by Dani Collins
“Oh, Zafir...” She went up on tiptoes, trying to kiss him.
He groaned, hands closing into her hair as his mouth landed on hers, rough and hot.
He gentled immediately, groaning again, but didn’t release her. With a growl of apology and frustration, he tenderly ravaged her mouth.
She closed her eyes, falling apart at the sweetness of having his kiss again. His arm came around her back to haul her in. Her hands closed on his thobe, grasping and trying to pull him into her. She couldn’t get close enough. Silly bump in the way!
He moved them deeper into the room, kicking the door shut with a slam. As he pivoted to sit on the padded love seat, he dragged her onto his lap, knees on either sides of his thighs.
“Okay?” he murmured between consuming bites of her mouth, his hands riding her skirt up her thighs and then cupping her bottom proprietarily, fingering under the lacy edges of her undies.
She braced her forearms on his shoulders, kissing and kissing him. Running fingers up the back of his neck into his hair. Knocking his gutra askew. Reuniting. “I’m too heavy on you,” she gasped, but couldn’t make herself pull away. His hands wouldn’t let her.
He laughed, using his nose to nudge her chin up so he could kiss her neck. He’d done that sort of thing in the tent at the oasis, told her without words what he wanted. Her throat, her collarbone, her breast. She scraped her hair back and away, offering. She told him with the angle of her body where she wanted his nibbling kisses, and sighed when he found the exact spot that melted her into heaven.
She ignited in his arms. Absolutely burst with the thrill of feeling him, smelling him, returning to this amazing place where touching and kissing and caressing was perfect and right and necessary. Where it was an expression of more than sexual attraction. Love.
Trying to wriggle closer, she scraped at his back, demanding the thobe come off, but he was sitting on it. He tried to set her on her feet and lift her dress at the same time.
“No, I’ll be too self-conscious,” she protested. “The lights...I just wanted to see and kiss you...” She slid to her knees on the area rug and pushed at his thobe, exposing his legs, running her hands up the rough hairs on his thighs.
With a savage noise, he stood long enough to pull it off and away, then sat and tried to bring her back up onto him, but she stayed on the floor and ran her fingers to the tops of his thighs, staring.
“I’ve never seen you,” she murmured, sending him a shy look before letting her enraptured gaze fall back onto his naked, aroused flesh. He felt so familiar in her hands yet looked darker and more imposing than she’d pictured.
He swore, but let his hand fall to the armrest. The other one gripped the backrest behind him. “Look then. But I’ll want to do the same and then are we really doing this? Because I love you and I want to show you how much.”
She stroked him, coming up on her knees to lean forward and breathe across his taut skin. She looked up, almost asking for permission.
His eyes narrowed, intense as the blue-green at the center of a flame.
Smiling with a woman’s wicked delight at having mastery over her man, she drew him into her mouth
He hissed and threw back his head, arched to press deeper against the swirling caress of her tongue. “I won’t last,” he said through his teeth.
She gave him an approving hum.
He held out, though, making sounds of deep torture while he grew harder than titanium under her ministrations. Her inner being soared with confidence at knowing he liked this, but more than that, she loved knowing it meant something to him that she wanted to give him pleasure. She expressed her love this way, openly and without reserve.
“I’m watching you,” he told her in a voice that tightened her skin. “I’ve only felt you do that in the dark, but you’re loving this, aren’t you?”
She let her smiling eyes meet his, allowing him to see how much she enjoyed giving him physical pleasure.
He was flushed and fierce, his possessive gaze barbaric, but his caress on her cheek was tender as he made her stop. “Are you comfortable? Kneeling there like that?”
“I...yes,” she said dazedly. “I don’t want to stop.”
His mouth widened in a feral smile. “Good. Neither do I. Stay where you are.”
He rose, but set a hand on her shoulder when she would have pushed up on her knees.
“No, keep your elbows on the cushion.” He lowered behind her and ran his hands under her skirt, bunching it until it sat under her breasts. Then he slid her knickers down her thighs.
“You want... Like this?” she asked, staring with scandalized eyes at the impression he’d left on the cushion between her clenching hands. “Maybe if the lights were off—” she protested.
“Lift your knee, ya amar.” Her underpants were whisked away. His hand stroked her naked thigh and smoothed over the curve of her buttock. “Freckles everywhere,” he chuckled softly. “I feared I would never know for sure. Are you as aroused as I am?”
They both gasped as he caressed between her thighs where she was slippery and aching. She dropped her face into the cushion, stifling her moan of yearning.
“No.” He continued to stroke her while he tangled his free hand in her hair, tugging just hard enough to pick up her head. “Let me hear you. We don’t have to bite our lips anymore.”
“Someone will come.”
“We both will,” he assured her smokily.
“It’s too much,” she whispered, growing taut all over as her climax approached.
“I never told you how good it was that night,” he said as he shifted to lean over her. His naked body brushed the exposed skin at the backs of her legs, her bottom and the small of her back. He rubbed his shaft against her sex in a way that was deliciously familiar and not enough. Not anymore. Not now she knew how it felt to have that thick pressure inside her. “You took me apart with your heat and tightness. You’re so wet for me again. You make me insane with desire, Fern.”
“Don’t tease, Zafir,” she begged. “Please.”
He was shaking as he entered her, passion barely restrained.
She cried out, pressing back to make it happen faster. Deeper. She was shattering and he was barely touching her, sliding his hand around to caress her as he made gentle, shallow thrusts.
He pinned her right on the cusp of climax and held her there. She arched, letting her moans of enjoyment fill the room, clutched in a storm of such magnificence she could only shudder and release ragged cries of joy. It was intense, her orgasm so close that when he decided they were ready, it arrived, swift and powerful. She feared she wouldn’t survive it, but didn’t care, crying out with abandoned ecstasy.
Dimly she was aware of him holding himself tight and deep, biting through her dress at her shoulder. His fist covered hers on the cushion and crushed her hand as he convulsed, bathing her in heat, inside and out. They were like a star exploding, so perfectly attuned they were one being melded soul to soul as the waves of climax overtook and drowned them, taking a long time to recede and let them come up for air.
His body branded her where his damp skin adhered to hers. She became aware of him braced over her, still shaking. His heart was pounding against her back. Her own pulse was trying to find a resting level along with her lungs. She remembered what they’d sounded like, how guttural his shout had been over her abundance of ragged cries.
She blushed.
He chuckled and kissed the back of her neck, then stroked her hair off the side of her face with a trembling hand. He touched his lips to the side of her face. “Okay?”
“Just trying not to die of embarrassment. That was rather...” She didn’t have words.
“It was,” he agreed with a nuzzle of her ear. “Worth waiting for.”
She turned her hand under his, wanting to link her fi
ngers with his, but he picked up her hand and kissed the backs of her knuckles before carefully withdrawing.
She settled onto her hip, still trembling, not sure where to look as she attempted to regain her modesty, trying to tug her dress into place and not reveal that as satisfied as she was, she was also still aroused and responsive.
He leaned back on his hand, his other wrist propped on his bent knee. He ran his gaze over her, possessive and impenitent. He was gorgeous. Sexy and comfortable in his nudity. The light gilded his skin to warm polished oak. The way his mouth relaxed in a smile of smugness and his eyelids blinked with heavy satisfaction sent a ripple of warm delight through her.
“You look like a sultan who just enjoyed his concubine,” she teased, pleased that she felt confident enough to say it, even though she couldn’t help primly tugging her dress into place under her bum and down her thighs.
“Someday I’ll be a duke,” he said, leaning forward to run his hand up her leg and under her skirt. “One who compromised the governess. I’m starting to think I’ll have a harem after all, full of intriguing women who all look like you.”
She leaned forward to steal a kiss, but wrinkled her nose at him. “Don’t remind me. Your abundance of titles intimidates me.”
“Anytime you’re daunted by me or any part of this life I’ve dragged you into, I want you to remember what you do to me. I’m utterly at your mercy. In lust and so deeply in love...” They kissed, tenderly and lingeringly.
“And it’s not sinful.”
“Not in the least. We’re blessed...”
EPILOGUE
Two and a half years later
ZAFIR’S STRONG ARM hooked around her and dragged her from sitting on the edge of the mattress, where she was debating between two bathing suits, to half-under his powerful body.
“What are you doing?” she scolded in a whisper, as if she didn’t know. “It’s broad daylight.”
“Freckle inspection,” he whispered back, beginning to unbutton her shirt.
She giggled and combed her fingertips against the beard scuffing his cheek, thinking of the reason he’d given her when she’d asked once why he was so entranced with her spots.
They remind me that there’s no clean line between my English and my Arab halves. I’m an aggregate of both, sifted together into one man.
She’d melted, loving him all the more when he made her feel like she was the absolute most right woman for him.
As he trailed kisses between her breasts and she crooked her knee against his hip, already warming with delicious slithers of arousal, she blinked at the tent ceiling above and marveled at the life she had, wondering how she’d come to deserve it.
He lifted his head to give her a puzzled look. “Did you go somewhere? Because making babies takes two, you know.”
She smiled, always amazed at how attuned he was to her. “Just having a moment of awe that we ever met. Here of all places. We could have met in England, but no, my soul mate was in a protected reserve that only a few select people are allowed to visit.”
“I like to think I would have found you no matter where you were,” he said, opening her top to admire her bare breasts. “But I’m glad it was here. Do you know when I think it happened for me? When I was such an ass to you and you were only trying to help that girl. I felt like the lowest form of life. Sick with guilt. Couldn’t sleep.”
“So you came to my tent, you wicked sheikh.” And the girl was fine. She’d just been here with the tribe for five days and they’d all left a few hours ago. Fern’s challenge now was figuring out how to encourage girls her age to pursue their education rather than marrying before they were out of their teens. And carefully, because the Bedouins had been instrumental in her acceptance by the rest of Q’Amara. She didn’t want to offend them.
Speaking of offended, Zafir was giving her a pointed look. She would have to think about work another time.
“You would have gone away that night, but I didn’t have it in me to let you,” she recalled, sidling her hand up the sleeve of his thobe so she could shape his bare shoulder.
He shifted to settle over her more purposefully. “I like to think I would have left, but I’m glad you didn’t test me.” He obeyed the urging in her touch to lower his head and kiss her properly.
She had to stifle a moan, it was so good.
“There she is,” he said with heated approval, as he cupped her breast and thumbed her nipple, inciting delicious tension in her belly.
They were in perfect synchronicity now. She hooked her calf across his lower back and lifted into him—
The boys’ voices approached. “Mother, are you in there?” Tariq called.
Zafir drew back with a beleaguered sigh, expression ruefully disgruntled. “Excellent timing, as always.”
She snickered and sat up to quickly button her shirt, cheeks hot as she called, “Yes, we’re here, Tariq. What do you need?”
“Ahmed wants you.” A shadow loomed against the front of the tent and separated as their two-year-old son slid off their twelve-year-old’s back. Little hands made indents on the nylon as Ahmed’s stern little voice said, “Mama. Come.”
“I’m coming,” she assured him, wrinkling her nose at her husband as she pushed off their low bed to open the front of the tent.
“Baba!” Ahmad said as he spied Zafir, running right past Fern to scramble onto the bed and tackle his father. He looked just like Tariq except for having Zafir’s green eyes and what everyone agreed was Fern’s pert mouth.
“Oh, yes, I can see it was me he was anxious to see,” she said, sharing a grin with Tariq. He was approaching the age where his shoulders were filling out and a light shadow stood on his upper lip, making her so proud of the man he was growing into, yet so wistful at how quickly he was growing up.
“He and Sadiq were fighting over the orange shovel again,” Tariq said with a long-suffering shake of his head. “He was angry when I tried to give him the red one. Started looking for you and wasn’t happy when he realized you weren’t still there.”
The toddler cousins gravitated to each other like puppies in a pack, but scrapped for the sake of it, Fern sometimes thought. “Do you want to leave him here?” she asked.
“No, I’ll wait until he’s ready to come play again.” He moved to hitch his hip onto the foot of the mattress, laughing when Ahmed rose from vanquishing Zafir to growl and attack him. Tariq caught his little brother and pretended to be overcome, falling onto his back on the mattress beside Zafir.
A wrestling match ensued, one Fern stayed out of as the two boys took on their father, making Zafir laugh so hard he weakened long enough for them to nearly overpower him.
“You could help,” Zafir scolded her in the middle of it, but she only shook her head, chuckling at his situation.
“I’m Switzerland. I don’t take sides,” she claimed, and it was true. She loved them all equally, each for the wonderful person he was.
When they tired and settled, Tariq held out his arms to his little brother. “Should we go find Sadiq?”
Ahmed nodded and Tariq sat up, offering his back. Ahmed clambered onto him, pudgy arms closing around Tariq’s neck. He bounced, and urged, “Go Sadiq. Go!”
“I’m glad you’re having fun with him, but you don’t have to spend all your time minding him,” Fern said, giving in to her mother’s need to smooth Tariq’s hair as he came even with her. “It’s your vacation, too. I know your uncle wants to take you into the desert with the falcons.”
“I know. But he told me that if you and Baba have time alone, you might think about giving me another little brother. Or maybe a sister.”
Oh, good heavens. Fire climbed Fern’s cheeks as she realized what Tariq—what Ra’id—was implying. She looked to Zafir.
He was lounging on an elbow and drawled, “Your
uncle said that?”
“He asked me if I wanted more siblings. I said I would so he said I should give you time to think about it and talk about it. If Baba doesn’t mind, I’d especially like it if you gave me sister,” he said to Fern. “We both would, wouldn’t we, Ahmed?”
“Sadiq!” the toddler insisted.
“That’s not how it works, Tariq!” Fern blurted.
“I know how it works,” he said with a rascal’s grin, hitching his brother higher on his back before walking out. “I’m just saying.”
Fern clapped her hands over her cheeks as he left, staring into Zafir’s laughing eyes. “We’re not fooling anyone, are we?” she asked in an askance whisper.
“Apparently not.” He hooked his arm behind his head and beckoned to her like the man he was: a sheikh wanting to lie with his Number One Wife, patting the mattress where he wanted her. “So zip the tent and unbutton your shirt. Let’s finish making another oasis baby.”
* * * * *
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