The Sheik's Jealous Princess(20)

The applause stopped and Ramzi straightened up. “This is it,” he said to her, laying a warm hand over hers, trying to be comforting. “He’s a good man, Shantra. I looked into him and I know you’re going to be fine.”

She glared up at him, too terrified of what was to come to be nice about this. “Men don’t really understand what it is like to be in my kind of a role. So your words of assurance don’t exactly ring true, brother-dear.” And with those words, she walked forward, not waiting for her brother to lead her into the room. If she was going to do this, she was going to do it on her own. She would succeed or fail in her marriage alone, so she was walking into it alone.

When Laithir stepped into place and extended his hand to her, she ignored the gesture and turned to face him on her own. But Laithir wasn’t going to ignore her snub. He reached down and took both of her hands in his, squeezing them slightly when he realized how badly she was trembling.

Laithir looked down at the woman who was so completely different from his first wife and a burst of satisfaction swelled up inside of him. This would be his woman. She was beautiful, refined, and he thought her designs were truly impressive. A wife to be proud of.

The ceremony took only a few moments. A few words spoken, both promising their lives to the other, and then they were husband and wife.

Laithir pulled her closer and pressed a brief kiss to her trembling lips, then tucked her hand onto his arm. Together, they faced the crowd that had gathered from all over the world to celebrate their wedding. Pictures, greeting the crowds gathered outside the palace and then they were back inside, having an elaborate feast.

Laithir held onto her hand the whole time as they moved about the ballroom greeting the guests. He wasn’t surprised that his new wife was too stunned by the events to have much to say. And if the truth were told, he wanted to carry her off and be done with all of the formalities. He wanted to take his wife to his bed, strip off all of the accouterments of her wedding clothes and make love to her.

Over the past few months, he’d allowed himself only a small taste of her passion. A touch here, a small kiss there, but nothing like what he wanted to do to her. He also suspected that his little wife wanted him to kiss her a bit more passionately. But he couldn’t. That one kiss in the limousine had proven two things to him. First, that his wife was responsive to his touch and secondly, that he had been perilously close to losing control.

He didn’t do that, he reminded himself. He never lost control. That had happened before his first marriage and had resulted in disaster. He’d vowed that he would never lose control again. Angela had thought she had sexual control over him, had lied, and tried to manipulate him with her body.

His first wife had been an absolute bitch. The sexual encounters leading up to their wedding had been fantastic, and he’d been too young to know what she was doing. But after the wedding, when her true personality was revealed to him, he knew that he only felt disgust for his wife. The drugs, the affairs, the almost constant inebriation had made him pity her. And he hadn’t been able to touch her.

She’d self-destructed and he’d let her. Oh, he’d asked her several times if she would enter a rehabilitation facility, but he’d known she would never stop abusing her body. There was guilt over his lack of interest in trying to help Angela but he also knew that she didn’t want any help. She’d married him because she’d thought she’d have an endless supply of money for her drugs and partying lifestyle. When he’d cut her off, she’d tried to use sex to manipulate him into giving her more. When that hadn’t worked, she’d done…other things…to earn that money. It had disgusted him when he’d discovered her perfidy.

And because of her manipulations and betrayal, he’d told himself that he would never marry again.

But that was before a beautiful, curvaceous sprite had told him how inappropriate a marriage between the two of them would be. After a thorough background check where he’d discovered her secrets and ascertained that she wasn’t anything like his first wife, he knew that Princess Shantra’s fate had been sealed.

Now he was leading her out of the ballroom, her feet almost skidding along the marble flooring with her reluctance to leave with him.

He leaned down and kissed her neck, felt her body freeze up just as it had done so many times over the past few months as he said, “We’re walking out of here, Shantra. One way or another, we’re leaving and spending some quality time together.”

She looked up at him, those soft, brown eyes making his body harden with anticipation. “Talk? We’re going to talk finally?” she asked hopefully.