To Tame a Sheikh Read Free Page B

could find no other explanation.
    Shaheen was coming on to her.
    As if he’d heard her thoughts, he seemed to tighten all of his virility and influence around her, dropping his voice an octave, sinking it right through to her core. “This will sound like the oldest line in the book, but even though you haven’t said one complete sentence to me yet and we met just minutes ago, I feel like I’ve known you forever.”
    The music chose that second to blare again, as if accentuating his announcement, cutting off any possibility of her blurting out that he felt that way because he had.
    At the deafening intrusion, he dropped his hand from her cheek, raised his head, his eyes releasing hers from their snare as he cast an annoyed look at the whole scene. He caught her again with the full force of his focus a moment later. “This place is incompatible with human sanity.” His eyes forged another path of fire down her body to where her purse was hanging limply from her hand. “I see you’ve got your bag with you. Shall we go?”
    She gasped as currents forked through her from where his hand curved around her upper arm in courteous yet compelling invitation. “B-but it’s your party.”
    His eyes crinkled at her as his lips spread, revealing the even power of his teeth. “ Aih, and I’ll leave if I want to.” His thumb swept the naked flesh of her arm, causing a firestorm to ripple through her as though through a wheat field in a storm. “And how I want to.”
    Her free fist came up, pressing against a heart that seemed to be trying to ram out of her chest cavity.
    The world had always transformed into a wonderland when he smiled. But this was…ridiculous. There should be a law against his indulging in the practice in inhabited areas!
    She blinked, her sluggish gaze drifting from his at the pull of something vague. And she blinked again. In disbelief.
    She was no longer in the middle of the party. She was in a spacious marble hall, walking on jellified legs toward what she judged to be McCormick’s private elevator.
    Had she really walked here? Or had he teleported them?
    Suddenly it was all too much. His every move and glance stripping her of basic coherence, his very nearness inching her to the verge of collapse as she and the situation spiraled out of control. He didn’t have the slightest memory of her, was enacting this aggressive seduction based on her anonymity, confident of her availability.
    Still, only when they stopped in front of the elevator did she manage to attempt to extract herself smoothly from his loose yet incapacitating grip. Her spinning senses made her stumble back instead, wrenching her arm away.
    She could see astonishment reverberate through him as the spectacular wings of his eyebrows snapped together and his lips lost the fullness of intimacy, chiseling into harsher lines that accentuated their perfection. And showed her yet another side of him that she’d never been exposed to—the ruthless royal he could become when provoked or displeased.
    So he couldn’t comprehend that a female would have the temerity to not fall all over herself to obey his decrees? Maybe this encounter would end in closure, after all. Just in a different way than she’d imagined.
    She glared her disillusion up into his eyes. “You’re so certain I want to leave with you, aren’t you?”
    Bitterness hardened her voice. She knew he heard it loud and clear, too.
    The last of the heat in his gaze drained as stillness descended. “Yes, I am. As certain of my desire to leave with you.”
    She huffed her fury. “You’re right. You are spouting the oldest lines in the book.”
    His pupils expanded, almost engulfed his vivid irises. “I realize they sound like that, but they happen to be true.”
    Her lips twisted, mimicking a fiercer contortion of her heart. “Sure they are.”
    “You think I’m so lacking in imagination or finesse that I’d use something so hackneyed to express myself if it wasn’t the simple