From One Night To Desert Queen by Pippa Roscoe

CHAPTER THREE

HAVINGBEENPROMISEDthe opportunity to see Burami, Star was surprised when, instead of turning out towards the main road, Kal led her back to the palace. The surprise lasted only a moment. She was distracted by the way sparks flew from where his palm pressed against hers, encompassing it, making her feel comforted in a way just seconds ago she’d not thought possible.

They came to a corner and Kal pulled up short before turning back to her, holding a finger to his lips.

Star folded her own lips between her teeth, but still a smile pulled at the edges of her mouth. ‘Are we sneaking into the palace?’ she whispered to him.

‘Yes,’ he replied, peering around the corner to see if the coast was clear.

‘You do this often?’ She couldn’t keep the laugh from her voice this time.

He looked at her, eyes blazing with something a little more than humour. ‘More than you’d think,’ he replied cryptically and drew her back into the hallway.

They’d made it about four feet towards the staircase Kal seemed to be heading for when they heard the hushed voices of two guards. Eyes wide and heart pounding in her chest, Star didn’t know whether to laugh or scream in fright. Either way she was pretty sure that she’d squeaked when Kal spun her round, pressing her back against a wall, arms braced either side of her head, and covered her with his body.

Star wasn’t laughing now. They were staring at each other as if that alone would keep them invisible from the palace guards. This close, she could see that there were flecks of gold in the rich espresso depths of his eyes, she could almost taste the smoky sweetness of the breath that fanned gently against her skin. She dared herself to inhale the scent of him, woodsy, masculine, brought to her from the heat of his body. In her peripheral vision she could see the flicker of his pulse just beneath his jaw, and shockingly she wanted to place her palm there, to feel it beat in time with her own.

His head dipped ever so slightly towards her, his nostrils flaring ever so slightly, his inhale expanding to close the space between their chests from inches to millimetres. Beneath the voices, she could hear footsteps coming closer and closer. She pressed into the wall as if that would make her and Kal invisible, adrenaline reaching deeper and deeper into her bloodstream. What would happen if they got caught? Her eyes flew to his, her mouth opening just slightly as if ready to ask the question when she felt the pad of his thumb against her lower lip, just as she’d once imagined doing to him. The gesture she was sure was intended to stop her words, not her heart, but that was the effect.

She wanted to bite down on his thumb, to anchor it there before he could remove it and in an instant any fear was completely consumed by exhilaration. She’d never felt like it before. She could just hear the sound of footsteps over the pounding of her pulse in her ears, and she couldn’t resist courting danger.

‘Are we going to get into trouble?’ she whispered against the pad of his thumb, instantly gratified when she saw his pupils flare.

‘No,’ he whispered back with an arrogance that was utterly devastating.

The footsteps receded, and Khalif waited until there was complete silence in the corridor. Not because he couldn’t move, he sternly assured himself, but because he was waiting until the coast was clear.

He walked on into the hallway, leading Star by the hand, his heart racing, half hoping someone would stop him, half hoping they wouldn’t. This was ridiculous. And certainly the first time he’d sneaked a woman into the palace rather than out of it.

Four feet to the staircase. He could still change his mind. Could still turn back.

Three feet. Her fingers tightened within his hold ever so slightly.

Two feet and he cast one last look up and down the long hallway.

One...

They raced up the stairs as if the guards were still behind them, falling through the door and collapsing on the other side in half relief, half surprise as if they’d not actually expected to get that far.

He watched as Star straightened and turned to look around at the room, wondering what she’d make of the large living space, lined with bookshelves on one side and a large television on the other. The sunken seating area was actually an illusion, the rest of the floor having been built up to allow for the cables and security measures fitted retrospectively to the ancient palace.

‘Are we in someone’s home?’ she asked as she looked between the open-plan kitchenette that he couldn’t remember using ever and the glass-fronted sliding doors that led to the balcony.

‘It’s okay, I know the owner,’ he replied, watching her walk towards the view he woke up to every morning.

‘I hope they’d be okay with this,’ she said as she reached the partly opened door.

‘They are,’ he assured her, but his answer was lost to her as she slipped through the narrow gap and out onto the stone balcony.

He told himself he was giving her time. That it had nothing to do with having to get himself—who was he kidding?—his libido under control. He clenched his fists as if it would erase the feeling of her lip beneath his thumb, her between his arms, the ghost trace of her chest against his... Three years without sex might not kill a man, but one night without Star might just do it.

No. This was for her. He’d seen how devastated she’d looked. Whatever had happened, or not happened, this was about ensuring that she didn’t leave with that look haunting her eyes. Instead, he reached for his phone, fired off a message to the palace staff asking for refreshments to be brought to his quarters, and another to Reza cancelling their meeting. He then purposefully put his phone on silent so as not to be subjected to the barrage of queries his oldest friend was sure to launch at him.

Clenching his jaw and ordering himself to behave, Khalif made his way out onto the balcony. He loved the large, deep green palms potted either side of the doors. The ornate, detailed carvings in the red stone balcony were almost as familiar to him as his reflection. Off to the left was a cream awning, under which were a table and chairs, but he knew that Star had seen none of it, her gaze instead glued to the whole of the city stretched out before her, beneath a sky that was turning the beautiful deep blue of early night and littered with stars more dazzling than any diamond.

‘Burami?’ she asked him without looking away from it.

‘A very, very large part of it, yes.’

It was absolutely the height of insanity to bring a woman to his palace quarters. It was something the old Khalif had never done. Had he deprived himself of so much that he was at risk of recklessness? And then he remembered the look in her eyes as she’d sat on the steps and knew that he’d have done it all over again just to see her eyes sparkle.

He heard the soft click of his door, movement in the kitchen area that seemed to pass unnoticed by Star and the door closing once again. The last thing Khalif felt was hungry, but somehow it seemed fitting to serve Star food, when she had done the same for him. The memory of her basking in the sun sliced through him, competing with the dusk that surrounded them now and haunted his suite.

He retrieved the platter of food and pitcher of the delicious apricot drink he thought Star would enjoy and returned to the balcony, stopping mid-stride. Star was still looking out at the desert, but her shawl had come loose and now hung from her shoulders, leaving her hair...

Thick streams of long, lazily curling fire danced on the wind, a riot of golds, deep reds and every imaginable shade of umber, flooding his tongue with the taste of turmeric, paprika and cinnamon.

She had removed her denim jacket and the long-sleeved top slashed across her neck, leaving her collarbone and delicate neck exposed to his desire. The blue cotton, regal and powerful, strong and bright enough to stand beside the glory of her hair, made him think of an ancient astrological chart he’d once seen, created from the deepest of blues and golds, rich with circles, lines, arrows and stars, all working to prove some mystical assertion.

Mystical. That was what Star made him feel. And it hit him like a hammer, as if this moment was something they’d stolen from ancient gods. Something that was just for them.

Star felt him return to the balcony behind her. As if his presence had the power to pull at her like the tide. He was giving her the time she needed. And she did need it. She was in the private rooms of a palace looking out at the desert. She’d had to pinch herself literally, she thought as she rubbed the pink flesh on her forearm, to know that this wasn’t a dream she’d conjured from her imagination.

She knew that she should feel danger, or at least a very real sense of concern. She barely knew Kal, but that felt wrong. She didn’t feel as if he were a stranger. He was physically imposing, that was true, but, rather than making her scared, it made her want—want in a way that she’d only ever read about before. She had waited all her adult years to find someone who made her feel the things she’d only ever read about and she was leaving tomorrow.

Star might be very used to daydreams, but she wasn’t naïve. She knew in reality that there was nothing past tomorrow for her, for them. But did that mean she should walk away from the possibility of what tonight held? She wanted to laugh at herself for being presumptuous, but... Her tongue ran over her lip, where his thumb had pressed so gently to such great effect. A tremor shivered over her skin and down her spine. Surely she wasn’t the only one affected by this?

She turned, expecting to find him looking at her, having felt the burn of his gaze across her shoulders and back, but he was busy removing small plates from a tray, two glasses and a pitcher that was rich with condensation from the warm air, despite the dusk falling around them.

‘If you’d like something alcoholic...?’

She smiled. ‘No, thank you. I’m afraid the Soames women cannot hold their drink.’ She reluctantly moved away from the balcony, fearing that she might search the rest of her life for something as beautiful as that view and never find it again.

She slipped behind the table so that she faced the cityscape edged by golden sand that looked like slashes of an abstract painting. He offered her a small glass of the amar al din she was going to miss terribly when she returned to England. Her mouth watered in expectation of the sweet, cooling apricot drink, but that was a mere shadow of the explosion of taste that hit her tongue when she drew it to her lips and she was helpless to prevent the moan of sheer delight that fell into the air between them.

‘That is so good,’ she praised unashamedly when she’d finished it. ‘I’m going to have to learn how to make it.’

She chanced a look at Kal and veered back to the cityscape before she could be burned further by the heat in eyes heavy-lidded with desire. It scorched the air she breathed, jolted her heartbeat and pulsed and flared through her body.

By the time Star was ready to risk another glance at him, he had turned towards the desert, staring at the magnificent view as if it were his. Possessively. The way she wanted him to look at her. The way she’d thought, just for a moment, he had.

Blushing, she returned her gaze to the same view, wondering whether Catherine had ever seen it. Star had read over the journals Catherine had written while in Duratra, but she couldn’t seem to make the descriptions from then fit with what surrounded her now.

‘I wonder what this view would have looked like a hundred years ago,’ she half whispered, her voice breaking on the words emerging from a throat half raw from need.

His reply was so long coming she’d begun to wonder whether he’d heard her.

‘There was less metal, less chrome and glass, and it was a touch smaller. But one hundred years ago, Burami was still an impressive city.’ She watched the way his throat worked as he swallowed, his eyes frowning once again at the view. ‘The market you passed on the way to the palace has been there for nearly three hundred years. The skyline would have been not too dissimilar, the silhouette of the minaret and the cross, the turrets of the university. We’ve always had a mix of cultures, religions—mosques near churches, near synagogues, near temples...all from the very beginning.’

He spoke with a cultural pride that was unfamiliar to her, a sense of personal history she felt that she’d only just begun to experience herself.

‘How long has your family been here?’

‘Since around then.’

‘It must be incredible—that sense of history, that sense of ancestry.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it. What about you?’

Star sighed. ‘We’ve just discovered a grandfather on our mother’s side.’

‘And that is what has you upset?’

She resisted the urge to ask how he knew, but it must have been clear on her face. She’d never been very good at hiding her emotions.

‘I... I have let my sisters down. My mother,’ she said, hating the way that saying it out loud seemed to make it real.

‘I know that feeling. With my brother. My father. I wasn’t exactly their first choice,’ he said before coming to an abrupt halt.

‘Choice for what?’

She watched the way his jaw clenched in the darkness of the oncoming night.

‘The head of the family business.’

‘Really?’ she asked, surprised. ‘You’d be my choice.’

‘You don’t know me,’ he replied darkly.

It was on the tip of her tongue to deny what he was saying. A half-forgotten song lyric hummed in her head about having loved someone for a thousand years... She shook her head, as if to free the words, but it only sent them scattering. Instead, she caught the words of one of her most loved books.

‘“It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”’

He barked a laugh, not at her but as if with her, and she felt the appraisal in his eyes even as he made a joke of it. ‘You just happen to have that to hand?’

‘It’s Austen. She should always be “to hand”.’

‘Oh, so you’re one of those,’ he teased.

‘If by “one of those” you mean someone who reads romance then yes, I am,’ she said with pride. ‘And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.’

He held his hands up in surrender. ‘I believe you.’

‘No, you’re humouring me. That’s a very different thing,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘It’s very easy to be cynical and sharp-edged in this world. It’s harder to have hope, to hold to romance and sentimentality, to allow the enjoyment of them and the sheer optimism, the faith of it all to sink deep into your bones.’

‘Faith?’

‘The conviction that love in whatever form conquers all.’

‘And if I say I don’t believe, does it knock a romance reader down dead?’

‘No,’ she replied, unable to turn to look at him with the smile on her face. ‘But it seriously diminishes your chances of finding true love.’

There was a beat—of something. Something that passed his eyes and crossed his features before he barked out another laugh that had both traces of the humour she sensed in him but also the weight that pulled at him. And it was that weight she felt partly tied to, as if the deeper it plunged, the more it drew her with it.

She caught herself frowning, not because she was confused by her feelings—she knew what they were, knew that this attraction was something as unique as it was raw. She was confused as to what to do about it. Because, while she didn’t need to know the why of it, Kal was holding back and Star just wasn’t confident or experienced enough to call it out into the open.

But she didn’t want to walk away from it either. She couldn’t explain it. But she was sure, more sure than anything she’d ever felt, that if she walked away now, she’d never find this again. This feeling that sank into her skin and delved into her bones, that caught her by the throat and squeezed at her lungs. She wanted to gasp for air, she wanted to gasp for him. Just thinking about the way he made her feel had her pulse quickening, and something deep within her quivering.

The only place he’d ever touched her was the thumbprint he’d left on her bottom lip. She bit down once again, into the soft flesh as if...

‘Stop,’ he commanded.

‘Stop what?’ she asked, her words breathless, as she peered at him through the sensual haze that had descended like a fog. The muscle in his clenched jaw flared again and again, as if he was as reluctant as she was to voice this thing between them.

‘Stop looking at me like that,’ he ordered, and she wondered how she looked at him. She’d thought it was just her who experienced the flashover when their gazes met. The thought that he could feel something similar...

‘Tell me,’ she whispered, hoping he couldn’t detect the begging in her tone, the tremor in her voice as she shuddered under the weight of her attraction to him.

‘Tell you what?’ he asked, his gaze still clinging to the horizon as if his life depended on it.

‘What you see when I look at you like that.’

He bit out something in Arabic that sounded hot and heavy, half-prayer, half-curse. She saw him inhale, drawing oxygen deep into his lungs and expanding his chest, the breadth of it making her palms itch and her fingers tingle. He moved his gaze from the horizon to the table between them, as if having to work his way up to looking at her. And when his eyes finally cut across the space, up to her face to meet her eyes, she felt branded.

‘It’s not what I see but what I feel,’ he said, his voice scraping over her nerves with wicked deliciousness. ‘A heat that snags on a spark just begging to catch fire. I see a want so pure, so powerful, so...naïve...as if it would rush headlong into a burning forest and be happy to die in its blaze.’ His eyes interrogated hers, leaving nothing unseen, unexamined. ‘I see fuel for a flame that lies deep within me and a fire that I’m too tempted by to not get burned.’

His words caught her heart and drew it upwards into the night sky. Not one book had prepared her for how this felt.

‘Which is why you should go,’ he said, dragging his gaze from hers, but it was too late. The damage was done. ‘You’re leaving tomorrow,’ he clarified to the question that had yet to leave her lips.

‘I know,’ she said simply.

‘I can’t follow you.’

‘I didn’t ask you to.’ She knew that he belonged here as much as she was needed in Norfolk. But she also knew that she would never forgive herself if she walked away from the promise of this night. One night.

‘Star, you’re innocent. You are—’

‘A virgin? Yes. I am. Does that mean I don’t know what I want?’ she replied.

‘No, but that doesn’t mean I can give you what you need.’

‘Oh. Would you not treat me well?’ she asked, not thinking for a second that he wouldn’t.

‘Of course I would.’

‘Would you be selfish and only take what you wanted?’ She couldn’t even imagine it.

‘No, I—’

‘Would you not be very good?’

The question was a taunt and his response, ‘Star...’ was a growl on his lips, a warning and an incitement, a call to arms that she felt down to her core, setting her on fire, energising her in a way she could never have imagined.

‘So you think I should leave and instead find someone who I’m less attracted to, who might not be good or treat me well and only be selfish in their wants?’

The thought burned the back of his throat and bruised his palms from clenching his fists too tightly. He couldn’t argue with her logic. He had spent years cutting a swathe through Europe’s most beautiful women and not a single one of them had caused this...arcane chemistry that burned the air between them—and his willpower to dust.

With his unseeing gaze still on the horizon, he felt her eyes like a brand against his skin, waiting for an answer, a response. His mouth ached to say the words, but he held them knowing he needed to be strong. He felt the subtle shift of her body as the fight left it and he closed his eyes, not wanting to see how giving up haunted her eyes.

Wordlessly she stood and approached the balconyas if the silhouette of his city contained answers that he was unable to give. She bowed her head and for a moment looked defeated. He wasn’t arrogant enough to believe it was all him.

‘I have let my sisters down.’

‘You’d be my choice.’

‘“It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy...”’

Snippets from their conversation whispered once again in his ear, threatening to pull him under, the word ‘intimacy’ like a spell drawing him to her. Before his mind could catch up, his body had taken him to her.

He stood behind her, inches from her, his mind on all the reasons why giving in to this desire would be bad and his body itching to touch all the reasons why it wouldn’t be. The glorious river of red had fallen over her shoulder, the delicate curve of her neck exposed. But it was when she moved her head slightly to the side, her pale skin gleaming in the light of the moon, willingly exposing her greatest vulnerability, surrendering to him completely, that he was lost.

He placed his hands against the stone balustrade either side of Star’s, encircling her without yet touching her. The roar of blood in his veins, the pounding beat of his heart in his ears—something primal, elemental was taking over, and as he placed his lips against that stretch of the palest, smoothest skin he offered his first prayer in over three years.

The shudder that travelled through him rippled through her and he couldn’t tell whether it was her legs shaking or his. He pressed his body into hers, leaning them both gently against the balcony, trapping her, holding her still. Her head fell back against his shoulder, her hair streaming over his forearm, offering him access to more of her. Rough stone was replaced by smooth skin as his hands left the balcony and swept around her petite body. He prised his eyes open to see the valley between breasts that were made to be held in his palms. He was torn, wanting to take this slow and wanting to take it all.

‘Please,’ she whispered.

And the leash on his restraint was lifted.

His hands swept over her breasts, palming the weight of them and feeling complete. His thumbs brushed her nipples into stiff peaks, ringing a shuddered moan that tightened Khalif’s arousal. As if feeling it, Star arched back into his groin, pressing against the length of his erection until it was cradled against her bottom. Desire exploded on his tongue and he gently scraped his teeth against the muscle of her neck. She shivered again—and he felt it against his chest, his hands, his thighs and his calf muscles, questioning why they were still standing.

It seemed inconceivable to him that Star was a virgin and, despite feeling all kinds of selfish, he couldn’t bring himself to stop. Unless she wanted him to.

‘Star, you need to know that if you want me to stop—’

‘Don’t stop, please, I—’

He bent his head to hers so that his lips were against her ear. ‘Nothing would make me stop. Not the sun falling from the sky, the desert freezing over, floods, locusts, or a third world war. Nothing would make me stop...but one word from you.’

‘I don’t need—’

‘Star. At any point, do you understand? You can stop me at any point.’