Married for the Sheikh's Duty(16)

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 Night, 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.