To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)

“Please, Amjad, please…”

He stabbed his fingers into her hair at the nape of her neck, secured her head, relinquished her lips to spread his promise against her cheeks, her eyelids, her jaw. “I will…please you until you can take no more, until you can never have enough. I’ve craved you for so long, Maram…too long.”

Then he swooped down, took her lips with the wrenching power she craved. She opened for him, encouraging him to take more, plunge deeper. And he did, thrust inside her welcoming heat, tongue and ferocity, filled her, overwhelmed her.

Her senses rioted at the taste of him, even better than his scent and feel combined. She needed more, more, tried to hurry him, have it. He obeyed, his tongue invading her, dueling with hers, drinking deeper of her essence. Her senses rode rapids of delight as he gave her and took her and finished her, his growls detailing his enjoyment of her, of her frenzy.

Then he tore his lips from hers.

Before she could cry out with loss, he turned her over on her stomach, straddled her hips. She gasped at the thrill of his domination, turned her face to look back and meet his eyes.

The smile crinkling them was feral as he snapped open her bra, slipped the utilitarian garment off her arms. She rose on her elbows to help him free her swollen flesh from its shackles. She arched back when he replaced it with his rough, warm palms, tossed her head, turned farther, begging for his lips. They took hers in a hot, moist vise, groaned his demand deep inside her, “Areeni kamm tebgheeni.”

Hearing him revert to Arabic, demanding she show him how much she craved him, hurled her over another threshold of arousal. She showed him, sucked on his tongue in abandon, writhed beneath him, smashing her breasts into his hands.

He weighed and kneaded her bursting flesh in his hard fingers, gave her unspoken admission back to her, “Abghaki ya, Maram, koll kelmah, koll get’ah, koll naffas. Enti sehr, jonoon.”

As if it wasn’t enough to hear him say, in that moving groan, how he craved her—every word and part and breath of her, that she was magic, madness—his teeth nipped her lips at the same moment that he pinched her nipples. The amalgam of his confessions and the sensations sent a bolt to her core.

She bucked to move him so that she could turn back over and capture him where she needed him most.

He restrained her, the purr of a lustful great cat resounding deep in his chest. “Hadi ma’dobati—this is my feast, you are, in case you haven’t realized.”

She subsided, her lips twitching in humor-laced distress as he ran his hands all over her back, first in gossamer sweeps, then massaging tracings, then blunt nail scratchings until every nerve burst into a conflagration, until she sobbed.

“Aih, cry for me for real.” He ground his hardness against her buttocks, sinking his fingers into her hair, tugging on it as if it was reins. “Do you know how many times your imaginary cries turned my brain to mush? How many times I burned to no avail imagining you cushioning me this way? Or risked damaging my hands so they’d stop giving me phantom sensations of running all over your velvet flesh like this?”

She threw him a smoldering glance over her shoulder. “Thrilled to know you suffered for your pigheadedness as much as you made me suffer.”

“Then let me thrill you more.” He sank his fingertips into her scalp, every press unraveling a new reserve of lust within her. “I woke up hard and in agony every day still fresh from dreams where I felt you quake with pleasure, with need…” He transferred his sensual exploitation to her back, dug pathways of pure pleasure into her muscles until she did. “Like this.” He retraced the path of distressing delight up. “Do you know how many times I was about to deliver killing blows to deserving adversaries only for an image like this—” he swept her hair from her nape, bent and sank his teeth there, like a lion securing his mate for a rough ride “—to invade my mind so that I ended up merely damaging them? I even let a couple go unscathed. Do you know how many times I’ll punish you for each instance?”

She arched her hips up, urging him to fulfill his threat. He stilled her movements, lay on top of her, keeping her eyes captive. She writhed beneath him until he thrust at her, mimicking what she was burning for him to do for real, tremors of receding control traversing his great body.

“Do you feel it, Maram? What you’ve done to me?”

That was what he’d warned her about. That she was undoing the leash of a being of such destructive potential.

She wasn’t worried. She knew things about him he didn’t know himself. She knew he’d never lose control. What he was losing was his distance, his separateness. As he had been since they’d arrived here, succumbing to the power of what they had between them, which would only get stronger, better, the more he did.

He reared up. She moaned at losing his anchoring weight. He didn’t give time for disappointment to sink in, turned her onto her back still trapped between his thighs. She surged, reached for him.

He held out a warning finger. “Don’t touch me.”

Her mouth dropped open. “That is one thing you don’t joke about.”

He caught her grasping hands, slammed them down to the bed in one of his. “No touching. For your own protection. We have no idea what I’ll turn into at your touch, remember?”

She keened as her salivary glands stung. She was literally drooling over him, needed her lips and tongue on his flesh, her teeth in it. “That’s not protection. That’s the punishment you were threatening.”

“That, too.” His ruthless smile had blood thundering in her head, her loins. Then he brought it to a boil as he released her hands only to slide down her body, sweeping her panties all the way off her feet. He rocked back on his heels and stilled as he looked on her full nakedness for the first time.

A frisson of delicious dread sheared down her spine at the look in his eyes. When he finally took her, he would shatter her.

If she didn’t shatter first with wanting him too much.

“Beauty like this won’t go unpunished, ya saherati.”

She sobbed, her delight that he found her as beautiful as everything about him confessed, her protest that he’d call her his witch when he was the one incapacitating her with his spell.

He took her feet in both hands, alternated his lips between them. They quaked at each electrifying touch, at the more enervating thought of having him kiss her feet. He firmed his grip then did worse, forcing her to withstand the sight, the sensations as he suckled her toes, rumbling his enjoyment. “This is another thing I almost had accidents fantasizing about.”