The Desert Lord’s Bride

with fantasy.

She should have known. He was magic. Better than anything her meager imagination could conjure. He was her mate. The one she’d believed existed before life had crushed hope out of her. He was the only one. And she wanted him. All of him. Now. Now.

He wrenched himself from her arms, making her feel he’d taken her skin with him. “Slow…I said we’ll go slow.”

“But I don’t need slow. I never needed…but I need you…”

“La, ya ghawyeti.” He caught her seeking hands, kissed them, crossed them over her heart. “No, my temptress. You’re overwrought, and this isn’t how I want you to feel during our first time. It has to be glorious, memorable. So we’ll take our time. As I said we would. I keep my promises, always.” He swept the covers over her, tucked her in. He walked to the windows, drew blackout curtains beneath the drapes, plunging the room into almost pitch-darkness. He came back to her, bent and pressed his lips to her mouth with such tenderness, tears welled in her eyes. “Now sleep, ya hayati. And dream of me.”

Six

Dreams had never been like this.

Dreams had been drab and nonsensical, forgotten even as they blipped their disjointed patterns over the gray landscape of unconsciousness. The ones momentous enough for her to follow, that left a mark on her memory once oblivion lifted, had been filled with replays of loss, of frustrations that would forever echo unresolved.

Now her dreams were vibrant and full of splashes of emotion and gusts of excitement. Blinding in clarity, transporting in delight, open fields of possibility and impossibility, where she flew, soared, right alongside her knight of the desert.

Now they were taking a new turn, for the tangible.

Pleasure rained all over her from warm, gentle caresses, spiced with the scent of maleness, accentuated by the rumbles of cosseting. She filled her arms with the dream, held on. It expanded, pulled back on a lazy purr. “It’s incredible to have you devour me in your sleep, ya gummari, but I’d rather have you do it awake.”

Panicking, she reached out to catch it, and in her alarm, opened her eyes. And something far better than any dream filled her vision, blocked out the world. Shehab.

She moaned his name. The most wonderful thing she’d ever heard or had on her lips. “Shehab…”

The smile he gave her, the indulgence he poured over her made her feel as if she’d melt into the bed beneath her.

He tickled her nose with a lock of her hair. “Are you awake this time, or are we having another sleep-talking session?”

“I love it when you tease…oh.” She stormed up to her feet, jumped over him and onto the floor. He too shot to his feet, alarm starting to form on his lips. She squealed, “Bathroom.”

He laughingly if urgently pointed at a door at the far end of the expansive room. She hurtled there.

After dealing with the emergency, she was thankful for the chance to freshen up. She’d never woken up with another person, wasn’t having any interaction with him-the epitome of mouth-watering freshness-before she was squeaky clean.

She was so acutely aware of his presence outside she barely took in the opulence of the all-marble-and-gold- fixtures bathroom as she tried to fix her appearance. Her self-consciousness at being all sleep-swollen and wrinkled increased when she came out to find him, a being out of oriental fables in an outfit made for the desert and sharing its hues and textures, propped up in her bed with his endless legs crossed at the ankles. The one thing that reassured her was that he was looking at her as if she was a hot gourmet meal and he was starving.

She approached him, feeling intensely gauche, her heart stumbling over a thousand insecurities. And incredulity.

God, she was really here. Halfway across the world. On his island. And he was waiting for her to join him in bed, an inexorable magnet when she was a helpless pin. Could this really be happening? She, Farah Beaumont, the ultimate misfit, understood and appreciated, hungered for by this man she hadn’t dared to dream existed?

She faltered, looked around dazedly. He’d opened the blackout curtains and light was seeping through the drapes, giving the room that dreamscape quality. How many hours had she slept? Not many, since sunset was around 7:00 p.m., and she’d gone to sleep as soon as he’d left the room, around 1:00 p.m…

One of his hands patted the space beside him, ending her confusion. She jumped there, curled into him like a cat.

“Now that was an emergency,” he drawled, amusement staining his magnificent baritone.

Just what she’d thought. She chuckled. “Yeah, which is weird, come to think of it. Say…” She sat up. “Don’t you have to go to work, take care of the crisis?”

“I did, for today. I flew out this morning, was in meetings and negotiations for six hours.”

“What do you mean six hours? How can you-this morning…?” Then it dawned on her. “God, how long have I slept?”

“Do you want the interval in hours, or in days?”

“Days!” She flopped back in his arms. “No wonder there was an emergency.” She sat back up, poking him. “Now stop making fun of me with me and tell me exactly how long I slept.”

Making a visible effort to keep a straight face, he examined his watch. “Considering you’ve been awake for exactly fifteen minutes and thirty-two seconds now, you slept exactly twenty-six hours, three minutes and…forty- three…four seconds.”

She poked him, kissed him, groaned against his lips, all at once. “It’s all your fault. I never sleep more than six hours.”

He surrendered to her, his hands restless on her back, his groans rising as her lips landed anywhere on his face. “I plead guilty. I whisked you away from your world, kept you up for over a day. I should have insisted you got some sleep.”

She drew back, ran her hands over his robe-clad shoulders. “There was no way I could sleep while you were awake. But you weren’t knocked for a loop staying up so long like I was. You even put in a full day’s work with flights and fights involved.”

He smoothed his hand down her hair. “I sleep little by nature. But with you around, insomnia will enter a new dimension.” His eyes fixed on her lips, pulling them by sheer will toward his. Just half a breath away, he whispered, “How about a ride?”

She pulled away, her eyes rounding, a hundred images crashing into her mind. Sculpted flesh, moist with exertion, hard with arousal, beneath her, around her, hands spanning her waist, moving her up, down…“Huh?”

He’d seen everything that had played in her mind, just as clearly as if it had played on a widescreen. She was certain. In response, his lips crooked at one corner, the roughening of his voice the only indication that reading her thoughts had affected him. “Do you ride? Horses?”

Oh. Oh. “Uh…umm…” She croaked. “Not since I got my scar. It was the last straw. Mom had a fit and insisted that Dad never take me to the ranch again.”

“The last straw, eh? So you’d given them one too many scares. But not to worry. I’ll give you my most accommodating mare to ride.” He dropped a kiss on her nose. “But first, something to eat. You must be starving.”

And she was. For him. But he wasn’t, for her? She’d thought he’d postponed making love to her because she’d been exhausted. But she was overcharged now. So why wasn’t he…?

He pulled her to him, buried his face in her neck, bringing her between his legs, leaving her in no doubt of the extent of his hunger, amazing her once more with his restraint. He groaned when she ground her core into his hardness, unconsciously trying to assuage the ache pounding there. His answering thrust felt as involuntary, riding what sounded like a pained rumble, before his hand on her buttocks ground her harder into him, stopping her from moving and maddening them both further.