To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)

She managed a huff and a smirk. “You have it backward. You’re Prince Walks Away.”

He straightened from his crouch. “I’ll be Prince Devours Away if you don’t.” He slid a palm down the chiseled planes of his chest and abdomen, stopping at his low, low pants’ waist, as if demonstrating the extent of what she’d get if she didn’t, his eyes seething with sensual menace. “So what will it be?”

She leaned one knee on the bed before she collapsed in a puddle of longing. “Are we talking…kinky stuff?”

He echoed her movement. “And if we are?”

Her other knee followed, struggling not to fly across the bed and tackle him down on it. “Which part of ‘I trust you’ didn’t you get?”

He again mirrored her action. “And which part of ‘maybe I’m not to be trusted’ didn’t you?”

She braced a palm on the cotton sheet that felt like sandpaper against her sizzling skin. “Here’s the thing. I trusted you with my life, twice. I’m here at your mercy if you so choose, and you made me feel safer than I’ve ever been. Distrusting you becomes impossible, don’t you think? I risked my life for you twice, too. You think anything else compares? So whatever you believe you lack to be eligible for my trust, I know you’ll do whatever it takes to deserve it. Even if you turn out to be the King of Kink and not just the Prince of Snarkiness, I know you’ll make me love it.”

His gaze relinquished hers to lower to the sheet his fingers had bunched up as if it was her hair, her flesh. “You know so many things I know nothing about.” He raised his gaze again, slammed it into hers. “I don’t have the slightest idea what I’ll become the moment I touch you, and worse, the moment you touch me.”

She put her other palm on the sheets before the force of his carnal threat knocked her off balance. She began prowling on the bed, toward his line. “How about telling me what you do know? How you want me? Specifics only, please.”

He let her advance, receding farther. “Sure you can handle those?” She nodded, spilling her hair around her breasts. Those eyes flared, before they glazed over with what looked like aching remembrance. “Since you first trained those reason-destroying eyes on me and had those will-depleting lips spilling witchcraft into my system, Princess Haram, you commandeered every second I used to have for self-generated thoughts, consumed my once-restful nights with exhausting fantasies of you. I understood just how dangerous you were when you forced me to turn to…self-help outlets in your honor. When that only made things worse, when every exposure to you aggravated my condition, you rose to the top of my keep-at-bay-at-any-price list. I would have kept my distance, suffered in resigned sarcasm. But you wouldn’t let me.” He leaned on both hands again, gearing to be unleashed. “So if you give me yourself now, I’ll first take four years of torment out on every inch of your mind-annihilating body. Then I’ll gorge on every spark of your magnificent being.”

She was shaking from head to toe now. With the effort it took her not to charge at him, sink her teeth into his flesh wherever they landed. “And I was…what? Speaking a language you didn’t understand? I told you that’s exactly what I want.”

“Aih, but you left out one thing. A time frame. ’Cause here’s the thing. Once I start, I won’t be appeased.”

This…this was far beyond anything she’d dared wish for.

He was telling her, in his own inimitable way, that he was taking her up on her offer of everything and raising her an open end. Maybe even their own brand of forever.

She trembled forward, a foot from his line now, from everything to make life worth living, from a future he’d always be the major part of. Amjad. The one made for her and she for him.

“Were you there the past four years?” she choked out with the enormity of it all. “And I won’t stop either. I very clearly can’t.”

“No matter what happens? You won’t change your mind?”

“If nothing changed it by now, nothing ever will.”

His palm rose, stopping her before she made that final move across his line. “The words, Maram. Give them to me.”

His bass rasp, laden with a vulnerability, with a need she’d never dreamed he’d bare to her, made her almost weep.

She swallowed the tears, crossed his line, slipped her hands around the chest heaving almost as agitatedly as hers. “If you don’t…if you don’t want me to, I will never change my mind.”

He looked down into eyes she knew were red and filled with tears, and his own darkened with accepting her pledge. She felt everything decelerate, even the storm outside, like a slow-motion sequence from a movie accompanied by frantic heartbeats and labored breathing to emphasize the gravity of the moments.

What he did next almost burst her heart.

His hands closed around her rib cage, raised her until her knees left the bed, until her legs dragged on it. He held her in his power, looking up at her as if she was the most incredible thing he’d ever laid eyes on.

Then he lowered her, buried his face in her bosom. For long moments, he burrowed into her, until she felt as if he’d traversed the physical limits of her body, melded with her, until she felt as if his lips were kissing her heart.

When she thought she would explode for real, he slid her down his body, every curve slotting into his angles until her lips glided over his face to his.

“Maram…” He breathed inside her. The heat and hunger he made of her name made her cry out.

She shuddered harder, her lips trembling over his. “Yes, Amjad, yes…”

He bit into her lower lip with enough force to still it, to show her the power of his craving. His long, deep groan filled her as he applied more pressure until she whimpered, collapsed to her back, the hands clenching around his neck taking him over her.

His chest barely touched her breasts as he loomed over her, plucking at her lips in a maddening tasting too voracious to assuage. She pulled at him harder, crushed her lips to his, her breasts to his chest. His rough rider’s hand slid a path of nerve-combusting abrasion from her waist to one thigh, hooking beneath her knee, bringing it over his hip. Then he ground his hardness against her readiness through the chafing restriction of their clothes. She arched up into him, clamped her leg tighter around him, a carte blanche for anything he wanted to do to her.

Her undulations became quakes as he began suckling her lips, drawing each into his mouth in long, smooth pulls between groans of her name, drawing more plumpness into her flesh, more molten agony from her core. Her whimpers became incessant.