He traced warm, knowing fingers down her spine until they met the slightly raised scar above her tailbone. She keeled over then, over the balustrade, swamped in sensation. He traced its outline, and the tissue that alternated between numbness and aching fired with stimulation. Each caress sent lightning forking throughout her body, lodging in her nipples and core.

“Does it still hurt?” His fingers traveled up and down to the rhythm of his words, yanking the direction of the electric current lancing through her back and forth until she almost collapsed. She could only shake her head. Shake, period.

“Tell me you never hurt yourself again.” His palm splayed over her scar in a gesture rich with something far more disturbing than lust. Concern, protection. What she’d never felt from anyone but her father and Bill. And to feel it from him…

She shook her head again, heard a satisfied rumble deep in his chest before he ended his torture, pulled the zipper up. Then he clamped her waist again, turned her to him, bore down on her with his aura and hunger.

And she couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Had to be totally still, to watch him do it, take the first taste of her.

But he didn’t do it. His lips descended only to whisper against her burning cheek, “Ya ajmal makhloogah ra’ayta’ha, the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen, dance with me.”

Dance? Dance? That was all he wanted?

But she wanted more. He’d been right. She’d never imagined she could feel anything like this. Hunger that rocked her, frightened her, made her crave things from him she’d never wanted from another man. Things she’d hated from other men.

But he was only drawing her into a loose embrace, leading her into the first languid steps of a waltz. Maddening her with enough contact to inflame her more, but not enough to blunt the talons of need that sank deeper into her flesh with every move.

To her surprise, she felt her feet flowing into steps learned during her days as her father’s favorite dance partner. Then the rest of her body followed, as one with the rhythm, with his every move, with him. She felt grace and power pulsing in her arms as she wound them around his steel bulk, securing him to her. She had a feeling it would all end when the dance was over. She was taking all she could…now.

At one point, Shehab groaned against her temple, “You are the meaning of your name. This would be how a hooreyah, one of the inhabitants of heaven who brings total joy, would feel in my arms…” He pressed her harder to his length. “But, no. If those creatures do exist, they’d be nothing to you. With you, it’s like dancing with bliss, with passion made human.”

Laughter flowed from her, unfettered, delirious. She didn’t believe any of those things applied to her, but it seemed he believed they did. Why not, when she believed the same about him? This had to be what he’d said it was. Magic. And she wouldn’t think how or why. She’d just wallow in it.

Somewhere in her hazy mind she realized the music had ended, another piece had started and they were no longer dancing. He was leading her down the wide marble steps to the gardens. And she was following him, still laughing, ready for anything. She felt like someone coming out of stasis and now rushing toward the first moments of life.

He took her behind obscuring trees, pressed her against a smooth trunk, then took her face in both hands. In a rogue moonbeam slashing among the foliage, his face and obsidian gaze were supernatural in beauty, in impact. She felt penetrated, the notion of spontaneous combustion no longer such an impossibility anymore.

Just as she thought she’d crumble to his feet in ashes she cried out, “Shehab…”

He swallowed his name, growled hers inside her. “Farah…”

And it was like opening a floodgate. She’d thought nothing could be better than his feel and scent. His taste was. She wanted to drown in it. She was drowning. In kisses that gave her glimpses of the ferocity she needed from him. His hands joined in her torment, gliding all over her, never pausing long enough to appease, until she writhed against him, whimpering, begging, not really knowing what she was begging for, “Shehab…please…”

His lips clamped down on hers then, moist, branding, his tongue thrusting deep, singeing her with pleasure, breaching her with need, draining her of moans and reason.

She took it all, not knowing what to do to pleasure him in turn. It was just so…so…everything. Pressure built, in her eyes, chest, loins. Her hands convulsed on his arms until he relented, lowered her zipper, pushed her gown and purse strap from her shoulders, setting her swollen breasts free.

She keened. With relief, with the spike in arousal. He had her exposed, vulnerable. Maddened. “Please…”

Her hands pressed her breasts together to mitigate their aching as everything inside her surged, gushed, needing anything…anything he would do to her. His fingers and tongue and teeth exploiting her every secret, his body all over hers, his manhood filling the void between her thighs, thrusting her to oblivion…

Oh, God. What was she thinking?

She wanted him to do all that to her? There? Then?

What was wrong with her?

Then revelation came. Nothing was wrong with her.

Something…everything…was finally right.

This was all wrong.

He was supposed to be the one performing the seduction.

He was always the one in control, easily taking what was on offer or leaving it, his libido never in the driver’s seat.

No woman had ever had him a breath away from insanity.

But as his eyes glazed over kiss-swollen lips and glistening eyes, over the perfection of full breasts pressed together in a mind-blowing offering, he couldn’t remember how this had started, or why he shouldn’t take what his body was bellowing for, come what may.

He’d been wrong about her. This unpredictable enchantress was nothing like the hardened vixen he’d expected.

And she was infinitely more dangerous for it.

And it didn’t matter to him. Nothing did. Not her crimes or that she was another man’s mistress, who, an hour after meeting him, was begging him to do anything and everything to her. It only inflamed him more, the force of her equal hunger…

No. No. He couldn’t give her what she wanted that easily.

If he did, he’d be a one-night stand to her. A steady supply of those had to be how she filled her insatiable sexual needs. Although she’d been discreet, no doubt fearing her lover’s wrath. His reports on her hadn’t included any known liaisons.

But she was pressing into him, all that glorious passion and flesh. He could smell her arousal, feel it vibrating in his loins, hear it thundering in his cells. Surely this much hunger wouldn’t be satisfied with one frenzied mating. He could take her now and it would only start her addiction, as he’d planned…

No. He couldn’t risk it. He had to stop. Even if he wasn’t sure his potency would survive the blow.

“Farah, wait.” She didn’t heed him, her lips at his pulse wringing coherence from his body. He tried again, his voice a gruff groan he didn’t recognize. “We have to stop…”

And again her reaction was nothing he could have predicted. It was as if he’d shot her. She jackknifed away, stumbling as she fumbled to pull up her gown and purse, emotions slashing across her face. Shock, frustration, embarrassment. It was the distress that disturbed him. A distress she must surely be feigning.

Before he could say anything she rasped, “You have someone in there…or somewhere, don’t you? I should have asked…” She stopped, her mortified gaze hardening into a glare. “Wait a minute. I’m less to blame here than you.” She struck his hands off. “What kind of a bastard remembers his commitment to another woman just before…What kind of promiscuous jerk starts a-a situation like this when-when…”

Kettle calling the pot black, anyone? But then, now wasn’t the time to let her know that he knew she was a two-timer herself.

He clamped her shoulders, wouldn’t let her shake him off. “You wait a minute. I have no one waiting for me in there, or anywhere.”

Her lower lip trembled. “Really?”

He barely stopped himself from catching that lip, making a feast of it. “Farah, I’m saying this once. I don’t have, and have never had, any kind of commitment to any woman.”

“Which probably doesn’t say much about you.”

Her scoffed volley was so unexpected it wrung a surprised laugh from him. “It says I’m free to start a ‘situation like this.’” She mumbled something. He frowned. “What did you say?”

She shrugged, her color deepening. “Nothing.”

“Farah.”

“Listen, I should just shut up, preferably forever, and get the hell out of here. Do me a favor and forget you ever saw me.”

“Alf la’nah-a thousand damnations-tell me what you said.”

She grumbled some more. Then she sighed. “I said ‘Of course you’re free to start a situation like this. And to end it. And to hell with your partner, anyway.’ Satisfied now?”

He laughed again. “Enti majnoonah, weh ajeebah…crazy and incredible.” He crowded her against the tree, snatched up her skirt, nudged her thighs apart as he lifted her, brought her down over an erection huge and hard enough for her to straddle. “Does it feel like I want to end this? Anywhere but inside you?”

She gasped as his hardness dug into her core through his taub and her sodden panties. Her hands clutched at some branches to hold on to, her legs going around his hips. “Then-then why…?”

He cupped her buttocks, rasped, “Why did I stop? Why aren’t we already in the throes of the first orgasm of many?”