by Olivia Gates
He gave her more to watch, thrust two more inches inside her.
“You were right…” she slurred at his deepening occupation, her tongue feeling anesthetized, swollen in her mouth. “This…is the edge of…survival. My heart…almost burst. I don’t know if this—” a lethargic finger indicated her twisting tongue “—is from a stroke…or if the paralysis…will wear off. If this was just…to take the edge off the hunger…the main course might well be fatal.”
He set his teeth as he rocked another inch inside her. “If ever there was a woman who can take a man to the limits of his mortality with her passion, it’s you, Carmen. It’s only fair I reciprocate in kind.”
Her voluntary functions were shot to hell. Her thrust to accept more of him had to be some autopilot, set on Farooq. “We had…this conversation…before…”
“Your limited experience is irrelevant.” He thrust deeper into her, the lubrication of their combined pleasure smoothing his advance. “You’re a natural-born femme fatale.”
Her hand moved under some external power, but with her hunger, trembled down the center groove of his abdomen to his shaft, to where they were merged. “Your femme fatale?”
“B’haggej’Jaheem—by hell, you are. Mine.” He ground deeper into her, reaching the point where the familiar expansion inside her turned into almost-pain. An edge of dominance, a sharpness of sensation that was glorious, addictive, overwhelming, even a little frightening. The idea of all that he was, melding with her, at her mercy as she was at his, filled volumes inside her, body and mind and soul. “Say it, ya Carmen. Enti melki.”
“Ana melkak…I’m yours, yours…Farooq, darling, please…”
At the word darling he snarled something colloquial she didn’t get, took the edges of her lehenga’s zipper in both hands…and ripped. She lurched in mortification.
He growled again. “I’ll have a dozen made for you, must see you…all of you…”
Still lodged inside her, he freed her from her torn clothes, his hands and eyes everywhere he exposed. She closed her eyes at the starkness of his appreciation, at the ferocity of anticipation. Now, he’d really make love to her…
He moved. But he wasn’t feeding her more of him. He was leaving her body. Her eyes tore open in panic, whimpering at his loss, her fingers too feeble to stop him. Cold shuddered through her. But it wasn’t that of losing her clothes or his heat.
His gaze on her lower belly was the source of frost.
“You have a scar.”
Eleven
Carmen bit a lip that trembled out of control.
She couldn’t talk about it. About her imperfections and losses. But oh God, he looked so…grim. Did he feel them? Did the external evidence of them put him off, now the edge had dulled?
“You had a Cesarean.” She nodded. His eyes turned almost all-black. “Did it hurt?”
She tried to laugh, managed a sound of distress rather than mockery. “I clung to the drug-free route only until they told me Mennah was obstructed and was in fetal distress. Then I was screaming for them to give me every drug they had and to open me up. From then on, I can assure you I felt no pain.”
“You know I meant afterward.”
She knew. And she didn’t want to answer. Didn’t want to remember the pain that had made her weep as she’d nursed Mennah, the debilitation that had turned caring for her daughter, moving at all, into torture. She couldn’t tell him any of it. He’d suspect that more than a surgical wound had caused her agony. And he’d be right. Her endometriosis had flared up to crippling levels until she’d given in, did the only thing that would put her back on her feet to be a mother for Mennah—removing the source of trouble. She’d had a hysterectomy three weeks after Mennah’s birth. The reopened scar had hurt then, had taken weeks to heal. And she’d been unable to take painkillers while she nursed her baby.
“It hurt,” he said when she didn’t answer, his voice vibrating with conviction, with a fury over it. “And you didn’t have anyone to take care of you, or Mennah for you. You fool.”
He suddenly heaved up to his feet, tore his clothes off his body like a madman, every sinew and muscle straining as if against a crushing weight, his engorged manhood erect flat against his steel abs. He still wanted her.
Those difficult tears she’d learned to shed since she’d known him burned at the back of her eyeballs, two breaking the barrier of her resistance, corroding a path to her chin.
He descended on her like a great vulture, pulling her to him, slamming her against his overheated flesh, demanding, “Why the tears, ya ghalyah?”
Oh God. His endearment. The one he’d always called her. Precious. Treasured. He’d made it hers again. The sentinel tears were followed by a flood. “I thought the scar put you off, that I—I’m…”
“A fool a thousand times over.” He gave her one quick shake, ending her doubts. “I crave nothing but you.”
His teeth pressed into her lower lip, with enough force to still it, to show her the power of his craving. He groaned long and deep as he applied more pressure until she whimpered, opened her mouth, her hands clenching around his neck, her breasts crushed to his chest, cushioning him, one leg clamping his hip, a carte blanche for anything he’d do to her.
When her undulations against him became quakes, he suckled her lips into his mouth, in long, smooth pulls, drawing more plumpness into her flesh, running his tongue inside them, drawing more of her taste until her whimpers became incessant. Only then did he plunge into her with tongue and ferocity. He drained her, then tore his lips from hers, trailed them over her cheeks, jaw, neck, breasts, nibbling and suckling her to madness. Then he reached her scar.
What he did then almost ruptured her heart.
He pressed his face against it, nudging her like an affectionate lion, groaning. “This is where you gave me Mennah, the source of her miracle, and of the pain you endured alone. This binds you to me, makes you aghla, more precious, makes me want you more, when I didn’t know there could be more wanting.”
She hiccupped an intake of distress. It hurt beyond measure, whether she feared he didn’t want her or she knew he did. Everything he did or said affected her with an intensity that ended up simulating pain. But it was worse now.
His lips were on her scar, paying homage, and for terrible moments, she felt a phantom womb convulse inside her. Primal longings burst there, to have his manhood driving into her as it once had, so huge and powerful it had breached her cervix, what remained of the core of her femininity, splashed his seed directly where the overriding forces of her love and his potency had smashed the odds, done the impossible, created the miracle of Mennah.
There would be no more miracles. Her potential had been amputated, and she’d been left clinging to her miracle with a desperation that might have suffocated her child, if Farooq hadn’t found them.
The emptiness inside her hadn’t hurt, had lain dormant, forgotten. But the wound had gaped with his reappearance, the loss damaging only with the yearning to be a whole woman for him.
He, as always, was the source of her agony.
And only he could make it bearable.
She grabbed him, tears splashing over him as she threw herself into the abyss of unrequited love.
“I feel so empty without you, darling,” she choked. “I missed you…the emptiness is too huge, fill it—fill me, Farooq, again please….”
“Sahrah.” He threw his head back at her invocation, calling her a witch on an elemental groan, his face twisting in carnal suffering as something seemed to shatter inside him. He plunged into her with all the force of the snapping momentum.
She screamed at the piercing fullness, beyond her capacity…tearing her apart…“Yes, Farooq, yes…”
But he rested inside her, possessed her lips in another exercise of abandon. She opened for his tongue, each plunge tightening her around his invasion in a vise until he growled, “Ya Ullah, so tight, so right…”
Next second, he was withdrawing from her depths
.
The implosion was crippling. “Farooq.”
In answer to her desperation he hauled her around him, bit her ear on a rough “Hang on” that had her digging her heels into his buttocks. He stood on the bed, stepped down from it, strode with her wrapped around him to the dining table set in the perfection of their wedding night dinner, set her on its edge. Then he reached behind her and sent everything crashing to the floor.
His violence jolted through her with a jumble of reactions. Consternation at his disregard for the things he’d destroyed, elation at his impatience to resume their merging, and fright.
“The glass…your feet…” she gasped.
He plastered her back to the cool mahogany, had her legs splayed, a hungry embrace for his bulk, her feet braced at the edge. “The wreckage is nowhere near me. From where I’m standing, the only injury I’m risking is a heart attack at your beauty, ya jameelati. Tomorrow I’ll make an altar of this height and serve you on top of it.” He plunged inside her again, filling her beyond her limits with every power and weakness. She was master and slave. Goddess and worshipper. His hands roamed over her, following the twin suns of his eyes, exacting every intimacy as he thrust inside her in an escalating rhythm, watching her climb, arch, seek. The volcanic core of an orgasm built inside her again and he came over her, gave her his weight to writhe under, his mouth to mate with, his fingers sliding between them, stimulating the focus of need, unlocking the code only he knew.
He gulped down every screech of her new climax, making it double as he exploded inside her, feeding her convulsions to the last twitches, pouring the fuel of his pleasure on hers.
It might have been another day, another age when she came back into her body, still keening, her teeth deep in his flesh, her most profound thanks for the torment and the satisfaction.
He extricated her fangs from his shoulder, his smile feral as he withdrew from her body. Even lost in the bliss and stupor of postorgasm devastation, she still moaned at his loss, at the sight of his erection still in full glory, glistening with the mixture of their pleasure.
He yanked her up, slamming her into his chest. “Don’t worry. I’m far from finished with you.”
He raised her up until her limp body hung above him at arm’s height, kept her there looking down on him, half-fainting with satiation, still shuddering with aftershocks. Then he let her slide down his sweat-slick landscape, caught her lips. Just as she caught fire again, sought him, he caught her hands.
“I said I wasn’t finished with you.” With hands filled with cherishing power, he turned her, laid her facedown on the table, her bottom jutting off its edge, her toes barely touching ground. She discovered another mirror flanking the dining area. He’d positioned it for the best view of the next stage in her enslavement. “Now I’ll find out how many times you have my name written in that maze. Here’s one.” He bent, nipped the tip of her shoulder blade. “Two.” His blunt nail scratched half an inch beside it. “Three…”
She lay there, helpless, watching him own her in their reflection, play her like a virtuoso, loving the game he’d invented, loving him as he reclaimed her every response and inch, sliding gossamer touches down her every sensitivity, sowing bites and suckles, knowing, pleasuring, punishing her every lightning-inducing switch until she felt her insides charring with the beauty, the expectation. The frustration.
So there was such a thing as torture by stimulation. Possibly death by arousal. He had unlocked her multiorgasmic potential, but surely those megaton orgasms should be all her nervous system could handle? How could she want more of him?
That’s why it’s called addiction, idiot. The more you have, the more desperately you want him.
When she felt she’d shudder apart she cried, “Just take me.”
“Take you, Carmen? You mean like this?” He slammed into her. She cried out at the abruptness of his invasion. He withdrew all the way out then slammed back, with even more power, forcing a sharper screech from her depths. “Or like this?”
“Farooq—yes!” She clawed at the smooth surface beneath her, putting all her strength behind thrusting back into his assault. She fought with him for deeper, harder, hating the inequality of their positions.
Then he lay on her back, his hands around her, under her, completing his exploitation, stroking her, stoking her inside and out into another blinding orgasm. On the final shearing spasms he joined her, exploding into a roar of completion, his seed filling her to overflowing.
She lay pressed between now-warm, moist wood and warmer, moister living steel, full, fulfilled, wishing to remain fused with him forever. But he was ending it.
She felt him receding from her. In every way.
“Farooq?”
Farooq gritted his teeth at the tremolo of her call. At its power.
She’d again offered herself, made him forget his resolutions. To keep it about carnal pleasures and nothing more. He’d even demanded confessions from her. And she’d freely offered them. Ya Ullah, the things she’d said…
And he still had no proof he could trust her. Yet he had. He’d believed her every word, every gasp and scream and tear.
Then he’d seen her scar and he’d been swamped. By the depth of the blessing she’d bestowed on him, what she’d had to endure to do it. Everything in him raged that he hadn’t been there to hold her ala kfoof er-raha—on the hands of comfort and cosseting, his princess in his cocoon of pampering and protection. He’d wanted to develop temporal powers to wrench back time, go to her in her hours of need, absorb her pain and fear. He’d wanted to swear that next time he’d be there from the first second, for every heartbeat afterward. He hadn’t.
He’d said enough. Ya Ullah, the things he’d said…
And beyond words, the way he’d lost all sense of self in her, surrendered to her as she’d dragged him into their dimension of carnal excess and sensory overload, spilled himself three times inside her in the delirium of ecstasy, each time with the image of all this pleasure forming another miracle like Mennah. She could already be pregnant again. The wish that she was, or soon would be, the need to tether her to him by any means, spread through him like a mind-altering drug…
La ya moghaffal—no, you fool. Stop.
He must decide how to proceed, couldn’t go back and take her again. Not on her terms. He had to set new ones before he did. As he would. As he had to. His sac felt heavy and painful again, his erection straining, every inch stinging to feel her beneath him, around him. And that was only the physical part. Everything else in him was clamoring for her. Her voice, her eyes, her wit, her hunger. Her warmth and sincerity…?
He struggled to deny the pangs as he ignored her tremulous call, crossed his space to the bathroom. He felt her gaze following him, her confusion and hurt palpable.
He gritted his teeth against their influence, entered the bathroom, crossed to the huge sunken tub, hit the heat-regulating buttons, started it. He’d soak. Until this seizure of hunger passed. Until she went to bed…
“Is this what I should expect from now on?”
Don’t turn. Send her to bed. Don’t look at her.
He turned, looked at her. He’d known he shouldn’t have.
She was naked, as he’d left her, the cascade of her hair a burst of color under the spotlights among her paleness. She looked like a mermaid who’d suddenly grown legs and was thrown on land, unsure how to stand. Her voluptuousness bore the marks of his eroded restraint, her thighs slick with the ecstasy he’d found inside her, her shoulders hunched, her arms hugging her middle as if bracing against crippling pain.
“We have sex, then you walk away?”
She called the chain reaction of cataclysms they’d just shared sex? But then, he’d treated it as such.
“You expected cuddling?” he bit off, furious, with her, with himself. “Expected the old Farooq?”
He could swear he felt something inside her quiver before it shattered. Hope? For what? The clean slate she’d asked for? Or a renewed ho
ld on him for a new plot?
Her eyes reddened. But their expressiveness, which for their six magical weeks and throughout this night had told him she was his in every way, was expunged, as if she’d ceased to…exist.
“I just needed to know what to expect. Now I know. When you get tired of me, will you let me move out of your quarters?”
“Who says I’ll get tired of you?”
“The old Farooq. He gave me three months, of which I served half. Should I expect that after serving the other half, whatever fascination I hold for you will be depleted and you’ll let me go, let me be Mennah’s mother only?” As he’d thought in her apartment. A few lifetimes ago. “Or have you decided you have a taste for hurting and humiliating me after all?”
“Enough,” he snarled. “You’ve changed your tune again, I see. All through the night you’ve begged for me, been mine and now…”
“Now it doesn’t matter what I am. It never mattered. To you or to anyone else. It’s what you are that matters. What you do, what you decide. I’m not in your league, Farooq. You pointed that out to me early on. As if I needed to be told. You’ll do what you want, and I have no say in the matter.” Without warning tears splashed her face, her arms, the ground. “I only ask, for Mennah’s sake…don’t destroy me.”
It was the most macabre thing he’d ever seen. Her face, as vacant as a corpse’s, flooded in tears streaming from eyes so red he felt they’d start gushing blood any second.
This was real. Wasn’t it? He could trust her. Couldn’t he? He couldn’t bear it if he was hurting her and she didn’t deserve it. If she was and had always been his. If she loved him…?
He wanted to say…everything. But he couldn’t. He had to make sure first. Because once he said it…he’d be hers, too. Forever.
He must find out if she was his, the same way. His heart and mind said yes. Now he had to await the verdict of time.
