Chosen as the Sheikh's Royal Bride

But still...

Tense and restless as he waited for the women to finish the interviews in the ballroom, he’d paced his private quarters. He’d known he couldn’t meet the brides. Not yet. It wasn’t protocol. But he’d found himself unable to either stay or go. So he’d gone outside in the dark, shadowy courtyard garden, trying not to think of either the future or the past.

Then he’d been interrupted by a beautiful, sensual, surprising woman. He’d been violently drawn to her, first by her incredible body, lush and ridiculously curvy in that tight dress. Then he’d been drawn by her frank, artless words. For a moment, he’d been distracted, even amused, as well as attracted.

Until even she had said that Laila, the half sister of his de

ceased long-ago fiancée, should be his bride.

Was there no escaping the past?

Looking up at the moonlight now, Omar felt a new chill. He’d thought the bride market would make it easier to have a clean break. Instead, tonight he was haunted more than ever by the memories of his first attempt at acquiring a bride, some fifteen years before. What a disaster that had been.

No, not a disaster. A tragedy.

One that must never happen again.

A low curse escaped him. Setting his jaw, he followed Dr. Edith Farraday back inside the ballroom. Standing quietly against the wall so he wouldn’t be noticed, he watched her from a distance, as she spoke earnestly to the vizier on the dais. Feeling his gaze, she glanced back, and their eyes met.

Then her gaze narrowed.

If she hadn’t known who Omar was in the garden, she must know it now. Her look was genuinely angry—even accusing.

A hot spark went through him as Omar looked slowly over her curvy figure in that tight dress.

His relationships of the last few years—shallow, sexual and short-lived—had been mostly with ambitious, cold, wickedly skinny blondes with a cruel wit. The opposite of black-eyed Ferida al-Abayyi, the fiancée he’d lost.

Dr. Farraday was different from all of them. She was neither a cool blonde nor a sensual, sloe-eyed brunette. Her long, lustrous hair was somewhere between dishwater blond and light brown. She had a dusting of freckles over her snub nose. Her heart-shaped face was rosy, her lips full and pink, and her eyes—it was too far to see the color, but they were glaring at him now in a way he felt all the way to his groin.

But if her face was innocently wholesome, her body was the opposite. She was a bombshell. That dress should have been illegal, he thought. Clinging to her curvaceous body, the silk whispered breathlessly that, at any moment, it might fall apart at the seams, and leave her incredible body naked and ripe for his taking. In that dress, Dr. Farraday could rule any man.

Or maybe it was just him. Looking at her in the brighter lights of the ballroom, all he could think about was taking her straight to his bed. Her skin, when he’d briefly touched her shoulder, had been even softer than silk. He could only imagine what the rest of her would feel like, naked against his own.

He took a deep, hoarse breath.

Omar could not seduce her, or any other woman here. The bride market was not about casual, easy seduction. In spite of Dr. Farraday’s remark about reality shows, it was a serious tradition, not an episode of The Bachelor.

The only way he would have the luscious Dr. Farraday in his bed would be after marriage. And she had far more to recommend her than just mind-blowing sex appeal. Her résumé had stood out from the other nineteen, because she was a research scientist specializing in the same childhood leukemia that had killed Omar’s older brother, long ago.

But if he hadn’t read that, he’d have had no idea that the woman had graduated from Harvard at nineteen with both an MD and a PhD in biochemistry. At twenty-six, she already led a team in Houston, doing bleeding-edge research. Edith Farraday rarely left the lab, he’d heard.

Someone like that should have been daunting, cold, formidable. But Dr. Edith Farraday didn’t act like her résumé. She was so different in person, Omar thought, that she almost seemed an entirely different woman.

She was warm, kind, self-effacingly funny. Even though she was different from his usual type, he was overwhelmingly attracted to her. Or maybe it was because she was so different.

Omar blinked when he heard the whispers in the ballroom suddenly explode, as a low rumble of shocked noise swirled around him. He’d been recognized by the other women in the ballroom. Without a word, he turned and disappeared back into the garden, and then to his private quarters in the residence.

But at the end of the evening, he stood alone in the upstairs salon, watching through the window as, below him, all twenty of the would-be brides climbed into limousines waiting to take them back to the luxurious, five-star Campania Hotel on the avenue Montaigne.

“The things I do for you, Your Highness.” His vizier’s voice came behind him. “Are you ready yet to just be sensible and marry the al-Abayyi girl?”

Not dignifying that question with a response, Omar turned. “You’ve made your decision which ten will be sent home?”

“It wasn’t easy.” Khalid paused. “Except for the last one. I barely spoke ten words to her before I knew she wasn’t your type.”

He was speaking of Dr. Edith Farraday, Omar realized, and said irritably, “I don’t have a type. Why does everyone think I have a type?”

“Because you do.”