“You want an heir?”
Jen heard her voice as if coming from someone else.
“Yes. An heir you’ll give me.”
The room started spinning. “I knew you’d have a price for helping me, but I never thought it would be that.”
“What did you think it would be? Yourself?”
Yes, she’d thought he’d want an affair. But she wouldn’t have considered that a price. It would have been a reward.
His brooding gaze captured her wandering eyes. “I never bargain for sexual favors.”
“No, you’d just have to make your desire known and women would line up to give you your heir.”
“I am making my desire known. To the only woman I ever considered for the role.”
“Why me?”
He gathered her tighter against his incredible heat and hardness. “Because you’re in my arms, within an hour of meeting. The attraction between us combusted the moment I saw you, and it’s been raging higher ever since.”
She wanted to wind herself around him, to forget everything and act on the need burning them up.
For the first time in her life she didn’t have control. And she loved it.
* * *
Pregnant by the Sheikh is part of The Billionaires of Black Castle series: Only their dark pasts could lead these men to the light of true love.
Pregnant by the Sheikh
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 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 Kathryn Falk. Words aren’t enough to describe what your unstinting support means to me, and how it has made what I feared might be impossible come true.
Contents
Jenan Aal Ghamdi watched the man she was getting engaged to flit among throngs of congratulators—and almost barfed. Again.
It never failed. Every time she looked at him, hell, every time she thought of him, nausea overpowered her. It was a testament to her self-control that she hadn’t thrown up all over him yet.
The one thing stopping her from giving in to the compulsion was the stronger aversion to rejoining that tragic farce of an engagement celebration. It had taken her over an hour to escape the hordes of prying—and pitying—guests and take refuge at the far end of the massive ballroom. She’d managed to slink away unnoticed only because she’d refused to wear the getup her “fiancé” had sent her. He’d wanted to flaunt his newly massive wealth and drape his “acquisition” in an oppressively ornate costume complete with scaffolding. With the ton of clashing jewelry he’d provided, she would have glittered with the power of ten disco balls. As it was, in her most obscure and suitably mournful matte black evening gown, she now blended into the darkness of the ballroom’s periphery. It was a minuscule victory, but with her expectations reduced to nil, anything counted now.
Retreating farther away from everyone’s line of sight, she started breathing normally again. And a surreal sense of detachment descended on her yet again. It was as if none of this was really happening to her but to someone else. As if this was some ridiculous dream she was confident would fade into nothingness the moment she woke up.
The artificial serenity lasted only moments before the illusion splintered and reality crashed over her again, with another wave of queasiness.
She was really getting engaged to Hassan Aal Ghaanem!
The man who happened to be the king of Saraya, who held Zafrana, his neighboring desert kingdom and her homeland, hostage.
No, she wasn’t getting engaged to the man, she was being bartered to him. Sold. Tonight felt like the beginning of the end of her life as she knew it. The end of her life, period. Whatever came after marrying him wouldn’t be considered life. Not in her book.
But though this fate was inescapable, she’d still refused to have this reception in Saraya, or even in Zafrana. It had been another empty triumph when he’d relented and agreed to hold it here, in her New York City stomping grounds.
The city had been her home for the past twelve years. It would stop being so once she started serving her life sentence as Hassan’s wife. But she’d refused to go back to that region to be buried there for the rest of her life a second before she absolutely had to. She’d fled, determined to never return, except for fleeting visits, which had been few and very brief.
But she’d been regretting her insistence since the moment she’d seen that man’s over-the-top arrangements. If there was anything more abhorrent to her than