longer, he slid his hands deep into her hair, he hauled her against him and he took control.
If the tent had ignited around them, he wouldn’t have noticed.
He simply lifted her to him so that she wrapped her long legs around his hips and her arms around his neck, and still he plundered her mouth. He angled his jaw and he took the kiss deeper, kissing her as if his life depended on it. As if he could kiss her forever. As if time had stopped for precisely this.
And then, when she was making those wild little sounds in the back of her throat that were more precious to him than all the jewels in his possession, in the whole of his treasury and all of his museums besides, he carried her over to the bed and laid her down on the soft cloud of linens.
He stretched out above her, pressing her deeper into the bed and taking her mouth again. And he kept on kissing her. He could not seem to taste her enough. He could not seem to slake his own thirst.
Her hands moved all over him as if she was learning him with her fingertips, soaking him in. He shifted, slipping a hand down to cup the sweet heat of her in his palm. He held her there until she moaned, and only then did he move, slipping beneath the lacy underthings she wore and thrusting his fingers deep into her molten core.
It was his name she cried when she shook around him, and Kavian hoarded that to him like another vow. Her voice against the night, brighter than the lanterns that lit the space around them, etched deep inside him like letters carved into the stone of his own heart.
He was filled then with a kind of wild desperation he’d never felt before. He needed to be inside her, or die of it, and he hardly knew what to make of it when he saw his hands shook slightly as he rid her of her little slip and those lacy panties she wore, then peeled off his own boxer briefs.
Nothing mattered but that slick initial thrust, so deep inside her they seemed more like one, and even that was not enough.
It will never be enough, a voice within him whispered.
And just then, he didn’t care.
He gathered her close. His arms wrapped around her, her mouth against his neck. And he rocked into her, slow and easy. A pace he kept even when she started to shift, to writhe. To move her own hips against his, trying to buck at him and make him go faster.
He laughed, a dark jubilation that seemed to come from every part of him, while she dug her fingers so hard into the skin of his back that he could feel her nails.
And still he held that torturous pace. A slow thrust in, a long drag back. Again and again, driving them both insane.
“Please,” she began to whisper. “Please, Kavian. Please.”
She was flushed red. Her whole body went stiff and she threw her head back, and Kavian had never seen anything so beautiful in all his life. He pounded into her, his own promise and his own solemn vow, over and over, like a prayer.
And when she burst into flame again, white-hot and endless, she took him with her.
* * *
The ride back across the hot sands was different.
Everything is different, Amaya thought.
She sat between Kavian’s legs again, with all his lean strength and male heat wrapped around her, hard against her back as the sleek Arabian stallion galloped so smoothly south. She couldn’t understand the things that moved in her without name, making her feel as if she hardly knew herself any longer.
The desert stretched out before them and around them, shimmering in the heat, immense and treacherous. Amaya had always hated the desert. The stifling heat. The sheer barrenness and lack of life. The profound emptiness. Its inescapable presence, vast and creeping closer all the time...
Yet that was not at all what she felt today. She wanted the desert to go on forever, vast and unknowable, as immense and beckoning as the sea. Or maybe it was this trip that she wanted never to end. And she had no earthly idea how to feel about that. About any of it. About what had happened out there between them, making the world itself feel altered around them.
It had something to do with how Kavian had woken her that morning, lifting her into his arms and then settling them both into a great tub she hadn’t seen the night before, tucked away behind a screen in the far reaches of the tent. She’d winced as she tried to move in the warm, fragrant water, and he’d made a low, rumbling sound that had not quite been a growl.
“Behave,” he’d ordered her. “You must let your muscles soak or you will find the ride back sheer agony.”
And she’d tried to behave. Truly she had.
But he’d been so hot and hard behind her, his strong arms so perfectly carved as they’d stretched out along the high sides of the bath. The hardest part of him had been like steel, pressed tight against her behind. She’d only shifted position once. Then twice, without really meaning it. Then again, to test the little thrill that had washed through her, before he’d let out a sound that had been something between a laugh and a curse. Both, perhaps. His big hands had gripped her around the waist and he’d lifted her up before settling her on him again, but this time he thrust hard and deep inside her while he did it.
He’d angled them both back again into their original positions, so she’d been lying sprawled over his chest again, her back to his front. And his hardness buried so deep inside her she almost climaxed from that alone.
And then he’d done nothing.
“Is that better?” he’d asked mildly after a moment, and it had been exquisite, to have him so deep within her and to feel his voice like that, a rumble against her spine, the tease in it like a drug. “I plan to sit here and soak myself, Amaya. If you wish to do anything else, you must do so all on your own.”
But even as he’d said that, his big hands, even warmer now from the water, moved to cover her breasts, sending a kind of delirious electricity rocketing through her as he cupped them, then brushed his thumbs over the tight peaks.
Amaya had tipped her head back so it had been cradled on his wide, hard shoulder, the urge to poke at him as impossible to ignore as his hardness snug inside of her. “I thought you liked to be in charge. That you insisted upon it. I thought that went with the kingly territory.”
“I think I can handle a single bath,” he’d assured her in that dark, stirring way that made her stomach flip and her core clench hard against the length of him deep within her. “Do as you like, and we’ll test that theory.”
So that was what Amaya did.
She’d quickly discovered that he’d severely limited her range of motion—but that maybe that was the point. The delicious challenge of it. She’d moved her hips in a sinuous, rocking motion that had them both breathing hard in only a few strokes, and then she’d given herself over to it. She’d learned the beauty in the sweet, slow slide. The lazy circle, all white-hot sensation and endless pleasure.
And all the while his wicked hands had moved between the tight peaks of her breasts and the hot center of her need, helping her build that fire between them, and pouring his own kind of gas on the flame. Until she hadn’t been sure who was in charge and who was simply reveling in the heat between them, or why such a thing should matter.
Until
