The Last Prince of Dahaar

CHAPTER ELEVEN


MEET ME AT the stables.

Ayaan looked at the note a little girl had fluttered in his hand. Frowning, he looked up and realized he had missed half of what Imran, his security chief, had said.

Motioning him to repeat, he walked toward the stables. And promptly stopped on the path when Imran was done. “So this information comes from the same source who provided us information last time on where the terrorist group will convene next?”

Imran shook his head. “No.”

Intelligence about a terrorist gathering in Dahaara the next month... It was the third time this information was coming his way. Information that had been accurate the first two times but was beginning to sound too good to be true. And this time, it was coming from a different source.

Something niggled at Ayaan, even though he couldn’t exactly place it. “See if you can trace it back to the source,” he said, taking another step in the direction of the stables.

“Are we not—”

“We are not acting on this until we figure out if there is a connection,” he said, dismissing him and covering the distance to the stables.

Imran had requested this meeting two days ago, and Ayaan, unable to focus on anything, had forgotten.

Like a teenager riding the first waves of infatuation, his mind, and his body, refused to focus on anything but on the image of Zohra underneath him, her beautiful brown eyes bewitching with raw need, sparkling with trust, the tight heat of her body, the heady moans from her mouth.

At some point past midnight, when he had exhausted them both, they had finally fallen sleep. Dreamless sleep, Ayaan had realized with a shock the next morning.

It had been two days since, two days where she had occupied his every thought, during which, interestingly, she had avoided him just as he had, where he had had more than enough time to berate himself for what he had done, to find numerous reasons why he could not do it again.

Even if his body, forever in a state of painful arousal, didn’t understand the fact.

He made his way to the stables, curiosity for once trumping the distinct unease he felt anywhere near it.

He stood inside, the echo of everything he had gone through in there rumbling through him. He understood the spine-tingling fear that had driven him to take Zohra, the need to keep her close, the need to lose himself in her body, but in the cold light of the day, the evidence of the instability of his mind skewered through him.

The scent of her carried to him through the light breeze, his body thrumming to life as though a switch had been turned on. He turned around to face her and frowned. Dusk was still a few hours away yet she had wrapped a thin shawl over her torso with white leggings under it. Her hair was covered with a scarf of the same color, and she looked the very picture of vitality, of life, an embodiment of everything he was not.

“Ayaan,” she said, as if she needed to force him to acknowledge her presence, as if the memory of how she tasted, how her body clenched him tight wasn’t etched into his very cells.

“You have been avoiding me,” he said. Tugging the scarf from her neck, she dropped it to the floor. Sunlight glinted in her hair, turning it into strands of coppery gold. “Are you regretting what happened?”

“No. And I’m not the one who’s doing the avoiding. I just didn’t hound you like I usually do.” She ventured farther in and tugged the huge door closed. Then her fingers pulled the shawl she had wrapped around her torso. Inch by inch, she unwound the fabric until it fell to the ground with a soft whisper.

She wore a sleeveless top, in the sheerest see-through silk in gold. With the light from the high windows behind her, every inch of her body was outlined under the thin fabric. He swallowed, the shadow of her lacy bra, the indent of her navel instantly drowning him in images and sensations of how she had felt beneath him.

Walking around the stables, she came to a halt near him. “I have ordered for it to be demolished.”

He raised a brow even as he enjoyed the raw command in her tone.

Sinking her hands under the top, she slowly peeled off her leggings. The sight of her long, bare, sun-kissed thighs set need coursing through him, rattling his self-control. “It serves no purpose other than to remind you of what you had to endure.”

“It’s not the only thing that reminds me of everything I have gone through and everything I am not,” he said, studying her with a hunger that was becoming all too familiar. The sight of the thin strings of her panties dried up his throat. “And demolishing it won’t fix me, Zohra.”

Shaking her head, she reached him, a resigned smile on her lips. “Maybe I don’t think you need fixing, Ayaan. There is one thing I wish to do here before it goes down, though.”

She was upset and she was battling it with her fierce strength. He didn’t question why or how he knew. He just did. And in this mood, she was a force to be reckoned with.

He covered the last step between them before he realized he was moving. Being near her and not touching her was akin to not breathing. Their gazes held, speaking to each other, assessing each other, and he immediately felt surrounded by her warmth.


Warmth that had a different source from the desire that flew hotly in his veins. This time, he willingly lost the fight, surrendered his will to her.

His fingers trembling, he touched her forehead. She exhaled on a whoosh. “Are you all right?” Burying his nose in her hair, he took a deep breath, until she was all he knew, all he felt, all he was. “Everywhere?”

Her chin tilted up, she held his gaze even as pink scoured her cheekbones. “I am not going to break so easily.” Her words were a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down. And yet, he could be the one who could break her, who could crush that indomitable spirit.

She ran her fingers over his jaw, and he closed his eyes. Her touch feathered over him, fanning the flames of desire that always simmered. It had taken him an incredible amount of control to not go looking for her in the past two days.

The indescribable pleasure he had found with her was addictive, but he could still do without it. But the warmth of her smile, the quiet contentment he found near her, he was afraid they would be his downfall.

The pads of her thumbs brushed over his forehead, his nose, his lips. When he would have stopped her, she pushed his hands away. “You will not deny me this.”

“Giving orders, Princess?”

Her hands moved lower, lingered over his neck. “No, simply exercising my rights as your wife.”

She kissed his cheek, tugged at his earlobe with her teeth, scraped them over the pulse in his neck. Her nimble fingers began unbuttoning his cotton shirt. Need gripped his belly, his arousal instantaneous, powerful and relentless.

She pushed him against the wall and he let her, enjoying the daring in her gaze, more than content to see how far she would go.

Pushing his shirt off his shoulders, she kissed his pectoral. “You are like steel covered in velvet. My fingers itch to touch you, to scrape you, to mark you as you did me.”

His breath balled up in his throat. “Do it,” he said, wondering how easily she enslaved him.

She raked a fingernail over one nipple and he fisted his hands at his sides.

Her hands clasping his on either side, she bent and scraped her teeth over the other nipple. A hiss of breath left him as his skin felt too hot, too tight to hold him. Her pink tongue darting out, she licked him, and his erection twitched.

Like a cat licking up cream, she rained soft, wet kisses over his chest, his abdomen, around his navel. His muscles knotted so tight that it almost hurt, but he resisted the urge to sink his hands in her hair.

She licked a path next to the line of hair disappearing into his jeans, and he bucked off the wall. He closed his eyes, fighting for control. Instead the image of her mouth around his arousal burned in his brain. He felt her fingers undo the button, tug the zipper down.

Heat billowed in his blood, curled in his muscles, threatening to shove him out of his own skin.

He uncurled his fingers and plunged them into her hair. “Stop, Zohra,” he said, uncaring that his tone was begging for something even as he spoke the words that said the opposite.

She sank to her knees at his feet, full of fluid grace. She looked up, her eyelids droopy with lust. “Remember how you gave me a gift, Ayaan?”

He nodded, his throat hoarse.

“Apparently, the bride is supposed to give one to the groom, too. The next time you think of this place, I want you to see me like this—on my knees, with my mouth around you.”

An unbearable longing churned through him. “You don’t have to do this, Zohra.”

“I want to. Just as you wanted to learn and taste every inch of me.”

With a smile that he would never forget curving those lushly erotic lips, she tugged his jeans and boxers down. And his erection sprang free.

Clamping his jaw tight, he closed his eyes. He heard the harsh rasp of her breathing, just before she wrapped her hand around his hard length, her fingers tightening as they moved up and down.

He instantly jerked his hips forward, coils of pleasure shooting down his groin.

Until he felt the tentative flicker of her tongue over the head. Heat blasted through him.

“Oh...” she said, her breath feathering over the wet tip.

He sucked in a breath, tried to get his vocal glands to work. “What?” It was all he could say.

“I see why you liked doing it so much.” Her pink tongue flicked out again and stroked him in a leisurely lick that tugged tight over every nerve ending. “Every time I do that, I feel this ache....” She shifted restlessly on her knees, before licking him again.

He banged his head against the wall, a low growl ripping from this throat when she closed her soft mouth over the head.

“Where?” he rasped again, his brain only capable of single words.

He heard her soft groan in the moment that she caught her breath. “Between my thighs. Every time I taste you, I feel it there,” she said, before sucking him into her luscious mouth again. His shoulders trembled, his knees quaked, a fine sheen of sweat covered his entire body.

She continued pleasuring him with her tongue and her mouth until he shook with the sensation of it, until curse upon curse fell from his mouth, until he could feel the intense rush of his climax building, a roaring fire inside him.

Holding on to the last vestige of control, reining the animal part of him that wanted only to find release, he tugged her up.

Her skin was flushed, her gaze soaked with lust. With movements that lacked both finesse and gentleness, he tugged her panties down and lifted her up against the wall. Her legs wound around his hips just as he thrust into her in long, smooth motion.

Pleasure, so acute that it bordered on pain, rode through him.

This time, he didn’t stop or think. He gave in to the need pounding upon him, the musky scent of her arousal telling him everything he wanted to know.

His orgasm was a breath away, but he didn’t want to ride the wave, not without this amazing woman he had married falling headlong into it with him.

He wanted her to splinter, he wanted to hear his name on her lips, here—in this place of all places—where something inside him had been forever lost, in the one place that stood for everything he was not and that she deserved.

With a voracious need that he now knew would never be satisfied, he pushed her top up until he found bare skin. He tugged the lace of her bra down and found a taut, aching nipple.

He pinched it between his fingers and she came undone. He kissed her mouth, loving his name on it as he pounded into her, their mingled groans and grunts rippling through the air.

Her hands in his hair, her teeth dug into his shoulder, just as he came in a fierce rush of pleasure. She whispered his name just as he wanted and it stole over all the cracked, broken places inside him.

Nothing would fix him, he knew that now, but in the moments when he was with her, Ayaan could almost believe that he was a better man, a man worthy of the amazing woman. Stealing a kiss from her, he righted their clothes and crumpled to the ground.

Leaning against the wall, he pulled her close until she was cradled between his thighs. Wrapping his arms around her, he kissed her shoulder, clutched her to him tight.

The most amazing kind of contentment ballooned up in his chest that he wondered if he would burst from it. “Thank you, Zohra,” he whispered, his heart beating loudly, loath to fracture the fragility of the moment.

She nodded. He had no idea how long they sat like that. But as minutes passed, Ayaan felt the tight fist of fear this place held in his core relent. Running his hands over her shoulders, he wrapped his arms around her waist.

“Zohra?”

“He has had another heart attack.”

Her words were so soft that he didn’t catch them until he felt her shiver. “I will arrange for your transport within the hour.”

“I don’t want to go.”

She turned suddenly and hugged him hard. Her arms clamped around his neck, her face buried in his chest, Ayaan felt a fierce rush of tenderness swamp him. She was hurting and he understood the feral urge inside of him that wanted to fix everything for her.

“I am scared, Ayaan,” she said, breathing the words into his neck.

He frowned at the shiver that spewed into her words. It spoke of a Zohra he had never seen or heard. “You afraid, Zohra? Of what?”

“Of truth, of seeing him, of learning of things that I never let my father say. But I have to ask him this time.”

He held her as she steadied herself, as she found her own strength again. “Remember what you said about truth, Princess? That even in its bitterest form, it is better than the sweetest lies. You have evaded it for thirteen years now, have let the very idea of it have power over you. He could have let you go to your uncle, he could have let you go through your entire life thinking he was dead, he could have easily shrugged off your responsibility, he could have placed so many restrictions on how you led your life. But he didn’t. It is time to face the truth, Zohra, time to see if it can really break you as much as you fear.”

“It didn’t break you, Ayaan. Being in this place, living through it, you are still standing.”

The very contentment he had felt a moment ago slid off him.

Still standing, that was what he was, that was what every small step he took amounted to in the end. Not that he gained control over his fears, not that he had made a small amount of progress, no.

His victory would always be that he hadn’t fallen back into the madness.


Even after he had realized the truth of what had happened to him, he hadn’t resented his life, he had accepted his reality without complaints, shrugged on the mantle of duty to the best of his ability.

But the moment he was near her, this crippling need flared inside him—to be more than what he was for her, this emaciating, perverse anger over circumstances he could not change, it gnawed at him.

Wasn’t that why he had risked this journey to the desert, risked his lucidity and everything it meant to his parents and Dahaar? Because he wanted to be a better man for her? Wasn’t he compromising the one thing he still had, his sense of duty, his honor, in her name?

Zohra burrowed into Ayaan’s embrace, even as she felt his cold retreat. Two days—she had held herself back, checked every impulse to go to him before she lost the little headway she had made with him.

The need to bear his pain for him, to help him through it, festered inside her. She couldn’t. Instead, she had wanted to dilute it, loosen its hold on him. And she was glad she had tried, she was ecstatic that he had let her, that she had held power over him in that moment, in making the powerful, honorable man that he was sway with need for her.

But that pleasure, she realized now, would always come at the price of losing whatever small connection she found with him.

Because until he realized everything he already was, Ayaan would loathe any pleasure he let himself feel, reject any happiness he found with her.

It was what she found with him, too. Even in his grief, his nightmares, being with him was what made Zohra the most alive. As if she had woken up from under a heavy blanket of resentment, of misplaced anger, of fear.

Even in the short time she had known him, seeing his struggle to rise above what he was, his honor in always doing the right thing, Zohra was finally awake. In a way she had never been until now.

She turned around in the cocoon of his arms, clasped his jaw, took a greedy kiss from him. As if she could bind him to her will by touching him. Because whatever she had from him, it was never enough. And today, she wanted another piece of him, she wanted something he had never given anyone else, she wanted his pain, his suffering. “Will you tell me what happened here?”

She thought he would refuse, shut her out, walk away. His tight grip on her fingers was the only sign that he had even heard her. “I have never spoken of it, to anyone.” A smile curved his mouth, bitterness etched into every strong line of his face. “Is this the final test, Zohra? Because if I speak of it, it will forever change how you see me. You will see what I see when I look in the mirror.”

“You can’t imagine what I see when I see you. Please, Ayaan.”

“It was going to be the last time our entire family attended the conference because Amira was to be married in a couple of months. Our parents had already left with most of the guard thinking we were accompanying them. But Amira and I learned that Azeez was staying back and decided to confront him.”

“Confront him?”

His breath fanned over her nape, his hold on her tighter. “The three of us, we had always been close. But something had been eating at him for almost a year. He became a different person, not the brother we knew. It hadn’t escaped our parents’ notice either. His coronation was only months away, and he had been avoiding both Amira and me. So we thought it was the best chance.

“And before I knew it, we were surrounded on all sides by armed men. But the strange thing was that Azeez had been prepared, he surprised them by instantly going on attack. He was something to watch, the way he fought. And we had a good chance of getting out of there, too. I caught the gun that he threw at me, but then a bullet hit Amira and I...I just froze.”

If she hadn’t felt his chest rise and fall, Zohra would have thought he had turned into ice right in front of her eyes. He raised his hand and looked at it as though he still held the gun. His face puzzled, his mouth held the bitterest of contempt.

And she found no words to say to him that could break through the dark cloud of self-loathing that poured out of his every word.

“I could not raise my hand and shoot. I just couldn’t. To this day, I ask myself why not. When he needed me, when my sister needed me, I failed.

“I didn’t shoot or even move to cover him. He got shot in the hip, and a bullet grazed my head...but even then, I just stood there, staring at him, useless.

“When I woke up next, Amira’s body was next to me while Azeez...he couldn’t move.”

Zohra wiped her own tears, the deep chasm of grief beneath his monotonous tone ringing through her. She forced herself to ask the next question, even as she never wanted to hear it again. “Did he die in front of you?”

With a smoothness that startled her, he stood up. She saw the tremble in his hands as he pushed his hair back. He paced like a caged tiger, the fury rattling from him a tangible thing in the air. “No. They bound me but not him, because his leg was already useless. Blood...there was so much of his blood everywhere. He kept telling me to try to leave...until suddenly he just lay still and they dragged him out of there. They needed us for negotiation. I remember thinking he would get medical aid, thinking...

“I didn’t see him again, have no idea what they put him through.

“I remember every moment of that cursed day until then. I have no idea how long they held me, how I escaped, no idea where they buried him. It’s the question I see in my mother’s eyes when she looks at me and I don’t have an answer. I have racked through my mind, but I...”

“Shhh...” Zohra whispered, hugging him, her own tears beating a path down her cheeks. She was not sorry she had asked. Because this grief was a part of him and she wanted all of him. She only wished she could bear its weight for him, even if for an infinitesimal second.

“Every time I hear the word courage associated with me, I cringe, I fall deeper into the pit of my own shame. Are you disgusted by me now, Zohra?” His words whipped through the air around them, polluting everything they had shared just minutes ago.

She held his face in a tight grip, a lump lodging in her throat.

Her chest was so tight that it was a wonder she could breathe. It hurt to see him hurt, it hurt that she couldn’t help him, it hurt that he would never embrace the little happiness he found with her. It hurt so much that her stomach lurched, her breath halted in her throat as an image of her life, forever waiting for him, within reach but far away, stretched in front of her.

He would do his duty by her, stand by her, maybe even create a child with her—because this pull between them was stronger than either of them, but he would never look at her with happiness, never accept her love, never return it.

Fear like she had never known before filled her veins.

How had she fallen in love with a man who was the very epitome of everything that had gone wrong in her life, a man who would give her his name, his honor, his life in the name of duty but not his heart?

And this time, Zohra understood what love meant. She understood that it was not a battle of wills, of individual needs and desires, that it demanded sacrifice, that it demanded everything one had. It flew through her, strengthening her and weakening her, glorifying her and damning her, freeing her and yet forever binding her to him.

She sucked a deep breath in, striving to hide the biggest truth of her life. If he realized even a flicker of what she felt for him, she knew he would banish her from his life. She would lose even the little she had.

“You were twenty-one years old, Ayaan. After all these years, can you not forgive yourself even a little?” she asked, her own sorrow bleeding into her words, “Can you not permit yourself to pursue your own happiness?”

His refusal was impenetrable, sealing her fate right along with his. “Not when it cost them their lives.” The darkest of smiles curved his mouth, a cold chill dawning in his gaze. “I think you know me better than I know myself. You knew what you were going to get and you still wanted it, Princess.” His mouth found hers in a punishing kiss, every stroke of his tongue a brand of possession, every caress calculated to master. He licked the seam of her ear, and Zohra clutched him swaying on her feet. “Do you want an out now, Zohra?”

She met his gaze, her heart in her throat. “Will you give it to me if I wanted it?”

He lifted her up and carried her out of the stables. “No. I have cast off what little honor I possessed, Zohra. Now you are bound to me forever, damned to this life right along with me.”

Lacing her hands around his nape, Zohra hid her face in his chest, an intense sadness weighing her down. Just as he had said, she had entered this relationship knowing what she was getting herself into. And yet suddenly, she realized with a sinking feeling, that it was not going to be enough.

Her heart wanted everything.