by Ann Jacobs
"I will care for you as I promised, Leila. As soon as I can arrange it, I will make you my wife. And if I still have wealth, I will see what can be done toward restoring what my eyes tell me was once beauty almost beyond belief. For your sake, because to me you are beautiful as you are today." He stroked her unscarred cheek, ran his fingers through thick, lustrous hair that felt like a velvety pelt above the perfect shell of her ear. "Now, houri, I would examine what will be mine."
"You wish us to marry?"
"Who better than you to become the bride of a man who has gone through hell? What woman might understand as fully when I do not laugh and joke and devote myself to the life of pleasure I enjoyed before enduring the years of humiliation Dubaq inflicted on me? I cannot imagine a woman better equipped to bridge the gap between the good life I can barely remember and the hell I will never be able to forget."
She didn't stop him when he slid the black abaya off her shoulders and draped it across a chair. But when he bent to lift her tunic, she stepped back until the bed blocked her escape. "These scars are not my only ones," she said, her voice flat.
"I did not imagine they were. Remove the tunic, Leila."
As though fear paralyzed her, she stood there. The tears sliding down her cheeks, their paths uneven over satin-smooth skin on one side, scar tissue on the other, provided the only motion to an otherwise frozen scene.
"Take it off." With the terse command, Jamil moved close enough that he could enfold her in his arms.
Suddenly she did as he commanded, but she dived beneath the covers on the narrow bed before Jamil could get a good look at the body he had already explored by touch through the concealing fabric of the her tunic.
Furious because he wanted her to bare herself freely to him, he grabbed the burqa and ripped it into four long strips. Leaving her covered while he used the remnants of the garment to tie her arms and legs to the four corners of the bed, Jamil tried to rein in conflicting emotions that assailed him.
Anger at the ravages war had left them with. Fear for a future in a world neither of them had seen for years. Lust, he thought, as his balls tightened in their sac at the sight of her squirming against her bonds. And something more. Hope for their future happiness that was no longer a futile fantasy.
Jamil snatched off his dishdasha and tossed it away. "Look on me now. You have seen before, but now I show you freely what war and imprisonment have done to me. There is more you cannot see with your eyes that you will learn in time from witnessing my nightmares. Now I would see the body I've mated with in the darkness. I would feast my eyes upon your yoni. Your full, soft breasts."
When he pulled back the covers, they caught briefly on the chain she wore between her nipple rings, making her nipples grow hard and tight. Even before he settled between her legs and caught her clitoris between his teeth, her yoni was wet for him.
Until she felt the warmth of his seeking fingers on her left breast, she'd almost forgotten her disfigurement. The lack of sensation when he touched the rough, hardened scar tissue there brought home the fact that she would never be whole again.
"No," she whispered, tugging in vain to free her wrists from their bonds.
Raising his head, he cupped both of her breasts in his hands and gently tugged at the rings in her nipples. "Yes. I give thanks to Allah for sparing these. One day they will nurture my child."
He truly meant to make her his wife?
Leila quit fighting the bonds that grew tighter on her wrists and ankles with every desperate attempt at escape. It mattered not, now that Jamil had seen each puckered scar, every shiny surface where the doctors had grafted skin to replace what the fireball that followed that terrifying explosion of an enemy bomb had destroyed.
A bomb dropped by his allies if not by Jamil himself had done this to her, she thought even as she grew hotter and wetter with every stroke of his callused fingers on her breasts, her belly, the sensitive skin of her widespread inner thighs. On her yoni, open and vulnerable to serve his pleasure.
"So soft," he murmured, his smoothly shaven cheek against her belly while he toyed with the chain that joined her nipples and the ring in her navel. "This night I will take you as you took me when I was bound, and if Allah wills it, you will bear my child by the time that ten new moons have come and gone."
Her mouth watered to taste his rigid lingam, and she wanted her hands free not to flee but to press his smoothly shaven face between her legs. To stroke the silky, jet black stubble that was already beginning to form a short pelt on his beautifully shaped head.
"Come to me, my sheikh. I would take your magnificent lingam inside my yoni and milk it dry."
He sat upright, his dark eyes aglow with desire. The broad head of his penis glistened on its rigid shaft, hot and pulsating as though it had a life of its own.
Leaning toward her, he bent until his breath ruffled her ruined hair. "Dahoud assures me my family's possessions are now mine, so I can promise you some degree of financial security, though it may not amount to the wealth we had before the invasion. I doubt I will ever fully recover mentally from the effects of my imprisonment, any more than your scars will suddenly fade away. Or that I will soon become accustomed again to being called 'sheikh' instead of 'prisoner.'"
"I care not. I hurt with wanting you."
"Say you will wed with me, Leila. Say it now and I will give you what you want." He reached down, rubbed his steely erection against her belly. "I will give you this."
"If you will allow me hijab, I will marry you." Surely he would take another wife to display before his friends and family. And to take to his bed once he shook off the worst effects of his imprisonment. That realization hurt, but she dared not try to extract the promise from Jamil that Saqr had reluctantly made her so long ago: that he would take her as his only wife.
"You may hide yourself from others if that is your wish, houri, but you must never shrink away from me. I would have you naked in my bed, in the light of day as well as under cover of darkness."
He stroked her scarred cheek, then tunneled his fingers into her hair that had never grown back properly after having been burned away. "These are nothing compared to my scars. You may not see them but they are alive inside me. Scars of humiliation. Memories of being chained and raped like a whore by Dubaq and his men. Of watching my countrymen endure similar torture only to be maimed and killed one by one as it served our captors' pleasure.
"You brought me pleasure, though you gave me no choice. Now I would prove you need not shrink away from the light. Feel my desire and know it is real."
Like velvet over steel, his long, thick lingam pulsed against the naked flesh of her belly. In his dark eyes she saw passion's fire. Her body answered his call with a fresh gush of hot, slippery lubrication that dripped from her yoni and settled around the entrance to her rear passage.
"I will wed with you, my sheikh," she said, desperate now for him to ease the ache that began in her puckered nipples and settled deep within her body. "Fuck me now. Do not make me wait."
In one smooth motion, he sat on his haunches between her legs and filled her. Hot. Thick. Incredibly beautiful because this time Jamil was fucking her because he wanted her. He might not love her-most certainly he did not-but Leila could not refute the desire that was evident in his pulsing erection that stretched the walls of her vagina.
Lifting her hips, straining against bonds far more gentle than the heavy chains Dubaq had ordered used on him each night, she felt her own passion build with every thrust and parry, each slide of his callused fingertips across the jutting points of her nipples.
His gaze was hot, dark, locked with her own when he seated himself in her so deep that his satiny balls rested against the sensitive entrance to her anus. His obsidian gaze held hers, and his hands slid down her body, gently tugging at the thin chains and tweaking her nipples as they moved.
When he found the hot, hard nub of her clitoris and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, she gasped with the exquisit
e pleasure and clenched her inner muscles harder around his invading lingam.
"I've never met a more responsive woman," he said, catching both of the chains where they converged at her navel ring and jiggling them to stimulate her nipples while he did his magic between her legs. "I will have your nipple rings chained to this," he told her as he gave her stiff little clitoris a quick, arousing pinch.
The thought of constantly stimulating the jewel of her sex made her clench her yoni harder around him. "And how would you decorate my navel, my sheikh?"
"I'll buy you jewels to adorn it, a precious stone for each day of the week. And you will dance for me in the privacy of our rooms." He thrust into her harder, deeper, each time withdrawing almost completely before filling her again.
The first waves of her climax rippled deep in her belly, radiating through her body like the fire that had practically destroyed her. It went on for what seemed like forever, consuming her so thoroughly she didn't realize until he clasped her hands and dragged them to rest on his heaving chest that he had freed her from her bonds.
Holding back his own release when Leila's pussy squeezed his cock like a greedy fist had Jamil trembling. When she scissored her fingers over the sensitive nubs of his nipples, he almost exploded.
"No, houri. I would give you more pleasure before I spend." Slowly, he withdrew from her hot, wet pussy and released her legs, kissing his way up the silky flesh from ankle to thigh, then tasting her satiny yoni with long, lazy strokes of his tongue while he pulled on the golden chain that connected her pink, pebbled nipples.
She smelled like apricots and spices and female musk, and he couldn't get enough of her essence. But his cock ached to feel her pussy around it, hot and tight, so much that prolonging the pleasure like this could not last for long.
Gently he turned her on her stomach and knelt between her legs, spreading her and raising her sweet ass for his attention. Her puckered anus twitched when he ringed it with his finger after moistening it with her own slick juices.
She opened further to him, lifting her ass as though she liked him touching her there. "Oh, yesss."
Her husky purr resonating in his ears, he inserted a finger past her anal sphincter, taking care not to cause her the pain he'd always associate with the act she seemed to want.
"Do you want me to fuck you here?" he asked when she moaned again.
"Someday. But not now. I want your big, thick lingam in my yoni. Now."
Jamil shifted, found her sweet yoni and sank slowly inside until his balls pressed hard against her clit. It felt like paradise, having her pulsating around his cock like this.
"Lock your ankles around my ass," he said, lifting her lower body as he rose to his knees.
"Like this?"
With her back arched sweetly into his belly and her face and upper body pressed against the snowy bed linen, Jamil saw none of the devastation Leila wanted so badly to hide. Her rounded ass and sleek back, even the silky hair on the back of her shapely head showed him only perfect womanly beauty.
"By Allah, yes." He could barely hold in his seed when she pulled him in her so deep that his cock pressed at the entrance to her womb. But he wanted her to come again, too.
Very gently he worked first one, then another finger into her rear passage and began to slide them in and out. Her pussy clenched him like a fist, and her slick, hot juices bathed his balls in liquid heat.
His cock swelled against the sweet constriction of her vaginal muscles, and the first waves of orgasm shot from his belly to his balls. He was losing control. While he finger-fucked her ass faster and harder, he reached beneath her, found the love chain, and tugged it to stimulate her nipples.
"Oh, yesss. Don't stop. I…" Whatever she was going to say was lost in her ecstatic scream. A scream that pushed Jamil over the edge and triggered the wild, hot spurts of semen that shot into her convulsing pussy.
Chapter Ten
While Jamil slept in Leila's arms, Brian sat at the unconscious Marsh Arab's bedside even after Zayed's grandson had arrived.
As anxious as he was to get processed at the American Air Force base in Saudi Arabia and fly home to Diane, Brian felt compelled to stay. It was as though Zayed had somehow become part of him during their flight.
"He stepped in front of a bullet that was meant for me," he'd told the old man's grandson in halting Arabic when Maktoum asked why he didn't leave and get his own rest.
Maktoum had nodded, as though he understood. "He is a Wise One."
What that meant, Brian hadn't a clue. But he passed the night swabbing sweat off Zayed's brow, hoping the old man would live while knowing from some spot deep inside him that the wound had been too much for the ninety-year-old man to survive.
How he knew, he could not explain. Both the Kuwaiti doctor and the American specialist Jake summoned had given Maktoum an optimistic prognosis for his grandfather.
But he knew with certainty that Zayed would not last the night. And that he had somehow willed him, Brian, to keep a death watch.
Outside the wind howled. Through the window of the old man's hospital room, Brian watched the swirling sand create a macabre moving picture in the light of the new moon.
Zayed stirred, as though roused by nature's unrest beyond these walls. With one bony hand, he reached to his chest and clasped the strange necklace Brian had first noticed this afternoon while he tended the old man's wound.
"May I help you?" Maktoum asked, and when the old man nodded, he unclasped the necklace and placed it in his grandfather's hand.
With what seemed like superhuman effort, Zayed lifted his hand and placed the necklace into Brian's hand. "Take this, young man. You will need-"
The Marsh Arab's strange dialect and his rapid, breathy speech over what sounded like death rattles was too much for Brian to translate any more of what Zayed was trying to say. But he gathered that the old man wanted him to have the necklace.
"He wants you to take it, says you will need it to show you the way to paradise," Maktoum told Brian after Zayed had lapsed into unconsciousness.
An hour later, with his grandson holding one bony hand and Brian clasping the other, the old man died.
* * * * *
Their ordeal was over. Jamil was home at last.
Well, not home, because the Iraqi army had destroyed his childhood home and killed his immediate family during the invasion years ago. But they'd arrived two days earlier at his cousin's villa near Mina Su'ud, the one he'd built after the one Jamil remembered had been destroyed during the Iraqi invasion. And yesterday Dahoud and Jake had taken him by helicopter to view his own oilfields that were now almost back at full production thanks to eleven years' hard work by the GreenTex crews Dahoud had hired to tend them after the war was over.
He'd learned how Jake had supervised much of the rebuilding after he graduated from college and took his place with his family's company. And that Jake was here now not to work but to enjoy an extended honeymoon with his new bride.
Much had happened to his cousin during the years of Jamil's imprisonment. Yet one thing remained the same. Dahoud and his beautiful American still showed every sign of being madly, wildly in love.
The reunion had been sweet. Seeing Dahoud's daughters and infant son made Jamil anxious to start living again, build a home for himself and Leila and start their own family. Tomorrow Dahoud's parents and his sister Alina would arrive from Kuwait City to celebrate his escape-and his marriage.
The rich fabric of Dahoud's traditional robe and headdress that he had borrowed felt strange after his years in rough prison garb and the time before that when he had eschewed tradition in favor of Western clothing. Since Leila wished to hide her disfigurement beneath traditional hijab, though, he thought he should dress to match.
After their wedding, which Dahoud's wife Shana was already planning with unseemly glee, Jamil would take Leila to the States to see renowned plastic surgeon Brent d'Angelo. Shana said he'd done her mother's facelift as well as those for dozens of H
ollywood celebrities and political personalities. Apparently he'd also performed liposuction on two Saudi princesses of their acquaintance, a fact which seemed to amuse his gorgeous cousin-by-marriage when she divulged it.
Insha'Allah, the man would be able to erase the worst of Leila's scars. For himself, he cared not. To Jamil, she was beautiful and desirable the way she was, and he thought he'd done a good job of proving that to her since regaining his freedom three days earlier.
"Are you ready, houri?" he called through the door, amused to have been banned while she dressed after they had worshiped each other's naked bodies for hours the night before.
"I am now."
Jamil liked Shana's idea of hijab. The ruby-red tunic his cousin's wife had loaned Leila clung to her supple curves, and a sheer scarf in a pattern of rose and red and gold shimmered about her face and neck and chin, calling attention to her incredibly sexy eyes, shapely nose, and the rosy full lips that had wakened him so lovingly this morning when they slid down his sleepy cock.
Shana el Rashid was an incredibly sexy lady. And so was Jake's bride Kate, in her own quiet way. But neither of them got him instantly hot and hard the way Leila did.
"You look beautiful," he told her, thinking that if he said it often enough when his cock wasn't reaming her pussy or buried down her throat, she'd come to believe him.
"Thank you. We should go and say good-bye to Brian."
"We should be seeing him again soon. He has accepted the job Jake offered him with GreenTex Petroleum. From what Dahoud said last night, the company manages several oilfields in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Because Brian speaks a little Arabic, I imagine he will be assigned to work here often."
* * * * *
The expansive living room they entered moments later still took Leila's breath away. An eclectic mix of old and new, east and west, it faced the Khalij, or Persian Gulf as Jake and Brian called it. This morning the first thing she spied when she looked out over the water was a huge ship in the distance, with gleaming silver airplanes on its deck.