To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)

She glared up at him. “I thought you were at best lying in Dahabeyah’s stall facedown, after she kicked you senseless. As you deserved to be for scaring me this way.”

“Scaring you how? Did you think I left you behind? Is that why you rushed out without protection?”

“It would never cross my mind that you’d leave me behind. You didn’t leave me behind when you thought a bomb could detonate and blow you apart, or bring the whole building down on you.” The fury and exasperation in his eyes wavered, just like it had that time years ago. “Just like I wouldn’t leave you to your fate even if it was one you so stubbornly and recklessly chose. But once I was convinced you were out there injured, maybe critically, every second counted. I couldn’t barricade myself in cloth that would have slowed me down or crippled me when I found you.”

She could feel him resisting, even when logic and the evidence of experience corroborated her words.

He still sounded nothing like his ridiculing self when he finally said, “Aih, of course. It was all for me.”

“So what are you proposing? That I was afraid for you only because I need you to survive? Hate to break it to you, but I don’t. If you were injured or…worse—” she swallowed the pain that choked her even from imagining it “—I’d still be safe in here for months if need be. After the sandstorm was over, a self-serving person would look for you only to get your phone and GPS and get help for herself.”

“Flaunting self-preservation could be on account of unreasonable, self-defeating fear for one’s own…”

He stopped. Distress the likes of which she’d never thought to see in his eyes seethed there, as if it was far more hazardous for him to believe her than to risk nature’s wrath or a bomb’s explosion.

She reached out with everything inside her, gentling his worry, transmitting her certainty.

Belief in him provided her with safety and stability, warded off the world’s betrayals and dangers. Belief in her would be his haven, as he was hers.

He snatched his gaze away seconds before his eyes admitted his capitulation. She almost whimpered from the fracture of the psychic and emotional meld.

His eyes were back to blazing concern as he took in the evidence of her ordeal, before his gaze seemed to snag on her right hand.

Her hand was white-knuckled, still gripping the handle of the first aid kit. She no longer felt like she was holding it.

He groaned as if in pain as he extricated the kit from her spastic fingers, led her to the settee, his hands gentle and unsteady as he pushed her down. He knelt in front of her, so tall that his eyes were level with hers.

His eyes flared and subsided as his gaze swept down her face and body, his own seeming to curve as if he would contain her. For a moment she thought he’d place his parted lips to her aching flesh. She silently begged him to make that connection, to show her he felt as shaken by her peril as she’d been at his.

He seemed to resist their needs with an effort that had him sweating. Before she could lean in and sweep the moisture from his forehead, lick it from his upper lip, he began washing her.

She moaned as her nerve endings welcomed the towel’s softness, the water’s coolness, soaked up his caring.

He suddenly hissed, “B’Ellahi, you were scraped raw, and that was the best-case scenario. If I hadn’t heard you, you could have been roaming the desert, waiting for the storm to finish you.”

And like his distress had been real, so was the anguish in his voice, emanating from his every pore. She couldn’t bear it, had to defuse it. Only one thing would make him forget anything.

Her lips quirked. “What else could I have done when you flounced out to mope in a lethal sandstorm, without any protection, too, I might add, and didn’t seem to be coming back?”

He grimaced as he mixed the containers’ contents, added oils that smelled of almond and lime, whipped it all into a homogenous cream. Then he started to paint her skin with it, massaging downward from her face with feather-light strokes.

She almost cried out. Not because it hurt. Because it impaled her to the heart to have his flesh on hers without barriers, to feel his solicitude seeping into her.

She moaned instead as the cool, floral/citrus-scented mixture soothed relief into her pores. She could swear it healed her skin on the spot. She spread her arms, arched, offering him full access, helping him apply that magical balm.

He was spreading it down her back, and she’d long disintegrated, when he rumbled, “I wasn’t moping. I was coming back when you went on your rescue mission. And even if I hadn’t, you shouldn’t have worried because I certainly am not suicidal.”

“Accidents—” she mumbled around the coal of longing burning in her throat “—especially in these conditions…happen.”

“I wouldn’t be so remiss that I’d have an accident and leave you here alone.” His voice cascaded down her back, spreading a different and far more distressing fire. “Not even if I was certain that you’d simply pick useful articles off my useless carcass afterward.”

His attempt at teasing broke her. She jabbed an elbow back into his steel gut in punishment for the macabre visual, turned to him, cupped his face with one hand, the other scooping up more of his balm. The hands on her froze, dropped to his sides as she started painting his skin with the healing mixture, tracing every line of power, every slash of beauty and jut of distinction that constituted his incomparable face.

She moaned and sighed with every sweep of tactile nirvana. To be touching him, to have him surrendering to her touch, was far more poignant than she’d even imagined. And how she’d imagined.

She’d feared she’d lost him. First a chance with him, then him for real. But she hadn’t. And she had to embrace everything about him, capture every breath, savor every nuance.

“Amjad…”

She closed her eyes on a ragged moan, pressed her face to his neck, inhaled his intoxicating scent. For a long, long moment, he remained as unmoving as a stone statue. Then something fierce and razing emanated from him, shuddering through her every bone.

She raised her face, her lids heavy with need as she trembled up the last inch separating their faces.

His eyes remained cast down as she brushed her cheek against his, before her lips mimicked the poignant motion against his own.

He didn’t turn into her caress, didn’t complete it. But it was enough for now that he let her revel in him.

But soon, she needed one more thing.