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“My condition is reversed. My heart beats thirty beats a minute.” Wow. Now that was fitness! “At maximum exertion it reaches seventy. Feel it now.” He clasped her trembling hand to the pulse point below his scar. The artery leaping beneath her touch was doing so at much higher than seventy beats a minute. “That’s what needing to be inside you is doing to me. Holding back is taxing my system more than the toughest survival test.”
Her teeth caught at his magnificent cleft chin and nipped. “Serves you right for holding out on me.”
His lips twitched as he repaid her nip with a nibble that traveled down to her breast. By the time he was suckling one nipple with his fingers tormenting the other, she had tears of arousal pouring down her cheeks.
She dug discharging fingers into his shoulders. “You misunderstood my condition. It’s the same as yours. My heart will stop because it will run out of beats.”
Obeying her desperation at last, he rose above her, caressed the thighs that spread in eagerness for him.
Moving between them, he leaned his daunting bulk over her. “I will stop your heart. With pleasure.”
His sandpaper growl made her swoon, and her hands fumbled with his boxers, needing this last barrier out of the way. His lips tugged in approval of her frenzy, letting her free him. But her hands lost all coordination the moment she released what she’d been begging for. The sheer beauty and size of him was… was…
Her core clenched with intimidation, only to flood in a surplus of readiness.
All she could do now was lie there, open, panting, need tearing at her. “Arjook, Rashid, arjook…”
And still he didn’t plunge inside her. Holding her gaze with an intensity she felt would singe her retinas, he groaned, “Look at me, at us. Look what I’m going to do to you.”
His gaze lowered, taking hers with it to where he held his shaft in his hand. Then he leaned, put the head of his erection to her engorged folds. She cried out at the sensation, her back bowing in a steeper arch of surrender, her core opening to him in total offering.
Growling something indiscernible, one of his hands secured her buttocks while the other moved his shaft against her flesh, bathing himself in her desire. At each nudge, sensations shredded through her, tightening the coil of desperation more with every grind.
Soon he had her on the edge of unraveling again, almost but not quite breaching her. She keened, her undulations fevered, her breathing fractured, her frenzy complete.
Then, holding her by her tresses and by his tempestuous gaze, he growled, “Now look—at us, as I take you, as you take me.”
The moment she obeyed, he slid inside her.
The power of his thrust forged through her barrier, tore it apart, before his shaft stabbed past into the depths that yielded for him.
A scream welled somewhere deep within her, but it couldn’t pummel through the barricade of total shock to her system, to her soul. Everything inside her converged on the part of him that was embedded in her depths like a red-hot lance.
Time stretched before blindness started to part. Harsh breathing, inside her, around her, filling her ears. Her reigniting vision filled with his face. Dark, frozen. His body was bunched over her, still. His eyes ferocious in their focus, unreadable.
But the pain was retreating like a rushing out tide. In its place an unbelievable feeling of fullness was taking over her, an unknown mindlessness rushing in. Her body knew what it wanted. For him to move. To fill her over and over and assuage that maddening ache.
But he didn’t move. His gaze bored into hers until she almost screamed, this time in frustration. Why wasn’t he moving?
“You should have told me.”
Her teeth clattered at the way he said it. At the realization that she hadn’t told him she was—had been—a virgin. She’d been so far out of her mind that she hadn’t considered that fact. Hadn’t realized that was why his invasion had felt like it had ripped her apart until he’d brought it to her attention.
What did he feel about it? Concerned? Worried? Angry? Would he have taken her had he known? Would he stop now?
It was next to impossible to think of anything but being overstretched with his potency, invaded, delirious with the carnality, with the completion. She felt she’d die if he withdrew.
Then he was withdrawing, making her claw at him. “Rashid… don’t leave… don’t stop… arjook—give me…”
When he hesitated, her legs clamped around him, pulling him back into her deepest reaches. This time the cry that escaped her was one of exultation, of ecstasy.
She’d thought he’d filled her on that first thrust. He now felt as if he’d never hit bottom, as if he’d forged all the way inside her to her womb, to her heart. She trembled all over, inside and out, as if with the advance tremors of a major quake.
She arched into him, begging for what would unleash the sensations that would disintegrate her if they accumulated more.
His face clenched on what looked like suffering as he raised himself on his arms. “Stop… I’m hurting you…”
She clung harder. “Only at first—now—ya Ullah ya Rashid—the pleasure of you inside me—I never knew anything could feel like this—that I could ever feel so much pleasure. But I need more, everything, as you promised me. Give it all to me, Rashid… arjook…”
“Anti sehr, j’noon…” His growl, declaring her magic and madness, was that of a man at the end of his tether. It zapped through her with its ferociousness, its desperation, with the hope he would finally give in, give her everything.
And he did. He drove back all the way to the recesses of her essence. Then, holding her gaze, his own as feverish as she knew hers must be, he began to move.
Each glide layered pleasure upon pleasure, burying her under an avalanche. With each stretching of her slick tissues around his invasion, she fell further apart, her surrender to his magic and madness deepening. Needing even more, her demands for it rose until his gentleness caught the fire of urgency, then ferocity, until everything was condensed into one pinpoint of absolute existence where he was plunging deepest inside her. Then it exploded.
She came apart, unraveling on shrieks of his name. She shattered then reformed around his thickness with every discharge, her core straining to drain all the pleasure he was driving into her body. He roared her name, stiffened in her arms, plunged deeper, breaching her completely as jets of his seed filled her. She writhed and wept from the sheer pleasure inundating her, with feeling his release surge against her intimate flesh, his weight and feel as he anchored her in the storm completion itself.
With her body replete to its last cell, lips open on labored breaths and his scar, the world spiraled down into a dark, safe place of contentment—the depths of his embrace….
In a dream state of pervasive bliss, sensations coalesced. She was lying on top of something hot and hard but so perfectly comfortable. And emanating steady, restrained booms.
A roughened caress swept down her back to cup her buttock. No dream had ever felt so bone-meltingly good, so mind-messingly arousing. She opened her eyes, met his.
Rashid. The best thing she’d ever woken up to.
Lying beneath her like a sleek black panther, it was evident he’d been long awake. And watching her.
Delight blossomed at the sight of him, spreading her lips, weighing down her lids, melting everything else. “I’d say good morning, but it would be the understatement of the millennium.”
His caresses continued, igniting every inch they smoothed. “A new adjective has to be coined to describe it, yes.”
Joy quivered in her heart. He thought the same in the cold light of day. He didn’t regret it.
But that look in his eyes… it was new. Nothing she understood…
“I have an adjective for last night, though. Life-changing.”
On that, too, they agreed. Though she was surprised he thought so. He wasn’t the one who’d been saved by the person he’d loved all his life then ended up begging her to take his virginity, which she did while teaching him what ecstasy was.
But she wasn’t about to look that gift miracle in the mouth.
She stretched languorously over his great body, delighting that he was big enough to sleep on, that he seemed to derive as much pleasure from being slept on.
Her voice came out a purr when she said, “And then some.”
“Aih. Neither of our lives will ever be the same again now that they will be forever entwined.”
She raised her head, stared at him. The way he’d said that. And that intent look. He couldn’t possibly mean…
In the next moment, he ended speculation. “Through marriage.”
Seven
“Marriage!”
Laylah’s incredulity echoed in the huge room as she scrambled up from Rashid’s embrace.
She gaped at him as he, too, rose to a sitting position, totally uncaring of his nakedness, or the fact that he was still gloriously aroused. Or maybe he always woke up in the morning like that…?
Focus, moron. Not the time to be drooling over his assets or reliving what he’d done to her with them when he’d just said… said…
“Marriage!”
The word rang out again before she could hold it back.
But who could blame her? Yesterday, she’d woken up never expecting to see Rashid again. Today she woke up in his bed, and he was already talking…
No! She wasn’t going to squeak it out again.
His hand reached out to smooth a long tress off her hot, damp cheek. “Of course. I took your innocence and I don’t—”
“Don’t.” His words hit her like a bucket of ice water in the face. Embarrassed at her nakedness all of a sudden, she groped for the covers she’d kicked to the bottom of the mattress a lifetime ago. “Just don’t even start on that.”
Having Rashid in her life at all was a miracle. Having Rashid as her husband was beyond imaginable. But she was damned if she’d let this progress to a bona fide offer based on that reason.
“You didn’t ‘take my innocence’, I gave it to you. And will you stop being so archaic and so—so… Azmaharian? Innocence, indeed. So now I’m, what, because you’ve ‘taken’ it—wicked?”
The eyes that had hardened and cooled with her every word suddenly softened, heated. “Indeed. But then, you were already that as an innocent. Now the mind boggles at what levels of devastation you’ll attain in your… newly forged wickedness.”
Heat splashed through her as she remembered in detail how he’d… forged said wickedness inside her…
Catching her swollen-from-his-passion-and-stinging-for-more lip in her teeth and letting the cover go, she leaned to rub her face against his chest. “Why don’t we find out?”
He caught her by the shoulders as her lips strayed over his flesh, held her off, his smile filling with indulgence. “We will. We have a lifetime to make extensive explorations of every iota of your potential for sensual mayhem.”
There he went again, talking about lifetimes. Nothing she wanted more than to have several of those entwined with him, but not if it was prodded by his outdated sense of honor.
She pulled back, this time wrapping the cover around her. “Listen, Rashid, I already told you in embarrassing detail how I had this hopeless passion for you. It turns out I didn’t have a clue what passion was all about, something you’ve rectified with enough clues to fill this place. If I thought I wanted you before, now I know, and just how fiercely and totally. If you want me with anything approaching that ferocity and totality, then there’s nothing more that I want than to be with you. Just not ‘through marriage.’“
And she realized the real meaning of yet another word. Ominous. That had to be what defined that scowl.
“You’re refusing to marry me?”
Her heartstrings shook at the darkness in his rumble. “I’m refusing to introduce the concept of ‘marriage’ at this point.”
And if displeasure could take form, it would wear just that face, and lash out with that solar-flare-level glare. “Marriage between us now is not a concept, it’s a necessity.”
“Oh, please, not the ‘innocence’ thing again. I wasn’t saving it for an eventual groom and you did not come and ‘take advantage’ of my ‘vulnerability’ and now you don’t have to offer yourself at the altar of honor and propriety!”
“You were saving it. If you don’t subscribe to our region’s values, why else are you—were you—still a virgin at this age?”
“Gah… at this age? Et tu, Brute?”
“Laylah!”
His warning growl was the essence of deliciousness. She grinned into his stern eyes. “I do subscribe to some regional values, but certainly not this one. So I’ll refer you to my previous confession for the answer to this question and every other you have now or might have in the future.”
“What confession?”
“Do you forget it every time I say it? That I wanted you all my life, of course. What other confession did I make?”
“I remember a night-long medley of revelations.”
She nudged him playfully in the ribs. “Admit it, I’m entertaining.” A twitch almost undid his lips’ disapproving rigidity. Her grin widened. “As for finding me in mint condition at this advanced age, it’s only because I wasn’t about to jump in bed with anyone else when all I wanted was you. You could say I was pointlessly saving it for you. So when fate provided both you and a bed, well—you have firsthand experience with how things progressed. Terminally chivalrous, you did your level best to ward me off, to make me back down. But I left you nowhere to run.”
“I’ve beaten back armies, pulverized my way out of sieges in war zones—on front lines, in boardrooms and in the market. The only reason I didn’t ‘ward you off’ was because I didn’t want to. Because I wanted you so much, I didn’t even stop when I found out you were—yes, here it comes again—an innocent.”
Her heart tap-danced at the momentous confession. That she’d been the one thing Rashid hadn’t been able to resist, and his desire for her the one thing he hadn’t been able to conquer.
Her grin grew teasing, even as her eyes filled with joy. “Take heart. By the time you found out, I was no longer any such thing. But how can you compare me to armies and adversaries? Their attacks only made you stronger, made beating them that much easier. Against my desire, you didn’t have a prayer.”
His grimness deepened as he exhaled. “You got that right. I was never exposed to anything like you. I didn’t know anything like you existed. You… overpower me.”
She fell back on her heels, rocked to her core. That confession was more than huge. It was historic.
But the way he’d said it… “You—you resent that?”
His focus sharpened on her. “No.” The force of his denial defused her rising anxiety. “But… it’s something I have no experience with. I could never abide accepting anything from anyone. Then you come along…” His hand traveled up her arm to her neck then her cheek, cupping it. “The way you want me, what you give me and how much I want it and you—it’s so unknown, I have no idea how to handle it.”
“You’ve handled it all flawlessly so far.” She threw herself at him, hugged him with all her strength. “But if you feel as shaken to your core as I do, are no longer sure if you’re coming or going like I am, that’s all the more reason to take it slowly and not jump into something as big as marriage.” She raised her face to his. “How about we take it one day at a time? And after a reasonable time—let’s say a month, if you can still stand me—you can bring up marriage again?” She pinched his hard cheek. “And if that comes to pass, I’d appreciate an offer, not a decree.”
He arched an eyebrow adamantly. “I won’t wait a month. Not even a day, if it means I won’t have you in my bed in the interim.”
“Bed? What bed?” She chuckled at the lion’s rumble that reverberated in his gut and melted back against him, indulgence turning her to goo. “Down boy. I wouldn’t dream of staying out of your… mattress. In fact, after last night, you just try to keep me off it. And if it was as incredible for you as it was for me…”
Those scrumptiously serious eyes became solemn. “I might not have been an innocent, but what I experienced with you was a first. I meant it when I said last night was life-changing.”
Delight gripped her heart so fiercely she feared it might pierce it. “Then it would be downright self-destructive if we didn’t indulge in this activity as frequently as humanly possible. But there are many more areas where we need to see if we’re that compatible.”
“Last night proved we are, in all areas that matter. You were right when you said we are not strangers. That has to be why we connected so smoothly and deeply.”
She laughed. “Sure. Connecting my tentacles deeply into you sure went smoothly. You’ve set a new record for Male Struggles Against Female Advances.”
“My struggles were a misguided attempt at chivalry, as you so correctly diagnosed.” His eyes lost that gravity, grew heated, hungered. “No more struggling, ever again.”
“That’s better news than anything I ever dared hope for. So can’t you let me, let us, savor this?” She smoothed out his gathering frown. “What’s the rush?”
She caught a relenting glimmer in his eyes, something she was starting to realize meant he was softening inside. “The rush is that your power, which your mother and aunt clearly knew nothing about, is so overwhelming, you shredded my ironclad control. I took you without protection. You might already be pregnant.”
The wish for that to be true was so intense, she couldn’t breathe.
When she could draw air again she said, “That’s still not a reason to rush into marriage.” Even if it was the struggle of her life not to jump on his offer. “I have to admit you were right. We don’t know a lot about each other.”
“We know enough. All the important things.”
Feeling herself on the verge of giving in, she tried again. “Why not take the time to know all the unimportant things, too? I hear those are usually what make people turn each others’ lives into hell and end up breaking them apart.” She ran a teasing finger down the cleft in his chin. “Maybe in a month’s time I’ll find you an incredible bore and you’ll find me an unbearable pain in the neck, and we’ll both be glad we didn’t rush into anything.”
His arm tugged her closer, pulling her into his rock-hard body. “Wanting like this would counteract any boredom you might feel. And it would relieve any neck pain I might suffer.” Before she could argue more, he had her spread and open beneath him. “But though I believe we don’t need it, you can have your month. As long as I have you all through it. And it’s not one day longer.”
Then he took her lips, took her. She welcomed him back into her body, her heart soaring.
She only hoped that by month’s end, his insistence on legitimizing their passion would no longer be driven by any hint of honor, commitment and duty. She wanted the passion itself to be the only reason.
Though what she really yearned for was that he would come to love her. As much as she loved him.
One miracle at a time, she reminded herself, as she drowned in his passion and pleasure again.
“Can we have a bed?”
Laylah stretched her arms up in the air, savoring the soreness in her every muscle as she walked back to Rashid. He was awaiting her return on that mattress where he’d been taking her to heavens she hadn’t known existed for the past week.
“Not that I don’t love that mattress. Literally the best time of my life has been spent on it. I just want some… variation.”
He caught her hand, brought her down on his lap, ensconcing her within his great body. “We can have anything at all that you want. If I don’t anticipate your wishes, just ask.”
Which would be impossible to do. Since their first night together, he’d not only been anticipating her wishes but doing things for her she hadn’t even known to wish for. Like taking her on a surprise flight on his private jet to visit Mira in Tennessee. And surprising her with an ingenious analysis report that would see her business jumping to a whole new level.
He seemed to be thinking of her every minute of the day, and what he could do for her. In his own unique way, he was doing something she’d never dreamed he’d do. He was courting her.
As if she needed to love him more. But she did as he wooed and watched over her, as he pleasured and possessed her. With every word and touch and action, he kept dragging her deeper in love with him. Every moment she shared with him, every breath and glance, was every dream she hadn’t dared believe would come true.
And he hadn’t kept her just to his personal time and domain. He’d shown her his business side, letting her see how a master negotiated deals and waged war, teaching her tricks she couldn’t wait to implement in her own business, tutoring her in the methods of maximum efficiency with minimum effort and time. He let her in on his every secret method, thought process and strategy. He was intense about everything, brilliant in every way.
But what surprised her most was how sensitive and caring he was, in his own subtle, practical, effective way. Not only with her, in and out of bed, but with his people. His right-hand man, Ahmad, had told her yesterday that Rashid’s army of deputies and underlings worshipped the dirt under his feet, would walk into an inferno for him. She believed it.
It was a validation of how right she’d been about him all her life. He was everything she’d ever admired and respected. He was her hero in every way.
She couldn’t imagine how anyone could contemplate anyone else for the throne of Azmahar. In her opinion, no king in history had ever been more qualified.
“I just want a bed,” she said, coming up for breath from his last kiss.
Passion blazed in his black eyes, but his voice betrayed some lightness. “I just gave you carte blanche. Do it justice, ya ameerati, use it well.”
“I did tell you I’m no good at asking for or accepting stuff. I’m no good at wanting stuff. I really want nothing else. So… I’ll just keep this carte blanche to use well in… other areas.”
“In those areas, you already have carte rainbow. But in this area, I’m ahead of you. I’ve already ordered everything that will turn this place into the sensual wonderland where I can do your voluptuous magnificence justice, with all the props that will give me every… variation to pleasure and service you into oblivion.”
If he was already redecorating his place for her, this had to be serious, and long-term. Oh, sure, he’d already asked her to marry him. But that had been driven by honor as much as passion.
This was all passion.
Overwhelmed with joy, she whispered, “I want one more thing.”
“Name it.”
She ran hands trembling with longing to and fro over his head, the dense, cropped silk covering it feeling like velvet beneath her aching palms. “Grow your hair back.”
His caresses stilled, his expression shuttering closed.
Had she tripped one of his proximity sensors? Did he find it easy to give her material things, let her come as close as could be sexually, but when it came to emotional intimacy, he balked?
Just as she was kicking herself for presuming too much, too soon, he pulled her closer, flattening her breasts against his chest, his eyes searing into her soul.
Then he said, “Done.”
Forgetting her decision to never again make such demands of him, she whooped, jumped in his arms, deluged him in kisses before pulling back, letting her greed take over. “Mid-back? In a ponytail?”
His lips twisted. “How about we take it an inch at a time?”
“That’s payback for my ‘day at a time,’ isn’t it?”