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The Desert King / An Affair with the Princess: The Desert King
Michelle Celmer
Olivia Gates
The Desert King Olivia Gates Their marriage will save his kingdom. And in return for an heir, Kamal Aal Masood will give his new wife Aliyah anything ; except the trust and intimacy she desperately wants. When Kamal abruptly ended their blistering affair years ago, he vowed Aliyah would never ensnare him again!An Affair with the Princess Michelle Celmer Wealthy architect Alexander Rafferty hadn't returned to the kingdom just to build a luxury hotel. He'd come back to take revenge on Princess Sophie, the girl who'd played with his heart years before. He meant to seduce her, then walk away without a backward glance. But the unforgettable heat still flared between them. . .
The Desert Kingby Olivia Gates
What was she doing, coming here? Answering his summons like one of his subjects?
Aliyah made up her mind to leave in a heartbeat, and spun around to face the guards who’d escorted her to Kamal’s mansion. “On second thoughts, tell your boss…or prince…or king…or whatever he is that I won’t see him, since I know what’s good for me.”
They gaped at her as if she’d grown another head and remained standing there like a barricade when she tried to go back through the door.
“OK, if you know what’s good for you, move out of my way.” At her growl, they exchanged anxious glances, then rushed away.
Suddenly that ominous sense of oppression expanded. It seemed to impale her between the shoulder blades just before a deep, rough-velvet caress of a voice did the same.
“It seems you’ve forgotten how things work. You can go only when I tell you to.”
An Affair with the Princessby Michelle Celmer
“You’re every bit as beautiful as you were ten years ago…” Alexander murmured. “I remember…”
She wondered if he was remembering the way they’d stood here on the balcony, talking for hours. The first time he’d drawn her to him and kissed her.
The first time they’d made love.
“I remember this,” he said, gazing around at the palace gardens. “You know what else I remember?”
“What?”
He turned to her, reached out to touch her arm. “This…”
It happened so quickly that she barely had a chance to think. One second she was standing beside Alex. The next, his lips were on hers and she was in his arms, the only place in the world where she’d ever truly felt she belonged…
Available in September 2009from Mills & Boon® Desire™
The Magnate’s Takeover by Mary McBride
&
The Tycoon’s Secret by Kasey Michaels Dante’s Wedding Deception by Day Leclaire & Mistaken Mistress by Tessa Radley The Desert King by Olivia Gates & An Affair with the Princess by Michelle Celmer
THE DESERT KING
BY
OLIVIA GATES
AN AFFAIR WITH THE PRINCESS
BY
MICHELLE CELMER
MILLS & BOON
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/)
THE DESERT KING
Olivia Gates has always pursued creative passions – painting, singing and many handicrafts. She still does, but only one of her passions grew gratifying enough, consuming enough, to become an ongoing career. Writing.
She is most fulfilled when she is creating worlds and conflicts for her characters, then exploring and untangling them bit by bit, sharing her protagonists’ 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 she’s 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.
Dear Reader,
When the throne of a phenomenally prosperous desert kingdom is at stake, what will its heirs do to secure it? Anything, of course! In The Desert King, Kamal has to secure the throne by marrying the lover he’d scorned years ago – a woman who seems to despise him as much as he does her. But duty soon transforms into intense pleasure, and passion reawakens love and the need to resolve the heartache of the past…
The Desert King wraps up THRONE OF JUDAR, my first mini-series for the Desire™ line, where I feel at home writing what I love best – irresistible heroes who meet their destinies in passionate heroines, experiencing tempestuous journeys of pleasure and heartache until they reach their gloriously satisfying happy ending.
I would love to hear from you, so please visit me at http://www.oliviagates.com.
Olivia
At the end of my first-ever mini-series,
I again dedicate it all to the two ladies
who helped me bring it into existence.
My phenomenal editor Natashya Wilson
and wonderful senior editor, Melissa Jeglinski.
Thanks, ladies, for the incredible experience.
Prologue
Seven years ago
“Did you think I could just let you walk away, Kamal?”
Kamal froze. It was either that or stagger with the impact of that voice, that challenge. That presence.
Aliyah. Here. From the direction of her voice, on his bed.
So this was why his agitation had spiked the moment he’d stepped into his mansion. He’d felt her, even when logic had kept telling him it was the one place she couldn’t ambush him.
But she’d done so already everywhere else. Why had he thought anywhere beyond her reach, her persistence? Her invasion?
He kept his unseeing eyes cast downward. It was only because they’d been focused there, crowded with inner visions of her, that he hadn’t seen her in the flesh as soon as he’d entered his bedroom.
It was no use. He didn’t have to see her for her to work her black magic. To turn him from the twenty-eight-year-old man who daily managed thousands of people, defeated moguls twice his age and assimilated their achievements on his ascent to global power into the idiot she’d enslaved the moment he’d laid eyes on her…
Ya Ullah, how had she gained entry here?
Did he need to wonder? She must have conned his men. Maybe even seduced them. What else could have made them risk his wrath?
More visions assailed him, images of Aliyah slithering over other men before she ran back to him, threw herself in his arms reiterating her longing and love, draining him of coherence with the force of her hunger. Her insatiable, indiscriminating hunger.
And she was here, gambling on the force of his own hunger, on his inevitable surrender to it, against all reason and pride.
“Don’t you know I can’t let you go? I can’t, ya habibi.”
The endearment, my love, gasped in a hot, entreating tremolo, broke him. He gave in. Looked at her. He knew he shouldn’t have.
She was spread on his bed, encased in lingerie designed to turn men into testosterone-driven dolts, her honeyed mahogany silk hair fanned around her thin shoulders, her endless legs arranged in a demure pose calculated to make him want to charge her, spread them, guide them high over his back and plunge into what they so maddeningly pretended to guard: the scorching center of her femininity.
This was how he’d dreamed of her, dreams that paled in comparison to reality. A reality she must have saved to use as an overpowering weapon during hardball bargaining, like now.
She’d never shared his bed or let him share hers. They’d met on neutral ground, made love—had sex on strange beds. She’d never arrived before him to prepare such a scene. And no matter how deep into the night they’d lost themselves in each other, or how spent they’d been afterward, she’d always left. And she’d always left first. She’d never slept in his arms.
Now her arms were stretched out, her hands trembling as if with emotions too brutal for her thin frame to hide or withstand. Emotions he knew she didn’t feel. Didn’t have. Now her voice broke, as if she had nothing but emotions, raw and driving. “Stop tormenting me, ya habibi. Talk to me. Come to me. You know you want to.”
Aih, he wanted nothing more. To silence all caution, to tear his clothes off, flesh rebelling against the crush of silk and cashmere, screaming to feel her beneath him, to thrust inside her, to expend his anguish in the tempest of her being, to wrench his pleasure from hers and be at peace.
But he’d never be at peace. The only woman he’d ever invited into his being, had allowed to extend her dominion over his mind, occupy his priorities and dreams, had been an illusion. He would have to learn to exist with the loss of her festering inside him, eating through him.
Just one last time.
The temptation, the weakness, hacked into him, like a saw slicing through soggy wood. She felt it, augmented it.
“You have to talk to me, Kamal, tell me what went wrong. You owe it to me, to us. I refuse to let you just walk away. I can’t stop loving you. And I know you can’t stop loving me, either. I know you haven’t.”
She knew him too well, and he hadn’t known her at all. But he did now. He knew all about the perversions that polluted her mind and body and ran thick in her blood. The moment he’d gotten proof, he’d made his decision. He’d never succumb again, never seek exoneration for her. It was over.
Not that she’d let it be over. She’d pursued him, pretending bafflement and pain at his abrupt breakup, shameless in her efforts to get him to recant his decision to walk away from his six-month-long addiction to her.
And she’d succeeded in cornering him. Tonight of all nights. He wondered how she knew that his hunger had accumulated to such levels, he’d probably risk anything for one more taste of her.
Enough. He couldn’t let her cheat on him anymore, couldn’t even rant accusations at her. He couldn’t bear to listen to the lies addicts like her were superlative at coming up with.
But her eyes—those seas of old-gold and sincerity—were roiling with the liquid silver of distress, beseeching his mercy, dictating his surrender. And against his roaring will, he obeyed, her beauty intensifying as distance evaporated, the scent of her arousal tugging at his guts, his loins.
Then, as his lips neared hers, preparing to sink into the trap of her surrender, he saw it. The relief. The triumph.
He jackknifed up, a geyser of rage and disgust—at himself—threatening to blow him apart.
Ya Ullah, he’d almost fallen for her again. He still wanted to let go and lose himself in the magnificence of her abandon.
But he’d be doing just that. Losing himself. He’d already lost enough of himself to her. And b’Ellahi, he was putting an end to the damage here and now.
“You want me to talk?” he snarled. “Tell you what went wrong? I tried to spare you, but since you’ve invaded my home and come begging for it in this pathetic way, I’ll tell you.”
Shock at his aggression rippled over her face, jolted through her, sent her scrambling up, gasping, “God, Kamal, don’t—”
“No. You went to lengths I didn’t think any female with the least brains or dignity would go to, to hear this. So hear it. I ended it because you sicken me.”
She spilled off the bed, groped for her clothes. “Please, stop…”
He plowed on, scraping his throat raw. “You’ll hear this to the end, the truth about yourself, what you thought you could get me too addicted to you to notice. The busiest whore in L.A. is more honest than women like you, sluts born in conservative cultures who drown in vices once they experience ‘free’ societies. You want to know why you are the bottom of the barrel? Because to you, vice is an indulgence, not a necessity.”
She sobbed now. “Please…I—I’ll go…just stop…s-stop…”
He grabbed her arm as she stumbled past him. “I thought you had the intelligence to understand what you were to me. A convenient lay while I had some idle hours during my time here. That’s all.”
She convulsed as if he’d shot her, tried to wrench away. He struggled with the urge to drag her to him, beg her forgiveness for the cruelties, his fingers tightening on her fragile arm, the tremors that racked her sending electricity arcing through him.
Then it all welled up inside him, like blood through a reopened wound. Every word, every sigh, every lie, every step as he’d watched her rush to another man’s bed. One of many, he’d learned…
Let her go…now.
He somehow did, released her arm as if it were something fetid and slimy. “Now you can go.”
She staggered away, and something splashed on his hand, seemed to eat through his flesh to the bone. Tears. Her tears.
The blast of agony, of fury, almost shattered his sanity.
She was at the door when he bellowed, “Aliyah.”
She turned like a broken marionette yanked by a string. But through the performance of devastation, it was still there. Hope that he’d succumb at the last minute. Or at least leave the door ajar for another incursion. He went mad.
He stalked toward her, for the first time in his life not in control, not knowing what he’d do once he reached her. She’d done this to him. He’d loved her so much. He hated her more now.
He stopped with a restraint he’d thought she’d destroyed. Then he heard a rumble. Alien, crazy. His. “If you know what’s good for you, you won’t let me see you or hear from you again.”
She seemed to crumble then, as if around the hope he’d pulverized. With a tearing sob, she stumbled out of his bedroom. Out of his life.
Where he had to make sure she’d stay.
One
Kamal ben Hareth ben Essam Ed-Deen Aal Masood’s fist smashed into his inert opponent with a bone-crunching crack.
The bag swung away in a wide arc before hurtling right back at him like a battering ram.
