Older Woman, Younger Sheikh Page 3

  "I am told he was quite sick at the end."

  She nodded. "He fought for every minute of life. Brave of him."

  "It is not brave to be afraid to die."

  "But isn’t everyone?" she countered.

  "Not if you live well." He put down his fork, leaned back in his chair. And he looked at her, openly staring, assessing her. For weakness? She got the feeling he was cataloguing her flaws, her vulnerable points.

  "Did you live well when you were at school?"

  "When I was, as a child, evicted from my home and sent to a foreign country to live with strangers?" he said. "No. In addition to all of that, I was under the thumb of a strict maternal figure."

  Despite the words, his resentful tone softened when he said “maternal figure.” Gratitude swept her. Mrs. Khan had been one of her own teachers, who had gone to England to run a boarding house at an exclusive private school. The whole reason she'd extracted Ghassan's promise to send Amin there. She'd known Mrs. Khan would become the mother he’d lost.

  "But you weren't at school the whole time you've been away. What about after?"

  He had graduated from the University of Leeds, three years ago, with his masters in economics. Ghassan had reluctantly offered him a job at Al Nawaz. Considering Amin held the majority of shares and could have ousted Ghassan at any time, the move was almost insulting. Okay, there wasn’t any "almost" about it. Just insulting.

  Amin had responded by turning the job down to join a large venture capital firm with an office in London.

  "I didn't live as well as I would have liked. I intend to remedy that now I have returned." He paused. "Why do you smile at that?"

  "Live better in Nalut than London?" Qena’s capital city had about seven hundred thousand people. Tiny, compared to London. "No bars, no nightlife, no world-class museums, no Michelin-star restaurants. I could go on."

  "True," he conceded. "But all those things are a short plane ride away. And Nalut has things you cannot get anywhere else."

  "I can't think what they are."

  "Can you not?" For the first time, she saw true emotion on his face. And that emotion was… hunger? His eyes flashed at her, but in a code she didn’t know how to read.

  They ate the rest of dinner in silence, leaving her alone with dark thoughts. He had an agenda, she could tell. What his agenda was, she had zero clue.

  He wanted something, and needed her to help make it happen. She couldn't imagine what, as hard as she worked her brain.

  Of course, she had an agenda herself. No one but Amin could look into the problem of her apartment. She couldn’t even do it. The agreement had always been between Ghassan and the condo complex.

  Now, instead of coming to Amin in honesty and creating a new friendship, she had to ask favors.

  After a dessert she hardly noticed and didn't taste, the time came for her to reveal her goal.

  "Amin." His name came out squeaky. After swallowing, she went on. "Please believe me when I say I regret asking anything from you. I would rather be friends with you than anything else…"

  He gave her a diamond-hard look. "However…"

  "I need a favor." She pressed her hand to her stomach, trying to quell the buzz of flies inside. "Ghassan left me in the dark about my finances. I don’t know how much longer I have in my apartment until I have to move. His files should tell you, if you would have someone look for me."

  He gave her a long, slow blink. Disbelief? No. Couldn't be. Ghassan had many people fooled into believing him generous. Amin, whose wallet Ghassan had controlled for years, wouldn't be one of them.

  He flattened his fingertips against each other and placed his elbows on the table. He looked at her over top of the unmistakable power gesture, and for the first time ever, she saw him smile.

  When he was ten, she would have given anything to see him happy. He should have had a safe, warm home. Instead, his distant parents died in a car accident, leaving him with Ghassan (his aunt's widower, barely even a relative), who would have thrilled to train him to be Ghassan II, the sequel. A man who didn’t think twice about doing whatever necessary to get his own way, no matter how many broken people he left behind him.

  Now that she saw Amin's smile, she almost asked him to stop. The expression was pure sneer, and all villain. That smile raked her over, leaving long red gashes behind.

  "I see we think alike," he said, bizarrely. "I brought you here tonight intending to discuss your finances.” He leaned back from the table. "You will continue your agreement with the palace."

  "My agreement with the palace," she repeated. "I don't understand."

  "Of course you do, Rania. You have always understood. No need to play games. I know what you are."

  Her heart thumped painfully. "What I am," she repeated, stuck in a loop.

  He furrowed his brow at her. "Idiocy is not attractive. But if you persist, I shall play. Your relationship with this office will continue. As of tonight."

  Office? He'd substituted one word she didn't understand for another. "Do you mean Al Nawaz Industries? I don’t have a relationship with an office."

  "You have had a relationship with this office since you were seventeen."

  She gulped. She'd only had one relationship since she was seventeen. It hadn't been with an office. He couldn't mean… "I'm sorry, Amin. I don't understand at all."

  His mouth twitched in unpleasant amusement. "With me. The agreement you had with my guardian will continue with me. Tonight."

  If her stomach was an elevator, someone just cut the cables. The car plummeted into the basement. The dinner she’d barely eaten hardened into a lump in her belly.

  "Are you not attracted to me?" Amin’s top lip ticked up into a full-on sneer before he turned aside as if he couldn’t look at her. "That seems unlikely. I am young, well groomed, fit. Surely you can have no complaints, especially in comparison to my guardian."

  The television static in her skull was all movement and no sense. "Why me? You could have a much younger wom—"

  She stopped, biting the word in half, as the full impact of what he’d said earlier hit her. The agreement. He knew about it.

  Now he controlled Al Nawaz Industries. Now Amin, not Ghassan, had his hand around her family’s throat. The faces of her sweet nieces floated in front of her.

  Merda.

  Amin had thrown her into the same situation she'd had for seventeen years. To save her family, she had to sleep with him. Her eyes kept being drawn to the partly open door to her left. The one she knew very well led to the sheikh's bedroom.

  "In addition to you being convenient, you were the subject of my schoolboy fantasies."

  She sucked in a breath.

  "You are shocked. I spent many nights dreaming of rescuing you from the clutches of my villainous guardian." An elegant, dismissive wave of his hand. The golden seal of Qena, the one Ghassan had also worn on his pinky, glinted in the candlelight.

  She clenched manicured fingernails into her palms, nearly to the point of pain. "No, Amin, I was always a kind of aunt to you."

  His laugh was more of a snort. "Perhaps you thought of yourself that way. I never did. Not even at the age of ten. Did I not once propose marriage to you?"

  He had. One of the few actual sentences he'd said to her—to anyone—at the time. "You didn't know what you were talking about."

  He rose and began to circle the table, his arms folded behind his back. "Of course, I did not truly understand what I wished from you then. And then several more years passed before I understood what you are."

  What she was. He didn’t need to say the word. A whore. Nothing more. A woman who had slept with Ghassan, and was paid for it. For seventeen years.

  Which made it okay to hold her hostage by threatening Farid's job.

  "I imagine—" His circling path took him behind her chair now. She wanted so badly to turn and look at him, but stilled herself. Instead, his dispassionate voice floated over her. "—any lingering sentimentality I have in regards to you
shall die when confronted with the reality. But for now, we will continue the agreement."

  "The reality of what I am." She couldn’t seem to stop herself from repeating his words.

  He whirled toward her, considered her. Something in his face softened in a way she hadn't seen before. The glow of empathy around his eyes…

  "Forgive my bluntness." His tone moderated as he looked down at her. Looked down on her. "I speak of things I should not. I do wish for us to have a pleasant relationship."

  Pleasant fucking relationship. She swallowed a bitter laugh.

  She'd learned to appreciate people who said what they meant to her face, instead of sticking sharp pins in her back. "I don't mind bluntness. Your uncle was blunt. In private."

  He visibly winced when she called Ghassan his uncle, not his guardian. "I wonder what you would have been if…"

  If he hadn't forced me into being his mistress. She didn't complete the thought for him.

  "If you had not met him," Amin finished.

  "I wonder the same about you," she said, keeping her tone cool. If Amin had never met Ghassan, he wouldn’t be forcing her into sexual servitude now, that was for sure.

  He strode over to the sitting area and lowered himself onto the antique couch. In a near-shrug, he stretched both arms out, taking up as much real estate as possible, showing perfect comfort with his ownership of all he surveyed. "I would not have been any different."

  I would have been very different. No nice shoes, no hotel-like apartment where she could never relax. A home. A sturdy husband. Some kids.

  No core of bitterness hardening inside me.

  "Come here," he said.

  Her body turned mechanical at his order, rising from the table and moving toward him. She’d heard the same command from Ghassan a thousand times. She’d never been able to escape it. Had stopped trying.

  Tonight. He'd said tonight.

  He wanted to sleep with her tonight.

  "Amin. There's something you need to know." She hesitated. "Ghassan. He had been sick. For years."

  "That information was kept from me, but I know it now. Why do you repeat such a thing?"

  She felt the heat pour into her cheeks. "We had not been together for a long time."

  Something she'd been insanely grateful for.

  His eyebrows drew together. "You are not nervous."

  "You'd be nervous about getting naked with someone ten years younger than you for the first time when you haven't performed in so long."

  He lunged from the couch, suddenly looming in front of her. She had to crane her neck to look into dusky hot eyes.

  “Fifteen-year-old girls are children. I have no interest in children,” he said, through gritted teeth.

  One arm clamped around the small of her back, drawing her against his hard body. The other cradled the nape of her neck and pulled her mouth to his own.

  As their lips touched, her pulse jammed. Her heart didn’t seem to know if it should slow to a crawl or achieve lift off.

  His mouth. Dio bono, his mouth was hot and firm. And surprisingly gentle. He didn't force her, but teased and tempted, drawing her into the kiss, making the thoughts rush out of her brain.

  The world fell away behind her. There was only Amin. The fine fabric of his jacket under her questing hands, the strength of the body beneath.

  She pressed herself to him, trying to feel more of him. The kiss deepened in sensation and hunger. She opened to him, feeling his solid teeth against her lips, a contrast to the wet movement of his tongue.

  A vague zip of a sound behind her as he moved a hand down her back. Then her dress flopped loose. She shrugged out of it, maintaining the kiss. The pile of satin tumbled to the floor, leaving her exposed, wearing only her frilly pink silk bra and panties.

  Strong hands explored her bare skin, sliding heat over her body. She'd never felt anything like this, this desire, need, want. She wanted more, more of everything he was doing to her.

  And she wanted him naked.

  She dropped her hands low on his back. And lower. She followed the curve of his very fine butt. Firm and rounded, with athletic dimples in the side.

  Someone growled. May have been her.

  She was moving backward, backward through the doorway to the adjoining bedroom. Maybe, hard to tell with him kissing her neck like that, planting ticklish, damp patches on her throat. She wanted to tell him something, but couldn't remember what… Her words kept getting lost and forgotten as he…

  Oh, as he did something fantastic with his tongue right below her ear. Someone whimpered. Definitely her.

  Stepping back once more, she hit something behind her. The bed. Thank God. And thank God Amin lifted her onto it, stepping between her thighs, right where he belonged.

  There was some reason she shouldn't be doing this, she knew. But as his shirt came off, revealing a wiry, muscled frame, she couldn't drag up that reason in her cotton-filled mind.

  He didn’t jiggle, like… someone else. Someone she knew she should be thinking of. Amin's hands slipping off her bra, running lightly over her exposed nipples, made whoever that person was seem like a faraway grain of sand in an endless desert, and then just fall away.

  But Amin still had his trousers on. Which was so wrong. She attacked his belt, the soft leather feeling a lot like his own skin. Which she needed more of against her own. She pushed the pants down his legs, taking the chance to feel up this fantastic butt as she did.

  He whipped off her panties—she heard a rip as they went, and she might have cared about that, except for Amin, bending over her, covering her. Something hard and incredible connected with her sex, lining up with her girl parts in the tastiest way.

  Or so she thought. But then he started moving himself against her, and she had to bite her own lip to handle the even tastier sensations.

  Almost unbearable heat radiated from her center to the soles of her feet as the sensation intensified with every rock of his body against her. She couldn't take any more. Too sensitive. Too raw. Too open…

  Her hands flattened against his pecs, but without the strength to shove him away and free herself from the beautiful tension happening between her legs.

  "Are you on birth control?" he asked.

  "Mmm-hmm," she barely managed.

  He drew back from her. Tried to, anyway. She wasn't about to let him go anywhere.

  "I am serious, Rania. I want no accidents with you," he said, when she let him have a breath to speak.

  Words. She needed to find words. What were they like again? You made them with your mouth…

  “I… U… D…” she squeezed out.

  He got it without more explanation. Good. She didn’t have headspace to clarify. Some distant, faraway thought had some other man in it, and her intense desire not to be connected to that man through a child, or to have any child be connected to that man. Even though she'd wanted a child connected to her.

  Then they were rolling on the bed, all tangling legs and tourist hands roaming over each other, exploring foreign territory. Sounds came out of her. She didn't even try to hold them inside. So many sounds she'd never heard from herself before. Hungry ones and happy ones and both at the same time, all mixed together.

  There was a tempting spot on his neck, just behind his ear. Soft and tender. Every instinct in her body told her to kiss it. So she did.

  Amin released an uncontrolled moan.

  Oh, so he liked that, did he? She did it again, this time sucking a little. Her reward was the moan again, this time with a full-body shudder attached.

  Seemed she’d found his weak spot. She noted it. Might come in useful later.

  Amin didn't make any more sounds, but his breathing came heavy and humid on her neck. His skin stuck to her with sweat. He pulled back from her, making her reach for him. He held her hands down, drawn above her head, and put chill air between them when all she wanted was more touching.

  "A moment," he panted. "I need a moment."

  Right. Thou
ght aligned with her brain for a second. This was his idea. He would want to be in charge, in control. She was supposed to service him.

  Like she'd serviced Ghassan before him.

  Ghassan's name, coming back, felt like a bucket of ice dumped on her. She winced, tightening her eyelids as if the act could keep him out of her mind.

  No. Amin. Amin. Amin. She repeated his name, kept repeating it. Not Ghassan, who had trapped her. Amin, who had wanted to rescue her. Once.

  But she couldn't summon the picture of young Amin telling her they would get married. Instead, she saw an older Amin in his place, as he was now.

  Well, as he was now, except with more clothes on.

  No good. The magic moment had fled. Ghassan had reached out from the grave again, to strangle her pleasure in the moment.

  When Amin had recovered himself, she summoned the stuff inside her that had gotten her through a hundred nights with Ghassan. She felt Amin's body from a distance, knew his touch meant pleasure, and tried to pull the sensation into her.

  She threw herself into the sex, tumbling with him, kissing and caressing him in ways she knew he'd like. Swallowing past a stone in her throat.

  When he entered her, she made the correct noises. She concentrated on clenching her insides to intensify his pleasure. She moved with him. And he eventually exploded in her. She timed a languid moan for just the right moment.

  He collapsed, being careful not to land on her, which she appreciated. Ghassan had not done the same, and he'd been a much bigger man.

  She gave Amin a minute, then curled into his side. He unfurled his arm, giving her a bicep to rest her head on. She smiled—in a contented way, she hoped.

  But she closed her eyes, not wanting him to see anything in them.

  After a while, he dozed. She expected him to wake when she rose, but he didn't. She managed to gather her clothes (sans destroyed panties) and make it to the attached bathroom.

  Should she go? Would he want her to stay? What would make him happy? Her happiness—survival—depended on figuring him out now. Somehow, she sensed none of her experience with Ghassan, hard-earned over the last seventeen years, would relate.