Prologue
“Do you know what it felt like, being trapped for two days in those hellish negotiations, away from you?”
Farooq’s voice swept over Carmen, dark and fathomless like the night sky she was staring into, the exotic accent turning it into a potent weapon, an irresistible spell.
She’d felt him the moment he’d entered the penthouse. The skyscraper. Long before that. Probably the moment he’d stepped out of the closed negotiations that had taken him away from her every day for the past six weeks. The nights had been all hers. All theirs. Madness and magic’s.
She’d thought she’d braced herself, was ready for her first exposure to him after forty-eight hours of deprivation.
After she’d found out something that had changed her life forever.
She wasn’t ready. His approach felt like that of a hurricane. Her teeth chattered with the convulsion of emotions ripping through her. How she loved him.
It had happened so fast, so totally. When she’d thought she stopped believing in love, wasn’t even equipped to feel lust. Then, everything inside her had shuddered with the first sight of him, stumbled with the first hours in his company, crashed with the first night in his arms. She’d been hurtling deeper ever since.
She’d known that, when her time with him was up, she’d keep on plunging, hadn’t cared what would happen then, had only been desperate to experience every minute afforded her of him.
Until today.
She gazed blindly through the floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass overlooking Manhattan, which sparkled beyond the sprawling darkness of Central Park. Each quiet step of now-bare feet on the luxurious carpet echoed inside her, along with the hiss of cashmere sliding off silk, then silk off living velvet steel, his masterpiece body slowly revealed, not in reflection, but in her memory, where his every nuance was etched in obsessive detail.
She still couldn’t turn to him. The scalpel edge she’d been balancing on began to slice into her, cutting slow and deep.
This would be their last night.
She wanted to cram a lifetime into it. Tear open every second and fill it with him, with them. She wanted to consume him, needed all his contradictions, patience and arrogance, tenderness and ferocity, all devastating, all at once.
“Wahashteeni, ya ghalyah.” His croon dipped into the bass reaches of her torment. Hearing him say he missed her, the endearment he favored—precious, treasured—hit a chord of blind yearning inside her. Her breasts heaved, her nipples hardened to points of agony. She couldn’t bear the crush of cotton over her inflamed skin, the chafing emptiness inside her. Then he made it far worse. “I shouldn’t have stayed away no matter what. Now I’m almost afraid to touch you, afraid that when I do, it will take us to the very edge of survival.”
He was half a breath away now, and inside her a tornado tore everything apart. She gasped for air. It screeched down her lungs, riding a scent of intoxication, the musk of tension, virility and desire. Of him. A phantom touch moved her cascade of burgundy hair to one shoulder, exposing her neck. He leaned a fraction closer…and breathed. Inhaled her. Drew her whole into him.
Then his hands moved over her, hovering an inch away, creating a field of sensual friction. He brought his lips to her ear and his soft rumble hit her with the force of a clap of thunder. “I couldn’t even call you, knew I’d lose every ground I’d won if I heard your voice, felt your desire. I would have dropped everything and come to you.”
And she knew. She couldn’t take even tonight with him.
If she did, she’d stay. And in six more weeks, he’d know.
He’d know she was pregnant.
And she couldn’t let him know.
She’d promised him it was safe to make love without protection. And it hadn’t been. He’d see her as a liar, a cheat. He’d be incensed. Or worse. Far worse.
He might have behaved magnificently with her, but she had no illusions about what she was to him. She was a diversion to let off steam during negotiations that taxed his soul and psyche. After that first night together, his offer had been clear. Be his lover during his three-month world tour to broker peace and relief. She was certain he intended to end their arrangement with all the largesse of the prince that he was, probably with an ultragenerous settlement. A settlement she would never have accepted.
But fate had given her something far more precious than anything he could have offered her, the ultimate gift…
She shuddered. She’d been so lost in misery, she’d left it too late to move away. Now he took her, wrapped her in his cabled arms, her back to his chest, her head in the curve of his neck as his towering body encompassed her, sending her reeling with wave after wave of such craving, she almost risked everything for one more taste of heaven in his arms. Almost.
She lurched out of his tightening embrace, tottering, trying to pretend it was a natural move, and croaked a distraction, “Did you manage to propose your relief projects without the Ashgoonian prime minister screaming that your monarchy has some nerve, criticizing his ‘democracy’s’ internal affairs?”
It took him a moment to answer. A moment during which he tried to pull her back into his arms. A look of incomprehension stained his overpowering beauty when she evaded him again.
Then he seemed to dismiss her action as nothing to analyze, shrugged his Olympian shoulders. “He did better than that. He gave me unconditional access into Ashgoonian territory for a hundred-mile zone across the borders with Damhoor.”
A surge of pleasure and pride in his extraordinary achievement, something the UN itself hadn’t been able to manage, overtook her, momentarily suppressing her misery. “Oh, Farooq, that’s incredible. You’re going to save so many lives.”
His sensuous lips twisted. “Let’s not count our saved lives before they’re saved, Carmen. In diplomacy I project only worst-case scenarios. But enough of that. I’m not Prince Aal Masood now. I’m the man who has untold pleasures in store for the woman who’s his most magnificent gift for his life’s best birthday.”
His birthday. She’d found out only yesterday, and it had been during her shopping trip for supplies to make the man who had multitudes of everything a handmade gift that she’d collapsed, ended up in hospital and found out that what she’d thought impossible had happened. Farooq’s baby was growing inside her.
He reached for her again. This time when she dodged him, his arms fell to his sides and bewilderment flashed over his sculpted face. Then comprehension dawned in the honeyed depths of his eyes.