And then suddenly all those words registered, all of it at once, and as the shock awoke her that orgasm roared its way in, smashed its way in, and she thrashed against him as those red curtains billowed with laughter, and she flailed in erotic agony as she came, and Grace swore she saw the face of the goddess riding the wave of her orgasm, felt the tongue of the goddess guiding the tip of his cock, heard the cackling laughter of the goddess in her own chokes and gurgles, whimpers and groans, sputters and moans.
And then she felt him come, by God she felt him come, those balls slapping one last time against her glistening underside and then seizing up, his thick fingers clamping down on her red nipples that were raw and aching, his cock ramming its way up into her one last time as he blasted his load into her depths, flooded her valleys with his milk, filled her wells with his waters, his thick semen flowing hot and heavy through the canals of her cunt as he groaned and grunted against her neck, muttering in Arabic, whispering her name in tongues.
He pumped her pussy and pinched her boobs as he continued to come, pouring more into her, and she could feel his semen pour into her, and she smiled as she took it, took it even as it took her, her own climax staying with their heaving bodies, her own orgasm stayed abreast with his, like two horses racing through the night, neck and neck, through the forests and into the sea, seahorses now, riding the waves of ecstasy, her orgasm now soaring to a crescendo and then shattering into a million secondary climaxes as she thrashed under his weight, shuddered beneath his strength, heaved with his heat, swooned from the sensation of his . . . his seed.
“Ana sawf mmil' lakum,” he groaned as he finally thrust one last time and seized up, pushing the last of his semen into her as Grace felt her pussy clench up again to milk out that final load. “Six months for this. Ya Allah, it is done. It is done.”
5
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
THE ISLAND KINGDOM OF MIZRA
“In six months it will be done.”
Sheikh Dhomaar glanced up from where he stood looking down at the sandy waters that lapped at his feet. The salt water was not good for the leather shoes he wore, and they would need to be tossed away. Salt water was not good for anything that did not live in the sea, in fact, and these dead plants that surrounded what had once been a thriving oasis on the desert island of Mizra were now a testament to the cold ruthlessness of nature. This was the third oasis on the sprawling kingdom of Mizra that had been claimed by the ocean waters that also flowed beneath the island through a series of caverns and tunnels. That was the very reason the island was a desert: No fresh ground water to give life to the earth. But now even the scattered oases that had been enough to give Dhomaar’s ancestors reason to take the island as their own were turning brackish as sea-levels rose around the world—or at least they appeared to be rising in the Gulf of Oman, whose salty waters were flooding underground caverns that had once lain empty.
“Six months, Dhomaar. And then you can go back to your whores and your harems, your sex vacations to Eastern Europe and South America. Do not act like it is the end of the world. It is actually the reverse, in a way. It is the beginning of a world.”
Dhomaar turned from the dying oasis and looked over at his wife, the tall and thin Queen Zareena, her dark hair cut short to where she looked boyish in her long black robes, the traditional black hijab she always wore even though it was not required of the Mizrahi women.
“It is the end of my world,” he growled as he strode past her and reached for a tall glass of fresh lemon juice that an attendant held out on a silver tray. He drank deep and slammed the thick-bottomed glass down on the hood of the silver Range Rover that served as the royal chariot when Dhomaar and Zareena ventured out of Mizra’s capital city.
“Look around you, my Sheikh,” Zareena said with a snort. “Your world is already ending. This oasis is dead, and that brings it to three oases that have turned to salt in the past two years.”
“This oasis is small and remote,” Dhom said. “We would never have needed its water anyway.”
“It is a symptom of the disease that plagues our island,” said Zareena. “A sign of what is to come. An omen of what lies ahead.”
“You and your omens,” Dhom muttered. “Why do you not use your magical powers to cast a spell and make the salt water turn sweet once more?”
“I do not believe in magic and you know that, Dhom,” said Zareena, walking towards the massive silver car as an attendant hurriedly pulled the back door open for her. “And if I have any special power, it is to sense the patterns of the universe, the rhythm of the force that underlies all life, the signals destiny tosses in our way to remind us that there is so much we do not understand about space and time, so much we do not understand about ourselves, our bodies, the eternal spirit that lives in each of us.”
“Ya Allah, your eternal spirit is hurting my head with this talk,” Dhom grunted as he squinted towards the horizon, putting on his sunglasses and surveying the rolling dunes, the undulating curves of deep yellows mixing with smooth shades of orange, brown, and gold. The beauty of the desert was undeniable, he thought. But it was a harsh mistress, this land. It could not be broken, even though his ancestors had tamed it over the centuries, building a capital city around the grand oasis of Mizra, smaller towns and settlements coming up over the years, each of them located within a few kilometers of one of the smaller oases. Oases that would be useless in another decade or two, if the salting of the groundwater continued.
Zareena smiled as Dhom turned to her and began to slowly walk to the car. She waited until he got to the other side of the silver Range Rover, and then she winked at him. “If your head is cloudy from my words, then six months without sex, without orgasm, without release . . . it will bring back your clarity, my Sheikh. Semen retention is something all the great sages and mystics practiced as they walked the lonely path to enlightenment, sought their own version of nirvana.”
Dhom finally grinned, thinking for a moment that yes, he did love this woman, though not in quite the way a man might love his wife. It was not a wholly sisterly love either, though the two of them had always been close, growing up as second cousins, raised within the marble and sandstone walls of the Royal Palace of Mizra. Their marriage had been arranged when he was thirteen and she only eleven, though the actual ceremony did not take place until Zareena turned eighteen.
Dhom smiled at his wife as he took his place beside her in the lavishly outfitted Range Rover, shaking his head at the way her strong jaw was set tight in her slim face. She was all business these days, though she had been blessed with a wicked sense of humor to go with that dreamy, mystical tendency that she seemed to be taking more and more seriously as she got older. Dhom had never understood that side of her, and indeed, he wondered at some of the decisions (decisions that defied logic but always worked out right . . . ) she made as Sheikha of the land, a co-ruler to the king—just as the old laws had wanted.
Indeed, it was the old laws that had dictated their betrothal, Dhom reminded himself as he turned to the tinted window and gazed out at the barren landscape whipping by as the heavy car glided smoothly through the rough desert roads. Two tribes had formed an alliance to capture this island in the Gulf of Oman over a hundred years ago, and when the first laws of the Sovereign Islamic Kingdom of Mizra had been written, it was stipulated that the tribes would maintain equal power through the ages, through the generations. The end result of that principle had been the successive arranged marriages between the eldest son of one tribe and the eldest daughter of the other tribe. Both would be royalty, and they would rise to be supreme leaders and rule as Sheikh and Sheikha, king and queen, equal in every way. They would have children, of course. But the new Sheikhoods would not automatically pass to their children—instead the new Sheikh and Sheikha would be chosen carefully from amongst all the royal children of that generation, making sure to manage the complications of mixing the bloodlines too mu
ch.
It had been a departure from the traditional Islamic scriptures, and the Mizrahi law had brought with it other stipulations that banned the Islamic practice of a Sheikh taking more than one wife. It also prohibited the Sheikh and Sheikha from availing of the ancient Islamic provision of talaaq, a religious divorce. The ancestors were prescient enough to see that perhaps a time would come when a man and a woman united as teenagers did not want to be married anymore, and though that was acceptable for a commoner, such mercies were not to be afforded to those who bore the burden of supreme power. With status came the status quo.
And so it was that in the island kingdom of Mizra the Sheikh and Sheikha were bound for life, their duties to land and people superseding their private needs, their individual urges. But those urges were there, and those needs remained. Arbiters of Allah’s will notwithstanding, the Sheikh and Sheikha were still of the flesh, and the flesh had needs and urges. And for this generation of Mizra’s rulers, those needs and urges were too far apart for any hope of common ground.
Dhom had satisfied those individual urges with reasonable discretion, preferring to pay handsomely for sex and secrecy abroad, forsaking the temptation of the women of his own land and even mainland Arabia. But Zareena’s private needs had stayed closer to home.
Dhom glanced over at his wife once again as he thought of the first time he had walked in on Zareena with a girl. Dhom had just returned to Mizra after his first year at Eton College in England, and he had walked to the princess’s private chambers unannounced, excited to greet his future wife, who was still just sixteen.
Sixteen but clearly quite grown up, Dhom had realized when he parted the lush purple curtains of her secluded evening-room and watched in shock, horror, and then amused wonder as his teenage cousin, his wife-to-be, the future queen of the land, gasped her way to a silent orgasm while grinding her crotch into the face of one of her young female attendants, the two girls naked and brown, glistening and beautiful in their forbidden embrace.
Dhom had kept her secret, even though by revealing it he could have saved himself from marrying a woman who would never want him sexually. It had not been an easy decision for a young, testosterone-filled man just entering his prime, the prince toweringly tall and strikingly handsome already, over six feet of heavy muscle by the time he graduated Eton, leaving in his wake a sea of European princesses screaming for one last taste of his Arabian manhood.
Yes, a hard decision, Dhom thought now as he watched Zareena take a phone call on her black headset, her sand-colored eyes narrowing as she barked at some poor minister in rapid-fire Arabic.
But of course he did not make the decision alone, he remembered as the domes and minarets of Mizra’s Capital City came into view over the desert horizon, the gold dome of the Royal Palace gleaming in the afternoon sun, the tall white towers of the city looking hazy in the background, like it was all a mirage.
“Yes, it will be a mirage. Our marriage will be an illusion,” that seventeen-year-old Zareena had said just two weeks before she turned eighteen, when she and the twenty-year-old Dhom were talking about what it would mean for them to go through with the wedding. “But all of life is a mirage, Dhomaar. We are all but wisps of smoke in the universe’s candle-flame. We have a God-given duty to our land, to our ancestors, to our people. You and I both know that we are the only ones fit to lead Mizra into this new era, where our oil revenues will eventually weaken as the world moves to sustainable energy and our people face the strain of having to adapt to an economy that might actually require them to make some effort, some contribution. It will take decades of setting new policy, changing how we educate the children of Mizra, how we integrate our peculiar tribal Islamic culture with the global culture emerging out of humanity’s shared values.”
Dhom had rubbed his head at the time, still a bit shell-shocked at the reality of what he was about to do. But Zareena was right, and he knew it. With royalty came a burden, and there were truly no other princes or princesses that could take their places. If Dhom revealed Zareena’s forbidden transgressions and refused the marriage, the succession would get complicated, since Zareena had no sisters and neither were there any other even remotely qualified female descendants of that second tribe in the current generation. Indeed, the family tree had dwindled over the years, and it was no longer a time when each generation saw thirty or forty royal cousins playing in the palace grounds. Dhom was the only real male choice, and Zareena was by far the most capable of the female royals.
So they had joined hands and taken the nikaah stage in the capital city of Mizra, the mirage of their wedding celebrated by the small island nation, their old parents beaming with pride as they watched their children take their rightful places.
For a decade Dhom and Zareena kept their secret, avoiding the question of having their own children when their respective parents would inquire about the schedule for an heir—an heir that would, for the first time, be a real heir to the throne.
“The family tree has been shrinking over the generations,” Dhom’s mother would say during those discussions when both sets of parents would accost the young Sheikh and Sheikha after the morning meal, when the families would sit in the shaded gardens by the grand marble fountain.
“The bloodlines of the two tribes have been mixed and matched, diluted and distributed,” Zareena’s father would add. “We all carry blood from both tribes now. We are one people.”
“And so we are getting to the point where it makes no sense to keep applying the old laws of ascendancy,” Zareena’s mother would say. Then, after some hesitation, she would add, “And as the number of children produced by each generation dwindles, we might soon be faced with the uncomfortable issue of . . . of . . . ya Allah, how to say it!”
“Inbreeding,” Zareena would say matter-of-factly. “Eventually a child will be born with a beak and three tails.”
“Perhaps scales and feathers,” Dhom would add, raising an eyebrow and shrugging as the young Queen Zareena would stifle her laughter and nod very seriously.
“We will need to put the children in cages instead of cribs,” Zareena would sometimes say, and that would usually be the end of their elders’ tolerance.
“You think this is a joke?!” Dhom’s father would roar when it became obvious that Zareena and Dhom did seem to think it was a joke. “We are talking about the future of our nation, the future of our people, the survival of our unique variation of Islamic culture. And here the Sheikh and Sheikha of the land are making jokes about our line producing children with . . . beaks!”
Dhom would usually hold himself back from passing a last quip about his father’s big nose which was very much like a beak. But he could not always resist the wisecrack, and those conversations often ended with both sets of parents losing their tempers and howling in Arabic as their twenty-something offspring left the room, passing each other secret looks of relief that they had avoided the topic for another few months.
But as the years rolled by and time had its way with all, Dhom and Zareena began to take those conversations a bit more seriously, and soon it was clear to them that their old parents were correct: Something had to change.
“It is time for Mizra to move to a more traditional system of ascendancy,” Dhom’s father had said in the later years, the man’s voice weak with age, when it was clear the old generation were close to taking their places with the angels.
“Your brothers and sisters and cousins will not oppose it,” Zareena’s mother had said quietly.
“We have spoken with all the others of your generation who have children of royal blood,” Dhom’s mother had added with a smile that was part relief, part pride that perhaps her political skills were still sharp.
“None will oppose a change in the ascendancy laws,” Zareena’s father had said through his breathing tube as he coughed and sputtered. “Many have left the island and are settled in Europe or the Emirates, and they a
re happy with their status and their wealth.”
“Ya Allah, it is almost sad,” Dhom’s father had growled. “Not even a whimper of protest. The oil money has truly made us all fat and lazy.”
“But someday that oil money will be down to a trickle,” Dhom’s mother had said with a frown. “And the preparations for it must start now. Great changes will need to be made over the coming decades, and it is a blessing there will not be any disputes over the ascendancy to complicate things.”
“So what are you saying?” Zareena had asked, her face twisting into a frown, those sand-colored eyes narrowing, her smooth brown face showing the fine lines of age even though she was just in her thirties.
“We are saying we have done the hard political work for you, my dears,” her mother said, nodding at Dhom before turning back to Zareena and touching the queen’s face tenderly. “Your first born child will be the undisputed supreme leader of Mizra, and from then on the line will stay fixed and clear. One heir. One line. It is done.”
Dhom had frowned and swallowed hard the first time he heard the old ones say it. Zareena and he had discussed it before, but it was one thing to speculate and another to face the reality. The reality that they needed to have a child!
“The best of the two tribes is in each of you,” Dhom’s mother said, her old eyes tearing up. “After generations of intermixing, both of you carry the blood of our ancestors. And your offspring will consolidate that mix one last time.”
“Or be born with three eyes and the beak of a toucan,” Zareena had said to Dhom privately that night, when the reality of the matter had sunk in so deep that the joke brought a smile to neither’s face. “That is a joke, but in a way it is not, yes? We still carry some of the same blood in us, Dhom. I know that cousins marry all over the world, and we are not even first cousins. But it does not feel right to me.”
Surrogate for the Sheikh: A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel (Curves for Sheikhs Series Book 7) Page 4
