SHEIKH'S SURPRISE BABY: A Sheikh Romance (40 page)

But sleep wasn't what was on Shawna's mind.

With Clark there were no promises, no stability, and yet she was not terrified. Following their month abroad and the good and bad of the adventure they'd shared, Shawna knew she was ready for life as she'd never been before. Clark pressed hot kisses down her neck, and one by one as they stood before the bed, they stripped free from their garments. Clark's nude body was as gorgeous as she had imagined, and Shawna couldn't wait to get to know it even better.

Another round of heated kisses melted her, and as a couple they sank onto the bed. Clark's broad, firm hands directed her and touched her in ways Ben's never had, and even without penetration, Shawna knew exquisite delight. Low, curt grunts from him were accented with her high, breathy trills of pleasure. The moments they had shared in Canada had promised wonders, and Clark did not disappoint.

Tens of minutes ticked by where they simply kissed and touched, but when Shawna was slick beyond belief, and Clark's body ready to give her pleasure, he did not hesitate. As though they had been born to fit with each other, Clark maneuvered over her and slipped into her depth without struggle. A mutual, breathy sigh escaped each of them, and Clark began to move in earnest. It wasn't long until he found the spot inside of her that made her cry out in delirious pleasure, and he invested everything he had to hit it again and again.

Each act progressed naturally, and it wasn't until Shawna felt his body hardening further inside of her that she thought of what it was they were doing. Clark's end was approaching, and without adequate protection, Shawna knew the risks.

"I-If you don't pull out, I might get pregnant," she warned him, the words caught in her throat from her ecstasy. The tight passages of her sex had begun to tighten in response to his encroaching release, and she felt the dark pleasures of orgasm begin to intensify and spread through her gut. Knowing that it was Clark who was inside of her, driving her to those heights, made it all the better. Ben had never been concerned with her pleasure, and Shawna was eager to finally have a lover who anticipated her needs as well as his own.

"Whatever happens, happens," Clark uttered. No matter what, he was going to leave his seed inside of her. Shawna found she didn't care — more than that, she wanted it, too. Clark was her wild man, her bad boy, and now that she'd turned over a new leaf, she wanted to know her own dangers first hand.

Clark grit his teeth and breathed out hard as his body pushed into her one last time. The heated warmth of their passion filled her sex — Clark, the dark, sexy man next door, had taken her raw and coated her insides with his seed. Shawna had never felt hotter. The first sinful pulses of pleasure rippled through her, and Shawna closed her eyes and threw her head back. Clark had done this to her. Clark had brought her to new places, had brought her to see new sights, and now had driven her to shattering highs.

In the aftermath, as he pulled away and swept her up in his arms to kiss her and run his fingers through her hair, she thought he could do no wrong.

By and large, Shawna was right.

Everything he did made Shawna feel amazing, and every day following, when he took her without protection, that feeling got better. By the end of the first week back in town, it was clear that she wasn't going to be getting her own apartment, and by the end of the third month they were on the road to Mexico — not to pick up chicks, Clark assured her, nor to spend time apart. There was only one chick he wanted, and she was the one with her arms around his waist on the back of his bike, ready to spend two full weeks in a lavish resort.

And Clark kept his word. Despite a past filled with freedom and the promise of travel and wild times, he let life happen. With Shawna's foresight and financial responsibility and his spontaneous nature, they eventually made the move into a little house just big enough for what they needed it for — a young family. Shawna's belly had just started to show, and the glow of pregnancy left her more radiant than ever. A new type of adventure was about to begin, but Shawna knew that not even parenthood would hold back the wild streak both of them savored so much. A change was what she'd needed, and it was what she got.

Nothing would ever be the same again, but Shawna didn't regret it. Simplest lives were often the most fulfilling, and now that she'd found her simple pleasures she'd never let them go.

THE END

Some days, I would just look at myself in the mirror, and I would sigh. I'd always had this feeling like I, and myself as a whole, were just all around too vanilla to be of any interest to anyone or anything, and that I would never be one of those lucky people who figure out what it is that makes them happy in life. It just seemed beyond what I was capable of, like my indecision and my inability to be what other people wanted me to be would be my ultimate pitfall in life, and like there was no redemption for me because of that.

To put it simply, I'd always been something of a curvier girl, and this had led to a lot of internal debating with myself as to my worthiness. We live in a time, obviously, where people at least attempt to be more accepting of people despite, and even because of their differences, and in some ways that should have been encouraging to me. But it still didn't do a whole hell of a lot for my confidence for some reason, and honestly, that sort of “universal acceptance” stuff could feel patronizing to me in my insecurity. Like, it was more of a consolation than a comfort. A nice enough sentiment, sure, and probably the way that all people should try to live. But when you really step back and cut out the crap, you can't honestly believe that people won't judge you by your appearance. That's just a fantasy, pure and simple, and if you live your life under the impression that things are really like that, you're basically trying to undermine millennia upon millennia of fundamental human nature.

Being talked down to, and told to accept traits that I didn't like, was the last thing that I felt that I needed, and I knew that all the rationalizing in the world wouldn't do me a lick of good. The question was, then, whether my curves were really the problem, or if the problem with my life was a lack of self-confidence, whether independent of my physical issues or otherwise.

On self-inspection, it really did seem like my sensitivities with regard to my appearance were something of an exaggeration- I was actually a rather attractive girl, once I could look around the own obstacles I had set up for myself. I had a roundish, beautiful face, with piercing blue eyes, and eyelashes that fluttered back at me from the opposite side of the mirror. Long chestnut hair flowed down from the top of my head to around my shoulders, framing my button nose and small, delicate lips like a photograph, the combined effect looking not altogether unpleasant, not by any means. Moving down, my breasts were large, round, and firm, a perk, I supposed, of being curvaceous, my dark cleavage deeply cut and tantalizing- the effect, I was sure, the same on a man as it currently was on myself. My curves, I decided firmly, and made myself believe without question, were in all the right places, and as my eyes danced down along them, they seemed to follow a certain tantalizing rhythm, zigging and zagging at just the right moments, and nearly making my head spin as I at last landed down at my waist, and I had to take a moment's rest before continuing.

Finally, I turned around to face the wall, with my butt toward the mirror, and craned my neck around to inspect my booty's reflection as well. It took a bit of standing on tiptoes with the mirror at its current angle for me to be able to see derriere in it, but at last I managed to see exactly what I wanted to, and the fact was confirmed for me, on no uncertain terms- I had a nice ass...

Guys, or at least pop culture would have one to believe, were all about big and juicy cabooses these days, and by all accounts I seemed to possess such assets in abundance. Physically, at least, there seemed to be no good reason why I couldn't seem to land a boyfriend, judging by my meeting of nearly all criteria by which the opposite sex are said to peruse for a mate.

This, then, seemed to indicate that the problem lay on a much deeper level than the surface alone, which I'd half come to suspect and fear in my analysis... It wasn't guys being shallow or guys unable to develop an interest in me- it was, quite simply, I concluded, that my own standards were too high. That I'd read too many damn romance novels to settle for any sort of real life relationships, expecting something miraculous in my life that I was sure to never truly experience, and that no woman ever did, really, or at least not in this lifetime.

The talented and insanely productive (not to mention wealthy) Arthur Benton could be said to be highly responsible for my disillusionment with the dating scene, and had, over the years, largely shaped my delusional impression of what the ideal man should be like. With no relationship experience of my own to my credit, I'd become very bookish over time, devouring the sorts of romance novels one might be wont to scoff at on the bookshelves, the dime paperbacks with smutty-looking covers of shirtless men ravishing the bodies of beautiful women in their tattered dresses, with titles so cheesy that they're impossible not to roll your eyes at them when you see them. And I knew full well, even as I was reading them, that what they were describing as far as true relationships was complete and utter nonsense. And I suspect that all women do as well, when they read those sorts of things. But that didn't stop me from taking those fantastic impressions Benton made to heart, internalizing the romantic, over-the-top gestures carried out by his characters as a sort of ideal for what I should be expecting in a partner myself.

Irrationally enough, I'd simply become enamored with so many of his shirtless examples of masculine perfection, manly men who, in all likelihood, did note even exist in the fashion in which they were presented in the written word, and who, if they did exist at all outside the realm of fantasy, would surely not be interested in such a woman as myself. Hell, did I really think that any of the shirtless macho men adorning the cover of his novels would even bat an eye if I walked past them completely stark naked, much less harbor any sort of romantic attraction to me in the least?

And that, I believe, was how Arthur Benton had become a billionaire... By presenting such an amazing and fantastical portrait of the ideal man that emotionally vulnerable women such as myself would become enamored with his depictions, and in fact develop addictions to such tantalizing fantasies, thereby buying into more and more and more of his works, unable to get enough, to satisfy our cravings and make up for the senses of emptiness we must all surely possess within our dull, humdrum lives.

But, like most addicts, I didn't care whether I was simply feeding my addiction, and making living a real life more difficult for myself by consuming Benton's works. I gobbled them up like candy, never able to get enough, unable to satiate my desires, and in fact, beginning to harbor a rather ridiculous crush on the author himself- I mean hell, could you blame me? I began to think, after a while, that so many of Benton's characters shared so many of the same chivalrous, heroic attributes, that he himself must have come to adopt such traits, or at the very least that he believed they were values that all men should display, and he therefore had come to exude characteristics of his own creations. I'd seen pictures of the man from long, lazy hours of online searching (not to mention fantasizing,) and he was in fact a handsome enough man. I mean, if he hadn't struck it big as a romance author, I can just about guarantee you he had just the kind of face that could easily have established him as an actor. Dark, penetrating eyes that seemed to flash right off the screen into reality, almost burning into the pupils of the gazer, not to mention, at least for my part, making them break into an outright cold sweat... He had luscious, jet black hair, a chiseled face, and, from what I could tell, a rather sculpted physique. Honestly, he was precisely the kind of macho man who could have posed for one of his own book covers, and I began to wish that he would do just that one of these days, for the sake of seeing him shirtless if nothing else...

So, yeah, overall, Arthur Benton was probably about the nearest picture I could fathom to any sort of ideal boyfriend- a devilishly handsome, good-hearted billionaire, precisely the kind of man who was as much the polar opposite the sort of man who could possibly harbor any interest in a girl like me whatsoever. Any thoughts to the contrary, I felt certain, were nothing more than me deluding the hell out of myself. But you can bet your ass that did little to stop me from fantasizing...

And yet, things seemed to take a somewhat unexpected turn, outside the simple realm of such fantasies... You see, I was shocked, one evening, while browsing the internet, to discover that my fantastical crush was on his way to a city near me- stopping, as he was, at a point on his book tour.

I was astounded... The opportunity, of course, was far too wonderful to pass up, but almost the instant I began to consider it I could feel the butterflies in my stomach spiraling out of control, making me seriously queasy with anxiety...