To Touch a Sheikh (11 page)

She was…everything.

It had been five days since they started. Nine since he'd brought her here. He could no longer remember anything before that time, or that a world outside their seclusion existed. He wouldn't
let
it exist, or anything intrude. He had to make sure what they shared was strong enough that nothing ever could.

She'd forgotten the outside world, too, hadn't even mentioned going back. And he wasn't bringing up the possibility.

For the past days, he'd been doing what he wished he could do indefinitely—taking her exploring and enjoying his hideaway where he felt most in harmony with himself and all of existence.

He'd thought he'd known this place as intimately as he did his body. She'd made him realize he hadn't known the potential either held until he'd shared them with her, experienced them through their affinity, through her eyes and senses and wonder.

He'd come to depend on her opinion, her enthusiasm, her pleasure, on knowing he fulfilled her in so many ways, on
opening himself for her to take of him what she would. She shook him to his core with the totality of her reciprocation, made him feel invincible.

She'd been right. They worked. Spectacularly. In every way.

Now she was rushing back to him, her strong, smooth limbs glistening as she splashed through the pool that had gathered in the slope of the dune. Her eyes were honey in the cloud-laden light, her smile delight and desire.

She grabbed him, climbed him, tasting and owning him all over, drinking the rain from his flesh, igniting his simmering hunger, boosting his expanded awareness, his very life.

He let her slide down his naked upper body, reveling as the movement peeled up the shirt she wore and her slick flesh glided over his.

He took her lips, murmured inside her, “Thank you.”

She kissed him back with that wholeheartedness that made him feel desired down to his last cell, made him believe he could fly,
did
fly, as long as he was with her, as long as she wanted him.

Aih,
he realized he sounded trite and insipid and ludicrous. He'd wondered many times if his brothers had been infectious and he'd contracted the same malady that had felled them.

But he couldn't bring himself to find what she made him feel abhorrent or laughable or pathetic. He only found it…miraculous.

She pulled back to smile her ardor at him. “You're so very welcome. For what?”

He tightened his hold. “For not giving up on me.”

He tried not to shudder as the memory assailed him. When he'd thought she had. Discovering his ex-wife's scheme to murder him slowly hadn't been a fraction as brutal.

Her eyes became solemn even as her smile remained impish. “It wasn't possible. I loved you too much. Or I knew I would love you if you let me close. Now that you have, I know I was wrong. I far more than love you.
Ana aashagak.
”

Everything inside him hit pause.

He hadn't given what he felt for her a name. He didn't
want
to give it one. A label would taint it with its limitations and specifics. He didn't want to find himself, or what they shared, trapped in the mold that labels besieged people with.

It disturbed him when she lavished endearments on him.
Habibi, hayati, rohi, galbi
—my love, my life, my soul, my heart. But he relegated them to hyperbole inflicted by arousal and ecstasy. He'd thought she was as content to revel in what they had without constraining it within a preset concept.

Now she had.

And she hadn't even named what she felt for him love, the emotion he despised, what in its name people committed and endured stupidities and insanities, even atrocities. She'd gone further and proclaimed it to be
eshg.
Something far superior to love, more encompassing and profound and unswerving, yet steeped in the most insatiable of carnal desires.

“Hey, don't look so grim.” She combed her fingers through his hair, gave it tiny tugs until he and his tension melted in her arms. She completed his enervation with a radiant smile. “It's what I always felt and saying it out loud doesn't change a thing.”

But it did. It introduced volatile elements and expectations. They worked perfectly as they were. Anything new was bound to introduce imbalance and imperfection. He
couldn't
have that. “Love and
eshg
don't exist. But this—” he clutched her tighter around him “—what we have, does. And I intend to mine its depths and savor its every last spark.”

Shadows entered her eyes at his vehemence, the honey becoming turbid.

His heart pummeled his ribs. Had she needed him to give her back the words? Would his rejection of their very concepts eat at her certainty until she pulled away, in preparation for an end he might have just convinced her would inevitably come?

He was about to succumb, give her whatever she wished for if it would restore her spontaneity, her confidence in her hold over him, when her face relinquished its disturbance, opening up again.

She bit his earlobe. “I so adoringly approve of your intentions, Your Royal Intensity. How about a demonstration?”

Arousal and relief almost buckled his knees.

He guffawed and swept her over his shoulder.

She screeched in shocked elation, sank her teeth in his shoulder blades. It made him almost throw her down and take her right there.

But he had to last until he got her to the setting he'd arranged early this morning when she'd still been sleeping. The cave at the bottom of the dune cliff that the cabin sat above. He almost felt his feet leaving the ground, the soggy sand no match for his eagerness.

Facing away from storm pathways had always saved the cave from being obliterated, but wind-blown sand had polished the rocks beyond its entrance so that they sparkled like gems in the rain. The palm trees it protected, drinking deep from the spring it enclosed, were verdant and heavy with crimson dates in the cleansing rain. The sight of them had images of Maram climbing the ones behind his cabin as he'd taught her flooding his mind's eye.

She ratcheted up his inflammation, giggling and wriggling and raining caresses and bites over his buttocks and back, her wet hair swinging over his sensitized flesh more lashes of arousal.

He threw her down on the inflatable mattress he'd placed a dozen feet from the cave's mouth, the centerpiece of his seduction scene. The wind countering the storm was blowing rain almost to the cave's center, drenching the mattress. She slid on it, laughed harder, loving his urgency, lunged up, dragged him down on top of her. He sank into her arms and welcome, crashed his hunger into hers.

Addicted. That was what he was. From the first touch. What he'd been afraid of, what he'd warned her about. There was no other word for it. The more he had of her, the more he wanted, the deeper his dependence, the less he could wait to have her.

The only thing that ameliorated the…ache of knowing she'd
shared her body with others was that she hadn't done so since she'd first seen him. The precautions she took had been installed by her second marriage and then maintained in hope of intimacy with him. But what appeased him most was that she said she'd shared passion only with him. He believed her. He could no longer think of distrusting anything she did or said. Which only deepened his surrender to what raged between them.

He tore himself from their fusion, growled, “I hope you're ready for this demonstration. It's going to be a doozy.”

She threw her arms over her head, thrust her breasts at him in aggressive surrender, her eyes telling him she knew it would be, but the lips he'd just ravaged crooned, “Braggart.”

He knew he must look like a grinning wolf as he soaked up her ribbing. “Going by your satisfaction ratings, I'd say I'm being annoyingly self-effacing.”

He tore his shirt off her, knowing she'd relish his ferocity. She repaid him in kind, stripping off his jogging pants, which he wore all the time now. He, and she, could no longer bear anything more detaining than elastic waistbands. Then she tackled him to the mattress, sank into him her teeth and nails and craving, struggling to get closer, take first, give more. He loved how she'd become an equal participant in their passionate duels. But her arousal scorched his senses, slashed away the man's skin, left only a beast in the grip of mating frenzy.

He swept her around again, pressed between her eagerly spreading thighs. “You got this wrong, Princess Delirium, this is
my
demonstration. I have a record to uphold, allegations to refute. Not to mention threats to fulfill.”

His hand bunched in her soaking locks. His eyes locked with hers as the rain pounded over them to the rhythm of their hearts. Then, as if by agreement, they both looked down to watch the wonder of their joining as he sank into her depths in one fluid thrust.

He swallowed her keen at his invasion, poured out his growl at her captivation as her flesh yielded to his shaft, sucking him into an inferno of sensation. The carnality, the reality, the
meaning
of being inside her was sometimes too much. He needed to cede his all to her, to pierce her essence and consume her.

He glided out of her tightness, pummeled back just as she pumped up, impaling herself further on his erection. Pleasure detonated, almost blew out his arteries.

“Maram…
ma beyseer feeh mot'ah kahadi
—there can't be pleasure like this, there can't be…” He heard his voice, that of the beast he felt he'd become. “Take it, Maram, give it all to me…”

Her cries rang out at his every thrust, shattering him with bolts of stimulation. “Yes…Amjad…
yes
—”

She crushed herself against him as if to merge their bodies, catapulting him into a frenzy. He pounded into her now, knowing only his full power would unleash her needs, wring her magnificent body of every spark of pleasure it could yield.

The heat, the friction escalated until he sensed she couldn't take any more, needed release before the heart thundering beneath his burst from the buildup.

He tilted her hips, angled himself before he sank inside her to the root, hitting her inner triggers in a plunge that had him lodging into her womb.

She lurched like a marionette with her strings snapped, plunging him deeper inside her. Then she shattered around him, her flesh gripping at his shaft, wringing her pleasure from him, the flood of her release razing him, the current of her peak almost agonizing in its pleasure.

He'd been able to practice control, not only to prolong the pleasure, but because he'd been too afraid of himself, of hurting her, of her response if he unleashed his full ferocity. And they'd practiced the incredible experience together, building their pleasure to near-infinity.

But after he'd become secure she could take him, did want him in all of his moods, there had been times when he'd wanted to be rough and wild, no buildups, just abrupt possession and explosive release inside her. Every time she'd read him right, had begged him to let go.

Now was such a time.

She again knew, urged him on. “Give to me, Amjad…
fill me.
”

Her frenzy snapped his sanity. He detonated inside her, a stream of ecstasy surging through his length, pouring his essence into the recesses of her femininity.

In his long-receded coherence, something niggled. Something that felt like regret. That it wouldn't take root, wouldn't bind them in even more profound ways than what they shared now…

Then everything vanished. He heard nothing but his groans echoing her sobs, felt nothing but their flesh straining together, melting into each other in the quivering surplus.

When his senses coalesced, it was dark and it had stopped raining. He lifted his weight from her on shaking arms. She seemed to come to only when he moved, then she whimpered, limp hands trying to pull him back as he left her depths.

He kissed and folded them on her tummy before swaying up to light the oil lamps. He came back, and she stretched up her arms.

He huffed in self-deprecation. “I'll oblige you. In a while. You can't have your fill of…cake and eat it, too.”

She chuckled as she rubbed her thighs together. “I don't think I can have more…cake for a while either. That was one
hell
of a doozy. All I'm good for now is snuggling.”

He laughed as he bent on unsteady legs, scooped her up and headed to the spring. He stepped into the cool waters, sat in the shallow end with her draped across him, sank into the luxury of her kisses and sighs.

At length he sighed, too. “Snuggling is good. Very, very good.”

She chuckled and dragged him deeper into the goodness.

His time with her was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Better than he'd ever dreamed.

Better than he deserved?

He swatted that thought away. As she'd told him, whatever
he didn't already deserve, he would do what it took so that he did from this time forward.

Anything?
A voice scorned.
Have you forgotten how this all started? Pride of Zohayd. Her thief of a father. Ring any bells?

It could ring a million bells. More than ever, he had to make sure Maram didn't get a whiff of the sordid mess. Starting tomorrow, he'd deal with it. And she'd never know a thing.

Everything depended on it.

 

Maram stretched in bed, gloriously sore and satisfied.

She listened for Amjad's movements outside. Nothing. She turned her head and saw the note by the room's opening.

Gone to feed my other Dahabeyah. Will return to feed the feline one I left purring in bed in thirty.

She giggled, hugged herself and again went over the lifetime they'd shared during the past days in stunned wonder.

She'd thought there was nothing to do around here but love Amjad. He'd proved her wrong and then some. He'd taken her hiking through the majestic desert by moonlight, exploring the incredible caves at dawn, climbing palm trees for ripe dates in the afternoon and skating on the dunes and jogging on the hard sand trails at twilight. After each exhausting, exhilarating activity, they'd set up a picnic, replenished and then they'd loved, in every possible way.