To Tempt a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 2)

No. He wouldn’t let her first intimacy with him be less than perfect bliss. He would show her he craved her pleasure far more than he craved his, that his pleasure would always stem from hers.

He tore away from her, snatched his fetters away then stopped. Stood transfixed. Stared at her.

He’d struggled to respect her helplessness when he’d covered her nakedness in the tent. And when he’d tended her in her sickness, his male hormones had been buried under gallons of stress. Now he looked.

She’d wrenched an unprecedented response from him when she’d been disguised as a man. He’d thought her the most beautiful creature in creation when he’d seen only her exquisite head and hands. She’d had him balancing on an edge both distressing and intoxicating with glimpses at her assets. But now…

Now he could see himself truly devouring her.

Encased in golden, glowing skin, taut and tight everywhere, her breasts were turgid and peaked, her thighs and hips full and firm, her waist impossible amidst her voluptuousness.

And he could no longer just look, he needed to experience all that, claim it, wallow in it.

“Rao’ah, jenan…” He growled, filling his hands with sunlight and gold and honey made woman. His woman. “A marvel, madness—beauty like this shouldn’t have been sanctioned by the heavens.”

“Look who’s talking,” she moaned as he took the mounds of her breasts into kneading hands, yearning for their weight and feel.

He felt he’d blow an artery without a taste. He bent to have it, laved their peaks, answered their demand for the pull of his suckles, the grazing of his nips.

“Elahati, my goddess.” He swept her up into his arms, didn’t register the journey to the platform bed. He laid her on it, arranged her limbs as if they were flowers, tracing every line demarcating her tawny tan from her still-creamy areas with his tongue. “We’ll sunbathe naked from now on. I want to see your inner lioness fully manifested. We’ll do anything and everything.”

A peach flush evened out her color and her eyes turned almost black as she writhed. “Yes…please, anything…everything…”

The totality of her hunger and trust shot to his heart, tampering with its rhythm. He anchored her as she began to buck beneath him, his fingers lost in the mindless pleasure of spanning her sharp concavity, digging into her taut flesh.

She whimpered a white-hot tremolo that attested to a pleasure she couldn’t breathe for its power. “Harres, take me…daheenah.”

Hearing her say now in his mother tongue felt like a giant hammer shattering the last pillar of his control. He would later swear he’d heard the shrieking snap of his mind giving way, the howling implosion of restraint’s end.

A rumble rolled inside him like distant thunder as he snapped her turquoise panties down her silken legs. She was golden down to her last secret. Rising on his knees, he barely pushed his drawstring pants down enough to release an arousal that was beyond rock now.

The look of feverish hunger, of shocked intimidation on her face made him want to hold back, take it infinitely slow and gentle. And they made him want to ram into her, ride her, grind his flesh into hers until she wept with the closeness, broke with the pleasure, dissolved in the fusion.

Feeling the world receding in a white noise of incoherence he grabbed her thighs, would have pressed them apart if they hadn’t fallen wide-open.

She arched, writhed, tried to drag him to her, inside her.

He pulled back, tried to regain control. She was tampering with his sanity, at the verge of destroying it. He could hurt her. Even if he knew he’d pleasure her, too, he had to hold back.

He opened her folds, forged a path between their molten heat, but denying her the full entry she craved. She came off the bed at the first touch of their most intimate flesh. He laved his hardness in her nectar, rubbing her in escalating rhythm, until she was sobbing. He alternated between shallow nudges and circular strokes, over and over and over, teasing without fully taking.

She rose on her elbows, lips open with distressed gasps, her eyes spewing azure wildness and invitation of anything at all he would do to her.

Then he moved in a tighter rhythm until she fell back on the bed, legs shaking wide, her back bowed deep as she convulsed into wave after wave of a screeching orgasm.

Seeing her lost to pleasure, pleasure he’d brought her, made his heart thunder with pride, with relief, with uncontrollable lust for more. He was already addicted to the sight, to the experience. He wanted it again. And he set about having it.

He stroked her swollen flesh, soothing it, desensitizing it. Drenched in tears and satiation, yet darkening with a deeper hunger, a wilder need, her eyes seethed as she watched him perform those ultimate intimacies on her, owning her flesh, manipulating her responses, extracting her ecstasy.

Soon, her pleas were a litany. “No, no more…more, you…you…take me, take me, daheenah, now, now…”

“Aih, now. I will take you now, finish you, claim you, brand you. I will plunder you and pleasure you until you weep with the satisfaction, ya talyeti.”

He rose onto his knees, kicked off his pants, cupped her buttocks in his hands, tilted her, opened her petals. He started to invade her…and it hit him like a sledgehammer.

He couldn’t take her.

He almost keeled over her with the realization.

He did slump over her, his head to her breasts, his whole frame shuddering.

She cried out, tried to drag him up, but he resisted her, raised his head, the words cutting him on their way out. “When we get back to the capital. I can only take you fully then.” He smoothed the look of distress off her brow, rasped, “But I’ll pleasure you now, in so many other ways.”

Understanding dawned in the pieces of heaven she had trapped in her eyes. Then a slow, sensuous smile spread her lips. She clamped her legs around his back, pulled him up. He acquiesced, slid over her slippery ripeness, mingling their moans and shudders and sweat.

Once he reached her lips, she gave a throaty moan of scorching seduction. “You can take me now. It’s safe. For at least a week. You can trust me. I’m a doctor.”

So it was a safe time for her. He almost wished it wasn’t, and he’d take her knowing that.

If it was up to him, he was sure. He wanted it all with her, now, no waiting. He needed her to know, everything.

“I trust you, ya habibati, with my life. And more. And I only cared, for you.” She nodded, her eyes adoring him into oblivion, the perfection of her belief pouring fuel on his conflagration. He filled his hands with her, unconditional love made flesh of his flesh. “And I’m safe, too.”