by Olivia Gates
She ran down the stairs, almost slipping on the slick stone. Once her feet touched rougher floor, her dash resumed. The force of the sounds ratcheted up with every step as she approached a wall partition at the far end of the loft. Beyond it, the pounding felt as if it would bruise her insides.
Her own heart thundering in response, she walked around the wall. And she saw the sound’s origin. Rashid.
Stripped to the waist, barefoot and barehanded, he was kick-boxing a punching bag in a constant barrage of viciousness that had almost destroyed its supposedly indestructible form. Those punches and roundhouse kicks could bring down a wall. A single one would have killed anything living. It made her realize he’d actually held back when he’d dealt with her attackers.
It was as if he was venting surplus anger, tearing the bag apart as he hadn’t a chance to do to them. Or was he imagining striking out at those who’d given him his ghastly scar?
Ya Ullah—that scar.
Continuing on a path of mutilation from his neck, it widened as it ran down his back. At his waist it snaked around to his front, as if to shackle his body, slithered up over his abdomen to his chest in a passage of livid disfiguration. Where it ended, its very tip, sharp and jagged, seemed to plunge beneath his skin to skewer into his heart.
It certainly felt as if it had plunged into hers. What he must have suffered!
B’Ellahi—how and when had this happened to him? And more important, what had it done to him? How deeply had that scar sunk into his psyche, into his soul?
It sank talons of anguish into hers.
Yet as she neared, fascination began to replace the anguish that gripped her insides. He was moving so fast, she hadn’t been able to make out what that darkness staining his skin around the scar was. She’d at first thought it was charred flesh, making her almost want to retch. But now she realized what it was.
A tattoo. Weaving around the scar as if to ward off its advance, stop it from spreading its damage.
Then she was close enough to fathom its complex configuration, to realize what the shapes enveloping the scar were. An ingenious pattern made of the symbol of the noble house he belonged to, a distant branch of her maternal family, of which he was the last surviving member.
She stood for what felt like hours, mesmerized, watching that powerhouse display of heart-wrenching rage and mind-numbing might. His skin, flawless apart from the scar that marred it and that he’d so boldly outlined, glowed as if real flames fueled his fury. Sweat accentuated the polish and definition of every formidable muscle, spraying crystalline droplets with each swing. His every line and move was sheer poetry of power and perfection.
What kind of training and drive fueled this level of expertise and endurance? He didn’t even seem to be breathing hard. Or seem to show that he’d ever slow down or stop.
Suddenly, he did, his arms falling to his sides. Fists clenched, he remained rock-still, feet planted apart, primed for reeruption into full-blown aggression, staring at his handiwork, every muscle bunched on the precarious control that momentarily contained the demon driving him to such excesses.
She’d never seen anything so absolutely magnificent.
Even unaware of her presence, lost to his inner struggle, his aura flooded her. It felt mystical, limitless. A knight with might enough to bear mythical burdens, determination enough to forge legends. She had no doubt she was looking at the only man who could restore Azmahar to its now-distant glory. He might have lived as an orphan and an outcast, but he was born to be a king.
He’d always been king of her heart.
And she couldn’t bear witnessing his turmoil. He’d suffered enough. She’d give anything so he wouldn’t suffer ever again.
“Rashid.”
At her tremulous whisper, he swung around, his face a mask of surprise, his slanting eyes widening, the flames beneath his skin blazing brighter.
“Laylah...”
It was the first time he’d ever said her name. Just her name.
Hearing it in that incomparable voice of his, darkness and magic made audible, shot liquid fire from her heart to flood her limbs. Her feet almost tangled around each other as she approached him. The field of agitation enveloping them tightened, choking her as she stopped before him.
Surprise deserted his face, harshness replacing it, hardening its hewn angles. “Don’t you know curiosity always backfires, princess? Now you have to live with this sight polluting your mind’s eye forever.”
Her gaze darted to where his exercise pants hung precariously low on his muscled hips. She forced it back up to his drenched face. “Your all-out revenge on the punching bag?”
Those obsidian flames lashed out from his eyes again. “Are you pretending that this—” he made a sweeping gesture to his tattooed scar “—doesn’t horrify you? I thought you had enough courage and candor to spare me the damned political correctness. Everyone struggles to pretend my scar doesn’t exist, when it’s all anyone can see anymore, and they’re torn between cringing, curiosity and the unreasoning worry that it will somehow infect them. But to a perfect woman used to perfection in everything, especially in men, I know it must revolt you, princess.”
“Rev—?” That zapped any languidness his nearness provoked. “Now listen here, Sheikh Rashid. I’ve put up with your misconceptions, since I realized you know nothing about me, and I was willing to educate you. But this is where I won’t try to convince you. This is where I’ll tell you.” She grabbed his arms, stood on tiptoes, to make up for the disadvantage of being dwarfed by him and his sweatshirt, to inject her posture with authority. “You have always defined perfection to me.”
His eyes shot wider, as if she’d punched him in the gut.
Shocked? How much more shocked would he be when she touched him where his flesh had been sundered and sealed along that terrible rift?
Her hand trembled as it fulfilled her overwhelming need.
It stopped midway, caught in the iron vise of his hand.
Raising her eyes, she found his face gripped with a ferociousness that would have scared off anyone else.
It only made touching him a necessity. Her heart felt it would stop if she didn’t.
Her other hand rose, met with the same fate, made her almost whimper. “Please, Rashid. Let me touch you.”
“Why? Even if I believed your wild claim, my alleged perfection is a thing of the past, from before I was almost torn apart and so sloppily put back together. So don’t you dare placate or pity me. I don’t take kindly to either offense.”
This needed taking care of, once and for all.
Hands gripped in his, she forced her lips to quiver into a smile. “Fine. Just remember, I tried to spare you. You now have only yourself to blame when I give you my uncensored opinion.”
His hands convulsed around hers before he let them go. Then, face empty of expression, he stepped back.
Her heart twisted. It was as if he needed to hear it from a safe distance. He believed her true opinion would hurt.
She bridged the distance he’d put between them, taking his hands, insisting on keeping him in place. “When you were younger and softer and in one pristine piece, you more than defined perfection for me. You filled my ‘mind’s eye’ with your impossible example and made anyone else fade into nothing.” She clung to his hands harder when he again attempted to jerk them away. “But that scar, what you’ve been through to have it, only to come out stronger—how you wear it as a tribute to your family and ancestors, making it the very embodiment of your noble house—it makes you indescribable. And infinitely more irresistible.”
Judging that the time to reach out again was now, when she had him boggling at the audacity of her confessions, her hands released his, making another attempt to reach his scar.
His hands caught them before she could blink. “You can’t really want to touch...this.”
“Did indescribable and irresistible have too many syllables for you to understand? I would find you both even if you were s
carred all over. I don’t only want to touch you, I’ve been waiting all my life to do it.”
This time, his stupefaction was almost tangible.
Pouncing on the opening it afforded her, she persisted, “Will you let me touch you? Please?”
A full-scale war seemed to erupt within him.
Then, with his gaze the darkest it had ever been, he let go of her hands.
Her first instinct was to pounce on him. But that starving-woman-at-a-buffet routine would be too much for him at this point.
Instead, she reached out, hands trembling as they made that first contact. With the scar at his heart.
The moment her flesh met his at that mark of old and severe pain and damage, her whole being seized, as if her essence flowed through her fingertips into him. She would give endlessly of it, if it would only erase his suffering, past and present.
On the verge of breaking down, her voice wobbled on the question that seared her. “Does— Does it still hurt?”
“No.”
The monosyllable conveyed how much and how long it had hurt.
“What does it feel like?”
A shudder coursed through him. Or it might be she who was shaking so hard. She couldn’t tell where the tremors originated.
“People stop asking when they know it’s not painful anymore.” His voice was thicker, impeded. “They don’t think any other sensation but pain matters.”
Empathy tightened her throat. “I’m not people. I’m me. And anything that you feel matters to me. Matters, period.” Unable to hold back anymore, one hand curled around his nape, urging his head down so her lips could follow her fingers in exploring that scar that made her only far more appreciative and protective of his every other inch. This time, there was no mistaking the jolt that passed through him as her lips traveled from the edge of his jaw down to the root of his powerful neck. She held him closer, insistent against his damp, hot skin. “Tell me, Rashid.”
Letting her discover every inch of his scar, his voice ragged, he said, “If I’m totally still, I can convince myself it doesn’t exist. But at the slightest movement, it feels as if the ruined skin no longer belongs to me. It sometimes feels like a chasm into another reality, a fault line where something malicious seeps into my body, infects me with its poison.”
So he did feel possessed. She’d do whatever it took to make sure he didn’t feel that way ever again.
Slipping around him, her lips followed the scar as it flowed from his neck to his back, as if she would kiss it better, suck all the negative energy into herself.
“How do you feel when it’s touched?” she whispered.
She felt his tension spike before it resumed buzzing through him like high voltage through a maximum-resistance cable. His voice was a hoarse rasp when he answered. “The few times it was touched, it felt like a jolt of acute discomfort and revulsion. It made me feel...violent.”
Her lips stopped over his shoulder blade, along with her heart. “Do— Do you feel like that now?”
“No.”
Her heart clanged at his instantaneous negation.
When he didn’t qualify it, she resumed her exploration, bolder now. “Then how do you feel when I do this...?”
A finger joined her lips in their sweep through the ridge.
When nothing but his slow, deep breathing answered her—which to the über-fit Rashid constituted panting—she nudged her head against his arm. He raised it, letting her follow an uninterrupted path up his abdomen to where the scar ended over his heart.
At the very tip, she slipped her tongue out to taste it and him. The voltage coursing through him almost electrocuted her.
She raised her gaze, panting. “How does that feel, Rashid?”
His face looked like a force of nature roused. His voice did sound like muted thunder when he answered. “Your every touch, your every breath triggers everything I can feel at once. It’s as if every sensation is amplified within the scar’s confines only to shoot out to my every nerve ending.”
Her hands stilled over the scar’s tip as she wet lips so dry she felt they’d crack. “Sounds...distressing.”
He followed her tongue’s movements, something deliciously scary smoldering in his eyes. “It is. Overwhelmingly so. It’s pleasurable to the point of pain. And arousing to beyond madness.”
His fingers were suddenly digging into her hair, twisting into her long tresses, tilting her face up to his. Her lips opened on a gasp of shock and pleasure at the spikes that shot from every hair to her toes, pooling in between in her core in a heavy, liquid throb.
She swayed into him, feeling the sensual whirlpool he generated tugging her under. At the touch of her length against his, his steady grip trembled once before firming again.
Holding her eyes, he singed her with intensity. “Is this what you want me to feel, princess? Is this what you want me to do?”
And his lips crashed over hers.
At the impact of his passion, a cry burst from her, laden with surprise, relief, delight and a dozen other emotions. He swallowed it, poured his own groans into her. Her lips opened wider, begging for more of his taste and ferocity.
She needed this kiss, this man she’d been waiting for all her life, more than she needed her next breath.
“Is this what you want?” He tore his lips away from hers to growl against her cheeks, her forehead, her neck, roaming over her with demand, owning her. At her frantic nod, he swept up the sweatshirt he’d loaned her, cupped her buttocks in the warmth of his large, calloused hands. Pressing her against the wall, he opened her thighs, grinding against her core with the massive hardness his pants barely contained. “Is this what you’ve been after as you pushed me and pulled at me and exposed me to your inexorable temptation? Do you want me to lose every shred of restraint, every spark of sanity and devour you whole?”
He accentuated his last words by thrusting against her in an explicit mimicking of possession. She could only moan her consent, going limp in his arms.
“Be absolutely sure it’s what you want, princess. I would have taken nothing, but if you say yes, I’ll take it all.”
Was he trying to scare her off? For her own good?
She had to convince him her only “good” was to be with him.
She struggled to wrap her legs around his hips, but was quaking so much, her legs slipped off him. She moaned in thankfulness when he scooped them up and held them around him.
Her hands trembled over his head as she transmitted her conviction into his eyes. “I am an all-or-nothing kind of person myself. And make no mistake, Rashid, I want it all with you.”
He pressed harder into her, as if testing her claims. “You make no mistake, give me one more intimacy and I’ll take everything you have. Everything, princess.”
The misguided man still thought the idea of his ravishing her could scare her away.
She decided to stoke all that ferocity higher. “You mean if at any point I say stop, you won’t?”
His eyes blazed in imperious confidence. “You will not want me to stop.”
She dragged his head down to hers, opened her lips over his scar, grazed it with her teeth. “Yet here I am still trying to convince you to start—”
She trailed off on a yelp. In another of those magical moves, he swept her up in his arms.
She snuggled against his muscled shoulder, soaking up the momentous feeling. He was striding across his domain, taking her to where she’d thought she’d spend the night alone then leave to never see him again. Could it be that everything she’d ever dreamed of was coming true instead? She would finally be with Rashid?
Her fingers dug into his arm, making him slow down. “I want you to be clear on something, Rashid.” He smoldered down at her, awaiting her conditions. “You will give me everything, too.”
After a protracted, unreadable glance, he gave a brief nod.
He accepted her terms, would abide by them.
Elation fizzed in her blood even as arousal thicken
ed it.
And that was before he said, “Just remember, when I give you everything, it was you who asked for it.”
Promises, promises, she almost said.
But teasing Rashid would come later. When he opened up to her more. Hopefully soon. And fully.
For now, she would take one miracle at a time.
Six
The miracle wasn’t unfolding as Laylah had anticipated.
It had played to her expectations till Rashid had lowered her onto his bed. Then it had diverged onto a totally unexpected path.
Instead of continuing his seduction, he’d risen to his feet. He now stood brooding down at her.
“Rashid, arjook...”
Was that her voice? That thick, covetous rasp?
But who could blame her? The man she’d fantasized about all her life was standing before her, proving her most extravagant fantasies of him modest.
Instead of answering her plea, he was turning away, tossing words over his shoulder. “You won’t appreciate me all over you sweaty like this.” Before she could cry out that she loved him sweaty like that, would want him all over her even slathered in mud, he dragged his blunt fingernails down his face, producing a scratching sound that deluged her in a fresh bout of tremors. “I’ve also grown some industrial strength sandpaper.”
Next second, he disappeared into the bathroom.
* * *
The moment he closed the bathroom door, Rashid bolted into the shower, turned it on cold and plunged beneath its freezing spray.
Gulping down air, he squeezed his eyes shut, leaned his flaming forehead against the cold tiles, willing the icy needles to pummel arousal’s hold on his senses.
What was he doing?
This had progressed so fast. Too fast. Too far.
Even when he’d been doing everything in his power to sabotage his own plans, it had only accelerated them.
Now she was out there, the woman he’d meant to eventually have in his bed, begging him to take her, now, not later. When he hadn’t done a thing to seduce her, had done the opposite, trying to ward her away, giving her every reason to back off.
