She laughed. It was such a delight to be exposed once again to that unexpected and unusual sense of humor that was the exact thing to tickle hers.
She wiggled against his erection. “I have rock-solid proof to this claim.”
He turned her on her back with a growl before he suddenly stopped. “Have you told your father everything?”
“Since I had no details, I preferred to say nothing.”
“So you disappeared from your so-called engagement party, let them all go insane wondering what happened to you, without a word of explanation?”
“Yep, that’s it in a nutshell.”
His lips suddenly spread into one of those smiles that gave her severe arrhythmia. “I said you were perfection.”
She grinned back. “I’m not going to keep saying look who’s talking. I’ll record it so you can play it back whenever needed.”
He guffawed, his first full-fledged laugh that she’d heard. Or it might be his first ever, since he looked very surprised, as if it had never happened before.
Yeah, right. He’d lived forty years without laughing from the heart even once?
No matter what, he was laughing from the heart now. She adored the ease and humor that flowed between them, when in her experience, postsex had always been tense and almost hostile. But that had been post–disappointing sex. She’d never known what post-earth-shattering sex was like. Till now.
Before he continued his earlier thought that had been interrupted, she held him off for one more question. “You haven’t told me what you do intend.”
He rose on extended arms. Seriousness replaced the mischievous passion in his eyes. “Tell your father to say nothing to Hassan and fly back to Zafrana. We’ll meet him there, where I’ll convene with him and his cabinet to get the details of the kingdom’s problems and debts. I have an idea already, since I spent the past night and day investigating the situation. I expect to set things in motion immediately. Once I do, we’ll go to Saraya and disabuse Hassan of his having the upper hand and the title of your fiancé.”
Her heart tightening, she stared at him in dismay.
Seeming to realize her distress, his gaze filled with concern. “Are you okay? Are you feeling any pain?”
She shook her head, bit her lip. “Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate what you’re doing beyond words. I really want this mess over with and Zafrana out of danger. But I really hoped I didn’t have to go back again.”
His expression cleared then heated, seduction in one lethal package. “But it won’t be the same when you go this time.” He bore down on her. “This time you’ll be with me.”
“You expect to carry on our...affair there? You want to kick up a region-wide scandal?”
“I care nothing what others think, as you know, but for your and your family’s sake, there won’t be a whiff of scandal. I know how to keep a secret.”
Still worried, she murmured, “I bet you can.”
“Leave everything to me and just concentrate on being totally free, on taking everything you want with me.”
When he put it that way, how could she object?
He stabbed his fingers into the hair at her nape, tethering her to the mattress by it, making her gasp then open wide for him, lips and legs. “Say yes, ya jenani.”
Unable and unwilling to say anything else, she cried out, “Yes!” as he plunged inside her.
And all through the night, she said an inordinate amount of yeses to just about everything, every apprehension evaporating in the conflagration that consumed her body and soul.
Six
“Are your sisters to be trusted?”
Jen watched Numair’s lips move, and the constant urge to capture them, lose herself in their pleasure and possession, almost overwhelmed her again.
She had heard him, understood the individual words, yet couldn’t come up with a collective meaning for his question. Her mind’s processing powers were busy catapulting back in time to what those lips had been doing to her for the past three days. Day and night and in between. Up till fifteen minutes ago when her sisters had come on board his private jet now sitting on the tarmac.
After that first night in her apartment, he’d taken her back to his suite at The Plaza, and they hadn’t left it. They’d done nothing but feast on each other, each time better than the one before it. They’d made love in so many ways she’d never known possible, ways she hadn’t dreamed of or thought would be pleasurable. Not until she’d done them with him. She’d been right beyond her wildest dreams. The incredible being known as Numair was the one man to teach her all there was to know about passion, the one who could plumb her sensual potential. And then some.