To Tame a Sheikh / His Thirty-Day Fiancée: To Tame a Sheikh

He not only believed it wouldn’t, he didn’t want it to.

He refrained from saying anything. His father would have to roll the dice and decide Shaheen’s fate himself.

Finally his father gave up, brushed past him and walked out with heavy steps.

Shaheen watched him, compassion flickering through the deadness inside him.

His father hadn’t had an easy life. Certainly not a contented one. Shaheen had grown up believing that his father had never known happiness or love outside of what he felt for his job and children. It had been only a couple of years ago that they’d found out he’d once tasted that happiness and love, with a woman. Anna Beaumont.

He’d had an affair with her during his separation from Queen Sondoss two years after Haidar and Jalal were born. Then Anna had fallen pregnant, and his efforts to end his marriage to Sondoss had failed. And though it had nearly destroyed him, he’d left Anna, telling her he could never be with her again, due to the threat of war with Sondoss’s home kingdom of Azmahar, and that it was imperative to abort their child.

Instead, Anna had put her baby up for adoption. Shaheen’s aunt Bahiyah, secretly knowing about her brother’s affair, had adopted Aliyah and passed her off as hers.

It was only many years later, while his father was recovering from a heart attack, that he’d searched for Anna again and discovered the truth. It was a timely discovery, as another flare of unrest in the region could only be resolved if a daughter of King Atef’s married the king of Judar. Now Aliyah was King Kamal’s worshipped wife and Judar’s beloved queen, and Anna Beaumont had become a constant presence in Aliyah’s and, by association, his father’s lives.

Shaheen believed that had only deepened his father’s unhappiness. For he could never have the only woman he’d ever wanted, and as Shaheen sensed, still did.

He and his father had that in common, too.

Shaheen kept his eyes fixed on his father’s slumped shoulders as they reached their destination, braced himself as they stepped into the ceremony hall.

Brightness and buzzing seemed to rise at their entry, but he couldn’t register the magnificent surroundings beyond the darkness and ugliness inside him. It was reflected on every surface, on every face that turned to look at him.

Suddenly every hair on his body stood on end.

What now?

His eyes panned the room, seeking the source of the disturbance that had drenched him. It now felt as if a laser beam was drilling through his gut.

Then everything came to a grinding halt.

His heart almost ruptured with one startled detonation.

There, at the farthest end of the hall …

Gemma.

Five

Shaheen’s mind had snapped. It must have.

He was seeing things.

He swallowed the lump of shock that had lodged into his throat, shuddered as it landed like a brick in his stomach.

He was seeing Gemma.

But he couldn’t be. His mind must be projecting the one thing it wanted most, the woman whose memory and taste and touch had been driving him insane and whom he’d despaired of seeing again.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them. She was still there.

“Shaheen, why did you stop?”

He heard his father’s concern as if it were coming from a mile away. Gemma, who was at the far end of the two-hundred-foot space, felt mere inches away.

Her gaze snared his across the distance, just like that first time, was roiling with the same intensity, the same awareness. One thing was missing. Shock.

Of course. She was expecting to see him. There was no element of surprise for her this time. But there was more in her expression. Apprehension. Aversion even.

She was that loath to see him? Then why was she here?

The relevant question hit him harder than the shock of her being here.

How was she here? In Zohayd, in the palace, at this function?

He felt himself moving again, his body activated and steered by his father’s hand on his forearm as he led him deeper into the throngs of people gathered to watch his sacrifice.

Moving forced him to relinquish his eye lock with Gemma. He rushed ahead to gain another direct path to her. But she evaded his eyes now, hid from him.

Frustration seethed through him, questions. The urge to cleave through the crowd, push everyone out of the way till he got to her overwhelmed him. He imagined hauling her over his shoulder and storming through the palace to his quarters, pressing her to the nearest upright surface and devouring her.

It wasn’t consideration for his father’s guests, the most influential people in Zohayd and the region, that stopped him. It was her avoidance. The knowledge that she didn’t want him as he wanted her. That whatever had brought her here wasn’t him.

For an interminable time, he believed he responded when addressed, monosyllables that he vaguely thought were appropriate, shook hands and grimaced at eager female faces and fawning family members, all the time trying to catch glimpses of her, desperately trying to get her to look at him again.

At one point, his older brother Harres appeared at his side.

“You look out of it, bro. Got stoned to get through this?”

Shaheen felt the urge to deck him. “And what if I did, Mr. Immune-From-This-Abominable-Fate Minister of Interior?”

Harres grimaced. “I did offer to do it myself again. I told them that, unlike you, I don’t care one way or another, and I’d certainly remain neutral in my post since I would never get attached to whatever wife they saddled me with. They still refused.”

Shaheen’s aggression drained. Harres had tried to take his place time and again. He would spare him if he could.

He exhaled. “They know you’d get attached to your children.”

Harres shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. I really can’t imagine being a husband let alone a father.” He put an arm around Shaheen’s shoulder, gave him a hard squeeze of consolation, the golden eyes that could have been their father’s flaring with empathy. “I would have done anything to spare you this.”

Which Shaheen had just thought. “Aih, I know.”

He again caught sight of Gemma among the shifting crowd, took an involuntary step nearer as if to force her acknowledgment, resurrect her hunger with his eagerness.

“And I know who you’re looking at. Who would have thought our little Johara would turn out to be such a stunner?”

Harres’s words made no sense. Had Shaheen’s mind started to deteriorate from the stress?