THE TRUE KING OF DAHAAR(58)

                The vast marble corridors of the resort, the grand archways that filled every inch of it with light, the world itself, looked like a brighter place today.

                She found Azeez sitting at a table filled with breakfast dishes in a veranda off the main lounge. As it was only nine in the morning, the heat was still bearable. Pausing to catch her breath, she leaned against a wall.

                His head thrown back over his chair, his eyes closed, his face was covered in sunlight. Long eyelashes cast shadows onto his gaunt cheekbones, his prominent, crooked nose shading the other side of his face from view, and his mouth…

                Honeyed heat gathered in her muscles at the thought of all the things that mouth had done to her. She clutched her legs together as if she could soothe the pulsing ache at the center of her sex, desperate to stave off the yearning before it turned into something else.

                She had wanted one night and she had taken it. If she continued to play with fire, she would only get burned.

                “You are welcome to join me, Nikhat.” The hint of teasing in his tone had relief sweeping through her. She exhaled deeply, and smiled, more than glad that he was in that wicked, humorous mood. It was only a fragile cover over the deep passion underneath, the heated intensity of his emotions, but she welcomed it anyway. “I won’t bite. Not now and not here.”

                Simple, mocking words. Yet it felt as if he had caressed her with his fingers. She sat down on the opposite chair and met his gaze.

                It swept over her slowly, as if he had been waiting to do just that. “You look very—” he inclined his head, still looking, still devouring, and her heart thudded “—carefree today. Very much…”

                She raised a brow, loving the wicked gleam in his eyes. “Very much like a satisfied woman? I did score—” she scrunched her face into a mock frown “—four times.”

                He erupted into rich laughter, and it was impossible not to join him.

                Shaking his head, his mouth still curved into a wide smile that dug grooves on his stubbled cheeks, he leaned forward. “I was going to say reckless.”

                “Remember that time when you came back from university and wouldn’t stop strutting around the palace, as though you were lord of everything you surveyed, and Ayaan and Amira bugged you incessantly—”

                “I was the lord of everything I surveyed.”

                Her breath hitched in her throat. The sheer, undiluted arrogance in his words, it was so much like the old him. “Fine. Like a….” She clicked her fingers. “You were like a peacock strutting your feathers or your mighty sword in this case,” she snorted in mock disgust. “It was so easy to see through you.”

                Slashes of deep color marked his cheekbones. “Your vocabulary, I see, has become just as enriched as the rest of you, habeebi.” His eyes wide, he ran his fingers over his eyebrows, his mouth still wreathed in smiles. “Of all the things to remember, Nikhat? I never told them. At least, Ayaan, not until a couple of years later. I can’t believe you…”

                Now it was her turn to blush under the dawn of a slow intensity in his gaze. “My obsession with you had already begun. I was years ahead of everyone else in biology. God, my fourteen-year-old self burned with jealousy. And I knew exactly what put that smug, self-satisfied smile on your face.” She pointed her finger toward her face, unable to stop smiling.

                “I believe that’s what you see today.”

                Shaking his head, Azeez studied her, wondered at how easy she made it to laugh, how she reminded him of everything that had been good about the past.