The Last Prince of Dahaar Read online

  He swept off the bed, and walked to the entrance to summon a maid for her. Stripping off his sweat-soaked shirt, he threw it. Utter masculine pride filled him as her gaze swept over his chest with a hunger she couldn’t hide. “A new image of you, habibati, naked and writhing under me, begging me to be inside you, calling my name as you come undone.” He smiled, the dark hunger he had held on to so tightly unleashing inside him. “I am going to make you mine tonight, Zohra. And you are going to wish you had never laid eyes on me.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  ZOHRA WOKE SLOWLY, her eyes adjusting to the soft light of the unfamiliar tent. Her limbs felt too heavy to move, as if they were filled with molten honey. Blinking, she pushed her hair out of her eyes and realized it was still damp from the bath Ayaan had ordered for her.

  Solar-powered lamps illuminated a tent that was just as luxurious as hers but much larger. Frowning, she moved to get off the high bed and gasped, feeling an echo of pain in her shoulder. She rubbed it just as Ayaan materialized on the side of the bed.

  His hair was damp, and he wore nothing but sweatpants. With a sprinkling of chest hair, the lean muscles of his torso beckoned her touch. She fisted her fingers in the sheets.

  Just the sight of him in touching distance, in the same bed, weaved an intimacy that tugged at her. His words as he threw her on his bed came pounding back and a tingle swept down her body.

  She remembered the maids coming in and pouring hot water into the claw-foot tub. And undressing her and giving her a massage despite Zohra’s objections.

  The prince’s orders, one of them had whispered with a smile.

  “Please tell me I did not faint,” she said, inwardly cursing herself. She wanted to add nothing more to the burden of guilt he already carried.

  “I think you like falling asleep in bathtubs, ya habibati,” he whispered and she breathed in relief.

  He sat in front of her, his face close to hers. And Zohra had to remind herself to keep breathing. His fingers found the sore spot on her shoulder. “Here?”

  She nodded, the rough texture of his tone a velvet caress. His fingers moved with long, lingering strokes, reducing her body to a mass of sensation. The tang of his skin burrowed into her blood. More than physical hunger uncoiling inside.

  She touched his chest, felt the shift of hard muscles under her seeking fingers, pulled herself forward until she was surrounded by the fortress of his lean body. With a sigh, she wrapped her hands around him, everything in her bracing for his rejection.

  Instead, his arms came around her and he held her tight. Her throat locked down, and Zohra squeezed her eyes shut. It lasted only an infinitesimal moment but his embrace encompassed everything he was.

  His fingers crawled up her nape, into her hair. She felt the press of his mouth at her temple, the whoosh of his breath over her skin. Swallowing her moan, she hid her face in his shoulder.

  “You smell divine, latifa.”

  She had no control over the next thing she did. She opened her mouth and licked his skin. Warmth billowed in her lower belly and pooled between her legs. He tasted of sweat and salt, like a hunger she had never known before.

  A tremor racked his lean frame, the race of his heart a loud boom in her ears. “I want to be inside you so much that it is a physical ache...” The naked want in his tone rolled over her skin. She tilted forward and laced her fingers at his nape. “But, Ya Allah, Zohra, after everything you have seen, you still want this?” He buried his head in the crook of her shoulder. His mouth was hot and wet against her skin, branding her, his touch possessive, even as he struggled with himself, with honor that was his very blood. “Because if I touch you, I have no will left anymore to stop.”

  Her stomach dived even at the thought that he might leave.

  The image of him with his head in his hands, his features wreathed in pure anguish—it should have sent her running. Instead, for the first time, she felt the weight of the duty he shouldered with pride and grace, understood the honor he found in giving it his all, the struggle he took on every day without a complaint.

  Because this was what he was born to do, this was his reality. She ached to be a part of his reality.

  She wanted to give him pleasure, she wanted to be the escape he sought, she wanted to be with him because for the first time in as far as she could remember, Zohra felt no struggle, no confusion, but the rightness of this.

  “Ayaan...” she sighed, wondering why her heart always had to choose the hardest path, “I am here not because this is something I have been warned not to do, not because it pushes the boundaries, not because I want to lash out at someone. I want this, I need this, for me.”

  She whispered his name again and again over his skin, the beat of his racing heart the only sound she could hear, his lean, hard body the only thing she could touch. She ran her hands all over his chest, loving the ripple and shift of the hard muscles at her lightest touch.

  Another curse ripped from his mouth, another shudder racked his powerful body. With his hands in her hair, he tugged her up. His gaze lit with the blaze of a thousand suns, his desire, his demons, his struggle—everything was laid out for her to see.

  He stole her breath in that moment and she had no idea how to hold on to it, how to stop from losing herself in him.

  He groaned, the sound weighed down with so much regret. “I have asked for it but I have no contraception, Zohra. And I cannot take a risk—”

  “I have been on the pill for a long time,” she said, a niggling concern rising to the surface.

  His gaze glittered with something unsaid, and Zohra wondered if the perfection of the moment was already fractured. “Ayaan, I know what—”

  “Shh...” he said, clasping her face in his hands. “You want me as I am, do you not, Zohra?” She nodded, her heart crawling into her throat, the tightrope she was walking between want and something far stronger blurring at the beauty of the man holding her, both inside and out. “And I want you just the way you are.”

  He pulled her up until their mouths were inches apart. Anticipation coiled in her stomach, her muscles molten. His mouth was warm, soft against hers, his control a strung out live wire around them. His hands were on her hips, as he licked her lower lip.

  Sharp coils of pleasure arrowed lower when he nipped it and licked it again. Demanding, owning, possessive, and this time without an ounce of control. He bit her, licked her and stroked her and did it again. And again. Until their breaths mingled, until their mouths fused, until the rasp of his skin was etched into hers.

  Breathing was something he granted her every other moment, and Zohra let herself be taken over.

  An erotic swipe of his tongue, a quick sweep of his palms down her body, a whisper of sinful promise at her ear in Arabic. Lost in a sea of sensation, Zohra sank her fingers into his hair and tugged. Pushed her body against his and ran her hands feverishly over his back. “Please, Ayaan...” Her voice broke on a needy sob.

  His hands moved to her shoulder, over her arms, his gaze hungry and intense. “I have no memory of another woman’s body, Zohra, no memory of feeling this kind of hunger, this kind of need to possess.” He licked the pulse at her neck, his breath fanning the flames of her own desire higher. “Do you know how much I have wanted to taste your skin, ya habibati, how much I have thought about you like this, how I would stand outside your door and try to remember all the reasons I couldn’t come inside and take what I wanted?” He sucked the same spot and she melted into his body. “I threw you out of my bedroom but the scent of your skin remained.” He brought her hands to his erection and she jolted at the feel of it. The pull between her thighs intensified at the thought of that velvet hardness entering her, moving inside her. “I have been without relief for a month because I couldn’t bear to touch myself. Because what I wanted was your hands on me, your mouth on me.” Wetness pooled between h
er thighs at the shocking eroticism of his very thoughts. She palmed his arousal and he jerked out of her grasp, his fingers clamping hers in a tight grip. “No, Zohra.” His fingers traced the neckline of her gown, and her skin snapped into life. “You cannot touch me until my ears are echoing with the sound of your moans, until I have kissed every inch of you, until I have licked you between your thighs...”

  Her breath balled up in her throat. His mouth moved along her neckline, trailing wet heat along her skin, kissing and tasting, winding her tighter and higher. The ache between her thighs flared stronger and hotter.

  She was so lost in what his mouth did, how it hovered over the curve of her breast, how his very breath seeped into her skin that she had no idea when his fingers had tugged the hem of her gown upward and over her head in one smooth movement. A cool breeze greeted her skin, and instinctively, Zohra lifted her hands.

  But his gaze remained lower and she followed it. Molten heat spread across every cell, every inch of her. Her panties were of the sheerest cream-colored silk, cut so deep that they barely covered her mound. And they had tiny white stones at the hem that caught the light of the lanterns hanging from the top and glittered.

  “I...” Zohra swallowed as he ran a knuckle over the hemline, a fierce rush of wetness drenching her. “My stylist packed my bags,” she finished lamely. He laid his palm, big and warm, fingers down, against her mound and Zohra jerked, and arched into his touch. The bundle of nerves at her sex cried for more. His mouth against her temple, he applied the tiniest of pressure with his fingers. And she sobbed, dug her teeth into his shoulder.

  “I told them to ready you for me.” He swiped his tongue along the seam of her ear. And she shivered. “Also, remind to me thank your stylist.”

  The roguishness in his tone was just as arousing as his fingers, and Zohra pushed into his touch.

  His hands clasping hers, he bared her torso to his sight.

  His eyes, darkened like a desert sky at dusk, roved over her breasts. Her nipples tightened into aching buds.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. The sound of his breath, harsh and uneven, pinged over her nerves and she felt a hot rush of satisfaction. “My imagination could not do you justice, Zohra. Do you know how many times I have imagined this?”

  She felt his fingers on the curve of her breast and moaned, the relentless dull, ache between her thighs turning into a sharp pull. Felt his abrasive fingers cup the weight of her breasts and jerked. Felt the tip of his fingers circle the tight, painful bud and shivered. Felt the wet heat of his mouth at the valley between, heard him draw in a deep breath, almost reverent. And she shook all over, her legs folding under her. But of course he held her up.

  His hair-roughened arms wrapped around her waist, keeping her exactly where he wanted her. Her breasts turned heavy and aching, her throat dried, her breath stilted, but he didn’t touch the tautened tips, didn’t give her what she wanted, teasing, taunting, until a sob crawled up her throat.

  She clutched his hand, ready to push herself into his touch. But he gripped her wrist. His breath fanned over her mouth just before he laved her lips again. “Open your eyes, Zohra.”

  She looked down and saw the blunt square tips of his dark fingers tweak one aching nipple. Jerking at the pleasure that arrowed right to her core, she moaned. “Look at what I am doing to you,” he said in a roughened voice that was pure eroticism.

  The sight was so compelling that Zohra couldn’t close her eyes even if he asked her to.

  He pinched the nipple, and her knees came off the bed. His arm around her waist locked her in place as he bent and sucked the nipple into his mouth.

  His name was a cry on her lips that reverberated around the tent, probably in the desert itself. Sinking her hands into his thick hair, she held him in place—a shameless request, a raw command, all rolled into one.

  And he suckled deeper, longer, until all she could feel, could see, could hear was the raw strokes of his tongue over the hard tip. Pleasure drenched every cell, every thought on him, every inch of skin quivering with need.

  He pushed her back onto the bed with his weight and Zohra folded, as if her limbs were nothing but sensation. He kissed her navel and downward, and she came off the bed. With a silky, golden-hued scarf, he gently tied her wrists before she could understand his intent. With a kiss on her mouth, he put some pillows under her head. “So that you can see what I am doing to you,” he whispered.

  Heat unlike anything she had known scoured through her as he trailed wet, hot kisses over the hem of her thong. Then he pressed his mouth against her mound, drew a shuddering breath in. The sheer fabric was no barrier to the sensations that grew within her.

  And then he was tugging them off her unresisting legs, spreading them wide, and leaning over her. “Look at me, Zohra,” he said, in a voice so heavy with desire, so laden with pleasure that it echoed through her.

  Zohra met his gaze and forgot to breathe. She fought against the ties at her wrists, the need to touch him, the need to return the pleasure a dark craving inside her. His fingers were featherlight on her inner thighs, his gaze lust-soaked, primitive, that of a conquering warrior.

  And then she felt his breath on the most sensitive part of her and he swiped at the throbbing flesh of her clitoris with his tongue.

  Zohra bucked off the bed, shaking, the pleasure that spread through her so acute, so addictive that her hips moved on their own. She cried aloud when he took another long, leisurely lick. A kiss came next, the image of his lush mouth against that quivering bundle shockingly intimate in her mind. He did it again and again and tight coils of sensation gripped her lower belly.

  She made sounds—sometimes a sob, sometimes a moan, sometimes his name, begging, whimpering, her head thrashing against the bed, her throat dry. Spiraling need pulled at her, pushed her out of her skin, building when he was there, fragmenting in the infinitesimal moments his touch retreated.

  And then he sucked at her core.

  Her orgasm rocked through her with the force of a sandstorm. She gasped for breath, the sound spilling from her mouth was erotic to her own ears. Waves of pleasure—acute, breath-robbing—drenched her inside and out. And yet he didn’t stop. His hands locking her hips, he continued stroking her with his tongue until he wrung every ounce of pleasure from her body, until she was nothing but a mass of quivering sensations.

  The aftershocks of her climax still tumbling through her body, she fell back against the bed. A shiver climbed up from the base of her spine and this time it arose from something inside her, something that wouldn’t settle down, something that asked questions she couldn’t answer. Keeping her tied hands above her, she moved to her side, a strange shyness coming over her.

  His face a dark shadow in front of hers, Ayaan pushed the damp hair from her forehead and kissed her temple. His palm moved over the curve of her hip, over her shaking legs, over her back. The way he cocooned her soothed something inside her that shouldn’t have needed soothing. “Zohra?”

  Her name on his tongue nestling deep into her, Zohra heard the unasked question and gave an answering nod.

  Unwilling to look into the strange feeling, she pushed her bound wrists toward him.

  He shook his head, pure masculine arrogance brimming in the golden brown depths. “I have never seen anything so erotic as you coming.” His fingers traced the curve of her butt, drew maddening lines up and down her spine. “I think I might get addicted to it.”

  When he touched his mouth to hers, she moved her head, although not before the taste of him seeped into her lips. “I think the entire encampment heard me, Ayaan,” she said, her lust-soaked body catching up to the niggling warning from her mind. “Is it—”

  “Nowhere near enough, ya habibati,” he said, grasping her question without being asked. Pushing her back into the bed, his body settled on top of hers. The hair on his legs rasped again
st her, the angular contours of his hips an intimate caress. He felt heavenly on top of her, the heavy weight of him a pleasure that rendered her mute.

  “Ayaan?”

  His face buried in her nape, he smiled. “Hmm...?”

  “I...” the words she wanted to say rose to her lips and fell away. Fear was a tight knot in her throat. This moment with every inch of him flush against her, the ever-present shadows in his eyes at least held back for now, she didn’t want to fracture its fragility, she didn’t want to risk another’s name entering it.

  She arched as he sucked at her neck, and then licked it. “I want something from you.”

  His grip on her hips tightened an infinitesimal bit. “Tonight, anything you want, ya habibati.”

  “I have dreamed of touching your scar, of kissing it, of tracing it with my tongue.”

  She felt the rush of his exhale between her breasts. In the next second, her wrists were unbound. And he fell back against the bed.

  She took in the sight of him, her breathing, raspy, shallow.

  His hair falling onto his forehead, his arms resting above his head, the contours of his chest narrowing to his waist, the hard, tight abdomen, lean hips covered by the sweatpants, olive-colored skin gleaming with a sheen of sweat—it was an intimate sight she hugged to herself, a sensual feast that would forever be etched onto her mind.

  Staying on her side, she ran tentative fingers over the winding scar, felt the puckered tissue. Tears rose in her throat and she swallowed them down. No, there was no place for sorrow in this moment either. “How did you get it?” she breathed the question into his skin, hiding her face.

  The tangy scent of him held her in place, the gentle stroke of his fingers in her hair rooting her to that moment.

  “They bound me with a metal rope that had several knots in it.”

  A matter-of-fact reply.

  She caught the sound of horror before it left her mouth. Sliding close, which rubbed her breasts against his side, she pressed her lips to the scar. His hands tightened in her hair, his abdomen bunched so tight that it took her a moment to understand.