open. Pleasure wasn’t subsiding, it was building, the screaming tension for release back in full force. He went on and on until she was heaving and keening again, in the merciless grip of an even fiercer climax.
Afterward, inside a body that was no longer hers to command and a mind she felt she had no access to, she saw him rise to prowl over her numb body, sweeping her with soothing caresses. Her eyes stung again at his generosity, his restraint. She couldn’t believe a man could deny himself so long when he was as agonizingly aroused as Rashid evidently was.
But instead of moving on top of her, he tugged her into the curve of his great body, stroking her quivering flesh gently, murmuring praise and passion in that voice that spoke to her soul.
“Laylah… the taste and sight and sound of your pleasure, everything about you—is beyond perfect, beyond belief…”
What was beyond belief was that he was arousing her again, when she suspected he was trying to lull her to sleep, too. When she’d thought he’d drained her of sensation, maybe forever. Now that her body knew what kind of pleasure he could provide, his merest touch and breath had it clawing its demand for his.
She twisted in his arms, wound herself around him, arms and legs. “You promised me yourself.”
Something almost frightening erupted in his eyes. His voice couldn’t hide his state, either. “Don’t pour more fuel on the fire now, ya ameerati.”
“I will if it’s the only way you’re going to stop worshipping me and give me what I need—you, inside me.” Catching his face between her hands, she rained kisses all over it before sliding to his scar, suckling and nibbling it in abandon, moaning against his burning flesh, “Come inside me, Rashid, arjook. I feel my heart will stop if you don’t fill me… now, Rashid, now!”
Those roughened hands whose touch drove her out of her mind and ignited every last one of her senses, tightened on her arms as he turned her on her back, loomed over her.
“My condition is reversed. My heart beats thirty beats a minute.” Wow. Now that was fitness! “At maximum exertion it reaches seventy. Feel it now.” He clasped her trembling hand to the pulse point below his scar. The artery leaping beneath her touch was doing so at much higher than seventy beats a minute. “That’s what needing to be inside you is doing to me. Holding back is taxing my system more than the toughest survival test.”
Her teeth caught at his magnificent cleft chin and nipped. “Serves you right for holding out on me.”
His lips twitched as he repaid her nip with a nibble that traveled down to her breast. By the time he was suckling one nipple with his fingers tormenting the other, she had tears of arousal pouring down her cheeks.
She dug discharging fingers into his shoulders. “You misunderstood my condition. It’s the same as yours. My heart will stop because it will run out of beats.”
Obeying her desperation at last, he rose above her, caressed the thighs that spread in eagerness for him.
Moving between them, he leaned his daunting bulk over her. “I will stop your heart. With pleasure.”
His sandpaper growl made her swoon, and her hands fumbled with his boxers, needing this last barrier out of the way. His lips tugged in approval of her frenzy, letting her free him. But her hands lost all coordination the moment she released what she’d been begging for. The sheer beauty and size of him was… was…
Her core clenched with intimidation, only to flood in a surplus of readiness.
All she could do now was lie there, open, panting, need tearing at her. “Arjook, Rashid, arjook…”
And still he didn’t plunge inside her. Holding her gaze with an intensity she felt would singe her retinas, he groaned, “Look at me, at us. Look what I’m going to do to you.”
His gaze lowered, taking hers with it to where he held his shaft in his hand. Then he leaned, put the head of his erection to her engorged folds. She cried out at the sensation, her back bowing in a steeper arch of surrender, her core opening to him in total offering.
Growling something indiscernible, one of his hands secured her buttocks while the other moved his shaft against her flesh, bathing himself in her desire. At each nudge, sensations shredded through her, tightening the coil of desperation more with every grind.
Soon he had her on the edge of unraveling again, almost but not quite breaching her. She keened, her undulations fevered, her breathing fractured, her frenzy complete.
Then, holding her by her tresses and by his tempestuous gaze, he growled, “Now look—at us, as I take you, as you take me.”
The moment she obeyed, he slid inside her.
The power of his thrust forged through her barrier, tore it apart, before his shaft stabbed past into the depths that yielded for him.
A scream welled somewhere deep within her, but it couldn’t pummel through the barricade of total shock to her system, to her soul. Everything inside her converged on the part of him that was embedded in her depths like a red-hot lance.
Time stretched before blindness started to part. Harsh breathing, inside her, around her, filling her ears. Her reigniting vision filled with his face. Dark, frozen. His body was bunched over her, still. His eyes ferocious in their focus, unreadable.
But the pain was retreating like a rushing out tide. In its place an unbelievable feeling of fullness was taking over her, an unknown mindlessness rushing in. Her body knew what it wanted. For him to move. To fill her over and over and assuage that maddening ache.
But he didn’t move. His gaze bored into hers until she almost screamed, this time in frustration. Why wasn’t he moving?
“You should have told me.”
Her teeth clattered at the way he said it. At the realization that she hadn’t told him she was—had been—a virgin. She’d been so far out of her mind that she hadn’t considered that fact. Hadn’t realized that was why his invasion had felt like it had ripped her apart until he’d brought it to her attention.
What did he feel about it? Concerned? Worried? Angry? Would he have taken her had he known? Would he stop now?
It was next to impossible to think of anything but being overstretched with his potency, invaded, delirious with the carnality, with the completion. She felt she’d die if he withdrew.
Then he was withdrawing, making her claw at him. “Rashid… don’t leave… don’t stop… arjook—give me…”
When he hesitated, her legs clamped around him, pulling him back into her deepest reaches. This time the cry that escaped her was one of exultation, of ecstasy.
She’d thought he’d filled her on that first thrust. He now felt as if he’d never hit bottom, as if he’d forged all the way inside her to her womb, to her heart. She trembled all over, inside and out, as if with the advance tremors of a major quake.
She arched into him, begging for what would unleash the sensations that would disintegrate her if they accumulated more.
His face clenched on what looked like suffering as he raised himself on his arms. “Stop… I’m hurting you…”
