Mingled wonder and shame coursed through him.

  He had never felt more like a man than when he had been buried inside her body. He had never felt more vulnerable than when confessing four decades of fear: that he could never please a woman; that no woman could ever please him.

  In the end, it had been she who had taken his life in her hands.

  Megan’s leg rode his upper thigh; her head was pillowed on his shoulder. Flyaway hair snagged his chin.

  She slept as innocently as a child, a whore who had offered comfort as well as pleasure. Her cheeks were pale—from sleep? From exhaustion? From satiation?

  Her clitoris had risen against his finger—once. Her vulva had clenched about his verge five times, tighter than his fist.

  She had reached her peak six times in total.

  He watched the stillness of her face, and thought of the man he had nearly betrayed—El Ibn, “the son” of his heart, if not his loins.

  He studied the fan of her lashes, and thought of the woman he had silently loved—safe in the knowledge that she had loved another.

  And knew he would never again be the same.

  He had experienced sexual union.

  One night. With one woman.

  Sexless duty was a pitiful substitute.

  His biceps and calves ached. Dull pressure radiated inside his groin.

  The first would ease with time and exercise; the latter with simple voiding. All he had to do was find the strength to get out of bed, he who had not lingered between the sheets since he was a thirteen-year-old boy, secure in who and what he was.

  Moving slowly, so as not to awaken Megan, he slid out from under her head, her leg, and then the covers.

  His toes curled. The wooden floor was icy.

  Briefly he stood over the bed and watched Megan sleep. Her echoing cries of pleasure rang in his ears.

  She had begged him. To not stop. To fill her more deeply. To love her harder.

  Never had he been so humbled, yet felt so powerful.

  Her black dress lay in a heap where she had stepped out of it to come to his bed. His white turban and thobs, a loose ankle-length shirt, was sprawled on the floor farther away, a visible reminder of the road he had traveled and the distance he had spanned.

  Prior to that night, he would have neatly folded his clothes away before retiring.

  Prior to that night, he would scoop his clothes up now and fold them away.

  Bending down, he grabbed the chamber pot from underneath the wooden slats of the sleigh bed. Crumpled rubber shone in the corner of his eye—the French letter he had used to protect himself from disease. Thin fluid congealed in the bottom of the sheath, proof that even he was capable of ejaculating.

  Plucking up the used prophylactic, he crossed the plank floor. Setting the heavy porcelain down on the chair by the fireplace that no longer emitted even a vestige of warmth, he lifted the lid in his right hand.

  Chipped black print stared up at him.

  Use me well, and keep me clean,

  And I’ll not tell what I have seen.

  A slight smile hitched up his lips. There was a certain bawdy charm about the English.

  Dropping the condom into the bowl, he reached down with his left hand to guide himself. For the first time the term manhood came to mind.

  She had praised him for his size—he who had never thought to receive praise from any woman.

  Hot urine arced into the chipped porcelain; it steamed in the chill morning air. Cursorily shaking himself dry, he replaced the lid.

  Megan would need to make use of the chamber pot when she awakened; he turned, leaving it on the chair for her convenience.

  Shadowy eyes stared up at him from the depths of the narrow sleigh bed. He did not need to see their color to know what it was: they were moss green. Verdant with life as the desert was not.

  His first instinct was to hide himself. For the first time in forty years he did not.

  His head felt oddly light, with no turban to protect his black hair that was liberally streaked with gray. But it was not his head that snared her attention.

  Gaze oddly hesitant, she stared at his groin.

  A prickle of heat rushed down his spine.

  He stood still, waiting for her to laugh—as women in the harem laughed. Afraid to move, lest he invoke the very laughter that he feared.

  “I did not know that men in Arabia shaved their private regions.” Megan’s gaze skidded up to meet his, danced past him. “Is it not chilly in the winter?”

  Her sally fell flat in the chill morning air.

  She had not judged him in the dark of night. But she did now in the light of day, else she would not make sport of his condition.

  The surge of rage took him by surprise.

  “Take another look, madam,” he bit out. “It is more than ‘private’ hair I am missing.”

  Her eyes widened. With uncertainty? Alarm that she had offended an Arab dog?

  He had offered her a gold sovereign. How much more money would it take for her to accept him in the light of day, as she had accepted him in the dark of night?

  She glanced back down and studied him for long seconds.

  Her tongue flecked her lips, a darker shadow in shadowy twilight. “You are not as . . . as large as you were last night, but that is understandable, surely.”

  Megan’s response was naive; it was not manufactured.

  His head snapped back.

  She was a whore. How could she not see the obvious?

  How could she not have felt it last night—that lack of flesh which made a man, a man—when she had grasped him in her hand? How could she mistake him for anything other than what he was, after he had lain between her thighs, buried so deeply inside her vulva that not even the night air had come between them?

  Unless. . . .

  “Who are you?” he snapped.

  Her gaze leaped back to his. The paleness of her face bleached into stark white. “I told you who I am.”

  “You’re not a whore,” he said baldly.

  No whore could fail to observe what she had apparently missed.

  His stomach clenched.

  But if she wasn’t a whore, why had she come to his room?

  What was she doing in his bed?

  He had cried, when he orgasmed, the tears he had not cried for forty years. She had held him, comforted him, loved him as if she were used to men who cursed and cried while they fought to find release inside a woman’s body.

  Who was she?

  Tense seconds passed. A man’s muffled shout for an ostler penetrated the outside hotel wall, a blaring reminder that the night was over and a new day had dawned.

  “I am a widow,” she said finally, evenly. “A patron of this inn, as you are.”

  His eyes narrowed, remembering his observation—that she did not sound as if she were from around Land’s End; remembering her answer—that she was not. Why hadn’t he questioned her further?

  “How is it that you came to my room last night?” he bit out.

  “I overheard you order the innkeeper to find you a . . . a prostitute.” Her breath fogged the air, blurring her face. “I intercepted her in the hallway. I knocked on your door in her stead, hoping you would mistake me for her.”

  And he had.

  A shrill whinny carried on the air; it was followed by a short, sharp, canine bark.

  It dawned on him that he should be cold, standing naked before a woman in a chill English inn, but he wasn’t. Blood pumped through his veins; vivid memories flashed through his mind like colored sand in a kaleidoscope, changing, shifting. Questions he had asked, thinking she was a whore; reassurances she had uttered, encouraging his abandon.

  Had she been disappointed by his ignorance . . . or had she reveled in her sexual superiority?

  Ten half-moons throbbed to life in his shoulders, the imprint of her fingernails.

  Had her flesh clenched around his in enjoyment . . . or frustration?

  She had lied to him, no matter that he, too, lied by inadmission. What did the likes of him know about women?

  How did he know if he had pleased her?

  “Exactly what had you heard about Arabs that incited your curiosity, madam?” he lashed out, masking his vulnerability. “Did you hope that my verge would be larger than that of an Englishman? Arab men are reputed to be masters at pleasuring women. Tell me. What did you hope to gain through your deception?”

  She had not cowered from his curtness the night before, nor did she cower before his anger now.

  “One night, sir. I hoped to gain one night of pleasure.” Her head slid back on the pillow, braid coiling, chin mutinously thrusting forward. “I thought that was what you wished, too, else I would not have taken up your time.”

  A woman lying naked among crumpled bedcovers, with her hair unkempt and her face shiny with dried sweat, should not manifest dignity. But Megan did.

  Unexpected pain ripped through his rage.

  This woman had not belittled him. Ridiculed him. Pitied him.

  I do not judge you, she had said.

  Why not?

  She was an Englishwoman, if not of good breeding, at least from a respectable family.

  How could she accept what harem women did not?

  “I am hadim,” he said brutally.

  “I am English,” she returned.

  Literally translated, hadim meant hairless; in any other language, it meant only one thing.

  He gritted his teeth and forced out the hated word—a word he had hoped not to use with this woman; a word that had haunted him for forty years. “I am a eunuch, madam.”

  The desert was a place of treacherous sand and shrieking wind; it was also a place of stillness and perfect quietude. He had never before witnessed such stillness in an Englishwoman, but he witnessed it now, in Megan.

  Her gaze did not waver from his. “I would say, sir, that your performance last night attests otherwise.”

  Silently, he cursed the heat that blistered his cheeks. He had not blushed in forty years. Twice now this woman had caused him to blush.

  “They cut off my stones,” he said crudely, hoping to shock her. To horrify her.

  To prove that he was not the man she believed him to be, but which he had felt like for one single night.

  She regarded him calmly. “By stones, I take it you mean your ballocks?”

  The tips of his ears pricked hotly at her blunt English. “I have no seed.”

  I have no seed reverberated inside his head—the cry of the thirteen-year-old boy he had once been, irreparably altered. The excuse of the Muslim he had grown up to be, filled with rage.

  His heartbeat pounded in his temples and his groin, counting the seconds, preparing for defense.

  “My husband was a vicar,” Megan said in a clear, dispassionate voice. “When the surgeon told him I was fashioned in such a manner that I would never be able to carry his children, he refused to share my bed. He did not want to endanger my life, he said, by causing me to have any more miscarriages. The local midwife apprised me of certain prophylactics that would prevent conception. My husband refused to use them, even though their use would have allowed us to be together. He said such devices were immoral, and that marital pleasure was solely for the benefit of procreation.”

  The faint protest of a carriage squeaking and the dull clip-clop of hooves broke the stark silence that followed her words; just as suddenly the external sounds faded.

  “I would to God that my husband had had no seed—or that I had been barren,” she concluded with cool decisiveness. “It would have been far more preferable than the loneliness he condemned us to.”

  He stood still, remembering her admission that a man had rejected her.

  Not a young swain, as he had thought. But a man who had shared with her the sexual intimacy that was indeed one of life’s true miracles. A man who had given her pleasure and who had seeded her womb with children she could not bear.

  A man who, by her own admission, she had loved.

  A tide of emotion swept over him: jealousy, at the depth of her affection for her deceased spouse; envy, at the long years of companionship she had shared with him; uncertainty, at how to comfort a woman whom he had admitted into his life solely for his own comfort.

  Anger came to his rescue, that he should feel the need to comfort and, feeling it, did not have the wherewithal to express it.

  Eunuchs could not afford softer emotions.

  “How long have you been a widow?” he asked curtly.

  “Two years.”

  “How many men have you been with since you were a widow, or were you in the habit of slipping into other men’s bedchambers before your husband died?” he asked, cringing at his cruelty, yet wanting to prove that she was a whore in flesh if not profession.

  Wanting to destroy the bond that had been forged between them in the night lest she expect more than he could give, eunuch that he was but did not want to be.

  “My husband is the only man I have ever been with, save for you,” she said stiffly. Her face, framed by her dark hair and white bedding, was ashen. “We were not intimate the last twenty years that he lived.”

  Twenty years. Two years.

  She had been abstinent more than half the number of years he had been a eunuch. Yet she had come to him, a man who was no man.

  “It was your husband whom you asked to touch you,” he said flatly.

  To kiss her. To lick her. To suckle her.

  All the things he had done to her last night.

  Had she imagined that he was her husband?

  “Yes.”

  “He was the man you loved.”

  “Yes. I thought he loved me, too, but he could not have, could he? A man cannot love a woman if he does not respect the needs of her body.”

  She rapidly blinked back tears.

  Of pain. Of anger. Of betrayal.

  Megan, too, knew loneliness.

  Memories of their joining washed over him: the hot core of her vulva; the silky-soft hardness of her feminine bud; the prickle of her pubic hair grinding into his pelvis while she swallowed him whole and did not once judge either his inexperience or his lack of testicles.

  “Women in Arabia use vinegar-soaked wool-plugs,” he said abruptly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Heat crawled down his neck. “As a prophylactic,” he explained shortly.

  “I see.”

  Tension thickened the air.

  Any moment now she was going to get up, dress, and leave. Never knowing what the night had meant to him.

  He desperately strove to divert her. “Is Megan your true name?”

  Even as the words left his mouth, he realized the incongruity of his question. He asked a truth from her that he was not willing to give in return.

  “Yes,” she said, terse as he had been terse. “If you will allow me a few moments of privacy—”

  “Don’t,” he grated.

  He could feel the stiffening of her body. “Don’t what?”

  Don’t leave me.

  “I am not an easy . . . man.”

  Megan’s silent agreement was decipherable in any language.

  He persevered, as he had persevered the last forty years.

  “I do not know how . . . to talk to women.” He spoke carefully, trying to soften his severity, to be what she would want a man to be. “I do not know what pleases them—”

  “I have told you—”

  “But I would please you, Megan,” he interrupted, the harshness kicking in to block out her pending rejection. “If you would let me.”

  Her expression remained inscrutable. “I do not understand what it is that you want from me.”

  Last night she had uttered similar words.

  His needs had not changed.

  He wanted to know what other men knew.

  He wanted to be what other men were.

  “I would have no more pretense or illusions between us,” he said, reigning in hope, harnessing fear.

  “Are you asking me to . . . . to spend more time with you?” she asked guardedly.

  He would never have another chance to experience a woman’s honest sexuality.

  “I am asking you to spend another night with me,” he said tautly.

  “And if I did?”

  His spine felt ready to snap. “I will do whatever you wish.”

  “My husband . . .” Megan shifted; the squeak of the bedsprings scraped across his skin. “I did not ask him to do the things I said to you last night.”

  “You did not ask him to touch you?” he asked, heart pounding, verge stirring, hope thickening his tongue.

  Megan held his gaze, suddenly seeming far younger than her years. “I did not ask him to . . . to kiss my breasts.”

  “Did you ask him to touch you between your legs?”

  “I did not have the courage to,” she admitted.

  But she had possessed the courage to come to him. To tell him what she wanted.

  A eunuch had no right to feel exultation at hearing that a woman sought intimacies with him that she had not sought from a man. But he felt that rush of possessiveness now for Megan, knowing he could give what her husband had not.

  He remembered her closed lips when she kissed him. Her uncertainty at how she should move on his verge when she straddled his lap.

  Her blatant curiosity. Her uninhibited response.

  He was inexperienced, but he was not ignorant of sexual practices.

  She was both ignorant, he realized, and inexperienced.

  “Would you like me to kiss your clitoris?” he asked abruptly.

  “What?”

  Megan’s shock was not feigned.

  “Men kiss women on their clitoris,” he said, deliberately enticing her with the lure of her sexuality. “They lick them. They suckle them.”

  Until they reached a peak of enjoyment.

  Awareness shimmered between them, he standing before her naked, vulnerable, she covered neck to toes with blankets, equally naked and vulnerable.

  “You would . . . you would do that?” she asked, not quite as composed as before. More like the woman she had been last night when darkness had been their alibi and she had freely admitted her desires.

  “I would,” he affirmed.

 

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