To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)
She might have been innocent once, but she wasn’t now. She’d learned her father’s lessons well, was adding her own genius and irresistibility to become unstoppable.
There was one way to stop her. Get out of her range.
He rose as if he didn’t want to explode to his feet and storm away, until his muscles hurt with the tranquility he forced into them. He looked down at her, met a gaze tinged with hope, which he believed would have brought a weaker man to his knees proclaiming he’d believe anything she had to say.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said, injecting his voice with the last dose of nonchalance he had in his arsenal.
He cleared their dinner, cleaned the kitchen, willing the mechanical actions to defuse his disquiet.
Before he went inside, he added, “Don’t hold your breath, though. Estimated response time ranges from a lifetime to never.”
After an endless night during which he felt as if he were sleeping on red-hot thorns, imagining he heard her breathing over the storm’s tumult, felt her body’s undulations transmitted to his every nerve, the next day was worse.
She woke up minutes after he’d given up on sleep and risen, cheery and inviting to his aching and cranky. Not that she was intrusive. She engaged him when he let her, occupied herself in silence, at least in humming, when he didn’t.
At the breakfast he prepared, he was back to full flaying mode. She met his game on the same level, her wit like lightning, blinding, electrifying, magnificent.
Morning passed as if it were a week. Not because it dragged, but for being so full of incident and interaction. At noon, she began to prepare lunch, and he somehow found himself in the kitchen, sharing the preparations, engrossed in the experimentations, eyeball-deep in banter.
He pulled back again while they ate, and she again let him take refuge in detachment, but wouldn’t let his pointed disregard fill the atmosphere with tension, her acceptance making even the tumult-accompanied silence companionable, communicative.
Afterward he found himself about to slide back into a teasing match with her, used Dahabeyah’s care to get away.
He returned from the stable to find her engrossed in a game she’d unearthed on his computer, shrieking in delight as she surpassed a personal best. As she turned to share her excitement, a moronic notion insisted it was only around him that she was this spontaneous.
To compel hours to pass without Maram exposure, he headed inside for a nap. Big mistake.
The sheets smelled—felt—of her. His body throbbed like an inflamed wound for the four hours he forced himself to remain there.
Finally, a hairbreadth from blowing essential physical and mental fuses, he rose and joined her.
He found her sitting on the settee, knees drawn up against her chest, head resting on them. Her face was turned to him, eyes glowing as if waiting to strike him to his core with their lucid beauty and power.
He headed to the kitchen without slowing down. He thought that if he did, she’d drag him deeper into this…affinity he was finding more disturbing than anything he’d ever experienced.
“There is a part of the truth I didn’t tell you.”
His hand spasmed over the coffeepot, almost smashed it.
Her voice, her words penetrated between his shoulder blades, reached inside his rib cage to clutch his heart.
He didn’t turn, threw over his shoulder, “Of course you didn’t, Shahrazad. Never telling the whole story is what you do.”
“It’s just one part. There won’t be more.”
He wouldn’t. He shouldn’t.
He turned to her.
This was ridiculous. He was behaving like Shahrayar for real, unable to bear the curiosity, the need to hear her next account, to hang on to her every word, eating through him to the marrow.
She unfolded her lushness, settling on the settee’s edge. Then she spoke, her voice dark, rich, like a woman confessing her most intimate fantasies to her lover. “I had no intention of returning to Ossaylan. Then there was the Political Dimensions of the Region’s Economic Expansion conference.”
He remembered that conference as if it were minutes ago.
His first exposure to her. He hadn’t recovered since.
“I flew back from that conference bent on relocating my business, selling my house and moving back to Ossaylan to live.”
She fell silent. He stared at her.
When he could talk again, he rasped, “You’re saying it was seeing me that made you decide to move back?”
“Yes,” she simply said. “You were—are the most incredible man I’ve ever met, and I wanted to be where I could get to know you.” She smiled this self-deprecating yet infectious smile, which she seemed to do with her whole body and being. “Not that you’ve made it easy, or sometimes, even possible.”
And rage ignited in his recesses. At the desire to stop resisting. Worse, his inability to remember why he’d been resisting, why he hadn’t long succumbed.
He forced calmness into his steps as he walked back to her, looked down at her with what he hoped was his most annihilating contempt. “How disappointing. Can’t you try a bit harder to be subtle about your mission?”
She blinked. “What mission?”
“The one your father sent you on. To go all out in a last bid to entrap me in marriage before giving up on me.”
Maram stared at him, her face a canvas of stupefaction.
Then she burst out laughing.
When she could finally catch a breath, she spluttered, “You think I want to marry you?”
Five
No woman had ever considered marrying him.
No matter the wealth and power marriage to him entailed, as he’d once told Shaheen, women feared he’d turn Shahrayar or Othello on them. Their families feared their necks would be next on the block of his crazed wrath.
Their horror and rejection had appeased him to no end.
So why would Maram’s incredulous mirth at the idea of marrying him disturb him? Even when he knew she was faking it?
He knew for a fact that she’d marry him, mayhem and madness and all, in a heartbeat. She was the only woman who’d been ballsy enough to not only consider risking it but to also actively pursue it.
The clear answer was that her pretense itself was what bothered him. But that wasn’t why.
He didn’t want her to want to marry him…did he?
Of course he didn’t. He was tired, sleep-deprived. And she was potent. Enough to make him begin to imagine he…felt things, beyond the physical.
He shook his head, deriding himself more than her. “Surely you don’t expect me to answer your stupefaction and let you lead me through another story with your ‘version of the truth’?”