The Desert Lord's Baby (16 page)

She gestured for Ameenah to leave her, dropped her head to her knees, doubling over from the disemboweling pain. Jealousy. The one thing she hadn’t suffered on his account. He’d been with her alone before. He had this integrity. But now, if all she felt for him was compounded by marrow-eating jealousy, her sanity
would
fray…

No.
The moment he took another wife, she’d retreat from his life, become Mennah’s mother only again. This meant one thing.

She had to take every breath she could of him, while she could, to hoard the memories for the nothingness ahead.

She pressed the dial button. Farooq answered before the second ring. “Carmen.” His voice shook her with the intimacy he made of her name, the magic, with the roughness that carried his perpetual hunger. “What does
Ameerati el ghalyah
want?”

Desperation rose with the mercilessness of a sandstorm.

“I want
you,
Farooq.
Now.
”

F
arooq tore through the palace, had people dashing out of his way as they would out of the path of an out-of-control vehicle.

They were wise to recognize the danger in the eagerness that rattled his bones. Just as his opponents had. None had dared make their annoyance known when he’d walked out on the negotiations the moment Carmen had demanded him. Another first that only Carmen could induce. His Carmen. His.

Certainty had been blossoming during the last glorious six weeks. Endless details, momentous and trivial, all incontestable, had reinforced the verdict of his heart. She
was
his. Had always been. Tareq had lied. She’d never been his mole. The only solid evidence of that had been the words of a man who lived to lie. The rest was circumstantial, with a dozen explanations now that he believed his Carmen would never do anything that wasn’t rooted in nobility and self-sacrifice. He had his proof in everything she was. He’d never bring it up, would never insult her with the inventions of the opportunistic pervert who’d claim-jumped her desertion, twisted it as he did everything to serve his purposes.

But Tareq no longer mattered. Nothing else did. Only Carmen.

Still…there was something about her that troubled him. Not him as Prince Aal Masood, but as her husband and lover. Something, an elusiveness, even through all her surrender and magnanimity, that stopped him from balancing the power between them once and forever. His mind had left the gravity of negotiations to ponder what else he could possibly need from her. Then she’d called, and he’d realized. This was what he’d been waiting for. For her to initiate intimacy, letting down the last barrier, trusting him unconditionally as he’d come to trust her. Did she also know that by doing so, she was invoking her ownership of him?

He stopped in front of their door, racked with emotions. He was ready to be claimed, body and soul, to relinquish all power to her. His voice, his fingers shook as he operated the door, posed on the threshold of the rest of his life.

He stepped inside and she sprang yet another surprise on him.

She charged him, climbed him, wrapped herself around him. He stood for a long moment, claimed, surrounded, deluged in her hunger, drowning in her ferocity. Then he staggered to their bed, his arms filled with happiness made flesh, made woman. His woman. He tried to lower her to the bed, but she twisted in his arms, made him change direction, take her on top.

He saw her then, rising above him, the flames of her hair scorching down on him, her body enveloped in another of those mind-messing creations that echoed her coloring, something semi see-through, stretched over her every perfection, showcasing her, hiding enough to send his imagination tearing through it. Which he would probably end up doing. He touched her and forgot how clothes where supposed to be taken off. But it was her face, her eyes, what he saw and felt there that sent his arousal shooting from distressing to life-threatening, catapulted his spirit on its first rocketing flight.

This. This was what he’d been born for. This woman. This being. This totality.
This.

He took her lips, her tongue, letting her in, all the way, needing, living,
being,
in her, in their merging.

“All of you…I want all of you, Farooq…
all…
”

He drowned in the depths of her desire as she exposed him to its full measure, ignited fever all over him with touches and bites and suckles all the way down to the manhood he now knew had been created to mesh them together, to give her pleasure.

Then she devoured him. He let her, surrendered, spread himself for her to dominate, to pleasure, to drain.

His fingers shook in her hair, his body and heart in her power. After a life of sufficiency and restraint, of superiority, to feel such dependence was scary, transporting. Vital. He thrust his hips to her ravenous rhythm, sinking deeper into her hunger.

She drove her fingers into his buttocks, warning him not to draw away at his peak. “Give it all to me, darling…must have my fill…”

He had learned to give her this. He never had with others, just as he’d never foregone protection, both lines of intimacy he never wanted to cross. Until her, from the first night. In the past six weeks, she’d showed him beyond doubt there were no lines between them.

His hand convulsed in her hair as his loins exploded. She took his pleasure, lapped it up, climaxing, too, just from causing it, taking it, from rubbing against him to the rhythm of his release.

He snatched her up to his heart, communing in profound mouth-mating, sharing their descent. She reached for him again, knew she’d find him harder, crazed for more. She now knew that he achieved the heights of pleasure only inside her heat and giving, only in her pleasure.

She scampered over him, pushing him to his back, straddling him, looked at him through tears that bound him, turning her eyes to the seas he’d been lost in, never wanting to be found.

She held his erection against her scar, caressed him until he was thrusting against her in torment. She rose to scale his length, trembled so much she failed, cried out, “I
want
you, Farooq.”

“Carmen,
ya ghalyah…
yes, want me…” He helped her, raised her, positioned himself at her entrance. “Feast on me, show me how much pleasure I give you…”

She took him in one downward stroke. A whiteout of sensation blinded him as her scorching honey engulfed him, his home inside her, his only home. His senses reignited when he felt himself deep within her.

“Farooq…”

He understood her frenzy, rose with her impaled on him, leaned against the mirror, held her buttocks in his palms.

“Ride me,
ya rohi.
Take me and take your pleasure of me.”

Her palms braced against the mirror, thighs trembling as she tried to rise his length. She’d managed to slide up only half of him when he engulfed one nipple while twisting the other.

Her palms slid off the mirror and she crashed on him, lodging him against her cervix, and wailed,
“Farooq…please…”

“Lean on me,
ya habibati.
” He placed her hands on his shoulders then held her hips and moved her up and down his length in leisurely journeys to the rhythm of his suckles and nibbles.

Then he told her. “Do you know how perfect you are? Do you feel what you’re doing to me? I never dreamed pleasure like this existed. I never want to stop, stop pleasuring you, giving to you.”

“I can’t…Farooq…can’t…it’s too much…”

Again he understood, put his power behind her back as he rolled to ease her onto it in the middle of the mattress, spreading her knees wide-open with his bulk as he lunged forward, sliding up her flaming flesh. He undulated his hips, stretching her around his invasion yet again and stilled, throbbing in her depths, rising above her. “Heaven would be nothing to being inside you.” He withdrew as he spoke. Then holding her streaming eyes, he growled, “Take me, Carmen, take all of me.” And he rammed back into her.

She screamed, her inner muscles squeezing his length in a fit of release. He rode the breakers of her orgasm in a fury of rhythm, feeding her frenzy. It went on and on until he felt her heart stampeding beneath his palm, saw her tears thickening, feared he might be doing her damage.

“Come with me…”

Her sob as her seizure continued around him broke his dam. He let go, buried himself to her womb, wished he could bury all of himself inside her, and surrendered to the most violent orgasm he’d ever known, jetting his essence into her milking depths in gush after exhilarating gush, roaring his love, his worship.

“Ahebbek, aashagek, ya Carmen. Enti koll shai eli.”

Carmen’s consciousness didn’t waver this time. The words exploding from Farooq’s lips had blown it wide-open. Blown her away.

I love you, I worship you. You’re everything to me.

She lay inert beneath his beloved weight, filled with him, with his roar, his words, their enormity mushrooming…

She felt him tear himself from her depths, pounce on her.
“Ya Ullah, Carmen…breathe.”

But she’d forgotten how. He shook her and air rushed in, almost bursting her lungs. She heard his choking relief, felt his kisses scorch off her skin, heard herself croak, “You said…said…”

“
Ahebbek? Aashagek? Amoot feeki?
And I
would
die for you.”

“Stop, Farooq, stop…it’s too much, too much…”

“
You
are too much. Everything you are, everything you make me feel. There’s no one like you. You own me.
Enti habibati el waheeda, hob hayati. Enti hayati. Ana melkek.
”

You’re my only love, the love of my life. You are my life. I am yours.
Too much. “But how…when…?”

“How can I not love you and only you? You are not tailor-made for me, you are created for me by God. As for when, from the first moment, and I fall in love with you again in every moment.”

“But I never dreamed…”

“
I
never dreamed a woman like you existed. But you do, and you’re mine as I’m yours.”

You
can’t
be mine. If you are, how can I ever give you up?

“Carmen,
ma beeki?
” The emotions turning his magnificent face incandescent dimmed. “You’re not happy that I…?”

He stopped, as if he felt her anguish, and it hurt him.

She’d never let anything hurt him.

She surged into him, buried him under a storm of kisses and tears. “I’m
not
happy,
somow’wak.
Happiness is an emotion mere mortals induce, but you…you devastate me, transfigure me, overwhelm me. No. None of that does you justice. I’ll have to invent new words to describe you, your effect, what you make me feel.”

He surged up, his face a display of all she’d attributed to him. “And you dare wonder how I love you? It took all I had, trying not to love you. All my struggles made me love you more,
ya maboodati.
”

She collapsed over him, weeping again. He now thought them tears of jubilation. As they were. Jubilation with an expiration date. “Oh, darling…what I feel for you…that you feel the same way…then you call me your soul and your life, and now your goddess…you’re messing with my life expectancy…”

“I’d give you mine. I’d give you all of it,
ya habibati.
”

She crashed her lips to his, silencing him. Every word, every expression on his adored face was impaling the spears into her deeper. She panted for mercy.
“Habibi, er-ruhmuh…”

He crushed her to him, kissed her back as ferociously, inundating her with his euphoria until emotional passion caught fire and they were fighting for a faster descent into delirium.

It was dawn when the impetus of their hunger was satisfied. She lay cocooned in his strength, his cherishing arms. His love. It was still, would always remain too huge to encompass, that she inspired the same emotions, the same devotions in him.

But she didn’t have always with him. She’d known that from the start. At first, because he was out of reach. Now, he was within reach, but would soon drift out of it again. But, like before, she’d think of the price later. She had now with him.

He rose above her, swept her with caresses, his love flaying her with its beauty, its power. “
Hayati,
whenever you feel ready, I want you to stop birth control. I can’t wait to give Mennah a brother. Or a sister. Hopefully both.”

She smiled at him, went through the motions until he wrapped himself around her, his hands caressing the abdomen he was certain would soon swell with his child again.

She waited until his breathing evened in sleep, then let his dreams detonate inside her, pulverize the now she had with him to ashes.

It had been three weeks since Farooq had confessed his love, asked her to stop birth control. She still hadn’t confessed that she
really
didn’t need it this time.

She couldn’t cut her time with him short. She’d remain with him until he left her to take a wife who would give him more children. Give Mennah siblings…

Her phone rang. Thinking it must be a wrong number, she snapped it up to reject the call. No one but Farooq called her on this number, and he was in the shower.

Something made her press the answer button.

“
Ameerah
Carmen?”

Carmen’s stomach lurched with instant dread and revulsion.

She remembered that androgynous voice. Tareq.

He went on, not waiting for an answer. “I’ll get to the point. I want to meet with you.”

She found her voice. “No.”

“Don’t be so quick to refuse. I’m doing you a favor.”

“Thank you, but again, no. Goodbye, Prince Tareq.”