The Sheikh's Reluctant Queen: The Sheikh's Destiny

Her teeth clattered at the way he said it. At the realization that she hadn’t told him she was—had been—a virgin. She’d been so far out of her mind that she hadn’t considered that fact. Hadn’t realized that was why his invasion had felt like it had ripped her apart until he’d brought it to her attention.

What did he feel about it? Concerned? Worried? Angry? Would he have taken her had he known? Would he stop now?

It was next to impossible to think of anything but being overstretched with his potency, invaded, delirious with the carnality, with the completion. She felt she’d die if he withdrew.

Then he was withdrawing, making her claw at him. “Rashid… don’t leave… don’t stop… arjook—give me…”

When he hesitated, her legs clamped around him, pulling him back into her deepest reaches. This time the cry that escaped her was one of exultation, of ecstasy.

She’d thought he’d filled her on that first thrust. He now felt as if he’d never hit bottom, as if he’d forged all the way inside her to her womb, to her heart. She trembled all over, inside and out, as if with the advance tremors of a major quake.

She arched into him, begging for what would unleash the sensations that would disintegrate her if they accumulated more.

His face clenched on what looked like suffering as he raised himself on his arms. “Stop… I’m hurting you…”

She clung harder. “Only at first—now—ya Ullah ya Rashid—the pleasure of you inside me—I never knew anything could feel like this—that I could ever feel so much pleasure. But I need more, everything, as you promised me. Give it all to me, Rashid… arjook…”

“Anti sehr, j’noon…” His growl, declaring her magic and madness, was that of a man at the end of his tether. It zapped through her with its ferociousness, its desperation, with the hope he would finally give in, give her everything.

And he did. He drove back all the way to the recesses of her essence. Then, holding her gaze, his own as feverish as she knew hers must be, he began to move.

Each glide layered pleasure upon pleasure, burying her under an avalanche. With each stretching of her slick tissues around his invasion, she fell further apart, her surrender to his magic and madness deepening. Needing even more, her demands for it rose until his gentleness caught the fire of urgency, then ferocity, until everything was condensed into one pinpoint of absolute existence where he was plunging deepest inside her. Then it exploded.

She came apart, unraveling on shrieks of his name. She shattered then reformed around his thickness with every discharge, her core straining to drain all the pleasure he was driving into her body. He roared her name, stiffened in her arms, plunged deeper, breaching her completely as jets of his seed filled her. She writhed and wept from the sheer pleasure inundating her, with feeling his release surge against her intimate flesh, his weight and feel as he anchored her in the storm completion itself.

With her body replete to its last cell, lips open on labored breaths and his scar, the world spiraled down into a dark, safe place of contentment—the depths of his embrace….

In a dream state of pervasive bliss, sensations coalesced. She was lying on top of something hot and hard but so perfectly comfortable. And emanating steady, restrained booms.

A roughened caress swept down her back to cup her buttock. No dream had ever felt so bone-meltingly good, so mind-messingly arousing. She opened her eyes, met his.

Rashid. The best thing she’d ever woken up to.

Lying beneath her like a sleek black panther, it was evident he’d been long awake. And watching her.

Delight blossomed at the sight of him, spreading her lips, weighing down her lids, melting everything else. “I’d say good morning, but it would be the understatement of the millennium.”

His caresses continued, igniting every inch they smoothed. “A new adjective has to be coined to describe it, yes.”

Joy quivered in her heart. He thought the same in the cold light of day. He didn’t regret it.

But that look in his eyes… it was new. Nothing she understood…

“I have an adjective for last night, though. Life-changing.”

On that, too, they agreed. Though she was surprised he thought so. He wasn’t the one who’d been saved by the person he’d loved all his life then ended up begging her to take his virginity, which she did while teaching him what ecstasy was.

But she wasn’t about to look that gift miracle in the mouth.

She stretched languorously over his great body, delighting that he was big enough to sleep on, that he seemed to derive as much pleasure from being slept on.

Her voice came out a purr when she said, “And then some.”

“Aih. Neither of our lives will ever be the same again now that they will be forever entwined.”

She raised her head, stared at him. The way he’d said that. And that intent look. He couldn’t possibly mean…

In the next moment, he ended speculation. “Through marriage.”

Seven (#ulink_b9a80c1d-507c-5af0-b4d1-24b8a60d8711)

“Marriage!”

Laylah’s incredulity echoed in the huge room as she scrambled up from Rashid’s embrace.

She gaped at him as he, too, rose to a sitting position, totally uncaring of his nakedness, or the fact that he was still gloriously aroused. Or maybe he always woke up in the morning like that…?

Focus, moron. Not the time to be drooling over his assets or reliving what he’d done to her with them when he’d just said… said…

“Marriage!”

The word rang out again before she could hold it back.

But who could blame her? Yesterday, she’d woken up never expecting to see Rashid again. Today she woke up in his bed, and he was already talking…

No! She wasn’t going to squeak it out again.

His hand reached out to smooth a long tress off her hot, damp cheek. “Of course. I took your innocence and I don’t—”

“Don’t.” His words hit her like a bucket of ice water in the face. Embarrassed at her nakedness all of a sudden, she groped for the covers she’d kicked to the bottom of the mattress a lifetime ago. “Just don’t even start on that.”

Having Rashid in her life at all was a miracle. Having Rashid as her husband was beyond imaginable. But she was damned if she’d let this progress to a bona fide offer based on that reason.

“You didn’t ‘take my innocence’, I gave it to you. And will you stop being so archaic and so—so… Azmaharian? Innocence, indeed. So now I’m, what, because you’ve ‘taken’ it—wicked?”

The eyes that had hardened and cooled with her every word suddenly softened, heated. “Indeed. But then, you were already that as an innocent. Now the mind boggles at what levels of devastation you’ll attain in your… newly forged wickedness.”

Heat splashed through her as she remembered in detail how he’d… forged said wickedness inside her…

Catching her swollen-from-his-passion-and-stinging-for-more lip in her teeth and letting the cover go, she leaned to rub her face against his chest. “Why don’t we find out?”

He caught her by the shoulders as her lips strayed over his flesh, held her off, his smile filling with indulgence. “We will. We have a lifetime to make extensive explorations of every iota of your potential for sensual mayhem.”

There he went again, talking about lifetimes. Nothing she wanted more than to have several of those entwined with him, but not if it was prodded by his outdated sense of honor.

She pulled back, this time wrapping the cover around her. “Listen, Rashid, I already told you in embarrassing detail how I had this hopeless passion for you. It turns out I didn’t have a clue what passion was all about, something you’ve rectified with enough clues to fill this place. If I thought I wanted you before, now I know, and just how fiercely and totally. If you want me with anything approaching that ferocity and totality, then there’s nothing more that I want than to be with you. Just not ‘through marriage.’“

And she realized the real meaning of yet another word. Ominous. That had to be what defined that scowl.