Married for the Sheikh's Duty

by Tara Pammi

  Utterly hypocritical of him, but even in this indulgent speculation, Zayn found he preferred the first option far better than the second when it came to Amalia. He, who had always welcomed sophisticated and sexually mature women into his bed, women who knew what they would get from him.

  What was beyond disturbing, however, was that his...interest in her didn’t wane either way. The growing realization that Amalia might be innocent should have been a deterrent. It had been before, for he was not a man from whom women could expect flowers, or gentle kisses or wooing. Jewelry, designer clothes, the right word in a highly connected ear, and mind-blowing sex—that was more his forte. For the first time since he’d come into his own, Zayn had a sense of inadequacy, for Amalia wanted nothing he could give.

  “I’m far too busy with my career right now anyway. And if I can’t meet a man like that, I guess I’ll stay single.” Did she know how dejected she sounded at the end there? That her eyes ate him away even as she challenged him?

  He leaned in, trapping her in her seat. She was forced to spread her legs to accommodate his frame, and the warmth of her body was a teasing rasp against his own. “You work all kinds of hours, you want this impossibly ideal man to marry. What will you do in the meantime?”

  Her tongue snaked out and licked at that lush lower lip, while her gaze locked with his. “In the...” a little throaty rasp, “in the meantime? What does that mean?”

  “What about passion, Amalia? What do you do when you get lonely at night, or when your body demands a certain kind of satisfaction that only a man can give?”

  He leaned in a little more until his breath feathered over the rim of her ear. A little tremor shook her shoulders, her fingers tight over the armrest. Something she had dabbed on her pulse point in her neck floated up at the warmth of her skin, the scent incredibly arousing. God, did she smell like that all over? “Are you telling me you’ve never felt even a little stirring of sexual hunger? Or do you take lovers just for that purpose and discard them when you’re done?”

  “Passion is overrated,” she whispered, and her breath caressed his cheek. In utter contrast to her words, her fingers rose to his cheeks, traced the line of his jaw. “All my life—” tips painted the palest pink now moved to the edge of his mouth and started tracing the curve of his lower lip “—I’ve seen the toxic effect it could have, not on one or two, but four lives.”

  Zayn felt like a predator caged and forced to sheath his claws while his favorite prey sniffed out around him. He wanted her hands on his hot skin, his tight muscles, those questing fingers on the part of him that was thickening in reaction to her touch. “But what about passion shared between two people who have no expectations of each other except mutual pleasure?” The question fell from his mouth before he realized he was asking it.

  Naked longing swept across her face as her gaze rested on his mouth. “I’ve never...been tempted to throw caution to the wind.”

  Until now.

  She didn’t say the words but her rumbling breath, her trembling mouth, they spoke for her. Her chest fell and rose fast, her mouth moving closer and closer to his. Another breath and he knew he would plumb the taste of her lush mouth.

  He tipped her chin up until she was looking into his eyes. Desire had darkened them; her nostrils flared. “If I kiss you now, I will not stop, Amalia. Come to me when you’re ready. Come to me when you can admit that you want me.”

  Before he was tempted to lick the pulse that was hammering madly at her neck, Zayn got up from his seat.

  His blood hummed with the thrill of the chase, his muscles tight against the heat flooding his body. He had never played at seduction this way; it had never been a chase like this where he didn’t really know how it would end.

  He didn’t know what he wanted to do with Amalia, only that he wanted to tame that fiery spirit of hers, just a little. To possess a part of her. Maybe like his Bedouin ancestors had done with wild horses.

  After all, he raised horses and he knew all too well what an edgy, risky venture it was to conquer the spirit of a high-strung filly without breaking its spirit. That it wasn’t about submission but only establishing his dominance over the wild horses. Until they became one.

  It was about possessing something wild for a few minutes in one’s lifetime; it was about living. He was sure Amalia would club him if she knew that he had compared her to a beast. Amalia, with her stubborn notions and impossible ideals, needed to be shown how to live a little.

  He had months yet with her, a devilish voice whispered in his mind but he squashed it for now. As he reached the entrance to the rear cabin, he turned.

  She was still sitting in the seat, quite as he had left her, her chest still rising and falling. “Amalia?” he prompted.

  “Hmm?” She looked up with a start and then blushed profusely. He let the amusement that filled him curve his lips, knowing it would aggravate her even more. Soft and vulnerable and a little too dazed to keep up her prickly defenses, he liked her like this. A lot. And from there, it was only a quick slide for his mind to imagine how she would be sated and pliable in his arms. Under his aching body. In his bed with her golden hair spread over his pillow.

  “Do not forget to finish the rest of the correspondence, yes? You look a little lost there.”

  He didn’t wait to see her expression. But he could feel her glare on his back, could imagine the steely set of her shoulders return. Zayn whistled a tune he didn’t even know he’d remembered, feeling lighter than he had felt in a long time.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AMALIA HAD SPENT most of the week meeting more people than she’d ever want to meet in her entire life. The luxury hotel Zayn and she were staying at, while sharing the same suite, had views of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower on either side.

  In the week since they had arrived here, they had been to a movie premiere and then reception with A-list stars, taken a quick flight to Dublin at predawn so that he could visit a stud farm on the outskirts of the city to buy a filly called Desert Night because apparently, her fiancé was not only a brilliant architect but also an expert on horse breeding and owned a world-class stud farm in Sintar, gone to a trade summit with some European leaders, and the culmination of the week was to be a charity fund-raiser at the Four Seasons in Paris again.

  Of course, there was media coverage of their every movement. And the wave of news began from the fact that Amalia had been the only woman to have ever been the sheikh’s partner for more than two days in a row. At the movie reception she had been called the sheikh’s new arm candy. After returning from the stud farm, she’d been called his new mistress. At the trade summit, they had speculated that maybe she was the sheikh’s new PA/lover.

  Because of course what hardworking prince of the country didn’t want to save money with a convenient woman doing double duty as both PA and lover... She’d made the tart remark thoroughly frustrated and overwhelmed by the press’s interest in him and them.

  “Should I be paying you double, then?” he’d said with a devilish twitch to that hard mouth that had made Amalia’s knees wobble. When he smiled like that with that amused gleam in his eyes, the panorama of his entire face changed. And Amalia’s resistance to him slipped a little.

  Somehow she’d had enough working cells in her brain to throw a pillow at him across the room and retort, “You don’t pay me even for one role, Sheikh.”

  His languid gaze had crept over her modest dressing gown that didn’t cover her wobbly knees, her vanity’s weakest point, and her horrible bed head until her pulse leaped into her throat. “You’ll let me know if you’re interested in joining my staff or my bed, won’t you, Azeezi?”

  Her heart thudding violently against her rib cage, Amalia had thrown the next thing she could find, her hairbrush, across the room. Laughing, he’d ducked in a graceful movement and said, “You’re exactly like Desert Nigh
t, Amalia. Prickly and wild-tempered.”

  She had stood there a full five minutes after he’d left, the suite’s silence amplifying what had to be the most absurd question she’d ever asked herself.

  Had he been only joking? Did he really want her? Damn it, why wasn’t she sophisticated enough to just ask?

  But even the thought of showing her slowly fluttering interest in him sent Amalia into an ice-cold sweat. What if he rejected her and laughed at her? What if he was disappointed with her, the sexual sophisticate that he was?

  The worst—what if he...had sex with her, was through with her the next morning and then expected her to continue their pretense like nothing intimate had happened between them?

  Fortunately, she had very little time to think these roundabout, frustrating thoughts. The shock that she’d even considered it remained with her for the rest of the day.

  Every movement of his and, therefore, hers, was so thoroughly followed that Amalia couldn’t breathe in the whirlwind the first three days. Arrogantly ignoring her protests, Zayn had arranged for a PR and social media expert to coach her every day on how to manage her responses, on dealing with suddenly being the media’s darling because apparently, only after three different appearances on Zayn’s arm, her sense of style had been labeled stellar and unique, and on to how present even the best profile to the press.

  Thanks to the prep and her own years of experience in dealing with a super-busy job and her mother’s deteriorating health, Amalia hadn’t blinked at the endless lessons in etiquette and protocol and the crash course in Khaleej’s politics.

  “For a woman who snuck into my office only two weeks ago, you’re very good at handling this,” Zayn had said, a grudging admiration in his eyes when Amalia had smoothly cut off a reporter for asking her about her fiancé’s tastes for multiple bed partners.

  The question had unraveled a disquiet in her gut, only she’d gotten better at hiding it. At examining it in the relative privacy of her bedroom at night, an all too familiar restlessness in her limbs.

  The very idea of Zayn’s colorful sexual life, the images supplied by her overactive mind, began to leave a bitter distaste in her mouth, a dark emotion whirling in her gut.

  The media coverage didn’t make Zayn even blink. He wouldn’t have cared about the lurid exposé, either, if it hadn’t affected Mirah’s wedding. And if not for the pressure of the article, he would’ve had her thrown out of the palace and she would have missed this glimpse into his world, the different facets of the man beneath the sheikh.

  Something, Amalia realized, was beginning to enthrall her more and more.

  And when he wasn’t attending dinners and lunches, the man worked like a demon. Of course, Amalia had known this and matched his punishing pace without a complaint.

  She’d never lacked in confidence in her ability to do her job, but the respect she saw growing in such a brilliant man’s eyes made Amalia feel as if she could conquer the world.

  Every single night, he’d asked Amalia if she was up to working with him for a few hours. Always work with him, he’d say. He’d even started asking for her unbiased, bluntly honest opinion, as he’d taken to calling it on most matters. Those ended up being Amalia’s favorite times she spent with him. For even though he was still the sheikh and she his unofficial PA, they quickly began to build a rapport with each other.

  When he’d shared the blueprints for the trade and commerce center in Sintar, she’d been dazzled by the scope of it. When she’d asked him who was designing it, his expression had shuttered before he had answered that it was a firm out of London.

  But it was the time when they weren’t working and they weren’t in the public that became the hardest. Even though those moments were few and far between.

  No public declaration had been made, too tacky for the sheikh’s personal team to cater to the media, she’d been told, and yet the flash of diamond on her finger after a week spent in Paris, the most romantic city in the world, and the fact that she appeared with the sheikh at every event, had done the deed.

  Amalia Christensen was now the fiancée of Sheikh Zayn Al-Ghamdi. The evening when the story had hit the press, Amalia couldn’t focus.

  With a sigh, Zayn had looked up from his laptop after she’d asked him to repeat something a second time. Scolded herself for being so weak, after all these years. “You’re restless tonight.”

  She shrugged, trying to make light of it. “I’m—”

  Perceptive brown eyes stayed on her as Amalia tried to erect her defenses. “You expected your father to call.”

  “No,” she retorted loudly, betraying herself anyway.

  “You’re determined to hate him for the rest of your life but there could be a hundred reasons he didn’t contact you now. And he is a phone call away for you.”

  His sympathy was unbearable in the face of her foolish, childish hope that her father, at least now that she was engaged to the sheikh, would call and ask about her. The long breath she took forced the lump back down her throat. She lifted her eyes to him and her resolve almost broke at the tenderness in Zayn’s. “The past week has been a crazy whirl, Zayn. Can you handle your workload without me tonight?” she forced herself to say.

  If he’d forced her to confront her feelings, Amalia was sure she’d have thrown herself at him and sobbed. And the last thing she needed was to weaken, especially in front of a coldly calculating man like him. Fortunately, his answer had been a coolly delivered, “Of course.”

  And just as she reached the door, he said, “You called me Zayn.” She heard his light footsteps on the carpet, felt the heat from his body stroke her back like an intimate caress. “But I have to admit, Amalia, never has my title sounded so good as when it falls from your impertinent mouth.”

  Amalia didn’t turn around, an unexpected bashfulness rooting her to the floor. It seemed that the last and somehow stalwart barrier had been finally razed. He didn’t know it but she knew what it signified. She’d seen the man beneath the sheikh and as much as he tried to remove the real him from the man he needed to be, she had seen him. And worse, she was beginning to like the hell out of him.

  That was about the only personal exchange they’d had in the whole week.

  But as the first week merged into the second and Amalia was so thoroughly integrated into every aspect of his life, a different kind of strain began to descend on her. Like a thread of silk that was stretched too tight and too far.

  What the endless number of teams and strategists and PR experts hadn’t taught Amalia was how to bear the little touches and intimate glances from the sheikh himself, how not to dissolve into a puddle at all the attention he showed her.

  When his rock-hard thigh collided against hers, when his arm draped around her waist, becoming the center of attention for every cell in her, when he ran his shockingly abrasive fingers against her upper arm, almost without his knowledge it seemed, when she had replied to someone’s question about Sintar...it was a continual onslaught on her senses.

  The boundaries she’d been so sure would come to her aid were already blurring under that dark, perceptive gaze. And yet, he seemed to be utterly unperturbed by the deluge of sensations that seemed to be drowning her.

  After hours of perfectly synchronizing their acts, of playing the roles of affianced lovers a bit too well, they returned to their suite, and their masks fell away.

  The easy camaraderie they shared through the day disappeared instantly.

  Tension corkscrewed in the air around them, and more than once, Amalia had wondered desperately if it was only she who felt it. He ignored her so thoroughly in those moments that in contrast, thoughts of him and them began to consume Amalia.

  She didn’t fit into his life, in any way, she kept reminding herself, but it didn’t stop her from imagining them as a couple.

  His comments about her ap
pearance were always polite, impersonal, just adequate. Which perversely made her pay even more attention to her outfit and her makeup and her hair. Only to be disappointed again and again at his changing behavior toward her in the last week.

  While the little bits and pieces of information she hoarded about him made her own attraction to him more and more consuming.

  That he was a ruthless boss but a fair one, too.

  That beneath the cloak of power he wore for Khaleej, he was at heart still a dreamer.

  “Why do you think I’m in such a hurry to beget sons?” he’d said, when she’d called on his fixation with an heir. “The moment they’re ready, I will pass on the mantle of Khaleej to their capable hands and then I’m going to start my career and live my dream.”

  Amalia hadn’t had the heart to tell him that she couldn’t imagine Zayn ever chucking that duty away, that he’d probably serve Khaleej in one way or the other until his last breath. But then she’d caught a glimpse of a faraway look in his eyes, the hard curve to his mouth as he watched the young apprentice architect describe some building design and she’d realized that he knew.

  That the duty-bound, coldly powerful sheikh always, always came first and far behind was Zayn the man himself.

  That if, a big if, he had felt any attraction to her that first day they had met, he’d have effectively killed it by now because Amalia Christensen didn’t fit in to the life of Sheikh Zayn Al-Ghamdi.

  It had been a painfully vulnerable moment to witness—she was sure Zayn didn’t even realize how well she understood him now—a moment that defined her relationship with him for Amalia, the moment that had brought home pretty hard that at some point, Amalia had started believing in the powerful charade, that she’d passed from attraction to admiration to feeling something much more powerful and terrifying for Sheikh Zayn Al-Ghamdi, the man who found her unsuitable for everything other than posing as his fake fiancée during the day and as his efficient PA at night.