by Tara Pammi
“Shh... I only want to hold you, Amira,” he said, even as his mind raced. “Whatever you need, it is here, now, with me.”
Turning, she burrowed into him. Her arms wrapped around his waist, her face hidden in his chest. The scent of her hair filled his own breath. He wrapped thick strands of her hair around his fingers, coiling and uncoiling, not unlike his own thoughts.
She was so damn innocent and trusting. Such a gift. A gift Zufar didn’t deserve. A gift Zufar didn’t even value, for why else would she crave a stranger’s company so much?
A gift that had unwittingly fallen into Adir’s hands.
He raised her chin until she was looking into his eyes. The transparent desire he saw there banished any doubts he might have had. Feral possessiveness filled him and he touched his mouth to hers in a soft press that sent lust punching through him.
She was so beautiful and young and soft.
So easy to seduce.
If anything inside of him revolted at the idea, Adir suppressed it with a ruthlessness learned through years of surviving the harshest desert conditions.
Shocked at first, she stilled underneath his kiss. But it was already there, the heat he had felt between them, a small spark waiting to be ignited.
Adir ran his hands over her back, soothing the tremors, learning her curves, all the while gently nibbling at her lips.
Honey and heat, she was the most perfect thing he had ever tasted. An urgency he had never known before filled his blood, pounding at him to push her against the wall behind them. To lock her body against his hungry one. To thrust his tongue into her mouth while he entered her heat in the same way...to make her his, here, in this moment, to stamp his...
No!
A small voice inside him whispered. Whatever his reasons for doing this, he wanted to make it good for her, too. And that meant he couldn’t let his libido run rampant.
“Adir?” she whispered, blinking owlishly. Making him smile. “Why did you stop?”
“I wanted to make it good for you.”
“It is good. It is so... I didn’t know a simple kiss could be so animalistic. So powerful.”
For an innocent, sheltered beauty, how could she be saying the one thing that fired his blood? He dug his teeth into her lower lip. And licked it when she moaned. “Between the right couple, a kiss can be a lot more.”
“So, it is this good for you, too?”
“You have quite the scientific mind, don’t you?”
She shrugged, studying him with those big eyes. “I wondered.”
He rubbed his nose against hers, a gesture of tenderness that shocked even him. It was only a prelude, he reminded himself. She had been his for the taking from the moment she had glanced up at him and sighed that feminine sigh.
What was wrong with blending into her fantasy a little? Giving her what she wanted? “You wondered what, Amira?”
“If it felt the same to you. I... I have never shared such a passionate kiss with any man.”
“Not even your fiancé?” The question slipped past his lips.
“No. The most he has ever done is hold my hand. At public ceremonies.” She blinked and he knew he would never forget that earnest expression in those wide eyes. The transparent desire. “Coming back to us... You’ve obviously been with a lot of women.”
He couldn’t remember a time he had enjoyed a conversation with a woman as much as he enjoyed having sex. But then, when had he had the inclination or time to have a proper relationship?
For him, women were for sex. To sate his body’s needs. And only when he was on his overseas visits because he could not disrespect any of his own tribes by taking a daughter or a sister or another’s wife as a lover.
Not when all the power rested in his hands.
“Why obviously? And are you asking?” he teased.
“No,” came her resounding answer. “I think it is tacky and I really don’t wish real life to interrupt this...dream. The only reason I brought it up is because it makes me curious if it feels just as powerful and passionate for a man who is sexually experienced and has had a variety of partners, in contrast to a woman who has lied to her own best friend when she told her that her fiancé had done more than kiss her because she feels too pathetic to admit that he barely even looks at her.”
This time, her admission, instead of giving that high again, made his chest contract in a strange sensation. No...chemistry was a strange thing, and he didn’t need to understand it. It was a tool tonight and he was using it. As he had always done—to carve his own path in life. To rise from orphan to sheikh of warring tribes.
To be the man who had done the impossible.
He brought her palm to his chest where his heart was thundering. Down his chest to the flat plane of his abdomen and farther down.
Eyes wide like a dark oasis on a moonlight, she gasped when her hand reached his groin. He covered her hand with his and let her feel the shape and hardness of him. It was a bad idea that made him grit his teeth when she explored him with that innate curiosity, her breath hitching in and out in the dark silence.
He leaned his forehead against hers, locking her wrist. “I have been like that from the moment I touched you. That kiss between us, Amira, is no common thing. It is a spark waiting to burn and I can’t breathe for wanting to set it alight.”
An incandescent joy lit up her face, and in that smile, he felt like a king.
Clasping her cheeks with his palms, he kissed her gently. He licked at the seam of her lips. Again and again. He sank his fingers into the thick mass of her hair and pulled her toward him until she was a perfect fit for him. He licked a damp trail from her neck to her jaw, dropping soft little butterfly kisses over her cheek, her nose, her eyelids, her temple. Everywhere but the sweet offering that was her mouth.
He did it again and again, until it felt like he had been waiting an eternity to taste her. Until every muscle in his body was coiled tightly, until the innocent rub of her belly against his erection was sensuous torture.
“I could do this all night, habiba,” he whispered, his own contrary nature fighting the pull she had on his own control. This was a means to an end—a pleasurable means, though.
“I can’t,” she threw back at him, her eyes daring him.
Adir laughed and decided to give in.
She groaned into his mouth and he deepened the pressure, hungrier than he could ever remember being for the taste of a woman’s lips.
No, for this woman’s lips. This woman’s body, her innocence and the desire she expressed with such fierceness and generosity.
Her hands caught between their bodies while he pressed her against him. When he demanded entry into the sweet cavern of her mouth, she gave it, clinging to him with a deep moan. He licked the inner curve of her lower lip, using every ounce of skill he had at his disposal.
Her hands moved to his shoulders, her breasts pressing into his chest, her mouth so addictively hungry for more. It sealed the night.
He would give her what she desperately needed for one night. She would come with him willingly, he knew that—the fire between them, it was unlike anything he’d ever seen or felt.
“Come away with me, Amira. For one night. A few hours. Steal something for yourself from your own life, ya habibiti.”
Her swollen pink lips trembled, her eyes shining with desire along with something else. He didn’t have to ask, she was his for the taking—the pulse beating madly at her throat, the hunger in her gaze—and yet Adir wanted her to make the choice.
He would take what he wanted—revenge. He would steal something that belonged to his half brother, just as Zufar had stolen from him. His revenge on Zufar so much fuller if his betrothed came away with him out of her own choice.
If she chose Adir over Zufar even for a few hours...
“A choice, Amira,” he said, running his thu
mbs over her trembling lips, his body primed for possession, and yet he carefully used the words that would shred the last bit of her fear and doubts, a ruthless strategy he had learned from his mother’s letters. “You can go back to your bed and wonder what magic could have happened between us for the rest of your life. Or...” He bent his head and licked the pulse throbbing at her neck and felt her jerk toward him. He smiled wickedly before sucking the tender skin with his lips before releasing it with a popping sound. This time, she writhed against him, looking for relief from the ache between her legs, he knew. She was ready for him, even if she didn’t know it. And the knowledge filled him with a primal pride, not unlike the rulers before him who had mastered the harsh desert. “...you can choose me. This. For a few hours.”
When she kissed his knuckles, when she looked up at him with tears shining in her eyes, as if he was the sun and moon and stars all combined together, he pushed away the fragile thread of unease in his gut.
You’re a dirty stain.
He would pay Zufar back for those words. He would take what had been handed to him without guilt.
Victory thrummed through him when she said, “Yes, I... I would like to spend the...a few hours with you.”
He pressed his mouth against her temple, holding her tight until the shivers that had overtaken her subsided. She was courageous, this fragile beauty, and he would make this night worth that courage. He would show her infinite pleasure.
“I will return you unharmed, yes?”
When she nodded, he took her mouth in a fierce kiss, forgetting in that instant that she was innocent. He bit the lush pillow of her lower lip and when she moaned, tangled his tongue with hers. Heat built inside of him, goaded on and on by a dark need to possess her. To take what should have been Zufar’s by right.
His mother’s legitimate son, the man who was poised to be King of Khalia, the man who had never doubted his origins or his place in the world, the man who even now denied Adir his rightful place when he himself held Khalia in his palm...
It was a fitting revenge.
His body vibrated with the need to be inside her, here...in the dark stairway. But whatever his half brother thought of him, Adir was no savage.
He pulled the threads of his control together and pulled away from the lush temptation of her mouth. Already, her lips were swollen and her hair mussed with his questing fingers.
And yet Amira didn’t back away, her breaths falling and rising rapidly. “Where shall we go?” Her eyes shone with an impish delight, even as she shivered. “I have to return before—”
“I have heard so many tales about her gardens,” he said, remembering the beautiful words with which his mother had painted the gardens. “That she toiled hours and hours there, that they were her true love.”
“The Queen’s Gardens? You know of them?”
He simply nodded.
A wide smile curved Amira’s lips. “That’s exactly where I wanted to go tonight.”
He took her hand in his and led her down the steps. “Then it must be fate that I came upon you tonight, of all nights.”
A small frown tied her brows and she halted his steps. Her chin tilted up, a fierce resolve in her eyes. “Not fate, Adir. No. You and I... We ended up in this darkened corridor because we both made choices, yes? Tonight, there is no fate, there is no destiny, there are no forces commanding us. Just you and me.”
“You and me,” Adir agreed and pulled her on, before she could see the shadow of his dark thoughts in his eyes.
She was his tonight. Not Zufar’s. That was all he had to remember.
* * *
Amira felt as if she had been floating on clouds for the last two hours. Two whole hours she had spent with Adir by her side, touring Queen Namani’s famed gardens. Two hours spent smiling, talking, laughing, teasing.
Two hours in which she had been more herself than she had been her entire life.
Whatever it was Adir did in his real life, it had taken him mere seconds to maneuver them both out of the stairway and through another corridor of the palace manned by armed guards.
Almost as if he had been trained in subterfuge in the military division of Khalia. Or perhaps the map of the Khalian Palace was embedded in his head, because he had known ins and outs through the lit and unlit corridors that wound down to the paths of the garden, routes that even Amira who had visited for years didn’t know.
Was that it? Was he a member of the visiting guard called upon as security for the queen’s funeral? Someone who traveled all over the region but never stayed still in one place?
Was Amira one of a number of women he did this with?
Seconds after the thought occurred, Amira discarded it. She didn’t really care what he did or how he lived. She couldn’t afford to. Not if she wanted to steal away this night for herself. Not if she wanted to believe that she deserved a few hours with a man who really saw her. Who admired her and liked her and was attracted to her.
Except for that shock she had glimpsed in his eyes when she had confided to whom she was betrothed, he hadn’t mentioned Prince Zufar again. Or the royal family. Only Queen Namani filtered into their conversation once in a while. If she sensed a certain veneration in his tone for the dead queen, Amira ignored it. What she thought of Queen Namani, however contrasting to his view, was irrelevant to tonight.
This night was hers.
So she let herself be Amira and she didn’t press him for any answers. Not that she doubted he would give her answers if she demanded them.
For all his charming wit and teasing taunts, there was a remoteness to him. And that was after coming up against that smooth arrogance of a man who knew he was an alpha among men. And also a protector at heart, for she had seen the fierceness of his expression when he saw her bruise.
“Cold?” he asked as she shivered at the thought and Amira nodded.
Instantly, she was surrounded by the warmth of his jacket.
Moonlight carved the deep planes of his face with an even harsher outline. Even with the fragrance of the night-blooming jasmines filling the night breeze with a pungent scent, the scent of him clung to her skin instead. They walked along the walls of the small maze until they reached the famed fountain in the center, lit up by huge brass containers holding lights.
She had visited the palace innumerable times and yet had never seen this cozy spot in the middle of the maze. There was a sense of secrecy about it, amplified by her knowledge that King Tariq had had it built as a present to please his wife Queen Namani.
Galila had never told her if her mother had appreciated it or not.
But it was a beautiful, magical night—as if the universe itself were conspiring to give Amira what she wanted.
The center of the maze felt as if it had been designed for them. The tall hedges provided privacy and the water at the intricately sculpted fountain was a tinkling backdrop that drowned out everything else.
Every sense she possessed tingled with awareness of the man holding her hand.
“Why a nursing degree?” he asked.
Warmth spread through her chest. “When I was a little girl, my mother talked a lot about how she had always dreamed of studying medicine. She bought me this cute doctor’s toy set and we used to play... She would be the patient and I the doctor.
“I think she had just as much fun as I did. And then suddenly, she fell ill. I used to sit by her and study and then just like that, it seemed, she was...gone.
“I was a good student, made the top of my grade always. But when I broached the subject of studying medicine with my father, he was dead against it. Said I was destined for better things.
“Soon, Zufar and I were officially betrothed and then...at some royal dinner after our engagement, I told him that I wanted to study nursing. That it would bring a nice background to the various children’s charities I would be working with in the f
uture. And that I needed his permission to trump my father’s refusal. That if he gave me his accord in that moment, I would never ever ask him for anything else for the rest of our lives. It was the only time I think he really looked at me. Not just this...placeholder of a wife that had been chosen for him, but a real, breathing woman.”
“What did he say?”
There was a strange intensity in Adir’s voice and Amira smile faltered. “That he...much preferred a wife who knew how to keep herself happy than one who ruined everyone else’s life. He...told my father that my education, my future all belonged to him as my future husband. I could have kissed him just for that.”
“Did you?”
She shook her head, trying to find again that fun, easy footing between them. An uneasy light came into his eyes whenever she mentioned Zufar. “No...even if I had, it would have been only from gratitude. Nothing like the one we shared.” She couldn’t imagine ever kissing Zufar like that. Ever sharing this sense of camaraderie with him. Ever feeling a fraction of what she felt with Adir even if she spent a hundred years with him.
Adir turned her toward him, his face wreathed in shadows. “For a woman who recites every inconsequential fact as if her life depends on it, a woman who looks so beguilingly innocent, you’re quite cunning.”
“You make me sound...wicked.”
He laughed, and the sound surrounded her in waves. “You took the situation you were handed and turned it to your advantage to realize your dream. It is a compliment, Amira.”
And because the genuineness of his emotion reverberated in his words, Amira went on her toes and pressed her mouth to his. She wanted his laughter and his compliments. But she also wanted to soak in the heat and hardness of his body. To learn what it was to be a woman who desperately desired a man.
She needed to be the woman who reached for what she wanted. This time, she opened up for him, like a sunflower turning toward the sun, trusting him to take her wherever he wanted. This time, when he devoured her, she was ready and more than willing for it.
