by Sophia Lynn
His harsh words only made the pleasure in her roar up higher. She threw her head back, giving her body over to the intense heat between them. She was buffeted by sensations, thrown back and forth, but they kept growing more and more intense.
Finally, just when she was convinced that it wouldn't happen again, her body lit up like a fireworks display. She dug her fingers into the floor beneath her as she arched her back. She knew that he could feel her pleasure the same way that she felt his a moment after. They both froze, their cries echoing in the room. She felt him thrust into her one last time, that frisson of pleasure driving her own climax just that much further.
When she finally came back to herself, she was panting, held up only by the last strength in her body and his hands. Slowly, Rasul lowered her to one side, coming to lie behind her. The only sound was their breathing. There were words that were meant to go into this silence, ones that trembled on her lips, but she couldn't say them.
"Are you all right?" he asked, his voice slightly hoarse.
"Of course I am," she said. "This feels …"
Right, Perfect. Like I love you …
"Amazing," she finished lamely. If he could tell that there was something she was holding back, he didn't say. Instead, he let her relax into him, lulling her with a gentle hand stroking over her hair and her shoulder.
Finally, just when she was beginning to get stiff from lying on the floor, he climbed to his feet and helped her to hers.
"Come on," he said, and a part of her wondered if there was already some distance between them. Still, his hands were gentle as he pulled her into the enormous shower with him, the water falling from above like rain. She stood perfectly still as the warm water fell down around her, relishing the way his hands soaped her body gently and worked the shampoo into her hair.
When they were done, he glided the soft towel over her lean body, drying her and making her squirm with pleasure. When she leaned up to kiss him, however, she found herself overwhelmed by a wave of weariness that made her lean against him.
"Tomorrow," he whispered. “"When you get your strength back. Then we will enjoy everything that I have promised you today."
"I will hold you to that," she murmured, and she barely made a sound when he scooped her up and took her back to bed. They fell asleep curled against one another as if they had done it for years, and as she drifted off into that sweet peaceful slumber, she wondered why in the world they hadn't done this sooner.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They spent the next morning in bed, making love and leisurely learning each other's bodies. Berry learned to delight in the power of his frame and the way that he could move her exactly as he liked. For his part, Rasul showed every evidence of adoring her lean figure. Every time she made a self-deprecating comment about being too thin or simply not curvy enough, he scoffed.
"You are perfect," he said over and over again. "Perfect for me. Perfect for my mouth, for my touch … only perfect."
By the end of the morning she was beginning to believe him, and finally, sore and happy, the two of them showered together and shared a light meal before they returned to the helicopter.
"Is it a little less terrifying this time?" he asked teasingly, and she laughed.
"It's strange," Berry said, settling against the seat, "but many things are less terrifying now."
His chuckle made low ripples of pleasure run through her body. She now knew what could come after that sweet sound, and her body was primed to respond to it.
As they flew the return journey to Alamun, she didn't sleep, but she did drowse, letting her mind take her where it wished. She thought of the work that she had waiting for her. She thought of how good it would feel to touch his strong body again. She thought of what else she wanted to share with him.
I love him.
The thought appeared in her mind as bright as a beacon, making her start up with a soft startled sound.
Rasul glanced at her questioningly. "Are you all right? Was it a strange dream?"
"No … no, I'm fine," she said, settling back against the seat.
Berry tried to remain calm, but the words that blared through her mind were still there and the more that she looked at them, the more true they were.
She had fallen in love with the man who was meant to be a fling. No, even worse, she had fallen in love with a man who she was bound to professionally. When their professional engagement ended, would this end as well?
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him, but she made herself go still. Asking where a relationship was going, whether he cared for her at all, that was what untried girls did. It was not something that sophisticated men wanted to hear.
With growing dismay, Berry realized that her questions would likely be nothing short of irritating for Rasul. He was a man who had been drawn to her independence and her spirit. To go crawling and cringing towards him … nothing would disgust him more.
She tried to close the topic in her mind—at the end of the day, it simply did not matter— but her heart cried out as if it were in pain. Once or twice, to her horror, she could feel tears threaten. With some effort, she was able to hide her emotions under the cover of drowsing in her seat.
When they landed at the airstrip, however, she was a nervous wreck, and when Rasul pulled her close for a kiss on the tarmac, he could feel how stiff she was.
"Berry? Are you all right?"
"I am," she said, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she could appreciate the fact that her voice was level. "I am just very tired, and there was some work I needed to do this weekend."
He frowned, and for a moment, she thought he was going to challenge her.
"I am sorry," he said. "If I had known about your work, I would have tried to get you back sooner. I wish you had told me."
For one brief moment, the dark cloud that hung over her heart broke, and she was able to feel the deep warmth he had created in her shining through.
"Oh, no, please don't be sorry," she said. "I had … an amazing time with you. Never be sorry for that."
Rasul brightened up at that, and this time, their kiss was far more natural and warm.
"So in that case, can I convince you to play hooky with me for a little while? Surely Farnsworth can't be that much of a slave driver?"
"I am very much afraid he is," she said with a wry smile. "I just … really need to get things done."
To her intense relief, he did not keep her longer. Instead, he drove her back to the city in his sleek black car, and when he walked her up to her door, he gave her a kiss that boiled her blood.
"Take care," he said. "I will call you tomorrow, yes?"
"Yes, please," she said.
Her heart clung to the fact that he wanted to see her tomorrow, but when the door closed behind him, she squashed that hope as much as she could.
This is too much, she thought. This is too real. I can't let him affect me like this anymore.
Then she took off her clothes, turned her shower up the hottest it would go, and stepped under the stream to cry. No matter what she had said in the helicopter, right now, she was terrified. What was going to happen when her work with him ended? What was going to happen to them?
***
Back at his own penthouse, Rasul was already noticing that he missed his little antiquarian. After spending the last few days with her, she had somehow come to occupy a space in his head as persistent and natural as the color of his hair or his left hand.
You are moving fast, his mind informed him, but his heart, which had been raised on stories of pitched battles for love and honor, disagreed.
He was prepared to spend the night thinking about where he wanted to take the lovely Berry next, where to eat, what to see, when he received a call on his private line. He frowned. There were only ten people in the country who had access to that line, and none of them would have called unless it was an emergency.
"Hello?"
To his surprise, it was the Minister of Finance, Mafusa
Algol. Algol was a tall, mustachioed man who had served his father, and he was not a man who ruffled easily.
"I am very sorry," Algol said. "But you will want to come to the capitol immediately.
That was not a statement that Algol would have made lightly. Swearing. Rasul turned around without sitting down at all, and made his way down to his car again.
"I'm en route," he said shortly. "Tell me what's going on …"
As Algol told him about the irregularities in the market that were shaking the faith in the country, he had a moment to think regretfully of Berry. From the way Algol was making things sound, it might take some time before he was back in her sweet arms.
I will be back as soon as I can, he promised in his mind. And soon, perhaps we won't have to be apart at all …
CHAPTER NINE
Berry told herself that she was not watching the phone. Watching the phone was something that teenagers did, or women who had nothing else going on in their lives. She certainly wasn't that.
Instead, she got things done. She went back to the souk, looking for treasure, and she did a few write-ups here and there for different artifacts that she had been meaning to take care of. Generally, she did her job, she did it well, and she never thought about Rasul at all.
That was a lie, however. She thought about him all the time, to the point where seeing sunlight glint off of silver jewelry in the souk made her tear up over his eyes.
She waited to see if any message would come in, but except for one hurried message saying he would see her again soon, there was nothing. That message had given her some hope, but when none came after it, she had to assume that it was merely politeness that had spurred it.
Three days after she got back from the mountain, Farnsworth wanted to speak with her, and his call only made her feel worse.
"What the hell are you doing out there?" he demanded as soon as she picked up the phone.
"My job?" Berry asked acidly. Farnsworth got like that sometimes, and sometimes, all that was necessary to make him more civil was to be just as rude to him as he was to her.
Farnsworth snorted. "I'm not sure I believe you. Listen, I sent you to work with the Sheikh for a reason …"
On top of her already frayed nerves, his reprimand was like being lightly grated. "Yes," she said, "and I worked for him. I dated everything he wanted me to date. I gave him history, and I told him which of his pieces were crap, just as I was told to do."
"If that is all you seriously thought you were there to do, I bet on the wrong horse," Farnsworth snarled. "Seriously, use your head, Berry."
She could feel her stomach drop down somewhere in the vicinity of her shoes. She knew that she should hang up. Farnsworth had often walked the line between being an acceptable level of cranky to being outright abusive, but right now, he had vaulted over that line and then some. If she were smart, she would hang up, and then seriously think about quitting. Instead, she froze in place.
"What are you saying?" she said through stiff lips.
"I am saying that when I put an attractive woman next to a powerful man with a goal in mind, everyone knows what's going on. I knew what was going on, he knew what was going on, it seemed as if you were the only one who wasn't on board."
Berry was already shaking her head. "No, no, listen, that wasn't what was happening at all! You've got it all wrong, we had met before …"
"Oh please, Berry, get over yourself," Farnsworth sneered. "He was drooling all over you at the gala. He wanted to make sure that he got a crack at you, and he did. It looks like you weren't able to complete the job …"
"You thought I was going to … to get your name in the door?" she asked. "I cannot believe you."
"Believe me when I say that that was the goal," he said sourly. "And since you've not delivered—"
"I quit," she said, her voice trembling.
There was a pause on the other end of the line before Farnsworth started to laugh. "What the hell do you think you're doing? Fresh out of school, and believe me when I say that I will make your life hell in this industry if you keep on like you are. You'll never work in antiquities again."
"Don't care," she said abruptly. "Fuck yourself, Farnsworth. I don't need you, I don't need him, and I don't need this."
Her smartphone certainly did not give her a satisfying way to slam down the call, but ending it helped her heart beat somewhere at its usual rate.
For a long time, she simply stood in the middle of her apartment, trying to figure out what had just happened to her. She should have been terrified that she had just lost her job, and that she was now in a foreign country with no way to make money.
Instead, she was consumed with the new information that Farnsworth had given her. She had known that she was being offered up as a kind of bribe. She knew that her expertise and her availability were meant to make sure that Rasul was decently invested in helping Farnsworth make his move to prominence in Alamun. What she had never expected was that she herself, her personality, her spirit, and her body, were designed to bring Farnsworth a little closer to his goal.
Berry tried to tell herself that it didn't matter. Nothing she did had been out of duty or any kind of mercenary sensibility. If anyone should feel ashamed, it was Farnsworth for thinking that such a thing would work.
Her thoughts touched on Rasul, and her heart twisted as if someone had squeezed it. No. He couldn't have known, shouldn't have expected. But had he? From the beginning, he had treated her capitulation as a sure thing. He had been kind and the pleasure she had experienced in his hands was honest, even if nothing else was.
With a sinking heart, Berry realized that whatever she hoped for, whatever she had felt, it was all to further Farnsworth's goals and Rasul's appetite. She stared at the ceiling, willing her tears to recede. Despite her best efforts, some of them still managed to flow down her cheeks, and they lead to a flood.
Finally, overcome by emotion, she curled up on the floor, sobbing until she felt as dry and worn out as a husk of corn after harvest.
Well, where do I go from here? Berry wondered, but at the moment, she had no clue. All she could do was to try to hold herself together as best she could.
In a little while, when she felt calmer, when she was more in control of her own world and her own tears, she would decide what came next. Perhaps she would try to find a job with one of Farnsworth's competitors, or she might go to try her luck in Dubai. Perhaps it was time to return to the United States.
All she knew was that there was no way in the world that she could stay in Alamun.
***
Every time he thought that the meeting was going to end, another representative needed to get up and voice his dissenting opinion. By the third day, Rasul was ready to strangle the next person who got up to say something irrelevant to the matter at hand.
At the very least, his increasing anger was keeping things going. More than one delegate sitting next to him in Dubai noticed that he was tense, just short of furious, and he would not have disagreed with that assumption.
The worst part of the experience was when he dragged himself back to his hotel after the final night of the conference, only to find that his messages to Berry had been attempting to send for days. He discarded them, and debated calling her, but the hour was late, and chances were good that she was already getting to sleep.
I'll make it up to her, he decided. I'll take her for a cruise, or perhaps we can simply find a resort where we can be perfectly at peace.
He left Dubai as soon as he could, and the entire plane ride back to Alamun, he thought of Berry. If he was honest with himself, her face, her voice, and her touch had haunted him for the entire financial emergency. He couldn't wait to have her in his arms.
Rasul hoped that she would forgive him for neglecting her for a while, but hopefully some presents would make it up for her. He flipped through some of the online catalogs that his cousins favored, and selected a few scarves and a few pieces of jewelry for her. He smiled to think of Ber
ry wearing his things.
His feelings for her were tumultuous. All he knew was that no one had ever made him feel this way before. Even before he had gotten to know her well, he would have said that Berry was one in a million. Now that he had spent the night with her, slept in her arms, and basked in the brilliance of her smile, he knew that someone like her came along once in a lifetime.
Rasul thought he knew what luck was before, but now, after having started perhaps the most important relationship of his life over an argument in the souk, he knew that he was incredibly blessed.
It was past one in the morning when he got off the plane, and as much as he wanted to know, he couldn't go over to see her. No. It was best to simply wait until morning, when their reunion could be everything it was meant to be.
***
Berry was utterly calm. She didn't think that she had ever been this calm in her entire life. She knew what she needed to do, and she wasn't going to let anyone stop her. She had blocked Farnsworth from being able to call her, which had reduced the amount of trouble she was dealing with. She was hardly perfect, however, Whenever a new text or message came in, she glanced at it hopefully. However, it always turned out to be the people who had arrived to look at some of the furniture she was selling, or the travel agency that wanted to confirm her tickets.
It was never Rasul, and as the days went on, she knew that it never would be. She was doing what she needed to do. During her brighter moments, she could even tell herself that she was looking forward to getting back to the United States, but in the dark of night, she knew that it was a lie.
The best she was able to do was to maintain some kind of calm as she went about the business of shutting down her apartment, getting rid of her things and preparing for the move. She was calm for so long that when Rasul showed up, she could actually feel it crack.
For a moment, Berry simply stood in the doorway, staring at the man who beamed at her from the other side.
