The Sheik Who Loved Me (13 page)

The water was cool against his skin, but heat boiled inside him. He kept a firm hold of her with one hand lest she bolt again. With the other he traced his fingers up the elegant column of her throat, the throat he’d admired when she lay unconscious in his bed. She responded by hooking one long and naked leg around his clothed one. She placed her palm flat against his bare wet chest, splayed her fingers, moved it slowly along his skin, down his belly. Lower. He swelled hard and hot against the wet fabric of his pants.

He slid his hand along her shoulder, slipped the thin strap of her gown down, exposing her breast. It was milky white, glistening with the sea under the lunar light. He caught his breath, touched her nipple with his fingertips. It reacted instantly, tightening to a hard nub.

He bent his head, sought out the hard tip of her aroused nipple with his lips. He flicked his tongue around it and then sucked, drawing it tighter, to a slick and salty point. He’d ached to do this since he’d watched her on the beach, since he’d watched the rise and fall of her breasts under the white Egyptian-cotton sheet as she’d lain unconscious in his bed, since he’d felt the soft weight of those breasts against his bare chest as he’d hunkered over her on his horse, riding ahead of the storm.

But the pleasure was more than he could even have begun to imagine. It drove his hungering ache to a feverish pitch. He scored her nipple with his teeth, bit.

She moaned, arching her back, pressing herself against him, offering all of herself to him. Her reaction drew a shaft of liquid fire that seared clean through to his groin. A low and hungry growl emanated from deep in his throat. He moved his mouth slowly up the column of her neck, tasting the salt, licking her skin, making her writhe under him with need.

Then he grasped the back of her neck firmly, lifting her face to his, and he forced his mouth down onto hers. He felt her open instantly under the pressure of his lips. Her warmth was salty. Elemental. Soft and deeply feminine.

With a groan he sank his tongue down into her. She responded, her tongue slipping, entwining around his. It cracked his world open into a dizzying rainbow of light. Colors spun riotously inside his head. Music seemed to swell though his core. He was feeding on her brightness, filling a void he hadn’t even known existed within him.

He pulled back, stunned, breathless. “Are you for real?” he whispered. “Or are you really something conjured up from the sea?” In his wild sensual delirium, he almost believed she might be.

She murmured in his ear sending hot and cold shivers over his skin. “I can be whatever you want me to be, David.”

“Be mine,” he growled, lips against hers.
Be my Sahar.

Jayde didn’t want to begin to think about what was happening, what she was doing. What he was doing to her. Her walls had been breached and right now she was utterly defenceless against the raw power that was streaming through them. She was quite simply imprisoned in the present, by her desire, by her desperate passion for this powerful man.

All she could do was lift her face to his. Right now she would be his Sahar. Because deep, deep down, the forgotten part of herself had actually become Sahar. A woman with feeling, emotion, and aching love in her heart. A woman who had been locked away, many years ago, by an eight-year-old child who had been burned by life. Until now.

And now she was desperate. Now she wanted everything she had missed. She looked up into his face. Desire etched his features into dangerous feral planes, his eyes flashed. A quiver ran through her stomach. “Take me, David,” she whispered. “Take me.”

He crushed his mouth down hard onto hers. She met his urgency, her tongue seeking his, her hands tearing at the buckle of his pants under the surface. She felt him swell free in her hands, his need blatant, hot and hard against the cool velvet of the water. There was no stopping now. It was fast. Furious. Desperate. He shoved the wet, floating silk up high about her waist, grasped at her lace panties, ripped them off her. She wrapped both her legs around him using the swells of the ocean for buoyancy. He pushed his mouth hard onto hers, invaded with his tongue, roughly. Demanding. She was overwhelmed with her own aching need. She arched her back, opened her legs wider around him, aching for him from the very center of her being.

He gripped her buttocks and thrust his full length into her as he pulled her down onto himself. He was hot, hard against her softness. She could feel her own heat pooling between her thighs, around him. He groaned and he thrust deeper. The movement drew cool water into her molten fire. She gasped. The contrast in temperatures inside her heightened every sensation, awakened every nerve. Her body screamed in delirious and silent delight.

She could hardly breathe. Each movement, each stroke sent her higher, made waves of watery resistance surge between them, their coupling creating a turbulence that fanned out in concentric phosphorescent ripples over the black waters of the lagoon.

Jayde felt as if she would burst. A desperate need to scream into the night air rose in her throat as he drove her higher and higher. She could feel the thick length of him inside her grow hotter. She could feel it quiver and she knew he was near.

That knowledge itself pushed her over the tip. Her vision blurred and she was blinded as scarlet waves slammed into her head and colored her mind. She swallowed her cry as the blinding sensation took hold of her. Her body rippled around him in wave after wave of hard contractions. And then he came, bucking, releasing into her with a final violent shudder.

They held each other, spent, bobbing gently in the water, silently in the swells, breaths coming light and fast.

He brushed his lips over her forehead. “Mmm…that was sublime,” he murmured against her skin. “A fantasy.”

Jayde began to feel the chill of the water against her skin as her body cooled. Cognizance crept back with the cold. With it came the sharp bite of reality. He was right. It was a fantasy. Only, he didn’t know the half of it. And she felt suddenly sick. She was deceiving him. She couldn’t do this.

But before she could begin to pull away, David reached up and ran his rough palm over her breast. “Shall we try to make it to the yacht this time?” His voice was dark with fresh promise.

Jayde was shocked by the bolt of new heat that shot to her belly. A pang of guilt touched her heart, but her desire pushed it away. “Yes,” she whispered in his ear.

Tomorrow could wait.

Tonight she was stealing time. Tonight she was stealing lost years.

They made love through the night. And as dawn glowed peach on the horizon, Jayde wished in her heart she never had to leave Shendi Island. Or David. They were made for each other.

No, she corrected herself.
Sahar
and David were made for each other.

Jayde Ashton had been trained to be something very, very different. Only, it didn’t seem to fit anymore. A part of her had actually become someone else, a woman with emotion and lightness and love in her soul.

She’d been rent in two. And she knew she could never become whole again. Not in the way she truly wanted. Not with David Rashid. Because when he found out who she was, he would never forgive her. He’d said it himself at dinner. There was nothing he abhorred more in life than a liar. And she believed he’d truly meant it.

Surely a man who abhorred lies could not be covertly shipping uranium to Libya and Korea? On the surface, Libya was dismantling its nuclear weapons program, but at the same time the Libyan leader was secretly backing the Falal, a radical extremist group charged with taking the country’s weapons program underground—and using Rashid uranium to do it. Jayde was one of the few people in the world who knew about it.

She lay on her back on the large double bed in the cabin of David’s luxurious yacht, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the slap of water against the hull, the chink of metal against the mast, the comforting sounds of David making coffee in the galley. And she drank in the heavenly scents of a domestic morning.

No. She could
not
believe he was involved. And she could not continue lying to him. She would not. She had to find a way to get hold of Lancaster.

She closed her eyes. God, she wished she didn’t have to do this.

“Morning, gorgeous.”

Her eyes flared open. He stood, dark and totally naked, a Zeus, holding two mugs of steaming coffee, a sinful grin across his ruggedly handsome face.

She smiled in spite of herself, allowing her gaze to roam brazenly, appreciatively over his exquisite body, taking in the broad, dark-skinned chest, the whorl of dark hair that ran down the center of his washboard stomach and flared out to cover his godlike maleness.

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “You look at me like that and you’re gonna have trouble.”

She laughed. “I can see trouble stirring already.”

He pulled a face, set the coffee mugs down and grabbed a
kikoi.
He wound the brightly colored strip of African cotton around his waist, hiding his swelling interest.

Jayde made a mock moue. “What a shame.”

He wiggled a brow. “We could fix that.”

Heat spurted to her groin. He sat down on the bed, leaned over her. She pulled his kikoi free…

But the sound of an engine coming at full throttle over the bay made them both pull back.

Someone was speeding toward the yacht.

David jerked to his feet, grabbed his
kikoi,
wrapped it around his waist. But before he’d even made it up on deck, Jayde felt the bump of a small craft pulling up alongside the yacht. Then she heard Tariq’s voice barking over the sputter of the motor. “I must talk to you, David. Now.”

“What is it?” Undisguised irritation laced David’s voice as he clambered up to the deck.

“Not here. In private. There is something you must see. It cannot wait.”

Jayde heard David coming back down to the cabin.

“What does Tariq want?” she asked, nerves skittering through her chest.
Had Tariq found something out about her?

He took her face in both his hands, kissed her full on the mouth. “Business. Wait for me. There’s food in the galley. Help yourself.”

“David—” she called after him in desperation.

He blew her a kiss. “I’ll be right back.”

Jayde’s heart sank like a stone. She listened to the roar of the engine as Tariq took David away from her. A heavy sense of doom descended on her as the splutter of the engine faded into the distant sound of waves.

She just knew David would not be back.

Not in the way she wanted him back.

It was over.

David stared at the item Tariq had placed on his desk as if it were a poisonous snake from the pit of hell. “Where did you find
that?
”

“On one of the small outer islands. We did a search early this morning, found some boat wreckage, clothing, life jackets, diving gear—” Tariq jutted his chin in the direction of the package “—and that.”

“Why did you search?” he snapped.

“I’m trying to help you, David. No one has claimed the woman. I was looking for some clues to her identity.”

David picked up the waterproof document pouch and yanked open the ziplock closure. He tipped it upside down. The contents spilled out over his desk. Two diving passes. Airline tickets from London. Two British passports. A boat rental agreement…

And a gold wedding band.

His heart drummed in his chest. His throat went dry. He reached out, picked up the passports, flipped one open. The photo was Sahar.

Except it wasn’t Sahar.

It was
Melanie Wilson.
He flipped the other document open. It belonged to Simon Wilson.

A lump swelled hard in his throat. He reached for the diving passes. Simon and Melanie Wilson. He grabbed the rental contract. It was made out to Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.

His heart shriveled in on itself. He struggled to breathe. Slowly he reached for the wedding band. It was cold in his hand. Smooth. A woman’s size. He turned it over in his fingers, read the engraving.

“Simon and Melanie forever.”

David sank bonelessly into his office chair, the gold ring clutched tightly in his fist.

Mrs.
Melanie Wilson. He felt as if every bit of life had been sucked from his marrow. She was
married.
And, inside, a part of him died.

Tariq was watching him silently. David looked up at him, forced himself to ask. “Was there any sign of…of her husband?”

“No.”

“Any sign of
anyone
else?”

“Nothing.”

David closed his eyes, rested his head against the back of his chair. He tried to steady his breathing. He hated himself with a passion for even beginning to think what he was thinking—that if her husband had drowned there was still a chance for him.

His eyes flared open. He slammed the ring onto his desk, glared at Tariq. “Why has
Mr.
Wilson not come looking for his wife, then?” he demanded. “What man doesn’t look for his wife!”

“David—”

“No.” He held his palm up. “Don’t talk to me. Just phone that damn diving operation and find out why no one is looking for
Mrs.
Wilson. Find out why no one is looking for that boat! Find out what in hell has happened to
Mr.
Wilson! And find out why the goddamn British Embassy doesn’t know these British subjects are missing!”

He jerked to his feet. Nothing added up. But he had to go to Sahar. He had to tell her they had an ID on her.

No, he corrected himself, not Sahar. She wasn’t Sahar. Not anymore. That fantasy was over. She was Mrs. Melanie Wilson.

And as David made his way back down to the bay, he caught sight of his yacht gleaming white on the water. He stopped and stared at it. She was on that yacht. Waiting for him.

His whole body began to vibrate against the tension in his muscles. Because now he couldn’t have her. She belonged to another man. And that meant he had to keep his hands off her. Just the idea of not touching her again made him feel like a bomb ready to blow its casing. He knew it would take every ounce of control to hold himself in check. Both emotionally and physically.