Free In Bed With a Stranger by India Grey Page A

from last night, of her body, tattooed by shadows as she kneeled astride him. As always, her desire rose to meet his and he felt her move towards him so that her breasts were brushing his chest.
    With a muffled curse he pulled away.
    ‘Don’t stop,’ she murmured, her eyes still closed and her face tipped up to his.
    ‘If I don’t I’ll be taking that dress off right here and making love to you on a pile of silk cushions,’ he said gruffly, ‘and they’re pretty strict about that here.’
    She looked down, biting her lip.
    Gently he unwound the scarf and picked up a tunic in the same colour. The shopkeeper had emerged from the back of his cave-like stall and was looking at them expectantly. His
face was seamed with age, his dark stare gimlet-sharp but friendly enough. There was no trace of the suspicion and mistrust Kit saw in people’s eyes when he was in uniform. So why was his heart beating faster, his fingers buzzing and nerveless?
    He suddenly felt inexpressibly weary. This morning he had been eaten up with guilt for putting it all behind him and forgetting. Now he knew that if he didn’t, the remembering would drive him mad.
    If he wasn’t there already.
    He handed the money over without bothering to haggle and went back to Sophie, draping the scarf around her shoulders.
    ‘Now, Salome,’ he said dryly, ‘if I tell you that the hotel has a highly recommended hammam, can I tempt you to come back with me?’
    Lying on her tummy in the dense, smoky heat of the Dar Roumana’s hammam, Sophie closed her eyes and tried to empty her mind, focusing on nothing but the sensation of warm oiled hands moving across her back.
    The trouble was her mind didn’t want to be empty. It was too full of Kit, and if she let her guard down the hands of the masseuse would reawaken the rapture in which he had drenched her. When they’d got back from the souk, hot and dusty, he had stripped her off and carried her into the enormous walk-in rainshower. Turning the setting to ‘mist’, they had lain on the limestone tiles and wordlessly drunk each other in.
    But he hadn’t talked to her, hissed a nasty little voice in her head. From the moment they’d woken up this morning she’d sensed a kind of tension in him, which had become increasingly obvious in the souk earlier. When she tried to ask what was bothering him he brushed her off, so she still had no idea what demons crouched at his back or what had put them there.
    She was so lost in thought that it was a moment before she realised that the masseuse had stopped rubbing her back. Sophie opened her eyes. Gracefully the girl unfurled a towel and held it out to her.
    ‘Time for wash now.’
    ‘Wash?’ Thinking of the shower, Sophie was about to say that wouldn’t be necessary.
    ‘Is Moroccan hammam speciality. This way.’
    Hastily doing up the clasp of her bikini top, Sophie followed her into a hexagonal room whose pale marble walls dripped with moisture. A huge marble slab stood, altar-like, in the centre of the space. Climbing onto it, Sophie felt like an offering.
    The heat was intense. Rivulets of sweat dripped down her back. The girl scooped a bowl of water out of a wooden bucket and tipped it over her shoulders. Sophie tucked her knees up and rested her chin on them, submitting to her ministrations like an obedient child.
    She had thought that getting away from London would make it easier. Perhaps he just needed time, she thought wistfully, allowing the masseuse to take hold of her arm and soap it from wrist to shoulder. Sophie had spent enough time on film sets to understand the bond created when people were thrown together in an intense environment. She knew the feeling of disorientation when returning to real life in the outside world, when for a while it felt impossible to connect with anyone who wasn’t there.
    For Kit, returning from a war zone rather than a film set, that feeling must be intensified a thousandfold. She knew how concerned he was about the boy