Pleasure splintered and shattered her into a thousand flashes of light and even before the tremors subsided, he thrust into her in one smooth, deep stroke. The groan that fell from his mouth was drawn out, rubbing against her senses. Amplified the utter sense of completion she felt down to her bones.
Pain this time was more of a fading imprint. Utterly replete, Amalia opened her eyes as his hands held her shoulders and he settled so deeply into her that she didn’t know where she ended and he began.
She ran her hands all over his hard body. His muscles clenched under her touch, a fine sheen of sweat covering his smooth skin.
“You feel incredibly good, habibti. I won’t last long.”
She loved seeing the dark desire in his eyes, the unraveling self-control. In that moment he was hers, Amalia knew. The sated languor left her body as he flipped her in a blink.
Every nerve ending felt tautly stretched as he pulled his legs forward and they were facing each other—nose to nose, lips to lips, and hips to hips. “Now, let’s see if we can make you scream again,” he whispered, sucking the tender flesh at her neck.
Such greedy languor spread through her lower belly that Amalia instinctively rose from his grip and then pushed herself back on him.
This time it was he who growled, his flesh pleading with her to not leave him. “Ride me, Amalia. I’m yours,” he said, and it was all the encouragement she needed.
She gloried in grinding herself against him, again and again, up and down until a bone-deep pleasure spread its fingers through her sex again.
When he thrust up, a wave of such piercing pleasure splintered through her that she screamed. And then she was landing on her back again, his big body covering hers as he thrust sharper and faster, exploding her pleasure into a newer level. Amalia locked her ankles around his, urging him on shamelessly, the move as instinctual as breathing.
He took her mouth in a hard, punishing kiss as his body bucked above hers and he climaxed with a guttural growl. And his bellowing breath fell around her, and his sweat-kissed body folded over her almost crushing breath. Amalia wrapped her arms around his sinewy strength and held on.
She felt like she was reborn, renewed, part of which was the raw experience of being possessed by this arrogant man. But part of it was this amazement at herself, too, for taking a chance with him, for taking a risk with her heart.
As her breath softened and her body felt boneless, fear touched that euphoria, too. She kissed his damp shoulder, her fingers tightening around him.
Because sharing this intimacy, opening her body to him, would make it a thousand times harder when it was time to leave him. But if she was given a choice as to knowing this with Zayn and a pain-free life, she knew she would make this choice again and again.
CHAPTER TEN
“YOUR FIANCÉE IS both beautiful and smart, Your Highness.” Translation: “Did you know that she is one of those modern, independent women?”
“Your fiancée has some interesting opinions about our education reforms, Your Highness.” Which actually translated to “This woman of yours thinks far too much. Control her.”
“Your fiancée, Zayn, has some strange ideas about Khaleej. Tell her where her place is before she becomes a liability.” This glittering warning from his father while his gaze held Zayn’s in a question.
A man who didn’t mince words, his advice was, “She’s a PA, Zayn. You could still keep her on in whatever position you want, and marry a suitable woman.”
Zayn had walked away before he could give voice to the storm brewing within him, before he forgot that this man was his father, a man who always deserved Zayn’s respect and loyalty.
The thought of making Amalia his mistress while he married another, reducing their relationship to that dimension, filled him with bile. Why when he had always accepted it as part of his fate? Was a faceless woman in the future in the same role just more palatable than a woman with whom he had shared the deepest and truest parts of himself?
For that was her appeal. With Amalia, he need not be just the sheikh or just Zayn. There was no dichotomy inside himself. He could be both and neither and still be comfortable in his skin, still know that he could trust in her absolutely.
Know that she understood everything that drove him, that made him who he was.
That kind of intimacy where they learned of each other, where they realized that there was so much more to learn, was both terrifying and exciting.
And addictively immersive.
The warnings and innuendos landed on Zayn like a pelt of stones, jarring the dreamy, drugged haze he seemed to be existing in in the month since their return from Paris, stirring inside him a violent urge to pound his fists into the nearest wall.
But since he hadn’t given in to that urge when he had been thirteen and his father had had his secretary transferred because the man’s fourteen-year-old son, who had been Zayn’s first, and probably only, best friend, was being a disrupting, corruptive influence on the prince, he didn’t do it now.
He pressed a hand to the back of his head where a soft pounding was beginning and retreated to a table at the corner of the hall. The way he was feeling right now, he would probably bite the head off some poor staff member who didn’t deserve his wrath. And the ones who did, the one who spoke of Amalia as if she was somehow beneath them, he could not shower his displeasure.
Signaling a passing waiter for some coffee, Zayn leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. The fragrance of coffee that wafted toward his nostrils lightened the growing tightness he was beginning to recognize in his chest.
He picked up his cup and took a sip. Amalia had gone from complaining that the brew was too bitter and pouring coffee into the creamer than the other way, to now asking what she had to do to ensure he sent her a supply of coffee for the rest of her life when she left Khaleej.
Even as he had been beyond tempted to voice his darkest desire, he had known that it was also a reminder. A reminder that she wasn’t forgetting that this was only an arrangement between them, that she knew the status quo.
That she didn’t, and never would, expect more of him than he was willing to give. That she wouldn’t get emotional and clingy when it was time to leave.
She gave so willingly and wantonly of herself to him in the dark of the night but Amalia also prided herself on her self-respect. She wouldn’t venture where she wasn’t sure of her welcome, her stubborn will her shield in so many ways.
Look how they’d been in Sintar for a month and she refused to still visit her father. Zayn knew from his aide that Professor Hadid had called her numerous times. He had even come to the palace but she bluntly refused to see him. Put him off with some excuse.
“Now he worries about where all this will end and what damage I might do to his reputation,” she had said when Zayn had argued that Professor Hadid was obviously concerned.
Amalia’s tough attitude hid so much hurt. Confronting her father, he knew, would break her. A vulnerable, hurting Amalia, he also knew, could become his own kryptonite.
So he let it be, even as he knew she had to face her father sooner or later.
Looking out around the vast hall where Mirah’s fiancé’s family was mingling with his own relatives, he pulled in a deep breath. He needed to shake off this spiraling feeling of losing his control, of being caught in an eddy.
Everything was going according to his own plan, he reminded himself. The risk he had taken with Amalia had paid off. Even as they questioned his choice, no one had doubted his relationship with Amalia.
The palace was ringing with the groom’s family and the wedding guests enjoying the lavish three-day celebrations that preceded the wedding. Even after this breakfast there were ceremonial events he had to attend as the bride’s brother and the sheikh.
Mirah’s nikah to Farid was tomorrow night and that was all that mattered, at least, for now. Not he nor Amalia or their all too real-feeling relationship.
He didn’t know why the shock and taunts of his friends and guests, even his parents, was leaving such a bad taste in his mouth. It was not news to him what Amalia was or what kind of a reaction she would draw from people who called themselves his well-wishers.
All he wanted to point out was that she had been by his side constantly for six weeks now and all she’d done was carry herself out in public with grace and decorum that made her no less than any daughter of some distinguished royal house that were assembled at the wedding even now.
Even when she disagreed with people’s views or faced prejudice just because she was a woman and an outsider, she did it with logic and conviction, with respect, even when she was denied it.
He also hadn’t failed to notice that she had ruffled more than one conservative cabinet’s feathers, and didn’t limit herself to a vapid, social existence. Even in the pretense, she had already involved herself in more than a few social issues and charity boards.
It was whiplash, for his statesmen had never seen a woman get involved in so many things, never mind break so many unwritten rules.
He had just finished his coffee when he heard a wave of excitement at the entrance to the hall. Dressed in a pale cream long-sleeved dress made of the sheerest silk and lace and with thousands of dollars’ worth of beadwork, Mirah walked into the hall. And next to her, dressed in a light mint-green dress was his fiancée.