Read To Tempt a Sheikh Online

Authors: Olivia Gates

To Tempt a Sheikh (15 page)

“They brought me here. I demanded the info I came for, and my contact told me it was bigger than I thought, that ‘my' problems were a part of something that could not only exonerate ‘me' but that would destroy the Aal Shalaans, as they deserved to be. Then he called on the cell phone they'd given me. He used one of those electronic voice distorters, said he couldn't afford to ever be linked to what he was about to reveal, wouldn't leave anything to be tracked back to him. And he told me about the stolen and counterfeited Pride of Zohayd jewels, and the consequences that would have for the Aal Shalaans and their regime. I asked how that would help ‘me' and he only said I was a bright lad, would work out how to use that info to my benefit. When I started to protest, he said he was in a very sensitive position, had to go now or risk exposure, but that he'd call me later with more info.

“I emailed Mark Gibson, Todd's lawyer and our childhood friend, to ask his opinion. I didn't specify what my contact had told me, just that I possessed info that could bring the royal house of Zohayd down. Two hours later, I was snatched from my rented condo. The next thing I remember was waking up in that hole in the desert. The rest you know.”

Then she felt silent. And realized that tears were streaming down her face. Reliving those past events and anticipating even more anguish and hopelessness, not only for Todd but for her and Harres in the future, broke her heart.

Harres's bleak eyes were eloquent with his acknowledgment of the validity of her trepidation. He said nothing, just pulled her back into his arms. Soon, he was kissing her, inflaming her, taking her with a new edge of recklessness, of desperation.

The dread that their time together was counting down to a crushing end made their hunger explosive, their mating almost violent, their ecstasy almost damaging.

Afterward, she lay curved into his body, quivering with the enormity of it all. He pretended to be asleep. She knew he wasn't.

She couldn't sleep, either.

She wondered, once she lost him, if she'd ever sleep again.

 

As night deepened, the oasis's unique environment somehow warded off the bitter cold of the desert. Even if it had been as bone-chilling as it had been during their trek, Harres wouldn't have felt a thing. He was burning up, from the inside out.

She'd finally fallen asleep. He'd left her side, gone out to try to find air to breathe.

He couldn't find any in the vastness around him.

He stumbled to a stop at the far edge of the cottage's garden, stared up at the preternaturally clear and steady stars. They blurred, swam. The heat seething inside him was filling his eyes with the moisture of frustration and despondence. Just as he'd seen in hers. It had hurt, still did, like a knife in his gut.

What hurt more was that he couldn't wipe those feelings away. He couldn't promise her what he wasn't certain he could deliver. Promises now would torment her with hope. That was even more agonizing than resignation, and if for any reason he failed to keep them, the crash to despair would be far more devastating. He
would
do whatever it took to secure her happiness. But until he did, he had to keep silent, had to suffer her suffering. And love her with all of his being.

He only prayed it wouldn't come down to a choice between him and her brother.

He couldn't afford to lose her. He wouldn't survive it.

Eleven

T
alia lurched awake, the ferocity and satisfaction of Harres's last possession humming in her blood, in her bones.

She stretched, moaning at the delicious frisson of soreness zigzagging through her. He
had
kept his promise of driving her to insanity and beyond. She now thought sanity, like the soul she felt he'd claimed, was a highly overrated and mostly inconsequential trimming.

He wasn't there. But he would be any second.

She rose, freshened up. Just as she finished, she heard the steady clatter of Reeh's hooves at the back of the cottage.

She rushed to the door. The moment she stepped out, gazing up into the twilight of the skies she'd come to depend on seeing, a meteor flashed bright then faded, as if it had never been.

It felt like their time together.

But they didn't behave as if it would ever fade. They both pretended this was forever.

He rode around the cottage, approached her with the smile that was everything worth living for. She rushed to him and he pulled her up on Reeh's back, molded her back to his front, enveloped her within his hot, hard body.

After a while of trotting leisurely in their daily excursion to
al ain,
Talia sighed, snuggled back into the cherishing heat and protection.

“I've come to a conclusion,” she announced. He kissed the top of her head, held her more securely, waiting for her revelation. “Getting kidnapped was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

He chuckled, hugged her exuberantly. “What a coincidence, since it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to
me
.”

She sighed, knowing he meant it, nuzzled back into his embrace, soaking up his feel, assimilating it into her being along with his scent, mingled with those of the pristine nature.

Then she teased, “Do you think it's possible I'll get to ride my own horse one day?”

“I have issues with seeing you in danger.”

“What danger? Horses here, like the rest of the inhabitants, human or otherwise, are wonderfully understanding of inept foreigners.”

“Then I have issues about keeping you in my arms for as long as possible….” He stopped, groaned, amended. “Having you in my arms at every opportunity.”

She knew he must be kicking himself for phrasing it that way, for even hinting that their time together would come to an end.

She swerved from the subject, turned lips tingling with the numbness of fear into his neck. “A noble cause.”

She felt a ragged breath empty his lungs as he gave her a tighter squeeze, as if to thank her for circumventing the emotional landmine. “None higher. I got addicted to holding you like this, ever since I rode back to the oasis with you.”

“Buttuli.”
She tilted her head back to smile up into his eyes and caught the bleakness there.

Tenderness replaced it, making her wonder if she'd even seen it. But she had. And she wouldn't bring it up.

What was the point of worrying about the future but to taint the purity of happiness they shared in the present?

She rubbed the hair he'd told her he adored, called spun gold milled from sunshine, against his bare chest. Now that he no longer wore a bandage but a local dressing over his fast-healing wound, she'd been wallowing in the sensory nirvana of touching his sculptured perfection at every opportunity. Which was almost always.

“Harres…”

“Yes, Talia, say my name like that, like you can't draw another breath if you don't have me inside you. As I will be, here and now.”

The blow of arousal at the thought of him carrying out his intention, here, was paralyzing. And not just because it was a fantasy she'd thought would forever go unfulfilled. They were out in the open, with the oasis people in the distance.

She thought he was only stimulating her, that he'd wait until they were by the
ain,
where they'd shared more than one explosive if hurried mating, but then he lifted her, dragged her voluminous dress from beneath her, let it flow over his lap.

Then, as one hand held the bridle, the other slid around to dip below the folds of the neckline, seeking her breasts. Fire forked to her core as his fingers manipulated her nipples. It
burst into flames when he sank his teeth in her nape, like a lion securing his mate.

She swooned back, her already open thighs falling apart wider, moisture dampening her panties.

“Do you know what scenting your arousal does to me?” He growled in her ear as his hand slid inside her panties, his palm gently squeezing her for a moment, winding the rhythm of the throbbing there into a frantic pounding. “I want to taste you again, but I'll have to settle for feeling your heat and your satiny flesh as it softens and melts for me. Show me how much you crave my touch,
ya talyeti
.”

Beyond caring that they might be seen, she bucked back against him, widening her thighs, giving him full access. “I'm out of my mind craving anything you do to me, all the time. Touch me, feel for yourself, do everything to me.”

With a groan of male possession, he dipped a finger along the molten lips of her sex, sliding its thickness and power on a mind-numbing path to and fro, each pass tightening the coil of agonizing pleasure inside her. She writhed, whimpered, turned her face up to his. He thrust his tongue inside her mouth as he replaced his finger with his thumb and plunged his middle finger inside her. The coil snapped, and she unraveled around him, in his arms on bucking keens. He stroked her inner trigger, stoked it until the climax drained her of the frenzy he'd built inside her.

“Having you lost to pleasure is the most magnificent thing I've ever experienced,” he rumbled against her mouth as his fingers still stroked her, avoiding her sensitive bud, until he soothed her, then he changed direction and rhythm, had her climbing to mindlessness again.

Once she was begging, she felt him release himself, his hard length slamming against her buttocks. He whispered
in her ear, “Rise up with your thigh muscles like I taught you in the trot.”

He was really going to take her here. Like this. The idea almost drove her over another edge.

She rose up and he positioned himself at her opening.

He was saying, “Settle down on me,” when her muscles jellified. She crashed down on him.

He forged through her inner folds like a hot lance. She thought she'd gotten used to his length and girth, but it seemed that every time felt like the first time, felt as if he filled her more.

Now the pressure reached an edge of pain, of domination that redefined all her concepts of physical intimacy and pleasure. She was addicted to the impossible fullness, the feeling of total occupation, of trapping such a vital part of him so inescapably inside her and drawing both their pleasure from depths she—and he insisted he, too—hadn't known existed.

By the fourth or fifth buck and fall of the trot she was a mass of tremors, fully at his power, breached to her core, invaded, occupied, pleasured, taken, maddened.

“Ride me…ride me…” was all she could say anymore, all that was left in her mind. She was enervated with an overload of sensation, the pressure becoming beyond her endurance. She needed him to thrust her to release. Before anyone passed.

He only lay back into the trot, let its rhythm layer even more sensation. All the time, he said things that drove her deeper into bondage. “Filling you this way, invading you, being captured by you is all I can think of, I want to be home, inside you, pleasuring you, always….”

And she found another word.
“Please.”

She felt him jerk inside her, grow bigger. She keened, writhed, and he growled, nudged Reeh, pounded into her
with all the fury of the gallop. Just when she thought her heart would stop and she would dissolve around him and be no more, his fingers massaged her bud in escalating circles, his teeth sinking into her neck again, his growls a carnal current knotting her heart and core. And she detonated.

A scream welled from her depths, too frenzied to form. The next one would have but he caught it in his palm, gave her his flesh to vent her agonized pleasure on.

She bit into the side of his palm, over and over as breaker after breaker of release crashed through her, receded, built only to smash into her again, scattering and reforming her for the next incursion. The convulsions radiated from the deepest point within her body, which he caressed, spread in expanding shock waves, each building where the last began to diminish. Then he plumbed a new depth in her, seeming to impale her to her heart, releasing his ecstasy there. Feeling him fill her to overflowing sent her thrashing once more. She wished…she wished…

She regained lucidity with a jerk. They'd reached
al ain
. He was still inside her. The pleasure was a continuous flow now, a plateau of contentment. Her head rolled limply over his heart.

“You should have told me you won't just drive me insane, you'll regularly knock me out, too.”

He chuckled, a sound of profound male smugness. “I live to please.”

She shuddered as he separated their fusion. “And how.”

He adjusted his clothes and jumped off the horse, holding out his arms for her. “And no one saw us.”

She closed her eyes in mortification. She couldn't believe she'd risked that. He did drive her insane.

His smile became pure bedevilment. “Let's hope for better luck next time.”

 

There was no next time.

It was almost sunset the next day when she felt a bass drone reverberate in her bones.

In moments the distant yet approaching thunder became unmistakable. A helicopter.

Harres's people had come for them.

Their idyll had come to an end.

Harres turned to her, his eyes eloquent with the same sentiments. But he attempted a smile. “They'll be here in minutes. Do you want to leave immediately?”

She didn't want to leave at all.

She only said, “Yes.”

He nodded. “Let's gather the stuff the oasis people gave us.”

“I only wish I had something to give them, too.”

“You gave them far more than souvenirs, made a lasting difference in so many lives. Many told me they were blessed the day the desert ‘yielded you to them.' And you can bring them whatever you want later.” She gasped. Then he articulated her wildest hope. “We'll be back here,
ya nadda jannati
. I promise.”

 

In fifteen minutes, she was standing with Harres a hundred feet from the clearing where the helicopter had just landed.

Four men jumped down, walked toward them with movements made of power and purpose, not even acknowledging the brutal wind buffeting them from the still-storming rotors.

As they strode closer, Talia was left in no doubt they were Harres's blood.

Apparently Aal Shalaan men all descended from a
line that had originated the oriental fables of supernatural beings.

The men were close enough to be classed in the same level, yet different enough as to be totally distinct from one another.

But it was the man who'd been in the pilot's seat who captured and kept her focus. And not because she recognized him as Zohayd's crown prince.

Amjad Aal Shalaan had an aura about him that lashed out across space and punched air from an onlooker's body. He reminded her of a majestic black panther, perpetually coiled for attack, complete with startling, searing, soulless emerald eyes. And he had those eyes trained on hers. She could swear she felt her eyeballs about to combust before he turned his attention to his brother.

But that brief eye-lock had been enough for her to have no doubt. He was nothing like Harres. That perfect body housed a dangerous, merciless entity. No one got a second chance with Crown Prince Amjad Aal Shalaan. She doubted anyone got a first one.

For the next few minutes she watched as those male manifestations of the forces of nature descended on Harres with relief and affection. All but Amjad. He held back, his gaze on her.

She felt him slicing through the layers of her character like a mental CAT scan, cutting to her essence like a psychic laser.

Harres introduced the others, Munsoor, Yazeed and Mohab—the latter Ghada's reluctant fiancé—as the cousins who'd been with him for her retrieval operation. They shook hands with her, expressed their pleasure to see her well, if not exactly who they'd signed on to save. They exchanged with Harres dozens of questions and reports about what had happened since they got separated twenty days ago.

Suddenly Amjad spoke. “Enough with the reunion. You can all debrief each other, or whatever you do in this secret-service game you play, later.” He focused on Harres. “After Shaheen spent the last three weeks tearing the kingdom apart with me looking for you, he couldn't waste one more moment away from his bride coming to fetch you and has jumped back into her embrace. He sends his ‘love' from its depths.”

Harres's lips twisted at him. “You tore apart the kingdom looking for me? I'm so touched. I hope we can now glue it back together.”

Amjad shot him a look of demolishing sarcasm. She was sure a lesser man than Harres would have shriveled up. “The trials and tribulations of the oldest brother and all that. And then I couldn't let you get lost in the desert with my vital info, now could I? You can glue things back together yourself. Cleanup detail is why a man puts up with younger siblings.”

Talia's mouth fell open. Harres only hugged her to his side and guffawed. “
Aih,
I love you, too, Amjad.”

Amjad's gaze clamped the unit she and Harres formed.

Then he grimaced, rolled his eyes before leveling them on Harres disgustedly. “Not you, too.”

Harres only laughed. “Oh, definitely me, too. And I hereby echo Shaheen's words. I can't wait until you make it three.”

Amjad dismissed him like one would an insignificant annoyance, turned to her. Then, as he looked directly into her eyes, he talked about her in third person. “So what does she have over the rest of the women in the northern hemisphere? Since you went through them all, I'd be very interested to know what extra features she has installed that made you shed your sanity.”

Other books

Johnny Swanson by Eleanor Updale
Scorpion in the Sea by P.T. Deutermann
Madison's Music by Burt Neuborne
Dancing With the Virgins by Stephen Booth
Blur Me by Jones, EB
Stalker by Faye Kellerman


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024