Midnight in Arabia: Heart of a Desert Warrior / The Sheikh's Last Gamble / The Sheikh's Jewel

“Of course I’m thinking of you. Who else would I be thinking of while I am in your bed?”

He looked away, telltale color showing on his cut cheekbones. “I used to wonder.”

“What? Why?”

“You were not a virgin when you came to my bed the first time.” He met her eyes then. “I thought it mattered.”

Yes, he had, though she hadn’t known it. “If I recall correctly, it was my bed we used the first time, and I was as close to a virgin as you can get.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you think I’d had a string of lovers before you?”

“I preferred not to know details.”

Arrogant, possessive sheikh. Even though he’d had no intention of staying with her, he didn’t like to think of anyone else with her, either. He didn’t deserve the truth, but maybe she deserved for him to know it.

Six years before, she’d thought her innocence obvious and had only learned otherwise when they broke up.

“I lost my virginity on a bet.”

“That is … a bet …” For the first time ever, she saw Asad bin Hanif al Sha’b Al’najid lost for words.

It made her smile despite the topic under discussion. “For my high school years, my parents placed me in a coed boarding school known for its science programs.”

At least they’d cared enough to take the advice of her middle school counselor on that.

“Yes?”

“There were the typical geeks and jocks, though most of the athletically gifted were highly intelligent, as well. It wasn’t easy to get placement in the school and required high marks on the standardized tests.”

“I imagine you did very well indeed.”

She had, but book smart didn’t equal people smart as she’d learned unequivocally her sophomore year. “I was the bookish, shy student who didn’t make friends easily.”

“Because you were afraid to let them in.”

“Partly.” And partly because she was socially awkward.

He gently tipped her head back toward him. “I would have been your friend.”

It was a nice thing to say, but she couldn’t stifle her laughter. “No, you wouldn’t. You would have been one of the popular people. You couldn’t have helped yourself. You wouldn’t have even noticed me.”

“I noticed you in college and you had not appreciably changed by then I think.”

“True.” Why was she sharing her past again when he wasn’t going to be in her future? “Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s old news anyway.”

“Tell me about this bet.”

“The year I was a sophomore, the senior boys had a bet going on for who could bag the most virgins.”

“Bag?”

“Get in the sack … have sex with.”

“I see, and clearly at that age, you were a virgin.”

“I was. When the senior boy who decided to make me one of his conquests started flirting with me, I had no clue what was going on. It was only the middle of the school year, but by then, most of the students knew about the bet, so girls were wary of these boys.”

“But you are not a gossip and you pay little attention when it goes on around you.”

“Right. So I didn’t know. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I thought he just wanted to be my friend. And the funny thing? We ended up enjoying each other’s company a lot. He became my best friend.”

Asad winced. “Then you had sex.”

“Yes. Despite my naïveté, I wasn’t an easy mark—simply because the idea he’d want sex with me was so completely outside my thought process.”

“And sex would have been an intimate encounter for you, something you’d already learned to avoid.”

“You understand me so well.” She bit her lip. “So did Darren. We finally had sex the week before graduation. It only happened once. I didn’t like it very much.”

“He was harsh?”

“No. He tried to make it good for me. He kept asking me if I was okay. He wasn’t a cruel boy, not really. But it was my first time and I wasn’t doing it because I wanted him. I never desired anyone that way until I met you. I just wanted to be close to him.”

“What a little bastard.”

“No. Selfish and thoughtless? Yes.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know about the bet until two days later when one of the other boys in the competition came up to me and complained about how he’d had it in the bag until I won it for Darren.”

“The little prick.”

“Yes, he was. He wanted me to hurt, to know the sex hadn’t been about love, but in that, the joke was on him. I never thought Darren loved me.” She’d thought he was her friend and she’d felt enough betrayal from that, though they’d worked through it in the end.

“Yet you had sex with him.”

“He was leaving.”

“So you gave him your virginity?”

“I don’t expect you to understand.” Darren had, though. He’d known how hurt she was by the bet too, even though she’d pretended indifference. “Darren’s guilt was way worse than my embarrassment.”

“Don’t tell me you forgave him?”

“He’s one of my dearest friends.” Though they hadn’t seen each other more than a handful of times in the intervening years, they stayed in touch with email and telephone.

He’d invited her to his wedding and introduced Iris to his wife as the girl who had made him the man he’d come to be. That bet had had a transforming influence on Darren, changing forever the way he related to others and decimating the power of peer pressure in his life.

He’d told her once that she’d freed him. She’d told him he was an idiot, but knew deep down that in a way he was right. Only it had been his own deep regret at hurting her and the other girls that had truly set him free.

“You cannot be serious.”

“I can. Darren learned not to use people.” Iris hadn’t been so lucky. She hadn’t learned not to be used, not then anyway.

“You cannot be this disgusting boy’s friend. I forbid it.”

She laughed, finding the telling easier than she’d expected it to be. “Too late. And he’s no longer a boy. He’s an adult man, married with two children and working in the diplomatic corps.”

“I will see about that.”

“You will do no such thing. Darren hurt me, but he didn’t abandon me, not like you did. The boy who told me about the bet? Darren disowned their friendship.”

“He was quite the tarnished knight,” Asad said with heavy sarcasm.

“He apologized. We moved forward.”

“I too apologized.”

“And I’m lying here in your bed. What more do you want, Asad?”

CHAPTER NINE

THE question took Asad by surprise. Surely she knew exactly what he needed from her. “Your forgiveness.”

She stared up at him in silence for several long seconds, her captivating blue eyes weighing him in a way he rarely encountered and then said, “I forgive you.”

Could it truly be that easy? “You don’t mean that.”

“Would I be here if I didn’t?” she asked, again referring to her place in his bed, their naked bodies pressed together, her gorgeous red tresses spread over his sheets.

“You forgive too easily.”

“Not really.”

“Yes.” And why he should chide her about that when he was benefitting, he did not know.

“Are you saying you want me to go back to ignoring you?”

“No.” He wanted her to trust him and somehow he knew her forgiveness did not come packaged with that commodity. “I want you to take me into your body.”

It wasn’t all he wanted, but since he wasn’t sure what exactly that did entail, he didn’t try to enlighten her.

Her answer was to shift under him, opening herself to him, but there was a part of herself she held back, a shadow in her eyes that had never been there in the past. Probably inevitable considering their history, but Asad did not have to like it.

Her trust was no longer on offer. And only now did he realize it had been a gift he’d taken every bit of as much for granted as that stupid high school boy had done. But Asad had been old enough to know better.

He would make up for it and he would regain that part of their friendship that he had found so comforting, but had been too blind to see the importance of, six years ago.

If she could forgive the little prick who had taken her virginity, call him friend and mean it, she could learn to give true forgiveness to Asad.

Asad reached for a condom. It was time to join their bodies in a way she could not hide from, could not pretend did not matter. Not his Iris.

He had brought her to the pinnacle of pleasure twice already because he knew he would not last long. Asad had only known his own hand for sexual release since well before Badra’s death. It was not enough, especially now that he had Iris in touching distance again.

The idea of taking another lover, one that might betray him, or even worse, his daughter, had been anathema to him. Nawar’s needs had to come first. Leaving her in order to enjoy liaisons to slake his physical hungers had not appealed to Asad.

He guided his head to Iris’s soft opening, pressing forward into the heated honey depths he could never forget, no matter how hard he tried. Her body encased him in pure pleasure and he had the undeniable sensation of coming home.

This was where he belonged. For now, anyway.

Iris gasped as his body claimed hers and he kissed the sound right from her lips.

The baffling sense of coming home was so strong, once he was seated fully, he could not move. Despite the need clamoring in his body for release, he remained still, savoring the sensations that came from amazing sex.

“I will not abandon you again,” he promised with the full force of his Bedouin honor. “I will be your best and truest friend.”

“Possessive.”

“I am.”

“You always were.”

He could not deny it.

Her voice was strained when she asked, “Are you going to move, Asad?”

“You wish for me to do so?” he taunted.

The clenching of her inner body was his only answer, but her eyes demanded he listen.

So he did, making love to her with less finesse than need. And instead of being bothered by his loss of control, he reveled in it. This was what had been missing for so long in his sex life.

Primitive, ungovernable passion.

In this, Asad’s Bedouin heritage ruled, not the urbanity Badra had demanded.

His pleasure built like a volcano inside him, his balls burning with the need to erupt. He gritted his teeth, holding off the explosion as he did his best to bring his aziz to climax one more time.

Their mouths joined in a primal echo of what their bodies were doing, sweat slickening the skin between them as he thrust into her.

He felt her climax like it was his own and pleasure boiled up out of his cock with all the power of Mt. Vesuvius.

He shouted his triumph even as she continued to convulse around him.

He broke the kiss, still buried deep inside her. “You are mine.”

“Your possessive side is showing again,” she gasped out, not sounding like it bothered her in the least.

“I am a sheikh. What do you expect?”

She smiled up at him, her eyes filled with sleepy satiation. “Nothing but what you are. I promise, Asad.”

He nodded, knowing her further assurances that she understood the parameters of their relationship fully this time around should please him. But a tiny, primitive part of him did not like it and he was not at all certain why. However, the knowledge that she had no hidden agenda and was not trying to get anything out of him with her capitulation into his bed did something in the region of his heart he would have thought impossible.

It moved him when he had been certain his diamond-hard heart could not be moved.

Carefully withdrawing from her body, he rolled to the side and disposed of the condom. Then he pulled her close so she was completely wrapped in him. Despite the niggle of worry at his response to their lovemaking, for the first time in more years than he cared to count, Asad fell asleep feeling replete.

He woke hours later to Iris trying to leave his bed. She’d pushed his arm off her and was trying to scoot away from him without making a sound.

He slipped his hand back over her stomach, tightening his hold on her. “Where are you going?”

“Back to my room.”

“No, az—” He broke off before saying the word she’d denied him. “Little flower, you belong here.”

“I don’t, Asad.”

“You do.” And he set about proving it to her, claiming her with his body and words until she was sobbing her pleasure out in his arms.

Afterward, they slept again, but he woke her in the early hours of the morning.

She blinked up at him with question. “Time for me to go back to my bed?”

No, damn it. If he had his way, she would not sleep another minute in that tiny bed. “Time for a bath.”

“But …”

“Come with me.”

He led her to the cave his grandfather had never revealed to the rest of the encampment, the place Hanif had only shown to Asad after his marriage to Badra. The private bathing cavern for the lion of the Sha’b Al’najid.

Carrying a high-powered flashlight, Asad led Iris through a complicated series of passages in the caves beyond the chambers for male and female communal bathing. Whenever they came to a fork, he took the one marked with a peacock feather carved in the rock.

He stopped in a rounded cavern. “This is the personal bathing chamber for my family.”

“Nawar didn’t mention it.” Neither had Genevieve.

It didn’t surprise her that the sheikh and his family had their own bathing chambers, but there seemed to be an air of secrecy about it.

“Nawar will not be told of this place until she marries and only if she remains with our tribe after the wedding.”

Wow, okay. So, definitely a secret. “What about the rest of your family?”

Asad flipped a switch and soft golden light filled the space. “Only my grandparents and parents are aware of its existence. This was my grandfather’s true gift to my grandmother upon their wedding, his way of giving her something to make up for all that she left behind.”

Iris gasped, unable to believe what her eyes told her she was seeing. “How?”

“In the beginning, Grandfather used real torches to light the space, but I had a solar lighting system installed.”

She hadn’t meant the lighting, but that was pretty cool, too. It was the rest of the space that had her so amazed.

“How did he have the tiling done?” she asked in awe as she took in the cave that had been made to look like a five-star European spa.

The single hot-tub-size pool in the center had a mosaic tiled surround wide enough to sit on comfortably and dangle one’s feet in the steaming water. An ornate wrought iron handrail led into the water, implying steps had been added inside the natural pool.

The cave walls had been smoothed and tiled with another mosaic of Eastern colors and design, a giant peacock centered on the wall opposite the cavern opening. Ornate marble benches graced the area between the wall and two sides of the pool. And on either side of the opening, there were six-feet-high wrought iron shelving units stocked with fluffy Turkish towels, robes and every bathing necessity and luxury Iris could have imagined.

And even some she wouldn’t have.

There was even a fully tiled oversize shower stall off to one side. With no door, or curtain, it was clearly intended to be used in luxurious privacy.

“How … the shower … it’s not possible.”

Asad smiled, pride gleaming in his espresso gaze. “For a Bedouin man with an engineering degree, such things are possible indeed.”

“Your grandfather has a degree in engineering?” she asked, feeling more and more like Alice having dropped through the rabbit hole.

Asad nodded. “I told you he’d gone to university in Europe. Many of the modern improvements in our camp are of Grandfather’s making.”

“He is an amazing man.” Just like his grandson.

“He is.”

“He acts like he knows only the way of the desert tradition.”

“Because at heart, he is that man, but he is more than that, as well.”

“Just as you are.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for bringing me here.” She didn’t really understand why Asad had decided to share his family’s private oasis with her, but it touched her that he had.

He shrugged, looked pained and then said, “It is what a dear and truest friend would do.”

“Ah, so you’re still lobbying for that position.”

“It would seem I am,” he said, sounding a little surprised by that fact himself.

She smiled, not minding in the least. Not when it had such results. She was a woman like any other in this respect … she wasn’t about to turn down the opportunity for a bit of pampering.

“It’s really wonderful,” she said, letting her appreciation of both his grandfather’s and Asad’s achievements show in her voice.

“It is indeed.” He placed his hands on her shoulders, his expression turning carnal. “Shall we take advantage of the amenities?”

“Yes. Definitely, yes.” Dropping her bag with the clean clothes she’d thought she would don after bathing in the communal chamber, she stripped quickly.

She’d never been shy around him, not even in the beginning. Which had always confused her. She’d thought it meant he was the one for her; now she knew he simply brought out the wanton no other man would probably ever meet.

“Beautiful,” he said in a husky tone she knew well.

She spun to face him, not in the least surprised to find him watching her. He’d used to watch her all the time, and not just when she was naked. He liked to watch her sleep, to work, to read, to study … doing just about anything.

It used to charm her; she realized it still did. “You like what you see?”

“You know I do.”

“Maybe I need you to show me again.” She ruthlessly pressed down the guilt at the prospect of getting a late start on her day.

Because with that look in Asad’s dark gaze, she knew the last thing she was in for was a quickie.

But Sheikh Hakim had been fine with her taking a full day off simply to get welcomed by the Sha’b Al’najid; a few hours more today wasn’t going to make a huge difference in how quickly she got her survey and reports done.

That was her story anyway, and she was sticking to it.

“You need more evidence of how very desirable I find you, my little flower?” he asked, his hands reaching out to tease at her breasts, caress her belly and then dip between her legs.

She moaned, letting her head fall back and just enjoyed his touch for several pleasure-filled moments.

Then she began undressing him, a small tremor of desire in her fingers. “Define need.”

All humor drained from his features, leaving a look of such intensity it took her breath away. “What I feel for you.”

“Asad …” She tipped her head back again, this time offering her lips.

With a strangled sound he yanked her toward him and took her mouth in a searing kiss. He swept his tongue inside, dueling with hers, tasting her, letting her taste him.

After a night filled with lovemaking, he kissed her as if he had been starved for it.

Needing to feel his naked skin against hers, she scrabbled at his thobe, yanking the traditional garment up and over his head, whimpering when that meant breaking their kiss, and going right back to it when the material was out of the way.

She twined her hands behind his neck, pressing her body against his, her already-excited nipples, tender from all his ministrations the night before rubbing against the silky curls on his chest.

She moaned in pleasure at this caress that had always been one of her favorites. Though she liked it even better with his chest hair left to grow naturally. There was just something so wild about her body taking pleasure from his and knowing how much he liked her to do so. Knowing that he was getting every bit as turned on as she was, the need between them growing like an out-of-control tornado.

His hands moved down her body with swift, sure movements to cup her bottom, and then he lifted her so his already-hardened flesh brushed against the apex of her thighs.

Needy sounds filled the steamy air around them, so like six years ago and yet so different. He was stronger now. His reactions were even more primal than they used to be, as if he’d stopped attempting to rein himself in. And she loved that.

She was more aware of what the world of sex had to offer and … not to offer. Innocent embarrassment at her own desires was a thing of the past. She knew how magical this was now, how much she would miss it when it was gone—so she reveled in every second, every breath and touch.

Even the hunger between them was both familiar and altogether different. It was so much stronger now, though she never would have believed that possible. Her craving for him was an ache inside her, but his want was out there for both of them to see and wholly undeniable. He had made love to her short hours before, but the urgency in his touch was as if they had yet to reach their first orgasm.

She felt movement and then her back against the cool tile of the wall. His grip shifted so that he had her thighs over his forearms, her legs spread, her sex open to him.

He pressed against her, but waited as if asking if this was what she wanted. She tilted her hips and pressed down, taking the tip of his engorged sex inside stretched and swollen tissues unused to so much activity.

It didn’t hurt; she was experiencing too much pleasure for that, but she felt it. Felt her body stretch to accommodate him, felt the slide of his hard-on against her inner walls, filling her in a way only he could do.

He tilted her just enough so that his head rubbed against her G-spot on both the pull and push of every thrust of his hips.

Ecstasy built inside her one electric jolt at a time until she was writhing against him as he possessed her. She couldn’t think, could barely breathe. It was too much and not enough.

He knew. He always knew.

He swiveled his hips, grinding against her sweet spot with his pelvic bone and she shattered. She was barely aware as he shouted out his own release, his hot essence filling her core.

And if a ridiculous wish that she didn’t have the uterine insert played through her mind, no one else ever need know.

She’d given up her dreams of babies and her own family when he’d walked out of her life six years ago. So, the dream wasn’t quite as dead as she believed. That was a weakness she would forgive herself.

They stayed like that, connected against the wall, for several long moments, the only sound their harsh breathing. Eventually, he made noise that could have been approval or something else, she was too out of it herself to really tell.

But it was followed by him carrying her to the shower and she realized the sound might even have been words. They bathed each other with the delicious-smelling soap Genevieve was so partial to.

They were soaking in the hot spring pool when Asad said with all the seriousness and more chagrin than she’d ever witnessed in him, “I forgot the condom.”

Only then did she realize she hadn’t told him she was covered for birth control.

“Are you clean?” she asked softly, aware that pregnancy wasn’t the only thing a modern woman had to worry about when having sex.

She sincerely doubted he was a reckless lover, but he had forgotten the condom when he didn’t realize she could not get pregnant.

He stared at her in confusion for several seconds before understanding dawned in his brown gaze and he growled, “I am not diseased.”

“I’m not trying to offend you. It was a legitimate question.”

“So you say. I say we have a much more serious worry to consider here.”

“No, we don’t.”

“You are on the pill?” He looked astonished by the idea.

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