There she lay, his wife.
Still in the turquoise dress that had so lovingly hinted at those lithe curves. She slept on her side, the silk scrunched up to her knees, displaying toned calves.
Deep red henna swirled over her feet and hands. She was marked like that for him, he thought with a primal possessive urge like he had never known before.
His breath coming in short bursts, he devoured the sight of her. Her hair haphazardly framed her face, a mirror of the spirited, independent woman. The bodice of the dress dipped at her chest, her folded arms pushing up the globes of her breasts.
Need ripped through him, for the first time in his life, leaving him absolutely unraveled on a level he didn’t understand.
Shedding his long tunic, he left his cotton trousers on. Much as he couldn’t wait to feel her silken flesh against all of him, he didn’t want to spook her when she was in such a deep sleep.
Slowly, he lowered his body onto the bed, shifted to his side and gathered her to him.
Mumbling something, she came to him, pliant and soft in a way she never was when she was awake, her dainty fingers drifting over his abdomen. His shaft tightened painfully and a groan burst deep from inside him.
Purring like a cat, she tucked herself against him, the scent of roses and her skin a sensory heaven. He hissed out a breath, the brush of her thigh against his sending shafts of heat through him.
Ya Allah, he had forgotten how fragile she had always been. Constantly pitted against that tough, self-sufficient exterior she presented, the delicate bones of her body and lithe curves made him feel like a hulking brute.
The remembered feel of her tight heat the first time he had gone to her apartment…desire was a roaring beast within him.
Yet, she had always stood toe-to-toe with him.
And now she was even more delicate, he thought, his gaze drifting over her curves, and going to the small, just-visible swell of her belly.
She was finally, irrevocably his. She carried his child in her womb, wore his ring on her finger.
His child and his wife, his in every way there was.
His, in a way no one had ever been.
His, in a way no one could ever take away from him.
* * *
The whisper of rustling clothes brought Lauren awake from the deep slumber she had fallen into. She blinked and sat up, the flickering light of lanterns illuminating her surroundings for her.
It took her a few seconds to realize she was at the desert hideaway, and that it was…her wedding night. Pushing her hair away from her face, she grimaced at the tangles. She had fallen asleep the moment her head touched the pillow, and had neglected to take her pins out. Wondering what time it was, she looked up.
Standing at the edge of the bed, his sparsely haired, lean chest bare, a white towel slung low around his hips, there was Zafir.
Her husband, hers to hold and obey and…love.
Her vows came back to her word by word, but panic was only a mild flutter in her chest now.
Faced with such potent masculinity, knowing that this powerful man had pledged his fidelity and respect and his body to her, everything else paled in significance.
This time, she was prepared for the burning flame of her own need, of the blast of heat that punched low in her belly.
Golden light bathed the musculature of his chest, delineating every ridge of tightly roped muscle and sinew. Droplets of water clung to his skin, skin that she knew would feel like rough velvet. Muscle and sinew, he was breathtakingly gorgeous and he had never been bared to her like this.
She must have made a sound—a needy whimper, because he turned around then.
Tawny eyes met hers and she gasped aloud.
A savage light filled those golden depths. He looked fierce, dark, like one of the warriors he had told her about, as if there was a well of some bright fire inside of him that lit him from the inside out. Power and confidence radiated from him in waves.
Fear of some unknown crashed through her, and she clasped her hands together to stop their shaking. This was ridiculous. She knew this man, but the reassurance rang hollow.
“Zafir?” His name was an entreaty on her lips, a soft intonation. As if she could tame whatever it was that clung to him like a second skin. As if she could call forth that veneer of civilized sophistication that she’d always known was only skin-deep.
The hand in his hair with a towel stilled and he looked up at her. A thoroughly possessive light glinted in his eyes as his gaze lingered over her brow, her nose and finally rested on her mouth.
“Did I wake you?”
Clutching the voluminous folds of her dress, she pushed her feet to the ground and stood up. “No. How long have you been back?”
Another rough tumble of his hair and then the towel went flying into the corner. “An hour, maybe.” Catching her look around, he said, “It’s almost dawn.”
“It took so long?”
Powerful shoulders rose as he shrugged. “Go back to sleep, Lauren.”
She licked her lips to moisten them. “No. I’m fine.” An infinitesimal shudder racked the tense line of his shoulders. “You went for a swim in the oasis in the middle of the night? You must be freezing!”
“I needed to cool down.”
That matter-of-fact statement hung in the room, sparking into life a simmering fire.
He was half-naked and she was drowning in silk and yet, she felt as if she was the one utterly bared to him.
Reaching him on barely steady legs, she stilled. The skirts of her dress fluttered against his legs. She thought his mouth must have twitched at how strange she was acting, but when she looked into his eyes, there was only that deeply disconcerting hunger again.
He was just as still as she was, waiting for what, she had no idea.
Breath hitching in her throat, she tried to smile. She had no idea where the sudden tension was springing from, why she felt as if she was meeting him for the first time. How a ceremony could drench them in a strange kind of intimacy. “Did everything go okay?”
He frowned.
“At your meeting with the High Council?”
“How do you know?”
“Ahmed said it was a meeting of all the tribal chiefs and the council members, a meeting unlike he had ever heard of or seen before.” Hardness inched into his face until the planes jutted out starkly. “That none of the staff had any idea that they would even be arriving for the wedding. That they hadn’t set foot in the palace, much less the city for so long. That you brought this all about. Is that true?”
“Yes. They will not contest my rule anymore.”
Short, clipped and with a warning. That she didn’t heed. “That’s fantastic. Ahmed said—”
An edgy smile, more a snarl, touched his lips. “Ahmed, it seems, is a raging gossip and probably half in love with you, yes?” He seemed so utterly displeased that for a second it was like looking at a stranger in the same skin. “Maybe he needs a tougher assignment where he’s not mooning over my beautiful wife and speculating on state matters?”
Heat tightened her cheeks as she strove to make light of his claim. But there it was again, that tinge of barely civilized hint to it. “Please don’t do that. Ahmed’s…infatuation,” she said, and was relieved to see the tight set of his mouth relax a little, “is perfectly harmless and nothing I can’t handle.”
And then she was wondering why she had said please. Wondering what subconscious instinct made her want to appease him rather than argue like she had always done, what unnamed, wild thing inside him she recognized today, of all days.
At his raised brow, she flushed again. “I like him. He’s young and friendly and—”
“You can’t socialize with the guard, Lauren.”
If she didn’t know such a thing was impossible, she would have thought him jealous. But jealous meant caring on a different level and speculating on his feelings or lack of them meant she’d have to face what she wanted them to be.
She injected steel into her voice. “And not prone to prejudice or judgment, like other members of your staff is what I mean,” she finished, thinking of his mentor, Arif. Although, for the first time since she had seen the older man in the trade center that day, his rigid features had relaxed when he had looked at her at the feast today.
Grudging acknowledgment, maybe.
“Tell me about the meeting, about their impression of me.”
“You don’t need to concern yourself—”
“Don’t say that. You don’t have to protect me from…the worst.”
“As your husband, that is one of the job requirements, habeebti,” he added archly. “Whether they be old, distrustful council members or your mother or even yourself that I have to protect you from.”
She bit her lip, hating the insecurity that balled up in her throat. Normally, she would have closed herself off completely, barred any way she could hearing what some traditional, rooted-in-the-past old men thought of her. Not venturing where she wasn’t needed, that had been her motto and her shield all her life.
Her parents didn’t want her to tag along on a year-long assignment one year?
She’d made plans the next year before they could even reject her.
If she didn’t give anything, there was no possibility of getting hurt.
But for the sake of her child, and for the sake of this man who had cared that she was upset, who had, while shouldering the burden of his volatile nation, still spared time to realize she must be feeling alone…