The Sheikh's Reluctant Queen. Оливия Гейтс

disentangled himself, groaned deep inside her mouth, “Don’t rush me, ya ameerati. Let me do all this beauty and generosity justice.”

      It was only that she realized he was in as much torment as she was, that made her concede and suffer his pace.

      His hands trembled as he released her from the few clothes she had on, which though loose had become suffocating. She writhed and moaned, caressing his head, drawing him closer, wishing there was hair for her hands to convulse in. At the first touch of those electrifying hands on her breasts, she scraped her fingernails across his scalp. He groaned in equal suffering, but wouldn’t hurry.

      By the time he had her naked, she knew what erotic torment truly was. It was still worth it, just to see his face as he looked down at her.

      She cried out at the savage hunger in his eyes. He closed them instantly, opened them again with it under control. Still afraid for her alleged fragile state of mind?

      But he couldn’t control the raggedness in his voice. “Anti akthar menn kamelah—more than perfect. You’re beauty incarnate.”

      Her head thrashed in protest. “That would be you.”

      He caught it in gentle hands, pressed a fierce kiss on her lips. “You honor me with your approval, but let me show you how much I hunger for every inch of you…”

      And he showed her. He drank her lips dry, then moved to her neck, her arms, her hands. When he drew one of her fingers inside his hot mouth, pleasure forked through her, lodging deep into her core. She hadn’t known that it could be like this. That he could do this to her, just sucking a finger. Then his lips pulled—hard.

      She bucked off the mattress. The throb between her legs squeezed another rush of molten agony. “Rashid… arjook, daheenah…”

      She was coming apart, needed him now… now…

      But he had other plans, deeper levels of torment. He exposed her to all forms of sensual stimulation, plumbing every response she hadn’t known her body was equipped with, taking every intimacy as he’d warned, creating erogenous zones wherever his hands and lips landed, or his tongue and teeth followed.

      He was everywhere. Kneading, kissing, licking. Nibbling, nipping and suckling. Her feet, down her back, all over her stomach and breasts and buttocks, the insides of her arms and thighs. All the time coming up to plunge deeper and deeper kisses into her mouth, along with more aroused, arousing confessions. She lost count how many times she begged for him.

      When he finally drew away, she thought he’d at last remove the only remaining barrier between them and join his body with hers. She rose to hurry him, welcome him…

      Next second she was flat on her back with her legs over his shoulders. Surprise and consternation warred inside her as a wave of contrary shyness overtook her. She’d been begging to share the ultimate intimacy with him, but had qualms about letting him have a lesser one? Stupid, but no less cripplingly real.

      Panting, she tried to sit up. “I want you, Rashid, you…”

      “You’ll have me, all of me. But first I feast on all of you.”

      He drew her legs wider apart, flattened on his stomach between them, cupping her buttocks, opening her core fully to him. Before one more neuron could fire, he blew a hot breath on the knot where it felt every last nerve in her body converged.

      The sound that she made was one of alien hunger. Coherence seeped out of her, nothing remaining but craving and sensation. The emptiness inside her was spreading, engulfing her…

      Her head thrashed, her face tangled in her hair. “You’re killing me…”

      “I’m worshiping you, ya ajmal an’naas.”

      Hearing him call her “my princess” before, not just princess was one thing. But “most beautiful of all people”? That he thought such a thing, the way he said it, only made her state more acute. Then he slid a rough, careful finger between the molten lips of her core.

      She screamed, bowed up, her whole body quaking. Her breathing stopped, her heartbeat stumbled.

      One trembling but insistent hand soothed her down, kneading her breasts, rolling her nipples as his other hand stroked her liquefied flesh in tight circles, just the right speed, just the perfect pressure. She writhed and begged for him more and more. He only quickened his ministrations, and quakes started, radiating from where his fingers played her flesh like a virtuoso. Her hips undulated, moving with his fingers, ripples of delight hurtling with frightening speed toward something far more intense than she’d ever felt or imagined…

      He rubbed his now-smooth face against her tender inner thighs, like a lion nuzzling his mate. He sounded like one when he growled, “So hot and fragrant, so ready for me. Now to taste you…”

      A shriek tore out of her at his tongue’s first plunge into her, drinking her pleasure at the source. Tightening his hold over her bucking buttocks, he swept its firm, slick heat through her trembling flesh to the pinpoint of torment. She imploded, collapsing back on herself.

      Then he sucked her flesh into his mouth, unleashing every spark of accumulated sensation.

      She ceased to exist, dissipated in wave after wave of white-hot release…

      The shudders racking her finally eased, her vision returned to the sight of his regal head between her thighs, still suckling her, drawing out her aftermath.

      Closing her eyes, she melted back into his cossetting, surrendered to his ministrations.

      Suddenly, her eyes snapped open. Pleasure wasn’t subsiding, it was building, the screaming tension for release back in full force. He went on and on until she was heaving and keening again, in the merciless grip of an even fiercer climax.

      Afterward, inside a body that was no longer hers to command and a mind she felt she had no access to, she saw him rise to prowl over her numb body, sweeping her with soothing caresses. Her eyes stung again at his generosity, his restraint. She couldn’t believe a man could deny himself so long when he was as agonizingly aroused as Rashid evidently was.

      But instead of moving on top of her, he tugged her into the curve of his great body, stroking her quivering flesh gently, murmuring praise and passion in that voice that spoke to her soul.

      “Laylah… the taste and sight and sound of your pleasure, everything about you—is beyond perfect, beyond belief…”

      What was beyond belief was that he was arousing her again, when she suspected he was trying to lull her to sleep, too. When she’d thought he’d drained her of sensation, maybe forever. Now that her body knew what kind of pleasure he could provide, his merest touch and breath had it clawing its demand for his.

      She twisted in his arms, wound herself around him, arms and legs. “You promised me yourself.”

      Something almost frightening erupted in his eyes. His voice couldn’t hide his state, either. “Don’t pour more fuel on the fire now, ya ameerati.”

      “I will if it’s the only way you’re going to stop worshipping me and give me what I need—you, inside me.” Catching his face between her hands, she rained kisses all over it before sliding to his scar, suckling and nibbling it in abandon, moaning against his burning flesh, “Come inside me, Rashid, arjook. I feel my heart will stop if you don’t fill me… now, Rashid, now!”

      Those roughened hands whose touch drove her out of her mind and ignited every last one of her senses, tightened on her arms as he turned her on her back, loomed over her.

      “My condition is reversed. My heart beats thirty beats a minute.” Wow. Now that was fitness! “At maximum exertion it reaches seventy. Feel it now.” He clasped her trembling hand to the pulse point below his scar. The artery leaping beneath her touch was doing so at much higher than seventy beats a minute. “That’s what needing to be inside you is doing to me. Holding back is taxing my system more than the toughest survival