harder into his assuagement. “Oh, she never said anything like that. It’s my own conclusion. You see, she’s always been morose, withdrawn. She does everything right, but it’s all…held back, as if she’s going through a chore, finding no…joy—there’s that word again—in it. When I learned about my real father, it made sense. She loved him beyond reason it seems, and was never the same after losing him.”
A long moment passed as he stared at her, his face a blank mask. At last he exhaled. “So you don’t feel bitter toward her? Or toward your real father for scarring her, making her less than the perfectly loving mother that you deserved?”
“I don’t do bitterness. What does it serve?”
“Indeed. So, not only a siren, but a deeply sane one, too.”
She coughed a laugh. Sane? Not that she’d noticed since she’d laid eyes on him.
“Is your real father alive? Do you now know who he is?”
“Yeah, to both questions. I found out over a month ago. And let me tell you, it’s been one hell of a roller-coaster ride.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Uh…I’d appreciate it if we change the subject. It ranks right up there with tearing my skin on barbed wire.” And she wasn’t exaggerating. If anything, she was understating how discovering her real parentage had left her feeling. Her world had blown apart when her mother had dropped the bomb that Francois Beaumont wasn’t her father—that some Middle Eastern monarch was. Then her newfound father, King Atef of Zohayd, had overwhelmed her with his happiness at finding her, his eagerness to know her— his long-lost daughter. And she’d found herself responding, liking him, waiting with baited breath for his next call or message. She’d worried about her eager reaction, wondering if she was desperate for a new father figure to fill the gaping void her adoptive father’s death had left inside her. But King Atef had swept her up in his excitement, soothing her worry that she was betraying her dad’s memory by being so happy to find another father. Then he’d come to meet her and had dropped another bomb. He needed her to marry some prince from a neighboring kingdom as part of a political pact.
And she’d realized that it had been another setup. Another lie. He was just another man pretending emotions he didn’t feel, saying whatever it took to get her to go along with his self-serving plans. She’d shut him and his protestations of sincerity out, kept hoping he’d find another easy way to put his pact through so he’d stop badgering her, so he’d forget she existed….
Shehab trailed a forefinger along her forearm, jogging her out of her oppressive musings before tears of letdown and heartache and guilt spilled from her eyes again.
“It hurt that much?”
“Actually, tearing my skin didn’t hurt that much.”
His eyes flared. “How? When?”
Her bones rattled with the blast of response to his intensity. “You mean the wound? Uh, I was trying to sneak under a fence on one of my father’s ranches and got caught on the barbed wire. I was eleven.”
“Where?”
“O-on my back…” She barely held back the rest, the other wound she’d sustained on her left buttock when she’d panicked and struggled to free herself.
“Show me.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a demand. A demand she didn’t even think of denying. She could only close her eyes, turn.
And his hands were on her. Spanning her waist, removing the cascade of her hair, exposing the dipping back of her dress.
His hands skimmed her skin as he searched for the healed evidence of her injury. She stood mute, unable to tell him he wouldn’t find it there. He didn’t need to be told. He eased her zipper down, the sound, the idea of what he was doing, what she was letting happen, almost making her keel over.
He traced warm, knowing fingers down her spine until they met the slightly raised scar above her tailbone. She keeled over then, over the balustrade, swamped in sensation. He traced its outline, and the tissue that alternated between numbness and aching fired with stimulation. Each caress sent lightning forking throughout her body, lodging in her nipples and core.
“Does it still hurt?” His fingers traveled up and down to the rhythm of his words, yanking the direction of the electric current lancing through her back and forth until she almost collapsed. She could only shake her head. Shake, period.
“Tell me you never hurt yourself again.” His palm splayed over her scar in a gesture rich with something far more disturbing than lust. Concern, protection. What she’d never felt from anyone but her father and Bill. And to feel it from him…
She shook her head again, heard a satisfied rumble deep in his chest before he ended his torture, pulled the zipper up. Then he clamped her waist again, turned her to him, bore down on her with his aura and hunger.
And she couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Had to be totally still, to watch him do it, take the first taste of her.
But he didn’t do it. His lips descended only to whisper against her burning cheek, “Ya ajmal makhloogah ra’ayta’ha, the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen, dance with me.”
Dance? Dance? That was all he wanted?
But she wanted more. He’d been right. She’d never imagined she could feel anything like this. Hunger that rocked her, frightened her, made her crave things from him she’d never wanted from another man. Things she’d hated from other men.
But he was only drawing her into a loose embrace, leading her into the first languid steps of a waltz. Maddening her with enough contact to inflame her more, but not enough to blunt the talons of need that sank deeper into her flesh with every move.
To her surprise, she felt her feet flowing into steps learned during her days as her father’s favorite dance partner. Then the rest of her body followed, as one with the rhythm, with his every move, with him. She felt grace and power pulsing in her arms as she wound them around his steel bulk, securing him to her. She had a feeling it would all end when the dance was over. She was taking all she could…now.
At one point, Shehab groaned against her temple, “You are the meaning of your name. This would be how a hooreyah, one of the inhabitants of heaven who brings total joy, would feel in my arms…” He pressed her harder to his length. “But, no. If those creatures do exist, they’d be nothing to you. With you, it’s like dancing with bliss, with passion made human.”
Laughter flowed from her, unfettered, delirious. She didn’t believe any of those things applied to her, but it seemed he believed they did. Why not, when she believed the same about him? This had to be what he’d said it was. Magic. And she wouldn’t think how or why. She’d just wallow in it.
Somewhere in her hazy mind she realized the music had ended, another piece had started and they were no longer dancing. He was leading her down the wide marble steps to the gardens. And she was following him, still laughing, ready for anything. She felt like someone coming out of stasis and now rushing toward the first moments of life.
He took her behind obscuring trees, pressed her against a smooth trunk, then took her face in both hands. In a rogue moonbeam slashing among the foliage, his face and obsidian gaze
