Sheikh's Baby Of Revenge

Almost as if he had been trained in subterfuge in the military division of Khalia. Or perhaps the map of the Khalian Palace was embedded in his head, because he had known ins and outs through the lit and unlit corridors that wound down to the paths of the garden, routes that even Amira who had visited for years didn’t know.

Was that it? Was he a member of the visiting guard called upon as security for the queen’s funeral? Someone who traveled all over the region but never stayed still in one place?

Was Amira one of a number of women he did this with?

Seconds after the thought occurred, Amira discarded it. She didn’t really care what he did or how he lived. She couldn’t afford to. Not if she wanted to steal away this night for herself. Not if she wanted to believe that she deserved a few hours with a man who really saw her. Who admired her and liked her and was attracted to her.

Except for that shock she had glimpsed in his eyes when she had confided to whom she was betrothed, he hadn’t mentioned Prince Zufar again. Or the royal family. Only Queen Namani filtered into their conversation once in a while. If she sensed a certain veneration in his tone for the dead queen, Amira ignored it. What she thought of Queen Namani, however contrasting to his view, was irrelevant to tonight.

This night was hers.

So she let herself be Amira and she didn’t press him for any answers. Not that she doubted he would give her answers if she demanded them.

For all his charming wit and teasing taunts, there was a remoteness to him. And that was after coming up against that smooth arrogance of a man who knew he was an alpha among men. And also a protector at heart, for she had seen the fierceness of his expression when he saw her bruise.

“Cold?” he asked as she shivered at the thought and Amira nodded.

Instantly, she was surrounded by the warmth of his jacket.

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 where he was joined with her.

When she snatched her hands back, he smiled. And kissed her on her mouth.

“You like this?” she asked, desperate for more of him, just as he thrust in again.

He wiggled his hips in some swirly motion and Amira’s eyes rolled back. “Do you doubt it still, habiba?”

And then his fingers were at the throbbing spot where pressure had been building with his every thrust, and then he was rubbing and pinching in between his smooth thrusts and Amira thought she would die if she didn’t...

Finally she released a thready, wicked sound when pleasure beat upon her in waves and waves.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said in a husky voice and Amira’s eyes flew open.

And when he moved faster and rougher inside her, when he pressed a rough, biting kiss to her mouth, when he gazed into her eyes and whispered her name as his own climax rushed him, when the indescribable pleasure he found with her laid him out in all his vulnerability, stripping from him the arrogance and the command and whatever darkness that dwelled in him, Amira knew she had made the right decision.

This man was hers, in this moment.

And she had chosen it.

CHAPTER THREE

Four months later

AMIRA TURNED SIDEWAYS and stared at her reflection in the gilt-edged, full-length oval mirror standing on clawed feet digging into the lush carpet on the floor. Everywhere around her was gilt furniture and priceless rugs and...it was all a cage.

A golden cage from which she had no freedom, a place where no one even knew the real her.

Her hands went to the swell of her stomach, utterly undetectable in the voluminous folds of her jeweled wedding gown.

Her wedding gown...her wedding day...and she was pregnant with another man’s child.

Adir’s child.

The thousands of gems sewed onto the tight bodice glinted in the mirror. Under the sun’s rays cast into the room through the windows, the glitter of the gems reflected everywhere, even catching her in the eye every time she looked up.

At least they made the tears in her eyes look like an illusion of light. Already, her friend Galila and the maid she’d been assigned had given her strange looks when she had insisted on getting herself into the dress that weighed a ton.

But maybe she should have let them see the evidence of her one night of freedom. Maybe it would have been better if the dress had showed her growing belly.

Her father’s rage when she’d told him had known no bounds. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much the powerful connection, the status of being the queen’s father mattered to him. Until that night, when he had roughly pushed her and locked her in her room, she had always made excuses for his autocratic, even sometimes violent behavior.

What did he think Prince Zufar would do when he discovered his wife was pregnant with another man’s bastard? A word she hated with every inch of her being, a word her father had used again and again to drill it into her that that was what her child would be called if she didn’t marry Zufar.

Ya Allah, she hated deception.

Zufar had never been interested in her, but he didn’t deserve this.

Her father meant to force her to give her child away. Like an unwanted package thrown onto the streets. A stain on her reputation to be swept away...

A growl emerged from her throat, startling Galila and the maid.

Despite her father’s threats, she had made every effort to see Prince Zufar alone last night. Somehow, she would have muddled through the explanation about why the wedding needed to be called off. But her father had caught her two steps away from the prince’s private study where he had agreed to see her.

He had dragged her back to her room and backhanded her with such brutal force that she had lost consciousness. And by this morning, it was too late.

Prince Zufar had already left for the parade walk with King Tariq and would meet her at the hall where their wedding ceremony was to be held.

In every guard, in every visiting dignitary, in every man she came across, she had searched for those broad shoulders, that serious face. That wicked, warm smile.

She had searched because she needed a way out of her predicament, she reminded herself. Because she desperately needed to stop this farce her father was bent on having played out. Nothing else.

But there had been no sign of Adir.

“Amira...is everything all right?” asked her childhood friend, Galila—Prince Zufar’s sister.

Fear made Amira’s mind leap from one useless fact to another. “Did you know that the money that has been spent on the future queen’s wedding dress throughout history could have fed and clothed Khalia’s poor more than ten times over? That it takes three hundred days and twenty women working from sunup to sundown to create a dress like this?”

Her gaze concerned, Galila took her friend’s hands in hers. “My brother might not be...the ideal man. But he’s not a monster, Amira.” Galila knew of her friend’s father’s temper and she must think that was why Amira was afraid.

Unable to meet her eyes, Amira pulled away.

Galila sighed. “The maid and I will bring the royal jewelry. Will you be all right for a few moments?”

“Yes, of course,” Amira answered automatically. But ten minutes later, her panic multiplied.

Could she run away before Galila and the maid returned with the jewelry? On the way to that vast throne hall, could she claim to be sick and then steal away somehow from the palace?

The gems on the dress itself would probably pay for a few months of food and shelter. Although how far would she go weighing a ton and seriously lacking in energy? For almost a week now, she had barely kept down anything she ate in the morning.

Also, the extravagantly expensive dress would be a dead giveaway. Which meant she would have to get rid of it if she meant to escape without being seen. And to shed the dress, she needed to...

Hysteria bubbled up in her chest as she dipped her head between her knees.

She would keep her baby somehow, no matter what. She wouldn’t let anyone separate them.

Just that promise to herself gave her a renewed purpose.

She was gulping down a glass of water when the catch on the huge window rattled. She frowned. It was not a windy day. In fact, Galila and the maid had both noted what a gloriously beautiful day it was to get married and she had snorted...

Her breath hitched as the top of a dark-haired head appeared outside the window. And then a hard, striking face—a face that had haunted her dreams for four months.

The intricately carved silver tumbler slipped from her hand, the loud clang of it softer than her thudding heart.

Broad shoulders. Tapered waist. Hard, powerful thighs that had straddled her hips when he had stroked himself into her, causing such indescribable pleasure that Amira was swamped with heat even now.

Amber eyes. A cruel slash of a mouth that was incapable of infinite tenderness. Adir landed on the floor with sure-footed grace.

“Salaam-alaikum, Amira.”

She reached for the back of an armchair, blinking rapidly to clear the fast approaching tears. It was only relief. Only relief. She repeated it like a mantra.

Adir’s presence meant help. Meant she didn’t have to go through with the wedding.

Why he was here didn’t matter. He had made no promises and she wouldn’t expect anything. But he would help her escape. And then she could make a life for her and the baby, a life that she designed for herself, a life that wasn’t ruled by anyone else but her. Once she had settled into a new life, maybe she could tell him. She would not force this on him. She would not change his plans for his own life.

Maybe he would agree to visit her child whenever he was between assignments, or in the country? Maybe they could reach some...

“Amira?”

She startled, her mind a jumble of thoughts. “I’m afraid to blink for fear you’ll disappear. It’s not rational, I know, because I see you. My body remembers your scent—horses and sandalwood and...you. And yet the mind is such a powerful thing, you know? It weaves such illusions. I used to see my mother like that, months after she was gone. Hallucinations are caused by...”

“How much time is left before you marry your prince?”

She flinched at the open rancor in the question. This was not the charming, laid-back man she had given her virginity to. Something was different. Something had altered.

He wasn’t smiling. No, it wasn’t just the absence of his smile. He hadn’t smiled a lot that night, either. It was the presence of something else in his eyes today.

A dark intensity full of shadows.

A cloud of some intense emotion...resentment? Anger? Why?

He reached her with silent footfalls. His lower lip curled into a sneer as he took in her glittering wedding dress. As if she were nothing but a fake, tawdry imitation of what the future queen should be.

When his gaze returned to her face, that resentment smoothed out for an instant. There was a flash of that tenderness she’d seen that one incredible night.

“My father will arrive to escort me an hour before,” she said calmly before the hurt turned into words. “Why do you look at me like that? With such contempt?”

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