Why was he wasting their precious time together?
She might not have known what to expect, but she’d thought he’d escalate the urgency he’d shown so far. She’d had visions of him carrying her to the limo, drowning her in kisses all the way here, pressing her against the door the moment they entered and showing her how eager for her he was.
Had he remembered his commitments and decided to cool things off, let her down easy?
She should spare him the discomfort, should leave. She shouldn’t have come at all, shouldn’t have said yes, shouldn’t have gone to that party …
Something whirred, flashed. She blinked in surprise, her left eye riddled in blue spots.
He’d snapped a photo of her with his phone. Now he walked toward her, big and lithe, gloriously male and impossibly beautiful. But it was his expression that made her sway, sending her heart swinging in her chest like a pendulum.
The lightness of the trek here was gone, sizzling sensuality replacing it, setting his eyes deeper on fire and his charisma to a higher level.
He stopped a foot away, reached for the hands he seemed so enamored with. “You looked so … pensive. And if possible, even more breathtaking. This photo is the stuff of the immortal masterpieces the old masters would have begged to portray.” He took her hands to his lips, giving each finger a knuckle-by-knuckle introduction to the cosseting of his lips, his eyes empty of all but seriousness. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“No.” The denial shot out of her, its fierceness mortifying her as it rang around them. But she had to know. “A-are you?”
He huffed. “The only thoughts I’m having are where to begin worshipping you and how to stop from swallowing you whole.”
So that was why he was holding back. He feared being too aggressive. She was being insecure again.
But who could blame her? All through the years, her love for him had been emotional, spiritual, with slight sensual overtones. She’d never imagined he could actually want her, and when she’d fantasized that he did, even in the freedom of her own imagination, he’d done no more than hold and kiss her. Yet she couldn’t breathe with wanting all he was willing to give her, with needing to experience him to the fullest.
She swayed closer, her heartbeats merging like the wings of a hummingbird with the enormity of what she was feeling, what she was about to reveal. “B-begin anywhere, Shaheen. J-just begin. And don’t stop your self. I don’t want you to stop.”
His eyes flared with her every faltering word. When she fell into embarrassed, panting silence, he entwined her hands in his, brought them to her face, twisting their embrace around so the backs of his hands stroked up and down her flaming cheeks.
“Then I’ll begin here. Your skin. It’s incredible, like every part of you. Lush, thick cream, free of paleness and fragility. It doesn’t flush with your emotions, no matter how strong, only becomes more vital, more vivid. It’s glowing now. Your eyes are gleaming like polished onyxes under spotlights, inundating me with an avalanche of expressions, each intoxicating in its clarity and beauty. And your lips. The way they mold to your every thought, the way they take the shape of your every emotion, the way they tremble to the frequency of each sensation … each tremor shudders through me until I am nothing but uncontainable hunger.”
She almost choked with stimulation. “I was right. You are made up of nothing but original bones and poetic cells.”
His lips twitched in a lethal mix of appreciation and predation as he touched the pad of his thumb to hers, stilling those tremors that so affected him. “It seems you didn’t hear my last words clearly.”
Her lips trembled even more as humor warred with anticipation and agitation. He rubbed his thumbs against them, his breathing becoming harsher.
She closed her eyes to savor the long-dreamed-about sensations. Her wildest imaginings hadn’t prepared her for reality. She moaned with the pleasure that corkscrewed through her, emanating from his breath, his nearness, his touch, to her every inch, her deepest reaches. Then her lips did what they’d been longing to do for most of her life—caressed the fragrant warmth and power pressed to them with a trembling kiss.
She heard his intake of breath. It sliced away more of the leashes of her inhibition. She opened her lips, grazed her teeth against his skin. Its texture, its scent, brought more moist heat surging from her core.
A fiercer inhalation expanded his chest until it pressed against her swelling breasts. She knew he could scent her arousal, felt the wildness it sent seething through him. It made her light-headed, the knowledge that she could do this to him, that he was doing this to her, that they had this to share.
Feeling bolder, she swept her tongue against his skin. Her knees did buckle at her first taste of him. He disentangled his other hand, caught her around the waist. She kept her eyes closed as she dove deeper into the sensations, her whole existence centering on his thumb against her tongue as he began to thrust it gently in and out of her mouth.
“This is extremely dangerous.” His bass hiss made her eyes snap open. His bore into them before moving to her lips with burning intent as he fed them his thumb, as they suckled it with increasing greed and abandon. She knew what he meant. He still elaborated. “That you want me as fiercely as I want you.”
She nodded, breath leaving her body under choppy pressure. She felt she was disintegrating with need for him.
He let go of her waist, grazed across her lower teeth as he slid his thumb lingeringly from between her lips, then dropped his forehead to hers, nuzzling her, inhaling her. “This is unparalleled. Agonizing but sublime.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
Though she had no experience to back up her belief, she knew the protracted inflammation of their senses was far more satisfying than any frenzied mindless coupling would be.
He eased her away only to glide both arms around her back, to her dress’s zipper. He slid it down with torturous slowness, never letting go of her eyes as he went back up to unclasp her bra. She gasped as its constriction eased, and again at the spike of ferocity in his eyes as he monitored her reaction. He drew more gasps from her as he caressed her dress and bra loose, then in one silky sweep, freed her from their shackles.
Before she could snap her arms across her nakedness, he dragged her dress beyond her waist to her hips, dropping downward with it. He ended up on his knees before her.
Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. From unbearable stimulation. From the way he looked her up and down, as if he would truly gobble her up.
Then he pulled her to him, rumbling, “Now, I worship you.”
She would have keeled over him if his shoulders hadn’t stopped her forward pitch. He added to her imbalance, burying hot lips into her flesh. She whimpered at each press into her abdomen, every tongue thrust into her navel, each tooth drag across her breasts. Her moans sharpened as he gently clamped her nipples, until a cry rushed out at his first hard pull. “Shaheen … please.”
In answer, he bunched her skirt in his hands, his thumbs hooking into the top of her panties. Then, in one magical move, every shred of covering was shed off of her.
Standing in nothing but her shoes with her clothes pooled at her feet, she felt the world recede. Shaheen looked up, the worshipping he’d promised her setting the hard nobility of his face ablaze.
This was beyond unprecedented. Beyond unparalleled. She was with Shaheen. Standing before him naked. She was about to be his in the flesh, just as she was already his in every other way.
She watched as he raised each leg to kiss and fondle from calf to thigh, her consciousness flickering like a bulb about to short out. She heard his magnificent voice as he raggedly lavished far better than poetry on her, spontaneous wonder pouring out in whatever language expressed it best.
She