The Desert King / An Affair with the Princess

The Desert King by 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 Princess by 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 2009 from 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

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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.

Snarling, imagining it one of the people who had put him in this predicament, this disaster, he met it with a barrage that would have left anything living a mass of broken bones and mangled flesh.

A full thirty minutes into his rampage, his punching bag seemed to grin back at him, pristine and unimpressed with either his strength or his punishment. Leave it to something inanimate to point out the futility of his fury.

He caught it on its last rebound, leaned his face on its cool surface on a harsh exhalation of exertion and resignation.

It was no good. He was still mad as hell. Madder. The edge hadn’t even dulled. Would the rage ever lessen? Would the shock?

The king of Judar was dead. Long live the king. Him.

Blood surged in his head again. His fingers dug into the bag.

The bag should have been his brothers. He’d bet they would have stood there and taken whatever he dished out.

And why not? After all, they’d gotten what they’d wanted. First Farooq, followed by Shehab, his in-total-control brothers had done the unthinkable—forsaken the world for love and dumped the succession to Judar’s throne in his lap. Then, two days before he’d gone through the succession transfer ritual, the king’s long-expected death had come to pass.

Now he would participate in a ceremony of a different kind. An ascension—or rather, as it was known in Judar, a joloos—a sitting down on the throne. Farooq and Shehab had become the crown prince and the spare, and they kept patting him on the back for taking the throne off their hands so they could live in a perpetual haze of domestic lust and breed princesses for Judar at light speed.

How he wanted to batter sense into them, to bellow that the women for whom they’d forsaken the throne would end up tearing out their hearts and treading on them. He had made his augury unadorned and brutal. He’d gotten identical answers from the brothers he’d once thought the most discerning men he knew. Serene glances and pitying voices telling him time would show him how wrong he was.

Malahees.

Muttering his verdict—that his brothers had had their minds licked away by the honeyed tongues of two sirens—he tore his soaked sweatshirt over his head, balled it up and slammed it against the wall on his way into the shower/sauna/dressing area.

If all Farooq and Shehab had done was set themselves up for destruction, he would have kept trying to save them. And as victims of witchcraft, they could have had his forgiveness if all they’d done was shove him onto the throne.

But now he had to marry the woman who came with it.

He still might have accepted this fate worse than life imprisonment had it been any other woman.

Any woman but Aliyah Morgan.

Ya Ullah, when would he lurch awake to find all this another nightmare featuring the woman he’d been struggling to forget for the past seven years?

But it wasn’t a nightmare. It was far worse. It was real.

And in this nightmare of a reality, by a macabre twist of fate, Aliyah had become the woman the future king of Judar had to marry, to fulfill the terms of the peace settlement that would secure the throne and restore balance to the whole region.

He should refuse his brothers’ abdication, insist one of them take back the throne. Then one of them would be forced to marry Aliyah, even though he had another wife…

He stopped in midstride, stared through the flawless Plexiglas wall into the marble and stainless-steel shower compartment, a fist balling in his gut, images deluging him.

Aliyah…marrying Farooq or Shehab, in either of their beds, writhing beneath them, driving them wild…

The fist tightened, wrenched, forcing a groan from his lips.

B’Ellahi, had he lost his reason again? How could he still feel the least possessive over a woman he’d never possessed in truth, who wasn’t worth possessing?

He entered the shower, turned the heat up to rival his internal seething, hissed his pain-laden relief as needles of scalding water bombarded his flesh and steam billowed around him, engulfing him in its suffocating embrace.

Damn his power of flawless recall. It gave him an edge that made him rise in every field he’d decided to enter, to conquer. It was also a curse. He never forgot. Anything.

He had only to close his eyes to feel it all again. Every sensation and thought since the moment he’d laid eyes on her.

Until that moment, to him, women had been either beloved family, cherished friends, potential-mate material, or self-acknowledged huntresses who understood that he had no needs, only fancies to be roused with utmost effort and appeased, swiftly, irrevocably. He had yet to meet a woman who hadn’t fallen into one of those categories.

Then he’d felt her gaze on him, and all his preconceptions had been blasted away. He’d approached her at once, and her cutting intelligence and crackling energy, her exhilarating openness about his equally powerful effect on her, had deepened her impact on him by the second.

Fearing his unprecedented involvement, his aides had cautioned him. Aliyah wasn’t using her modeling profession to insinuate herself into the highest tiers of society, hunting for sponsors—she was doing far worse. Not only was she exploiting her unconventional beauty, but also her status as a princess of Zohayd, violating the rules of her culture and rank to catapult herself to stardom through scandal and controversy.

But Kamal, for once out of his controlled, focused mind with hunger, had rejected the cautioning. To him she’d been a miracle, something he’d thought he’d never find. A woman created for him. One who lived in the West but had her roots in his culture, an equal who “got” him and mirrored him on every level—the duality of his nature, the struggle between the magnate who abided no rules with the prince who knew nothing but. He’d thought it was fate.

And it had been. Fate at its cruelest, setting him up for the biggest fall of his life.

The ugliness of the discoveries, of that last confrontation, still lashed him. But only with anger at himself, for blinding himself that much, that long, for still being so weak he’d counted on others to make it impossible for her to reach him again.

Now it was others who’d given her access to him for life.

The accursed Carmen and Farah, who’d ensnared his brothers. His idiotic brothers, who’d succumbed to their wives’ influence. The damned Aal Shalaans, who’d demanded this marriage on threat of civil war. And the miserable Aal Masoods, who’d considered the marriage a peaceful solution. But it was originally the king of Zohayd’s fault.

King Atef was the one who’d fathered Aliyah then refused to acknowledge her. Then her American mother had given her up for adoption, and King Atef’s own sister had adopted her…No, they were all to blame.

The mess of mistakes would have remained a secret if King Atef hadn’t sought out his ex-lover and assumed the daughter she’d raised was his. But his ex-lover had adopted Farah only when remorse over giving up Aliyah had overwhelmed her. It had ended well for Farah. She was now the wife whom Shehab, the fool, worshipped.

But it hadn’t ended well for him. It had come full circle, throwing him together with Aliyah, now permanently. Aliyah, the half-blood princess whom everyone in formal society pretended didn’t exist, but whose debauched life in the States provided constant fodder for malicious gossip in the region’s royal social circles.

It enraged him that an accident of birth could make kingdoms steeped in tradition and conservative values consider such a woman queen material and an instrument of peace.

To heap insults on injuries, she was pretending outrage herself. She’d more or less told her father, her king, to go to hell, that she’d rather die than marry Kamal.

He was certain she’d known the declaration would hurl its way to him, a challenge designed to goad him to rise to it.

And he would. He was damned if he didn’t make her eat her words. But not for any personal reasons, he told himself.

This was for the throne of Judar.

He stepped out of the shower, every nerve stinging from the combined punishment of overexertion and physical and mental overheating. He tore a towel off the nearest rack and, without bothering to do more than tie it around his waist, he stalked out of his workout area and made his way to his offices.

The bodyguards who’d proliferated in number and intensified in vigilance since he’d risen to the rank of king-to-be faded into the background so as not to encroach on his privacy or purpose.

As if anything could. He’d lived with all kinds of infringement all his life, had learned early on to thoroughly tune them out. Right now, it would take an attacking army to distract him from his intentions.

He strode to his computer station in measured steps, came to a stop before the central screen, clicked the mouse, accessed his e-mail program. Two clicks brought up the e-mail address he’d acquired hours ago. He clicked open a new message.

He paused for a long moment, rivulets coursing down his chest and back from his still-soaked hair, his mind a blank.

What could he say to the woman he’d parted from on the worst terms a lifetime ago? The woman who would now become his enforced wife, his queen, the mother of his heirs?

Nothing, that was what. He’d say nothing to her. He’d give her an order. The first of many.

Inhaling a deep breath, his fingers flew over the keys. Two terse sentences flowed onto the screen.

He stared at them for minutes before his gaze gravitated to the name in the address bar. Aliyah…

How could it still wield such influence, strike such disturbance in a composure he’d thought unshakable?

It had to be echoes of the weakness he’d once had for her. Echoes of an illusion. As unreal as everything they’d ever shared.

He ground his teeth and hit Send.

The phone slipped from Aliyah’s fingers, hit her lap.

She leaned forward, fighting down a fresh wave of nausea.

She’d almost forgotten how that malignant turmoil used to seize her, contort her emotions and reactions. She’d fought too long, too hard for control, and feeling it ebbing away again…

She should cling to one thing. This time, her upheaval wasn’t being generated inside a chemically imbalanced mind. She had major-with-a-skyscraper-high-M reasons to thank for her current state. This was no overreaction brought on by drug residues, or worse, a resurrection of her old volatility, as had been implied.

Oh, no. This wasn’t a pathological reaction. She’d bet every cent she’d ever made—and she’d made heaps—that no one would react differently if, after twenty-seven years of a turbulent enough existence on this planet they discovered that everything they’d thought they knew about their life was one convoluted lie.

And what a lie. It had been perpetuated by the very people who’d been the pillars of her existence, who’d now brought it all down around her ears.

Could she accept it all one day? That Randall Morgan wasn’t her father but rather her adoptive one, that Bahiyah Aal Shalaan wasn’t her mother but her paternal aunt, that King Atef wasn’t her uncle but her biological father, and her biological mother was some American woman she’d never met in her life?

Yet everyone begrudged her her shock. They’d dropped the bomb on her and had expected her to gasp in surprise then shrug and carry on as if nothing had changed. They’d implied that her distress lasting for more than a couple of days indicated a return of her instability. They made her feel unreasonable for demanding time to grapple with the revelations, for resisting being shoved into this new persona and accepting her fate with a smile. That last call from her uncle/father/whoever-he-was had made her feel cruel for not rushing back to Zohayd to meet the woman who’d given her up for adoption, starting the chain reaction that had led to this point. This mess.

Well, she was entitled to her freak-out time. As she was entitled not to see said woman, or any of them. Not just yet.

And no, it wasn’t only because they’d managed to twist the course of her life, past and future. She would eventually come to terms with the rewriting of her history and her identity. What she couldn’t bear hearing or thinking about was the main disaster they were railroading her toward…

A sharp ping startled her. She set her teeth as she sat up. She had to change that irritating “new e-mail” alert. But to what? All available alerts were equally aggravating.

Sighing, she clicked the track pad and the laptop’s screen woke up. Her e-mail program window swam into view.

It took three beats for her heart to stop.

Just when she thought it wouldn’t restart, all the missed beats converged in a detonation that almost blasted the organ out of her ribs.

She choked as the name rippled across her vision, passed through the barrier of shock, sank into her brain, into the brand it had long seared there.

Kamal Aal Masood.

She collapsed back, lungs burning, stomach churning.

An e-mail. From him. The man she despised above all, the man who’d taken all the love and passion and dreams of her too-stupid-to-live twenty-year-old self and ripped them to shreds.

The man everyone was insane enough to say she had to marry.

Every muscle twitched with the enervation that followed the blow as her vision wavered over the screen again. There was nothing in the subject line. Just his name in the “from” area.

Figured. What could the subject line be, from the man who’d thrown her out of his life like so much garbage? To Clinging Idiot? Re: Sickening Slut? Parting Threat Renewal Notice?

There was nothing to say. He’d said it all then.

So what had he sent her? More abuse? She’d welcome that now. It would be written proof of the ludicrousness of the political marriage everyone was talking about as fait accompli.

Her hand trembled over the track pad. The cursor shook across the screen, missed its target. Hissing, she squeezed her hand to steady it, returned it to the track pad, clicked the e-mail open.

She stared at the words for what could have been an hour.

We will have dinner to discuss the situation. You will be picked up at 7:00 p.m.

That was all. No closing. No signature.

We will have dinner. You will be picked up. Picked up…

Yeah, like he’d picked her up that night they’d first met.

She’d been so deluded she’d thought him the embodiment of the best of her dominant half’s culture, a knight of the desert, with chivalry and nobility running in his blood. She’d thought him her counterpart, her soul mate, a man burdened with inherited status, struggling with its shackles, its distorting effect on people, overcoming its limitations while making no use of its privileges to become his own person and a phenomenal success. She’d done the same, even if her success had been nowhere as phenomenal.

She’d thought he’d seen through her hyper surface to the vulnerable soul inside, struggling to conquer her weaknesses, the one man who wanted more than friendship from her, who’d valued her as a person, didn’t consider her as a means to access status and wealth or a pawn in royal games of pretense. She’d thought he’d never get enough of her. Then he had, had walked away without a word.

She’d gone up in flames of desperation, begging for an explanation, a reconciliation. He’d walked away time and again, as if she’d ceased to exist to him.

His dismissal had driven her over the edge. And she’d gotten what she deserved for disregarding all survival instincts. Kamal had smeared her face in the ugly truth. What she’d thought a powerful love affair with her perfect match had been nothing but the sick game of a twisted hypocrite who’d exploited her and reviled her for falling for it.

And here he was, reinvading her life. Relegating her to being picked up like a pile of dirty laundry he didn’t deem to touch himself.

That royal bastard. Literally royal. Regal even, in a matter of days, thanks to the weird game of musical chairs the heirs of Judar had played, leaving him the one poised to sit on the throne. Not that he needed a throne to be ruthless. He’d always swept through life like a scythe, cutting down anyone who didn’t make way for his advance. And she’d been pathetic enough to consider his cruelty a strength, one she’d been desperate to be close to, to absorb a measure of.