The Sheikh's Destiny (11 page)

But he couldn’t control the raggedness in his voice. “
Anti akthar menn kamelah
—more than perfect. You’re beauty incarnate.”

Her head thrashed in protest. “That would be you.”

He caught it in gentle hands, pressed a fierce kiss on her lips. “You honor me with your approval, but let me show you how much I hunger for every inch of you...”

And he showed her. He drank her lips dry, then moved to her neck, her arms, her hands. When he drew one of her fingers inside his hot mouth, pleasure forked through her, lodging deep into her core. She hadn’t
known
that it could be like this. That he could do this to her, just sucking a finger. Then his lips pulled—hard.

She bucked off the mattress. The throb between her legs squeezed another rush of molten agony.
“Rashid...arjook, daheenah...”

She was coming apart, needed him now...
now...

But he had other plans, deeper levels of torment. He exposed her to all forms of sensual stimulation, plumbing every response she hadn’t known her body was equipped with, taking every intimacy as he’d warned, creating erogenous zones wherever his hands and lips landed, or his tongue and teeth followed.

He was everywhere. Kneading, kissing, licking. Nibbling, nipping and suckling. Her feet, down her back, all over her stomach and breasts and buttocks, the insides of her arms and thighs. All the time coming up to plunge deeper and deeper kisses into her mouth, along with more aroused, arousing confessions. She lost count how many times she begged for him.

When he finally drew away, she thought he’d at last remove the only remaining barrier between them and join his body with hers. She rose to hurry him, welcome him...

Next second she was flat on her back with her legs over his shoulders. Surprise and consternation warred inside her as a wave of contrary shyness overtook her. She’d been begging to share the ultimate intimacy with him, but had qualms about letting him have a lesser one? Stupid, but no less cripplingly real.

Panting, she tried to sit up. “I want you, Rashid,
you...
”

“You’ll have me, all of me. But first I feast on all of you.”

He drew her legs wider apart, flattened on his stomach between them, cupping her buttocks, opening her core fully to him. Before one more neuron could fire, he blew a hot breath on the knot where it felt every last nerve in her body converged.

The sound that she made was one of alien hunger. Coherence seeped out of her, nothing remaining but craving and sensation. The emptiness inside her was spreading, engulfing her...

Her head thrashed, her face tangled in her hair. “You’re killing me...”

“I’m worshiping you,
ya ajmal an’naas.
”

Hearing him call her “my princess” before, not just princess was one thing. But “most beautiful of all people”? That he thought such a thing, the way he said it, only made her state more acute. Then he slid a rough, careful finger between the molten lips of her core.

She screamed, bowed up, her whole body quaking. Her breathing stopped, her heartbeat stumbled.

One trembling but insistent hand soothed her down, kneading her breasts, rolling her nipples as his other hand stroked her liquefied flesh in tight circles, just the right speed, just the perfect pressure. She writhed and begged for him more and more. He only quickened his ministrations, and quakes started, radiating from where his fingers played her flesh like a virtuoso. Her hips undulated, moving with his fingers, ripples of delight hurtling with frightening speed toward something far more intense than she’d ever felt or imagined...

He rubbed his now-smooth face against her tender inner thighs, like a lion nuzzling his mate. He sounded like one when he growled, “So hot and fragrant, so ready for me. Now to taste you...”

A shriek tore out of her at his tongue’s first plunge into her, drinking her pleasure at the source. Tightening his hold over her bucking buttocks, he swept its firm, slick heat through her trembling flesh to the pinpoint of torment. She imploded, collapsing back on herself.

Then he sucked her flesh into his mouth, unleashing every spark of accumulated sensation.

She ceased to exist, dissipated in wave after wave of white-hot release...

The shudders racking her finally eased, her vision returned to the sight of his regal head between her thighs, still suckling her, drawing out her aftermath.

Closing her eyes, she melted back into his cossetting, surrendered to his ministrations.

Suddenly, her eyes snapped open. Pleasure wasn’t subsiding, it was building, the screaming tension for release back in full force. He went on and on until she was heaving and keening again, in the merciless grip of an even fiercer climax.

Afterward, inside a body that was no longer hers to command and a mind she felt she had no access to, she saw him rise to prowl over her numb body, sweeping her with soothing caresses. Her eyes stung again at his generosity, his restraint. She couldn’t believe a man could deny himself so long when he was as agonizingly aroused as Rashid evidently was.

But instead of moving on top of her, he tugged her into the curve of his great body, stroking her quivering flesh gently, murmuring praise and passion in that voice that spoke to her soul.

“Laylah...the taste and sight and sound of your pleasure, everything about you—is beyond perfect, beyond belief...”

What was beyond belief was that he was arousing her again, when she suspected he was trying to lull her to sleep, too. When she’d thought he’d drained her of sensation, maybe forever. Now that her body knew what kind of pleasure he could provide, his merest touch and breath had it clawing its demand for his.

She twisted in his arms, wound herself around him, arms and legs. “You promised me yourself.”

Something almost frightening erupted in his eyes. His voice couldn’t hide his state, either. “Don’t pour more fuel on the fire now,
ya ameerati.
”

“I will if it’s the only way you’re going to stop worshipping me and give me what I need—you, inside me.” Catching his face between her hands, she rained kisses all over it before sliding to his scar, suckling and nibbling it in abandon, moaning against his burning flesh, “Come inside me, Rashid,
arjook.
I feel my heart will stop if you don’t fill me...now, Rashid,
now!
”

Those roughened hands whose touch drove her out of her mind and ignited every last one of her senses, tightened on her arms as he turned her on her back, loomed over her.

“My condition is reversed. My heart beats thirty beats a minute.” Wow. Now
that
was fitness! “At maximum exertion it reaches seventy. Feel it now.” He clasped her trembling hand to the pulse point below his scar. The artery leaping beneath her touch was doing so at much higher than seventy beats a minute. “That’s what needing to be inside you is doing to me. Holding back is taxing my system more than the toughest survival test.”

Her teeth caught at his magnificent cleft chin and nipped. “Serves you right for holding out on me.”

His lips twitched as he repaid her nip with a nibble that traveled down to her breast. By the time he was suckling one nipple with his fingers tormenting the other, she had tears of arousal pouring down her cheeks.

She dug discharging fingers into his shoulders. “You misunderstood my condition. It’s the same as yours. My heart will stop because it will run out of beats.”

Obeying her desperation at last, he rose above her, caressed the thighs that spread in eagerness for him.

Moving between them, he leaned his daunting bulk over her. “I
will
stop your heart. With pleasure.”

His sandpaper growl made her swoon, and her hands fumbled with his boxers, needing this last barrier out of the way. His lips tugged in approval of her frenzy, letting her free him. But her hands lost all coordination the moment she released what she’d been begging for. The sheer beauty and size of him was...was...

Her core clenched with intimidation, only to flood in a surplus of readiness.

All she could do now was lie there, open, panting, need tearing at her. “
Arjook,
Rashid,
arjook...
”

And still he didn’t plunge inside her. Holding her gaze with an intensity she felt would singe her retinas, he groaned, “Look at me, at us. Look what I’m going to do to you.”

His gaze lowered, taking hers with it to where he held his shaft in his hand. Then he leaned, put the head of his erection to her engorged folds. She cried out at the sensation, her back bowing in a steeper arch of surrender, her core opening to him in total offering.

Growling something indiscernible, one of his hands secured her buttocks while the other moved his shaft against her flesh, bathing himself in her desire. At each nudge, sensations shredded through her, tightening the coil of desperation more with every grind.

Soon he had her on the edge of unraveling again, almost but not quite breaching her. She keened, her undulations fevered, her breathing fractured, her frenzy complete.

Then, holding her by her tresses and by his tempestuous gaze, he growled, “Now look—at us, as I take you, as you take me.”

The moment she obeyed, he slid inside her.

The power of his thrust forged through her barrier, tore it apart, before his shaft stabbed past into the depths that yielded for him.

A scream welled somewhere deep within her, but it couldn’t pummel through the barricade of total shock to her system, to her soul. Everything inside her converged on the part of him that was embedded in her depths like a red-hot lance.

Time stretched before blindness started to part. Harsh breathing, inside her, around her, filling her ears. Her reigniting vision filled with his face. Dark, frozen. His body was bunched over her, still. His eyes ferocious in their focus, unreadable.

But the pain was retreating like a rushing out tide. In its place an unbelievable feeling of fullness was taking over her, an unknown mindlessness rushing in. Her body knew what it wanted. For him to
move.
To fill her over and over and assuage that maddening ache.

But he didn’t move. His gaze bored into hers until she almost screamed, this time in frustration. Why wasn’t he moving?

“You should have told me.”

Her teeth clattered at the way he said it. At the realization that she hadn’t told him she was—had been—a virgin. She’d been so far out of her mind that she hadn’t considered that fact. Hadn’t realized that was why his invasion had felt like it had ripped her apart until he’d brought it to her attention.

What did he feel about it? Concerned? Worried? Angry? Would he have taken her had he known? Would he stop now?

It was next to impossible to think of anything but being overstretched with his potency, invaded, delirious with the carnality, with the completion. She felt she’d die if he withdrew.

Then he was withdrawing, making her claw at him. “Rashid...don’t leave...don’t stop...
arjook—
give me...”

When he hesitated, her legs clamped around him, pulling him back into her deepest reaches. This time the cry that escaped her was one of exultation, of ecstasy.

She’d thought he’d filled her on that first thrust. He now felt as if he’d never hit bottom, as if he’d forged all the way inside her to her womb, to her heart. She trembled all over, inside and out, as if with the advance tremors of a major quake.

She arched into him, begging for what would unleash the sensations that would disintegrate her if they accumulated more.

His face clenched on what looked like suffering as he raised himself on his arms. “Stop...I’m hurting you...”

She clung harder. “Only at first—now—
ya Ullah ya
Rashid—the pleasure of you inside me—I never knew anything could feel like this—that I could ever feel so much pleasure. But I need more, everything, as you promised me. Give it all to me, Rashid...
arjook...
”

“Anti sehr, j’noon...”
His growl, declaring her magic and madness, was that of a man at the end of his tether. It zapped through her with its ferociousness, its desperation, with the hope he would finally give in, give her everything.

And he did. He drove back all the way to the recesses of her essence. Then, holding her gaze, his own as feverish as she knew hers must be, he began to move.

Each glide layered pleasure upon pleasure, burying her under an avalanche. With each stretching of her slick tissues around his invasion, she fell further apart, her surrender to
his
magic and madness deepening. Needing even more, her demands for it rose until his gentleness caught the fire of urgency, then ferocity, until everything was condensed into one pinpoint of absolute existence where he was plunging deepest inside her. Then it exploded.

She came apart, unraveling on shrieks of his name. She shattered then reformed around his thickness with every discharge, her core straining to drain all the pleasure he was driving into her body. He roared her name, stiffened in her arms, plunged deeper, breaching her completely as jets of his seed filled her. She writhed and wept from the sheer pleasure inundating her, with feeling his release surge against her intimate flesh, his weight and feel as he anchored her in the storm completion itself.

With her body replete to its last cell, lips open on labored breaths and his scar, the world spiraled down into a dark, safe place of contentment—the depths of his embrace....

* * *

In a dream state of pervasive bliss, sensations coalesced. She was lying on top of something hot and hard but so perfectly comfortable. And emanating steady, restrained booms.

A roughened caress swept down her back to cup her buttock. No dream had ever felt so bone-meltingly good, so mind-messingly arousing. She opened her eyes, met his.

Rashid. The best thing she’d ever woken up to.

Lying beneath her like a sleek black panther, it was evident he’d been long awake. And watching her.

Delight blossomed at the sight of him, spreading her lips, weighing down her lids, melting everything else. “I’d say good morning, but it would be the understatement of the millennium.”