A Christmas Bride for the King

She wrapped her hand around him and saw how his facial muscles tightened, felt his whole body going still as she moved it experimentally up and down. His silky skin glided over the hard shaft of flesh and it fascinated her...its inherent strength and intense vulnerability.

Charlotte looked down and saw a bead of moisture. She spread it over the thick head of his erection but he stopped her hand with his.

She looked at him, suddenly unsure, and he said, ‘If you keep doing that I’ll spill right here...and I need to be inside you.’

Her heart stuttered as she watched him reach for protection and roll it onto his turgid flesh. He came over her, settling his hips between her legs, widening them further. Her muscles ached, but she barely noticed when she felt her body softening and ripening again.

He braced himself over her with a powerful arm, his othe

r hand on his own body, guiding himself to her core... But when she expected him to thrust into her body instead he bent his head and kissed her, mimicking penetration with his tongue.

Charlotte moved against him, twining her arms around his neck, so that when he did thrust between her legs it was in tandem with his mouth and tongue and it stopped her gasp of shock and soothed it all at once.

He stopped moving for a moment, letting her body get used to his thickness, and she felt the resisting wall of muscle relax infinitesimally, allowing him to slide deeper. He did—with a groan that reverberated deep inside her.

For a moment it was too much—Charlotte felt impaled, and had an instinct to push him off her—but even as she put her hands to his shoulders and looked up at him the urge to push turned into something else. An urge to wrap her legs around him and keep him there.

His eyes burned down into hers and held her captive as he started to move in a relentless rhythm, in and out. Gradually Charlotte started to feel that urgency build again, and Salim slid an arm underneath her, arching her up towards him. He found her breast and sucked her nipple deep, and the twin sensations made her blood thunder under her skin.

Charlotte could feel the climax coming, but couldn’t articulate any words to stop it for fear that she wasn’t ready for it... On some dim level she knew she’d never be ready, and that all she could do was submit and let it sweep her away.

And that was exactly what it did. Salim’s body moved within hers and she couldn’t remember a time when she’d been a single entity.

Her body gave up its fight to resist the oncoming storm and shattered into a million pieces, her muscles milking him as he plunged deeper and deeper until he finally reached his own completion and her body claimed his, holding him deep within her as the final spasms of her own climax faded, until there was nothing left but the tattered remnants of the person she’d once been.

* * *

Salim knew the sandstorm had passed because there was a sense of stillness outside the tent and the sound of muffled of voices. No doubt the men were already in recovery mode in the early dawn—unearthing anything that had been buried during the storm.

That storm might have passed, but another one raged inside him. He was sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the tent from the bed, looking at the sleeping figure there warily, as if she might jump up at any moment and bite him.

He recalled her biting him last night, in the throes of her orgasm, on his shoulder. She’d broken his skin and he’d welcomed it.

Even now he couldn’t really credit what had happened. The most intensely pleasurable sexual experience of his life. And the most vanilla. Sex with a virgin. You couldn’t get more vanilla than that. And yet... Salim had felt like a novice too—learning his way into a woman’s body for the first time.

She’d been a virgin.

The word resounded like an echoing klaxon: virgin, virgin.

He’d sensed it before he’d known for sure, and he knew that in any other situation, with any other woman, he would have run a mile at the merest suggestion of innocence. But it had only fired up his libido even more.

So her cooler than cool persona wasn’t just a front. Unlocking her body had only made him think of all that she’d told him about her family and her upbringing. That sense of kinship echoed inside him again—they’d both suffered at the hands of their families and built up walls high enough to keep everyone out.

But after last night those walls were in danger of tumbling down around Salim’s feet. And he could only imagine how seismic it had been for Charlotte to give up her innocence.

He’d wanted to bed her because he’d wanted her more than he’d wanted any other woman and he’d naively thought that would be enough. But he could feel a clawing, raging hunger for more. Much more. And...worse...he didn’t just feel physical satisfaction. He’d felt an elusive sense of peace steal over him in the moments just after his explosive orgasm, when his body and Charlotte’s had been joined so tightly that for a second he hadn’t wanted ever to break the connection.

What was he doing?

Salim stood up as adrenalin flooded his system—the fight or flight impulse. He was an expert in letting women know not to expect more than a no-strings encounter, and yet Charlotte—with her prim silk shirt and pencil skirts and no fear of him—had burrowed so far under his skin that he had all but forgotten his own strict code of ethics. He’d wanted her that badly.

A very rare sense of disorientation made him feel dizzy for a moment. He never lost sight of what was important to him. And yet he was in danger of losing sight of a lot more. He was here in Tabat with one aim—to promote and stabilise the country for someone else to run—and yet that had been the last thing on his mind over the past few days as he’d broken bread with these tribes and had felt a mounting sense of ownership take hold.

As if hearing his inner dialogue, Charlotte moved on the bed and everything in Salim’s body went still and taut. Just then there was a noise from outside the tent—a conspicuous clearing of a throat.

Salim tore his gaze from the still sleeping woman on the bed and went to the entrance. He found Rafa waiting for him.

‘Sire, the storm wasn’t as extensive as we feared so we can leave this morning. But you need to speak with the elders before we go.’