“Made it sound as if it wouldn’t matter to you either way.”
“Will you stop retro-predicting what I did?” He drove his hands into his hair, every move loaded with self-recrimination. “But aih. Though it didn’t happen quite so…peacefully.”
She could fill in the spaces with the worst she could imagine.
“He dropped off the face of the earth. Then three years ago, he suddenly called me. He sounded as if he was drunk or high. I was stunned, since the Rashid I knew was a health and sobriety freak. But what did I know about what he’d become in the years since I last saw him? He said he needed help, gave me an address then hung up. I rushed there, found nothing.”
“You didn’t find him?”
“I found literally nothing. No such place existed. I kept calling him, but the number he’d called from was out of range. Days later, he texted me, saying he’d been drinking, and to please forget it. I texted back, begged to see him. He never answered me. Frustrated with his on-off behavior, I did my best to forget it. And him. A year later, right after the mess in Zohayd was resolved, he came back into my life. As enemy number one.
“I thought he was giving me a hard time to get payback, and to prove that he was ‘a year older and a light-year better.’ So I called him, offered him a partnership, the one we’d dreamed of as boys. He responded that the only and last time he’d put his hand in mine again would be after I’d signed everything I had over to him, and to never contact him again. I was so frustrated with him and his grudge-holding that I never spoke to him again. Until today.”
He was telling her things she already knew—how he couldn’t see beyond what he wanted and felt. He’d done the same with her. With Jalal. She shouldn’t sympathize. But she did.
Maybe because he was explaining the motives behind his actions for the first time…? It changed him from a callous brute to someone who’d never learned how not to appear so. It painted him in grays instead of blacks.
But it still made no difference to those he’d injured.
He looked at her as if he needed her to tell him he wasn’t crazy. “But none of that explains his enmity, does it? It was all just…words. And he had to know I didn’t mean them.”
“So he’s a mind reader, too, among his other talents?”
He grimaced. “I mean he should have put what I said in context. Even if he bought every word I said, that still wasn’t a good enough reason to want to bury me alive.”
“Depends on what you said.”
Admission blared in his eyes. “Unforgivable things.”
Another shock to hear him admit that.
“And at first I felt so guilty, I let him tear into me. But soon his actions made me so mad, I threw myself into what escalated into a war. I was resigned I was responsible for our conflict, deserved his enmity and could do nothing but continue our battles. But seeing him in person again today jolted through me like a thousand volts.”
She had to nod. “Quite understandable. He’s one scary dude.”
“But that’s the problem. That’s not the ‘dude’ I knew. And that scar… Ya Ullah.”
She frowned. “Scar?”
He looked at her as if she was crazy. “How can you miss it? How isn’t it common knowledge?”
“I haven’t seen him up close. And according to my sources, Rashid’s first appearance in Azmahar in the past seven years was today. Seems no one has seen him before to spread the news.”
He nodded slowly. “That makes sense.”
Not to her. “That’s what shook you so much? The change in his appearance?”
“It’s not only that. He’s become someone totally different.”
“Being a soldier can change you. Being in armed conflicts certainly will.”
He shook his head. “I thought that, too, but it’s more. Something happened to him. Something terrible.”
“More terrible than being in a war?”
“Yes. And he believes I had a hand in it.”
Her heart kicked her ribs, hard. “Is he right?”
His whole being stiffened, as if she’d kicked him in the gut. “What do you think?”
Haidar was many things. A criminal wasn’t one of them. And he would be worse, a monster, if he’d had a hand in his former friend’s physical and psychological disfigurement.
She bit her lip. “What will you do to prove him wrong?”
Tension seeped from him—something like…thankfulness?—staining his gaze as he acknowledged her exoneration. “I need to investigate before I can formulate a plan. It’ll be harder because I can’t have anyone finding out anything I discover when Rashid has gone to such lengths to cover it up.”
“Let me know what I can do to help.”
This time when his eyes bored into hers, there was no mistaking it. He was grateful. More. Moved.
Tears suddenly stung her eyes. “Haidar…”
Before she could utter another word, she found herself pressed against the wall with two hundred–plus pounds of hard maleness and demand pressing into her every inch. Her gasp of shock was swallowed by his openmouthed possession. His tongue breached her, thrust into her, driving, claiming, conquering.
The taste of him, the heat and feel of him, what he was doing to her, the way his hands sought all her secrets, sparked her ever-simmering insanities. She writhed against him, nothing left inside her but the need for his long-yearned-for assuagement.
He bent, bit her nipples through her blouse, rose to receive her sharp confessions of pleasure. He resumed devouring her as his big, rough hands slid up her thighs, bunching her skirt, pushing beneath her soaked panties, cupping her buttocks with strength and greed, lifting her, spreading her for his domination.
Falling into an abyss of mindlessness, she clung around him, delighting in his bulk and power as he filled the cradle of her thighs, the one thing left to hang on to in her world.
A storm raged through her, rising from the core his hardness thrust and thrust against. Moans spilled from her with his every wrenching kiss as he escalated the rhythm simulating possession into a fever. She opened wider for him, mouth and legs, to do whatever he wanted to her, to give her everything she needed.
“Haidar…”
The coil of tension in her core suddenly snapped. She cried out into his mouth as the pulse of pleasure tore through her. He had no mercy, his every grind against her bucking body continuing to feed it, unwind it, until she was a lax mass of stunned satisfaction in his arms.
He slowed then stopped his thrusts. Then, still hard and pressed against her quivering flesh, his lips relinquishing hers in one last clinging kiss, he raised his head, looked down at her with eyes raging with arousal, heavy with promise.
“I know what you can do to help me, ya naari. Let me pleasure you properly, repeatedly, for the rest of the night.”
Six
“Come home with me, Roxanne.”
Haidar heard his voice, thick, ravenous. Agonized.
His body would implode if she said no now.
But she wouldn’t. Every fabulous inch of her voluptuousness was pliant against him with surrender, her eyes stunned with the explosiveness of this encounter, heavy with wanting more.
At least it had been explosive for her. It made him want to thump his chest that he’d made her come, so quickly, so powerfully, without even taking her. It was beyond gratifying to know he could still have her out of her mind with a touch. But his arousal was far past the red zone.
He could have so easily joined her. Her release had almost driven him over the brink. He’d held back with all he had. He would take his pleasure only inside her.
He’d waited too long to have it any other way.
“Say yes, Roxanne.” His fingers pressed into the delight of her flesh, his body roaring from the feel of her and the scent of her satisfaction.
Her breasts still shuddered, her chaotic breathing pressing them against his burning chest. Her full lips, red and swollen with the savagery of his hunger, trembled. Receding pleasure and resurging arousal weighed down her lids, ignited her eyes with an emerald fever.
She would say yes. And he’d spend the rest of the night possessing and pleasuring her in every corner of the house he’d bought just for—
Something tugged at the edge of his clouded awareness. A sound. The unhurried, powerful rhythm of footsteps…
She stiffened. Then she exploded, pushing him away as if she’d found herself wrapped around a slimy monster.
Unable to think, to move, he stood frozen as she struggled to pull down her skirt. Then, without looking back, she ran away.
“I am really curious, Haidar.”
Rashid.
He turned, his body clamped in a vise of agony.
Rashid was approaching from the direction of the ballroom this time, his progress slow, steady, his face impassive. Haidar answered his empty stare with a glare reflecting the storm that still raged inside him. Rashid would no doubt add to the havoc.
“Tell me, Haidar, how did you manage to reach any level of success, let alone your admittedly impressive one? Men who can’t keep it in their pants aren’t known for the discipline and acumen needed to attain, let alone maintain, success.”
Haidar gritted his teeth against the urge to blacken Rashid’s darker-than-sin eyes even more. “After payback already, Rashid?”