Sheikh's Possession (7 page)

Why had she accepted this invitation if she was going to hide? Did she take some kind of pride in making a sheikh dance on attendance on her? He had certainly known women who had. However, whenever he tried to get angry about it, he only thought of Berry, with her snapping green eyes and unaffected grace. She was far too direct to engage in the games that he was accustomed to. He couldn't imagine her wanting a man to be consumed with anger and frustration over actions.

However, that only took him back to where he had been before, which was confusion. What was she thinking?

There was a moment in the hall of statues where he had felt something he had never felt before. When their eyes met over the statue of St. Theresa, he had felt something pass between them that took his breath away. A woman who had lived centuries ago had had her sensual thrill immortalized in marble, and suddenly, he had wanted more than anything to see Berry in just such a pose.

To Rasul's distress, she had backed away as if frightened.
Surely he couldn't have frightened her?
The thought was absurd, but it lingered.

The rest of the day, no matter how he had tried to entice her, she had hidden in her room like a scared rabbit. Her actions did not make sense with the bold and spirited woman that he had met, the one that he was half-convinced he was falling in love with.

He was not making any headway in this fashion, so that meant that it was up to him to change his luck. A fisherman who was not catching any fish changed his bait; a hunter who was not felling any game changed his location. He must adapt, and over the course of the night, he wondered what he was going to do.

***

By around eleven a.m. the next morning, Berry had done everything that she could possibly do. She had finished the write-ups and backed them up, she had showered, and she had found the clothes that Rasul had promised in the closets. After some deliberation, she found a light dress in a summery green that fit as if it was tailored for her slenderness, and as an afterthought, she braided her chestnut hair and let the braid hang down behind her.

When her stomach rumbled, she knew that it was time to give up and come out of her hiding place.

Walking through the halls of the mansion, for that was the only word she could come up with to describe the place, Berry felt very small. Rasul's family had been in power for hundreds of years, and their family line was distinguished for its wealth and its pride. When she went past the surprisingly homey wall of family portraits, she stopped to look at the one of Rasul's parents again. What would his father, so stern and like his son, have thought of her? Would his mother, so lovely and serious, have liked her, or would she have thought that her son was choosing someone beneath himself? There was no way to tell, and finally, she simply walked on.

The kitchen was an airy and sunny place, and Berry was only a little startled to find Rasul there. He looked up from his phone when she entered, and smiled slightly.

"So the sleeping beauty has emerged," he teased. "Did you sleep well?"

Abruptly, his innocent words made her blush. She thought of her dreams, where a dark man with light eyes had touched her all over before making her his, and she shook them away.

"Yes! That is, I did," she said, a little more calmly. "I did. Did you?"

He shrugged. "It was perhaps a little dull," he said. "I was half hoping that you would finish with your work early and we could entertain each other."

There were so many ways for her to take that. She fought back the blush decisively, smiling a little at him. "Well, I'm happy to say that I'm completely done with the write-ups now, and I am at your disposal."

He raised an eyebrow, and she was reminded all over again of her own cowardice when it came to how she had hidden all day yesterday.

"Really?"

"Really," Berry insisted. "In fact … I decided I liked your idea of staying for the weekend."

If anything, Rasul's eyebrow went even higher. "I will warn you that neither of us will be entertained if you stay in your room with the door closed," he said mildly, and hearing the implicit challenge in his voice, Berry lifted her chin.

"I won't," she said. "And unless you have more antiques for me to take a look at … well, I'm all yours."

So far, she and Rasul had been chatting together mildly enough, the flames between them low and easy to ignore. When she said those words to him, his eyes lit up. It was, she thought, like waving a red flag before the bull, and now she knew how the matadors of Spain felt.

"That is what you wish?" he asked, his voice intent and low. After a moment, she nodded, her tongue tied and her throat dry.

As she watched in an agony of anticipation, he stalked towards her. She backed up until she hit the wall behind her, and could go no farther. Still he came on until he was lightly pressing her to the wall with his bulk. She whimpered a little as he touched her chin, making her lift her face to his.

Without a word, without a warning or anything else, he lowered his mouth to hers. The kisses that they had enjoyed before were rough and hurried things, powerful for their speed and strength. This kiss, however, was powerful simply due to the slowness and deliberation of it, to the sweetness of being able to enjoy each other.

As Rasul kissed her, Berry lost all of the fear and hesitation that she had been harboring. Instead, under his masterful touch, she gave herself up to the kiss and to the power of his need that made hers rise up so high. He kissed her the way that she had always wanted to be kissed, and when he pulled back, she looked at him with a small degree of shock.

"Rasul?"

He smiled slightly. She saw with a fascinated glance that his lips were red with what they had done, and she knew that hers must be the same.

"That is just the start of what I want to do with you," he murmured, "but before we do anything, I want you to be sure. However … I have started to wonder if part of the misunderstanding between us is how you want to move forward."

"How I want to—"

"It is a simple thing," he said with a slight smile. "For the next twenty-four hours, you may say no to anything that you wish. If you tell me no, than I will stop. However, I am free to do as I like until you say no. Is that clear?"

For a moment, she was so struck by the sheer eroticism of his plan that she was silent. Then Berry nodded. "Yes," she said, and if her voice came out huskier than she thought it should, neither of them commented on it.

"Good," he said.

For a moment, she thought that he was going to start in with their strange experiment that very moment, but then he stepped back to the refrigerator.

"It is a bit late for breakfast, but perhaps you would like an omelet for brunch?"

For a moment, she didn't realize what he was asking, but then she heard him and laughed. "Yes, eggs sound very good," she said.

What had she been thinking, after all? No matter what her fantasies were, Rasul was a real man who lived in the real world. She couldn't expect her erotic fantasies to take over completely.

At least, that was what she thought until he gave her some green onions and a knife and directed her to a cutting board at the kitchen island. She was thinking of nothing more than getting the onions chopped for their meal when he came up behind her, his arms wrapped loosely around her waist.

"I do not think that you have any idea how beautiful you truly are," he whispered. "I do not think that you understand how very much any man seeing you would want you."

"I … I think I have had many men look at me and decide that they didn't want me," she whispered self-consciously. "I'm tall, and my hair is dull and I'm so flat …"

"You are elegant," he corrected, "and your hair shines like a rare wood and as for your figure …"

She held her breath as his hands wandered up her sides to cup her small breasts in his hands. The tingles from his touch were enough to make her gasp, and then he squeezed gently, making her press back against him for more. Her mind was filled with the idea of him sweeping the onions aside, bending her over, lifting her skirt, and …

To her intense regret, however, he stepped back. "The men who turned you down were fools," he said decisively.

And then, as her face was flushed with heat for him and as she was close to whimpering with want, he returned to the heating skillet.

"I can tell you're looking at me," he said calmly. "Hadn't you better get back to the green onions?"

For one brief and delicious moment, she wondered what he would do if she threw those green onions at his head. Would he come back and pin her against the kitchen island again? Would he growl her name and kiss her until she felt faint?

Instead, Berry took a deep breath to get herself back under control, and smiled a little. "Right away, chef," she said jauntily, and got to work.

One thing that she had realized was that it was simply better to step back and to see where Rasul went. At the moment, there was something intensely freeing about leaving the next twenty-four hours up to him. He was going to be the one who decided what they did, and she had a feeling that she was not going to be using her no very much at all …

CHAPTER SEVEN

There were one or two more antiquities that Rasul wanted her to take a look at. He led her through the manor, stopping to point out rare bits of his family's history.

"What is it like?" she asked finally, after seeing a lance that a distant ancestor had used in the cavalry.

He glanced at her. "What do you mean?"

"What's it like to have all of this history, all of this family? I barely knew my grandparents, and most of my friends in the United States, when we stand up, we only stand up for ourselves. No one I know has ever had to represent a family name, or anything like that."

Rasul thought for a moment, running his thumb along the rounded handle of the lance. Generations ago a man who perhaps looked a great deal like Rasul had mounted his horse and rode into battle with only a lance made of wood to ensure that he could defend himself and all he held dear. Now his descendent stood in designer clothes in a house high on an impassable mountain, a woman from halfway across the world at his side. If she thought about it too much, she could become overwhelmed.

"You may not believe me," he said finally, "but it sometimes feels very empty."

She blinked. That hadn't been what she thought he was going to say at all. "Lonely?"

"Yes. I can count my lineage back for generations, back to a time when people were defined by who they were related to and what their legacies were. My father, before he died, was always very stern about how I represented the people who came before me and who had died, so that I could stand where I stood that day."

Berry considered it for a moment. "That sounds like a great deal of pressure for a young child," she said cautiously, and he smiled at her. It was a brief and fleeting thing, but there was a bit of old pain there that she longed to soothe.

"It could be. But I think overall, I was grateful for it. It is … incredible to look back over the long list of people who made me who I am. It made some of my more awkward teen moments particularly embarrassing, but when I thought about it during my victories, it made me feel like a strong link in a chain that goes back centuries."

The moment passed, but as it did, Rasul reached out and squeezed her hand gently, a touch that was there and gone before they moved on. For some reason, that gentle touch stuck with her. Despite the physical intimacy that sprang up between them at a moment's notice, despite the power of the electricity between them, there was something almost shockingly personal about how that gentle squeeze had felt. It was something that was passed between people who knew each other well, and who cared about each other.

That day, she helped him calculate the value and history of a set of armor that had been in the family so long he didn't even know when it had appeared, and a small chair that had simply been left in the room of a long-deceased great-aunt. Seeing the chair had made Berry laugh until she cried.

"Only you," she said, when Rasul had looked alarmed. "Only you would have an old chair that belonged to a great-aunt that turned out to be worth some fifty thousand dollars."

He had looked at her skeptically. "That seems truly unlikely," he said. "Are you just teasing me?"

She shook her head, and reaching for her tablet, she pulled up a recent auction from Sotheby's. A chair identical to the one that was reposing in dust and drapes in front of them had sold for almost sixty thousand dollars at auction.

Rasul raised his eyebrows. "That's impressive. I suppose my great-aunt had better taste than the rest of us knew. My grandfather was always trying to get rid of that chair …"

"And now you can simply sell it, and endow a research organization or something," she said with a giggle.

There was simply so much history around them, so much to see and do, but throughout the day, Rasul would reach for her. His touch might be a light brush of a fingertip across her cheekbone, or it might be a significantly longer kiss that made her sigh. The only thing those kisses had in common was the fact that they ended long before she was ready for them to do so. Whenever he pulled back, she would feel a moment of disbelief, and then she only wanted him more.

When the day was over, and the shadows were deep in the house, they spent the evening watching the television in the den, as she showed him ridiculous clips from the cartoons that she had watched as a young girl. He had missed all of them, and laughed uproariously at the antics of the shows she had loved.

Every now and then, she was struck by the strangeness of it. They were so very different, but this was something they could share. In that moment, it seemed as if they were not so very different at all.

Of course, most of her thoughtful realizations were completely totaled by the fact that he kept his arm over her shoulder, his fingers tickling along her bare skin there. Somehow during the course of the day, she had become completely sensitive to him. His light touches, his gentle caresses, and the occasional heated kiss had twisted her into something that could only focus on the man sitting next to her now, watching her favorite cartoons from when she was a girl.