“Oh, Malek, I know that!” She hugged him, remorse compressing her heart. “What we shared, not only making love but everything we shared, every second of it, was the best thing that has ever happened to me. So I hope you’re not finding more ways for it to weigh on your conscience now.” Suddenly something occurred to her. “Say, would you have taken me if I’d told you?”
He gave a self-deprecating huff. “After you pointed out how you could have been lost, and we both wouldn’t have lived first for not being together? Oh, yes, I would have.” His eyes blazed with such adoration and agony-mixed contrition that her heart dropped a few beats. “But I would have initiated you so thoroughly you wouldn’t have felt that much pain.”
Her hands framed his face, trembling, begging his belief. “The pain was glorious, Malek—glorious. A searing evidence of our intimacy and an unrepeatable experience of such elemental magnitude that I probably can’t describe it to you, as you never had anything comparable.”
“I did,” he contradicted. “Not a replica of the physical experience, but falling in love for the first time has been gloriously agonizing, spiritually and physically.”
“Oh …” And how stupid was it that she felt jealousy crush her heart?
“You.” He caught the tremor that shook her lower lip in a devouring kiss. “My first and last love.”
Oh. Oh. He’d read her mind and insecurities again.
She surged into him, her lips and tongue mating with his in wrenching, draining kisses, the fuse of her hunger relit. Overcoming her shyness, she blindly reached for him, needing to feel his potency.
He stopped her with a look that liquefied her bones, rolled her over him, got out of bed with her wrapped around his waist.
He took her to the bathroom, and in an endless warm shower, he taught her how to satisfy her urges, how to complete her ownership of him. He was soon telling her she’d been born to drive him out of his mind, roared his surrender as she brought him to orgasm just as he brought her to another one.
They were clinging under the flow of water, moaning at the profoundness of their intimacy, when Malek finally murmured in her mouth, “Some food is becoming an emergency, ya roh galbi. Then I want to share another first with you.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“YOU’RE TOTALLY off track,” Malek murmured in Jay’s ear.
“You mean it’s bigger?” Jay could barely turn to gape back at him. His head was resting on her shoulder, his hard body pressed into her back, his thighs enveloping hers.
He laughed, cuddled her more securely. “If after you’ve been around it, you still can’t guess, I’m not telling you.”
She nestled into him, cast her gaze over the depression of el waha—the oasis that sprawled below them.
Being on top of Zeenah, Malek’s mare, gave her an even higher vantage point from this, the highest elevation before the desert surrendered its dunes to the rocky terrain that heralded Jabal al Shamekh’s mountainous dominion miles in the distance.
It was mind-boggling, the explosion of lush green life in the middle of the desert. Date palms and olive trees numbering in the hundreds of thousands, wild flowers and cacti, impossible in beauty and abundance, farmed fruits and vegetables, especially apricots, figs and corn, astounding in size and taste. To complete the Garden of Eden setting, beside the prerequisite horses, camels, sheep and goats, wildlife was plentiful. Malek’s favorite moments were when she spotted a deer or a fox or an unknown bird and bounced up and down in delight.
Besides being breathtaking, the oasis was vast. Her last guess was fifty square miles. She gave it another go. “Seventy?”
He hugged her, laughed again. “Ah ya malekat galbi, I can’t bear to see you burning even in curiosity. It’s a hundred.”
Jay shivered at the passion that permeated the lightness in his voice. He’d just called her the owner of his heart. And by now, a week after they’d first made love, a week in a heaven she hadn’t dreamed existed, basking in his love, plunging deeper in their entrenching unity, she was certain she was.
She was certain of something else. This wouldn’t end. He’d promised it. She knew he kept his promises.
It was unbelievable, too much to grasp, to imagine, to look forward to. But Malek was hers, like she was his, for life.
Sunset was in an hour and he’d just finished showing her the last of the oasis’s wonders and its northern limits.
The oasis and its people were considered off-limits to the outside world they lived independent of. They welcomed only Malek, and whomever he invited. He’d never wanted to share the experience he treasured with another before her. He was held in such high esteem here, they even let him bring in all the laborers he needed to build his dream retreat on their land. He wouldn’t tell her why.
She’d found out why in one of the feasts that had been held for them. Around a huge fire, their best storyteller had recounted the story of the knight of the desert who was riding his powerful machine, looking for solitude and communion with nature, when a sandstorm came up. He came upon a group of their young who’d foolishly tried to visit the nearest town and had got lost. They would have all died if he hadn’t braved one of nature’s most destructive forces, instead of blasting through it to reach safety, and if not for his healing powers.
Malek had suffered through the retelling, muttering about the hyperbole that was so integral to the region’s culture. She’d only kissed him soundly, teased him about his inability to stomach people singing his praises.
“Here we are,” Malek murmured in her ear.
He’d ridden back into the depths of the waha, brought his magnificent black mare to a halt by the ayn, a miniature lake of crystal-clear water enclosed within a canopy of intertwining palms where everyone, including them, fetched their drinking water, crisp and perpetually cool. The air was sweet and earthy, the temperature seemed to be calibrated for perfect comfort all year round, as he’d told her.
Malek dismounted, reached up for her, lifted her down, his effortless strength, the cherishing in his every glance and touch as she slid down his body a constant current jolting through her heart.
And she asked something that had been on her mind from day one there. “uh, Malek, I realize the people here are nowhere as conservative as any I’ve seen throughout Damhoor, still, how—how did you explain my presence here?”
“I told them you are my wife.” She gasped, and he pressed her harder into his embrace. “You are my wife, ya janaani. Did you think I was spouting platitudes when I said that?”