by Marian Tee
The pressure of the sheikh’s hands on her head dictated the rhythm of her movements, and she followed him like an eager pupil would its master. The soft grunts and the hoarse growls that the sheikh emitted were her praise, and she found herself working harder to pleasure him, wanting, needing him to lose control the way he made her lose control.
Soon, he was clutching her head tightly, his hips moving wildly, and his phallus was shoving in and out of her mouth, all the way to the back of her throat.
“Will you want to swallow my cum, qalifa?” she heard him grate out.
She answered this by sucking hard on his penis, and his entire body stiffened.
“Aira.” Fuck!
And then he was holding her hair even harder as his phallus shot out its sweet, salty load into her mouth, one powerful jerk after another, and she strove to drink it all, swallow it all, but there was so damn much that when she finally released his phallus, a few drops of cum still managed to trickle down the corner of her mouth.
It was the most beautifully erotic sight, seeing his semen on his woman’s lips, and when her pink tongue darted out to lick the drops, the sheikh groaned, his semi-erect penis once again shooting up in throbbing arousal.
Harper, still on her knees, was wide-eyed in disbelief. “You’re hard again.”
“All because of you, saghira.” And as his need for her burned, Khalil reached for her, dragging Harper to his lap, and just before conquering her mouth, he muttered against her lips, “You turn me on like no other ever has.”
And then he kissed her, hungrily, and his self-control was further threatened when she kissed him back just as hungrily, her arms going around his neck as her legs straddled his lap. This time, he didn’t have to teach her at all. Her tongue played with his, and then she was biting his lip, sucking on her tongue –
Ah, fuck. He forced himself to put an end to the kiss, breathing hard, knowing that if he didn’t stop now, he would end up taking her virginity in the back of his limo. And he didn’t want that – not for her. Especially not for her.
When he looked back at her, she was panting, her eyes clouded and confused. Why aren’t we kissing anymore?
The sheikh wanted to laugh and groan. She was so damn innocent. He continued watching her, his gaze taking note of the way her green eyes darkened as reality slowly returned. He felt her stiffen as her face paled –
Any moment now, the sheikh thought.
When she suddenly scrambled off his lap, he let her go and reached for his trousers and briefs. He saw her head snap towards the windows as he dressed himself, and when he was done, he said softly, “We must talk.”
“I don’t want to.”
His lips pressed together to suppress his smile, knowing that if he hadn’t, it would only rile her up even more. Seeing that the limousine had reached the airport, he let the matter drop for now, and he kept his silence as they were cleared for immigration.
He could see the tension in his security team and the rest of his staff as they prepared for his sudden flight and made a mental note to apologize to them. It was not normal for kings like him to take off without months of planning in advance, but since he was king---
Khalil glanced at the woman walking stiffly beside him, her chin up but her eyes not meeting anyone. The trouble he was causing his staff was unfortunate, but the ends justified the means in this case. Because it was as Tarif had said. He was running out of time.
Harper couldn’t help but find the sheikh’s silence suspicious. Sure, he was quiet most of the time, but not with her. Never with her. Whenever they spent time together, he tended to talk – a lot – mostly to bully her, so much so that she often found herself wanting to choke the sheikh as much as she wanted him to kiss her.
And in the end, Harper thought gloomily, she had ended up doing the wrong thing.
She had kissed him instead of choking him.
The sheikh’s private plane was again an unprecedented sight, starting with the elevator – oh my God, was this for real – that took them straight to the king’s private third-floor entrance. From there, the king excused himself to talk with his staff while an aide took over to show her around.
While the third floor was exclusively for the king’s use, the second floor consisted of six guestrooms and offices, alongside several types of recreational quarters. The first floor, on the other hand, offered a fully equipped kitchen to dish out a ten-course meal at a moment’s notice, a grand dining room, a library, and a viewing room.
“What’s a viewing room?” Harper couldn’t help asking. Weren’t those what windows were for?
“I’m glad you asked,” the aide – Melina – answered with a smile, “but I believe it is better to show you, anisdi.”
And so off they went to the viewing room, with Melina opening the door with flourish. “Your magic carpet, anisdi.”
Oh!
The room was small and sparsely furnished, but it was the floor that took her breath away. It was completely transparent, allowing passengers to view what the plane would be flying over. “For security reasons, we press this button here---” Melina gestured to the switch panel behind a glass cabinet. “And a secondary layer covers the glass floor. It will be available to use as soon as we’re airborne.”
The pilot then announced via the PA that they were readying for takeoff, and Melina escorted her back to the third floor. Khalil was already in his seat, and Harper hesitated by the doorway. “I could just, you know…” She shrugged uneasily. “Downstairs?” After everything she had seen, it just didn’t feel right to stay next to the king. The palace was the palace, but it had never really sank into her mind that it belonged to Khalil. In her mind, it was like a museum that belonged to the people of Ramil, and Khalil simply happened to live in that museum.
But this plane…
This plane was reality, and it gave her hundreds of millions’ worth of reasons why she should not have anything to do with him.
Harper looked at the sheikh. “So…can I?”
Despite the vagueness of her earlier words, the sheikh had understood her perfectly. He smiled, and just as Harper started to tentatively smile back at him, Khalil said pleasantly, “Your place is with me.”
Harper scowled.
He crooked a finger at her.
Her face flamed. She wanted to bite that finger and break it at the same time.
Through the PA, the pilot repeated his request for passengers to take their seats, and Harper stalked to the seat next to Khalil. “Bully,” she hissed at him under her breath.
Ignoring her hiss, Khalil said, “Let me help you with that.”
Harper frowned. Help with what? And then the sheikh leaned towards her, reaching for her seatbelt, and she jerked. “No, it’s okay---” His arm brushed against her breast as he reached for the other end of her seatbelt. She shut up and focused on breathing instead.
It took him the longest time to secure her seatbelt, with his arm constantly brushing against her breasts. By the time he finally pulled away, she was red-faced, breathless, and turned on.
Their eyes met.
He smirked.
Damn sheikh.
“Are you alright?” he asked politely.
“Better than ever,” she snarled. Damn sheikh.
As the plane sped down the runway for takeoff, the sheikh murmured, “Remember when I said I had something to tell you?”
“No.” She was simply being contrary, and when he smiled, she knew he was letting her know that he knew it was so – and he found it amusing. Damn sheikh.
Grimacing, she grumbled, “Fine, I do remember. What is it?”
The plane took off, forcing them to lean back against their seats, and as she felt her stomach do its tiny customary flip, she heard the sheikh murmur something like, Will you marry me?
Even Harper had to smile a little at that.
Yeah right.
As the noise of their flight receded, she glanced back at the sheikh, saying, “Sorry, I didn’t qu
ite catch that. What did you say again?”
He smiled at her. “I think you did.”
Oh, that smile. That heart-stopping, jaw-dropping smile. She cleared her throat and told herself to stop being a ninny. “I really didn’t.”
“Very well then.” And with that too-sexy smile still playing on his lips, the sheikh asked in a perfectly casual voice, “Will you marry me?”
Chapter Six
Harper had not spoken for fifteen minutes now. Khalil didn’t mind, and while her silence had initially surprised him, he realized after a while that it was exactly like her to react like this. Although her temper tended to have a short fuse over the smallest of things, Harper was the opposite in the moments that mattered. He recalled a story about her once, the first time she had heard of her father’s injury and the possibility that he would never walk again. She had been silent for a long while, and then – while her father had been in the operating room for hours – she had started reading books. Started talking to doctors. Started asking about the funds that were available to soon-to-be-decommissioned soldiers like Howard.
When Howard had woken up, his daughter was by his side, and she had the answers to all the questions he could ever want to ask.
Looking at her now, with her brows furrowed and her gaze darting to him once in a while, he knew she was thinking things through, considering and dismissing possibilities that did not fit his profile.
Was he insane? Was he joking? Why would he want to marry me?
Some questions she could answer herself, other questions –
He only had to wait until she asked them of him.
Meanwhile, he would simply enjoy looking his fill of her. She would be dynamite in a bikini, the sheikh thought with a frown. That was a good thing, but only if she wore the bikini in his presence alone. Everywhere else would be forbidden.
The thought had him shifting in his seat, the sheikh grimacing when he realized that imagining a bikini-clad Harper was enough to have his penis growing hard under his trousers.
“Sheikh?” It took a moment before the sheikh turned to face her, and she frowned, thinking he looked a little flushed. “Are you okay?”
“Of course.” Now was not the time to tell her he was thinking of fucking her. “You have made up your mind?”
“Ha. Ha. Ha.” She would really thump him if he were serious about that.
His smile was faintly apologetic. “I am rushing you then.”
“No kidding.”
Her tone was extremely sarcastic, but her eyes showed faint panic. He was sorry for this, but not enough that it would dissuade him from his objective. She was what he wanted, and he would have her. It was only a matter of when. Studying her face, he asked slowly, “May I at least think you are not rejecting my proposal outright?”
“I should,” she muttered, “if I were smarter.”
The sheikh frowned. “Why do you say this? Would it be so bad to be married to me?”
“Will I be the only woman you’re marrying?”
Ah. So she was worried about that. “I respect the dictates of Islam, but I was also baptized Catholic.”
Oh! She had not known about that.
“Also, to have more than one wife is not actually a requirement of Islam.”
“But it’s allowed,” she said darkly.
“In a nutshell, yes. But you need not worry about that. When I take you as my wife---”
“If you take me as your wife,” she corrected.
He ignored this. “It will only be you.”
Oh. He sounded so serious, so matter-of-fact, and her heart swayed just a little. Could she really believe that this was happening?
“Do you have other concerns?”
“Just one.” And she asked baldly, “Why me?”
“Because you are what my country and I need.”
Oh.
Okay.
Not.
Harper crossed her arms over her chest. “Sorry, sheikh.” Her tone was flat. “But I’m not buying it. How can I be what you and your country need?”
Khalil allowed himself a slight smile. “You do not think highly enough of yourself, qalifa.”
“I’m just being realistic.”
“What you are,” he countered mildly, “is being blind. Where do you wish me to start? Why I need you? To put it plainly, I need someone whose company I am certain to enjoy for a lifetime.”
She frowned. “Is that your way of saying you’d like to have someone you can bully for the rest of your life?”
He ignored that. “I also need someone who’s not a gold-digger.”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“You’d have jumped on my offer of marriage if you were.”
“What if I’m just pretending I’m not?”
“And you truly think I’d fall for such a ruse?”
Harper snorted. “You’re not that infallible, sheikh.”
“Perhaps. But rarely do I make the wrong call when judging people.”
She supposed she could accept that, knowing that his position as king had allowed him to meet all kinds of folks, and she highly doubted that all of them were nice and decent.
“Also---” Her eyes flew back to the sheikh at the word, and as soon as their gazes met, he drawled lazily, “I want to fuck you.”
Oh.
“To be specific: I want to fuck you more than I’ve ever wanted to fuck any woman in my life.”
Harper coughed, and when that wasn’t enough for her to get over her toe-curling embarrassment and shameful excitement, she scowled. She scowled as hard as she could, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to swoon. “Is that supposed to flatter me?”
“Does it not flatter you?”
Yeah. It did. But she would never let him know that. “Anyway,” she said gruffly. “Moving on.”
The sheikh smirked, not at all fooled by her tone. He would have liked to tease her more, but because they were pressed for time, he reluctantly set his urges aside for another day. Anyway, once they were married, she would be his to tease for the rest of their lives.
“What else do you wish to know? The requirements of my kingdom for its queen?”
“Wouldn’t they want someone who’s local?”
“That would have been expected for most other Arab nations, but ours is different. We have had a more open culture compared to our neighbors, and more than sixty percent of our population consists of foreign settlers. My people wish for progress more than anything else. They wish to move away from the years of bigotry and tyranny they had to suffer under my late grandfather’s rule. I, too, wish for the same thing, and I want my marriage to be a symbol of that. I want my own life to be proof that different cultures – even different religions – may co-exist peacefully and work side-by-side for the betterment of this kingdom.”
His quiet but impassioned words impressed Harper, but a tiny part of her felt a little hurt. In other words, didn’t that mean he was only choosing her for all the politically correct reasons? From here, even she could see why he had specifically chosen her. Her face was familiar to his people, and more than that they knew and loved her father, who was one of the kingdom’s most cherished modern-day heroes.
But was that enough to build a marriage on?
“You still doubt my reasons for choosing you.” The sheikh’s soft tone was more a statement than a question, and she nodded reluctantly.
“I just think there are more women who’d be more qualified---”
“But do they love my kingdom as much as you do?” Her startled glance made Khalil smile. “I love my kingdom, and it is what enables me to know the people who feel the same way about Ramil. You chose to specialize in Ramilian history, Harper---”
She couldn’t help interrupting him, muttering, “There must be a thousand others at least who also specialize in Ramilian history---”
The sheikh dismissed this with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “True. But I don’t want to fuck them.” And his gaze captured hers. �
�I want to fuck you.”
Her mouth opened and closed, her toes curled, and her heart – ah, shit, oh, shit. It swayed like it was a ballroom dancer on steroids, and she quickly closed her eyes in a futile attempt to deny the truth. Damn sheikh. She was sensible, unsociable Harper Griffiths. Most guys wouldn’t have dared say that to her face. And yet this damn sheikh did, and he was right to do so because –
It actually meant a lot to her, Harper realized shamefully. She liked – no, she loved knowing the sheikh wanted her so, and he knew it. How the hell had he known when she had only realized this now?
The sheikh suddenly took her hand, and her eyes flew open.
“Harper.” His voice was a sweet, soft caress.
Her heart swayed, and Harper thought, this was bad. She immediately tried tugging her hand away, desperate to free herself from the heat of his touch, but the sheikh’s grip was inflexible.
“Marry me.”
“I can’t---”
“Yes.” His voice was firm, but his gaze was coaxing, seducing her into a state of submission. “You can.” And so very softly, he said, “You will.”
Shit. Oh, shit. Those eyes of his were too dangerous. “At least g-give me time---”
“I cannot.” And this time, the sheikh’s lips briefly pressed together. “I know you deserve time to think about this, but it is the one thing I cannot afford to give you.”
Harper listened with a frown as the sheikh explained about his grandfather’s will, which only the royal family’s legal council was privy to. Among other things, Khalil was to marry within a hundred days of his ascension – or risk losing the throne.
“When are your one hundred days up?” she asked.
“Two weeks from now.”
Oh. She gulped. Two weeks. Wasn’t that too soon to decide whether to marry someone?
“And for the marriage to have the proper preparation, I would need at least a week.”
Worse and worse, Harper thought. “In other words, there’s really just a week---”
“Nem.” The sheikh looked at her. “Those are all my cards on the table, qalifa. Now, it is your turn to make a decision. Will you marry me?”