Moonlight carved the deep planes of his face with an even harsher outline. Even with the fragrance of the night-blooming jasmines filling the night breeze with a pungent scent, the scent of him clung to her skin instead. They walked along the walls of the small maze until they reached the famed fountain in the center, lit up by huge brass containers holding lights.
She had visited the palace innumerable times and yet had never seen this cozy spot in the middle of the maze. There was a sense of secrecy about it, amplified by her knowledge that King Tariq had had it built as a present to please his wife Queen Namani.
Galila had never told her if her mother had appreciated it or not.
But it was a beautiful, magical night—as if the universe itself were conspiring to give Amira what she wanted.
The center of the maze felt as if it had been designed for them. The tall hedges provided privacy and the water at the intricately sculpted fountain was a tinkling backdrop that drowned out everything else.
Every sense she possessed tingled with awareness of the man holding her hand.
“Why a nursing degree?” he asked.
Warmth spread through her chest. “When I was a little girl, my mother talked a lot about how she had always dreamed of studying medicine. She bought me this cute doctor’s toy set and we used to play... She would be the patient and I the doctor.
“I think she had just as much fun as I did. And then suddenly, she fell ill. I used to sit by her and study and then just like that, it seemed, she was...gone.
“I was a good student, made the top of my grade always. But when I broached the subject of studying medicine with my father, he was dead against it. Said I was destined for better things.
“Soon, Zufar and I were officially betrothed and then...at some royal dinner after our engagement, I told him that I wanted to study nursing. That it would bring a nice background to the various children’s charities I would be working with in the future. And that I needed his permission to trump my father’s refusal. That if he gave me his accord in that moment, I would never ever ask him for anything else for the rest of our lives. It was the only time I think he really looked at me. Not just this...placeholder of a wife that had been chosen for him, but a real, breathing woman.”
“What did he say?”
There was a strange intensity in Adir’s voice and Amira smile faltered. “That he...much preferred a wife who knew how to keep herself happy than one who ruined everyone else’s life. He...told my father that my education, my future all belonged to him as my future husband. I could have kissed him just for that.”
“Did you?”
She shook her head, trying to find again that fun, easy footing between them. An uneasy light came into his eyes whenever she mentioned Zufar. “No...even if I had, it would have been only from gratitude. Nothing like the one we shared.” She couldn’t imagine ever kissing Zufar like that. Ever sharing this sense of camaraderie with him. Ever feeling a fraction of what she felt with Adir even if she spent a hundred years with him.
Adir turned her toward him, his face wreathed in shadows. “For a woman who recites every inconsequential fact as if her life depends on it, a woman who looks so beguilingly innocent, you’re quite cunning.”
“You make me sound...wicked.”
He laughed, and the sound surrounded her in waves. “You took the situation you were handed and turned it to your advantage to realize your dream. It is a compliment, Amira.”
And because the genuineness of his emotion reverberated in his words, Amira went on her toes and pressed her mouth to his. She wanted his laughter and his compliments. But she also wanted to soak in the heat and hardness of his body. To learn what it was to be a woman who desperately desired a man.
She needed to be the woman who reached for what she wanted. This time, she opened up for him, like a sunflower turning toward the sun, trusting him to take her wherever he wanted. This time, when he devoured her, she was ready and more than willing for it.
The male heat of him surrounded her, his fingers moving, touching, digging into her body, waking her up.
She clung to him, to the raw heat he evoked with his wicked mouth, to the rough urgency of his tongue as it slid in a spine-tingling dance against hers.
His fingers buried in her hair, he tugged her face up. “I would love to be there on the day when Amira Ghalib decides to be truly wicked.”
She traced the outline of his lips with her thumb, the press of his lengthening erection against her belly searing her skin. “This is the moment, Adir. I want to be wicked. With you.”
His dark eyes flared with fire, with need. With deep desire. “Here, with me?”
When he pulled the jacket off her shoulders and laid it on a thick grassy bank, Amira’s heart pounded. When he turned her around and undid the zipper holding her long gown together all the way to the curve of her buttocks, her breath grew shallow.
When he pushed the dress off her shoulders and kissed a line down of her spine, all the way to the curves of her buttocks, she thought she would incinerate from the inside out.
And when he fell to his knees, when he turned her around to face him, when he buried his face in the flat curve of her belly, when he gripped her hips and took a deep breath as if to inhale the scent of her arousal, she gasped at the rush of wetness at her core.
When he slid his fingers through the thin strings of her panties and pulled them down, when he delved into the folds of her sex while his dark eyes held hers captive, when he licked the wetness on his finger with a wicked, all-consuming smile and asked if it was all for him, her knees refused to hold her up and she fell into his waiting arms.
If she lived a hundred years, Amira wouldn’t forget the sounds, the scents, the sights of that night. Of the night-blooming jasmine he had pinched between his fingers and rubbed over her belly as he licked her before declaring that no scent in the world could beat the scent of her arousal.
Of the stars shimmering in the sky overhead because he had taken her nipple in his mouth in such a carnal caress that she had thrown her head back into the grass.
Of the throaty sounds she had made, again and again, unashamed, begging whispers when he penetrated her with two long fingers so gently that she thought she would explode for the want of more.
Of the sensations that poured through her, like buffeting waves of the sea when he thrust into her—the quick, sharp flash of pain, the overwhelming fullness when he was seated all the way in her, the feeling that she would never again be whole without him; the sweat beading on his forehead and the tautness of the lean angles of his face; the flutter of butterfly wings of pleasure in her lower belly when she shifted to relieve the fullness, the tight friction that sent arrows of sensation firing in all directions when he moved, the building vortex of need in her lower belly every time he drove into her...
She wanted to drown in the pleasure their bodies created together. She wanted to give herself over to the moment, let him cast her about as he pleased.
But for the even more desperate need to watch his face.
Silvery moonlight caressed the sharp planes, etched tight with need as he thrust in again. The grunting sound he made in the back of his throat wound around her senses. And then when he looked into her eyes, his amber eyes lit with desire, Amira pushed up onto her elbows and kissed him.
He tasted like sweat and horses and masculinity.
“You want something,” he whispered and Amira nodded.
“I want to touch your skin.”
He nodded.
Amira sneaked her hands under his buttoned shirt, greedy for more and more of him. Velvet rough, his skin was warm, his heart racing under her fingers. She moved her hands restlessly over his chest, discovering the roped muscles of his abdomen she couldn’t see, and lower