Protecting the Desert Heir

Harder. Deeper. Longer. Hotter.

He wrapped her legs around his waist and held her there, twined around him with no other support, making her tremble at the strength he displayed so offhandedly—and then he shifted again, so their hips dragged against each other, his hardness against the part of her that was the neediest, and she moaned into his mouth.

She’d never liked being touched. But she found that didn’t apply to Rihad, who couldn’t seem to touch her enough.

And right at that moment, she didn’t care why that was. She would die if he knew, she thought. If he comprehended how untouched she truly was.

It wasn’t until her back came up against something that she realized it wasn’t just that spinning in her head that was making her feel loose and adrift—he’d walked over and laid her out on the table like his very own banquet.

“Reach up,” he ordered her, sounding more like a king than she’d ever heard him sound before, and there was probably something deeply wrong with her that she liked it. More than liked it—that hot, dark note in his voice swept over her skin as if he’d used his mouth against her, his mouth and his wicked tongue. “Hold on.”

She did as he asked. As he commanded. She didn’t even think twice about it, and not only because she wanted him to think she was that slut everyone believed she was, but also because that was so much easier than who she really was.

Sterling reached up over her head and grabbed the far edge of the table as he leaned in harder, pressing his hips against hers even as this new position made her back arch, as if she was offering up her breasts to him.

She was. She hoped she looked as if she’d done this a thousand times before—or even if she didn’t, that he’d be too interested in her breasts to care.

He smiled dangerously as he looked down at the place their bodies pressed together, and Sterling felt the glow of that sweep over her. Through her, hard and hot and needy, until it settled like a lightning bolt between her legs.

She bucked against him, helpless against these new sensations, and he laughed.

And then he bent down and found her nipple through the gauzy material of her dress with that dangerously clever mouth of his, so hot and so demanding, and sucked it straight into all that heat.

Sterling lost her mind.

There was nothing then, but the fire that rolled through her, one bright flame after the next, building toward something so immense, so impossible, that she would have been afraid of it if she’d been able to catch her breath.

But Rihad didn’t allow that.

He pressed the proof of his need hard into the place she hungered for him the most, soft and wet and wild for him even through the trousers he wore, with her ankles locked in the small of his strong back. He set a lazy, mind-melting rhythm, and Sterling could do nothing but meet it, shuddering more with every roll of his lethal hips.

She didn’t know what she was doing. But she couldn’t seem to stop.

His mouth teased her breasts through her dress while his hands streaked beneath it, testing her shape, her heat. Learning all kinds of things about her. That she rarely bothered with a bra, even these days when her breasts were still bigger than they’d been before her pregnancy. That a careful pinch against one nipple and a deep tug on the other made her clutch her legs tighter around him and ride him shamelessly, rubbing herself against him as wantonly as she could—

And then it slammed into her.

Like a train.

She cried out, but he was there, licking the sound of it from her lips, moving his own hips harder against hers, making it go on and on and on.

Making her shatter, then shatter again, then shatter once more.

Changing everything.

Changing the whole world.

Turning Sterling into someone new.

And when it was over, he let her drop her legs from around his waist and took a step back while she simply lay sprawled there on the table in a thousand pieces, trying to breathe.

It took a while and even then, it was a shaky thing.

When she sat up and pulled her dress back down to cover her, Rihad stood there above her, his dark face hard and his golden eyes glittering. He folded his arms over his powerful chest and considered her for a long, breathless moment, as if he wasn’t still so aroused that she could see the proof of it pressing against the front of his trousers, hard and thick, and how could she still want him? Even now?

Even as the events of this morning flooded her, making her question a lot of things. Her sanity chief among them.

“Congratulations, Sterling,” Rihad said in that low, rough voice of his that kicked up that fire in her all over again. “You succeeded in distracting me. How long do you think that will work?”