. It was ridiculous, but in some way he felt slightly betrayed …
by a tattoo.
Samia was looking at him expectantly, her skin soft and glowing and more seductive than she could ever know.

He forced himself to be rational and quirked a wry smile. ‘A tattoo is not something I associated with the mouse who came into my study that first day in London.’

Samia flushed pinker and looked away, and perversely that made Sadiq feel comforted. He caught her chin and brought her head up so he could inspect those blue depths. Curbing his insatiable desire to rip the towel away and do
what she’d just been begging him to do in the shower, he asked gruffly, ‘What does it mean?’

‘It’s the Chinese symbol for strength.’

Sadiq saw something intensely vulnerable flash in those aqaumarine depths and had to drive down a spark of emotion. It made his voice more curt than he would have intended. ‘Let’s have dinner and you can tell me all about why you’d want a symbol for strength tattooed onto your skin.’

He watched Samia walk into the bedroom and dither for a moment before self-consciously pulling on the kaftan which had been left out for her, leaving the towel around her till the last minute. Clearly she was not used to this kind of intimacy, and evidently Sadiq had become too jaded from seeing lovers eager to display their naked bodies to him, because watching Samia was like watching the most erotic striptease he’d ever seen.

He saw the tattoo again just before it was covered up by the kaftan dropping over her body and had to admit it was sexy, positioned where it was just above the jut of her buttocks, where only someone intimately acquainted with her body would see it.

As he dressed himself and tried to control his insatiable libido, which was responding helplessly to that image, he had to admit to a slight feeling of disorientation. Samia was turning into something of an enigma, and this was something Sadiq had not accounted for. Nor he was even sure he particularly welcomed it.

An hour later they were sitting on an open-air terrace on the level below their bedroom. A table for two had been set with flickering candles. Chilled white wine was in beautiful goblet-style glasses. The discreet staff, dressed in the same white clothes that were a trademark of the Hussein castle,
had been flitting to and fro, serving a range of delicious delicacies for them to feast on.

Samia loved the rustic nature of the dinner—the fact that the table was bare and plain, despite obviously being an antique and inlaid with mother of pearl mosaics. The feel of the raw silk of the kaftan against her skin was like an erotic caress, and she had to stop herself squirming in her seat, already wantonly wishing they were back upstairs in that huge bed with nothing between them. She was also desperately hoping that Sadiq wouldn’t remember what he’d said.

But, in that uncanny way he had of honing in on her most private thoughts, he sat back, took his wine glass in his hand and looked at her. ‘So … tell me. Strength. What did you need strength for?’

Samia wiped her mouth with her napkin and looked across the table at Sadiq. She’d been avoiding looking at him because in this flickering light, with a hint of stubble on his jaw, he looked so gorgeous … She sighed. He was waiting for her answer.

Why did it have to be Sadiq who wanted to hone in on the workings of her psyche? She looked down and pleated her napkin nervously. ‘I told you before about my stepmother?’

He nodded. ‘You said you didn’t get on?’

Samia nodded and looked up, took a sip of wine for fortitude. ‘I got the symbol for strength because embarking on that sailing trip I felt as if I was strong—for the first time in my life. After years of feeling weak.’

She flashed a brittle smile at Sadiq, hating how vulnerable this was making her feel.

‘Alesha despised me from the moment she saw me, for all sorts of reasons, but mainly because I looked like my mother. It was common knowledge that my father and mother had shared a great love. He visited her shrine every day religiously until he died.’

She grimaced slightly. ‘Alesha used to tell me from when I was tiny that because I looked like my mother it made it harder for my father to be around me, because I was the reason she died.’

‘Samia—’

She cut him off, pretending not to hear him, not wanting him to think she was looking for sympathy. ‘Her forte was targeting people’s weak spots. She used it to chip away at my self-confidence, constantly pointing out how different I was. Things got worse when she had girl after girl and no precious male heir to counteract Kaden’s supremacy and mine.’

Samia’s voice had become a monotone, as if she could try and hide the emotion she felt. ‘If I found anything I enjoyed doing, she’d stop me. It was a constant war of attrition and I couldn’t fight her.’

Sadiq said dryly, but with a steel tone, ‘She sounds utterly charming.’

Samia looked at him and was relieved not to see pity. Her heart pounded a little at the look in his eyes. ‘She was, you see—to anyone on the outside looking in. She was an arch manipulator, angry and bitter because she knew my father didn’t love her. I was meant to give a piano recital one day in our huge banquet hall, for my father and some important guests—’ Samia stopped. What was she doing, babbling on about mundane childhood incidents?

But Sadiq inclined his head. ‘Go on, Samia. I want to hear this.’

Cursing herself for bringing this up, she continued reluctantly, ‘I’d practised for weeks on my mother’s piano. She’d nearly become a concert pianist before she met my father, and when I played I felt somehow … close to her. Not that I had half her talent.’ She blushed, feeling silly, but Sadiq was still looking at her with something unfathomable yet encouraging in his eyes.

Samia took a deep breath. ‘Alesha took me aside just before I went on. I don’t even remember what she said now, but when I sat down … I froze. I couldn’t remember a note of the music and I couldn’t move. All I can remember is excruciating terror, not knowing how to just get up and leave. Kaden had to come and physically lift me off the stool. I’d let my father down in front of his guests—but, worse than that, I felt I’d let my mother’s memory down. I haven’t touched a piano since.’

She grimaced at herself now. ‘It’s all so mundane really. My childhood was no worse than many others. Alesha was just a bully. Apart from her we had a perfectly stable and secure background.’

Almost harshly, Sadiq cut in. ‘No, it’s not. Nothing is mundane, when you’re a child and your world is threatened. You can have the most secure background and yet within that lies any number of threats.’

Samia looked at him, her eyes growing wide. ‘Why do you say that?’

His jaw clenched. ‘Because it’s true. My world was threatened every day when my father took his anger at my mother out on me—or her. Whoever was closest. I watched my father kick her so hard in the belly once that she lay there bleeding. But he wouldn’t let me help her. I tried to, but he beat me back.’

Samia sucked in a horrified gasp. ‘How could he have done such a thing? And let you watch?’

Sadiq smiled grimly. ‘So that I would know how to deal with a disobedient wife. A wife who wouldn’t give him any more children.’

Samia shook her head, feeling sick. ‘You would never be capable of such a thing. How old were you?’

Sadiq shrugged now. He felt curiously raw at Samia’s easy assertion that he was not like his father. ‘About five.’

Samia shook her head. ‘Sadiq, that’s horrific. Is that why she didn’t have any more children?’

‘She didn’t have any more children because my father slept with mistresses while she was pregnant with me and then passed on a sexually transmitted disease to her. She wouldn’t sleep with him after that, and as a result of his pride and refusal to seek treatment he became infertile.’

The disgust he felt whenever he thought of his father was rising inside Sadiq, and he wondered wildly for a moment how on earth they’d strayed onto a subject he never discussed with anyone.

‘Is that why you doubted your own fertility? Or why you can’t look at your mother? Because you feel guilty that you weren’t able to protect her?’

Samia’s question hit Sadiq right in his gut. He saw Samia’s huge, expressive eyes shimmering suspiciously and put down his napkin. ‘I think we’ve had enough conversation for one evening.’

Samia watched Sadiq stand up to his full impressive height. Her heart ached in a very peculiar and disturbing way. He looked so remote and proud. He was obviously angry with himself for having revealed what he had, and she’d gone too far with that question.

But she’d been no less forthcoming—as if someone had injected her with some kind of truth serum. She could have made up any old cliché about why she’d got the tattoo. She wasn’t meant to be feeling anything for this man. When he put his hand out now she took it gratefully, suddenly as eager as he was to change the subject.

Afterwards, when Samia’s head was on Sadiq’s chest with his strong heartbeat under her cheek, she thought of something and said, ‘You’re using protection now …’

She lifted her head and looked at him, and a wave of
shyness washed over her to think that he’d just made love to her and had done so with such passion that she was still floating in a limbo of languorous satedness. Sadness gripped her at the thought that this would not last. It couldn’t. If he wasn’t already growing bored with her limited range of responses, he would be very soon. And she hated the self-pity that that thought engendered.

He’d gone very still for a moment, and then he looked at her, and those eyes were unreadable and his jaw was tense. He moved then, and manoeuvred them so that Samia was on her back and he was on one elbow, looking down at her.

Her insides contracted. Lord, but he was gorgeous. It was almost intimidating. The languorous bliss in her body was dissipating slightly under the cool look in his eyes.

‘I thought that it would be a good idea to give ourselves some time to get to know one another before getting pregnant.’

‘Oh …’ Samia said ineffectually. So that was the reason for his suddenly using protection.

Sadiq twitched back the sheet from where it covered Samia’s body and she flushed under his blatant appraisal. ‘But as you could already be pregnant, and part of the requirements of this marriage are heirs, I don’t see the advantage any more.’

And before she could speak, or formulate a response to that, Sadiq had drawn her up over his body, legs either side of his hips, where she could feel the potent strength of him against her moist core.

Samia had the feeling he was angry about something and taking it out on her, but she was too distracted by the feel of his erection. The sensation of hot skin to hot skin was too much. With a small groan of helpless desire she slid down onto his hard length and forgot all about anything but this delicious insanity.

Sadiq couldn’t sleep, and he wasn’t surprised. He’d just acted like a complete neanderthal and taken his own self-anger out on Samia in a very cavalier fashion. Not that she’d complained. He’d never slept with any woman so impassioned, so responsive and so giving. His heart thumped ominously. He came up on one elbow and looked at her, skin still flushed with their lovemaking, lashes long against her cheek.

He could still see her sitting astride him, and the look of pure shocked bliss on her face as she’d realised that she could dictate the pace of their lovemaking—much to his intense torture, her evident delight and an eventual climax that had been so strong he’d blacked out for a split second. A first for him.

With a muted groan he got out of the bed and pulled on his robe, crossing to the ornately trellised wall which surrounded their private terrace. The desert lay spread out before him.
Dammit.
He brought his clenched fist down on the wall. He
had
intended talking to Samia about birth control. He
had
thought it would be a good idea to wait at least for a few months, to let her get used to life at the castle.