His Sterling. His queen.
Somehow, he moved them to the shallower end of the pool, where he could stand. When he did, he trapped her between the pool’s bank and his body. He felt the wind against the wet shirt on his back, but he didn’t care. He only cared about Sterling. About this. Her hands digging into the flesh at his shoulders. Her legs moving to wrap around his hips again.
And for the first time in his entire adult life, Rihad stopped thinking.
He fumbled between them, wrestling with his soaked trousers to pull himself free. Then, his mouth still fused to hers, he reached down between them, out of finesse and out of his mind as he pushed her little bikini bottom to one side and stroked beneath it, straight into her soft, scalding heat.
“Rihad...” she moaned, straight into his mouth, and it was the sexiest thing he’d ever heard.
He didn’t think. He moved his hand, he held her close and then he simply thrust straight into her, hard and sure, making her truly his at last.
At last.
She made an odd sound, and he pulled back to look down at her lovely face, the haze clearing slightly.
Sterling’s eyes were too big and hinted at some kind of emotion he didn’t recognize. Rihad held himself still, and she breathed hard. Shakily. Once, then again.
“Are you all right, little one?” he asked quietly, still so deep inside of her he thought it might kill him. She was so hot, so wet. Snug around him, as if she’d been made to receive him exactly like this. “Did I hurt you? Are you not yet healed from giving birth?”
“No...” she said, as if she wasn’t sure. Her blue gaze was dark, slick, in the light from the gently dancing lanterns overhead. He frowned as she continued. “I’m fine. I’m healed, I... It’s just... It’s weird, that’s all.”
“Weird,” he repeated, as if the word didn’t make sense, and slid back a few inches, experimentally, just to see what would happen—
And then, impossibly, Sterling McRae blushed.
Bright red. As if, Rihad thought in total fascination, she was entirely innocent. As if this was her first time.
But that was crazy.
Still, once the thought was there, Rihad couldn’t seem to keep himself from indulging it. He’d wanted to lose himself in her, pound them both into delirious oblivion with all the pent-up need that had haunted his every thought of her for months now—but instead, he slowed down. He took his time.
He treated her like the virgin she couldn’t possibly be.
He kissed her everywhere he could see that flushed red skin, until the rosy glow she wore was for another reason entirely. He set a slow, lazy pace, easy and wicked at once, making sure that each time he slid away she clung to him a little more, then pulled him back to her a little harder. He used his mouth and his hands, his teeth and his voice, until she was writhing against him, mindless and moaning, just the way he’d wanted her.
Then he reached down, pressed hard against the center of her need and sent her flying.
And it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. So damned beautiful it hurt—and he wasn’t done.
When she came back to herself, panting and dazed, he went a little bit faster, a little bit harder. He held her where he wanted her and took her until that made her cry out, then splinter all over again, and that time, he went with her.
But he was in no doubt, even then.
Sterling was a virgin.
Or had been one anyway, before she’d entered this pool.
And now she was his.
* * *
Rihad was unusually quiet when he climbed from the pool and then pulled her out behind him, but Sterling was still floating off in the clouds somewhere, too lost in the sensations still storming through her body to care.
He lifted her up and swung her into his arms, then carried her over the sands to his tent, not seeming to notice that he was still in his soaking wet clothes. He shouldered his way inside, where Sterling blinked in the softly lit interior until her eyes adjusted. When they did, she had to bite back a gasp.
Because it was like walking into a dream. Where her tent was like a desert rendition of a high-end hotel room, Rihad’s was something else entirely. It was a pageant of scarlet and gold, from the wide bed on its magnificent, kingly platform to the seating areas, some with pillows on the floor arrayed around what looked like a fireplace, some with wide, inviting couches, some set carefully around what looked like a personal library. There were jeweled chests and thick rugs, tapestries and ornate screens to mark off separate areas, and it felt like all the half-formed fantasies Sterling had ever had about distant harems and the harshly beguiling men who ruled over them.