by Delta James
Withdrawing, Christian watched his cum dribble out as her pussy gaped from his hard use. The flecks of blood on the inside of her thighs and on his cock were a sharp reminder he really had felt what he thought on that first impaling thrust. He shook his head. What the hell had he done? He’d not only fucked Fariq’s baby sister, he’d taken her virginity. He should be terrified for them both, but all he could think about was getting her naked and on her back so he could do it all over again.
“We need to get out of here and find a place to talk,” he said, drawing away from her.
Easing up off the table, Aliya sighed. She rubbed her wrists, then rubbed her bottom. Finally, she pulled her shorts up, smoothed her skirt down, and before his eyes, became the unsullied princess once more, only with his cum smeared on her thighs as she turned around.
“There’s nothing to talk about it.”
“Nothing? I took your virginity…”
She shrugged with one shoulder. “It was mine to give…”
“I think your brother might think differently.” He rubbed his face with both hands, wearier than he’d felt in a long, long time.
She shrugged again, but her dark eyebrows were buckling, her brow creasing as if she didn’t understand why he was protesting.
“If it comes up, I won’t tell him who it was.”
“That’s not the…” Exasperated, he rubbed his face and stepped close to her again, lowering his voice and striving for calm enough to explain. “Aliya, I fucked you over a table.”
She stared back at him, completely non-comprehending.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I liked it.”
“You deserve better,” he argued. “You deserved a comfortable bed and a gentle introduction to lovemaking. Every inch of your body should have been adored. I should have been soft with you.”
“I was raised in a convent,” she quipped. “But even I know it doesn’t work well unless it’s hard.”
“Not funny.” He almost swatted her but pointed at her instead. “I’m going to get us a cab. You stay here until I come back for you.” He should go but couldn’t help touching her one last time, cupping her bottom in his hands, feeling the heat blazing from her well-spanked flesh through her clothes and into his palms. “Make no mistake, that you deserved, but the other…”
“Was I that bad?” she asked softly, disappointment creeping into her eyes. “Didn’t you get any pleasure?”
He couldn’t help himself. He slanted his mouth over hers, his tongue sweeping through her mouth, enticing hers to dance with his. Nibbling on her lower lip, he kissed her until she softened against him.
“More pleasure than I ever thought possible. I’ll take care of this, Aliya. Are you all right?”
She nodded, and with one last gentle kiss, he left the back room and made his way through the café out onto the street. This changed things. It shouldn’t, maybe for some men it wouldn’t, but it changed things for him. Whether he had all the evidence they needed or not, it was time for him to get away from Fariq, and he was taking Aliya with him.
He hailed a cab, then quickly jogged back through the café to fetch Aliya… only to find the back room was empty. The back door was standing open, swaying ever so slightly, and when he ran to it, he was just in time to see Aliya at the opposite end of a long, cluttered alley. She was alone, pulling her shawl back over her dark hair, which immediately killed the spark of panic he’d felt at his first thought—kidnapped—finding her gone.
He opened his mouth to shout after her, but a booming explosion rocked the market half a block behind him, sending a shower of broken bricks and chunks of clay raining down everywhere. The shock wave knocked him down, the entire back of him stinging as if he’d been physically slapped. Whether it truly was as silent as it seemed to be directly following that explosion or if it was the ringing in his ears masking all sound, he didn’t know, but for a few startled heartbeats, the whole world fell absurdly still. When he looked up, instead of being huddled on the ground with her arms thrown up over her head at the far mouth of the alley, Aliya was gone.
The rapid fire of automatic rifles discharging on the other side of the café killed the silence. Then came the screaming.
Scrambling to his feet, Christian ran down the back alley, but when he rounded the far corner, Aliya wasn’t huddled on the ground there, either. Instead, the alley opened back up onto the main market street, now flooded with fleeing, panicking people. Somewhere out there, amid the bullets and the shoppers, was Aliya.
“Fuck. Fuck!” A bullet zinged past his ear as he bolted out of the relative safety of the alley into the running crowd. He ducked and dodged through the stalls, leaping over spilled wares just in time for the person running alongside him to get shot. Bullets peppered the corner of the alleyway he threw himself into for cover. Where the hell was she?
Spotting two discarded shoes halfway down the alley, he broke into a run, but the alley dead-ended in someone’s private garden, shrouded on all sides by clay walls, half-again as high as he could reach by jumping.
He ran up one of the two household steps that shared the garden area, but the door at the top was locked. So was the other door at the top of that set of steps, but the door rattled loosely when he shook it. When he heard the sharp firecracker report of rifle fire coming from inside, he drew his gun and kicked in the door.
Two men in black flak gear hunkered at the window, firing randomly into the crowd, short, sharp bursts meant to hit above the ducking heads of the fleeing, screaming people, deliberately, methodically scattering them. One snapped around when Christian kicked in the door. Had he not recognized the man as one of Fariq’s, he’d have shot him.
The other man recognized him, too, never fully bringing his rifle up high enough to shoot.
“What the fuck!” Christian snapped, anger exploding through him every bit as violently as the bomb had done.
The second guy jerked around, although the first grabbed his gun, averting it before the man could aim it. Christian would have shot him. The only thing that kept him from firing was seeing how openly startled they both were.
“Where is she?” he snarled, only just keeping his temper under control.
“Who?” the first guy asked.
“Mona fucking Lisa,” he snapped. “Who do you think I’m talking about!” Ripping the headset from one of their heads, he yelled into the microphone, “Cease fire, goddamn it. Aliya’s in the market!”
Someone swore through the earpiece before the ceasefire was repeated, and the order to withdraw abruptly given.
“You lost her?” the second guy asked incredulously.
“You shot at her?” he returned. His own gut was too tight for him to truly enjoy the rapid paling on both their faces.
“We were following orders!” the first protested, but he wasn’t listening.
The sound of gunfire was completely gone by the time Christian raced back out the back door. Where was she?
From the porch, it was a short leap onto the top of the high wall. He scanned the sea of small, crooked gardens that made up a neighborhood block worth of private backyards. The echoes of people screaming and running on the front side of the house at his back ricocheted off the earth buildings, along with the distant wail of emergency sirens.
Frustrated, he looked back the other way, and it was only by sheer happenchance the wind caught a hanging laundry sheet, lifting it just enough for him to catch sight of Aliya three private gardens away, huddled against a wall. She wasn’t alone. A dark-skinned man dressed in Islamic white shoved something into her hand, forcing her fingers closed around it before he bolted out of the garden and down another side alley.
She looked at her hand, then as if suddenly feeling eyes on her, she looked up. Their eyes met.
“Stay right where you are!” he shouted.
Eyes widening, she charged down the alley after her fleeing companion.
Christian bolted after her. Running as fast as he could the way he’d come, he s
pilled back out onto the main street, where a shower of bullets very nearly hit him. He ducked, throwing up an arm to deflect the chunks of clay that peppered his face as the building was hit instead. He ran faster.
“Cease fire!” someone shouted, but the spray of bullets still followed his duck-and-dodge all the way to the next alley, where he damn near ran smack into Aliya on her way out.
She yelped, her eyes widening and her face paling. Snapping around on her heel, she tried to run back the other way.
What. The. Fuck?! What the hell was she doing?
Growling, Christian tore up the street after her. She wasn’t a soldier, nor was she a spy, and she sure didn’t spend two hours every morning like he did, working out his guilt and frustration on the machines in Fariq’s private gym to keep in the top physical condition this shitty job demanded of him. She still surprised him with how fast she moved, especially with him right on her heels.
“Stop, goddamn it!”
She dove into another garbage-strewn back alley, racing between the narrow buildings, past two huddling people at the mouth at the far end, and directly into the duck-and-dodge of the market crowd, fleeing from the bazaar. Too late, she tried to find a place to hide, but he was right behind her. Grabbing a basket of roasted nuts, she threw them at him. His arm blocked the basket, sending a shower of nuts bouncing off his back, but he finally snagged the back of her dress.
A single shot rang out just as he yanked her backward, out of the middle of the street and against a hard wall. Had he not lost his balance, he’d have been killed. The bullet meant for his head ricocheted off the building, pelting his hair and the side of her face with sharp chips. Throwing his arm over her, he kicked in the nearest door, and threw her into the cover of the building ahead of him.
As he grabbed the door, for a half-second, he thought he spotted a familiar face staring coolly down at him from the rooftop of the opposite house. Lamar reloaded the rifle he’d just fired, and Christian slammed the door.
Grabbing Aliya before she could pick herself up off the floor where she’d fallen, he pulled her well away from both the door and the windows.
“L-Let go,” she gasped, trying to extricate her arm from his grasp.
“No! Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“Anywhere away from you!”
“The hell you are!”
From farther up the street, shouts signaled the arrival of the local police. They filed into the marketplace like soldiers at war, belatedly returning gunfire at what few snipers still remained, sending Lamar and what few of Fariq’s men still remained into retreat. That the police had no idea who they were looking for was obvious. When Christian cautiously glanced out a side window, he could see uniformed officers yanking people out of the fleeing crowd in random arrests and kicking down doors to search the rooftops on either side of the market.
“You’re hurting my arm,” Aliya tried again, still breathing hard from their run, but her voice wasn’t quite as shaky as it had been a moment ago.
Ignoring her, he dragged her through the house to the back door into the private garden. Grabbing her around the waist and planting a hand on her ass, he all but threw her up and over the wall that separated this line of houses from the row directly behind them.
Jumping to catch the top of the wall, he heaved himself up after her. Dropping into the next garden, he grabbed a fistful of her hair before she had fully picked herself up off the ground.
“Stop!” she gasped, but he was pissed, and they weren’t safe yet.
There were no alleyways here. He broke into the occupied house, standing sentry between him and the next open street. With Aliya clawing at his hand the entire way, he marched her past a startled old woman cooking in the kitchen, two kids playing in the living room, and out the front door.
The street was much calmer but filling fast with refugees from the bombed-out bazaar. Police were everywhere, putting up barricades and stopping anyone they thought looked suspicious.
He checked the rooftops, but nothing moved, and he saw no sign of Fariq’s men. Nor did he recognize the faces of the men hurrying past him to get home or to safety.
The businesses here must have closed when the bomb went off. Dragging Aliya behind him, he crossed the street to where an empty café stood, with half-eaten food still on plates and coffee cups still on the tables. The front door was closed, and the shutters were drawn on all the windows. The patrons had fled in case the trouble from one street over decided to spread itself to this one.
The familiar whoop-whoop-whoop of helicopter blades caught his ear, and he quickly ducked to see past the fluttering canopy, only just catching sight of a helicopter swiftly retreating out to sea.
It was over.
Try telling that to the rest of his body. Christian’s senses were keyed, every inch of him primed to move as fast as possible, and it didn’t matter what the direction. His grip on Aliya’s arm never loosened, and he barely noticed she’d drawn blood with her clawing attempts to pry his fingers loose.
“Stop!” she gasped, digging in her feet when he would otherwise have hurried her back out into the crowd to get a little more distance between themselves and the police, who were itching to make arrests.
“We have to keep going,” he muttered, but with a last violent yank, she wrenched her arm free.
Stumbling, she fell into an abandoned table, knocking over the coffee cup that had been left behind with its patron’s hasty departure. Rubbing her arm, she glared at him.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me?” For the first time, every ounce of energy he’d been pouring into his fight to keep her safe while they escaped that FUBAR of whatever Fariq had been trying to do, snapped, becoming anger. “What the hell were you thinking? Who was that?”
“Who?” she shot back.
“That man you were with!”
“What man?” A flicker of nervousness in her eyes told him she knew exactly who he was talking about.
“You’re a piss-poor liar,” he growled. “The one you were with back there in that garden. What did he give you?”
“He didn’t give me anything.” She hiked her chin. “For all I know, it was just somebody trying not to get shot!”
She was still lying. His eyes narrowed, every instinct he had homing in on her face. He wasn’t mistaken and sure as hell hadn’t been seeing things. Not when he watched that unknown man slip her something and certainly not when she…
“You looked right at me,” he marveled. “You looked right at me and ran the other way.”
“H-How was I to know you weren’t trying to kill me?” she accused, but she stuttered, and the nervous glint in her eyes only grew more obvious.
“How were you to…” His anger spiked all over again. “Why, you spoiled rotten little liar!”
He’d never meant to touch her again. Well, that wasn’t strictly true—he’d meant to get them to safety, then he’d touch her in all kinds of ways and places. It all happened so fast. One minute he was standing there, telling her exactly what he thought of her, and in the next, he had her by the arm, his butt in the first chair he came to, and she was yanked down across his thighs.
He spanked her exactly the way a spoiled rotten liar should be spanked—hard, fast, and with the flat of his hand—making sure she got the message in a way sure to stick with her for at least the rest of the day.
He’d meted out a good handful of swats before his anger abated enough to realize something didn’t add up. Where had she gotten the pair of white shorts? Shorts she certainly hadn’t been wearing when she’d come down the ladder of Fariq’s yacht. He looked at her feet, suddenly noticing they weren’t bare from having dropped her shoes in the alley. She was wearing canvas tennis shoes.
She’d bought a change of clothes in the market. She’d done it covertly. Each time she’d snuck away from his side, forcing him to chase her through the market, she hid the purchases she was making. The ones inte
nded to alter her appearance so she could slip into the crowd unnoticed, by him or anyone else.
She’d planned this.
She’d planned to run away from him… no, not him—Fariq.
“Are you crazy?” she shrieked, kicking up her heels, twisting in a vain effort to grab his slapping hand or yank her skirt down over her rump.
That Fariq’s men might have been acting on her orders… that Lamar might have taken that shot at his head on her command… rekindled every ounce of fury shock had momentarily lulled.
“Oh, Princess,” he seethed. “You want to play with the devil? You have his attention now.”
Grabbing the back of her new shorts, he stripped them off her ass and down her legs. That he ripped her panties off at the same time hadn’t been part of the plan, but he wasn’t complaining. He shut his ears to her shrieks and blistered her naked ass, locking his arm across her back, grabbing her hand when she flung it back in defense of her quickly reddening bottom, and clamping her wildly thrashing legs between the vise of his thighs. He didn’t stop until his hand ached, and her ass was a bright flush of hot, angry red.
“Stop!” she wailed. “Christian, stop! Please!”
Eventually, she laid limp across his lap, absorbing the swats he gave her with no more protest than the wordless wails that grudgingly dissolved into tears. He had never once touched a woman against her will or in anger, but this had been twice in the space of an hour. Goddamn, though, if this hadn’t been well-deserved.
Abruptly, he released her, shoving her to get her moving off his lap.
Sobbing, she scrambled to her feet, pulling up panties and shorts over her apple-red cheeks and slapping at the back of her dress to get it back down in place. A rueful deflowered liar, she rubbed at the seat of her skirt, staring up at him with tears on her cheeks and a bright humiliated blush turning her face the same apple shade his hand had painted her bottom in. Her eyes searched his face. It took every ounce of willpower not to reach out to her… to comfort her, but he needed her to learn right now, lying to him had consequences.