She didn’t want to stop it.
“Beautiful,” he muttered, and then he pushed the edge of her panties aside and traced the greedy button beneath, and it took Cleo a shuddering breath to realize that the keening sound she heard, edgy and haunted and deliciously needy, came from her. That he’d undone her so easily, with a single touch.
The way he had once before.
“Khaled,” she began, though she had no idea what she meant to say.
Maybe it was more of a prayer, and he only laughed, bracing himself over her with one hand in a fist near her head. And then he twisted his wrist and sent two fingers stroking deep inside her.
And Cleo simply went mad.
She arched into him, wanton and mindless, without a single thought for anything that wasn’t this.
Here. Now. Him.
“Now, Cleo,” he ordered her in that matter-of-fact, authoritative way that made her burn, as if he was the lord and master of her body as well as his country, and she believed it. She felt it. “I cannot wait much longer.”
And she obeyed.
Again and again, she obeyed, shaking and shuddering and falling apart all around him.
And when she came back to herself, when she could breathe again, he was braced above her, the hardest part of him nudged up against her melting softness. Her heart thumped too hard in her chest, and she was caught in all the dark, male heat in his gaze.
“Please,” she whispered, and he thrust deep.
So deep. So perfect. Long and slick and hotter than simple fire.
She didn’t know if she groaned or he did. She didn’t care.
Cleo reached up and held on to him, curling her legs around his hips, and watched his fiercely beautiful face as he set a torturously slow and devilish pace. One deliberately slow thrust, then another, until Cleo was shaking against him, as needy and demanding and wild as if she hadn’t already shattered into pieces.
“Again,” he ordered her.
“I can’t,” she hissed at him, a broken whisper, and the fire inside her raged on.
“Never lie to me, little one,” he whispered, and then he took her mouth with his, wicked and carnal and certain while he thrust so deep below, and she was lost all over again.
And this time, when she burst into too many scattered points of light to remain whole or even herself, he called out her name and followed her.
* * *
Cleo didn’t know how much later it was when Khaled roused himself and slowly peeled her dress from her body. The lanterns still danced with light, and the tent felt hushed all around them, as if the way he looked at her then was sacred.
And if there was that yearning thing in her, dark and deep and lodged behind her heart, that wanted it to be sacred and then some, she ignored it and made herself smile at him. This formidable man who stood at the edge of the vast bed and stripped down in front of her.
Her husband. Her lover. Hers.
Cleo’s mouth went dry. He was even more beautiful without his clothes on, all those smooth, hard planes and lean muscles like poured metal in the flickering light. How could she want him again when she wasn’t sure she’d recovered from having him once already? But her body stirred, that fist low in her belly clenching tight and hot all over again.
“Do you swim?” he asked.
His voice was still rough, and Cleo frowned at him, not understanding why the question bothered her.
“I do,” she said. She propped herself up on her elbows, still wearing the lace panties he’d shoved to one side and the matching lace bra that he’d only revealed afterward, when he’d helped her out of her wedding dress. Something hot and odd twisted around inside her, like a too-sharp band of metal around that low heat, and she didn’t know why. “I was a lifeguard at the town pool for at least five summers after I turned sixteen.”
“Thank goodness. I feel safer already.”
Cleo wanted to smile back at him, but there was that yearning place inside her and the sharp thing besides, and she couldn’t.
“I never thought my husband would be a stranger to me,” she said without thinking it through, then froze.
Khaled stared at her for a moment, imperious and ferocious, and Cleo forced herself to sit up. To stop lolling about like a satiated sex kitten when she felt so ragged and unwieldy inside.
“I told you that you should eat,” he said quietly after a moment, his tone so even and mild that it made her flush with embarrassment at what her own had been. “Hunger affects the mood.”
“I’m not a child,” she said crossly.
He was magnificently nude as he stalked toward her, looking like a warrior god clad only in the force of his will and the candlelight from the glass-paned lanterns, and that thing in her flipped over. Then twisted in on itself.