USA TODAY bestselling author Olivia Gates introduces the first marriage-of-convenience novel in her Married by Royal Decree series.
Only one thing stands between Aram Nazaryan and the high-powered position he craves: the proper wife. Although this billionaire would do anything to return to Zohayd, the desert kingdom he considers home, marrying Princess Kanza Aal Ajmaan is too high a price to pay. Or so he thinks—until he meets Kanza…and she turns his world upside down.
After claiming Kanza as his princess, everything falls into place. But then she learns the truth. She may have married for love, but his vows are tainted by ambition. Will doubt, betrayal and mistrust end this too-convenient union?
In moments, she drove away with a screech.
He stood watching her backlights flash red as she hit the brakes at the garage’s exit, the adrenaline of exhilaration flooding his system.
She’d really done it. Something no other woman, no other person, had ever done. She’d turned him down. No. More. She’d rebuffed him. And then some.
Well. There was only one thing he could do now.
Give chase.
Dear Reader,
When I first met Aram Nazaryan in the first book of the Pride of Zohayd trilogy, To Tame A Sheikh, he told me he had a heart that had been lonely all his life, the deepest need for belonging among my heroes…but that he’d long given up on the hope that he’d ever have his heart filled, or would ever belong with anyone, or anywhere.
Then his best friend and brother-in-law, Prince Shaheen Aal Shalaan, offered him what would provide him with a family and a return to the one place he’d ever called home…Zohayd.
I winced as I heard the offer, for I knew this “Marry a Princess to Become Royal” snag would make Aram refuse. He wasn’t a man who would marry for convenience, and certainly not “Kanza The Monster.”
He did refuse, and I thought all was lost…until he met said “Monster”… and she proceeded to turn him inside out and his world upside down.
It was a delight to go on this roller-coaster ride with Aram and Kanza as they developed a unique-to-my-heroes-and-heroines connection. Their feelings developed from antagonism to camaraderie, then from close friendship to the deepest reaches of passion. I was heartbroken along with them when everything seemed to be destroyed beyond repair. I hope you will feel as powerfully about their relationship as I do.
I love to hear from readers, so please visit my website for my latest news at www.oliviagates.com, email me at [email protected], and connect with me on Facebook, www.facebook.com/oliviagatesauthor, on Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/author/show/405461.Olivia_Gates and on Twitter, @OliviaGates.
Thanks for reading!
Olivia
Conveniently His Princess
Olivia Gates
OLIVIA GATES has always pursued creative passions such as 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 heartpounding 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 my family and friends, who give me all I need… love, understanding, encouragement and space, to keep on writing…and enjoying it. Love you all.
Contents
One
“You want me to marry Kanza the Monster?”
Aram Nazaryan winced at the loudness of his own voice.
Not that anyone could blame him for going off like that. Shaheen Aal Shalaan had made some unacceptable requests in his time, but this one warranted a description not yet coined by any language he knew. And he knew four.
But the transformation of his best and only friend into a meddling mother hen had been steadily progressing from ignorable to untenable for the past three years. It seemed that the happier Shaheen became with Aram’s kid sister Johara after they had miraculously reunited and gotten married, the more sorry for Aram he became and the more he intensified his efforts to get his brother-in-law to change what he called his “unlife.”
And to think he’d still been gullible enough to believe that Shaheen had dropped by his office for a simple visit. Ten minutes into the chitchat, he’d carpet bombed him with emotional blackmail.
He’d started by abandoning all subtlety about enticing him to go back to Zohayd, asking him point-blank to come home.
Annoyed into equal bluntness, he’d finally retorted that Zohayd was Shaheen’s home, not his, and he wouldn’t go back there to be the family’s seventh wheel, when Shaheen and Johara’s second baby arrived.
Shaheen had only upped the ante of his persistence. To prove that he’d have a vital role and a full life in Zohayd, he’d offered him his job. He’d actually asked him to become Zohayd’s freaking minister of economy!
Thinking that Shaheen was pulling his leg, he’d at first laughed. What else could it be but a joke when only a royal Zohaydan could assume that role, and the last time Aram checked, he was a French-Armenian American?
Shaheen, regretfully, hadn’t sprouted a sense of humor. What he had was a harebrained plan of how