by Olivia Gates
Cheers rocked the hall, rising to thundering levels as Mohab smashed the region’s every ban on displays of public affection and devoured her in a deeply explicit kiss.
Without hesitation, she sank into the rough demand, the ecstasy of his taste and feel. She would take it all with him, every second, every breath, every spark of his desire, and make a reservoir of memories for the life ahead devoid of all of that, of him.
Amid a storm of cheering led by her family, he finally relinquished her lips. Then, grinning down at her, eyes blazing with exhilaration, he shouted to her over the din, “Shall we give them the joloos they’re after?”
Nodding, his enthusiasm infecting her, she rushed after him to their thrones. After he’d seated her in hers, he came down before her on one knee, his eyes roiling with hunger as he kissed her hand. Then he whispered something she couldn’t hear. But she read it on his lips. “Maleekati.”
My queen.
Somehow she didn’t burst into tears. But she knew the memory of this moment would fuel weeping jags far into her future, probably till the day she died.
With one last kiss on her hand, he rose to his feet and a hush descended, as if everyone held their breath. She knew just how they felt. Her breath clogged in her lungs as she watched him glide to his throne with the regality of a king born. Then, sweeping his abaya aside, he sat down.
Still holding his abaya back with a hand at his hip, he leaned forward to prop his right hand over his knee and struck a pose, a display of grandeur and entitlement that would be the standard for every king who came after him.
After he was satisfied everyone had enough photo and video documentation, he turned to her, his smile flaring again. “How about we feed all these enthusiastic people? They’ve yelled enough for their dinners, don’t you think?”
Suddenly she was spluttering with laughter, then with surprise as she found herself plucked from her seat and up into his arms. He descended the steps, with her cradled against him as if she weighed nothing, and waded through the growing din of approval as people parted to let him pass.
The world spun with every thud of his powerful steps, with his feel and scent. Hoping she didn’t mess her face or his clothes too much, she clung around his neck, burying her face in his chest, letting him take her wherever he wished.
Excitement swelled as he whisked her outside the citadel walls, where the gigantic wedding tent had been erected in the clearing overlooking Zahara, which was celebrating their new king and his wedding in the most delightful way.
Under a rising full moon, every dwelling in town had its windows open, and in each room blazed a light with a different color, turning the hills they were built over into a spread of glowing gemstones as far as the eye could see.
Then they came to the tent that looked like a fairy castle made of malleable materials, its whiteness silvered by moonbeams and gilded by the flickering flames of the thousand torches surrounding it at a safe distance. It was so big it would accommodate the three thousand people who were attending from the three kingdoms and the world.
The inside was adorned in the same color scheme of her bridal clothes, the rich tones giving everything a deep luxury bordering on decadence. Mohab carried her past hundreds of tables spread with satin tablecloths, lanterns, flowers, the finest local pottery and blown glass, all in vibrant, complementing colors. Then he was setting her down in their kousha, a gilded arabesque “marital cage,” open on one side so they’d preside over the celebrations. Right in front of them was the biggest dance floor she’d ever seen covered in hundreds of hand-woven keleems.
As soon as everyone took their places around the semicircular tables, affording everyone the best view of the action, Mohab gestured for dinner to be served, and hundreds of waiters poured from every opening of the tent holding huge serving plates under brass domed covers. Her family and his were in the first row of tables across the dance floor. Her family looked so elated, it twisted the shard in her heart deeper. She brought it under control as she contemplated his family. Everyone, including that old goat King Hassan, looked happy with the whole thing. Everyone except Najeeb.
He hadn’t talked to her again since the engagement, but his disapproval grated on her every nerve. Najeeb had long come to terms with what his father had done, yet another of his parent’s ongoing transgressions that he’d had to put up with all his life. It was Mohab he couldn’t forgive. Najeeb also couldn’t understand why Jala was giving Mohab a second chance after everything that had happened.
As every hurt she’d ever suffered began rushing to her eyes, Mohab tugged at her. The music started to an overpowering rhythm and dozens of young men in flowing beige robes and red headdresses rushed in to form lines. Many women followed to face them, wearing beige-and-garnet dresses and head covers embroidered in cross-stitch designs. Then one of the most energetic folk dances she’d ever seen commenced, one she hadn’t witnessed during all the entertainment they’d had in the past two weeks. It must be one reserved for big occasions.
As if reading her mind, Mohab shouted over the music. “That’s a special dance for weddings. You haven’t seen one before because they postponed all weddings to focus on ours.”
As he talked he started clapping, urging her to clap, too. She did and was soon swept up in the unbridled energy of the performance. Then her family and all of his, except Najeeb, were rushing to the middle of the dance floor, uninhibitedly imitating the steps and soon becoming one with the choreography.
Suddenly the dancers streamed toward her and Mohab, the women converging on her and the men on Mohab.
“You put them up to this!” she accused laughingly, as she was carried on their wave away from him.
He gestured to her, feigning innocence. Then the two waves of dancers rushed toward each other with them in the middle, met then receded, leaving only her and Mohab together, with their families forming a circle around them. Guffawing, he caught her by the waist and swung her round and round, then put her back on the ground and prodded her to dance with him. Recalling long-unpracticed dance steps from Judar, she was soon moving with him to the primal, blood-pounding beat, her heart booming exuberantly in her chest. Finding herself transported into another realm where nothing existed but him, she felt his eyes dominating her, luring her, inflaming her, as he moved with her. It felt as if he was connected to her on fundamental levels, as if it was his will that powered her body.
The dances went on and on, interspersed with brief pauses to snatch refreshments and bites of food, then resuming. At one point, the singers handed mikes to each of the celebrity dancers to sing part of the songs. Mohab, of course, sang his motherland’s songs perfectly, but when she warbled through her own effort, the kind crowd still roared in approval.
At some point the music came to an end, and she couldn’t tell how much time had passed, minutes or hours. It felt as though she was wading in a dream. Then hundreds of people were shaking her hands or kissing her, insisting they’d never enjoyed themselves like this before. Even her family said this rivaled the delight of their own weddings.
Then Mohab disappeared from her side.
Eleven
Before alarm could descend on Jala, her brothers swept her into a 4x4 and drove with her into the desert.
As Farooq drove and Shehab sat beside him, Kamal accompanied her in the back. She nestled into him, still stunned by everything that had happened, endorphins and adrenaline fogging her brain. She didn’t even ask where they were taking her. It had to be to Mohab.
Then the car stopped and Kamal pulled her out, and there he was. Mohab. A dozen feet away, at the top of three-foot-wide stone steps leading to a columned patio that wrapped around a one-level adobe lodge. Fiery light glowed behind its closed windows.
His hair rustled around his head like silk, and his abaya billowed around his body like the wings of a preternatural bird of prey
, with him in the middle of the enchantment, her every fantasy come to life.
Then he spoke, his voice as deep as the desert night enveloping them. “Skokrunn ya asdeka’ee for delivering your most valued treasure into my safekeeping. In return for this privilege and trust, I owe you everything.”
“Oh, you certainly do,” Farooq said, chuckling.
Shehab nodded. “And we have a lifetime to collect.”
Kamal rounded it all up. “And don’t think we won’t.”
Mohab bowed his head, his palm spread over his heart in pledge. “I’m counting on it.”
With senses fixed on him, she barely registered her brothers kissing her one last time, then driving away.
As their vehicle receded, she forced wobbling legs to move toward Mohab. He wasn’t smiling. Or moving. He stood there, his gaze roasting her alive, making her feel he was memorizing her down to her last cell.
“Is this another tradition in Jareer?” she whispered, her voice loud in her ears in the desert’s pervasive silence. “Grooms here don’t go to the trouble of sweeping their brides away but have their families provide delivery services?”
He smiled then. She didn’t know how she remained on her feet with the eruption of arousal.
Ya Ullah...how was it possible to want that much?
He came down a step, then another, his movements tranquil, as if he was afraid she’d bolt if he moved too fast. He reached out a hand to her with the same care.
“Welcome to my sanctuary, ya ajaml aroos fel kone.”
The way he said the most beautiful bride in the universe had her stumbling into his embrace. “One of your lairs?”
“Back to the predator motif?”
“I do feel I’m walking into a starving wolf’s den,” she confessed.
“That’s perfectly true. I will gobble you up.”
“I’m counting on it.”
At her giving him back his words, a chuckle rumbled deep in his chest. “Everything you say or do rouses unprecedented reactions from me.” His eyes suddenly sobered. “And after all these years, after I first laid eyes on you and wanted you—but thought I could never have you—here you are, my bride, in my sanctuary where I have never let another.”
Shying away from dwelling on his declarations, she focused on his statement about this place. It was that vital and exclusive to him. That had to be why she felt as if her essence was flowing through the ground beneath her feet to forever mingle with this place. Why she felt she’d never belong anywhere else again but in this land, with this man.
She stared up at him, towering above her, swathed in moonlight, as one with the desert and the night, unattainable as the stars. But the universe was giving him to her for now. Sort of on loan. Not having him forever meant she only had to wring every minute with him of all it had of pleasure and intimacy.
Surging against him, she buried her face where his top was open, teeth pulling gently at the muscled power beneath, catching in the perfect cover of silky hair. “Here I am.”
“And what you do to me....” Groaning, he swept her up in his arms, made her feel weightless.
She clung to him, burying her lips in any part of him she reached. “Show me, Mohab. Everything I do to you. Everything you need from me. Show me everything, do it all to me.”
His growl was savage this time as he took her lips, making her nerves fire in unison.
He relinquished her lips only to stride into the lodge. Kicking the door closed behind them, he swept through a dimly lit corridor that made her feel as if he was taking her deeper into a wizard’s den. Which he was. He’d always practiced magic on her. And for the next six months, she’d revel in surrendering to his spell—until the enchantment expired.
She now surrendered to the experience, every foot deeper making her realize for the first time what it meant to have a sanctuary. This place. Where he was.
It was as far as could be from the opulence of the palace of Judar or the ancient majesty of his citadel in Jareer. It was composed of elements of the desert, unpolished and unpretentious, and more evocative and atmospheric than those mind-boggling edifices for its starkness and simplicity.
He took her into a great room that seemed to comprise the whole place, apart from a kitchen and bathroom. It had stone walls and adobe floors, and was strewn with thick, hand-woven keleems. On one side was a settee with a long table in front of it spread with serving dishes on gentle flames. A fireplace presided over the area, its fires leaping in a hypnotic dance, with the other sources of illumination, brass lamps, on every surface. A mosaic incense burner emitting musk and amber was hanging by thick copper chains from the beamed ceiling.
On the other side of the room was the bed. A ten-by-ten-foot, two-foot-high concrete platform with a thick mattress on top of it was draped in the only luxurious touch around—solid dark gold satin sheets, pillows and covers.
He lowered her down on top of it, then mounted it and brooded down at her as he removed his abaya and top, muscles rippling beneath his polished skin, his face all noble planes and harsh slashes and grim hunger, all of him painfully male and beautiful. And hers. For now.
She scrambled to her knees, needing to be rid of her own shackles. She’d removed only the veil when he knelt in front of her, stopping her, his sure, deft hands replacing her clumsy ones. She moaned in protest. “You took your clothes off when I spent the whole night promising myself I’d do it.”
“You can dress and undress me from now on. But I spent the whole night having minor coronaries every time I looked at you in this getup, betting myself I’d get it off you in ten seconds flat.”
And he did. He got the dress off as if by magic, his eyes on every part he exposed, making her feel purely feminine and utterly desirable. Then he moved around her so he was enveloping her from the back, his hard flesh plastered to her flaming back, his harder erection digging into her buttocks through his pants, making her feel contained...dominated.
His breath steamed down her neck as he whispered, “You want me to show you what I wanted to do to you during those three weeks of torture?”
Her nod was shamelessly frantic. “Yes, yes, show me. Do it all.”
“I wanted to catch you, wherever I found you, and do this....” His hand cupped her breast, squeezing until she moaned and arched back, thrusting against his erection, making him growl and snap his teeth over her shoulder. “And this....” The other hand slid down over her abdomen to cup her mound, his fingers delving between her molten feminine lips, finding her entrance, slipping up her flowing readiness.
Her cry rang around the lodge.
His chuckle into her neck was unadulterated sensual devilry. His fingers twisted inside her, making her grind into him, desperate for assuagement. “I take only verbal requests. Graphic ones.”
She’d give him graphic. “I want you buried all the way to my womb. I want you to ride me until you shatter me, until I wring your life essence from you.”
He snatched his hand from her insides, the withdrawal as exquisite as the plunge. “I changed my mind. Be graphic later. Right now I might have a major coronary.”
The sound of his zipper sliding down screeched through her nerves. Moistness gushed from her eyes and core when his erection thudded against her back, hot and hard and heavy. Mohab. Here. With her. Her husband. For now.
He thrust against her, up and down, burning a furrow in her buttocks and back. “Here I am, everything you need. Take all of it inside you, take me whole, as I take you.”
With what felt like the last heartbeat left in her, she turned, rose and sank on him. A cry of welcome rose from her center outward. His erection felt as big as a fist forging inside her. Filled beyond capacity, she writhed against him, pain and pleasure amalgamating into an indecipherable mass. She’d never get used to how he felt inside her, to the sensations his i
nvasion wrung from her every nerve.
Delirious with the feeling of reclamation, she sobbed it all out to him. How he felt inside her, what he did to her, how he inundated her with exquisite pleasure. He only gave her more, thrusting up, harder, faster, forging new depths inside her, panting his own confessions.
The pressure built in her loins with each word, each abrading slide and thrust, spread from that elusive focus of madness he hit over and over. She rode him harder, each thrust layering sensation until she was buried, incoherent, insane for her release from the aching spiral of urgency.
Then it started, like shock waves heralding a detonation too far to be felt yet. Ripples spread from the outside in, pushing everything to her center, compacting it into a pinpoint of desperation. He plunged into her, taking her into one more perfect fusion...and it came. The spike of shearing pleasure, followed by slam after slam of satisfaction.
He pitched her forward, crammed a pillow beneath her stomach, angling her hips upward, then pounded into her wracking convulsions, pouring over her gushing pleasure with the long, hard bursts of his own release.
The next moments or hours, as pleasure raged, they strained against each other, shuddering all over, driving him deeper inside her than he’d ever been, until she felt they’d dissolved into each other.
Then the intensity broke, eased and everything receded, left her replete, complete, spiraling into oblivion....
* * *
It was morning when she came to. He had knocked her out for hours this time. And he was again propped beside her, watching her with a smile of supreme gratification.
She stretched luxuriously against him, rubbing her legs against his, delighting in finding him fully aroused. “Sorry I zonked out on you. Not what I planned at all.”
“That was the best wedding night gift you could have given me. Lovemaking so explosive it pleasures us both into oblivion. Aih, I was knocked out right after you were.”
