LITMIR.BIZ

       “You should fear me.”

      Her heart quivered to a standstill.

      This was the moment she’d waited and worked for since she’d laid eyes on him. The full disclosure. The final negotiation before he surrendered. Before he let her give him herself, let her have him.

      She rose to her knees, shaking. “I would fear anything and anyone but you.”

      “How did you come by this certainty?”

      His bass rasp shivered down each quailing nerve. She had to be very, very careful. The wild, wounded tiger was giving her one chance to reach out and pet him. If she got it right, he’d be hers for life, she knew it.

      But if she didn’t get it right …

      “Do you have a few years? I’ll tell you, show you.”

      “What if I told you I don’t deserve your trust?”

      Her lips trembled on a smile at the ferocity of his final struggle. “Don’t bother. You have it. So if you think you don’t deserve it, how about doing all you can from now on so that you do.”

      Dear Reader,

      As soon as Amjad Aal Shalaan made an appearance in the first book of the PRIDE OF ZOHAYD trilogy, I knew. He would be my favourite of all my heroes so far. For not only is Amjad a man who has barely survived treachery and sworn to never think the best of anyone ever again, he’s a man who’s hidden for so long behind an impenetrable barrier of cynicism, he now believes he’s indifferent as well as invulnerable.

      So it was easily the most fun I’ve ever had writing, penning his every wickedly irreverent word and thought. The fun escalated when I gave him the only heroine who could … undo him, in every way, and sat back and watched them spar and parry and fall irrevocably, absolutely in love.

      With this book, the PRIDE OF ZOHAYD trilogy comes to an end. For me, it has been an exhilarating journey that concluded on a high note. I hope you enjoy this book, and the other two in the trilogy, as much as I delighted in writing them.

      I love to hear from readers, so please contact me at [email protected]. Also please visit my website www.oliviagates.com for my latest news and contests. I would also love it if you like me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

      Thanks for reading!

       Olivia

      About the Author

      OLIVIA GATES has always pursued creative passions like singing and 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.

      To Touch

      a Sheikh

      Olivia Gates

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To Marialina Tota, the first one who loved Amjad. For

      all your support. Wish I could have ‘dedicated’ him

      to you for real! ;-)

      Prologue

      “Will you forgive, Amjad?”

      Amjad Aal Shalaan could barely raise his gaze to the man whose voice boomed out the question.

      His father and king loomed over him in full regalia, his responsibility-carved face frozen in a mask of control. His eyes blazed with an amalgam of regret and wrath, agony and outrage.

      Amjad’s unfocused gaze panned to his brothers, who flanked his father, then to the sea of tribal representatives who crowded the expansive glory of Dar Al Adl—Zohayd’s Hall of Justice. Their faces blurred into a homogenous mass of anticipation as his father’s question reverberated off the arches and domes of the venerable place in a taunting echo.

       Will you forgive?

      But he’d already forgiven what no other man would have.

      He’d forgiven his bride for not coming to their marriage bed a virgin. He’d soothed her fear, assured her he wouldn’t hold against her what he couldn’t provide himself. What mattered were her life choices after she became his wife.

      Then he’d forgiven her when he’d discovered that she carried a baby. From her previous lover.

      People made mistakes. No sense in destroying a life, or even a relationship, over one.

      He couldn’t feel betrayed. She’d been a stranger he’d picked—or rather had had pointed out to him with a … strong recommendation—from a list of convenient brides a week before the wedding. As crown prince of a kingdom ruled by tribal pacts, his own considerations hadn’t come into play.

      But she’d become his wife, was going to be his one woman. And because he couldn’t live the rest of his life for the cold convenience of everyone else, he’d determined to see only the best in her, to give her the best of himself. He’d focused on what he appreciated in her, dismissed what he didn’t.

      And she’d repaid his clemency and compassion with deceit and destruction.

      “Amjad?” His father’s gruff whisper prodded him to answer.

      He’d had many answers. To his worries when loss of appetite had been followed by pins and needles in his palms and cramps in his calves. Overwork, stress, exhaustion.

      When the burning in his gut, the gnawing in his throat and that terrible taste in his mouth joined in, he’d suspected another cause. Soul sickness.

      His mind might have accepted his situation, but his spirit was seared that they were starting the marriage with a lie to protect his wife’s and her family’s honor, to maintain the peace their marriage had sealed. That he might not love her baby as every innocent child deserved to be loved.

      It was only when the real sickness began, purging every bite of food and drop of water from his body, when restlessness started dismantling his psyche and crippling headaches his sanity, that he’d sought out the royal physicians in secret.

      They’d been baffled. His symptoms defied their tests, their prescriptions did nothing to mitigate them. He’d felt relieved when apathy descended on him, sparing him the constant torment.

      But when delirium followed dizziness and drowsiness, doubts became certainty.

      Something malignant was eating through his body. Because tests could find nothing within, it had to be something from without.

      He’d doubted everything, and almost everyone. But not her.

      How could he doubt the wife who showered him with tokens of her gratitude and blossoming love?

      His focus wavered on the hands lying limply on his knees. They bore the marks of her treachery. White crescent markings on the fingernails, dark mottling of the skin.

      He shuddered with the blow of recollection. When realization had crushed him. Of how he’d been poisoned.

      The poison had been slipped into the most solicitous of gestures and sweetest of gifts. Clothes, towels, delicacies, bath salts, scented oils and far more. All emerald green, the color

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