The Desert Lord's Baby (14 page)

“There are more places I want my name on.” He slid down her body, the silk of his body hair brushing her every inch into a distress of arousal. “Here.” He gently bit each nipple in turn, had her crying out, before settling into a ruthless rhythm of suckling that had magma pouring from her core, until she was pummeling him for the release only the power of his possession would grant her.

He caught her clawing hands, slammed them to the bed in one of his, slid down as he bunched her
lehenga
up and her thong down to her feet. “And here…” He let go of her hands, held her feet apart, alternated kisses between them, suckled her toes, forcing her to withstand the sight, the sensations before moving up. “And here…” He bit into her calves, kneading them with his teeth as he trailed up to her inner thigh. “And here…” Her body contorted under his onslaught.

Suddenly he hissed like a geyser about to blow, his hands digging in her buttocks. He’d seen the henna patterns there.

On an explosive expletive, he knocked her legs wide with his shoulders, lunged between them.

She squirmed, trembled, tried to squeeze her legs closed. “You, please, I want you,
you,
inside me, now please now…”

He looked up at her, eyes like twin infernos, sable hair cascaded over his leonine forehead. Then with his mouth set in cruel intent, he slid up her body, igniting every fuse along the way until he lodged his hardness at her entrance through his clothes, had her whimpering, “Yes, yes, please, yes.”

In answer he only knocked her clamping legs from around his hips, came over her, straddled her midriff, loosened his pantaloons enough to show her his shaft.

A clench of intimidation sank its talons into her gut at his girth and length, at his beauty and sleekness. She craved his invasion, not only for the ecstasy it forced from her flesh, but because when he occupied her, she was intimate with his power and maleness, the potency of his desire, with his essence. With him. Giving her pleasure without union now wasn’t a reward but a punishment.

He held his shaft, doing what her hands, imprisoned by his thighs, burned to do, stroking himself inches from her lips.

“Is this what you want most, Carmen?” Her nod was frantic, a tear slipping from one eye, trickling to her ear as she writhed beneath him, trying to free her hands, to get them on his flesh.

“You told me you had your most intense orgasms with me inside you. Is that true, or were you catering to my ego?”

She renewed her efforts to escape the prison of his body, have him where she needed him, her heart stampeding with futility. “True…it’s true, please, please…”

He tightened his waistband again, widened his thighs, let her pull her arms out only to clamp her hands, raised them for her to look at. “You think you can wear my name like this…” He dismounted her, twisted her toward the mirror to show her his hand slipping between the cheeks of her hennaed buttocks. “And this, and go unpunished, Carmen? For this you don’t get what you crave most.”

He pushed her onto her back, nudged her folds apart with deft fingers, before descending to replace them with his tongue.

He licked a taste, breathed her in, let his appreciation growl out over her engorged flesh, sending her screeching and scratching. He groaned his pleasured pain. “This is for every time you wrote my name on your delectable flesh. I’ll torment you, like you tormented me every second of the past sixteen months.”

Ignoring her protests, he took the lips of her core in a voracious kiss, tonguing her, thrusting light then hard, sweeping short then long, suckling, layering sensation until she was buried. He brought her to the edge, snatched her away, never pushing her over, too many times to count, no doubt the number of times his name marked her body.

When her breath fractured, her pleas stifled, and she lay beneath him paralyzed with hyperstimulation, he talked into her, sending the shock of each vibration, each syllable throughout her system. “Next time it’s me who’ll write my name all over you. But right here…” He pinpointed the bud where all her nerves converged, took it in a sharp nip. “I’ll tattoo my name.”

The discharge of all the pent-up stimulation was so explosive, she heaved in detonation after detonation until she felt her spine might snap.

He had no mercy, pushed three fingers inside her, sharpening her pleasure, lapping up its flood until her voice broke. He didn’t stop even then, sucked every spasm and aftershock out of her, blasting her sensitized flesh with more growls. “And this is to get you ready for what you deserve for walking out on me.” Two fingers sawed inside her spasming channel while one beckoned at her internal trigger, his thumb echoing the action on its mirror image outside. She writhed under the renewed surge, the need for release a rising crest of incoherence. She thrust against his hand until his rumbled
“Marrah Kaman”—one more time—
hurled her convulsing and shrieking into another orgasm.

He came up to loom over her, watching her trembling with what he’d done to her, watching his hand tracing the patterns of his name on her buttock. Mute, saturated with pleasure, hungrier for him than ever, she watched him, the emotions on his face coming too fast and thick for her to register, to decipher. To withstand.

Melting with the barrage, with needing him to end his punishment, give her the punishing ride she was dying for, she wrenched her eyes away, down. He was jutting against his pantaloons, the crown of his shaft straining beyond the waistband, wide and thick and daunting, dark and glistening with craving, throbbing with control. The moment he freed her hands to strip off her armbands, she lunged to snatch his pants down.

He caught her hands. “Even now you stand by your claims that you need me inside you for the most intense climax?”

She bucked her hips at him, begging. “I’m still conscious am I not? Still hungry, hungrier…” She was stunned to find her voice hoarse not gone. “I crave everything you do to me, your every touch turns me inside out with pleasure, but when you’re inside me, it’s…it’s indescribable…”

Lava simmered in his gaze, the rest of him freezing. She made use of his stillness, skimmed stinging hands over the silk skin and hair-covered steel of his pecs, his abs, following the pattern with her lips and tongue while her hands delved beneath his waistband, closed on his engorgement.

He lay on his side, letting her worship him. He waited until she thought she’d fulfilled her hunger, was kissing the satin head, licking the precious flow of his arousal, let her get a full sample of his feel and taste and thickness as he thrust into the moist heat of her hunger, once, before he reared back, left her choking with chagrin and deprivation.

“This is my feast, Carmen. You are.” He snatched a pile of pillows, arranged them, dropped her back on top of them, had her arched, prostrated for his domination with an urgency bordering on violence, kneeled between her spread thighs, took her buttocks in his hands, his fingers digging shards of pain and frenzy into her. “And this is just to take the edge off…”

“Just do it…tear into me, tear me apart…
please…
”

He did. He rammed into her. All his power and the accumulation of frustration and hunger behind the thrust. The head of his erection, nearly too wide for her, mashed against all the right places, abrading nerves into an agony of response, pushing receptors over the limit of stimuli they could take, the gush of sensation they could transmit. He’d forged halfway inside her when she screamed, arched up in a deep bow, going into a paroxysm as the world flickered out, diffused, only his beloved face in focus, clenched in pleasure, his eyes vehement with his greed for hers.

And what she’d heard was true. Sex
was
better after her operation, her great loss. Blindingly, excruciatingly better. Orgasm raged through her, discharging in blow after blow of pleasure so sharp it was agony.

She raved, begged. “Can’t…can’t…please…you…you…”

He understood. Gave her what she needed. The sight of his face seizing, the feel of him succumbing to the ecstasy she gave him, the hard jets of his climax inside her. They hit her at her peak, had her thrashing, weeping, unable to endure the spike in pleasure. Everything blipped, faded…

Heavy breathing and slow heartbeats echoed from the end of a long tunnel as the scent of sex and satisfaction flooded her lungs. Awareness trickled back into her body, which was a mess of tremors, so sated it was numb. She felt one thing, though. Farooq. Still inside her, even harder, larger. She opened lids weighing half a ton each, saw him swim in and out of focus, still kneeling between her legs, her hips on his thighs, one palm kneading her breasts, the other gliding over her shoulders, her arms, her belly.

“So it does take orgasming around me to knock you out.”

“Told you so…” Her head flopped to the side, her heart following at the sight they made, the image of erotic abandon, half out of their wedding fineries, his ruined, their hair tousled, her face shell-shocked, his taut, savage, her position the image of wantonness, her arms thrown over her head, arched back over the pillows he’d piled beneath her, her hips jutting, her legs opened over his hips, his shaft half-buried inside her, stretching her glistening entrance, her lips wrapped around him in the most intimate kiss. And he was watching her watch them.

He gave her more to watch, thrust two more inches inside her.

“You were right…” she slurred at his deepening occupation, her tongue feeling anesthetized, swollen in her mouth. “This…is the edge of…survival. My heart…almost burst. I don’t know if this—” a lethargic finger indicated her twisting tongue “—is from a stroke…or if the paralysis…will wear off. If this was just…to take the edge off the hunger…the main course might well be fatal.”

He set his teeth as he rocked another inch inside her. “If ever there was a woman who can take a man to the limits of his mortality with her passion, it’s you, Carmen. It’s only fair I reciprocate in kind.”

Her voluntary functions were shot to hell. Her thrust to accept more of him had to be some autopilot, set on Farooq. “We had…this conversation…before…”

“Your limited experience is irrelevant.” He thrust deeper into her, the lubrication of their combined pleasure smoothing his advance. “You’re a natural-born femme fatale.”

Her hand moved under some external power, but with her hunger, trembled down the center groove of his abdomen to his shaft, to where they were merged. “Your femme fatale?”

“
B’haggej’Jaheem—
by hell, you are.
Mine.
” He ground deeper into her, reaching the point where the familiar expansion inside her turned into almost-pain. An edge of dominance, a sharpness of sensation that was glorious, addictive, overwhelming, even a little frightening. The idea of all that he was, melding with her, at her mercy as she was at his, filled volumes inside her, body and mind and soul. “Say it,
ya
Carmen.
Enti melki.
”

“
Ana melkak…
I’m yours, yours…Farooq, darling, please…”

At the word
darling
he snarled something colloquial she didn’t get, took the edges of her
lehenga’
s zipper in both hands…and ripped. She lurched in mortification.

He growled again. “I’ll have a dozen made for you, must see you…all of you…”

Still lodged inside her, he freed her from her torn clothes, his hands and eyes everywhere he exposed. She closed her eyes at the starkness of his appreciation, at the ferocity of anticipation. Now, he’d really make love to her…

He moved. But he wasn’t feeding her more of him. He was leaving her body. Her eyes tore open in panic, whimpering at his loss, her fingers too feeble to stop him. Cold shuddered through her. But it wasn’t that of losing her clothes or his heat.

His gaze on her lower belly was the source of frost.

“You have a scar.”

C
armen bit a lip that trembled out of control.

She couldn’t talk about it. About her imperfections and losses. But oh God, he looked so…grim. Did he feel them? Did the external evidence of them put him off, now the edge had dulled?

“You had a Cesarean.” She nodded. His eyes turned almost all-black. “Did it hurt?”

She tried to laugh, managed a sound of distress rather than mockery. “I clung to the drug-free route only until they told me Mennah was obstructed and was in fetal distress. Then I was screaming for them to give me every drug they had and to open me up. From then on, I can assure you I felt no pain.”

“You know I meant afterward.”

She knew. And she didn’t want to answer. Didn’t want to remember the pain that had made her weep as she’d nursed Mennah, the debilitation that had turned caring for her daughter, moving at all, into torture. She couldn’t tell him any of it. He’d suspect that more than a surgical wound had caused her agony. And he’d be right. Her endometriosis had flared up to crippling levels until she’d given in, did the only thing that would put her back on her feet to be a mother for Mennah—removing the source of trouble. She’d had a hysterectomy three weeks after Mennah’s birth. The reopened scar had hurt then, had taken weeks to heal. And she’d been unable to take painkillers while she nursed her baby.

“It hurt,” he said when she didn’t answer, his voice vibrating with conviction, with a fury over it. “And you didn’t have anyone to take care of you, or Mennah for you. You
fool.
”

He suddenly heaved up to his feet, tore his clothes off his body like a madman, every sinew and muscle straining as if against a crushing weight, his engorged manhood erect flat against his steel abs. He still wanted her.

Those difficult tears she’d learned to shed since she’d known him burned at the back of her eyeballs, two breaking the barrier of her resistance, corroding a path to her chin.

He descended on her like a great vulture, pulling her to him, slamming her against his overheated flesh, demanding, “Why the tears,
ya ghalyah?
”

Oh God. His endearment. The one he’d always called her. Precious. Treasured. He’d made it hers again. The sentinel tears were followed by a flood. “I thought the scar put you off, that I—I’m…”

“A fool a thousand times over.” He gave her one quick shake, ending her doubts. “I crave nothing but you.”

His teeth pressed into her lower lip, with enough force to still it, to show her the power of his craving. He groaned long and deep as he applied more pressure until she whimpered, opened her mouth, her hands clenching around his neck, her breasts crushed to his chest, cushioning him, one leg clamping his hip, a carte blanche for anything he’d do to her.

When her undulations against him became quakes, he suckled her lips into his mouth, in long, smooth pulls, drawing more plumpness into her flesh, running his tongue inside them, drawing more of her taste until her whimpers became incessant. Only then did he plunge into her with tongue and ferocity. He drained her, then tore his lips from hers, trailed them over her cheeks, jaw, neck, breasts, nibbling and suckling her to madness. Then he reached her scar.

What he did then almost ruptured her heart.

He pressed his face against it, nudging her like an affectionate lion, groaning. “This is where you gave me Mennah, the source of her miracle, and of the pain you endured alone. This binds you to me, makes you
aghla,
more precious, makes me want you more, when I didn’t know there could be more wanting.”

She hiccupped an intake of distress. It hurt beyond measure, whether she feared he didn’t want her or she knew he did. Everything he did or said affected her with an intensity that ended up simulating pain. But it was worse now.

His lips were on her scar, paying homage, and for terrible moments, she felt a phantom womb convulse inside her. Primal longings burst there, to have his manhood driving into her as it once had, so huge and powerful it had breached her cervix, what remained of the core of her femininity, splashed his seed directly where the overriding forces of her love and his potency had smashed the odds, done the impossible, created the miracle of Mennah.

There would be no more miracles. Her potential had been amputated, and she’d been left clinging to her miracle with a desperation that might have suffocated her child, if Farooq hadn’t found them.

The emptiness inside her hadn’t hurt, had lain dormant, forgotten. But the wound had gaped with his reappearance, the loss damaging only with the yearning to be a whole woman for him.

He, as always, was the source of her agony.

And only he could make it bearable.

She grabbed him, tears splashing over him as she threw herself into the abyss of unrequited love.

“I feel so empty without you, darling,” she choked. “I missed you…the emptiness is too huge, fill it—fill me, Farooq, again please….”

“Sahrah.”
He threw his head back at her invocation, calling her a witch on an elemental groan, his face twisting in carnal suffering as something seemed to shatter inside him. He plunged into her with all the force of the snapping momentum.

She screamed at the piercing fullness, beyond her capacity…tearing her apart…“Yes, Farooq,
yes…
”

But he rested inside her, possessed her lips in another exercise of abandon. She opened for his tongue, each plunge tightening her around his invasion in a vise until he growled, “
Ya Ullah,
so tight, so
right…
”

Next second, he was withdrawing from her depths.

The implosion was crippling.
“Farooq.”

In answer to her desperation he hauled her around him, bit her ear on a rough “Hang on” that had her digging her heels into his buttocks. He stood on the bed, stepped down from it, strode with her wrapped around him to the dining table set in the perfection of their wedding night dinner, set her on its edge. Then he reached behind her and sent everything crashing to the floor.

His violence jolted through her with a jumble of reactions. Consternation at his disregard for the things he’d destroyed, elation at his impatience to resume their merging, and fright.

“The glass…your feet…” she gasped.

He plastered her back to the cool mahogany, had her legs splayed, a hungry embrace for his bulk, her feet braced at the edge. “The wreckage is nowhere near me. From where I’m standing, the only injury I’m risking is a heart attack at your beauty,
ya jameelati.
Tomorrow I’ll make an altar of this height and serve you on top of it.” He plunged inside her again, filling her beyond her limits with every power and weakness. She was master and slave. Goddess and worshipper. His hands roamed over her, following the twin suns of his eyes, exacting every intimacy as he thrust inside her in an escalating rhythm, watching her climb, arch, seek. The volcanic core of an orgasm built inside her again and he came over her, gave her his weight to writhe under, his mouth to mate with, his fingers sliding between them, stimulating the focus of need, unlocking the code only he knew.

He gulped down every screech of her new climax, making it double as he exploded inside her, feeding her convulsions to the last twitches, pouring the fuel of his pleasure on hers.

It might have been another day, another age when she came back into her body, still keening, her teeth deep in his flesh, her most profound thanks for the torment and the satisfaction.

He extricated her fangs from his shoulder, his smile feral as he withdrew from her body. Even lost in the bliss and stupor of postorgasm devastation, she still moaned at his loss, at the sight of his erection still in full glory, glistening with the mixture of their pleasure.

He yanked her up, slamming her into his chest. “Don’t worry. I’m far from finished with you.”

He raised her up until her limp body hung above him at arm’s height, kept her there looking down on him, half-fainting with satiation, still shuddering with aftershocks. Then he let her slide down his sweat-slick landscape, caught her lips. Just as she caught fire again, sought him, he caught her hands.

“I said
I
wasn’t finished with you.” With hands filled with cherishing power, he turned her, laid her facedown on the table, her bottom jutting off its edge, her toes barely touching ground. She discovered another mirror flanking the dining area. He’d positioned it for the best view of the next stage in her enslavement. “Now I’ll find out how many times you have my name written in that maze. Here’s one.” He bent, nipped the tip of her shoulder blade. “Two.” His blunt nail scratched half an inch beside it. “Three…”

She lay there, helpless, watching him own her in their reflection, play her like a virtuoso, loving the game he’d invented, loving him as he reclaimed her every response and inch, sliding gossamer touches down her every sensitivity, sowing bites and suckles, knowing, pleasuring, punishing her every lightning-inducing switch until she felt her insides charring with the beauty, the expectation. The frustration.

So there was such a thing as torture by stimulation. Possibly death by arousal. He had unlocked her multiorgasmic potential, but surely those megaton orgasms should be all her nervous system could handle? How could she want more of him?

That’s why it’s called addiction, idiot. The more you have, the more desperately you want him.

When she felt she’d shudder apart she cried, “Just
take me.
”

“Take you, Carmen? You mean like this?” He slammed into her. She cried out at the abruptness of his invasion. He withdrew all the way out then slammed back, with even more power, forcing a sharper screech from her depths. “Or like this?”

“Farooq—yes!”
She clawed at the smooth surface beneath her, putting all her strength behind thrusting back into his assault. She fought with him for deeper, harder, hating the inequality of their positions.

Then he lay on her back, his hands around her, under her, completing his exploitation, stroking her, stoking her inside and out into another blinding orgasm. On the final shearing spasms he joined her, exploding into a roar of completion, his seed filling her to overflowing.

She lay pressed between now-warm, moist wood and warmer, moister living steel, full, fulfilled, wishing to remain fused with him forever. But he was ending it.

She felt him receding from her. In every way.

“Farooq?”

Farooq gritted his teeth at the tremolo of her call. At its power.

She’d again offered herself, made him forget his resolutions. To keep it about carnal pleasures and nothing more. He’d even demanded confessions from her. And she’d freely offered them.
Ya Ullah,
the things she’d said…

And he still had no proof he could trust her. Yet he had. He’d believed her every word, every gasp and scream and tear.

Then he’d seen her scar and he’d been swamped. By the depth of the blessing she’d bestowed on him, what she’d had to endure to do it. Everything in him raged that he hadn’t been there to hold her
ala kfoof er-raha—
on the hands of comfort and cosseting, his princess in his cocoon of pampering and protection. He’d wanted to develop temporal powers to wrench back time, go to her in her hours of need, absorb her pain and fear. He’d wanted to swear that next time he’d be there from the first second, for every heartbeat afterward. He hadn’t.

He’d said enough.
Ya Ullah,
the things
he’d
said…

And beyond words, the way he’d lost all sense of self in her, surrendered to her as she’d dragged him into their dimension of carnal excess and sensory overload, spilled himself three times inside her in the delirium of ecstasy, each time with the image of all this pleasure forming another miracle like Mennah. She could already be pregnant again. The wish that she was, or soon would be, the need to tether her to him by any means, spread through him like a mind-altering drug…

La ya moghaffal—
no, you fool. Stop.

He must decide how to proceed, couldn’t go back and take her again. Not on her terms. He had to set new ones before he did. As he would. As he had to. His sac felt heavy and painful again, his erection straining, every inch stinging to feel her beneath him, around him. And that was only the physical part. Everything else in him was clamoring for her. Her voice, her eyes, her wit, her hunger. Her warmth and sincerity…?

He struggled to deny the pangs as he ignored her tremulous call, crossed his space to the bathroom. He felt her gaze following him, her confusion and hurt palpable.

He gritted his teeth against their influence, entered the bathroom, crossed to the huge sunken tub, hit the heat-regulating buttons, started it. He’d soak. Until this seizure of hunger passed. Until she went to bed…

“Is this what I should expect from now on?”

Don’t turn. Send her to bed. Don’t look at her.

He turned, looked at her. He’d known he shouldn’t have.

She was naked, as he’d left her, the cascade of her hair a burst of color under the spotlights among her paleness. She looked like a mermaid who’d suddenly grown legs and was thrown on land, unsure how to stand. Her voluptuousness bore the marks of his eroded restraint, her thighs slick with the ecstasy he’d found inside her, her shoulders hunched, her arms hugging her middle as if bracing against crippling pain.