They brought him to his before her.
She gasped, swayed, then a hot sound of protest broke from her as she tried to pull him back up.
He only brought her hand to his lips and pledged it all to her. “Ana ahebbek, aashagek ya talyeti, ya noor donyeti—I love you, worship you, and more, my Talia, light of my world.”
She went totally still. Her tremors stopped. Her breathing. Her stare emptied of all but shock.
Then she shook her head. “I—I don’t—you don’t have to say that…I just want to be with you while I can…so don’t…don’t…”
He rose, gliding his aching body against hers, catching her around her hips and raising her up until she was blinking her surprise down at him. His heart quivered at the incredible sight and feel of the treasure filling his arms, his lips spreading with the pleasure. “I am getting good at getting you to shut up and listen. And yes, ya talyeti, I do have to say this, because it’s what I feel, all that I feel.”
She wriggled in his arms until she made him put her down. He smiled all his love down at her, willing her to read into his heart. But when the flabbergasted look in her eyes, the distress didn’t waver, uncertainty crept up on him.
Had he seen and felt more from her than there actually was? She wanted to act on the desire that had raged between them from the first moment, but that was all?
The unbearable doubt with all its ramifications hit him like a barrage of bullets in his gut. He swayed back under its brunt.
At last, he rasped the most difficult words he’d ever uttered in his life, “If you don’t reciprocate, just walk away, and we’ll forget I ever said anything.”
With his certainty shattered, the expressions that wove in her eyes tangled in his mind. He stopped trying to analyze them, too afraid to hope, too scared she’d end hope.
“You won’t take me up on my offer?” she said, slow and husky.
His heart contracted. “Not if you don’t feel the same.”
Suddenly, something he’d never thought to see in her eyes almost had him flat on his back. A look of unadulterated seduction, so hungry and demanding and erotic, he could swear he heard hormones roar in his arteries.
His arousal jerked painfully. And that was before she gave him a reason-numbing body rub with her hot firmness.
“Sure I can’t change your mind about that?” she purred against his neck before sinking her teeth in his jaw.
“Talia…” He growled his agonized stimulation, his whole body turning to rock with the need to crush her to him.
Before he could push away, her hands tangled in his hair and dragged his head down.
He knew if she kissed him, he wouldn’t be able to stop. And he’d rather not have her at all than have her in every way but the one that mattered.
He turned his face away, felt her scorching lips latch on to his cheek, open, moist, devouring. “Don’t…”
“Oh, shut up.”
Her aggressive growl ended with a sharp tug on his hair. Then before his overcharged nerves could fire one more impulse, her lips sank onto his, paralyzing him with their hunger, with their softness and fragrance and taste.
Before the pain of it all could travel to his core, shatter it, she moaned inside him, “I thought it was impossible, but I can love you more. You just made me.”
He jerked back, she clung. His whole system was going haywire from the mixed signals. He groaned. “You love me?”
She spread nips and nibbles over his jaw, detonating depth mines of pleasure and ferocity in his blood. “Down to your last pore. I’m sure I’d find even your cellular structure pant-worthy.”
The image her words painted, their import, struck him. And just like that, everything inside him surged with jubilation.
He squeezed her off the ground, held her up high, guffawed. “Only you. Only you would say this, my unique dew droplet. I did have to go fall in love with a doctor.”
She braced her hands on his shoulders, her eyes burning with desire dueling with challenge dipped in insecurity. “Of all the women you wade in, huh? I did hear the Guardian Prince was also the sultan of a worldwide harem.”
He put her down, caught her face in an adamant grip. “Only one woman for me. Ever. You. And I would say everything before you went to waste, but it didn’t. It did serve a great purpose. To make me recognize the certainty of your perfection for me faster, appreciate it with everything in me.”
She only nodded, her eyes now inundating him with everything in her. She believed him. With just his word. And she was making him believe, too. That he had all of her.
He now truly had the whole world.
He bent, breathed her in, angled his lips against hers. Then he sank. He felt life rush through him, passion cresting in dark, overwhelming waves, crashing inside him. Magic. And love. More. Adoration and beyond. His Talia.
“Talyeti, enti elli, wana elek,” he growled in her mouth, between tongue thrusts that breached the sweetness she surrendered with such mind-destroying eagerness. “You’re mine. And I’m yours.”
“Yes, yes…” She snatched at his lips, hers rising in heat. “How do I say ‘my Harres’?”
“Harresi,” he groaned.
“Harresi. My guardian knight.”
And he did feel hers. Owned. And delirious to be so.
He sank to his knees before her again, bunched her dress in his fists, raised it up in inches, replacing it with his lips, tongue, teeth, coating her velvet firmness in suckles and bites, skimming and tantalizing her, lingering and tormenting himself. Her moans echoed his groans, became keens, then pants.
When he could no longer bear it either, he exploded up and took her dress with him. She flung up her supple arms in a sweep of eagerness and surrender, helping him, urging him. He snatched the garment away as if it was his worst enemy. But before he could step back and look on the treasure he’d uncovered, her hands were attacking his clothes with the same vehemence.
She tore the abaya off his shoulders and down his arms. Then with him still entangled in its tethers, she devoured him, her tongue painting him in ravenous greed, her teeth sinking into his flesh in delicate bites, each nip a new lash of arousal. He lurched under the power of each one. Then she moaned, “You taste and feel as magnificent as you look. I want more of you, all of you.”
He roared. The pressure in his loins was becoming unbearable. He had to stop her, pull back from the precipice or this wouldn’t be the languorous seduction he’d planned it to be. Any more and it would be like a dam breaking the moment he thrust inside her.