“But through the Aal Masood brothers’ intensive negotiations, the Aal Shalaans accepted a peaceful solution. That the future king of Judar would marry the daughter of their noblest patriarch so their blood would enter the royal house of Aal Masood. The problem is, after much deliberation, that patriarch was determined to be the king of Zohayd himself, who has no daughter.”
This kept getting better and better. Carmen felt twinges of hysteria rising through the numbness. “So now what?”
“They’re in negotiations again,” Ameenah rasped, as if confessing a crime. “Over picking another patriarch, I guess.”
“And once this happens, Farooq will marry his daughter, to stop the whole region from going to hell in a handcart.”
“Yes. But, Maolati, this won’t affect you, you mustn’t let it. You are the wife he picked himself, the one he loves.”
She burst out laughing, shocking Ameenah like she’d once shocked her husband. This was a prime example of sharr elbaleyhah ma yodhek—the worst plights induce laughter.
She’d been tormenting herself with all the reasons it would end, and now she was going to lose him over something she couldn’t have imagined. She couldn’t even be angry that he’d married her knowing he’d take another wife. Farooq sure married only for momentous reasons. His daughter’s future, now Judar’s—the whole region’s.
He’d marry another woman, come to her after copulating with that woman to produce the heir who’d avert civil wars…
She gestured for Ameenah to leave her, dropped her head to her knees, doubling over from the disemboweling pain. Jealousy. The one thing she hadn’t suffered on his account. He’d been with her alone before. He had this integrity. But now, if all she felt for him was compounded by marrow-eating jealousy, her sanity would fray…
No. The moment he took another wife, she’d retreat from his life, become Mennah’s mother only again. This meant one thing.
She had to take every breath she could of him, while she could, to hoard the memories for the nothingness ahead.
She pressed the dial button. Farooq answered before the second ring. “Carmen.” His voice shook her with the intimacy he made of her name, the magic, with the roughness that carried his perpetual hunger. “What does Ameerati el ghalyah want?”
Desperation rose with the mercilessness of a sandstorm.
“I want you, Farooq. Now.”
Twelve
Farooq tore through the palace, had people dashing out of his way as they would out of the path of an out-of-control vehicle.
They were wise to recognize the danger in the eagerness that rattled his bones. Just as his opponents had. None had dared make their annoyance known when he’d walked out on the negotiations the moment Carmen had demanded him. Another first that only Carmen could induce. His Carmen. His.
Certainty had been blossoming during the last glorious six weeks. Endless details, momentous and trivial, all incontestable, had reinforced the verdict of his heart. She was his. Had always been. Tareq had lied. She’d never been his mole. The only solid evidence of that had been the words of a man who lived to lie. The rest was circumstantial, with a dozen explanations now that he believed his Carmen would never do anything that wasn’t rooted in nobility and self-sacrifice. He had his proof in everything she was. He’d never bring it up, would never insult her with the inventions of the opportunistic pervert who’d claim-jumped her desertion, twisted it as he did everything to serve his purposes.
But Tareq no longer mattered. Nothing else did. Only Carmen.
Still…there was something about her that troubled him. Not him as Prince Aal Masood, but as her husband and lover. Something, an elusiveness, even through all her surrender and magnanimity, that stopped him from balancing the power between them once and forever. His mind had left the gravity of negotiations to ponder what else he could possibly need from her. Then she’d called, and he’d realized. This was what he’d been waiting for. For her to initiate intimacy, letting down the last barrier, trusting him unconditionally as he’d come to trust her. Did she also know that by doing so, she was invoking her ownership of him?
He stopped in front of their door, racked with emotions. He was ready to be claimed, body and soul, to relinquish all power to her. His voice, his fingers shook as he operated the door, posed on the threshold of the rest of his life.
He stepped inside and she sprang yet another surprise on him.
She charged him, climbed him, wrapped herself around him. He stood for a long moment, claimed, surrounded, deluged in her hunger, drowning in her ferocity. Then he staggered to their bed, his arms filled with happiness made flesh, made woman. His woman. He tried to lower her to the bed, but she twisted in his arms, made him change direction, take her on top.
He saw her then, rising above him, the flames of her hair scorching down on him, her body enveloped in another of those mind-messing creations that echoed her coloring, something semi see-through, stretched over her every perfection, showcasing her, hiding enough to send his imagination tearing through it. Which he would probably end up doing. He touched her and forgot how clothes where supposed to be taken off. But it was her face, her eyes, what he saw and felt there that sent his arousal shooting from distressing to life-threatening, catapulted his spirit on its first rocketing flight.
This. This was what he’d been born for. This woman. This being. This totality. This.
He took her lips, her tongue, letting her in, all the way, needing, living, being, in her, in their merging.
“All of you…I want all of you, Farooq…all…”
He drowned in the depths of her desire as she exposed him to its full measure, ignited fever all over him with touches and bites and suckles all the way down to the manhood he now knew had been created to mesh them together, to give her pleasure.
Then she devoured him. He let her, surrendered, spread himself for her to dominate, to pleasure, to drain.
His fingers shook in her hair, his body and heart in her power. After a life of sufficiency and restraint, of superiority, to feel such dependence was scary, transporting. Vital. He thrust his hips to her ravenous rhythm, sinking deeper into her hunger.
She drove her fingers into his buttocks, warning him not to draw away at his peak. “Give it all to me, darling…must have my fill…”
He had learned to give her this. He never had with others, just as he’d never foregone protection, both lines of intimacy he never wanted to cross. Until her, from the first night. In the past six weeks, she’d showed him beyond doubt there were no lines between them.