Thea Devine - Fascinated

Hot, almond-scented air gusted against her cheek. "Does it cause you pain?"

Yes.

"No."

But it sounded as if he suffered.

She had forgotten how physically close a man and a woman were in conjugal intercourse. Or perhaps she had never really known.

Her breasts molded his chest; her thighs saddled his hips; her groin locked with his groin.

One breath.

One body.

One heartbeat.

"I have never…" Her internal muscles convulsively clenched around him. "I cannot… move. I do not understand how it can be done in this position."

"Grind your pelvis against mine."

He ground her body down onto his. At the same time he thrust his pelvis up.

He gasped.

She gasped.

The surge of heat that shot through her was far more agonizing than pain. Far more intense than pleasure.

Her nether lips were flattened against smooth skin-he had no pubic hair. The hardened bud of her femininity rubbed bare, naked flesh.

Megan impulsively spanned the short inches that separated their mouths and kissed him.

Lips closed. Eyes open.

He froze.

His lips were dry. Firm. Softer than a sigh.

The heat radiating through her pelvis leaped to her mouth, her breasts that stabbed his muscled, hairless chest, and bolted back down to her vagina that milked his rubber-sheathed manhood.

She jerked back, breathing hard.

"I have never kissed a woman," he said stiffly. He, too, breathed hard.

"Did you like it?" she asked, feeling invaded, feeling vulnerable, feeling as if she were far younger than a woman her age had a right to feel.

"Yes," he said shortly.

Megan was not deterred by his shortness.

Releasing his shoulders, she cupped his face in her hands- his skin felt as if it had been freshly shaved-and deliberately pressed her mouth to his.

His lips clung to hers. And then they possessed hers.

Shocked pleasure washed over her.

He was-probing the seam of her lips with his tongue. As if he wanted her to open her mouth.

Megan opened her mouth.

He touched the tip of his tongue to hers, simultaneously piercing both her upper lips and her nether lips.

A wave of heat ripped through her.

Megan climaxed, mouth sucking in his breath, vagina drawing on his manhood.

When she moved to jerk away, to escape the unexpected jolt of sensation, Muhamed grabbed her by the back of her head and held her in position. A sharp hairpin jabbed her scalp, a distant pain.

He licked her as if he could taste her pleasure, underneath her tongue, the roof of her mouth.

Light exploded inside her head.

Gripping her behind with his left hand, he ground her against him, making her ride out her peak of enjoyment until she could not distinguish between pain and pleasure, or even between an Arab man and an Englishwoman.

She tore his mouth away and rested her cheek against the hot slipperiness of his. Gasping. Still spasming.

"In sha' Allah." The foreign phrase scalded her ear.

Without warning, Muhamed stood up in a crouch, taking

Megan with him. The motion drove him deeper inside her, knocking the breath out of her lungs. Then he turned, and he was slipping out of her, and she was falling…

The bed creaked and groaned. Coarse wool bit into her buttocks; her head sank into a pillow, unmercifully driving hairpins into her scalp. Megan blindly clutched-with her hands, her knees, and then she had him. Muhamed's hips sank between her thighs; at the same time he surged hard and deep inside her.

Again.

And again.

And again.

The creaking of the bed matched the rasp of his breath in her ear. Their bodies were slick with perspiration. For a terrifying moment she could not tell who possessed whom.

She arched her hips, demanding more.

He gave her more.

A series of feminine cries randomly penetrated her consciousness: "Oh." "Please." "Oh, God." "Love me." "Harder." "Love me harder." "Oh, please." "Don't stop." "Please don't stop."

Muhamed gave Megan her third orgasm. Her forth orgasm. Her fifth orgasm. When he gave her a sixth orgasm, he gasped words she did not recognize. "Allah. Ela'na. LowsamaHt. Mara waHda." And two words she did recognize. "Goddamn you. Goddamn you. Goddamn you."

She dimly realized that it was not all sweat that dripped down Muhamed's face and splattered onto hers; his tears mingled with their combined perspiration. When he bonelessly collapsed on top of her, she held him as tightly as she could- as tightly as she wished she had been held twenty-two years earlier when she had cried in the night.

The smell of Megan's sex permeated the air: it was more potent than the most expensive perfume.

Light filtered through the drape covering the window, turning faded cloth to luminescent green. Beside him, dark hair threaded with silver peaked out from underneath the covers.

His lips burned in memory of her kiss; his body burned from the contact of hers, shoulder to ankle.

A long, thick braid snaked across his pillow; metal pins glinted in the dim light. Her hair had been secured on top of her head when she straddled his lap; it had come undone during the night.

He thought of the discomfort she must have experienced, sleeping on sharp pins. He thought of the tightness of her vulva, clasping his sheathed verge.

His chest constricted in memory.

She had kissed him, this woman whom he had accused of being too old to be a whore.

She had cradled his head, while he learned the taste a,nd texture of her breast.

She had shared with him the miracle of a man and a woman's joining.

Mingled wonder and shame coursed through him.

He had never felt more like a man than when he had been buried inside her body. He had never felt more vulnerable than when confessing four decades of fear: that he could never please a woman; that no woman could ever please him.

In the end, it had been she who had taken his life in her hands.

Megan's leg rode his upper thigh; her head was pillowed on his shoulder. Flyaway hair snagged his chin.

She slept as innocently as a child, a whore who had offered comfort as well as pleasure. Her cheeks were pale-from sleep? From exhaustion? From satiation?

Her clitoris had risen against his finger-once. Her vulva had clenched about his verge five times, tighter than his fist.

She had reached her peak six times in total.

He watched the stillness of her face, and thought of the man he had nearly betrayed-El Ibn, "the son" of his heart, if not his loins.

He studied the fan of her lashes, and thought of the woman he had silently loved-safe in the knowledge that she had loved another.

And knew he would never again be the same.

He had experienced sexual union.

One night. With one woman.

Sexless duty was a pitiful substitute.

His biceps and calves ached. Dull pressure radiated inside his groin.

The first would ease with time and exercise; the latter with simple voiding. All he had to do was find the strength to get out of bed, he who had not lingered between the sheets since he was a thirteen-year-old boy, secure in who and what he was.

Moving slowly, so as not to awaken Megan, he slid out from under her head, her leg, and then the covers.

His toes curled. The wooden floor was icy.

Briefly he stood over the bed and watched Megan sleep. Her echoing cries of pleasure rang in his ears.

She had begged him. To not stop. To fill her more deeply. To love her harder.

Never had he been so humbled, yet felt so powerful.

Her black dress lay in a heap where she had stepped out of it to come to his bed. His white turban and thobs, a loose ankle-length shirt, was sprawled on the floor farther away, a visible reminder of the road he had traveled and the distance he had spanned.

Prior to that night, he would have neatly folded his clothes away before retiring.

Prior to that night, he would scoop his clothes up now and fold them away.

Bending down, he grabbed the chamber pot from underneath the wooden slats of the sleigh bed. Crumpled rubber shone in the corner of his eye-the French letter he had used to protect himself from disease. Thin fluid congealed in the bottom of the sheath, proof that even he was capable of ejaculating.

Plucking up the used prophylactic, he crossed the plank floor. Setting the heavy porcelain down on the chair by the fireplace that no longer emitted even a vestige of warmth, he lifted the lid in his right hand.

Chipped black print stared up at him.

Use me well, and keep me clean, And I'll not tell what I have seen.

A slight smile hitched up his lips. There was a certain bawdy charm about the English.

Dropping the condom into the bowl, he reached down with his left hand to guide himself. For the first time the term manhood came to mind.

She had praised him for his size-he who had never thought to receive praise from any woman.

Hot urine arced into the chipped porcelain; it steamed in the chill morning air. Cursorily shaking himself dry, he replaced the lid.

Megan would need to make use of the chamber pot when she awakened; he turned, leaving it on the chair for her convenience.

Shadowy eyes stared up at him from the depths of the narrow sleigh bed. He did not need to see their color to know what it was: they were moss green. Verdant with life as the desert was not.

His first instinct was to hide himself. For the first time in forty years he did not.

His head felt oddly light, with no turban to protect his black hair that was liberally streaked with gray. But it was not his head that snared her attention.

Gaze oddly hesitant, she stared at his groin.

A prickle of heat rushed down his spine.

He stood still, waiting for her to laugh-as women in the harem laughed. Afraid to move, lest he invoke the very laughter that he feared.

"I did not know that men in Arabia shaved their private regions." Megan's gaze skidded up to meet his, danced past him. "Is it not chilly in the winter?"

Her sally fell flat in the chill morning air.

She had not judged him in the dark of night. But she did now in the light of day, else she would not make sport of his condition.

The surge of rage took him by surprise.

"Take another look, madam," he bit out. "It is more than 'private' hair I am missing."

Her eyes widened. With uncertainty? Alarm that she had offended an Arab dog?

He had offered her a gold sovereign. How much more money would it take for her to accept him in the light of day, as she had accepted him in the dark of night?

She glanced back down and studied him for long seconds.

Her tongue flecked her lips, a darker shadow in shadowy twilight. "You are not as… as large as you were last night, but that is understandable, surely."

Megan's response was naive; it was not manufactured.

His head snapped back.

She was a whore. How could she not see the obvious?

How could she not have felt it last night-that lack of flesh which made a man, a man-when she had grasped him in her hand? How could she mistake him for anything other than what he was, after he had lain between her thighs, buried so deeply inside her vulva that not even the night air had come between them?

Unless…

"Who are you?" he snapped.

Her gaze leaped back to his. The paleness of her face bleached into stark white. "I told you who I am."

"You're not a whore," he said baldly.

No whore could fail to observe what she had apparently missed.

His stomach clenched.

But if she wasn't a whore, why had she come to his room?

What was she doing in his bed?

He had cried, when he orgasmed, the tears he had not cried for forty years. She had held him, comforted him, loved him as if she were used to men who cursed and cried while they fought to find release inside a woman's body.

Who was she?

Tense seconds passed. A man's muffled shout for an ostler penetrated the outside hotel wall, a blaring reminder that the night was over and a new day had dawned.

"I am a widow," she said finally, evenly. "A patron of this inn, as you are."

His eyes narrowed, remembering his observation-that she did not sound as if she were from around Land's End; remembering her answer-that she was not. Why hadn't he ques-tioned her further?

"How is it that you came to my room last night?" he bit out.

"I overheard you order the innkeeper to find you a… a prostitute." Her breath fogged the air, blurring her face. "I intercepted her in the hallway. I knocked on your door in her stead, hoping you would mistake me for her."