Then nothing would ever bring her back.
Meanwhile, she wouldn’t voice her blasphemous opinions of her uncle’s newfound deity. While she believed this would end in heartache, as everything involving Jalal always did, she didn’t have the guts to extinguish her uncle’s rekindled appetite for life. She’d keep her apprehensions to herself. For now.
This was something her uncle and mom needed, something they hadn’t let themselves dare to dream of. If they were to wake up one day to an ugly reality, she wouldn’t be the one to shock them awake now. She could only speculate what Jalal’s endgame would be…
“…tonight.”
Her uncle’s last words crashed into her train of thoughts, piling them up. He—he couldn’t have said…
But, looking about to sprout wings and take flight, her uncle said it again. “You heard right. Prince Jalal has invited us all to his residence tonight to celebrate my addition to his team.”
* * *
“Marhabah ya bent el amm.”
The voice that had echoed in her being for most of her adult life reverberated in the still, warm night. As smooth as the steel of a burnished sword, as calm as the desert. And it had said…
Welcome, cousin.
Fury surged like a geyser. She swept around with the momentum of her frustration at being cornered again, with the blade of her family’s fragile expectations held to her throat.
And she snarled, “Oh, no you don’t.”
In answer to her vehemence, a chuckle rumbled as if out of nowhere and everywhere, echoing on the deceptively placid breeze.
Her hairs stood on end as Jalal seemed to materialize out of the darkness, forged of its magic, imbued with its menace and magnificence. His face emerged from the velvet gloom in a masterpiece of hewn grandeur, stamped with an ancient birthright as merciless as the desert that had spawned him. His eyes reflected the flames of the brass torches flanking the cobblestone path she’d just traveled as if to the hangman’s noose.
“Don’t what, Lujayn? Call you what you really are to me?”
“I’m nothing to you.”
“You were always many things to me.” A smile twinkled gold in the cognac depth of his eyes, played seduction on the sculpted lips that had taught her what passion was, reminding her of every second when he’d plumbed her body and soul for ecstasies that had branded her for life. “And we discovered you’re more to me than we ever thought.”
“Finding out that we share a couple of stray blood cells and gene strands makes us as related as humans and apes.”
“Hmm, I assume I’m the one on the lower rung of the evolutionary scale here.” Merry demons licked their lips at her as he obliterated the distance between them.
“Don’t.” She didn’t know what her “Don’t” meant now. Or she did. Don’t mess with her. With her will. Her need to stay angry.
“Don’t what? Come closer? Like this?” She gasped as his arm slid around her waist, and again as her body surged into his without her volition. “But you’re right about my evolutionary status. Where you’re concerned, at least. You devolve me to my essential beast. One who only wants to possess, plunder—” he gave a slight tug, had her melting against him from breast to thigh “—pleasure.”
His feel demolished her balance and his scent deluged her lungs as her gaze flitted around frantically.
The only signs of life were the sounds of conversation and laughter emanating from the two-level sprawling villa at his back. She’d seen guards at the gates when she’d been driven into the estate’s extensive grounds, but none since arriving. Maybe they were so ingeniously hidden that she couldn’t even feel them.
No. He wouldn’t be doing this if any eyes were around to witness it. Her driver had driven away in haste, probably following Jalal’s orders for everyone to disappear once she arrived.
He’d set up his trap and lay in wait, like a panther on the hunt, now playing with her like one would torment its prey.
“Take your hands off me, or your guests will know exactly what happened to you from the way you’ll limp back inside.”
His grin widened, his large, talented hands securing her without force, spreading over her back in gentle caresses.
“So you’ll knee me this time?” His fingers accessed the pleasure points that hadn’t been activated before or since him. “I’d risk way worse to feel you like this again.”
She glared up at him as every word, every gust of breath, every rub against that virility, hit her bloodstream like an aphrodisiac, spasming her core, swelling her breasts.
“And then, it’s not like you don’t want to feel me every bit as much.” To prove his point, he took his hands away. Her traitorous body remained pressed against his.
No matter what her mind was screaming, her every inch was begging for his feel, for everything. And it made her furious. Far more with herself than with him. For he was only making her admit and succumb to her weakness. She was the one responsible for it.
Yet when she spoke, she seethed, “So you had your fun forcing me to come here and to endure your pawing without being able to retaliate. Can I go now?”
The teasing in his eyes intensified. And that pout. She didn’t know how she kept from grabbing him by that mane that brushed his collar and yanking down his head so she could bite him. “First, you’re here of your own free will, as usual, as my esteemed guest and newfound if admittedly distant cousin. Second, you can retaliate in any way you choose. I’ll wear the marks of your passion with pride. Third…” He gathered her closer again when she didn’t step away, let her feel his daunting hardness throb into her belly. “I haven’t had my fun yet, not by a long shot.”
She barely held back from grinding into him. “You should have one of your concubines take care of this…big problem.”
Another chuckle revved in his expansive chest. “It’s you who made it that big when you didn’t show up with your family.”
Her uncle and mom had been puzzled and dismayed when she’d excused herself from going. But she hadn’t been able to come up with a good enough reason why. She’d thought even the real reason wouldn’t have been good enough for them.
So she’d pretended to cooperate but when the escort team Jalal sent had arrived, she’d said she’d gotten distracted, wasn’t ready and they’d had to go without her.