by Tara Pammi
It was the last thing he’d expected Amalia to say tonight. A taunt on his lips, he’d looked up and read the resolve in her eyes.
She wanted him.
All his life, he had surrounded himself with brazen, sophisticated women who wanted sex and mutual pleasure or women like his third PA and the candidates sent over by Ms. Young, who only saw the glitter and power of his position in the world.
Amalia fell into neither camp and yet, to both. From the time he could understand the world he’d been told that he was the prince, the future sheikh, not just Zayn. Never just Zayn.
And yet he felt different, both and neither when held by her alluring gaze, when she glared at him or argued with him even.
With a gritted jaw, he realized she might not be truly innocent, but it was clear that she was inexperienced. A woman he’d begun to understand and admire. A woman he couldn’t blithely seduce and walk away from when the curtain fell on their charade.
Damn it, she had looked crushed when he’d claimed he needed a shower and left the room without acknowledging her question. As if it wasn’t the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life—to walk away from the lush temptation she presented.
He stepped out of the shower and toweled himself dry.
Sharing the suite with Amalia for the duration of their stay in Paris seemed to be the worst idea he had ever had. Right in line with choosing to keep her close by parading her as his fiancée.
Knowing that she was in the next room, probably freshly showered like he was...just the passing thought sent a flurry of images through his overheated mind.
Her silky skin would be soft and damp, the towel sticking to those pouty breasts that had finally been displayed in their full glory in that dress tonight. Her long, toned legs would be bare under the towel, would be perfect wrapped around his waist as he...
Gritting his jaw, he wrapped the towel against his hips and walked out into his bedroom. The Paris skyline was a feast outside the French windows but tonight he drew no pleasure from it.
The jar of the door behind him made every muscle curl with heat and want.
He turned to find her leaning against the closed door. Her hands hung limply by her sides. A fine tension seemed to resonate from her but it was her face that arrested him.
Her face was free of even the little makeup she had worn earlier. Hair tied up in that ponytail again, pulled tautly from her forehead. She wore a knee-length robe tightly cinched at her waist.
And just as he guessed, her legs went on and on under the hem, tanned and shapely in the moonlight. Seeing a woman’s bare legs for the first time had never been such an intimate act. A small gold chain hung at her neck where her pulse pounded violently, quite like his heart inside his chest.
“You’re probably used to and expect all sorts of flimsy, sheer stuff—” pink scoured her cheeks here “—but I don’t have any...sex clothes,” she finished, and absurdly, he wanted to laugh.
She didn’t wait for his answer, either. Pushing away from the door, she glanced around the room. On every third breath of his, her gaze focused back on him and then skittered away quite without landing. She halted when she came to the middle of the room, her bare toes pressing into the thick carpet.
“Amalia, I did not—”
“Lisa...the stylist, did ask me if I wanted to look at some lingerie and nightgowns, too, and I was like, dude...the last thing I’m going to do on this trip is have sex and she gave me this strange look, I mean, I didn’t actually say it...anyway, so I only chose a couple of cute pajama sets.”
She undid the sash of her silky robe and shrugged her shoulders to let it slide off.
The robe pooled at her feet and Zayn’s breath slammed into his throat.
Somehow he possessed enough wits still to say, “I would not call that attire cute.”
She scrunched her nose and he had the most overwhelming urge to kiss the stubborn tip of it. He had been seduced before, yes, but it had been a game he had willingly played.
This...whatever it was that Amalia was doing, it disarmed him on more levels than he could fathom. Resolve and innocence played in her every word, every action. Never had a woman beguiled him so thoroughly...
Navy blue silk top with thin straps bared pale skin and fluttered against her breasts. His mouth dry, he watched as her nipples pointed against the silk. He would tongue them and suck them into his mouth; he would make sure she’d never forget about him. The top left a strip of flesh at her midriff bare while her shorts barely covered her toned thighs.
He cleared his throat, his blood rushing sluggishly through every nerve ending now. “I cannot offer you anything beyond the next couple of months.” Hands fisted by his sides, he saw that made no dent in the resolve in her eyes. His will against hers—tonight, Zayn realized, he was going to lose. “It is why I have been trying my best to not indulge in all the fantasies I have of you every night.”
She swallowed and nodded. Every second seemed to stretch between them while his heart pounded. “You’ve had fantasies about me?” An edge of complaint crept into her tone. “All these days, I’ve been wondering, going crazy...”
“I did not think—” his skin felt tightly stretched over his hungry muscles “—it a good idea for you to know the power you could have over me.”
Her face fell. “That’s what this will be, too, between us, Zayn? A power struggle? An agreement?”
“No, but why tonight, Amalia? I will not be a replacement for another man.”
Her head jerked up, and the breath bated in his throat. “I don’t want Massi. I’ve never felt this way about him or any other man.” The flutter of a breeze played with the hem of her top, giving him a peek of silky soft flesh and the cute indentation of her navel. Every silky inch of her—he would learn it, lick it, know it. “You were right. I have to start living my own life now and this...you and I, this is what I want.”
The urge to fasten his mouth at the pulse on her neck and taste the small drop of water clinging there rode him hard. She licked that pillowy lower lip and all the blood in his body fled south. “Yet, your gaze will not land on me.”
Finally, she met his gaze. Resolve laced with naked desire in her eyes razed the last bit of reason from his mind. “Put your hair down,” he demanded in a rough tone, a sense of defeat in his veins making his voice harsh.
Was it defeat just because he was indulging himself? Because the lines between his private and public life were blurring?
He’d been given a respite from the marriage he had to make, so why not take it? Why shouldn’t he, for once in his life, have a meaningful, if brief, relationship with a woman he admired? A woman who incited more than just lust in him?
“What?” she asked, face blazing, long lashes barely revealing her expression.
“Your hair...it is always tied up like that or hidden away in some elaborate style.”
“It took me two hours to get it into this style,” she complained.
The return of her backbone made him smile. “I hate it like that. I want to see it down.” He could practically feel those silky strands wound up around his fingers as he held her still beneath him. While he plundered her mouth and filled her body.
Fever took root in his muscles. But he held the words to himself. The last thing he wanted was to scare or hurt her when she’d come to him with such artless desire.
Amalia wasn’t like any other woman he bedded and not just because she was inexperienced. She was someone who should be cherished and loved and cared for. Loyal to the last, with a steely core, and beautiful on the outside and inside, such a woman deserved a man who would worship her. Not use her in a torrid affair under a pretend engagement...
But all the recriminations in the world were not going to make him turn back on tonight. There was one thing he could make sure Amalia had tonight and he
would give her that—pleasure.
She set those doe eyes on him for so long that he thought she would protest. Desire clashed with anticipation inside him while he waited. Slowly, she raised her hands and tugged the band holding the tousled waves. Just as that day on the flight, the movement thrust her breasts up, and his belly tightened.
Hair that was the color of burnished gold fell down in lustrous waves, framing the delicate angles of her face. She pushed her hand into it and shook it out, an intrinsically feminine action that made his mouth dry. It fell to her waist and to her midriff in the front, covering the outline of her nipples from him.
Suddenly, the custom that the Bedouins followed, making their women cover their hair except in front of their men, seemed a very good idea. Magnificent and lustrous, he wanted no other man to see her like that...no other man to know how she would look with only her hair hiding her body from his eyes...
“It’s too much to manage and takes almost an hour to wash and dry. I’m going to ask the stylist to cut off most of it. Maybe something really short and fun now that I—”
“No.” His voice hadn’t risen but the command in it carried around the room.
Her fingers stilled in the silky weight, her eyes wide in her face. “No what?”
“Do not cut it. And that’s an order.”
She laughed then, and the defiance in her eyes greeted him like an old friend.
“I mean it, Amalia. Cutting it off would be a crime.”
“Zayn, you can’t order me to... I want to be your lover, not your...your...”
He raised a brow and waited, his mouth twitching. “When you look at my body, which I know you’ve been avoiding since you entered the room, does it give you pleasure, habibti?”
Those long eyelashes lifted and her gaze did a sweep of his torso. Slowly and thoroughly over his naked chest and abdomen, flitted sideways to his lean hips and the towel resting there. Then stopped at the line of hair that disappeared beneath his towel.
“I don’t see all of you, Sheikh,” the minx demanded then, and husky laughter came from his chest. Her hand moved to her nape, a restless slither of her body that made his skin stretch taut all over him. “Drop that towel and I can tell you whether you please me or not.”
He raised a brow at her saucy tone. No woman had ordered him like she did, nor demanded her due.
Chewing her lower lip between her teeth, she looked up. “What? I can’t order... I mean ask my lover to—”
He dropped the towel. The air was a cool whisper against his heated skin.
Her mouth opened and a soft gasp slid out of those lush lips. That pink mouth wrapped around the head, that tongue licking the length of him...images tightened his body to near torturous arousal.
“Does my fiancée find me to her liking?”
Color made her sharp cheekbones even more pronounced. Her breath left her in a whistle, breasts rising and falling. Her hand drifted to her abdomen and Zayn smiled at how telling her gestures were. At how artlessly naive she was even when she taunted with her words.
“I wouldn’t be a woman if I didn’t like the look of you, I think.” She swallowed as he took a step toward her. “And I completely forgot where we were going with this.”
He pulled long strands of her silky hair and wound it around his fingers, tugging her closer and closer. She came with her mouth upturned, her body thrumming lightly. “Your hair...” He traced the lush lips. “Everything about your body drives me crazy even when you hide most of it. I wouldn’t want to lose that pleasure. Just as you wouldn’t want me right now to cover up, yes?”
“My pleasure feeds yours and yours mine,” she whispered, her words throaty.
“Yes.”
She covered the last few steps between them. Hands on her shoulders, Zayn pulled her closer until the silk of her top rasped against his body. Her forehead fell against his chest, her body shaking.
“You’re trembling. I would never hurt you.”
* * *
Not physically, she knew. But what about her heart?
Amalia lifted her face to Zayn’s and lost the ability to breathe all over again. Such a breathtaking face rendered harsh by his will, implacable by his duty...and all she could see in that moment was the desire that unfurled in it, for her.
How had she doubted whether he wanted her?
She felt as if she was suspended over a cloud of desire and need, not quite able to land her feet anywhere. As if there were a rope that was hooked into her lower belly tugging her higher and higher, amplifying every sense...
The dark gleam of desire in his eyes prodding her, she touched her lips to his. Instant heat sizzled over them as lips merged with lips, as her breasts rubbed against his hard chest. Groans rippled through the charged air, erotic sounds full of need and desperation that played over her nerves.
He took over the kiss almost instantly, none of that gentling in his caress now as that first kiss. Such harshly contoured lips could kiss so softly.
“You taste like a berry, Amalia, tart and sweet, incredibly erotic. And I’m going to taste you everywhere...”
She groaned as his legs spread and created a cradle for her own. The contrast of his body against hers sent ripple after ripple of sensation over her. They were so different in so many ways and yet it seemed their bodies were made for this, every press of their muscles, every whispered slither of skin against skin ramping up the need.
Clutching his nape, Amalia sank her fingers into his thick hair and pressed herself to him. The jut of his manhood against her lower belly, thick and hot, branded her.
Fingers held her jaw tight while he plundered her mouth. His lips devoured her upper lip, the erotic swipe of his tongue teasing her to do the same. But when she did, he backed off. Until she demurred and he started all over again.
In minutes her lips felt swollen, hot, her breasts were crushed against his hard chest, her lungs burning to keep up with her heart.
This kiss was one of possession, of primal masculinity demanding her surrender, of the wild desert heat finally claiming her for his own.
She surrendered willingly, slapping her fingers onto his bare chest.
His muscles clenched under her fingers, the fine hairs on his chest tickling her palms. Golden tanned skin stretched taut over pectorals that were defined but lean.
His tongue delved into her mouth while his hands landed on her hips. Amalia shuddered all over as his tongue called hers into a wildly erotic dance that made her toes curl into the carpet at her feet.
Oh, the press of his arousal against her lower belly...an answering ache spread low within.
When he pushed his hand under her top and branded her hot flesh with his fingers, she wanted to do the same. Her questing touch roved over his hard chest hungrily and soon she discovered that she affected him just as he did her.
Hot mouth skimmed over her jaw, the sensitive rim of her ear and then the pulse at her neck...when he dug his teeth into her skin, Amalia jerked in his arms, a jolt of heat narrowing down to her core.
So many sensitized places throbbed under his expert caresses; so many sensations battered at her that she felt her breath saw in and out of her in an unsteady rhythm.
But even under the assault, a dim sort of doubt lingered at the back of her mind. He’d done this so many times with so many women. Even if she didn’t believe all the numbers that exposé had quoted, his expert caresses, the way he’d already learned how he could play her body, how to turn her on so skillfully, it spoke of what an experienced lover he was. God, already he knew her body better than she herself did.
Amalia didn’t want to be another woman the playboy sheikh took to his bed to satisfy his voracious appetite. A convenient relief after the hard, relentless pressures of the last two weeks. “Zayn...” She pulled his face down to hers, breathi
ng so hard that the sound echoed in the thick air.
His hard chest rose and fell, his hands pulling her hips flush against his.
“You didn’t ask me if I betrayed our deal to Massi.”
Sensuous lips pulled back to a snarl. “You’re asking me this now? Now? Amalia, if your plan is to—”
“How do you know I haven’t?”
Nimble fingers crawled up and up her abdomen under her top, and cupped her breasts. His fingers were abrasive, rough against her sensitive skin. A working man’s hands... And then he covered the hard nubs with his palms, kneading and lifting one to his mouth.
Something harsh fell from his mouth in Arabic. In the haze of desire, she couldn’t catch what it was. Every inch of her trembling, she stared as he lifted the pouty nipple to his mouth and flicked it through her top. A bolt of pure desire shot through her and Amalia arched her body into his, a pit of longing in her gut.
“Seeing you in his arms made me forget everything, azeezi. About Sintar, about my duty, about Mirah’s happiness, about your brother and the media... I forgot everything.” He punctured the words with flicks of his tongue and now he took the nipple into his mouth and sucked it. Amalia pinched her thighs together against the arrows of pleasure converging around her sex. “So you tell me now. Have you betrayed our deal, Amalia?”
She sobbed when he released her nipple with a soft plop, her entire being tense like a bow. With hands that could play her like a violin, he took the hem of her top and pulled it up over her head until her torso was bare to him.
And then his hands stroked over the flesh he had uncovered. Large hands pressed and stroked her until all she could do was give herself over. Moving to her shoulders, he kneaded her back, so aggressively male that Amalia drowned in him.
“Did you, ya habibti? Did seeing Massi remind you what an arrogant beast I was in comparison?”
Amalia didn’t want to agree. She wanted to remind him of his tenderness when he’d thought she’d hurt herself, the concern she’d read in his eyes because he’d feared for her safety. But no sooner than the thought formed, he drove it out with his fingers plucking restlessly at her turgid nipples.
