by Olivia Gates
But she was panting, whimpering, twisting in his hold, and his intentions to postpone his pleasure, her possession, dwindled with each wave of stimulation her movements elicited.
He had to stop her, before he gave in.
He moved over her, imprisoning her beneath him. She went still as if he’d knocked her out. Anxious that he might be suffocating her, he rose on both arms, removing his upper body from hers, found her eyes the color of his kingdom’s twilight. She wasn’t breathing.
Before he took her lips, forced his breath into her lungs, he grated, “Now repeat after me, Carmen. Zao’wajtokah nafsi—I give you myself in marriage.”
She tossed her head on the bed, writhing again. He pressed harder between her splayed thighs, fighting not to reach down and take hold of her hips, tilt her, thrust at her as his body was roaring for him to do. Even without seeking her heat with his hardness, the pressure he exerted still wrenched dueling moans from their throats. “Say it, Carmen. Zao’wajtokah nafsi.”
“God, Farooq…” she pleaded. “Be reasonable. You don’t want to marry me. We can find another way…”
“There is no other way. Now say it, Carmen.”
Her stricken eyes meshed with his, her flesh burning beneath him, reminding him of all he’d once had with her, the overwhelming hunger, the affinity he hadn’t been able to duplicate with anyone else. He knew that, if he wanted, he’d be buried inside her in seconds, would find her molten for him, knew she’d attain her first orgasm as soon as he thrust inside her. He could get her to promise anything when he was inside her. But he didn’t want her consent that way. “Say it, Carmen. For Mennah.”
At hearing Mennah’s name issue from him like an invocation, she went still beneath him again.
Staring at him with eyes now the color of his kingdom’s seas in a storm, she finally nodded her acquiescence, her defeat. “Zao-zao’wajtokah nafsi…”
Triumph roared in his system, her quavering words the most coveted conquest he’d ever made. “Wa ana qabeltu zawajek.” He heard the elation in his voice, was unable to leash it in, saw her wincing at its harshness. “And I accept your marriage. Alas’sadaq el mossammah bai’nanah—on the terms we name between us. Again, Carmen, what are your demands? Make them.”
“I just want Mennah.”
“And you will always have her. What else do you want?”
“I don’t want anything.”
She was lying again. She had to be. She wanted luxuries and privileges, like any woman. That was why she’d been with him. Why she’d betrayed him. But she knew she’d get them by default being his wife, was pretending she cared nothing for them. A trick as old as woman.
She was also lying about something else. She wanted him. He could smell her arousal, feel the need for satisfaction tearing through her as it was tearing through him. He’d soon give it to her, give her everything she wanted. He’d have it all, too.
He’d give his daughter his love, her birthright. And he’d quench his lust for Carmen until he was sated. He’d relegate her to the role of Mennah’s mother when he had no more use for her.
He might even divorce her if he wished. He didn’t need her consent for that. He’d decide it, and it would be done.
But if his memories of what they’d had were anywhere near accurate, if the agony he was in at the moment was any indication, that wouldn’t happen for a long time yet.
A very long time.
Five
“Will you need anything else, ya Somow’el Ameerah?”
Carmen squinted up at the thin, dark, bird-of-prey-like man who stood above her, body language loud with deference.
He’d called her Somow’el Ameerah. Again. She couldn’t get her head around it. Wondered if she ever would.
It had been Somow’el Ameer Farooq this and Somow’el Ameer Farooq that since they’d set foot outside her building. All the way out of the country. It had taken his word—well, under a dozen words—to get her out of there. It had taken even less to make her Somow’el Ameerah. Highness of the princess. Her royal highness in Arabic. He’d waved his magic wand and made her a princess….
It had really happened. He’d stormed into her life, had uprooted her existence all over again.
He’d literally uprooted it this time. He’d snatched her from her home, from her country, from everything she knew, had soared with her to the unknown. And she had a feeling she’d never be back. Not for more than visits anyway. And since she had no one to visit anymore, she doubted she’d even be back at all…
Her lungs emptied as another breaker of anxiety slammed into her, pushing her under, the foreboding of stepping into the quicksand of Farooq’s existence pulling at her, the forces synergizing, paralyzing her under their onslaught.
Oh God, what had she let herself in for?
She was on board his jet, on her way to Judar. There was no going back, no way out, now or ever…
“Ameerati?”
The concern in that word slowed down the spiral of agitation. The man with the hawk’s face and eyes was doing it again. Probing her with solicitude, scanning her with an insight she’d bet could read her thoughts. She’d also bet he’d seen through Farooq’s declaration that he’d reclaimed his wife and child, ending the misunderstanding that had led to their separation.
She remembered him well. He’d been there from the first time she’d seen Farooq, his shadow. Hashem. Farooq had told her to ask Hashem for anything in his absence. He was the only one Farooq trusted implicitly, in allegiance and ability, discretion and judgment.
Had he trusted him with the truth? Or had the shrewd man worked it out for himself? Or was everything obvious to everyone?
What did any of that matter? Hashem would take what he thought to his grave, would reinforce his prince’s version of the truth with his last breath. No one else would dare even think but what Farooq had declared to be the truth.
“Ameerati—are you maybe suffering from air-sickness?”
Carmen winced at his gentleness. It made her realize how raw she was, how vulnerable she must seem to him. She shook her head.
His gaze was eloquent with his belief that she needed many things but couldn’t bring herself to ask for any.
“Please, don’t hesitate to ask me anything at all. Maolai Walai’el Ahd wants you to have all you need till he rejoins you.”
Smart man. Being the über P.A. that he was, he knew the best way to make her succumb to his coddling was invoking his master’s wishes, the master he’d called…
Maolai Walai’el Ahd.
Carmen started, the three words that had flowed on his tongue with such reverence erasing all she’d heard before and after them, blasting away what remained of her fugue, blaring in her mind.
Had she misheard? Was her Arabic translation center offline…?
She’d heard just fine. All her senses had been functioning to capacity since she’d set eyes on Farooq. In fact, she felt she was developing hypersensory powers. Everything was amplified, sharpened, heightening the impact of every stimulus, yanking responses from her that ranged from agitation to anguish.
Her translation center was fine, too. That was the sturdiest part in her brain. She understood what Maolai Walai’el Ahd meant all right. It was literally my lord successor of the Era. Aka, crown prince.
Farooq was the crown prince now?
But how? A year and a half ago, he’d been only second-in-line to the throne of Judar. What had happened to the first-in-line?
This information jogged another in her mind, igniting it with new relevance. The king of Judar was ill. From all reports there wasn’t much optimism regarding his return to health. And if he died…
Farooq would soon become king of Judar.
And she’d graduate from plain Ms. Carmen McArthur to somow’el Ameerah to Maolati’l Malekah in no time flat.
Malekah. Queen. Yeah, sure.
The preposterousness of the whole thing burst out of her.
Hashem’s dark eyes rounded at he
r outburst. Self-possessed as he was, she’d managed to shock him.
Yeah, him and her both. In fact, the cackles tearing out of her shocked her more than they could him.
“Ameerati?”
His bewilderment, the way he kept calling her “my princess,” spiked the absurdity of it all. She spluttered under an attack of hysteria, felt her sides about to burst with its merciless pressure. “I’m s-sorry, Hashem, I’m j-just—just…”
It was no use. She was unable to stem the racking laughter, to muster breath enough to form a coherent sentence.
The man stood before her, watching her with heavy eyes that seemed to fathom her to her psyche’s last spark, until she lay back in her seat, trembling with the passing of the fit as if in the aftermath of a seizure.
“God, you must think me a total flake,” she wheezed.
“I think no such thing,” he countered at once, his voice a soothing flow of empathy that jarred her.
God, she would have preferred anything to bristle at, to brace against. His kindness only knocked her support from beneath her, left her sinking. She hated it. She’d survived by counting on no one’s goodwill, by doing without support of any kind. She had to keep it that way, now more than ever. Or she’d be destroyed.
“I apologize if my surprise gave you the impression that such an unfavorable opinion crossed my mind for a second, when the exact opposite is true. I fully realize how overwhelmed you must be. Everything has happened so fast, and Maolai Walai’el Ahd is formidable—and, when he has his sights on a goal, inexorable.” This man was all-seeing. And they sure saw eye to eye in evaluating Farooq. “But he is also magnanimous and just. You have no reason to feel apprehensive, ya Ameerati. Everything will be fine.”
Okay, here was where their concord ended. Even if she agreed the qualities mitigating Farooq’s ruthlessness existed, Hashem didn’t know that Farooq no longer considered her entitled to his magnanimity, was dealing out his brand of justice by using Mennah to pressure her into giving up her freedom and choices. She was also not buying Hashem’s prognosis for a second.
How could everything be fine? Ever again?
She could only pray it would one day grow tolerable.
To have Hashem’s allegiance as an extension of his to Farooq, mixed in with his pity for her as a casualty of his master’s inescapability, a man of such insight and importance in Farooq’s life, might grow comforting. Right now she had to make him leave her to her turmoil.
She answered his original question. “Thank you, Hashem. I promise to avail myself of your services if I think of anything.”
With a last probing look, he bowed and walked away, obviously loath to leave her in her state without offering service or solace.
Instead of relief, the moment he disappeared from her field of vision, chaos rushed in to fill the vacuum he’d left behind. Everything her eyes fell on contributed to her imbalance.
In both her personal and professional lives, she’d lived and worked where power brokers weaved their pacts, where billionaires flaunted their assets in an addiction to competition and for leverage in business. She’d been in the bowels of private citadels, of diplomatic and hospitality fortresses. She’d studied beauty and luxury, learned their secrets and power and how to utilize their nuances to enthrall the most jaded senses, smoothing her clients’ path to winning their objectives through the goodwill engendered by perfectly designed and realized events.
This jet surpassed anything she’d ever experienced in taste and sheer, mind-numbing opulence. She’d had an idea it would be something unprecedented when she’d laid eyes on it. It was surely the first bronze-finished Boeing 737 she’d ever seen. Then she’d set foot on its plush carpeting and had plunged deeper into the surrealism of being with Farooq, being introduced as his wife and deluged in the veneration of a culture that revered its royals. All her knowledge of the best that money could buy had only sent her mind boggling in appreciation of every detail around her.
She gaped again at every article of genuine art, every flawless reproduction in design, everything spanning centuries and cultures, the classical meshing with the modern, the Western with the Middle Eastern, disparate forms of beauty melding with luxury and futuristic technology in a symphony of unlikely harmony.
She fingered her seat’s armrest. A panel slid open, exposing a set of buttons. Hashem had said they gave her control over all amenities, from service to entertainment to climate control. She pushed one with a screen icon. Her head snapped to the left as an eighteenth-century mural disappeared with a smooth whir to reveal a screen of a size she hadn’t known had been manufactured yet.
No need to experiment further. There’d only be more wonders, a refresher course as well as a first-time close-up of Farooq’s affluence and power. And this was only his transportation…
She was staring down at her sweaty palms, fighting another wave of dizziness when her senses overloaded. She almost moaned at the force of the breach. Farooq.
She didn’t want to raise her eyes. Didn’t want to watch him approaching, obliterating her autonomy, shrinking the world into the parameters of his presence, his desires, his decrees.
She did, saw his eyes firing with satisfaction at her slumped pose. He closed in on her like a force of nature, two men from his extensive entourage trying to keep up with him, documenting his muttered orders. They’d disappeared by the time he reached her, a partition sliding behind them to isolate the dining area where he’d seated her before going to “arrange matters” from the rest of the jet.
He looked down at her with the same intensity as he had when he’d been on top of her, demanding she repeat his land’s ancient marriage rite.
Her heart lurched like a captured bird in her chest.
Oh God, she’d really done it.
She’d really married him.
She’d lain beneath him, feeling him imprinting her, hard with an indiscriminate reaction to feeling a female body beneath him, had repeated the words that had bound her to him in a marriage without love or respect—or anything, really. A sham. A cold-blooded ruling on his part, a capitulation on hers.
It’s all for Mennah. It’s all for Mennah.
Maybe if she repeated the mantra enough she could endure this. The feeling of forever plummeting into an abyss.
She snatched her gaze away from his, fingered Mennah’s baby monitor receiver, praying for her daughter to wake up so she could run to her and be spared another exposure to Farooq.
All she heard over the amazingly low drone of the jet’s engines was the soothing Middle Eastern music through the surround sound system, and Mennah’s soft breathing.
Mennah had awakened during their departure, had bubbled with excitement in response to Farooq’s delight in her all through the trip in his limousine right up to the jet and through takeoff. She’d executed her sudden sleeping maneuver an hour ago, and he’d secured her car seat in one of the jet’s bedroom suites.
“You haven’t eaten.”
At his rebuke, her eyes fell on the masculine, square-cut silver service set and cutlery, laid out before her on midnight-blue silk tablecloth, nestling among sparkling crystal and crisp white napkins. She’d picked something from the extensive menu Hashem had provided. It had been served with great fanfare under polished brass domes, placed to simmer over gentle flames. Hashem had raised the covers to show her the cookbook perfection below and the aromas of the haute cuisine creations had hit her salivary glands. Her stomach had fed on its emptiness, churned with revulsion against being catered to as if she was a beloved mistress when she was just a necessary evil, an abhorred hostage.
Corrosion surged again in her throat. “I’m not hungry.”
His jaw hardened. “You haven’t eaten in the last seven hours. Your stomach must be feeding on itself by now.”
Gee. What was it with men suddenly being able to read her mind? Or was she just too predictable to live?
“You’ll have to excuse my stomach if it isn’t functioning to
your calculated expectations. After all that’s happened in said seven hours, all it feels now is the urge to heave out its nonexistent contents. Just imagine what it would do to existent ones.”
“You’re trying to tell me I make you nauseous?” Exasperation flashed across his face before morphing into derision.
“Still playing games? Still challenging me to expose your proclamations for the feminine taunts that they are?”
She pressed a fist to her head in an attempt to mitigate the pressure building inside. “Just why do you want me to eat? I wouldn’t miss a few pounds. If I ever manage to part with them.”
His eyes changed hue, melted down her enervated body like his fingers once had, following a path of seduction, of destruction over her. “You have gained some weight.”
She snorted. “Yeah, tell me about it.”
“I will. In detail. When I’m in…possession of the full range of…particulars.”
“Gee, thanks. Just what every woman wants to hear. An inventory of her expanding assets.”
He leaned, ran a light touch down her left forearm to her ring finger, circled a nonexistent ring before sawing his finger between hers. “Expanding is an inaccurate word. Your assets have…appreciated.” He pushed a button on her seat’s armrest, swiveling it around, picked up her hand, tugged her out of her slouch, bringing her face level with his groin. “See for yourself how appreciated they are by inspecting my expanding assets.”
A second before he had her performing a hands-on assessment, she snatched her hand from his as if he’d been forcing it into an open fire, darting a look around.
He encroached closer, coming between her legs, making her feel dwarfed, dominated. “Don’t worry about accidental audience. We won’t be disturbed for anything less than an impending crash. Do get on with your reconnaissance, put your mind to rest about the efficacy of your weapons.”
