Exhaling a harsh breath, he pushed out the concern and curiosity, too. They had both known that this was about one night.
Glorious sex after six years of abstinence was frying his brain, warping his mind. Nikhat and he were tied together by a curious twist of fate but nothing else. It had to be.
She shivered and he pulled up the duvet to cover her naked body.
He lay back down on the bed, on his side again, and gathered her close. The scent of sex and her, a delicious combination, settled deep into his skin. He pressed a kiss to her forehead, and she snuggled into him. Her eyes fluttered open, drowsy and sated, her mouth curving into a satisfied smile. “Can we do it again?”
He laughed and tasted her mouth again.
Her eyes fluttered closed. “All I need is a little rest, and I will be ready for round two.” She cracked her eyes open and winked at him. “Unless it’s your creaky joints that aren’t up to scratch, really. If so, we will—”
He sent his fingers on a search up her thighs, until they found her buttocks and gave her a little squeeze. She yelped and hid her face in his neck.
His throat clotted, and he marveled at how easily she had made him laugh at himself. And he stilled at another realization. Even the pain in his hip, his inability to move inside her as he wanted without pain shooting down his leg, hadn’t derailed him the way it usually did. And, of course, he couldn’t contest the fact that it was because it was her. He swallowed the bittersweet realization. “Sleep, habeebi.”
* * *
The next morning, Nikhat woke alone in her bed. Sunlight glinted across every surface in her room, touching everything with a golden glow. Moving to her side, she dragged the pillow next to her toward her nose and took a deep breath. That dark scent of Azeez, with undertones of sex and sandalwood, instantly evoked tingles across her skin. Smiling, she lay there for a few more minutes, reliving last night.
The same sense of lightness and contentment pervaded her as she showered and dressed in a long cotton skirt adorned with beads and tiny mirrors that fell to her ankles, and a thin silk blouse in a pale yellow. Adding large dangly earrings that she had bought in a quirky jewelry store in Brooklyn, she studied her reflection in the mirror.
Color filled her cheeks and there was a light in her eyes. She looked every inch like a woman who had been loved, very thoroughly, last night. Refusing to let her thoughts veer into negative territory, she pulled a comb through her long hair, pulled it to fall in an angled ponytail over her shoulder and set off in search of Azeez.
The vast marble corridors of the resort, the grand archways that filled every inch of it with light, the world itself, looked like a brighter place today.
She found Azeez sitting at a table filled with breakfast dishes in a veranda off the main lounge. As it was only nine in the morning, the heat was still bearable. Pausing to catch her breath, she leaned against a wall.
His head thrown back over his chair, his eyes closed, his face was covered in sunlight. Long eyelashes cast shadows onto his gaunt cheekbones, his prominent, crooked nose shading the other side of his face from view, and his mouth…
Honeyed heat gathered in her muscles at the thought of all the things that mouth had done to her. She clutched her legs together as if she could soothe the pulsing ache at the center of her sex, desperate to stave off the yearning before it turned into something else.
She had wanted one night and she had taken it. If she continued to play with fire, she would only get burned.
“You are welcome to join me, Nikhat.” The hint of teasing in his tone had relief sweeping through her. She exhaled deeply, and smiled, more than glad that he was in that wicked, humorous mood. It was only a fragile cover over the deep passion underneath, the heated intensity of his emotions, but she welcomed it anyway. “I won’t bite. Not now and not here.”
Simple, mocking words. Yet it felt as if he had caressed her with his fingers. She sat down on the opposite chair and met his gaze.
It swept over her slowly, as if he had been waiting to do just that. “You look very—” he inclined his head, still looking, still devouring, and her heart thudded “—carefree today. Very much…”
She raised a brow, loving the wicked gleam in his eyes. “Very much like a satisfied woman? I did score—” she scrunched her face into a mock frown “—four times.”
He erupted into rich laughter, and it was impossible not to join him.
Shaking his head, his mouth still curved into a wide smile that dug grooves on his stubbled cheeks, he leaned forward. “I was going to say reckless.”
“Remember that time when you came back from university and wouldn’t stop strutting around the palace, as though you were lord of everything you surveyed, and Ayaan and Amira bugged you incessantly—”