and they lay with their fingers tracing each other’s outlines. His muscular arms were as she remembered and his erection still responded to the trace of her finger on the hairs of his thigh. It was Alim who wavered from the sensual tracing and ran his hand along the soft insides of her thighs. He savoured them again with a teasing caress, then tortured her by halting her at the peak of the thrill.
‘Did you ever think of contacting me?’ he asked, and she bit on her lip in frustration. As he held back the pleasure, she became a little more truthful. ‘I wanted to but, you moved to Zethlehan.’
‘Not until recently.’ He looked up. ‘You had months when you could have made contact.’
‘For the pleasure of being rejected again?’ Gabi shot back, and her more honest response was rewarded by a deep kiss to her breast, one that hurt because it was so exquisite.
His fingers stroked her inside and it was his deep desire for her that made Gabi burn and want.
Yet as he removed his fingers and the deep contact of his mouth, she was reminded how abruptly he had ended things between them and as he went to part her legs, she drew them closed.
He parted them with his palm. Not even a hint of pressure, just the soft touch of his skin and she opened to Alim; he came to kneel between her calves.
She felt again like his prey.
He moved her knees and her legs up higher, and her throat was tight as he lowered his head.
‘Gabi...’ he said, and she felt his words in her most intimate space. ‘Tell me...’
Tell him what?
That she loved him and that she was going out of her mind because she lay in the desert with a man who had brought her here on a lie? Yet she was fighting not to plead for him.
His tongue was subtle.
At first.
She considered that she might relax into the caress of his mouth and then his kiss strengthened and he moved down onto his stomach, his tongue slipping inside her. She heard the kiss and swallow of him and she moaned.
‘Tell me...’ he said again.
‘I have thought of you.’
There, she had said it.
His tongue was making love to her and his fingers hurt her thighs but she would not have him lighten his touch, not even a fraction.
Gabi’s hand was turning, searching, for a pillow, a cushion, for an anchor but he was tasting her so deeply her fingers then tugged at his silky hair. His unshaven jaw was rough and delicious and she had never thought she would know such pleasure again.
‘Alim...’
Inadvertently, as she had the night their baby had been born, she sobbed out his name.
Alim liked it.
He liked how she cried out his name as she started to come, and he drank her in, yet she frustrated him too for, even in the throes of passion she did not reveal the truth.
And so he rose from between her legs, left her in the middle of her climax, and reached for a sheath.
Gabi almost screamed in frustration at the sudden dearth of sensation. He rose over her and she ached for him to be inside her, yet he was busy taking the care he had not that first night.
‘Please...’ Gabi begged, and she was about to tell him she was covered, not to worry, for she was on the Pill, but it didn’t matter now; he was over her and squeezing into where she was so swollen, aching and ripe.
‘We don’t want you getting pregnant...’ he said, and she gave in to the bliss, but it was short-lived, for Gabi’s eyes flew open to just one word from Alim.
‘Again...’
He knew!
She was a ball of panic and he was taking her, a mire of sensation, for he was an assault on all of her senses.
His lovemaking was savage. Her pleasure he had taken care of already and now, when perhaps it should be just for him, she was taken to the edge of sanity as Alim unleashed himself.
He spoke words she did not understand but they were harsh and scolding, yet his arms held her tight as he bucked within.
She was dragging her nails down his back and now it was Gabi’s anger that was released. For he had left her, and she had had to fight to survive in a world that did not contain him.
Their teeth clashed, their bodies locked and she bit his shoulder; it felt primal and she was screaming. Her thighs burned now as her legs wrapped tightly around him, and his rapid thrusts had her high and coming so deeply as he shot into her.
‘Never...’ he said, and was about to tell her to never lie again, but as he came, as he felt her deep pulses drag him in, words did not matter.
He lay on top of her and they breathed in air that felt clear and cool, as if a storm had just passed.
It had.
Alim knew, Gabi thought as she lay there.
He kissed her back, a very soft kiss, for the storm really had passed.
She knew he knew now.
‘WERE YOU EVER going to tell me?’
Alim had waited for her breath to even out before he asked her.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Alim said, and he turned his face to Gabi’s. ‘I gave you every opportunity and you said nothing.’
‘I wanted to tell you from a distance.’
‘Why?’
Gabi didn’t answer that for she did not want to admit that being around him made her feel weak and that she’d been scared what she might agree to when she lay by his side.
Here, she felt they could do no wrong.
Here, in the desert, this love did not feel so forbidden, and the idea of being his desert lover felt rather wonderful, in fact.
‘What did we have?’
His words said so much—that he accepted their baby as his and that the question was gently asked brought tears to her eyes.
‘A little girl.’
She was back there again in those lonely hours, giving birth without Alim by her side, but now his hand found hers as she told him their daughter’s name.
‘I called her Lucia.’
‘She is well?’
Gabi nodded for her words were strangled by tears as she heard the care behind his questions.
‘You’ll never forgive me, will you?’
‘Gabi, I accept that the decision would have felt like an impossible one.’
Alim did not like it and maybe later he would resent the times denied to them but now was not that time; there were too many things he needed to know this moment.
‘When did you have her?’
‘The last time we met,’ Gabi said. ‘When you were showing Raul through the hotel.’
Alim frowned. ‘The night I returned to Zethlehan?’
Gabi nodded.
‘You didn’t look pregnant,’ Alim said. ‘Though admittedly I was doing all I could not to look at you.’
‘I lost a lot of weight,’ Gabi told him. ‘I’ve put it all back on, though.’
‘Good.’
He