CAROL MARINELLI - Sheikh's Forbidden Queen - Zarif's Convenient Queen / Gambling with the Crown

‘No, don’t,’ Ella protested, squirming against his lean, powerful frame in a manner that only stretched his control thinner than ever.

‘Tonight you’ll be mine,’ Zarif pronounced with unashamed satisfaction, lifting her up against him as though she were a doll and planting her on the edge of the table, pushing her knees apart to stand between them, leaning forward to thrust his aroused body into the apex of her thighs.

Tingling awareness bubbled like a volcano low in her body. Her bright blue eyes widened, pupils dilated as she stared back at him because for once they were on a level. He had sinfully sexy eyes. Her top felt scratchy and uncomfortable against her tender breasts and her breath was catching in her throat. A voice was screaming in the back of her mind, telling her to get a grip, but what kept her still was the warm liquid melting sensation steadily spreading through her lower limbs and most pressing of all, at its pinnacle, a downright unbearable physical ache for the fulfilment she had never known. ‘And you’ll love every moment of what I do to you,’ Zarif forecast hoarsely.

Ella heard his voice through the wall of sensation caused by the outrageous stroke of the long, lean fingers encircling her hips just below her top, the touch of his fingertips across her skin alerting her to an innate sensuality she had not had the chance to experience with him before. She could feel his erection through the fine barrier of his pants and the knowledge that she aroused him even in her pjs and without make-up was ridiculously empowering. She struggled to draw another breath past her tight throat as he pressed his mouth hungrily against the tender skin between her neck and her shoulder and her head fell back without her volition, a tiny gasp escaping her parted lips.

His hands slid up beneath her top and cupped the full globes of her breasts and excitement sent her heart racing so fast she felt light-headed. The surge of heat and wetness between her thighs as he tugged at her straining nipples sent shockwaves through her as his mouth found hers again with a raw passion that thrilled her. Her hands clutched at his arms, nails biting into his sleeves, frustration hurtling through her that she couldn’t touch him the way he was touching her.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry...!’ The sound of her mother’s voice and the door opening and closing again in fast succession roused Ella from her sexual stupor as nothing else could have done. She opened her eyes, not even recalling when she had closed them.

Infuriatingly, Zarif had regained control first and had already stepped back from her. She clashed with burning golden eyes and snatched in a shuddering breath, her face crimson as she acknowledged what she had allowed to happen between them. And when she was furious with him too? That was the most galling admission of all: that Zarif could touch her and every other consideration could simply melt away.

‘I will see you later, habibti,’ Zarif murmured tautly, a flush lining his hard cheekbones.

Ella slid off the table like an electrified eel and hauled open the door. Her mother beamed at her from the hall. ‘The beautician’s here and you haven’t had breakfast yet,’ she fussed. ‘Will Zarif be staying?’

‘No...’ From behind her, Zarif took over the conversation with effortless ease and not the smallest hint of discomfiture.

* * *

Zarif watched his bride exchanging greetings with the children of some of the guests. She was good with little ones, he recognised, watching her animated face and her sparkling eyes as she laughed and chatted, displaying the first warmth she had shown since he saw her at the church. She was so naturally beautiful in her simple elegant gown he had found it a challenge to look away. She had played the bridal role with a shuttered look in her gaze though, polite and smiling but with all true feeling edited out of the show. His wife. The designation still felt like a shock—almost as much of a shock as it had been to his uncle Halim when he phoned him three weeks earlier to break the news.

‘Of course, it is past time for you to take a wife,’ Halim has declared valiantly, holding back on the word, ‘again’, diplomatic and generous to the end. ‘And British like your grandmother? She will be a popular choice with those who wish us to look West rather than East as we move into the future. I shall look forward to meeting her.’

And for an instant Zarif had felt a piercing shame that he was about to foist such a sham on the old man, who had watched his only child, Azel, become Zarif’s first wife, queen and mother before the heart-rending car crash took both her life and that of their son. Devastated, Halim had taken refuge in his academic books, finally requesting permission to leave palace politics and return to his professorship at the university where lectures and students had, at least, distracted him from his grief.

Times without number, Zarif had crushed the futile wish that he too could find such an outlet to escape his memories because the only change in his daily life had been a constant shadow of indescribable loss. Even so, Zarif was well aware that his remarriage, his doing what had to be done and before Halim died, would be a comfort to the older man. After all, Halim had raised his nephew to believe that the stability of Vashir came first and last, before personal feelings, before everything else. And now, for the first time in his life, Zarif was suddenly shockingly conscious that he was guilty of betraying his duty because he had allowed his desire to possess Ella Gilchrist to suppress every other consideration.

Across the room, a little girl was examining Ella’s shiny new platinum wedding band and complaining mournfully that it didn’t sparkle and Ella was explaining the difference between wedding and engagement rings, a clarification that ran out of steam when she was asked why she didn’t have an engagement ring.

Rising to her feet with a rather stilted laugh, Ella abandoned the challenge, her attention roaming to Zarif, tall, dark and extraordinarily handsome in a tailored morning suit teamed with a grey striped silk cravat, where he was chatting to her parents. He was so damned smooth and polished in his every move that she wanted to scream. Nobody would ever have guessed that the wedding was a charade that cast a respectable veil over the most basic transaction possible between a man and a woman. Inside herself she shrank, thinking there could be little difference between her and any other woman who sold her body for money, for wasn’t that exactly what she was doing?

And worst of all, with a male who felt absolutely nothing for her, she reflected wretchedly, for while Zarif’s outer façade of cool might have convinced their small select band of guests that he was a joyful bridegroom, it had not fooled Ella. That rare flashing smile of his had not been in evidence once. She just knew he was thinking about Azel because she could feel the distance and reserve in him, see the haunting darkness in his eyes. The one and only time he had discussed his first wife with her had been the day he proposed marriage to Ella three years earlier and his words then were still branded into her soul like unhealed wounds.

He had referred to Azel as irreplaceable while assuring Ella that he was not asking her to supplant his first wife in her role as that would, apparently, have been an impossible task.

And when she had asked Zarif if he loved her in surely the most poignant question a young woman in love could ask?

‘I will always hold Azel in my heart. I cannot pretend otherwise.’

And yet after that little speech, the living proof that some men wouldn’t understand or recognise emotion unless it was tipped over their heads like boiling oil, Zarif had been stunned when Ella turned his proposal down. Even madly in love and at only twenty-one years of age, Ella had foreseen what a disaster it would have been for her to have even tried to follow in Azel’s perfect footsteps. Zarif, whether he had known it or not, hadn’t been ready or able to put another woman in Azel’s place. Ella, heartbroken, had backed off from such an impossible and thankless challenge.