MARRYING HER ENEMY & STOLEN BY THE DESERT KING

by Connelly, Clare

  His outburst kept firing through her brain – statement after statement exploding like a row of bombs. “What’s a pithaki?” She whispered, the words tortured from her soul.

  “A brothel.”

  She winced, spinning away from him and moving towards the doors to the balcony. It was pitch black outside, but still not as dark as her husband’s eyes; her husband’s soul.

  And could she blame him for his black rage?

  By his reading of events, she’d had a choice in this. He hadn’t. If she’d pulled out of the wedding, then he would still be free to live his life. To be single. He’d had to marry her. And he was making the best of the situation – sleeping with her even when he apparently wanted nothing else from his wife.

  She stifled a sob, lifting a fist to her mouth, wondering at why she was so upset. Why any of this surprised her.

  “I’m sorry.” The words were soft. She whispered them even as her own heart was breaking.

  “For what?” His response was whip fast and no calmer than his earlier outburst.

  “I’m sorry that you had to marry me. I’m sorry that my family and his family have some ancient grudge against your family. I’m sorry that you married me. That we married.” She pressed her palm flat against the glass, staring out unseeing at the desert beyond. “If there was any way I could undo this, I would.”

  He stared at her, long and hard, every cell in his body revolting against the idea. He told himself it was because this marriage served many purposes – one of which was making the Haddads suffer. Of hurting Fayez.

  His mouth was a grim line in his face. “And yet, we can’t.”

  She blinked her eyes shut – until that moment, she hadn’t understood how desperately she needed him to say something. To comfort her in some way; to tell her he didn’t want that. But of course he did.

  “No.” She bit down on her lip, running through the situation as though it were an equation. All her life, maths had been the only thing that had made sense to her and she’d become adept at slotting real-life conundrums into a mathematical context, in an attempt to unwrap them fully. “We can’t undo this, so we have to live with it.” She sucked in a breath, nodding slowly as events multiplied and then divided and formed a sort of line in her mind. There was no ready-answer, but there were wrong-answers, and sometimes they could be just as illuminating. “And I’m telling you, I can’t live with our marriage if this is all there is. I’d rather have nothing from you – nothing – than an hour in bed together that makes me feel … that makes me feel…”

  The words tapered off and Khalifa waited with barely disguised impatience. “What does it make you feel?” He prompted after several beats of thick silence clogged the air between them.

  “For the time you’re here,” she turned slowly, just enough to angle her face towards his, “I feel like it’s real.” The words caught in her throat and unshed tears sprang to her eyes. “You’re the first man I’ve ever been with and in bed… it’s so perfect … This feels real. Our marriage. Us. What we mean to each other. But it’s not, is it?”

  His eyes flecked with something she didn’t understand. Her equation jolted. Quivered. Waiting for new information that would suddenly make everything better.

  “You are my wife.”

  She made a scoffing sound of frustration. “And it’s that simple to you?”

  “It is as simple as it ever was. And I cannot see that any woman who agreed to marry, at twenty two, a man about which she knew nothing, has any right to argue. You are comfortable. You are cared for. You are safe,” he said the last word in a way that sent shivers down her spine. She frowned, not quite sure how to interpret it.

  “You don’t get it,” she said with a sigh. “Arranged marriages aren’t a property transaction. I expected to marry someone who would have the same desire to make our marriage work. To make it a real marriage. In this way I would have been far better off with Fayez Haddad.”

  Something inside Khalifa flashed with a dark emotion. His expression shifted, haunted, and a muscle jerked along his jaw, as though he was working hard to control that same emotion.

  “He is a monster,” Khalifa said darkly.

  “And you’re not?” She spat the insult at his feet. “You think using me for sex when it suits you makes you some kind of hero? You think you’re not every bit as bad as him?”

  Khalifa was very still, his body like stone, his expression tight in his face. “Careful, azeezi. You are close to taking it too far.”

  “I don’t care! I want to take it too far! I want to speak my mind and argue with you and talk to you and interact with you in some way that’s not sex!”

  “Why?” He demanded, ignoring the screaming accusations of his inner-self. Everything she was describing was what he’d forced himself to ignore. That day in the desert had been a wake-up call for him, reminding him of the dangers that would come from seeing this woman as anything other than a convenient bride. Yes, a very sexy, very desirable one. But Khalifa had had great sex before. That wasn’t enough to ignore common sense for.

  “Because that’s marriage!”

  “So is this!” He stalked across the room and lifted her hand, showing her the ring she wore, the ring that marked her as his.

  He wore no such jewellery.

  “You’re wrong. That’s a chattel.”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes glinting. “But it is one that binds us both.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said with a frustrated shake of her head. “There’s more here. We could be so much more.”

  “No.” A harsh denial. Kylie sucked in a sharp breath. “I do not want more.” The words were like daggers to her soul. “I do not want more.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, tears leaking from both corners. “Well, I don’t want this.”

  Something like regret twisted in his gut. He crossed his arms and ignored the feelings. “Perhaps you should have thought twice before signing your life away for a few million dollars, mmm?”

  She looked up at him, confusion obvious in her features.

  “I bought your debts, azeezi. If that was enough reason to marry Fayez, it is enough to stay married to me.” He lifted a finger to her lips, tracing the outline, his expression strange and foreign.

  She pulled away from his touch, her body ice-cold.

  “You know that’s not the only reason I would have married him…”

  “Oh, yes. Your parents.” His expression was terse. “I do not think they would complain that you have ended up with me. So far as groom-swaps go, you have got a far better arrangement now.”

  She stomped her foot, her hair flying about her face. “Stop being like this. Stop it! It’s not who you are! I don’t know why… I don’t know why you’re acting like you don’t feel this too but I know you do. Why are you ignoring it?”

  “Ignoring what?”

  “There’s something … like … I look at you and I know you feel it…”

  “You are speaking in riddles.”

  “I don’t know what it’s called. Not love,” she said with a shake of her head. “And yet … maybe? I don’t know. I just know I’ve never felt it before.”

  “What you are feeling,” he said with surprising kindness, “is lust. You have not had sex before and it is natural that you would confuse those feelings with something bigger.”

  “No,” she shook her head. “It’s different. It’s more.”

  “Believe me, Kylie, I have had great sex before, and I have been in love before. We are one of those things only.”

  She flinched at the delivery of this news – both its content and its horrible, strange pointedness. The gulf of what she didn’t know about him spanned the ground between them, like an impassable ocean. He’d been in love? So he was capable of that emotion?

  And he didn’t feel it now.

  She nodded, her expression unknowingly crestfallen. She turned away from him, moving away too, needing distance and space. Time to think and feel and exam
ine her heart.

  “Fine.” It wasn’t fine, but she needed him to go. She needed to be alone so badly.

  Minutes later, she was. And her heart ached.

  * * *

  It was the first night of their marriage in which he hadn’t come to her.

  She told herself she was glad. She spread out in her bed and stared at the ceiling and replayed their argument in her head, remembering his determination not to listen to her. To make her accept the black and white limitations of their marriage. She told herself he was respecting her wishes and not using her body for sex when he wasn’t prepared to open his heart.

  She told herself it was a good thing.

  But when he didn’t arrive the next night, it became harder to listen to that comforting advice.

  Four nights alone in bed and she realized there were worse things than being in a loveless marriage. Being in a sexless marriage was Kylie’s new nightmare. Having been made to crave and need his body, she found not being with him an unbearable absence.

  So much so that on the fifth night, somewhere in the small hours of the morning, she tiptoed to the door between their room, intending only to press her ear against it and see if she could hear anything of her husband.

  Her ear flat against the door, she lifted her palm for support and the door clicked and gave, opening inwards with a very quiet whoosh.

  She startled, jumping backwards guiltily, a hand lifting to her lips. She was instantly confused. Tempted beyond belief! Her pulse raged through her body, devouring her vascular system angrily, marking her from the inside. And then, without even realizing it, she took a step forwards. And another. Until she was just a door’s width from his room.

  She could hear the water lapping and, again, of their own volition her hands lifted and turned the door knob. It was ancient and brass and very heavy but the door sprung inwards with surprising alacrity.

  He was swimming.

  His golden flesh shimmered in the water as he pushed powerfully through it, his arms dragging the smoothness of the surface, his head a dark pelt. All the breath escaped Kylie’s body. She pressed a hand into the wall beside her for support, sucking in air desperately. What the hell was she doing?

  He didn’t want her.

  He didn’t want her heart.

  And he no longer wanted her body.

  Had she come to beg?

  With a sense of frustration, she took a silent step backwards, and another, until she was almost level with the door.

  But she didn’t move fast enough and he emerged unexpectedly from the water, spinning around almost as though he’d sensed her, his eyes locking to hers.

  And she froze.

  Her body was no longer capable of any movement other than trembling. She stared across at him, her stomach in knots, her lungs burning with every attempt at breath.

  He had no such problems. The ability she lacked he had in abundance; he moved easily through the water, with a predatory grace and hunger that weakened her knees. His eyes pinned her to the spot so that, even if she were capable of thought and action, she would have found it impossible to escape the intensity of his hungry gaze.

  He was naked. She noted the fact as he stepped from the water, striding across to her with his long gait. He was wet, too, something she didn’t fully appreciate until he caught her around the waist and pulled her to him, crushing his mouth to hers, moulding their bodies as if they were one.

  She moaned into his mouth, the insanity of what they were doing something she was incapable of controlling; something she didn’t want to control.

  Whatever else they were, this made sense. Blinding, clear sense. This was necessity and greed; hunger and desperation. He lifted her easily, wrapping her legs around his wet body. His arousal pressed against the fabric of her underwear and she ached to feel him – all of him. Her fingers tangled in his wet hair.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  He groaned though, a guttural sound of frustration. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You don’t ever hurt me,” she murmured with obvious confusion, her eyes heavy.

  “I don’t mean here.” He thrust his arousal forward and ground his hips. “I mean here.” He dropped a kiss to her chest, and through the construction of her body her heart hammered so hard she knew he felt it. “I’m not a monster.”

  Not like Fayez.

  The words hung between them and Kylie swallowed, wondering at the wounds she’d unknowingly inflicted on her husband. Was there any path that wouldn’t see her hurt? She loved him. She couldn’t ignore that fact anymore. He might call it an infatuation arising from their physical relationship, and maybe he was right. But to Kylie, it felt like love.

  And though she had no experience with the emotion – in the romantic or any other sense – she would have bet her life on it.

  “Please.” A shuddering breath. She needed everything about him. His breath on her body, his kiss on her skin, his hardness inside her. “Please. Please. Please. Please.”

  “Shush,” he soothed, understanding the fires that were ravaging her blood.

  But she wouldn’t be silenced. Nor would she be ignored. She reached down, pushing at her underwear, sliding them aside. He watched her, holding her weight as she manouevered herself back down, sliding over his length with a low, sensual groan of fulfillment.

  The possession was all the more perfect for the time apart. She pulled back and took him deep again, rolling her hips and whimpering as pleasure spiraled through her.

  And Khalifa watched, his body still, allowing her to pleasure herself until her face was pink and her body coated in a sheen of perspiration and then he took over, digging his fingers into her hips and holding her low on his waist as he thrust into her harder and she cried out, tilting her head back with sheer relief. He grunted and took a long step, bringing her back into connection with a tiled wall of his bedroom. He braced her there so that he could free his hands, so that he could remove her damned nightgown. The impediment wasn’t wanted. He pushed it over her head and, in the same movement, dropped his head to her breasts, sucking her nipples, tormenting them with his tongue, his lips, marking her body as he ever had.

  He drew his mouth to the other, and his fingers took over, rolling the exposed, aching nipple until Kylie was whimpering and whispering his name over and over again, her voice high-pitched and loud.

  Her responsiveness was its very own torment. Had there been nothing else he desired about her, the way her body answered his would have been enough. But it wasn’t just that. He wanted all of her. Everything she offered, he would take greedily. Even her heart; even when his own wasn’t on offer.

  He would enslave her. He would keep her. She was his.

  The primal thoughts slammed into his brain as he moved through her, hard and fast, and her nails dug into his shoulders.

  He had stayed away because it had been the right thing to do. The honourable thing.

  He was done being honourable.

  From now on, he would give her body everything it wanted so that she wouldn’t even realise what her heart was missing.

  She made a keening noise low in her throat and he knew all of her noises, all of her wants, so that he understood – she was close to coming. He dragged his mouth up her décolletage, knowing her flesh would show rawness from his stubble, and he kissed her, his tongue slashing her mouth as his body moved within her. He kissed her, so that she groaned into his mouth, so that he tasted her pleasure as she exploded around him, her muscles tightening on his length so that it was only with the utmost discipline he didn’t join her in the euphoria of release.

  But Khalifa wasn’t done.

  Oh, no. The day was in its infancy and he planned to make up for lost time. The last five nights had been a torture.

  He let her catch her breath – or at least catch some of it – and then he pulled her from the wall, stalking across to his bed. She was tired – the sweetness of satiation had weakened her limbs and she was wrapped around him
as though he were her lifeline.

  He would rouse her, though.

  He slid her down his body and, standing, her underpants pushed aside, he gripped them in his large, broad hands and he pulled, so that the silk split in his grip. Kylie’s eyes were huge at the display of strength and a tight smile flickered on his face.

  Had he been gentle with her for a particular reason? Her innocence, perhaps?

  His wife wanted all of him. He wasn’t going to hold back any longer. It wasn’t until he gripped her hips that he understood he had been treating her with kid gloves, letting her get used to the newness of their sexual relationship without realizing that her hungers met his own.

  He spun her without warning and slid a hand up her back, pushing her forward so that her hands rested on the edge of his bed.

  “Please,” she groaned into the bed-linen and his arousal jerked.

  He didn’t need to be asked twice. He held her still, teasing her with his tip before thrusting straight into her heart, letting her muscles squeeze and tighten around him, grinding his teeth to stop from exploding. But damn, he was close, and she was perfect. He ran his hands up her back as he moved, admiring the perfect curve of her arse as he took her, again and again.

  Her arousal caught them both by surprise but she cried out, reaching her hand out in front of her and squeezing the sheets between her splayed fingers as an orgasm broke around her. He stilled, letting her muscles ride the wave, letting her ride the wave. He stroked her back gently, comfortingly, so that even at the height of her desire she would know it was okay. That this was normal. The intensity of what they were, though uncommon, was nothing to be afraid of. And then he caught the wave with her, riding it, holding her, his head tilted backwards as euphoria danced on the edges of his mind.

  Chapter 11

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG. Different.

  Kylie stretched her arms over her head, blinking her blue eyes heavily in answer to the morning light. It streamed through the windows at her side like a blanket of gold, landing on her face and shoulder. What time was it?