“Never said they weren’t,” I answered. “But I don’t separate the mind and the body. I’ve never been an ‘either/or’ man. I can enjoy your mind as well as your body and vice versa. I don’t believe in taking one or the other. I want ’em both.”
“You’re greedy.” she laughed and leaned back.
For the first time the robe came open to reveal the soft swell of her breast, a tantalizing mound for exploring.
I felt my hand move forward involuntarily.
Marina’s eyes were deep, almost black, glistening orbs.
“Maybe I am,” I agreed. “Don’t tell me he never was greedy.”
“Never,” she said. “I told you, we had a very unusual relationship. I often wondered how I could remain so cool and platonic with Anton. I know now that it was he who kept it that way. He made love to me in his own way, with his mind, with music and poetry, with the soft touch of his hand on mine. He never went further than that.”
I kept thinking of Karminian the big drinker, the patron of Fatasha, the devotee of strange and weird sexual pleasures in the medina. This was one hell of a strange cookie, this Karminian.
“You say, you know now that it was Anton who kept it on this level,” I questioned. “Why do you know that now?”
“Because just sitting here I can see it would be impossible with you,” she answered, her eyes twin black coals, glowing with a dark fire.
“You are damned right,” I said.
I leaned forward, took the silk robe at the collar and pulled her to me. I saw her lips part as my mouth moved onto hers, and then I was tasting the sweet honey of her tongue.
She let it play with mine, then withdraw and then come forth again, inviting, tantalizing. Her breath had increased, and now her arms were sliding around my neck.
I felt my hand move onto the soft, smooth skin of her shoulders, my thumb gently pressing in, kneading the skin just beneath her shoulder bones. She tore her lips away and her cheek was against mine.
“No... no,” she gasped. “I... I had forgotten how much I longed for this. But I cannot... no, please.”
I moved my hands down an inch closer to her breasts and heard her draw her breath in sharply. “Why not?” I asked. “Being faithful?”
“Maybe,” she whispered and looked up at me, her eyes asking for understanding.
But, a long time ago, I had learned that understanding is not always compassionate.
“Maybe that’s it,” she said. “Being faithful.”
“To what?” I asked brutally.
I saw the shocked pain flare in her eyes and I reached into the silk robe and seized both lovely, full, pear-shaped breasts.
Marina cried out in anguished ecstasy and threw her head back, eyes closed, still trailing the remnants of her cry into the silent room.
“To what?” I repeated again and rubbed my thumbs over the soft, hardly protruding nipples.
Marina cried out again in half-anguish, half-rapture. It was her last such cry. She reached up and seized my neck, pulling my face down to bury it in her breasts.
I took her breast in my mouth and gently caressed its softness, moving it back and forth under my tongue until Marina was clutching at my back, my shoulders, my neck in a frenzy of desire.
I gently pulled away from her breasts as she gasped in delicious rapture. I took my clothes off slowly, watching her as I did, knowing she gazed at me through half-slit eyes and then, suddenly, she leaped forward to clasp my naked body to her, pressing her face against my abdomen, kissing me with feverish anxiety.
Here was a creature of passion who, in some strange, inverted way, had been able to hold off the roaring volcano that was within her. I was happy to be around for the eruption.
Marina’s long-legged body slid beneath mine, one of the brightly colored pillows supporting the small of her back. She clasped her smooth thighs around my waist and welcomed me with a biting cry of pleasure, a gasp of unsuppressed joy, a cry of desire set free at last.
She moved beneath me, setting her own frenzied rhythm, and I felt the tips of her breasts enlarge and rise up in hunger.
My lips eagerly sought their softness, my tongue tracing gentle paths of pleasure around each eager circle as Marina moaned and murmured and whispered wild words of desire into the night.
Suddenly, I moved from her and for a split second she lay still, her gorgeous body held in suspended animation, and then she exploded against me in a frenzy of hungry passion.
“Oh, no, no,” she gasped. “Oh, God, you can’t stop... oh, no.”
She grabbed at me, pulling me over her, writhing her hips feverishly, and now she was crying little sobs.
When I returned to her she screamed in a glorious mixture of relief and desire, and her hunger was insatiable.
Her mouth found my lips, my chest, as she arched her back, thrusting upward in her feverish desire to enjoy every possible part of me.
I stayed with her this time, moving faster and faster until there were only mountain peaks, each one a little higher than the preceding one, and Marina gasped and cried out in overwhelming pleasure.
I felt her suddenly stiffen, her body grow tight around me and though her lips opened wide there was no sound from her and her deep eyes were in some other world all her own.
Only the quivering stiffness of her body told me what was happening and then, finally, she sighed, a long drawn sigh from the very depths of her innermost being, and she lay there, a limp, spent rag doll, a beautiful rag doll.
I moved beside her, laid my lips against one lovely, upturned breast, and she cradled my head against her.
“It’s been too long,” she whispered, hardly breathing. “And you knew. Somehow, you knew.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know the answer, not for certain. Had I known, had I sensed her desires, her needs, in some subconscious way? Or had it been the reverse? Had she sensed, in me, someone with whom all that had been held back could be released?
It had then, for her, been both a surrender and a victory. It was that victory she spoke of later, when she held me close.
“We know so little about each other,” she said. “But this had to be. I knew that from the moment we met.”
Her victory, for her, had been complete but her surrender was equally so, and I knew it in the deep softness of her eyes.
I moved quickly, almost brutally so, knowing that she could no longer hold back.
“Where is Karminian?” I asked softly.
She just shook her head helplessly.
“All right,” I pressed. “Who might know where he is?”
She spoke with her eyes closed, held tightly shut, as though she didn’t want to hear her own words. “There is a man,” she said, “called Rashid the Rif. He lives in the Arab quarter. Anton spoke of having important dealings with him.”
I pressed my lips against one soft, pear-shaped breast.
“It is good you have told me, Marina,” I said, breathing softly against the pink tip. “Believe me.”
She stirred and lifted my head with her hands, gazing deeply into my eyes. “Who are you?” she asked, almost pleadingly.
“A friend,” I answered.
It was true, as far as it went. I would be a friend, and a good friend, so long as it did not conflict with my mission. Friendship, in this business, like love, had its clearly defined limits.
Chapter 3
Marina had made me promise to return soon. It was a promise she needn’t have extracted. I had to push thoughts of her out of my mind.
The memory of her milk-white skin against the blackness of her hair, her beautifully formed breasts, her long, slender thighs, lingered in my mind, distracting, bothersome visions. Her hunger, so long denied, had not been satisfied this one time, I knew.