Sheikh's Forbidden Queen: Zarif's Convenient Queen / Gambling with the Crown

Zarif withdrew the ring box from his pocket and set it in front of her. ‘I intended to give this to you yesterday but there was no opportunity.’

Ella opened the box to stare down at the magnificent sapphire and diamond ring. ‘What’s it for?’

‘I heard the child at our English wedding ask why you had no engagement ring. I bought it for you three years ago,’ Zarif admitted ruefully.

‘And you don’t mind me wearing it?’ Ella had flushed. He had very much disconcerted her.

‘I want you to wear it, habibti. It was always meant to be yours.’

Ella slid on the ring. It was a perfect fit. He had kept it for three years, maybe even forgotten he still had it until a child’s chatter had reminded him. He was being practical, that was all. He would hardly want to give the ring he had chosen for her to another woman in the future. ‘It’s gorgeous. Thank you,’ she said quietly.

Zarif liked looking at the two wedding rings and the engagement ring on her slender finger. She was his at last, a surprisingly soothing thought. He watched her eat the croissant, crumbs scattering while a look of delight slowly wakened on her lovely face. Within seconds he was hot and hard and when she sipped the chocolate, just a hint of the sweet drink coating her full, soft lower lip as she emitted a soft moan of pleasure, he was ready to rip her out of the chair and carry her to bed. Suddenly all he could think about was seeing that expression on her face while he pleasured her.

‘I want you...’ he husked.

Ella froze like a cornered kitten, blue eyes flying wide as she stared back at him, a tiny pulse beating like crazy just above her collarbone.

‘I meant to wait...I intended to wait,’ Zarif confided thickly as he sprang gracefully upright. ‘But when I look at you, I can’t.’

Her mouth ran dry while the blood in her veins ran hotter than lava. He towered over her, all male, decidedly exotic and stunningly sexy in his pristine robes. Her gaze locked tight to him, her heartbeat quickening, her breath feathering in her throat while her lungs laboured to fill again. That stillness, that primal sexual awareness that engulfed her was exactly what had made mincemeat of her principles when she had first met him. It shocked her that that could happen to her again, cutting through her new maturity, her bitterness and distrust to leave only the mindless yearning she had once suppressed.

As Ella began to rise from her seat Zarif bent his head and claimed a long, intense kiss. His tongue skated across hers and a piercing dart of such primitive longing slithered through her that it was a challenge to stay upright. A strong arm slid to her spine to support her slender frame and he lifted her off her feet with breathtaking ease to carry her back into the bedroom.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_f6ec7a81-217a-58d0-b454-d6072f60b7a6)

ELLA SURFACED TO find herself lying on the bed. After that burning kiss she felt a little as if she had been hit with a brick because her brain no longer felt as if it were functioning. Zarif was poised several feet away, stripping off his robes and letting them fall on the rug, his proud dark head already bare. Ella breathed in slow and deep.

It was time, she told her quailing nerves firmly. They were married. This was the deal she had made. Neither love nor liking came into the arrangement. Sex was on the menu, nothing else, and she had to learn to be practical about the fact.

Naked but for his boxers, Zarif was an intimidating sight, a literal power-house of whipcord muscle overlaid with smooth bronzed skin. Her intent gaze skated down over the steely muscles of his formidable chest, down over the little furrow of soft dark hair disappearing below the waistband of his boxers, and screeched to a sudden halt. The bulge of his straining masculinity was larger than she had expected and she tensed, telling herself not to be silly, not to get all worked up about something that other women took in their stride. She wasn’t a child. She might not have had sex before but she was an educated adult and none of her friends had been swept off to paradise by their first-time experience. Once it was done, though, it was done, she bargained with herself, desperate to establish a calmer outlook. Afterwards she would know what all the fuss was about and she would be able to treat such intimacy as a mundane event.

‘I’ve wanted you for so long,’ Zarif admitted, running long supple fingers through the swirling spill of her honey-coloured hair across the pillows. ‘You’re so beautiful...’

Ella very nearly laughed. She could see herself as pretty on a good day but only when she was all done up and her hair absolutely perfect. Certainly she did not compare well to the true beauties she had seen him pictured with in newspapers three years earlier. Zarif was the truly beautiful one, an outstandingly gorgeous male, who had stolen her heart the first time she saw him and broken it the day he proposed, sending her plunging from the heights of happiness straight down into the darkness of despair. In the aftermath she had picked herself up and gone on but the trust he had broken remained broken and she was a much more anxious, suspicious person than she had once been.

His thick silky hair nudged her cheek and then his mouth, velvet and warm, claimed hers again, closing out the rest of the world as though it had never been. There was nothing then but the racing beat of her heart and the tightening at her secret core. Without warning the towel she wore was gone and he cupped her full breasts, his thumbs strumming her engorged nipples to send currents of fire shooting down into her pelvis. Her hips shifted, rose without her volition and at the heart of her she felt tight as a drum and desperate for more.

Zarif drew back, lean, strong features taut. ‘If you truly don’t want this, I will stop. I don’t want anything from you that you don’t want to give, habibti.’

Taken aback, Ella stared up at him, still partially lost in the stirring responses shimmying through her lethargic body.

Luxuriant black lashes dipped low over his tawny eyes. ‘You didn’t want this,’ he extended. ‘You agreed because you had no other choice but I find that I no longer want a sacrifice in my bed.’

Disconcerted, Ella stiffened. ‘I’m not a sacrifice.’

His mouth dipped to her delicate collarbone and the tip of his tongue flicked the pulse beating there below her pale fine skin and she tingled in reaction from her head to her toes. ‘I will have you willing or not at all. To say no is your right and I promise that there will be no reprisals,’ he asserted thickly.

In shock at that startling offer coming when she least expected it, Ella opened her eyes to their fullest extent and stared up at him, almost mesmerised by the stunning amber gold of his steady gaze. ‘But I agreed and you—’

‘You agreed under the duress of your concern for your vulnerable parents,’ Zarif reminded her. ‘And I am man enough to only want what is offered freely.’

His hands rested on her ribcage and she wanted so badly for him to lift his hands and touch her breasts again. The strength of that craving took her aback for nothing in her experience had ever equalled it. She shut her eyes, shutting him out but the craving, the sheer hunger mushroomed up inside her without abating. And why was she surprised? She wanted him; she had always wanted him.

Her lashes lifted, her decision easily made. ‘It’s free...I mean, it’s only sex...let’s not make a production out of it,’ she framed awkwardly.

Zarif frowned in disagreement, automatically writing off her quip about sex as a clumsy careless joke. ‘I very much want it to be a production with you, habibti.’

Ella lay back, pliant and melting with helpless anticipation. She had come to an understanding with herself and the past and present were melding into a seamless whole. She wanted Zarif to become her first lover because she had never wanted another man the way she wanted him and sharing her body with him made perfect sense to her. He nipped at her lower lip and then blew softly over a rosy straining nipple before suckling erotically at the tender peak. Ribbons of hot desire pulled taut between her breasts and her thighs.

Zarif slid down the bed, tugging away the towel still partially wrapped round her and skimming off the boxers he still wore with impatient hands. Lying there naked, Ella reddened, fighting off the urge to yank the sheet over her exposed body. He parted her thighs and before she could react moved down the bed towards her on his knees with the predatory grace of a stalking cat. Ella lay still, eyes rounding when she glimpsed the long thick length of his erection hung low between his muscular hair-roughened thighs. A spasm of something she didn’t recognise pulled taut in her pelvis.

Zarif dropped a kiss on her gently rounded stomach and tension leapt high inside her as he stroked the soft skin of her inner thighs, moving ever closer to the heart of her desire. ‘I want to taste you,’ he told her hungrily. ‘I want to drive you crazy with need and then I want to make love to you until you are senseless...’

‘A lot of wants,’ she pronounced shakily, shy of that new side of him and the raw sexual self-assurance she had never seen him display before.

‘And all the time in the world in which to enjoy them,’ Zarif murmured, pushing her slender thighs back at almost the same time as he lowered his head and swiped his tongue across her clitoris.

The sensation was so powerful that she almost shot off the bed in shock. ‘No...no, you can’t do that!’ she told him when she had found her breath again.

‘You’ll discover that I am naturally domineering in the bedroom,’ Zarif confessed without apology, his strong hands clamping to her hips to hold her in place for his attentions.

‘I’ve...I’ve just never quite...’ Ella mumbled unevenly.

‘But your body loves it and so do I,’ Zarif countered hungrily, marvelling that an experienced woman could have such an inhibition while he ran long fingers soothingly down the outside of her slender thighs to relax her tense muscles. ‘Close your eyes...I promise only pleasure, habibti.’

Afraid of making a fool of herself and entering into an undignified tussle, Ella shut her eyes tight, mentally willing herself to play it cool. She really didn’t want Zarif to know that she hadn’t done any of these things before. If he realised she was still a virgin he might then appreciate what a catastrophic effect he had had on her life three years earlier and her pride was too great to reveal the massive hurt he had unwittingly inflicted.

He teased the entrance to her body with gentle fingertips and she jerked, insanely conscious of where she needed to be touched and cringingly aware of how wet she was. He eased a finger into her and then lowered his head to tease her with his sensual mouth. Almost unbearable sensation engulfed Ella in a never-ending cascade. She no longer controlled herself; he controlled her. Her body hummed and jerked with constrained power like a race car at the starting line, raring to go. Excitement roared through every cell in her body, drowning all thought, closing out everything but what he was making her feel. The ripples of growing sensation soared to a peak and her back arched and she cried out while ripples of pleasure spread outward, making the pleasure last and draining every ounce of energy from her body.

‘I have no condoms here,’ Zarif groaned in frustration and he levered himself off the bed.

Ella blinked as she struggled to emerge from that frighteningly intense climax and suddenly reached out to close a hand over his before he could move out of reach. ‘I’m on the pill...it’s safe,’ she muttered, assuming it would be safe, then certain it was because she had, after all, been taking the mini pill for years to regulate her periods and surely all those years had to count for something.

For a split second, Zarif hesitated and then he came back to her with alacrity. ‘It’s a very long time since I had sex without a condom,’ he confided, pulling her close to his warm, musky male length, his erection pressing against her lower stomach. In that instant her hunger for him rose to such a height that she felt weak and dizzy with it.

‘You can be assured that I am clean and healthy,’ he murmured, studying her with scorching dark golden eyes fringed by quite ridiculously long black lashes. ‘And you?’

‘I’ve never had sex without a condom,’ Ella replied, trying not to laugh because, of course, she had never had sex at all but she was convinced he would not be able to tell the difference between her untried body and a more practised woman’s.

He captured her lips in a soul-shattering kiss and deep down inside her the tingling and the prickle of awakening heat and the awful aching emptiness began to fire her up afresh. He was so hot, she reflected helplessly, so hot that he made her crave him like a sunburn victim craved ice. She quivered below the hard, warm weight of his lean, powerful body, entranced by the intimacy but nervous of what the next step entailed, regardless of how much her body seemed to yearn for it.

He tilted her up to facilitate his entry and nudged at her entrance before pushing in, filling her completely and stilling to give her time to adjust.

‘You’re very small,’ Zarif husked, his black hair brushing her cheek. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

Ella was all bound up in the alien sensation of his intrusion in that wildly sensitive place and in the same moment he pulled back and then drove forward, thrusting into her with primal force. A strangled shriek of shocked pain escaped her and he froze over her.

‘What the hell?’ he breathed rawly, frowning down at her in consternation.