With that, they broke apart, and her father placed her hand in Shaheen’s. Shaheen hugged her to his side as he led her and their procession to their final destination, a gilded woodwork miniature of the palace—the kousha—where the ma’zoon awaited them, and where they’d sit throughout the wedding proceedings.
As they sat down on the silk brocade couch, Johara between Shaheen and her father and the rest of their family on either side, she exchanged a look of total love and alliance with him.
Then the ritual began.
Three hours of escalating festivities later, Johara stood jangling in the aftermath of it all in Shaheen’s bedroom, at his dresser, taking off the jewels.
He’d told her he’d wanted to take her to their home by the sea, or even fly them away and have their wedding night on board his jet. But the jewels were prohibited from leaving the palace.
She was completely okay with it. She’d been imagining being with him in this room ever since their aborted time together the night he’d come back to Zohayd.
He’d gone to inform their fathers that the jewels would be returned in the morning. When she asked what excuse he’d given for that, he made her wish she hadn’t. She blushed now thinking about it.
“Take your dupatta off, ya joharti.”
She spun around as the hunger in his bass rumble licked her back. She watched as he approached, her hands automatically rising to obey him.
As her dupatta slid off her head, he snapped his scarf off his neck, hurled it to the floor. “Now your lehenga.”
She obeyed again, at once, unable to wait to be free of her clothes and crushed beneath him, taken, invaded, made whole.
He covered more of the two dozen feet between them, giving up his cloak for her skirt, then his top for hers. She swallowed over and over at the sight as each move gave her a show of rippling strength and symmetry. Soon all that remained were her panties, and she gave him those for his sash. All she had left on were her three-inch sandals.
“This is the ultimate unfairness,” she croaked as he stopped before her in his low-riding pants and boots, a colossus carved by gods of virility. “You always have more clothes.”
His eyes crinkled as they swept over her, the fire in them rising, singeing her. “I wish I can take credit for that. There’s no higher cause than feasting on your nakedness.”
“You can take credit this time.” She cupped her breasts, trying to assuage their aching. “For everything. Today was beyond anything I ever dreamed of, ya habibi. The outfit, the thought behind it, the note, every last detail of this night, Mom and Aram. I have no words to tell you what your thoughtfulness meant to me. What you mean to me. You’ve always meant…everything. Now…now… No…there are no words. I only hope you’ll always let me show you how much I love you, as you keep showing me.”
She trembled with the magnitude of her love and gratitude, that he existed, that he was now hers, no matter how fleetingly. She’d loved him with everything in her from the moment he’d touched her. She’d wanted him even more when she’d felt his baby growing inside her. And now he was her husband. Her husband.
The knowledge made it all deeper, all-encompassing, turning her hunger for him almost into distress.
Then he put what she felt into words and made it much worse, and infinitely better. “Anything I can think of to show you my love, prove your ownership of me, will never be enough. I thought I wanted you as much as I possibly could before. But now, knowing our baby is growing inside you, knowing you’re my wife…my desire for you makes my former ferocity seem tame and my worry of losing control an easily curbed impulse. My mind is shooting to all kinds of fanciful fears, that our union this time, with us feeling this way, might take us all the way to the edge of survival.”
“So what?”
Her reckless challenge cracked his control. He dragged her by the hand, slammed her against him, breast to thigh. “So what indeed. How about we see what the edge of survival feels like?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, take me there, Shaheen, and beyond.” She slithered from his hold onto her knees before him, her hands worshipping his hardness through his pants, shaking on his zipper.
As she slid it down he whipped one hand to his back, snapped something from the band of his pants before they fell to mid-thigh, allowing him to spring free, thick and daunting, dark and glistening with craving, throbbing with control.
She’d barely taken him into her mouth, licking the addictive taste of his desire from his silk-smooth crown when he pulled her up, gathering her from the ground in one arm. She cried her protest and he growled as he saluted each of her nipples with a devouring suckle. She cried out again as another wave of arousal crashed through her, her core pouring its demand for his invasion.
“You always say it’s punishment, not reward, giving you pleasure without giving you me.” He pressed her to the capitoné wall beside his bed. “Tonight you get reward first, then punishment later.”
He made a lightning-fast move with his left hand as his right one secured her against the wall, his bulk opening her around him. She felt a sharp tug, heard a sharper click.
She tried to turn her head, to investigate, but his eyes caught hers, and everything ceased to matter, to exist.
Lava simmered in his eyes and from the erection that found her entrance. His hiss felt even hotter. “I want to invade you, finish you, perish inside you.”
“Then do it, finish us both…please…”
He rammed into her. All his power and love and hunger behind the thrust. He slid against all the right places, places he’d created inside her, abrading nerves into an agony of response, stimulating receptors for all the sensations they could transmit. Then he moved as hard and fast as she was dying for him to.
Almost too soon she started shaking, arched against him in a deep bow, hovering at the edge of a paroxysm as the world diffused, only his beloved face in focus, clenched in pleasure, his eyes vehement with his greed for hers.
She tried to bring both arms around him to hold him as she gave everything to him, but her right hand snagged, wrenched back.
She looked down in her haze, found it shackled to his left one in a gilded handcuff.
Just the idea—that he’d done this, bound her to himself, thought of it, wanted to show her how inseparable he wanted them to be, how mind-blowingly deep, how decadently wicked it all was… Her senses went haywire, sent overload shearing through her.
“I did tell you I’d tie you to my wrist, didn’t I?” he growled as he gave her his fiercest thrust yet and her body all but exploded in the most powerful climax he’d ever given her.