And then, impossibly, Sterling McRae blushed.
Bright red. As if, Rihad thought in total fascination, she was entirely innocent. As if this was her first time.
But that was crazy.
Still, once the thought was there, Rihad couldn’t seem to keep himself from indulging it. He’d wanted to lose himself in her, pound them both into delirious oblivion with all the pent-up need that had haunted his every thought of her for months now—but instead, he slowed down. He took his time.
He treated her like the virgin she couldn’t possibly be.
He kissed her everywhere he could see that flushed red skin, until the rosy glow she wore was for another reason entirely. He set a slow, lazy pace, easy and wicked at once, making sure that each time he slid away she clung to him a little more, then pulled him back to her a little harder. He used his mouth and his hands, his teeth and his voice, until she was writhing against him, mindless and moaning, just the way he’d wanted her.
Then he reached down, pressed hard against the center of her need and sent her flying.
And it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. So damned beautiful it hurt—and he wasn’t done.
When she came back to herself, panting and dazed, he went a little bit faster, a little bit harder. He held her where he wanted her and took her until that made her cry out, then splinter all over again, and that time, he went with her.
But he was in no doubt, even then.
Sterling was a virgin.
Or had been one anyway, before she’d entered this pool.
And now she was his.
* * *
Rihad was unusually quiet when he climbed from the pool and then pulled her out behind him, but Sterling was still floating off in the clouds somewhere, too lost in the sensations still storming through her body to care.
He lifted her up and swung her into his arms, then carried her over the sands to his tent, not seeming to notice that he was still in his soaking wet clothes. He shouldered his way inside, where Sterling blinked in the softly lit interior until her eyes adjusted. When they did, she had to bite back a gasp.
Because it was like walking into a dream. Where her tent was like a desert rendition of a high-end hotel room, Rihad’s was something else entirely. It was a pageant of scarlet and gold, from the wide bed on its magnificent, kingly platform to the seating areas, some with pillows on the floor arrayed around what looked like a fireplace, some with wide, inviting couches, some set carefully around what looked like a personal library. There were jeweled chests and thick rugs, tapestries and ornate screens to mark off separate areas, and it felt like all the half-formed fantasies Sterling had ever had about distant harems and the harshly beguiling men who ruled over them.
And he was far better than any fantasy she’d ever had, she knew now. Even the ones she’d had about him, little, though, she’d wanted to admit that to herself.
Rihad still didn’t speak.
He stalked across the room and disappeared behind one of the screens, into what Sterling assumed was his own bathroom suite. She stood where she was, dripping onto the priceless carpet like a drowned thing, and when he returned, his face was set into an expression she couldn’t begin to work out. And his gaze was so fierce she couldn’t look at him directly—though that was not exactly a hardship, she thought, as her eyes dropped from his. He’d stripped off his wet clothes and was starkly, proudly naked, striding toward her as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to do so.
She supposed it was. Even she understood that nudity was commonly a part of the whole sex thing.
The whole sex thing that you’ve now done, she reminded herself, still more than a little dazed by it. The act itself and the fact that she’d slipped across a kind of internal boundary line while she’d been shattering apart in Rihad’s arms.
It was over. Virginity dispensed with quickly and efficiently, and the best part was, Rihad was none the wiser. No awkward conversations filled with explanations and confessions, no accusations of being a great big freak of nature—all the things she’d always feared would happen if she ever got around to this hadn’t happened with Rihad.
And she was still so turned on, still so hungry for him, that she shook.
He picked her up again, as if she was as light as a doll—or as if she was utterly his, a thought that was so electrifying it burst inside of her like pain—and she should have protested that, but she didn’t. This time, he set her down on the high, wide platform step next to the bed and set about peeling her bikini all the way from her body, his hands like hot brands where the wet material had chilled her skin.
He produced a towel from somewhere and dried her off, carefully and thoroughly, and before he was done she was restless and needy all over again, moving from foot to foot when he crouched down before her—
And he knew it, she realized, when he glanced up at her, his eyes glittering darkly and that lush mouth of his in a crooked curve.
Her breath left her in a rush.
Rihad wrapped his hands around her hips and lifted her, then tipped her back so she sprawled out on the high bed before him. Then he folded up her knees and held her there with those too-strong hands of his, all of her aching lower body open to him. He looked at her for a smoldering moment, then leaned down and licked his way deep into her heat.
Sterling made a sound that could only be described as a scream.
And he took his damned time, all over again. He tasted every contour, every fold. He took her femininity as relentlessly and totally as he’d taken her mouth, and she was burning up for him so quickly, so deliriously, that she had the wild thought that she might not survive it.
He laughed against the core of her and it went through her like lightning, and then once more, he threw her off the side of the planet into that sweet, hot oblivion.
This time, when she came back to him he’d crawled up over her on the bed. He lined up that hard, proud length with her most sensitive flesh and, when she gasped out his name, pushed in deep.
It was different this time. Darker, hotter.
Harder.
She felt the wave snap back, then swell, and she tossed her head against the bed, as afraid of what was coming as she was desperate for it.
“Beg me,” he ordered her harshly against her ear as he held himself over her, and it was like its own caress, rough and wild.
And she didn’t think. She didn’t argue.
She obeyed. She begged.
And it made it that much better.
Hotter. Sweeter.
Rihad pistoned in and out of her, making her a creature she’d never imagined she could be. She tore at him. She scratched him. She pleaded with him and he laughed, and that made her plead all the more. She writhed and she held on, she met each hard thrust as if she’d been made for this. For him. As if she’d waited all this
