Each heavy thrust parting and delving, stretching and burning. She bit into his shoulder harder, fighting the cries welling inside her, fighting to hold back.

“No,” she moaned. 01C;No. Please, Abram. Don’t…” She shook her head. “I want to scream,” she whimpered. He growled. His lips covered hers, his tongue delved inside. He trapped the sound. He thrust harder, his cock stroking deeper, fucking her, possessing her, owning her as he never had before.

In that second she felt the sensations rushing, surging. Silent screams were ricocheting through her head and through her soul.

She was coming with a force. She didn’t know if she could survive. Exploding around the thick wedge of his cock as it began to throb violently. He groaned into the kiss and began coming inside her. Heated, deep spurts of his semen pulsing, surging inside the spasming flesh of her pussy.

Groaning into the kiss that held back her screams, his arms holding her to him, possessively, desperately.

And for the first time in her life she swore she belonged.

For the first time in his life, he knew what belonging meant.

And it terrified them both.

11

“Move! It’s time to go!” Abram hissed at her ear, a sense of

danger filling his voice and awakening her with a surge of fear-laced adrenaline.

Paige’s eyes came open, staring up in confusion at him, his hand capped over her lips to cover any sound she may have made, born of fear or surprise.

Staring up at him she saw the icy features of his face, the cold, murderous rage glittering in his black eyes and she knew something, somehow, had just gone to hell.

“Clothes.” He lifted his hand and with the other pressed clothing into her hands. “Shoes.” They felt like hiking boots and they were shoved into her other hand. “Hurry.”

Gripping her wrist as he jerked the blankets back, exposing the warmth of her naked flesh to the chill air outside the covering, he pulled her from the bed.

Coming to her feet she was surprised to find soft, wool trousers, a heavy, short tunic, socks, and definitely hiking boots. She dressed quickly, her gaze trying to pierce the darkness as she caught Abram’s shadow moving close to her as he dressed as well.

“Extraction will be in place,” Tariq hissed through the darkness. “There are horses waiting in the caverns, but we’re going to be cutting it close. Azir is with the Matawa now, and they’re itching to get in here.”

The Matawa, the feared religious police who enforced the strict Islamic law on all matters from courtship to dress and marital intercourse.

“Why are they here?” Jerking her socks on she tried to keep the fear from her voice as she hurriedly finished dressing. “For us,” Tariq snarled in a sibilant whisper. “Azir called them in. They’ll hold you, me, and Abram until he makes the vow to the emissary, and once the emissary is finished they’ll secure Abram for punishment of the crimes of sexual deviance and intent to abdicate a vow given to the monarchy, which is the same as treason. Until then, you will be held in the cells below the castle until the vow is given to give you time to contemplate your sins before you’re stoned to death.” Disgust rang in his voice as she laced the boots then rose to her feet.

“Here.” Jacket, gloves, and a hat. “The temperature’s dropped significantly. We have to hurry; they’ll be here within minutes.”

There was a sound of stone scraping against stone, and seconds later Abram gripped her hand and rushed her into a darkness even more overwhelming than that of the bedroom they had been in.

As he and Tariq wrestled whatever door was used back into place securely, the click of the lock reengaging, they all froze at the sound of heavy pounding at the bedroom door.

“You will open this door. Abram el Hamid Mustafa. Tariq bin Sa’id Mustafa. Paige Eleanora Galbraithe, you are hereby under arrest for the crimes of sexual deviancy and conspiracy to commit treason against the Saudi Arabian empire.”

Paige reached out, her fingers clenched on Abram’s arm at the sound of the rough, cruel tone and the charges being leveled against them.

The voices turned lower, the words muffled by the wood and stone barriers, only barely reaching her ears as adrenaline began to surge through her.

Why were they just standing there?

Her fingers clenched tighter on his arm, the need to run overwhelming her now. Each of those charges were punishable by stoning for a woman, though only the charge of treason held such a punishment for Abram and Tariq.

She could feel him against her, the tension in his body mounting as he extricated his arm from her grip only to wrap it around her shoulders and pull her to him.

The pounding came again.

“Three.” Abram began counting off. “Two.” As he spoke he turned her toward the back of whatever cave, cavern, or room they were hidden within.

A second later the loud, raucous sounds of a heavy metal band began to scream through the room.

Paige jumped, only barely managing to hold back a cry of surprise at the shrill music. In the same d, Abram’s arms tightened around her and they were rushing headlong into a darkness barely lit by the penlight Tariq held out before him.

“What the hell happened?” Abram snarled as they began to run through the stone corridor that she was certain had to run on forever.

“I don’t know what the hell happened,” Tariq hissed back. “I was with our contact arranging extraction when he got the call that the Matawa were moving in on the fortress to arrest the three of us, and that Jafar couldn’t be found. Azir contacted them from what our contact, Yassir, learned and he rushed me back to the cave entrance. From what we were being told as we ran for the caverns, Azir called them in and informed them of the charges. He’s also having an ‘arrest on sight’ order placed against Khalid, Paige’s mother, and her father if they enter Saudi Arabia. It’s a fucking mess, and I still haven’t figured out how Azir arranged it.”

Azir, Abram’s father. He had found another way to betray his son.

“He has minor influence with the Matawa,” Abram growled. “He’ll be able to keep the order in force only until the authorities in Riyadh hear of it and bring it before the king. But until then, they can do exactly that; kill on sight.”

He didn’t even sound breathless or tired and Paige knew her legs would have already given out on her.

She tried to draw enough air into her lungs to keep from collapsing, her heart racing hard and fierce as Abram all but carried her at a dead run.

“Did you complete the extraction plan?” Abram’s voice was lifeless, all emotion stripped from it now.

“Extraction was all but complete when the call came in. Yassir managed to call in emergency extraction at that point,” Tariq informed him. “We have three hours to reach the pickup point in the mountains. If we’re not there, then they leave without us. I talked to the commander of the rangers myself and he intends to make damned certain nothing stands in the way of that information getting into their hands, but he’s not willing to watch his men die to get it. Did you get the files?”

Had any of them had time to get anything?

“On my back,” Abram bit out. “My pack holds everything we’ve gathered over the past year. Don’t worry; extraction won’t leave without us, Tariq. They need this too damned much and they know it.”

He had made certain he wouldn’t become a casualty to politics or indifference in the plans made to pull him and Tariq, and now Paige as well, out of Saudi Arabia.

“Jafar had Chalah driven to the desert airstrip where a private Learjet made a quick stop and picked her up before heading out again, earlier9;t worry;ening. That’s where we suspect he is, on his way back from the airstrip,” Tariq reported, as Paige swore there was no end to the tunnel.

“At least she’s out of here,” Abram bit out roughly. “Having my friends endangered in this war Azir has been waging against us is going to get him killed.”

And she could hear the certainty in Abram’s voice that he would be the one to kill his father.

“What I’d like to know is why the hell Jafar was so damned intent on getting her out of here tonight,” Tariq questioned, his voice harsh.

“Why hasn’t he kept her here, as Azir has been pushing him to do?” Abram asked in return. “God only knows what either of them have planned.”

“There are horses waiting in the cavern, and we should arrive at the extraction location just in time if we’re damned lucky,” Tariq stated as they rounded yet another curve in the tunnel.

“Is there any way they can find the hidden door in Abram’s room?” Paige whispered as the fear clenched her stomach and trembled in her voice at the thought of being followed.

“Azir has searched that room and every other room in the castle for the doors to the tunnels he’s already closed in. He still hasn’t found some of those. Many of the tunnels veer off in several different directions with the ones leading to more strategically located rooms accessed by more than one hidden stone door and tunnel, like a damned underground maze with no map,” Abram told her. “This particular corridor empties into an old mine. It’s easily millennia old and the exit is no more than a narrow slit in a wall surrounded by fallen boulders. If it were going to be found, Azir would have done so by now.”

They hadn’t slowed. Both men kept a steady pace that never slackened, one Paige couldn’t have had a hope of keeping up with if it weren’t for Abram’s arm locked around her waist.

Still, she was breathless, tired, and fighting to keep up just enough to keep him from having to slow his pace. She felt helpless, weak, and unable to fight enough to even participate in her own escape.

“Why did Azir turn you into the Matawa?” She gasped as she struggled to help Abram keep her on her feet. “What was the point?”

“The hell if I know,” Abram growled. “It’s at least two more weeks before the emissary is due to arrive and Azir has to have me there to give that vow, not under arrest, awaiting death, or dead. It served no purpose.”

“He would have held Paige and me until you gave your vow, then saw to our deaths once you gave it,” Tariq stated, his voice heated and rough as he led the way through the corridor. “He’ll nt risk allowing you even a single ally if he can keep you here.

“Paige is an American citizen whose family is more than aware of where she is,” Abram growled. “He knows he can’t get away with that, just as he knows I would find a way to contact the American consulate, the Saudi royal offices, and any journalist willing to listen.”

“And accidents happen in jails all the time, especially the detention cells the Matawa keep. When they did release her, Abram, you know the shape she would be in.”

Paige didn’t want to imagine the shape she would be in. She’d heard enough about the Saudi prisons from Khalid as he recounted the horrors friends of his had suffered when being held by the Matawa.

“Doesn’t sound like my idea of a favored vacation activity,” she whispered, her voice trembling as she thought she felt a breeze and detected a touch of fresh air ahead.

“Yeah, well, you need to talk to your travel agent about that, baby,” Abram assured her somberly.

“Maybe demand a refund,” she whispered.

Yes, that was definitely fresh air.

Thank God. She hadn’t known if she could stand it much longer in that enclosed corridor with its dark, dank air and sense of forced enclosure.

The narrow slit of the opening in the cavern wall deposited them first onto a shallow pile of boulders that reached toward the roof of the rock ceiling overhead.

As though they had been tossed randomly at the wall and bounced to the floor around it. Still gripping her wrist, Abram pulled her through the brief stone maze into the main room of the large cave.