To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)

It disturbed him when she lavished endearments on him. Habibi, hayati, rohi, galbi—my love, my life, my soul, my heart. But he relegated them to hyperbole inflicted by arousal and ecstasy. He’d thought she was as content to revel in what they had without constraining it within a preset concept.

Now she had.

And she hadn’t even named what she felt for him love, the emotion he despised, what in its name people committed and endured stupidities and insanities, even atrocities. She’d gone further and proclaimed it to be eshg. Something far superior to love, more encompassing and profound and unswerving, yet steeped in the most insatiable of carnal desires.

“Hey, don’t look so grim.” She combed her fingers through his hair, gave it tiny tugs until he and his tension melted in her arms. She completed his enervation with a radiant smile. “It’s what I always felt and saying it out loud doesn’t change a thing.”

But it did. It introduced volatile elements and expectations. They worked perfectly as they were. Anything new was bound to introduce imbalance and imperfection. He couldn’t have that. “Love and eshg don’t exist. But this—” he clutched her tighter around him “—what we have, does. And I intend to mine its depths and savor its every last spark.”

Shadows entered her eyes at his vehemence, the honey becoming turbid.

His heart pummeled his ribs. Had she needed him to give her back the words? Would his rejection of their very concepts eat at her certainty until she pulled away, in preparation for an end he might have just convinced her would inevitably come?

He was about to succumb, give her whatever she wished for if it would restore her spontaneity, her confidence in her hold over him, when her face relinquished its disturbance, opening up again.

She bit his earlobe. “I so adoringly approve of your intentions, Your Royal Intensity. How about a demonstration?”

Arousal and relief almost buckled his knees.

He guffawed and swept her over his shoulder.

She screeched in shocked elation, sank her teeth in his shoulder blades. It made him almost throw her down and take her right there.

But he had to last until he got her to the setting he’d arranged early this morning when she’d still been sleeping. The cave at the bottom of the dune cliff that the cabin sat above. He almost felt his feet leaving the ground, the soggy sand no match for his eagerness.

Facing away from storm pathways had always saved the cave from being obliterated, but wind-blown sand had polished the rocks beyond its entrance so that they sparkled like gems in the rain. The palm trees it protected, drinking deep from the spring it enclosed, were verdant and heavy with crimson dates in the cleansing rain. The sight of them had images of Maram climbing the ones behind his cabin as he’d taught her flooding his mind’s eye.

She ratcheted up his inflammation, giggling and wriggling and raining caresses and bites over his buttocks and back, her wet hair swinging over his sensitized flesh more lashes of arousal.

He threw her down on the inflatable mattress he’d placed a dozen feet from the cave’s mouth, the centerpiece of his seduction scene. The wind countering the storm was blowing rain almost to the cave’s center, drenching the mattress. She slid on it, laughed harder, loving his urgency, lunged up, dragged him down on top of her. He sank into her arms and welcome, crashed his hunger into hers.

Addicted. That was what he was. From the first touch. What he’d been afraid of, what he’d warned her about. There was no other word for it. The more he had of her, the more he wanted, the deeper his dependence, the less he could wait to have her.

The only thing that ameliorated the…ache of knowing she’d shared her body with others was that she hadn’t done so since she’d first seen him. The precautions she took had been installed by her second marriage and then maintained in hope of intimacy with him. But what appeased him most was that she said she’d shared passion only with him. He believed her. He could no longer think of distrusting anything she did or said. Which only deepened his surrender to what raged between them.

He tore himself from their fusion, growled, “I hope you’re ready for this demonstration. It’s going to be a doozy.”

She threw her arms over her head, thrust her breasts at him in aggressive surrender, her eyes telling him she knew it would be, but the lips he’d just ravaged crooned, “Braggart.”

He knew he must look like a grinning wolf as he soaked up her ribbing. “Going by your satisfaction ratings, I’d say I’m being annoyingly self-effacing.”

He tore his shirt off her, knowing she’d relish his ferocity. She repaid him in kind, stripping off his jogging pants, which he wore all the time now. He, and she, could no longer bear anything more detaining than elastic waistbands. Then she tackled him to the mattress, sank into him her teeth and nails and craving, struggling to get closer, take first, give more. He loved how she’d become an equal participant in their passionate duels. But her arousal scorched his senses, slashed away the man’s skin, left only a beast in the grip of mating frenzy.

He swept her around again, pressed between her eagerly spreading thighs. “You got this wrong, Princess Delirium, this is my demonstration. I have a record to uphold, allegations to refute. Not to mention threats to fulfill.”

His hand bunched in her soaking locks. His eyes locked with hers as the rain pounded over them to the rhythm of their hearts. Then, as if by agreement, they both looked down to watch the wonder of their joining as he sank into her depths in one fluid thrust.

He swallowed her keen at his invasion, poured out his growl at her captivation as her flesh yielded to his shaft, sucking him into an inferno of sensation. The carnality, the reality, the meaning of being inside her was sometimes too much. He needed to cede his all to her, to pierce her essence and consume her.

He glided out of her tightness, pummeled back just as she pumped up, impaling herself further on his erection. Pleasure detonated, almost blew out his arteries.

“Maram…ma beyseer feeh mot’ah kahadi—there can’t be pleasure like this, there can’t be…” He heard his voice, that of the beast he felt he’d become. “Take it, Maram, give it all to me…”

Her cries rang out at his every thrust, shattering him with bolts of stimulation. “Yes…Amjad…yes—”

She crushed herself against him as if to merge their bodies, catapulting him into a frenzy. He pounded into her now, knowing only his full power would unleash her needs, wring her magnificent body of every spark of pleasure it could yield.