Michelle Reid - Hot-Blooded Husbands

CURSING and swearing in seething silence, Hassan prowled three sides of the bed like a caged tiger while the yacht’s Spanish medic checked her over.

‘No bones broken, as far as I can tell,’ the man said. ‘No obvious blow to the head.’

‘Then why is she unconscious?’ he growled out furiously.

‘Shock—winded,’ the medic suggested, gently laying aside a frighteningly limp hand. ‘It has only been a few minutes, sir.’

But a few minutes was a lifetime when you felt so guilty you wished it was yourself lying there, Hassan thought harshly.

‘A cool compress would be a help—’

A cool compress. ‘Rafiq.’ The click of his fingers meant the job would be done.

The sharp sound made Leona flinch. On a single, lithe leap Hassan was suddenly stretched out across the bed and leaning over her. The medic drew back; Rafiq paused in his step.

‘Open your eyes.’ Hassan turned her face towards him with a decidedly unsteady hand.

Her eyes fluttered open to stare up at him blankly. ‘What happened?’ she mumbled.

‘You fell down some stairs,’ he gritted. ‘Now tell me where you hurt.’

A frown began to pucker her smooth brow as she tried to remember.

‘Concentrate,’ he rasped, diverting her mind away from what had happened. ‘Do you hurt anywhere?’

She closed her eyes again, and he watched her make a mental inventory of herself then give a small shake of her head. ‘I think I’m okay.’ She opened her eyes again, looked directly into his, saw his concern, his anguish, the burning fires of guilt—and then she remembered why she’d fallen.

Aching tears welled up again. From coldly plunging his imaginary knife into her breast, he now felt it enter his own. ‘You really went and did it,’ she whispered.

‘No, I did not,’ he denied. ‘Get out,’ he told their two witnesses.

The room emptied like water down a drain, leaving them alone again, confronting each other again. It was dangerous. He wanted to kiss her so badly he could hardly breathe. She was his. He was hers! They should not be in this warring situation!

‘No—remain still!’ he commanded when she attempted to move. ‘Don’t even breathe unless you have to do so! Why are females so stupid ?’ he bit out like a curse. ‘You insult me with your suspicions. You goad me into a response, and when it is not the one you want to hear you slay me with your pain!’

‘I didn’t mean to fall down the stairs,’ she pointed out.

‘I wasn’t talking about the fall!’ he bit out, then glared down into her confused, hurt, vulnerable eyes for a split second longer. ‘Oh, Allah give me strength,’ he gritted, and gave in to himself and took her trembling mouth by storm.

If he had kissed her in any other way Leona would have fought him with her very last breath. But she liked the storm; she needed the storm so she could allow herself to be swept away. Plus he was trembling, and she liked that too. Liked to know that she still had the power to reduce the prince in him to this vulnerable mass of smashed emotion.

And she’d missed him. She’d missed feeling his length lying alongside her length, had missed the weight of his thighs pressing down on her own. She’d missed his kiss, hungry, urgent, insistent…wanting. Like a banquet after a year of long, hard fasting, she fed greedily on every deep, dark, sensual delight. Lips, teeth, tongue, taste. She reached for his chest, felt the strong beat of his heart as she glided her palms beneath the fabric of his top robe where only the thin cotton of his tunic came between them and tightly muscled, satin-smooth flesh. When she reached his shoulders her fingers curled themselves into tightly padded muscle then stayed there, inviting him to take what he liked.

He took her breasts, stroking and shaping before moving on to follow the slender curve of her body. Long fingers claimed her hips, then drew her against the force of his. Fire bloomed in her belly, for this was her man, the love of her life. She would never, ever, find herself another. What he touched belonged to him. What he desired he could have.

What he did was bring a cruelly abrupt end to it by rising in a single fluid movement to land on his feet beside the bed, leaving her to flounder on the hard rocks of rejection while he stood there with his back to her, fighting a savage battle with himself.

‘Why?’ she breathed in thick confusion.

‘We are not animals,’ he ground back. ‘We have issues to deal with that must preclude the hungry coupling at which we already know we both excel.’

It served as a dash of water in her face; and he certainly possessed good aim, Leona noted as she came back to reality with a shivering gasp. ‘What issues?’ she challenged cynically. ‘The issue of what we have left besides the excellent sex?’

He didn’t answer. Instead he made one of her eyebrows arch as he snatched up her spritzer and grimly downed the lot. There was a man at war with himself as well as with her, Leona realised, knowing Hassan hardly ever touched alcohol, and only then when he was under real stress.

Sitting up, she was aware of a few aches and bruises as she gingerly slid her feet to the floor. ‘I want to go home,’ she announced.

‘This is home,’ he replied. ‘For the next few weeks, anyway.’

Few weeks? Coming just as gingerly to her feet, Leona stared at his rigid back—which was just another sign that Hassan was not functioning to his usual standards, because no Arab worthy of the race would deliberately set his back to anyone. It was an insult of the worst kind.

Though she had seen his back a lot during those few months before she’d eventually left him, Leona recalled with a familiar sinking feeling inside. Not because he had wished to insult her, she acknowledged, but because he had refused to face what they had both known was happening to their marriage. In the end, she had taken the initiative away from him.

‘Where are my shoes?’

The surprisingly neutral question managed to bring him swinging round to glance at her feet. ‘Rafiq has them.’

Dear Rafiq, Leona thought wryly, Hassan’s ever-loyal partner in crime. Rafiq was an Al-Qadim. A man who had attended the same schools, the same universities, the same everything as Hassan had done. Equals in many ways, prince and lowly servant in others. It was a complicated relationship that wound around the status of birth and the ranks of power.

‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to ask him to give them back to me.’ Even she knew you didn’t command Rafiq to do anything. He was a law unto himself—and Hassan. Rafiq was a maverick. A man of the desert, yet not born of the desert; fiercely proud, fiercely protective of his right to be master of his own decisions.

‘For what purpose?’

Leona’s chin came up, recognising the challenge in his tone. She offered him a cool, clear look. ‘I am not staying here, Hassan,’ she told him flatly. ‘Even if I have to book into a hotel in San Estéban to protect your dignity, I am leaving this boat now, tonight.’

His expression grew curious, a slight smile touched his mouth. ‘Strong swimmer, are you?’ he questioned lazily.

It took a few moments for his taunt to truly sink in, then she was moving, darting across the room and winding her way between the two strategically placed chairs and the accompanying table to reach for the curtains. Beyond the glass, all she could see was inky darkness. Maybe she was on the seaward side of the boat, she told herself in an effort to calm the sudden sting of alarm that slid down her spine.

Hassan quickly disabused her of that frail hope. ‘We left San Estéban minutes after we boarded.’