Sheikh's Pregnant Princess

by Sophia Lynn

  The mural, deep underground and in one of the most remote spots in the country, was as breathtakingly vivid and beautiful as it had been when the artist touched his brush to the smooth stone walls. It was a lively piece painted in reds and golds, the scene of a menagerie and gardens in full bloom. She could see the orange-and-black stripes of a tiger, the white feathers of an egret, and the graceful backs and antlers of the deer. Each animal was rendered in vivid, loving detail, surrounded by lush green curls of ferns and trees.

  It was a masterpiece, and all around the edge were words in the scrolling calligraphy of Arabic.

  “It tells a story,” Raheem said quietly. He took a seat on the cold stone floor, and when Irene took his proffered hand, he guided her to sit down on his lap. It could have been a sexual thing, but she realized that there was nothing sexual about it. He merely wanted to give her a place to sit that was comfortable and close to him, and she warmed to him for it.

  “There was once a great lord who kept a menagerie the likes of which the world had never seen,” he read softly. “He was a handsome man, blessed in every way. He was a notorious lover, a fearsome warrior, and a great statesman, but the only thing that could move his heart was his menagerie. His obsession was such that it had to have a fine sample of every animal in the world, and to that end, he sent his men scouring the ends of the earth. They brought back tall giraffes from Cush, enormous cold-blooded lizards from the tropics of distant oceans, deadly cats from the land called Fu Sang. With every animal that was brought to his menagerie, he only grew greedy for more, sending his men far away.

  “One day, as he was wandering through his prized possession, he noticed a little roe deer in one of the cages. She was small and delicate, perfect in every way, but in a menagerie of gorgeous peacocks and mighty rhinoceros, there was little special about her. He started to go on his way, but to his shock, she called him back.

  “‘Please stop and listen to me,’ she said, ‘for I suffer under a mighty curse. My father is a good sorcerer who has quarreled with an evil one, and in their battle, I was transformed and sent here. Please, if you help me, I will grant you wealth and victory the likes of which you have never seen.’

  “The lord looked at her and shrugged. ‘I have wealth and victory already. I need not these things, but I do need a perfect roe deer in my menagerie.’

  “At his words, the roe deer shook, but finally she made her last offer. ‘If you help me, I will love you as no man was ever loved.’

  “The lord paused, thinking.”

  Raheem stopped then, but Irene was so entranced by the story that she had to take a moment to realize that he had. Then she poked him without thinking about it. The story was captivating in a way. She had never heard it before, but someone had loved it so well, they had come all the way down to the Quiet in the Rock to paint it.

  Raheem shook his head, a solemn expression on his face.

  “My father brought me down to this place when I was only a boy,” he said, “and he showed me this mural. All my life, I have wanted to know how the story ends, what happened to the roe deer and the man she promised to love.”

  Startled, Irene followed Raheem’s pointing finger to the mural panel that was slightly beyond where they sat. To her shock, there was an enormous chunk of the rock chipped away. Feeling slightly queasy, she got up to investigate. It wasn’t the work of erosion or an accident, she realized. It was a deliberate act of theft. Someone had wanted to take a portion of that mural back, probably to sell, and they had simply chipped it out of the rock on which it was painted. What was left was damage that was likely decades old, but there was an awful freshness to it, as if the wound would never heal.

  She turned back to Raheem, who was watching her carefully.

  “That happened in the 1920s,” he said, “when Khanour suffered under the boot of France. We did not have the money and the industry that we would, and France came in to take half of whatever it was we made and more if it could get away with it. It was a dark time for Khanour, made all the darker because the French took more than just our money. They also took our treasures. Sometimes they said it was because it wasn’t truly important, and the items in question could be bought, even if it was only for a pittance. Sometimes, they said it was because we did not know how to handle beautiful things, and they would keep it safe. All we knew was that by the end of France’s colonial rule, our country was culturally beggared. There is only so much that oral tradition can keep alive. This story was one thing that we lost.”

  Irene felt sick when she thought of it. Every culture in the world had a legacy, and to see Khanour deprived of the one that Raheem was desperate to preserve was brutal. She felt too drained for tears. She felt as if she had been wrung out of any emotion.

  For the rest of the afternoon, she and Raheem explored the church, marveling at the bits of history that had clung on in spite of raiders and thieves. Irene was constantly impressed by how much had survived even after so much was lost. Some pieces had been retouched and protected, while others had survived simply by dint of being made by people with an eye toward history and those that came after them.

  Raheem was silent on the way back. As he drove with an assured confidence over the dunes, she couldn’t help but sneak covert glances at him. Even in repose, there was something deadly serious about his gaze. He was a man from a line of warriors. They had protected their country as if it were a sacred trust. Now that she had been in the Quiet of the Rock, she had an idea of what he was trying to protect.

  She was lost in her thoughts when they returned to the house. She had a shower and changed into a light dress, needing to be away from the weight of the grit and the sand. He prepared a light meal for them, but when he placed it in front of her, she pushed it away.

  “Raheem.”

  He looked up, startled.

  “Irene?”

  “I have something I want to tell you.”

  She took a deep breath and told him all of it. She told him how she had been recruited, and how they had threatened her brother. She told him where she had gone, and who she had talked to. Her excellent memory provided him with names, addresses, everything he would need. Irene talked until her voice was hoarse, but then, finally, she revealed everything to him, everything he needed to know.

  Halfway through her speech, he had pulled out his phone, texting the information she gave him to his men. From the intent way he looked, she could tell he was absorbing every scrap of knowledge, taking everything she could give him and turning it into an action that would protect his country.

  Irene deliberately did not think of her brother.

  When she was done, she slumped back into the chair. She felt as if she had been fighting a hard battle for weeks. In a way, she had been.

  “Thank you…” he began, but she cut him off.

  “Don’t thank me,” she whispered. “Please don’t. Just… just let me be free of it. I cannot think of it tonight.”

  He looked troubled at her speech, but he nodded. When she couldn’t eat her dinner, he did not protest, and only took it away.

  That night, he left her in the main bedroom while he went to the smaller one. She could hear him talking to his men, strategizing what they wanted to do and how. Irene emptied her mind of all of it. All she knew was that the bed felt too large, too empty. When the voices from the other room had been quiet for a while, she stood and walked across the hall to find the man who was, by law and ancient right, her husband.

  “Will you hurt my brother?” she asked, her voice naked and afraid.

  He cared too much for her to lie to her.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  They were silent. Irene had thought that she would weep, that she would scream, but after all this time, there was only a clean, gray emptiness. It was so silent inside her that she thought she would go mad if it were not filled.

  “Make love to me.”

  In any other situation, Raheem’s look of surprise would have been funny. He
turned to look at her, his eyes wide.

  “Irene…”

  Despite the concern there, she could see the heat rising in him as well. The night before, he had done nothing but give her pleasure. The memory of the last time that they had truly joined was vivid in his mind, and she could see his passion try to overtake his reason.

  “I know what I want,” she breathed. “I need to… be away from myself. This is how I want to do it.”

  Raheem licked his lips, his gaze roving up and down her even as she could see him fight himself over what was right for her.

  “I don’t know if you are in your right mind…”

  “I was in my right mind when I gave you what you wanted to know,” she said, her voice quiet. “Give me what I want now.”

  A shudder went through him. She knew that in the war between his passion and his reason, his reason was going to lose. The air between them became heavy with the promise of sex. The space between them was so charged that a single spark would have caused it to ignite.

  Irene could feel Raheem’s eyes on her, making her more aware of her body than she ever had been before. She was aware of the weight of her clothes, the way her hair brushed against her bare shoulders, the way her light skirts brushed against her naked legs. Despite being fully clothed, she wasn’t sure that she had ever felt so naked.

  “If you don’t want what’s happening here, you should tell me now,” Raheem said, his voice low. There was a hint of menace there, something almost wild. It should have made her want to run, but instead, she was drawn to it. It was how it always seemed to be with Raheem. Everything about him only pulled her in deeper, made her want more.

  “I… I do want it,” she said softly.

  The dark fire that flared in his eyes woke something hot inside her, something that curled through her body and made her skin feel as if it were alive with electricity.

  “This is your last chance, Irene,” he said warningly. When he took a step toward her, she thought of a panther stalking its prey, its eyes bright to catch every movement.

  Irene had to swallow twice before she could speak.

  “I don’t want a last chance,” she said clearly. “I want you.”

  It was like throwing gasoline on a fire. She felt more than heard his soft intake of breath. In a matter of seconds, he had crossed the floor to where she stood, catching her up in a wild embrace. Before she could say another word, his hard mouth slanted across hers. He was warm, so warm everywhere, bathing her senses in the sheer maleness of his body. His strength, his scent, the demand of his mouth, they overwhelmed her, and with a willing moan, she allowed herself to be drowned.

  “I have wanted this since the first moment I met you,” he groaned. “When I first laid eyes on you, I knew that I needed to know how you felt, how you sounded when you moaned with pleasure…”

  She could feel the tension that was threaded through his frame. He was all hard angles and muscles. When he shifted, she could feel his cock pressed up against her thigh. Without thinking about what she was doing, she pressed herself against him. The contrast of his hard body to her softness made her nearly dizzy with need and with pleasure.

  Raheem’s laugh was nearly a groan.

  “You could undo me with a single embrace,” he growled. “That’s the kind of power that you have over me. That is how much I want you.”

  She laughed a little at the idea of someone like her being able to control a man like Raheem. There was something beyond belief about it, but Raheem seemed perfectly serious.

  “You could make me beg,” he said, lifting her up in his arms. “You could make me crawl, if I were not careful.”

  “That’s not what I want you to do,” she whispered huskily, and his answering laugh was harsh.

  “No, I think I know what you might like, beautiful woman…”

  He laid her on the bed, where a single beam of moonlight illuminated the white sheets. For a moment, he simply looked down at her. She wondered how she must look, sprawled in wild abandon over the bed. He reached for her dress. At first, she thought that he meant to undo her buttons, but as she reached to help him, he fisted his hands in the thin fabric and ripped it open. She gasped at his strength and her sudden exposure. Lying in the ruined remnants of her dress, wearing only a peach demi-bra and matching panties, she had never felt quite so exposed. Wide-eyed, she looked up at him, and his grin was very sharp.

  “I was tired of being kept from your skin, your beauty,” he said, and he came down to rest his body on top of her.

  He started to kiss her, resting his weight on his elbows. With a sense of utter dominance and desire, he toyed with her mouth, running the very tip of his tongue along her lower lip before sliding his tongue alongside hers with insinuating intimacy. She had never thought that kissing was a terribly erotic act, despite its intimacy, but now she could feel that it was only adding fuel to her fire. When he pressed his tongue between her lips, it was a sly intimation of what he was going to do later, and her body responded to it.

  Irene ran her hands along his body, frustrated that he was still clothed. She tugged ineffectually at the fabric, wishing that she could tear it away as easy as he tore hers. She slid her hands along his sides, down his thighs, and then they came up again to cup the steel of his desire between her palms. Her intimate touch made him groan, and for a moment, she thought she had broken through that iron control. Instead, he drew back with a soft laugh.

  “Clever girl, but too clever, I think, by half.”

  She started to ask what he was going to do about it, but then he reached for one of the scraps of her dress. Before Irene could figure out what he was doing, he had captured her wrists, twining them together with the fabric before lashing the loose ends to the bars at the top of the bed. Now she was stretched underneath him, her hands helpless above her head. It should have been frightening, but there was something in her that had always craved being this open, this helpless under a man she was coming to realize she trusted so deeply.

  “Well, what are you going to do with me now?” she asked, and somehow, it came out more sultry than frightened.

  “Exactly what I want to do,” he responded, and he proceeded to drive her insane.

  She could feel the electricity between them. If she was honest, it had been there, coloring their interactions since the first time they had laid eyes on each other. Despite that electricity burning brighter than it ever had, Raheem acted as if he didn’t notice it all. Like a man with all the time in the world, he started touching her bare skin gently, first with his fingertips and then with his palms. He ran his hands up and down her body, sensitizing her skin until it tingled.

  With the same careless strength that he had used on her dress, he tore her panties away, leaving her gasping at the exposure. Raheem only chuckled as he palmed her soft flesh there, testing her warmth and her wetness.

  “You feel so good here,” he murmured. “Like you want me. Like you’re already ready for me…”

  She whimpered as he traced a taunting finger down her slit, sliding against the soft skin before pressing her folds apart with just the slightest pressure. She could feel how slippery she already was, and that was before his fingers moved higher to find her clit. With just a little more pressure, she was tilting her hips up to meet him. Her heels dug into the bed underneath her as she whimpered, wanting more.

  “Look at how hot you are,” Raheem marveled. “So beautiful…”

  With a smooth motion, he slid a finger into her warmth, wetting it and then bringing it back to her clit. His touch before had made her wild, but now she was nearly moaning with desperation. She could feel the pressure of her own climax rising inside her. She knew that if he just… kept… touching her the way he was, it would be inevitable.

  Just when she was trembling on the verge of completion, he pulled his hand away, making her whimper.

  “No, please, more,” she cried, too filled with need to even be worried about how she sounded. “Please, Raheem, I need mo
re!”

  His laugh was a purring growl, and he started to touch her again. She closed her eyes tight, fighting to get back to that place she was before. Soon enough, her body began to tremble, to tense, and then he pulled his hand away again.

  She didn’t have words this time; Irene only groaned out loud, her eyes flying open and meeting his. Irene was shocked to see that instead of laughing at her, his gaze was as desperate with need as hers was.

  “Please,” she whispered. “With me?”

  He seemed to understand exactly what she meant. He rose from the bed, stripping his clothes off roughly before reaching into the cabinet by the bed. She watched with wide eyes as he sheathed himself with a condom. She had never known how sensuous it was before to see a man’s hands on his own cock, preparing himself for her.

  When he returned, he came to stretch his full length over her.

  “Is this what you want?” he asked. “Truly?”

  With a soft cry, she nodded. If she could have, she would have thrown her arms around him. Instead, they were still pinioned over her head, stretching her out helpless underneath him.

  He shifted until her legs were spread wide, and he lay between them. Now she could feel his hard proud member against her hot flesh. She felt him press his cock against her entrance, and then with one smooth motion, he entered her, not stopping until they were joined as closely as they could ever be. The feeling of being filled after being teased to the brink twice was exquisite, and for a moment, Irene simply closed her eyes, breathing at the sheer pleasure of it.

  She didn’t have long to relish it, however. With a deep growl that seemed to echo through both their bodies, he began to thrust into her, growling as he moved above her. Somehow, she managed to get her heels underneath her so she could push up against him, increasing their pleasure and making him even more wild.

  Irene could feel the savage pleasure inside her rise up again, and this time, she knew that there would be no tease, no moment where he would stop. Instead, the sensations that were shaking her body rose up higher and higher until just when she thought she couldn’t take it another moment, they crashed down in a climax that tore a full-throated scream from her lips. Her legs wrapped around Raheem’s as electricity danced through her frame, making her cry out again and again.