Effendi

CHAPTER 47 28th October

“I shouldn’t . . .”

“Yeah, so you keep saying,” said Raf. “You shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t have done that . . .” He was grinning like an idiot, he couldn’t help it. Beside him, Zara lay curled tight, with one of her arms thrown across his stomach and tiny beads of sweat tangled in her short dark hair, at the point where it brushed back from her forehead. Quick breaths flexed the cage of her ribs.

“You okay?”

“What do you think?” Zara untangled her legs from his and rolled away. This time round she didn’t bother to pull up a sheet, merely sprawled on Raf’s bed with one arm up over her grey eyes, revealing dark-tipped breasts that were high and perfect and honey-sweet in the early daylight that crept through the windows from the garden outside.

“Do you think they heard?”

Raf listened to the crunch of heels on gravel below, the unmistakable squeal of boots as a soldier executed a perfect about-turn at the end of the path, swivelling on the spot.

“I would imagine so,” he said, straight-faced, only to shake his head when Zara sat up and stared across, eyes wide.

He’d done only what she allowed. Which was more than Zara intended and less than he wanted. She was working to rules, though even Zara wasn’t quite sure whose rules those were.

“How about you,” she asked. “You okay?”

“Sure.” Raf shrugged. “I’m fine.”

“Right.” Her smile was lopsided. “Of course you are.” Zara yanked back his covers. “Anyone can see that.”

Somewhere in the hinterland between midnight and early morning, as the stubborn darkness finally diluted, Raf had first struggled out of his shirt and then his pants, stripping himself bare. Neither of them had suggested Zara might want to do the same. But his hands had caressed her beneath her nightdress and finally found answering movement from her body. Movement that built slowly until she took his hand and almost pushed it into her pants.

“Stand over there,” said Zara, and pointed to a patch of sun that lit the room’s white floor. So Raf did what she asked, aware that she watched as he climbed naked out of the bed and walked across the tiles. When he stood where she wanted, he turned to face her and saw her blush.

“Now what . . . ?”

She knelt with marble tiles cold and hard against her bare knees. There were a dozen good reasons why she shouldn’t be kneeling there. Some personal, some cultural, a few of them even political.

“What?” Raf asked, seeing her shoulders shrug.

“Nothing,” said Zara and then could say no more. She felt his hips tense under her grip and heard him begin to swear softly as his back arched and every muscle in his legs seemed to lock.

She was a republican and Marxist, he was an Ottoman bey. She was new money and he was wealth inherited. No, she scrubbed that, Raf had little money, either way. He was police and her father was a criminal. Iskandryia’s establishment had adopted him and that too made him her enemy. Her father was on trial and he controlled the court. If it was in her power, she would overthrow everything he represented and the order to which he belonged.

And here she was on her knees before a man, something she’d promised herself would never happen. It didn’t matter if it was sex, money, violence or necessity that put a woman there; once there the weight of history made it hard to get back up again.

Zara could feel Raf’s fingers hard on the side of her head, so she took her right hand and wrapped it round him and moved her mouth in time to his need.

And later, with his taste still in her mouth, she led Raf back to the bed and sat beside him while he curled into a foetal ball and slept like the child she guessed he’d never been.

It was impossible that he knew how much she loved him, how much his vulnerability made her afraid.