LITMIR.BIZ

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      The endearment, my love, gasped in a hot, entreating tremolo, broke him. He gave in. Looked at her. He knew he shouldn’t have.

      She was spread on his bed, encased in lingerie designed to turn men into testosterone-driven dolts, her honeyed mahogany silk hair fanned around her thin shoulders, her endless legs arranged in a demure pose calculated to make him want to charge her, spread them, guide them high over his back and plunge into what they so maddeningly pretended to guard: the scorching center of her femininity.

      This was how he’d dreamed of her, dreams that paled in comparison to reality. A reality she must have saved to use as an overpowering weapon during hardball bargaining, like now.

      She’d never shared his bed or let him share hers. They’d met on neutral ground, made love—had sex on strange beds. She’d never arrived before him to prepare such a scene. And no matter how deep into the night they’d lost themselves in each other, or how spent they’d been afterward, she’d always left. And she’d always left first. She’d never slept in his arms.

      Now her arms were stretched out, her hands trembling as if with emotions too brutal for her thin frame to hide or withstand. Emotions he knew she didn’t feel. Didn’t have. Now her voice broke, as if she had nothing but emotions, raw and driving. “Stop tormenting me, ya habibi. Talk to me. Come to me. You know you want to.”

      Aih, he wanted nothing more. To silence all caution, to tear his clothes off, flesh rebelling against the crush of silk and cashmere, screaming to feel her beneath him, to thrust inside her, to expend his anguish in the tempest of her being, to wrench his pleasure from hers and be at peace.

      But he’d never be at peace. The only woman he’d ever invited into his being, had allowed to extend her dominion over his mind, occupy his priorities and dreams, had been an illusion. He would have to learn to exist with the loss of her festering inside him, eating through him.

       Just one last time.

      The temptation, the weakness, hacked into him, like a saw slicing through soggy wood. She felt it, augmented it.

      “You have to talk to me, Kamal, tell me what went wrong. You owe it to me, to us. I refuse to let you just walk away. I can’t stop loving you. And I know you can’t stop loving me, either. I know you haven’t.”

      She knew him too well, and he hadn’t known her at all. But he did now. He knew all about the perversions that polluted her mind and body and ran thick in her blood. The moment he’d gotten proof, he’d made his decision. He’d never succumb again, never seek exoneration for her. It was over.

      Not that she’d let it be over. She’d pursued him, pretending bafflement and pain at his abrupt breakup, shameless in her efforts to get him to recant his decision to walk away from his six-month-long addiction to her.

      And she’d succeeded in cornering him. Tonight of all nights. He wondered how she knew that his hunger had accumulated to such levels, he’d probably risk anything for one more taste of her.

      Enough. He couldn’t let her cheat on him anymore, couldn’t even rant accusations at her. He couldn’t bear to listen to the lies addicts like her were superlative at coming up with.

      But her eyes—those seas of old-gold and sincerity—were roiling with the liquid silver of distress, beseeching his mercy, dictating his surrender. And against his roaring will, he obeyed, her beauty intensifying as distance evaporated, the scent of her arousal tugging at his guts, his loins.

      Then, as his lips neared hers, preparing to sink into the trap of her surrender, he saw it. The relief. The triumph.

      He jackknifed up, a geyser of rage and disgust—at himself—threatening to blow him apart.

      Ya Ullah, he’d almost fallen for her again. He still wanted to let go and lose himself in the magnificence of her abandon.

      But he’d be doing just that. Losing himself. He’d already lost enough of himself to her. And b’Ellahi, he was putting an end to the damage here and now.

      “You want me to talk?” he snarled. “Tell you what went wrong? I tried to spare you, but since you’ve invaded my home and come begging for it in this pathetic way, I’ll tell you.”

      Shock at his aggression rippled over her face, jolted through her, sent her scrambling up, gasping, “God, Kamal, don’t—”

      “No. You went to lengths I didn’t think any female with the least brains or dignity would go to, to hear this. So hear it. I ended it because you sicken me.”

      She spilled off the bed, groped for her clothes. “Please, stop…”

      He plowed on, scraping his throat raw. “You’ll hear this to the end, the truth about yourself, what you thought you could get me too addicted to you to notice. The busiest whore in L.A. is more honest than women like you, sluts born in conservative cultures who drown in vices once they experience ‘free’ societies. You want to know why you are the bottom of the barrel? Because to you, vice is an indulgence, not a necessity.”

      She sobbed now. “Please…I—I’ll go…just stop…s-stop…”

      He grabbed her arm as she stumbled past him. “I thought you had the intelligence to understand what you were to me. A convenient lay while I had some idle hours during my time here. That’s all.”

      She convulsed as if he’d shot her, tried to wrench away. He struggled with the urge to drag her to him, beg her forgiveness for the cruelties, his fingers tightening on her fragile arm, the tremors that racked her sending electricity arcing through him.

      Then it all welled up inside him, like blood through a reopened wound. Every word, every sigh, every lie, every step as he’d watched her rush to another man’s bed. One of many, he’d learned…

      Let her go…now.

      He somehow did, released her arm as if it were something fetid and slimy. “Now you can go.”

      She staggered away, and something splashed on his hand, seemed to eat through his flesh to the bone. Tears. Her tears.

      The blast of agony, of fury, almost shattered his sanity.

      She was at the door when he bellowed, “Aliyah.”

      She turned like a broken marionette yanked by a string. But through the performance of devastation, it was still there. Hope that he’d succumb at the last minute. Or at least leave the door ajar for another incursion. He went mad.

      He stalked toward her, for the first time in his life not in control, not knowing what he’d do once he reached her. She’d done this to him. He’d loved her so much. He hated her more now.

      He stopped with a restraint he’d thought she’d destroyed. Then he heard a rumble. Alien, crazy. His. “If you know what’s good for you, you won’t let me see you or hear from you again.”

      She seemed to crumble then, as if around the hope he’d pulverized. With a tearing sob, she stumbled out of his bedroom. Out of his life.

      Where he had to make sure she’d stay.

      One

      Kamal ben Hareth ben Essam Ed-Deen Aal Masood’s fist smashed into his inert opponent with a bone-crunching crack.

      The bag swung away in a wide arc before hurtling right back at him like a battering ram.

      Snarling, imagining it one of the people who had put him in this predicament, this disaster, he met it with a barrage that would have left anything living a mass of broken bones and mangled flesh.

      A full thirty minutes into his rampage, his punching bag seemed to grin back at him, pristine and unimpressed with either his strength or his punishment. Leave it to something inanimate to point out the futility of his fury.

      He caught it on its last rebound,

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