Then the car stopped and Kamal pulled her out, and there he was. Mohab. A dozen feet away, at the top of three-foot-wide stone steps leading to a columned patio that wrapped around a one-level adobe lodge. Fiery light glowed behind its closed windows.
His hair rustled around his head like silk, and his abaya billowed around his body like the wings of a preternatural bird of prey, with him in the middle of the enchantment, her every fantasy come to life.
Then he spoke, his voice as deep as the desert night enveloping them. “Skokrunn ya asdeka’ee for delivering your most valued treasure into my safekeeping. In return for this privilege and trust, I owe you everything.”
“Oh, you certainly do,” Farooq said, chuckling.
Shehab nodded. “And we have a lifetime to collect.”
Kamal rounded it all up. “And don’t think we won’t.”
Mohab bowed his head, his palm spread over his heart in pledge. “I’m counting on it.”
With senses fixed on him, she barely registered her brothers kissing her one last time, then driving away.
As their vehicle receded, she forced wobbling legs to move toward Mohab. He wasn’t smiling. Or moving. He stood there, his gaze roasting her alive, making her feel he was memorizing her down to her last cell.
“Is this another tradition in Jareer?” she whispered, her voice loud in her ears in the desert’s pervasive silence. “Grooms here don’t go to the trouble of sweeping their brides away but have their families provide delivery services?”
He smiled then. She didn’t know how she remained on her feet with the eruption of arousal.
Ya Ullah...how was it possible to want that much?
He came down a step, then another, his movements tranquil, as if he was afraid she’d bolt if he moved too fast. He reached out a hand to her with the same care.
“Welcome to my sanctuary, ya ajaml aroos fel kone.”
The way he said the most beautiful bride in the universe had her stumbling into his embrace. “One of your lairs?”
“Back to the predator motif?”
“I do feel I’m walking into a starving wolf’s den,” she confessed.
“That’s perfectly true. I will gobble you up.”
“I’m counting on it.”
At her giving him back his words, a chuckle rumbled deep in his chest. “Everything you say or do rouses unprecedented reactions from me.” His eyes suddenly sobered. “And after all these years, after I first laid eyes on you and wanted you—but thought I could never have you—here you are, my bride, in my sanctuary where I have never let another.”
Shying away from dwelling on his declarations, she focused on his statement about this place. It was that vital and exclusive to him. That had to be why she felt as if her essence was flowing through the ground beneath her feet to forever mingle with this place. Why she felt she’d never belong anywhere else again but in this land, with this man.
She stared up at him, towering above her, swathed in moonlight, as one with the desert and the night, unattainable as the stars. But the universe was giving him to her for now. Sort of on loan. Not having him forever meant she only had to wring every minute with him of all it had of pleasure and intimacy.
Surging against him, she buried her face where his top was open, teeth pulling gently at the muscled power beneath, catching in the perfect cover of silky hair. “Here I am.”
“And what you do to me....” Groaning, he swept her up in his arms, made her feel weightless.
She clung to him, burying her lips in any part of him she reached. “Show me, Mohab. Everything I do to you. Everything you need from me. Show me everything, do it all to me.”
His growl was savage this time as he took her lips, making her nerves fire in unison.
He relinquished her lips only to stride into the lodge. Kicking the door closed behind them, he swept through a dimly lit corridor that made her feel as if he was taking her deeper into a wizard’s den. Which he was. He’d always practiced magic on her. And for the next six months, she’d revel in surrendering to his spell—until the enchantment expired.
She now surrendered to the experience, every foot deeper making her realize for the first time what it meant to have a sanctuary. This place. Where he was.
It was as far as could be from the opulence of the palace of Judar or the ancient majesty of his citadel in Jareer. It was composed of elements of the desert, unpolished and unpretentious, and more evocative and atmospheric than those mind-boggling edifices for its starkness and simplicity.
He took her into a great room that seemed to comprise the whole place, apart from a kitchen and bathroom. It had stone walls and adobe floors, and was strewn with thick, hand-woven keleems. On one side was a settee with a long table in front of it spread with serving dishes on gentle flames. A fireplace presided over the area, its fires leaping in a hypnotic dance, with the other sources of illumination, brass lamps, on every surface. A mosaic incense burner emitting musk and amber was hanging by thick copper chains from the beamed ceiling.
On the other side of the room was the bed. A ten-by-ten-foot, two-foot-high concrete platform with a thick mattress on top of it was draped in the only luxurious touch around—solid dark gold satin sheets, pillows and covers.
He lowered her down on top of it, then mounted it and brooded down at her as he removed his abaya and top, muscles rippling beneath his polished skin, his face all noble planes and harsh slashes and grim hunger, all of him painfully male and beautiful. And hers. For now.
She scrambled to her knees, needing to be rid of her own shackles. She’d removed only the veil when he knelt in front of her, stopping her, his sure, deft hands replacing her clumsy ones. She moaned in protest. “You took your clothes off when I spent the whole night promising myself I’d do it.”
“You can dress and undress me from now on. But I spent the whole night having minor coronaries every time I looked at you in this getup, betting myself I’d get it off you in ten seconds flat.”
And he did. He got the dress off as if by magic, his eyes on every part he exposed, making her feel purely feminine and utterly desirable. Then he moved around her so he was enveloping her from the back, his hard flesh plastered to her flaming back, his harder erection digging into her buttocks through his pants, making her feel contained...dominated.
His breath steamed down her neck as he whispered, “You want me to show you what I wanted to do to you during those three weeks of torture?”
Her nod was shamelessly frantic. “Yes, yes, show me. Do it all.”