Chapter Thirty-two #2
He chose not to comment on her discomfort, saying instead, “What shall we do tonight?”
“A walk in the garden?”
Chantelle immediately started to get up. An arm across her thighs prevented her.
“What would you like to do—here?” he clarified, and to her relief removed his arm.
“I—I don’t know. What would you—” He cocked his head to look up at her, and his grin was so blatantly wicked, she didn’t have to finish the question. “Besides that,” she added a bit sharply.
He gave the barest of shrugs, his gaze traveling slowly down her body to end at eye level on her lap. “Have you learned to dance yet?”
She knew what kind of dancing he meant. She had watched one of the ikbals practicing in the courtyard, and it was like nothing she had ever seen or could even imagine.
It was a dance designed solely to arouse male passions, with sinuous belly and pelvic movements that were not just seductive; as far as she was concerned, they were obscene.
“Your Eastern dances are too…foreign for my tastes,” Chantelle said.
“But I would very much like to see you dance, Shahar,” he replied, and ran a finger down the top of her thigh to her knee, where his hand then rested. “Will you learn for me?”
He looked up for her answer. The heat in his emerald gaze caused her throat to tighten. Her belly was already turning flip-flops from his touch.
“I—I couldn’t.”
“You could,” he murmured thickly, and his finger started a trail back up her thigh. “You choose not to. But it is not something that can be forced. You have to want to inflame my passions—”
“Jamil!”
She grabbed his finger before it could go any farther. He startled her by yanking it away and sitting up. When he glanced back at her, she knew she had displeased him from the tight set of his features. She assumed it was because she had stopped him. It was a surprise to find out differently.
“You may call me anything but Jamil.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Call me Derek.”
“What?” she said incredulously.
“It means ‘beloved.’”
She blinked. What the devil had come over him?
“In what language?” she asked skeptically.
“Never mind what language!” His voice rose in his irritation. “Will you call me Derek?”
“No,” she replied simply, and saw his jaw stiffen.
“In another language, it also means ‘bastard.’ Now will you call me Derek?”
It was too much. She grinned and the laughter followed, until she was bent over with it, clasping her sides. When she finally leaned back, she saw him watching her with his own lips curled.
“Oh, God.” She sighed, wiping tears from her eyes. “If I’m not permitted to call you Jamil, you only had to say so. Derek indeed. The name’s as English as I am.”
“So is my mother, Shahar,” he pointed out. “Perhaps she gave me the name.”
“Did she?”
“No,” he said truthfully, for it was his grandfather who had named him Derek.
He reclined again, bemused by his irrational reaction to hearing her call him by his brother’s name. What was a name, after all? Just because it belonged to someone else…
Chantelle was watching him curiously. “What was that all about, then, if you don’t mind my asking?”
He glanced up at her, suddenly aware that her humor had relaxed her guard. That would change, however, if he claimed his prerogative not to answer.
He shrugged offhandedly. “My frustration, rising to surprise us both.”
She could believe it, but was loath to pursue that subject. “Oh, well…”
He chuckled. “Where’s your courage, English?” Aren’t you curious why I’m frustrated?”
“No!”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I want you in my bed, yes, but I want other things as well.”
Before she realized what he meant to do, he had hooked his fingers in the top of her pantaloons and tugged, gently enough so that the buttons on each hip didn’t snap off, but enough to bring her sliding down the silken pillow until she lay flat on her back next to him.
She brought up her hands immediately to ward him off, but he didn’t lean over her as she had expected.
“That’s better,” he said. “I was getting a stiff neck looking up at you.”
If that was meant to reassure her about this new position, it didn’t. “I don’t think—”
“Shh, don’t you want to know what I want to do to you?” She shook her head emphatically and he gave her back her own words. “Besides that.”
“No matter,” she insisted. “It can’t help to talk about it.”
“How do you know? And how do you know you won’t like what I want to do to you?”
She closed her eyes with a little groan, only to snap them open as she felt him lean closer. His face was now above hers, a mere breath away. His hand, still holding the band of her pants, turned so that she felt his palm against her skin. It wasn’t as warm as the smoldering heat of his gaze.
“I want to put my fingers inside you, Shahar.”
“Oh, God!” she got out before his mouth slanted across hers to add to the whirling of her senses that his words had caused.
Still, she reached for his arm, wrapping her fingers about his wrist. That there was no strength to her tug was not surprising.
“If you don’t give me something, woman, I am going to go mad,” he said against her lips.
His kiss turned fierce, possessive, as if he meant to devour her. She became even weaker under this onslaught, until her hand fell away. His hand immediately slid into her pants, the fingers parting her curls, moving down, finally doing what he said he had wanted to do.
Her reaction was to soar up against him, which allowed his fingers to press even deeper inside her. She clung to him, reeling in the most delicious sensation, mindless of anything except that pleasure.
“Oh, love, you’re so hot, so wet.”
Chantelle melted to his words, wrapping her arms around him, kissing him back with a frantic need. That he had spoken in English didn’t penetrate, she was so inflamed. And he continued to work his magic, not letting the fever abate for even a moment.
And then suddenly he was lying between her legs and there were no clothes between them.
How he had managed it, she didn’t know, couldn’t recall at all.
What had brought her to an awareness of it, she wasn’t sure.
Perhaps the overall heat of his skin pressed to hers, belly to belly, chest to breast. Perhaps the vulnerability of having her legs parted to accommodate him.
Perhaps because he had stopped kissing her for a breathless moment.
But there was no time for panic or fear to take hold.
He had only waited for her awareness to crystallize, to see it in her violet eyes, and then he was kissing her again, his tongue plunging deeply.
At the same time she felt the exquisite pleasure of his fingers inside her once more…
no, not his fingers this time, but him, that part of him she had feared but feared no more.
Slowly, so slowly he entered her, and with such ease, for she was hot with waiting, moist with needing.
There was a fullness unlike his fingers, a tightness that was much more delicious for her knowledge of what it was, and then a strange sensation as if something had popped inside her, not actually hurtful, but startling, then an even greater fullness so deep inside her.
His groan mingled with her own as he continued to kiss her, gently now, but no less passionately.
He moved in no other way for a moment, and she didn’t mind, savoring this new feeling, knowing instinctively that there would be more.
And there was. When his hips began a slow thrusting against her, her heartbeat seemed to pick up the same tempo, accelerating as he did, faster and faster, until she was jolted with a thunderbolt of liquid sensation so extreme she cried out, her arms tightening around him as he gathered her even closer, his own pulsating climax joining hers.