Zadir had brought out another side of her that she’d never imagined existed. A sensual woman, capable of intense sexual arousal, but more than that. She had feelings for him. Feelings that went beyond the physical.
Their hips rose and fell together as sensation flooded her. She could hear his pleasure in the soft groans that filled her ears. She loved that he was enjoying this so much. It gave her pleasure to make him happy. Which meant that she cared about him.
And she did. She cared about this man very much.
The thought shocked her, even scared her a little. And it did something strange to her body as well because her insides gripped him with force and he climaxed with a gasp at the same time she did. She held him tight in her arms as their chests heaved against each other, and more unexpected emotion threatened to bring tears to her eyes.
“You’re very special, Veronica Baxter,” he breathed roughly.
“You are, too, Zadir Al Kilanjar.” She enunciated his unusual name carefully, meaning every word.
“I’m glad that we made love on purpose.”
“So am I. At least I think I am.” She bit her lip to stop it quivering. Too much emotion and she wasn’t in control of it.
“You have doubts?”
“Who doesn’t?”
Perhaps sensing that this was all a bit too much for her right now, Zadir slid next to her and kissed her gently on the cheek. He embraced her softly in his big, comforting arms. “Shhh. Don’t worry about anything.”
It was hard not to. She’d never known sensation or passion or emotion like this, and it shook her to her foundation. Zadir had opened up a whole new dimension of life that made all the other ones seem rather pale and dull by comparison.
“Just sleep now. It’ll be morning soon.”
That’s the problem. If she could stay here in Zadir’s arms everything would be fine. But that wasn’t how life worked.
“You sleep,” she commanded gently. “Stop worrying about me. I can take care of myself.” She kissed his cheek. Unlike her, he listened and obeyed, and within two minutes his breaths grew longer and deeper.
“You’re a lucky girl, Veronica.” Her grandmother’s words, spoken decades ago, sounded in the recesses of her brain. Her dad’s mother had pushed him hard, encouraging him to attend MIT and start his own business as soon as he graduated.
Her grandmother had died of an aneurism when she was seven, but not before making a big impression on her lonely granddaughter. Of course now she was old enough to know that luck came in two basic flavors: good luck and bad luck. The good luck that made her father so successful and wealthy also made him too busy and preoccupied to be a real parent to her.
Was this affair with Zadir good luck? It had filled her body with pleasure and her heart—at least temporarily—with joy.
Or bad luck that would cost her the commission of a lifetime and possibly her sanity. Ronnie sometimes liked to skip ahead to the end of a movie to make sure it ended happily before investing too much time and energy into it.
Shame she couldn’t do that in real life.
In the morning she snuck back into her bedroom while Zadir was still asleep. She showered and dressed and checked her messages, trying to get a grip on reality before those seductive blue eyes could lure her into a world where business was an inconvenience.
She laid out the paper he’d brought for her and started work on some sketches of his house, glad to lose herself in the familiar language of geometry. Her ideas for the building were starting to coalesce into a simple and dramatic form, like an unexpected rock outcropping, when she was interrupted by Zadir.
Annoyingly gorgeous in gray-blue pants and an open-collared shirt that complimented his tanned skin, he appeared in the doorway. “Morning, Ronnie. I missed waking up with you in my arms.”
“Sorry. Had to catch the worm.”
He grinned. “I hope it was juicy.” She saw his eyes fall on the desk in front of her.
“It wasn’t bad.” She tried to act cool. She wasn’t ready for him to see the drawings. Usually she worked on something in private for at least a couple of weeks before she developed enough confidence in her ideas to show them to anyone.
“Can I see your drawings?”
“Not yet.” She hoped he wouldn’t press. It was hard to say no to him. Another thing that made her wary.
“Then let’s get some breakfast.” He acted like the drawings weren’t even there. Which was quite gallant of him considering that he’d paid an insane amount of money to bring her here for them.
“That sounds good.”
They ate a quiet breakfast together, and Zadir insisted on making inquiries about whether they could put her on a plane that afternoon, so she could still be back home for her meeting tomorrow, but the answer was still a firm no, and he apologized so profusely that she began to feel bad for making a fuss.
After breakfast they walked in the garden and visited the black leopards. She was beginning to wonder if he intended to spend the whole day entertaining her and ignore the reports of growing protests and crowds gathering on the streets of Nabattur and outside the palace, but eventually Sam appeared to intercept her and tell him he was wanted in Osman’s study.
“Are things going to be bad tomorrow?” Ronnie asked. “When they overturn the law against divorce.”
“I don’t know.” Sam’s pretty face did have a slight shadow of worry. “The tricky thing about moving to a foreign culture is that you can think you understand how things work, but it’s always possible that something important is getting lost in translation.”
“Do you think you’ll ever feel completely at home here?” Ronnie was curious about how it must feel to choose to spend the rest of your life in a foreign land.
“I do feel at home here, largely because the husband I love is here, but it’s a continuous process of adjustment.”
“What do you miss most?” They were walking through an avenue of date palms, where a small green parrot watched them from a high branch.
“Family and friends. Though it’s funny, since I didn’t see many of them all that much when I lived in the States. I grew up in California but moved to New York so I only really saw them at holidays. And of course there is no Thanksgiving here in Ubar. Or Christmas, for that matter. Our most important celebrations simply don’t exist here.”
“What do they have instead?”
“I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t investigated yet. Nearly everywhere has some kind of harvest festival, but Ubar doesn’t really have crops in the traditional sense. I have no idea when they harvest stuff like the baskets of figs and rose petals I see in Nabattur.” She sighed. “I think there’s a festival of light around the darkest time of the year, but I don’t know anything more than that. I’d better get on top of Ubar’s traditional celebrations, hadn’t I?”
“Would Osman be upset if you brought some traditions from home?”
Sam frowned. “I don’t know. Isn’t that funny? I don’t think so, but I’m honestly not sure. We’ve never discussed it as there’s always so much going on. Learning to live here—and be the king—is a process of adjustment and adaptation for him, too. He’s always encouraging and supportive to me, but he feels pretty strongly about preserving the traditional culture of Ubar in the midst of all the positive changes he plans to make. We never had a formal wedding, with my family present, because although we talked about it he pointed out that as far as Ubarites were concerned we’d married at the three-day marriage festival along with everyone else, and perhaps that was good enough for right now. I suppose he has a point.”
“But you still want a big wedding?” Sam always seemed so capable and confident, it was interesting—and touching—to hear that she had unfulfilled emotional needs just like everyone else.
“I don’t know. It seems silly. I never wanted a big wedding in the U.S. because it would have been too expensive. But I did want to throw a party and invite my best friends from high school and college, and some of
my crazy relatives. It’s a whole different ball game when you have to fly them around the world and put them up for several days.”
“I hear you. And probably not safe with all the unrest happening lately.”
“True. I should stop whining! It’s just nice to have another American woman to chat with. Someone who understands.” She smiled. “I’ve tried making friends with Aliyah, the kings’ last wife, and she’s very sweet but half the time she stares at me wide-eyed like I’m a character on television. I think she finds my independence and outspokenness shocking. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve said totally the wrong thing to her. Hopefully we’ll grow closer as I get better with the language.”
Zadir dropped in on the prisoner again. At the brothers’ insistence, he’d been moved from the darkest recesses of the palace to a hurriedly repurposed building in Nabattur. He was still chained to a wall, due to the lack of secure bars—they’d since been ordered—but it felt a lot less medieval than having him inside the walls of the royal residence.
He lit a cigarette and left it smoking in an ashtray on the floor just outside the prisoner’s reach.
“We offered an opportunity to place bail,” he said, as he stood over the man. “But no one responded.”
“Of course not,” he sneered. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his beard was darkening. “They know you’re trying to find out who they are.”
“They? So it is more than one person.”
“Believe whatever you want. It makes no difference to me.”
“It was clever of you to remove the window from the plane before you took off.” He was talking about the first plane, which had crashed with him and Ronnie aboard. “I hear that once a plane is in the air it’s almost impossible to operate a door or window due to the force of gravity.” He stared the man in the eye.
“Gravity!” The man snorted. “It’s the air pressure. Any idiot knows that.”
Zadir didn’t bother to respond. He considered his question asked and answered. The man had not protested or said that it wasn’t him. He’d simply tried to demonstrate Zadir’s ignorance. This was the pilot who’d left them for dead.
“And the fire you started went out quickly. You should have used something a bit more volatile than kerosene to start the fire.”
The man opened his mouth—probably to protest that he saw the plane go up in flames, or to respond that he didn’t use kerosene, since the fire had been started with gasoline—then must have realized he was being played, so he closed it. Zadir watched with satisfaction as his eyes darted to the smoldering cigarette before heading to the far wall.
Sadly, he was bluffing because the plane was completely destroyed by the intense heat of the fire, as was a portion of the runway underneath it. He lit another cigarette and left it smoking next to the first one. “I don’t imagine the sight of waste bothers you when you attempted to waste my life.”
The man shifted in his chair, but didn’t say a word.
“Why do you hate me and my brothers?”
“I couldn’t give a rat’s intestine about you and your brothers.”
“So you’re a killer for hire.”
The man’s cool stare answered his question.
“But why? Is it the threat of change?” Protesters were waving signs no more than fifty feet away, in the marketplace of Nabattur.
The prisoner’s lip curled. “If you’re too stupid to see what’s going on right under your nose, I can’t help you.”
Zadir felt a flash of anger and frustration, but he schooled his features to stay steady. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Ronnie spent most of the day in her room, working on her drawings and coordinating material for the next day’s meeting with her assistant. Dinner was an impromptu buffet, where she sat with Sam and Zahaina and Barbit while the men pored over their speeches for the next day. Already she’d started to fall in with the rhythms of palace life, chattering about spices and fabrics while the menfolk took care of important business. Thank goodness she wouldn’t be here that much longer! It was a little scary how matters of great urgency back in D.C. started to seem like tiny items on a distant to-do list.
“Are you nervous about the proclamations tomorrow?” Zahaina asked Sam.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.”
“You think someone might shoot at Osman while he’s talking?” She chewed on a date.
Sam blinked. “I can’t even contemplate something like that. We just have to hope for the best and a positive outcome for everyone.”
“It would be safer if they left well enough alone,” croaked Barbit.
“Safer maybe, but not better,” Sam said with conviction. Ronnie admired her bravery. She was nervous for Zadir, who would be out on some balcony above the marketplace for the announcements along with Osman and Amahd, and she wasn’t even his wife. Or his girlfriend.
She was just his…lover. Would they sleep together tonight, either by accident or on purpose, when he was so preoccupied with matters of state?
Her answer came the moment she opened the door to her bedroom.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The powerful and distinctive perfume of fresh roses crept over Ronnie as she stood in the doorway, staring. Pink rose petals covered the entire floor like an insanely decadent carpet. Bouquets of roses bloomed in big brass jugs and vases on every surface in the room—including, to her dismay, the desk with her iPad and drawings.
The scene was both amazing and disturbing. Hundreds of roses had been denuded of their petals for this extravagant gesture, making it a kind of floral car wreck that stole her breath and jangled her nerves.
The door to Zadir’s room opened, and he appeared, tall in the low-arched doorway, dressed in a simple pair of white pants with his bronzed torso and muscled arms bare.
“Hi,” she managed. “I think someone has turned my room into a flower shop.”
A crooked smile crept across his mouth as he stepped onto the petal-covered floor. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“You managed.” She didn’t really want to walk on all these lovely petals. At least not with her shoes on. She bent down and unstrapped her sandals, then placed one foot tentatively on the soft surface. “This is crazy.”
“Roses are very precious in Ubar. We use them for all kinds of things—food, drinks, scents, tonics, and lotions.”
“I’ve noticed.” She smiled as she picked her way across the floor, releasing the strong scent of rose oil as she walked. “And now you’re trying to bury me alive in them?”
“When a man cares deeply for a woman, he paves her path with roses, to show her how he intends to make life easy and beautiful for her from now on.” He watched for her reaction.
She swallowed. This was some kind of declaration. Sam had apparently found herself married to Osman almost by default after attending a three-day marriage festival at his side. Ronnie had no idea what she was getting into right here. “Goodness.”
“Since the moment I met you, I seem to have done nothing but make life hard for you.” He walked closer until he could reach out and pick up her hand. He turned it over and kissed her palm softly. Her insides jangled and her breath quickened. “This is my attempt to make it up to you. Roses soothe the nerves and calm the senses. Sleeping among them stimulates the brain and deepens sleep. By filling your room with roses I want to pave your way to success in your meeting tomorrow.”
“That’s sweet of you.” Her heart squeezed. She couldn’t think of whining about how many roses had died to make this extravagant gesture when he’d done it to make her happy while the whole palace was abuzz with anxiety about the proclamation tomorrow. “I’ve never seen anything so romantic.”
“I have strong feelings for you, Ronnie.” A tiny frown crossed his brow. “I think you know that.”
“I have feelings for you, too.” It was true. Didn’t mean anything would ultimately come of them, of course. But at least she could be honest. She felt she owed him that much. “You’re v
ery kind and caring.” She looked into those haunting blue eyes. “And very handsome.”
His dimple appeared. “I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that your beauty draws me to you, like a bird to a flower. But that’s not why I created a charitable conspiracy to bring you here or why I can’t help being secretly glad that you’re still trapped here.”
She blinked. She did feel ridiculously beautiful when Zadir rested that hot and steady gaze on her.
“It’s not your gorgeous body, either.” He let his eyes hover on her face, then appraise the rest of her with a swift and satisfied-looking glance. “Though that heats my blood more than the desert sun. It’s your sharp mind, your creativity, and your resilience. You’re a powerful woman, Ronnie, who knows what she wants and goes after it. I freely admit that I want to be on that list.”
She smiled. “I suspect you can read in my eyes that I want you.” She knew he meant something deeper than mere lust—and that excited and scared her—but she tried to brush it off as simple attraction.
“I can see all kinds of things in those big dark eyes of yours: kindness and compassion, genius and the spark of inspiration. I could gaze into them for a long, long time.”
Her breathing quickened as he held her gaze—and her hand—until her heart threatened to explode out of her chest. She knew he wanted more from her than a simple fling. He wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble just to bed her. And now he was promising to pave her path in life with roses?
This was all a little scary. She didn’t belong here. She should be home, drinking herbal tea and doing her evening yoga stretches, not gazing into the eyes of a man who’d soon be king.
His mouth lowered over hers so slowly that she had plenty of time to duck out of the way or start talking if she’d wanted to. But she didn’t. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to hug him and caress him and run her fingers through his hair and moan hot breaths against his skin.
Desert Kings Boxed Set: The Complete Series Books 1-6 Page 35
