The Sheikh's Collection. Оливия Гейтс

abdomen and powerful hair-roughened thighs. He would either be highly amused or highly offended to learn that she pictured him when she tried to look sexy in a pose.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      SAFFY WOKE UP because she was too warm and then went rigid, for at some stage of the night she and Zahir had drifted across the great divide of mattress separating them in the huge bed and it was hardly surprising that she had overheated. Their bodies were welded together like two magnets and, compared to her, he put out the most extraordinary amount of heat. Even more disturbing, however, was the hard male arousal she could feel thrusting against her thigh.

      He was always in that state in the morning: she had realised that while she was married to him. But the flush of awareness that shimmered through her was shockingly new, fresh and intensely energising and she shivered. Her fingers flexed against the male bicep they were resting on, colour flashing across her embarrassed face as a hunger to touch him flared deep inside her. It was a supreme irony that in the past, while she couldn’t bear him to touch her, she had loved to touch him.

      Black lashes dark as midnight and effective as silk fans swept up and she collided with stunning golden eyes and knew instantly what he was thinking. She yanked her hand off his strong muscular bicep and snaked back from him but she wasn’t quick enough, for Zahir had closed long brown fingers into her hair to entrap her.

      ‘Right at this minute,’ he positively purred like a very large predatory jungle cat on the prowl, ‘I’m all yours.’

      ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ she said in desperation, a spasm of panic claiming her.

      ‘Want me to tell you what you’re thinking about?’ Zahir husked. ‘Or will I just tell you what I’m thinking about?’

      ‘Let me go!’ she gasped.

      He freed her hair and rolled back.

      Low in her pelvis something clenched almost painfully while her nipples tingled into throbbing beads.

      ‘You want me to take care of this myself?’ He gestured towards where his erection was evident beneath the sheet, shameless in his enjoyment of her most mortifying yet moment of recollection as if he had somehow worked out exactly what was on her mind.

      No, she wanted to flatten him to the bed, kiss her way down the roped muscles of his stomach and… With a stifled sound of distress, Saffy leapt off the bed as though she had been bitten and fled from the room to the bathroom. He had kidnapped her, deprived her of her freedom and she had been lying there in that bed tempted to reach for him, touch him, caress him with her mouth, watch him reach a climax with pride and satisfaction, the only satisfaction she had ever known in the bedroom, an entirely one-sided stunted thing born of her inability to engage in intercourse.

      He was cruel; no, he was gorgeous. She couldn’t make her mind up to the extent that in the grip of that struggle she felt semi-insane and, refusing to think, she took care of her more pressing needs instead. A knock sounded on the door when she had finished brushing her teeth with the brand new battery-powered toothbrush set out for her use. After a moment’s hesitation, she yanked the door open. Sheathed in jeans and nothing else, Zahir handed her a pile of clothing.

      ‘I was joking.’

      ‘No, you weren’t,’ Saffy snapped.

      Zahir lifted and dropped his lean brown hands and sudden amusement slashed his full sensual mouth. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have said no…first and foremost, I’m a man and I have some very hot memories of you.’

      ‘H-hot?’ Saffy stammered helplessly, taken aback by the word, certain he must have misused it.

      Zahir stared at her, taking in the tousled golden hair hanging like a veil round her slim shoulders, the brighter than bright blue eyes, and acknowledged that the embarrassment her entire stance telegraphed was not at all what he had expected from her. She wasn’t an innocent any more, so why was she blushing?

      ‘In that department you were very hot.’

      Cold tainted her at the meaning of that sentence, the reminder that there had been others intimate with him since their divorce. ‘Now that you can make comparisons?’

      ‘Don’t take that angle—it’s offensive,’ Zahir ground out with sudden force. ‘If I’d known what I was doing in our bed, we wouldn’t have had problems!’

      Consternation slivered through her taut length. ‘Is that what you thought? That it was somehow your fault? You are so wrong, Zahir. There was nothing you could have done to make things any different between us,’ she declared with fierce conviction, her innate sense of fairness making her speak up. ‘I needed professional help.’

      Saffy couldn’t believe she was telling him her even a little piece of her biggest secret, but then he had been the only other person who had experienced her problems with her. It shook her that he had blamed his inexperience for her failure in the bedroom, but then how could he possibly have guessed what was really wrong with her? Was that why he had come up with the insane idea of kidnapping her? Was that why he still supposedly wanted her? Was that ferocious pride of his still set on rewriting the past and retrieving his masculine pride?

      Zahir frowned, his surprise palpable. ‘Professional help?’

      ‘Never mind. Like you last night and your back…not something I choose to discuss,’ Saffy fielded, because she was extremely reluctant to share her secrets, and indeed was already wondering if he might consider her in some way ‘soiled’ if he knew the truth. And just at that moment, quite ridiculously in the circumstances, she really did value the fact that, in spite of everything, Zahir was still attracted to her. It made her feel better about the past, and when she collided afresh with his mesmerising dark golden eyes she was beset by a stark sense of regret and loss. After all, when she stripped all the complications away one fact stood clear: he wanted her and she was still fiercely attracted to him, the guy she had fallen for as a teenager. Did that make her sad and pathetic? Was it the pull of first love that still made her want to reach out to him? Or simply that all-important element of sexual desire that she had not so far managed to find with another man?

      And did it really matter? she asked herself, for at last the opportunity to move into the adult world and be a normal woman was being offered to her with no strings attached. If she had sex with Zahir, nobody would ever know about it and she would never see him again… Wasn’t this finally the chance for her to achieve the intimacy that she had always longed to experience? Sex was a physical thing, she bargained with herself, and it didn’t have to mean anything, didn’t have to take place within a defined relationship. Her sister, Kat, was a bit of a prude and had raised her to have a very different outlook…but Saffy had done the serious thing, the marriage thing and the love thing and had ended up broken to pieces inside herself, enduring a pain and insecurity that she had still not managed to overcome. Simple sex would be enough for her, she reasoned in desperation, suppressing her uneasy feelings while telling herself that she was surely old enough and mature enough to follow her own instincts.

      ‘Go back to bed,’ Saffy murmured tautly, the momentous decision already made and it was a choice that she felt she could live with. ‘I’ll join you in a few minutes…’

      Zahir’s cloaking black lashes lifted on frowning dark eyes of incomprehension. ‘What are you saying?’

      Saffy shrugged a slender shoulder, putting on a face because her pride was too great to allow him to suspect how insecure and inexperienced she actually was. ‘It’s only sex, not something worth making a fuss about…’

      Taken aback by that blunt statement, Zahir breathed in deep. ‘Passion is always worth pursuing.’

      ‘Not in my world,’ Saffy countered doggedly, thinking of the many casual affairs she had seen begin and end among her friends, and she doubted that true passion-ripping-your-clothes-off passion—had