The Sheikh's Reluctant Queen. Оливия Гейтс

put up with your misconceptions, since I realized you know nothing about me, and I was willing to educate you. But this is where I won’t try to convince you. This is where I’ll tell you.” She grabbed his arms, stood on tiptoes, to make up for the disadvantage of being dwarfed by him and his sweatshirt, to inject her posture with authority. “You have always defined perfection to me.”

      His eyes shot wider, as if she’d punched him in the gut.

      Shocked? How much more shocked would he be when she touched him where his flesh had been sundered and sealed along that terrible rift?

      Her hand trembled as it fulfilled her overwhelming need.

      It stopped midway, caught in the iron vise of his hand.

      Raising her eyes, she found his face gripped with a ferociousness that would have scared off anyone else.

      It only made touching him a necessity. Her heart felt it would stop if she didn’t.

      Her other hand rose, met with the same fate, made her almost whimper. “Please, Rashid. Let me touch you.”

      “Why? Even if I believed your wild claim, my alleged perfection is a thing of the past, from before I was almost torn apart and so sloppily put back together. So don’t you dare placate or pity me. I don’t take kindly to either offense.”

      This needed taking care of, once and for all.

      Hands gripped in his, she forced her lips to quiver into a smile. “Fine. Just remember, I tried to spare you. You now have only yourself to blame when I give you my uncensored opinion.”

      His hands convulsed around hers before he let them go. Then, face empty of expression, he stepped back.

      Her heart twisted. It was as if he needed to hear it from a safe distance. He believed her true opinion would hurt.

      She bridged the distance he’d put between them, taking his hands, insisting on keeping him in place. “When you were younger and softer and in one pristine piece, you more than defined perfection for me. You filled my ‘mind’s eye’ with your impossible example and made anyone else fade into nothing.” She clung to his hands harder when he again attempted to jerk them away. “But that scar, what you’ve been through to have it, only to come out stronger—how you wear it as a tribute to your family and ancestors, making it the very embodiment of your noble house—it makes you indescribable. And infinitely more irresistible.”

      Judging that the time to reach out again was now, when she had him boggling at the audacity of her confessions, her hands released his, making another attempt to reach his scar.

      His hands caught them before she could blink. “You can’t really want to touch… this.”

      “Did indescribable and irresistible have too many syllables for you to understand? I would find you both even if you were scarred all over. I don’t only want to touch you, I’ve been waiting all my life to do it.”

      This time, his stupefaction was almost tangible.

      Pouncing on the opening it afforded her, she persisted, “Will you let me touch you? Please?”

      A full-scale war seemed to erupt within him.

      Then, with his gaze the darkest it had ever been, he let go of her hands.

      Her first instinct was to pounce on him. But that starving-woman-at-a-buffet routine would be too much for him at this point.

      Instead, she reached out, hands trembling as they made that first contact. With the scar at his heart.

      The moment her flesh met his at that mark of old and severe pain and damage, her whole being seized, as if her essence flowed through her fingertips into him. She would give endlessly of it, if it would only erase his suffering, past and present.

      On the verge of breaking down, her voice wobbled on the question that seared her. “Does—Does it still hurt?”

      “No.”

      The monosyllable conveyed how much and how long it had hurt.

      “What does it feel like?”

      A shudder coursed through him. Or it might be she who was shaking so hard. She couldn’t tell where the tremors originated.

      “People stop asking when they know it’s not painful anymore.” His voice was thicker, impeded. “They don’t think any other sensation but pain matters.”

      Empathy tightened her throat. “I’m not people. I’m me. And anything that you feel matters to me. Matters, period.” Unable to hold back anymore, one hand curled around his nape, urging his head down so her lips could follow her fingers in exploring that scar that made her only far more appreciative and protective of his every other inch. This time, there was no mistaking the jolt that passed through him as her lips traveled from the edge of his jaw down to the root of his powerful neck. She held him closer, insistent against his damp, hot skin. “Tell me, Rashid.”

      Letting her discover every inch of his scar, his voice ragged, he said, “If I’m totally still, I can convince myself it doesn’t exist. But at the slightest movement, it feels as if the ruined skin no longer belongs to me. It sometimes feels like a chasm into another reality, a fault line where something malicious seeps into my body, infects me with its poison.”

      So he did feel possessed. She’d do whatever it took to make sure he didn’t feel that way ever again.

      Slipping around him, her lips followed the scar as it flowed from his neck to his back, as if she would kiss it better, suck all the negative energy into herself.

      “How do you feel when it’s touched?” she whispered.

      She felt his tension spike before it resumed buzzing through him like high voltage through a maximum-resistance cable. His voice was a hoarse rasp when he answered. “The few times it was touched, it felt like a jolt of acute discomfort and revulsion. It made me feel… violent.”

      Her lips stopped over his shoulder blade, along with her heart. “Do—Do you feel like that now?”

      “No.”

      Her heart clanged at his instantaneous negation.

      When he didn’t qualify it, she resumed her exploration, bolder now. “Then how do you feel when I do this…?”

      A finger joined her lips in their sweep through the ridge.

      When nothing but his slow, deep breathing answered her—which to the über-fit Rashid constituted panting—she nudged her head against his arm. He raised it, letting her follow an uninterrupted path up his abdomen to where the scar ended over his heart.

      At the very tip, she slipped her tongue out to taste it and him. The voltage coursing through him almost electrocuted her.

      She raised her gaze, panting. “How does that feel, Rashid?”

      His face looked like a force of nature roused. His voice did sound like muted thunder when he answered. “Your every touch, your every breath triggers everything I can feel at once. It’s as if every sensation is amplified within the scar’s confines only to shoot out to my every nerve ending.”

      Her hands stilled over the scar’s tip as she wet lips so dry she felt they’d crack. “Sounds… distressing.”

      He followed her tongue’s movements, something deliciously scary smoldering in his eyes. “It is. Overwhelmingly so. It’s pleasurable to the point of pain. And arousing to beyond madness.”

      His fingers were suddenly digging into her hair, twisting into her long tresses, tilting her face up to his. Her lips opened on a gasp of shock and pleasure at the spikes that shot from every hair to her toes, pooling in between in her core in a heavy, liquid throb.

      She swayed into him, feeling the sensual whirlpool he generated tugging her under. At the touch of her length against his, his steady grip trembled once before firming