To Tame a Sheikh / His Thirty-Day Fiancée: To Tame a Sheikh

Finding both hot and molten, he growled his surrender at last, sank into her in one forceful thrust.

She’d been certain it wouldn’t hurt, that she was ready.

But she couldn’t have been ready for this. For him.

And it wasn’t only her untried body. She was sure experience wouldn’t have helped her withstand the first invasion of his girth and length.

It was on the second thrust that he seemed to realize. Why the first had taken such force, found such resistance, why her cry had been so sharp, why her body was so tense and trembling.

He froze. Shock rippled over his face. At last he choked out, “You’re a virgin?”

“It’s okay … I’m okay. Don’t stop … please, Shaheen, don’t stop.”

“B’Ellahi!” he rasped, tried to pull out of her.

She clamped her quaking legs over his hips, stopping him from exiting her body.

“Stop, Gemma!” he growled, resisting her. “I’m hurting you.”

“Yes.” This made him heave up, his eyes horrified. She only clung harder to him, arms and legs and core. “And the pain is nothing compared to how you feel inside me, is making it all the more … intense. I feel you … branding me. Please … you said you wouldn’t hold back.”

“This was before I knew you were …!” He shook his head, his disbelief and bewilderment rising. “Ya Ullah, I’m your first.”

“Are you … disappointed?”

“Disappointed? Try flabbergasted, overwhelmed. Ya Ullah.”

Mortification flooded her. Her limbs relinquished their hold on him. “I should have told you. It wasn’t a conscious decision not to … but you have no reason to believe that …” She swallowed the weeping jag that was building behind the barrier of her throat. “Let me up. I’ll go and you’ll never—”

He slid deeper into her, gentler, slower, his eyes heating again. “Does this feel like I’m sorry I’m your first? I already knew you were the biggest gift I’d ever received. But now you’ve bestowed this on me, and the gift is even bigger. I wish I could offer you something of the same magnitude.”

“You are giving me the biggest gift, too.” Tears were overtaking her. And that would spoil everything. Her lips trembled with what she hoped approximated teasing. “Figuratively and literally.” He inhaled sharply, grew even bigger inside her. Even through the burning, she thrust her hips upward, engulfing more of his erection. “So if you really want to give me a gift, don’t hold back. Give me all of you.”

“You do want a raving lunatic all over you, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, please.”

“You say, yes, please, and everything insides me snaps,” he growled as he rose, cupped her hips in his hands, tilted her and thrust himself to the hilt inside her. It was overwhelming, being stretched by him, being full of him, beyond her capacity.

He withdrew, and she cried out at the loss, urged him to sink back into her. He resisted her squirming pleas for a moment, his shaft resting at her entrance before he sank slowly back inside her.

She cried out a hot gust of passion, opening wider for him. He watched her, gauging her reactions, adjusting his movements to her every gasp and grimace, waiting for the pleasure to submerge the pain before he let her really have all of him, before he quickened his pace. All through, he kept her at fever pitch, caressing her all over, suckling her breasts, draining her lips, raining wonder over her.

Then he groaned into her lips, “Glorious, ya galbi, inside and out, literally and figuratively. Everything about you, with you.”

She keened as her depths started to ripple around him. As if he knew, he tilted her, angled his thrusts, and snapped the coil of tension inside her. Convulsion after convulsion squeezed shrieks out of her, clamped her tight around him, inside and out.

Only then did he let go, a moment she’d replay in her memory forever. The sight and feel of him as he surrendered inside her to the ecstasy that union with her brought him. She peaked again as he threw his head back on a roar of pleasure, as the heat of his release surged into her womb until she felt filled, never to be empty again.

Shaking with aftershocks, she whimpered as he moved, needing him to come down on top of her. He swept her around instead, took her over him, careful not to jar her, to remain inside her.

She lay on top of him, the biggest part of her soul, satiated in ways she couldn’t have imagined, in perfect peace for the first time in her life.

As he encompassed her in caresses and murmurs of appreciation, awe overtook her at everything that had happened tonight.

Then he made it infinitely better.

He shifted, brought her to her side facing him, kissed her deeply, leisurely, then whispered into her lips, “This was, hands down, the best thing that has ever happened to me. You are.”

She believed he meant it.

But he wasn’t free to mean it.

The knowledge expanded inside her soaring heart, a ton of dejection bringing it crashing to the ground of reality.

But she still had the rest of tonight with him.

Shaking off despondence, she focused on the miracle in progress, in her arms.

She suckled the tongue rubbing against hers, caressed the muscled back rippling beneath her fingers, smiled into his kiss. “Your feelings, sir, are a mere reflection of mine.”

He pulled back to look down at her, his own smile bliss and bedevilment at once as he pressed her buttocks closer, driving his intact arousal deeper into her. “Then it’s up to me to prove to you how authentic my feelings are.”

And for the rest of the night, he left her in no doubt.

Johara drank in the magnificent sight Shaheen made.

Sprawled on his back, the dark green cotton sheet twisted around one thigh and leaving the rest of him bare for her to devour, he had one muscled arm arced over his head, the other with its palm flat over his heart. He looked as if he were holding the kisses she’d planted there before she’d left his side, telling him she’d go to the bathroom and would be back in moments, in place.

Her heart constricted. Her vision blurred.

And she choked out her pledge. “I will always love you, ya habibi.”

He sighed in his sleep, his lips curving in contentment.

Even though she was across the room, she thought he said, “I love you, too, my Gemma.”

Tears poured thicker, as if they were flowing from her heart. She closed the door and walked away from his room and out of his penthouse. Out of his life.

She felt as if hers was over.

Four

The moment he opened his eyes, Shaheen knew something was wrong. Wonderfully wrong.

He was … serene.

He remained still, closed his eyes again, to savor the alien sensation of absolute contentment.