âYou want an heir?â
Jen heard her voice as if coming from someone else.
âYes. An heir youâll give me.â
The room started spinning. âI knew youâd have a price for helping me, but I never thought it would be that.â
âWhat did you think it would be? Yourself?â
Yes, sheâd thought heâd want an affair. But she wouldnât have considered that a price. It would have been a reward.
His brooding gaze captured her wandering eyes. âI never bargain for sexual favors.â
âNo, youâd just have to make your desire known and women would line up to give you your heir.â
âI am making my desire known. To the only woman I ever considered for the role.â
âWhy me?â
He gathered her tighter against his incredible heat and hardness. âBecause youâre in my arms, within an hour of meeting. The attraction between us combusted the moment I saw you, and itâs been raging higher ever since.â
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 didnât 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.
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 careerâwriting.
She is most fulfilled when she is creating worlds and conflicts for her characters, then exploring and untangling them bit by bit, sharing her protagonistsâ 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 sheâs 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 arenât enough to describe what your unstinting support means to me, and how it has made what I feared might be impossible come true.
One
Jenan Aal Ghamdi watched the man she was getting engaged to flit among throngs of congratulatorsâand 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 hadnât 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 pryingâand pityingâguests and take refuge at the far end of the massive ballroom. Sheâd managed to slink away unnoticed only because sheâd refused to wear the getup her âfiancéâ had sent her. Heâd wanted to flaunt his newly massive wealth and drape his âacquisitionâ in an oppressively ornate costume complete with scaffolding. With the ton of clashing jewelry heâd 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 ballroomâs periphery. It was a minuscule victory, but with her expectations reduced to nil, anything counted now.
Retreating farther away from everyoneâs 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 wasnât 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 wouldnât be considered life. Not in her book.
But though this fate was inescapable, sheâd still refused to have this reception in Saraya, or even in Zafrana. It had been another empty triumph when heâd 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 Hassanâs wife. But sheâd refused to go back to that region to be buried there for the rest of her life a second before she absolutely had to. Sheâd fled, determined to never return, except for fleeting visits, which had been few and very brief.