To Touch a Sheikh

“You should fear me.”

Her heart quivered to a standstill.

This was the moment she’d waited and worked for since she’d laid eyes on him. The full disclosure. The final negotiation before he surrendered. Before he let her give him herself, let her have him.

She rose to her knees, shaking. “I would fear anything and anyone but you.”

“How did you come by this certainty?”

His bass rasp shivered down each quailing nerve. She had to be very, very careful. The wild, wounded tiger was giving her one chance to reach out and pet him. If she got it right, he’d be hers for life, she knew it.

But if she didn’t get it right …

“Do you have a few years? I’ll tell you, show you.”

“What if I told you I don’t deserve your trust?”

Her lips trembled on a smile at the ferocity of his final struggle. “Don’t bother. You have it. So if you think you don’t deserve it, how about doing all you can from now on so that you do.”

Dear Reader,

As soon as Amjad Aal Shalaan made an appearance in the first book of the PRIDE OF ZOHAYD trilogy, I knew. He would be my favourite of all my heroes so far. For not only is Amjad a man who has barely survived treachery and sworn to never think the best of anyone ever again, he’s a man who’s hidden for so long behind an impenetrable barrier of cynicism, he now believes he’s indifferent as well as invulnerable.

So it was easily the most fun I’ve ever had writing, penning his every wickedly irreverent word and thought. The fun escalated when I gave him the only heroine who could … undo him, in every way, and sat back and watched them spar and parry and fall irrevocably, absolutely in love.

With this book, the PRIDE OF ZOHAYD trilogy comes to an end. For me, it has been an exhilarating journey that concluded on a high note. I hope you enjoy this book, and the other two in the trilogy, as much as I delighted in writing them.

I love to hear from readers, so please contact me at oliviagates@gmail.com. Also please visit my website www.oliviagates.com for my latest news and contests. I would also love it if you like me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading!

Olivia

OLIVIA GATES has always pursued creative passions like singing and handicrafts. She still does, but only one of her passions grew gratifying enough, consuming enough, to become an ongoing career—writing.

She is most fulfilled when she is creating worlds and conflicts for her characters, then exploring and untangling them bit by bit, sharing her protagonists’ every heart-wrenching heartache and hope, their every heart-pounding doubt and trial, until she leads them to an indisputably earned and gloriously satisfying happy ending.

When she’s not writing, she is a doctor, a wife to her own alpha male and a mother to one brilliant girl and one demanding Angora cat. Visit Olivia at www.oliviagates.com.

To Touch

a Sheikh

Olivia Gates

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Marialina Tota, the first one who loved Amjad. For

all your support. Wish I could have ‘dedicated’ him

to you for real! ;-)

Prologue

“Will you forgive, Amjad?”

Amjad Aal Shalaan could barely raise his gaze to the man whose voice boomed out the question.

His father and king loomed over him in full regalia, his responsibility-carved face frozen in a mask of control. His eyes blazed with an amalgam of regret and wrath, agony and outrage.

Amjad’s unfocused gaze panned to his brothers, who flanked his father, then to the sea of tribal representatives who crowded the expansive glory of Dar Al Adl—Zohayd’s Hall of Justice. Their faces blurred into a homogenous mass of anticipation as his father’s question reverberated off the arches and domes of the venerable place in a taunting echo.

Will you forgive?

But he’d already forgiven what no other man would have.

He’d forgiven his bride for not coming to their marriage bed a virgin. He’d soothed her fear, assured her he wouldn’t hold against her what he couldn’t provide himself. What mattered were her life choices after she became his wife.

Then he’d forgiven her when he’d discovered that she carried a baby. From her previous lover.

People made mistakes. No sense in destroying a life, or even a relationship, over one.

He couldn’t feel betrayed. She’d been a stranger he’d picked—or rather had had pointed out to him with a … strong recommendation—from a list of convenient brides a week before the wedding. As crown prince of a kingdom ruled by tribal pacts, his own considerations hadn’t come into play.

But she’d become his wife, was going to be his one woman. And because he couldn’t live the rest of his life for the cold convenience of everyone else, he’d determined to see only the best in her, to give her the best of himself. He’d focused on what he appreciated in her, dismissed what he didn’t.

And she’d repaid his clemency and compassion with deceit and destruction.

“Amjad?” His father’s gruff whisper prodded him to answer.

He’d had many answers. To his worries when loss of appetite had been followed by pins and needles in his palms and cramps in his calves. Overwork, stress, exhaustion.

When the burning in his gut, the gnawing in his throat and that terrible taste in his mouth joined in, he’d suspected another cause. Soul sickness.

His mind might have accepted his situation, but his spirit was seared that they were starting the marriage with a lie to protect his wife’s and her family’s honor, to maintain the peace their marriage had sealed. That he might not love her baby as every innocent child deserved to be loved.

It was only when the real sickness began, purging every bite of food and drop of water from his body, when restlessness started dismantling his psyche and crippling headaches his sanity, that he’d sought out the royal physicians in secret.

They’d been baffled. His symptoms defied their tests, their prescriptions did nothing to mitigate them. He’d felt relieved when apathy descended on him, sparing him the constant torment.

But when delirium followed dizziness and drowsiness, doubts became certainty.

Something malignant was eating through his body. Because tests could find nothing within, it had to be something from without.

He’d doubted everything, and almost everyone. But not her.

How could he doubt the wife who showered him with tokens of her gratitude and blossoming love?

His focus wavered on the hands lying limply on his knees. They bore the marks of her treachery. White crescent markings on the fingernails, dark mottling of the skin.

He shuddered with the blow of recollection. When realization had crushed him. Of how he’d been poisoned.

The poison had been slipped into the most solicitous of gestures and sweetest of gifts. Clothes, towels, delicacies, bath salts, scented oils and far more. All emerald green, the color she’d said she adored for being that of his eyes.

All laced with arsenic.

His wife had been killing him. Slowly. Almost untraceably.

She almost had. He’d barely gasped his conviction to his brothers before he’d descended into a coma. Finally knowing what to treat him for, the doctors had been able to drag him out of it. Their treatments had made him wish they hadn’t.

Now there stood his father, asking for what his attempted murderess’s family couldn’t ask themselves. His forgiveness.

His gaze blurred back to the crowd.

To one side, segregated, supplicant, stood Salmah. Beside her was her lover. Her accomplice.

Their eyes, beneath the dread and shame, were eloquent. With hope. No. More. With certainty. That he’d forgive. As he’d forgiven so many unforgivable things before.

If he forgave, rescinded his right to mete out punishment, the law would decide it, mitigating it. Enforcing his right meant he could demand satisfaction in any way he deemed sufficient, from not only those who’d perpetrated the crime, but also anyone who had the misfortune to be of their blood.

His gaze steadied on Salmah. Now that he wasn’t blinding himself to what disturbed him, her act of trembling repentance was as superficial as that of her budding love had been. She considered him a weak fool to be manipulated, then dispatched. She was sorry only that she hadn’t succeeded.

A shard of clarity traversed his being. She had.

He was dead, inside.

He closed his eyes, accepting the feeling, welcoming it.

“Amjad?”

The anxiety in his father’s voice made him open them.

Amjad imagined what raged inside his father at the sight of him. His brothers had had to help him into his clothes, had wheeled him in here. He’d seen the horror of his condition twisting every face in his path. The emaciated remains of the man he’d been before six months of accumulated poison had ravaged him in flesh and spirit.

But his father had to advocate peace even when he writhed for vengeance for his firstborn. His brothers seethed to avenge him, too, but had to abide by his verdict.

He pushed the deadweight of his body up on shaking arms, fought the weakness pulling at him, demanding his defeat. He gestured feebly, aborting his family’s dash to help him. They stood back, his father looking as if he’d already lost a son; Harres, Shaheen, Haidar and Jalal, a brother.

They still might.

But if he survived, he’d never again give compassion dominion over his decisions, never blind himself to disturbing truths.

He’d never think the best again.

He dredged reserves of power into his poisoned nerves, straightened on wasting legs, faced the crowd.

“I will not forgive.”

His gravelly whisper was met with stunned silence.

Everyone had expected him to play the chivalrous prince who’d waive his rights for everyone’s benefit.

Salmah burst into tears. Her mother swooned. Her father begged his mercy in his righteousness.

Irony trembled on Amjad’s lips as he ignored their theatrics, turned his gaze to those whose power plays he’d almost died for. They weren’t here to show him support and regret, but to make sure their interests would be served, their convenience undisturbed.

He swept his hand in a wide arc, his forefinger pointing at all of them. “I will never forgive any of you. I will never forget. What you all did, what you all are. You’d better pray I don’t survive this. If I do, I’ll live to make you pay. And don’t bother trying to get rid of me. You had your chance and you blew it. No one’s ever getting another one.”

One

Eight years later

Maram Aal Waaked was finally getting her chance at the Mad Prince.

At least, Amjad Aal Shalaan was known that way to the world.

To her, he was the best thing since chocolate fudge.

He’d been tantalizing her with his dark, rich lusciousness for four years now and leaving her starving for more. But this time she had him cornered.

Yeah, right. Cornered among dozens of nosy male royals in the open desert. The man who was so slippery, he could pull a Houdini in a heavily guarded one-exit room.

He had once, during closed negotiations she’d attended representing her emirate. When others had begun to rant, he’d given that worthy-of-sonnets smirk of his, said, “Bored now.” Then he’d disappeared. Poof.

Her friends called her crazy for even thinking about him.

Sure, they said, he was a phenomenal male who made women within a one-mile radius swoon. But he also made them cringe, because he was a madman who would pulverize any woman in his power.

She said if he were, he would have collected women to abuse. Not letting anyone get close to him proved that he was actually merciful and sane.

They dismissed the reasons for his paranoia, said he should have gotten over his past already. She thought that no one could come back from something so terrible except through something equally wonderful. Or at least through someone who appreciated his ruthlessness, cared nothing for his wealth and power and saw the wounded soul, the noble, heroic man underneath.

She lived for the chance to prove she was that someone.

But before she could achieve such ambitious aspirations, she had to make him stay put long enough to have a real conversation.

Apart from one epic incident, he’d spared her nothing but a few acerbic-wit-filled moments before leaving her to deliver her volleys to his departing back.

But she was going to soothe that magnificent beast if it was the last thing she did. All the pleasures she’d experience when she could finally … pet him were worth any battle scars.

The first skirmish was about to begin.

Her GPS said she was minutes from the battleground, a five-mile solid-earth flat track among the dunes. Amjad’s location of choice for the region’s royal horse race. Zohayd hosted the race annually on the last day of fall. This year, due to unchangeable commitments, Amjad had brought the date forward.

Everyone had been horrified at his proposal to hold the race midsummer. In response, Amjad had sent taunting letters, something only he could get away with, considering the recipients were hard-hitting royals with egos to complement their lofty status.

She’d seen his letter to her father, could hear his lazy, lethal voice in her head as she’d read his elegant, forceful handwriting.

Was her father afraid of roughing it in the sun, outside his rarefied cocoon of luxury? Was the big, tough man afraid of some sweat, when he wasn’t even racing?

He must have tailored his missives to each recipient’s idiosyncrasies. Her father was too wary physically, too fastidious about his neatness. Not that anyone knew this. Her father recognized these characteristics as a potential source of ridicule, projected the opposite. But Amjad Aal Shalaan was infallible in deciphering people. That was just one among the endless weapons that made him unstoppable in the worlds of highest-level finance and politics.

Needless to say, everyone had succumbed to his wishes. He’d specified three o’clock for arrival.

It was noon. She’d just called her father to tell him she’d arrived. He’d exclaimed his anxiety that she’d gone alone, had left behind the entourage he’d tried to saddle her with. She’d told him they could catch up, that she had no problem going back with them. But she was getting some one-on-one time with Amjad first, before the desert became a forest of people for him to fade among.

She eased her foot off the accelerator to savor the last moments of approach. The sight warranted the most leisurely of zooms, to savor its every smidge of magnificence.

And no, she didn’t mean the majestic desert with its undulating dunes surrounding the naturally flat land. That and the canopy of bleached-blue sky, painted in wisps of incandescent white, were indeed glorious. But it was the sight of him that spread firecrackers of pleasure through her system, had flutters of anticipation accumulating in her rib cage.

He stood in front of one of the huge tents. Dozens of his men flitted around him. She saw only him. Standing half a foot taller than anyone else, broad, lean and loaded with inborn grace and inimitable power, uncaring of the mercilessness of the sun beating down on his raven head, indifferent to existence in its whole.

The man was so aptly named “most glorious.”

And that was before you took into account the difference in him today. She’d only ever seen him in hand-sculpted suits that looked to be made of living silk, designed and delighted to worship his body. She’d thought that nothing could look better than that.

He did now. All in white, his billowy shirt tucked into skintight pants and those into tan boots, he was … description-defying.

She parked beside the other cars, grabbed her bag and hat and hopped down from the steel behemoth her father had bequeathed her for the trip. She slung her bag across her torso and hid from the sun’s pummeling rays beneath the hat, willing the necessities to cool down her urge to run to him.

Not that Amjad was in any rush to acknowledge her. It was only when she slammed the door that he glanced sideways at her in that maddeningly delicious, delightfully nonchalant way of his.

From beneath the arch of world-famous eyebrows, legendary emerald eyes documented her approach with ponderous detachment. She felt them drilling into her recesses, taking her apart one cell at a time. His ruthlessly sensuous mouth was set, every hollow and slash of his masterpiece bone structure showcased by the almost-perpendicular sunrays. While the harsh shadows they cast turned others into grotesque caricatures of themselves, they made him into the god of vengeance that he was. The ultimate yum that he was.

As she closed the last feet between them, he sort of faced her, looked at her in his patented insignificance-inducing way.

Undeterred as usual, she waved a salute to all present, then focused on him, gave him her brightest smile and said, “I’m here!”

She is here.

The words reverberated inside Amjad’s mind.

B’haggej’ jaheem! What, in hell’s name, was Princess Aal Waaked doing here? He’d invited Prince Aal Waaked.

Yet Maram Aal Waaked was here. As she’d so triumphantly announced after walking up to him with all the mesmerizing intent of a stalking, starving tigress.

Amjad forced every muscle in his body into neutral as Maram’s every detail surged through his awareness.

Lushness encased in a loose beige pantsuit that still did nothing to obscure each long limb and ripe curve, each undulation of feminine assurance and fluid grace. A ponytail that would cascade into a waterfall of gold-shot butterscotch when released. Eyes as hot as the sun, as fathomless as the desert, deep-set in mystery and self-possession. Features sculpted from cream flawlessness by a higher god of beauty. A bearing of one who knew her worth, wielded it like a weapon, cast it like a spell.

His lungs burned.

It was seconds before he realized why and breathed again.

Seemed being male was incurable.

Problem was, his maleness only manifested around this manifestation of brazen womanliness.

There was no mistaking it. Maram Aal Waaked was a hazard wherever creatures of the XY persuasion trod.

And that wasn’t his “paranoia” talking.

At thirty, Maram had already gone through two men. Officially. A prince and a business-empire heir. One older than her father, the other young enough to be her kid brother. Off the record, dozens were no doubt scattered on either side of the swath she’d cut through the male population.

She now had her eye on him. Both of her dipped-in-molten-gold-and-captured-sunshine eyes.

Before that implied he was anything special, he had to amend the statement. She had her eye on him and his brother.

Whichever fell into her honey trap would do. She probably wouldn’t mind and could handle it just fine if they both did.

She’d sooner entrap the devil than him. But his half brother, Haidar, while a wily, temperamental fiend in his own right, wasn’t as impervious. He’d shared some syrupy friendship with her since they’d been young, and she might penetrate his defenses through nostalgia. Not that he could see any man other than himself even considering resisting her if she made her desire evident.

She was her name, after all. The aspired to. The coveted.

But never by him. And she was now more off-limits than ever before.

If he’d once put her on his most-abhorred list due to her own actions, he now put her on the list of his most-bitter enemies due to her father.

Yusuf Aal Waaked, ruling prince of the neighboring emirate of Ossaylan, was behind the theft of the Pride of Zohayd jewels, the master conspirator behind the plot to dethrone the Aal Shalaans.

Now, the serpent’s daughter—a boa constrictor herself who’d squeezed the reason and life out of many a man—was looking up at him with that excitement that always threatened to devour him.

He inclined his head at her, injected his voice with its maximum level of scorn. “Princess Haram.”

Maram blinked. Had he just called her Haram?

The glint in those unique eyes said he had!

Sinful. Wicked. Evil. Taboo.

The word encompassed all that. And more.

And he’d made sure everyone had heard it.

So. How did he expect her to react? Get flustered? Defensive? Outraged?

No. The Amjad she knew would expect her to engage him. And boy, would she.

She gave him a curtsy, fluttered her lashes. “Prince Abghad!”

Amjad’s eyes snapped a fraction wider before danger slithered across his heart-stoppingly gorgeous face, his hand flattening over his heart in mock hurt. “And here I thought you … liked me.”

“I far more than … like you. And you know it.” She grinned up at him. “But a Haram deserves at least an Abghad.”

“Princess Sinful and Prince Hateful,” Amjad said slowly, as if tasting the slurs, his darkest-chocolate voice making them as delicious as the sweetest compliments. “Those do have a far better ring to them than the trite names our pompous parents saddled us with.”

She nodded, enjoyment rising. “They’d sure make for better protagonists in a fantasy novel or D&D video game.”

“They’d also spawn far better descriptions than the ones we’ve earned so far. Instead of the Half-Blood Princess you’d be the Blonde Taboo and instead of the Mad Prince I’d be Bad, Mad and Loathsome. We’d sell millions.”

She grabbed her ponytail, wagged it at him. “I’m not blonde, Your Horrid Highness.”

“Technicalities, Your Venerable Vileness.”

Her grin widened as she noticed that everyone had left their prince to his sparring match.

“Where’s Prince Ass-ef?” he said offhandedly. “Couldn’t wake up early after a nightlong taxing game of solitaire?”

A chuckle burst out of her at his double pun. In Arabic Prince Ass-ef meant the Sorry Prince. In English …

She giggled again. “He is Ass-ef, that he can’t come.”

Everything about him seemed to hit pause. She felt as if the whole desert froze, bating its breath for his reaction.

When it came, it sent a frisson sliding through her spine. His narrowed eyes became laserlike slits. “He isn’t coming at all?”

Weird. That his annoyance would be so great that it would show.

“He recently had pneumonia and his doctors feared a relapse with exposure to unfavorable weather conditions.” She smiled coaxingly. “But isn’t it your lucky day he sent me in his place?”

His spectacularly sculpted lips twisted with disdain. “It feels like every unwanted present I’ve been cursed to receive has burst open in my face at once.”

Relieved that he’d gotten back to searing sarcasm, she chuckled. “Oh, I love it when you try to be mean.”

“I assure you, when I do try, you won’t love it that much.”

“Take your best shot, Prince Abrad.”