SEDUCING HIS PRINCESS (14 page)

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

B
efore 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 invasion 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.”

Her lips spread, bliss humming in her bones. “You mean
I
knocked you out.”

His indulgence deepened until she drowned in it. “That you surely did. I just woke up. I’ve never slept that well in...probably ever.”

Her hands roamed his face, his head, shoulders, arms and back, reveling in every inch of him. “Anytime. And I want you to take that literally. I want you
any
time, all the time.”

“Habibati.”
His growl went down her throat as he took her lips, pressed her under him and came fully over her.

And he took her up on her offer, plunging into her without preliminaries, knowing she’d be molten with need for him, would love his urgency, his ferocity. She more than loved it, she was mad for it, the fullness and the power and the domination of him. Just a few unbridled thrusts hurled her into ecstasy all over again. And he joined her in the abyss of pleasure, roaring his completion, jetting his seed inside her until he filled her.

He spoke as soon as she opened her eyes. “All these years, all I wanted was to have you again, have what we had, what kept me starving for you. Now I have you again, and it’s not the same.” Her heart thudded. Did he mean...? “It’s way better. When I never thought there could be better.”

Her heart filled with so much she couldn’t reveal. But she could tell him at least one thing. “It
is
way better.”

She didn’t go on to say that she believed it would be that way only at first, with six years of frustration behind the initial explosiveness, before everything leveled then tapered off.

Needing to take them away from such disturbing discussions, she asked one thing that had been worrying her since she’d arrived here. “Why didn’t you bring the kitties?”

His laugh revved beneath her ear. “Not even I would bring cats to my wedding night.” He laughed again. “Though I might have considered it if the place had another room. They’re good about staying in another room if I want to be alone...or with you, like that first night back in Judar. But they’re in their favorite new place back in the citadel with all those places to explore.”

Another worry struck her. “What if someone leaves a door to their quarters open? Or a window? Or if one zooms out when someone goes in to feed them or...”

Mohab swept her in a soothing caress from shoulder to buttock. “I’ve left as many paranoid instructions about keeping them safe as your heart can desire.”

Still not satisfied, she said, “Can we check on them?”

“We certainly can. Mizar would even come to the phone.
Then
I will devour you again, and this time longer and harder, just for being so protective of my kitties.”

She gasped as he turned her onto her back and reached over her for his pants on the ground. “Aren’t they mine, too, now?”

“Oh, yes, they are. They are part of me, and I’ve already given you carte blanche to me and mine.”

And as he called his people to fulfill her wish, she threaded her aching fingers through his silky hair, and wondered.

Did he mean everything he said to her the way it sounded? Did he really feel this way about her? The way she felt about him? Did she even want him to feel that way?

No. She didn’t. She wanted to have this with him, let them enjoy each other as much as they wanted, as much as they could and nothing else. For six long—and way too short—months.