The Desert Lord's Baby (Throne of Judar 1)

The emptiness inside her hadn’t hurt, had lain dormant, forgotten. But the wound had gaped with his reappearance, the loss damaging only with the yearning to be a whole woman for him.

He, as always, was the source of her agony.

And only he could make it bearable.

She grabbed him, tears splashing over him as she threw herself into the abyss of unrequited love.

“I feel so empty without you, darling,” she choked. “I missed you…the emptiness is too huge, fill it—fill me, Farooq, again please….”

“Sahrah.” He threw his head back at her invocation, calling her a witch on an elemental groan, his face twisting in carnal suffering as something seemed to shatter inside him. He plunged into her with all the force of the snapping momentum.

She screamed at the piercing fullness, beyond her capacity…tearing her apart…“Yes, Farooq, yes…”

But he rested inside her, possessed her lips in another exercise of abandon. She opened for his tongue, each plunge tightening her around his invasion in a vise until he growled, “Ya Ullah, so tight, so right…”

Next second, he was withdrawing from her depths.

The implosion was crippling. “Farooq.”

In answer to her desperation he hauled her around him, bit her ear on a rough “Hang on” that had her digging her heels into his buttocks. He stood on the bed, stepped down from it, strode with her wrapped around him to the dining table set in the perfection of their wedding night dinner, set her on its edge. Then he reached behind her and sent everything crashing to the floor.

His violence jolted through her with a jumble of reactions. Consternation at his disregard for the things he’d destroyed, elation at his impatience to resume their merging, and fright.

“The glass…your feet…” she gasped.

He plastered her back to the cool mahogany, had her legs splayed, a hungry embrace for his bulk, her feet braced at the edge. “The wreckage is nowhere near me. From where I’m standing, the only injury I’m risking is a heart attack at your beauty, ya jameelati. Tomorrow I’ll make an altar of this height and serve you on top of it.” He plunged inside her again, filling her beyond her limits with every power and weakness. She was master and slave. Goddess and worshipper. His hands roamed over her, following the twin suns of his eyes, exacting every intimacy as he thrust inside her in an escalating rhythm, watching her climb, arch, seek. The volcanic core of an orgasm built inside her again and he came over her, gave her his weight to writhe under, his mouth to mate with, his fingers sliding between them, stimulating the focus of need, unlocking the code only he knew.

He gulped down every screech of her new climax, making it double as he exploded inside her, feeding her convulsions to the last twitches, pouring the fuel of his pleasure on hers.

It might have been another day, another age when she came back into her body, still keening, her teeth deep in his flesh, her most profound thanks for the torment and the satisfaction.

He extricated her fangs from his shoulder, his smile feral as he withdrew from her body. Even lost in the bliss and stupor of postorgasm devastation, she still moaned at his loss, at the sight of his erection still in full glory, glistening with the mixture of their pleasure.

He yanked her up, slamming her into his chest. “Don’t worry. I’m far from finished with you.”

He raised her up until her limp body hung above him at arm’s height, kept her there looking down on him, half-fainting with satiation, still shuddering with aftershocks. Then he let her slide down his sweat-slick landscape, caught her lips. Just as she caught fire again, sought him, he caught her hands.

“I said I wasn’t finished with you.” With hands filled with cherishing power, he turned her, laid her facedown on the table, her bottom jutting off its edge, her toes barely touching ground. She discovered another mirror flanking the dining area. He’d positioned it for the best view of the next stage in her enslavement. “Now I’ll find out how many times you have my name written in that maze. Here’s one.” He bent, nipped the tip of her shoulder blade. “Two.” His blunt nail scratched half an inch beside it. “Three…”

She lay there, helpless, watching him own her in their reflection, play her like a virtuoso, loving the game he’d invented, loving him as he reclaimed her every response and inch, sliding gossamer touches down her every sensitivity, sowing bites and suckles, knowing, pleasuring, punishing her every lightning-inducing switch until she felt her insides charring with the beauty, the expectation. The frustration.

So there was such a thing as torture by stimulation. Possibly death by arousal. He had unlocked her multiorgasmic potential, but surely those megaton orgasms should be all her nervous system could handle? How could she want more of him?

That’s why it’s called addiction, idiot. The more you have, the more desperately you want him.

When she felt she’d shudder apart she cried, “Just take me.”

“Take you, Carmen? You mean like this?” He slammed into her. She cried out at the abruptness of his invasion. He withdrew all the way out then slammed back, with even more power, forcing a sharper screech from her depths. “Or like this?”

“Farooq—yes!” She clawed at the smooth surface beneath her, putting all her strength behind thrusting back into his assault. She fought with him for deeper, harder, hating the inequality of their positions.

Then he lay on her back, his hands around her, under her, completing his exploitation, stroking her, stoking her inside and out into another blinding orgasm. On the final shearing spasms he joined her, exploding into a roar of completion, his seed filling her to overflowing.

She lay pressed between now-warm, moist wood and warmer, moister living steel, full, fulfilled, wishing to remain fused with him forever. But he was ending it.

She felt him receding from her. In every way.

“Farooq?”

Farooq gritted his teeth at the tremolo of her call. At its power.

She’d again offered herself, made him forget his resolutions. To keep it about carnal pleasures and nothing more. He’d even demanded confessions from her. And she’d freely offered them. Ya Ullah, the things she’d said…

And he still had no proof he could trust her. Yet he had. He’d believed her every word, every gasp and scream and tear.

Then he’d seen her scar and he’d been swamped. By the depth of the blessing she’d bestowed on him, what she’d had to endure to do it. Everything in him raged that he hadn’t been there to hold her ala kfoof er-raha—on the hands of comfort and cosseting, his princess in his cocoon of pampering and protection. He’d wanted to develop temporal powers to wrench back time, go to her in her hours of need, absorb her pain and fear. He’d wanted to swear that next time he’d be there from the first second, for every heartbeat afterward. He hadn’t.