His Defiant Desert Queen

His lips brushed hers again. “But I am kissing you.”

“No,” she said, arching as he found the hollow beneath her ear and did something delicious to it, so delicious that she clenched inwardly, craving his hard body filling her, warming her, satisfying her. “A proper kiss,” she insisted, no longer caring that she was supposed to resist him. Somehow reality no longer mattered, not when need licked at her veins and Jemma felt starved for sensation.

She reached up to clasp his face, her hands learning the shape of his jaw, the hard angles and planes as she pressed her lips to his, deepening the kiss, focused only on the heat between them.

He drew back after a moment, his eyes almost black in the dark pavilion interior. “Maybe we should stop. I don’t want to force you.”

“I don’t think you’re forcing me,” she said, giving her head a slight shake, as if to clear her head of the heat and need and intense physical craving to be touched. Taken.

She throbbed and pulsed in places that shouldn’t throb and pulse. “If anything, I feel as if I’m forcing you.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “I’m not being forced. Trust me.”

She stroked her hand over the warm hard plane of his face. Such a beautiful face. He was using his good looks against her. His charm, too. “You’re too good at this.”

His laughter was a deep rumble in his chest. “That’s better than being bad at this.”

“You’re making it impossible for me to resist you.”

“But you can. All you have to do is say stop, and we are done. I will never force you to do anything.”

Then his mouth traveled down her neck, over her collarbone, down her chest, to the swell of her breasts. He lips teased the underside of the breast through the fabric of her bikini, finding nerves in every place he touched. She shivered, gasping as his mouth settled over her taut nibble, sucking the tip through the fabric.

She arched as he sucked harder, the pressure of his mouth making her inner thighs clench together with need.

She was the one to tug the fabric away from her breasts, exposing her nipple, and she was the one to draw his head back down, so his lips covered her bare breast.

She sighed at the feel of his mouth on her hot skin. His lips were warm, the tip of his tongue cool, but once he took the tight bud of her nipple in his mouth, it was his mouth that felt hot, wet, and she gasped, arching into him, her hips lifting, grinding, her body on fire.

She wanted him to take her now. She wanted his hands between her thighs, peeling her bikini bottoms off, wanted him to part her knees and thrust deep into her body, filling her, making the maddening ache inside of her go away.

But he didn’t go lower, his hands stayed at her breasts, his mouth fastened to her nipple, sucking and licking, drawing hard on her, whipping her to a frenzy. Throbbing, she rolled away from him, and sat up, stunned that he’d brought her to the verge of an orgasm. She would have climaxed, too, if she hadn’t stopped him.

She could barely look at him, excruciatingly shy. The sensations inside her were still so intense. How could she climax without him even touching her between her legs?

Mikael turned her face to him. “Did I scare you?” he asked quietly, his dark eyes searching hers.

She shook her head, but there were tears in her eyes. Her emotions felt wild.

“What then?”

“You’re just very good at all...that.”

He stroked her cheek with his thumb. “It was too much.”

Her eyes burned. Her throat squeezed. “I don’t know you.” His touch was soothing. It eased some of the tension within her, but not enough. “I don’t know you,” she repeated. “And for me to feel this way, physically, I think I should.”

* * *

Jemma always found a way to surprise him.

But it wasn’t her words that surprised him now, as much as her emotion. He felt her confusion. She didn’t understand what she was feeling.

She wasn’t who he thought she was. She was nothing like her father. And her softness and sweetness reminded him of his mother.

Suddenly, he wondered what his mother had been like, as a girl, before she’d married his father. She must have been daring and adventuresome. She was American, after all, and she’d married his father, a sheikh, and although she’d loved the exoticism of her husband’s culture, she’d apparently never assimilated into the culture, and Mikael’s father hadn’t helped her adapt, either. He’d left her to fit in. Left her to sort it out for herself.

A mistake.

But then, their entire marriage had been a mistake. Even he had been a mistake.

His mother had said as much, too.

His chest grew tight, the air bottled inside his lungs.

He did not want his future to be like his past. He did not want his children to grow up with such terrible unhappiness.

He lifted Jemma’s hand, kissed her palm, her wrist, feeling the flutter of her pulse against his lips. Her skin felt soft and warm. She was soft and warm and he felt the strongest urge to protect her.

“I have a gift for you,” he said, leaning back on the cushions.

“I don’t need gifts,” she answered, still unsettled, still reserved. “In fact, material things just leave me cold.”

“So how can I spoil you?”

“I don’t want to be spoiled.”

“What can I give you then?”

She studied him for a long moment. “I want to know about you. Tell me something about you.”

“Me?”

“Rather than presents, every day tell me something new about you.”

“Showering you in jewels would be easier.”

“Exactly.” She looked at him, her expression almost fierce. “So if you want to give me something meaningful, give me part of you. Let me know you. That would be a true gift...one this bride would treasure.”

He smiled faintly. “What shall I tell you? What would you like to know?”

“Tell me more about your mom,” she said promptly. “And your dad.”

“That’s not a very pleasant subject.”

“Parents and divorces never are.”

“So why would you want to know about them?”

“Because they’re important people in our lives. Our parents shape us. For good, and for bad.” Her gaze met his. “Were you closer to one than the other?”

He sighed. He didn’t want to talk about this, he didn’t, but he liked her lying here next to him. She felt good here, and he wanted her to stay. “I don’t remember being close to my father,” he said after a moment. “But I’m sure he doted on me. Saidia parents tend to spoil their children, especially their sons.”

“And your mother?”

“Adored me.” It was uncomfortable talking about his mother. “She was a good mother. But then they divorced.”

“Do you know why they divorced?”

He looked at her. “Do you know why your parents divorced?”

“My dad was having an affair.”

Mikael hated the heaviness in his chest. He reached out and touched a strand of her hair, tugging on it lightly. “My father wanted to take a second wife,” he confessed.

“So they divorced?”

“Eventually.”

“What does that mean?” Jemma asked, turning onto her side.

“It means it took her nearly five years to successfully divorce him. My father didn’t want the divorce, so he contested it.”

“He loved her,” Jemma said.

“I don’t think he loved her. But he didn’t want her to shame him. He was the king. How could his wife leave him?”

Jemma was silent a long moment. “Your mother loved him. She didn’t want to share him?”

“I don’t remember love. I remember fighting. Years of fighting.” And crying. Years of crying. But not the tears of Saidia women. His mother only cried quietly, late at night, when she thought no one was listening.

But he had listened. He had heard her weeping. And he had never done anything about it.

Jemma put her hand on his chest, her palm warm against his skin. “She had to know when she married your father that he might take another wife.”

“She said he promised her that he would never take another wife. She said he had it added to their wedding contract. But it wasn’t there. My father said my mother never added a clause, and that she knew all along there would be other wives. That she was only the first.” He hesitated, trying not to remember too much of those years, and how awful it’d been with the endless fighting, and then his mother crying late at night when the servants were asleep. “By the time the divorce was final, he’d taken three more wives.”

Mikael looked away from the sympathy in Jemma’s eyes, uncomfortable with it. He focused on the ceiling of the pavilion, and the whirring of the fan blades. “I was eleven when the divorce was finalized.”