He set his teeth as he rocked another inch inside her. “If ever there was a woman who can take a man to the limits of his mortality with her passion, it’s you, Carmen. It’s only fair I reciprocate in kind.”
Her voluntary functions were shot to hell. Her thrust to accept more of him had to be some autopilot, set on Farooq. “We had…this conversation…before…”
“Your limited experience is irrelevant.” He thrust deeper into her, the lubrication of their combined pleasure smoothing his advance. “You’re a natural-born femme fatale.”
Her hand moved under some external power, but with her hunger, trembled down the center groove of his abdomen to his shaft, to where they were merged. “Your femme fatale?”
“B’haggej’Jaheem—by hell, you are. Mine.” He ground deeper into her, reaching the point where the familiar expansion inside her turned into almost-pain. An edge of dominance, a sharpness of sensation that was glorious, addictive, overwhelming, even a little frightening. The idea of all that he was, melding with her, at her mercy as she was at his, filled volumes inside her, body and mind and soul. “Say it, ya Carmen. Enti melki.”
“Ana melkak…I’m yours, yours…Farooq, darling, please…”
At the word darling he snarled something colloquial she didn’t get, took the edges of her lehenga’s zipper in both hands…and ripped. She lurched in mortification.
He growled again. “I’ll have a dozen made for you, must see you…all of you…”
Still lodged inside her, he freed her from her torn clothes, his hands and eyes everywhere he exposed. She closed her eyes at the starkness of his appreciation, at the ferocity of anticipation. Now, he’d really make love to her…
He moved. But he wasn’t feeding her more of him. He was leaving her body. Her eyes tore open in panic, whimpering at his loss, her fingers too feeble to stop him. Cold shuddered through her. But it wasn’t that of losing her clothes or his heat.
His gaze on her lower belly was the source of frost.
“You have a scar.”
Eleven
Carmen bit a lip that trembled out of control.
She couldn’t talk about it. About her imperfections and losses. But oh God, he looked so…grim. Did he feel them? Did the external evidence of them put him off, now the edge had dulled?
“You had a Cesarean.” She nodded. His eyes turned almost all-black. “Did it hurt?”
She tried to laugh, managed a sound of distress rather than mockery. “I clung to the drug-free route only until they told me Mennah was obstructed and was in fetal distress. Then I was screaming for them to give me every drug they had and to open me up. From then on, I can assure you I felt no pain.”
“You know I meant afterward.”
She knew. And she didn’t want to answer. Didn’t want to remember the pain that had made her weep as she’d nursed Mennah, the debilitation that had turned caring for her daughter, moving at all, into torture. She couldn’t tell him any of it. He’d suspect that more than a surgical wound had caused her agony. And he’d be right. Her endometriosis had flared up to crippling levels until she’d given in, did the only thing that would put her back on her feet to be a mother for Mennah—removing the source of trouble. She’d had a hysterectomy three weeks after Mennah’s birth. The reopened scar had hurt then, had taken weeks to heal. And she’d been unable to take painkillers while she nursed her baby.
“It hurt,” he said when she didn’t answer, his voice vibrating with conviction, with a fury over it. “And you didn’t have anyone to take care of you, or Mennah for you. You fool.”
He suddenly heaved up to his feet, tore his clothes off his body like a madman, every sinew and muscle straining as if against a crushing weight, his engorged manhood erect flat against his steel abs. He still wanted her.
Those difficult tears she’d learned to shed since she’d known him burned at the back of her eyeballs, two breaking the barrier of her resistance, corroding a path to her chin.
He descended on her like a great vulture, pulling her to him, slamming her against his overheated flesh, demanding, “Why the tears, ya ghalyah?”
Oh God. His endearment. The one he’d always called her. Precious. Treasured. He’d made it hers again. The sentinel tears were followed by a flood. “I thought the scar put you off, that I—I’m…”
“A fool a thousand times over.” He gave her one quick shake, ending her doubts. “I crave nothing but you.”
His teeth pressed into her lower lip, with enough force to still it, to show her the power of his craving. He groaned long and deep as he applied more pressure until she whimpered, opened her mouth, her hands clenching around his neck, her breasts crushed to his chest, cushioning him, one leg clamping his hip, a carte blanche for anything he’d do to her.
When her undulations against him became quakes, he suckled her lips into his mouth, in long, smooth pulls, drawing more plumpness into her flesh, running his tongue inside them, drawing more of her taste until her whimpers became incessant. Only then did he plunge into her with tongue and ferocity. He drained her, then tore his lips from hers, trailed them over her cheeks, jaw, neck, breasts, nibbling and suckling her to madness. Then he reached her scar.
What he did then almost ruptured her heart.
He pressed his face against it, nudging her like an affectionate lion, groaning. “This is where you gave me Mennah, the source of her miracle, and of the pain you endured alone. This binds you to me, makes you aghla, more precious, makes me want you more, when I didn’t know there could be more wanting.”
She hiccupped an intake of distress. It hurt beyond measure, whether she feared he didn’t want her or she knew he did. Everything he did or said affected her with an intensity that ended up simulating pain. But it was worse now.
His lips were on her scar, paying homage, and for terrible moments, she felt a phantom womb convulse inside her. Primal longings burst there, to have his manhood driving into her as it once had, so huge and powerful it had breached her cervix, what remained of the core of her femininity, splashed his seed directly where the overriding forces of her love and his potency had smashed the odds, done the impossible, created the miracle of Mennah.
There would be no more miracles. Her potential had been amputated, and she’d been left clinging to her miracle with a desperation that might have suffocated her child, if Farooq hadn’t found them.