The Sheikh's Claim. Olivia Gates

those sordid memories, her eyes darted around the hotel suite. She’d reserved it for the coming weeks as it was within walking distance of the hospital so she’d be constantly available for her aunt.

      She’d just come back from starting arrangements at the hospital. Just thinking of what lay ahead filled her with dread. No wonder Aliyah’s call had shaken her. She was already in turmoil. And it had nothing to do with any other Aal Shalaan.

      She rose and headed to the kitchenette to make a cup of herbal tea. She needed to be calm for the drive back to her aunt’s at the outskirts of Durrat al Sahel. Traffic in the capital had gotten far worse than she remembered.

      With the first sip from her hibiscus brew, a loud, melodious noise shattered the suite’s silence. She gulped the hot liquid, scalded her tongue and choked.

      She was coughing her lungs out when the noise went off again. A doorbell. She hadn’t even realized the suite had one!

      It must be housekeeping. And she hadn’t thought of hanging a Do Not Disturb sign—she’d planned to stay only an hour.

      She stalked to the door, flung it open, intending to let them in and herself out … and froze. Her heart did, too.

      Filling the door, dwarfing her and causing the world to shrink, stood Jalal. The reason behind every tumult in her life since she’d laid eyes on him.

      But he wasn’t only that man. He was … more.

      She’d once thought nothing could surpass him in beauty and magnificence. And nothing had. And during their affair, he’d proved only he could best his own standards. That six-foot-six broad-shouldered, divinely proportioned body she’d thought the epitome of manhood had kept maturing to godlike levels, as she’d had hands-on proof. Every day they’d had together had hewn his face further with the chisel of maturity and virility, manifesting his intelligence and sensuality and dominance in its every slash and angle and expression.

      But something had happened to him since she’d last seen him two years ago. As if the darkness and danger she’d long suspected he’d hidden beneath the facade of graciousness and gorgeousness had manifested in his looks, emanated from his every nuance. It turned his beauty, his impact, from breathtaking to heartbreaking.

      He was staring down at her as if he, too, was shocked to see her. When he was the one who’d almost given her a heart attack just by showing up.

      After what felt like an hour of suspended thought and escalating distress, his whiskey-colored eyes narrowed, singeing her. Then his voice poured over her, feeling like a dip in lava.

      “I said I’d delete you from my memory, but it appears there is no forgetting you without erasing it altogether. So I’ve decided to stop trying, to go all the way in the opposite direction. I now think my only cure is to revive every memory, to reenact every single intimacy we ever shared.”

      Three

      Lujayn stood paralyzed as Jalal pushed past her. The door clicked closed, sounded like a gun going off at close range.

      She still couldn’t move. Speak. Breathe. Reactions deluged her as she watched him walk farther into the suite, memories and sensations and compulsions tangling, trapping her volition in their maze. It had always taken him just a look to neutralize her will, her sense of self-preservation.

      And that he still retained the same influence over her, after all she’d suffered and lost and continued to struggle with because of him, made her spitting, foaming mad.

      The moment he turned to face her, his eyes sweeping her in tranquil appreciation and intent, she seethed, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get out.”

      “I will. At some point.” His shoulders moved in a languid shrug. “But since it won’t be now, how about saving your obligatory apoplectic tirade and getting on with discussing the particulars of my proposition?”

      “How about I revive our first memory? Reenact the first ‘intimacy’ I shared with you?”

      His wolf’s eyes flared with remembrance as he walked back to her. “When I first saw you hiding behind Aliyah and watching me like a wary, hungry kitten? Or is it when I walked up to you and took your hand in mine—” his hands clenched and unclenched, as if reliving the sensations “—and it shook from the power of your response, with the promise of what it would later do to me?”

      A ragged scoff escaped her. “Way to go rewriting history. I was at a loss at how to react to a stranger’s forwardness.”

      “I was never a stranger to you. You’ve known who I was probably since you were old enough to know anyone.”

      “I knew of you. And what I knew accounted for the wary part of my reaction.”

      “What about the hungry part?” His eyes turned goading. “And I never asked—didn’t Aliyah sing my praises? How … un-cousinly of her at the time, if she didn’t.”

      “If she’d sung anything about you, I bet it wouldn’t have been praises. And since you went to great lengths to divert her from your intentions concerning me, she never did the cousinly thing for me, and warn me to keep you at world’s length.”

      “I diverted her in the interest of preserving the eyes you said you adored.”

      And those eyes, damn him, were as magnificent as ever, emitting the golden lust that put common sense on the fritz whenever he trained them on her.

      “From the mother cat routine she had going with you, she would have scratched them out had she known my ‘intentions.’” A frown gathered the spectacular slashes of his eyebrows. “So which first intimacy were you talking about?” Suddenly his eyes blazed with sensual challenge. “You mean when you sucker punched me?”

      “I did no such thing. I gave you plenty of warning.”

      “Aih, to let you go or else. When I wasn’t holding you against your will. I wasn’t even touching you.”

      “You were backing me into a corner.”

      “I was walking toward you. You were the one who kept retreating, cornering yourself.”

      “Because you had me alone in your hotel suite.”

      “Where you came under your own power and of your own free will.”

      “I came to attend a party, with Aliyah.”

      “My party, in my suite. And I wasn’t the one who made Aliyah leave you there to bail out one of her other lost souls.”

      “I was never a lost soul of hers. And I only stayed because she said she’d be back in thirty minutes.”

      “You still didn’t leave when she was much later than that.”

      “I was new in New York and I thought I was safer in your suite than I would be on the streets alone at night.”

      “And you were.”

      “It didn’t look like that when everyone left me alone with you. A man twice my size, twenty times as strong, not to mention a prince with diplomatic immunity and god-level entitlement.”

      “And you thought I sent them away to have you to myself.”

      “I was right.”

      “Not about the sinister intentions that earned me that one-two combo.”

      “Don’t exaggerate. That follow-up punch didn’t even connect.”

      “Only because the first one almost felled me.” His hand wrapped around his throat as if feeling it again. “Not to mention the shock of the angel I couldn’t wait to have turning into a harpy. Ya Ullah, if I wanted you one karat before that, I wanted you twenty-four then.”

      She’d been horrified at what she’d done, had tried to run out. He’d stopped her. Without touching her still. Just by calling to her. It had