His rumble was that of a beast bewildered with too many blows. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“My last two unmarried sisters’ weddings. With each from a different mother and with how things are in Zohayd where weddings are battlefields, they’ve reached a standoff with each other and with their bridegrooms’ families. It seems there’s more hope of ending a war than reaching an agreement on the details of the weddings. Enter me—what Father thinks is his only hope of defusing the situation.”
He frowned. “Why you?”
Her lips twisted whimsically. “Because I’m what Father calls the ‘neutral zone.’ With me as the one daughter of the woman who gave birth to me then ran off with a big chunk of my father’s wealth, I am the one who has always given him no trouble, having no mother to harass him on my behalf. And being stuck as the middle sister between eight half sisters, four each from a stepmother, it made me the one in his brood of nine female offspring that no one is jealous of, therefore not unreasonably contentious with.” She sighed dramatically. “I was always dragged to referee, because both sides don’t consider me a player in the family power games at all. Now Father has recruited me to get all these hysterical females off his back and hopefully get those weddings under way and over with.”
What about the groom who proposed to you? That…prince? Why aren’t you telling me about him?
The questions backlashed in his chest. He couldn’t give this preposterous subject credence by even mentioning it.
There was only one thing to ask now.
“Is it me?”
She stared up at him, standing against the winter sunset’s backdrop, its fire reflecting gold on her skin and striking flames from the depths of her onyx eyes and the thick mahogany satin tresses that undulated around her in the breeze. She was the embodiment of his every taste and desire and aspiration. And the picture of incomprehension.
But he could no longer afford the luxury of caution. Not when he had the grenade of that…prince’s…proposal lying there between them. Not when letting the status quo continue could give it a chance to explode and cost him everything.
He halved the step he’d been keeping between them. “You’re the only one who’s ever told me the whole truth, Kanza. I need you to give it to me now.”
Her gaze flickered, but she only nodded. She would give him that truth. Always.
And that truth might end his world.
But he had to have it. “I believe in pure friendship between a man and a woman. But when they share…everything, I can’t see how there’d be no physical attraction at all. So, again, is it me? Or are you generally not interested?”
No total truth came from her. Just total astonishment.
He groaned. “It’s clear this has never even crossed your mind. And I’ve been content with what we share, delighted our friendship is rooted in intellectual and spiritual harmony—and I was willing to wait forever for anything else. But I feel I don’t have forever anymore. And I can’t live with the idea that maybe you just aren’t aware of the possibilities, that if I can persuade you to give it a try, you might…not hate it.”
Still nothing. Nothing but gaping.
And he put his worst fear into words. “Were you stating your personal preferences that first night? When you said I was disgustingly pretty? Do your tastes run toward something, I don’t know, rougher or softer or just not…this?” He made a tense gesture at his face, his body. “Do you have an ideal of masculinity and I’m just not it?”
Her cheeks and lips were now hectic rose. Her voice wavered. “Uh… I’m really not sure…”
Neither was he. If it would be even adequate between them. If he could even please her.
But he felt everything for her, wanted everything with her, so he had to try.
He reached for her, cupped her precious head and gazed down into her shocked eyes. “There’s one way to make sure.”
Then he swooped down and took her lips.
At the first contact with her flesh, the first flay of her breath, a thousand volts crackled between them, unleashing everything inside him in a tidal wave.
Lashed by the ferocity of his response and immediacy of her surrender, he captured her dainty lower lip in a growling bite, stilling its tremors, attempting to moderate his greed. She only cried out, arched against him and opened her lips wider. And her taste inundated him.
God…her taste. He’d imagined but couldn’t have possibly anticipated her unimaginable sweetness. Or the perfume of her breath or the sensory overload of her feel. Or what it would all do to him. Everything about her mixed in an aphrodisiac, a hallucinogen that eddied in his arteries and pounded through his system, snapping the tethers of his sanity.
He could have held back from acting on his insanity, could have moderated his onslaught if not for the way she melted against him, blasting away all doubts about her capacity for passion in the inferno of her response. Her moans and whimpers urged him on to take his possession from tasting to clinging to wrenching.
His hands shook with urgency as he gathered her thighs, opened her around his bulk, pinned her against the railings with the force of his hunger. Plundering her with his tongue, he drove inside her mouth, thrust against her heat, losing rhythm in the wildness, losing his mind.
But even without a mind or will, his love for this irreplaceable being was far more potent than even his will to live. She did mean more than life to him.
Tearing out of their merging, rumbling at the sting of separation, he looked down at the overpowering sight of the woman trembling in his arms. “Do you want this, Kanza? Do you want me?”