of hard work and efficiency, Ms. Christensen.”
“You sound like it’s a bad thing,” she retorted.
He smiled, and Amalia for the first time understood the meaning of knee-buckling. Her fingers tingled to trace the grooves in his cheeks.
“I should warn you that this is unlike any job you’ve worked at before. What are your expectations?”
“That I would be compensated well and dealt with fairly.”
He laughed then. She’d been right. Full of his own consequence he was, but he also had a sense of humor. The laugh lines around his mouth sat easily on the hard contours of his face. “Your bluntness is refreshing. You know that monetarily, you will be set up very well for the rest of your life.” He sobered up. “As to being treated fairly, I always treat women well.”
“Have I convinced you that I am right for this...position, then?”
“I’m holding judgment on that. As you know,” a glint in his eyes made Amalia aware of her own skin, the rapid beat of her heart, the slow tingling low in her belly, “it is not a decision I can make in a half hour. But you will be glad to know, on paper, I would have rejected you immediately. I have to hand it to Ms. Young. She made a bold but different choice with you.”
“You would’ve rejected me? When I’m supremely qualified?”
“Defiant as you are in rejecting your Khaleejian heritage, I can’t believe you can be that naive about your suitability, Ms. Christensen. Khaleej is at the most troubling and exciting point in history now, straddling ancient traditions and the modern world. Everyone around me reflects on me.”
Amalia prided herself on the career she’d worked so hard for. She’d dedicated years to it, had looked after her mom before she’d passed away last year, paid for her endless treatment... His dismissal of her stung. “Just tell me why,” she demanded.
“A career woman full of her own ideas about independence and gender equality and with a grudge against her own father is the last thing I need on my hands.”
All those fluttery, useless sensations that she was beginning to recognize died a sudden, much-appreciated death as Amalia tried to wrap her head around the sheikh’s statement.
If he didn’t want a professional, dedicated, experienced career woman for the position, how did he expect to get anything done? What use would a woman who couldn’t think for herself be in—?
Her heart sank to the soles of her sensible pumps.
It wasn’t a job he was interviewing for.
And if it was a stripper or a belly dancer she’d insanely thought, well, he’d have asked questions about that field, wouldn’t he? Maybe even asked her to give a trial performance. But even that crazy idea was better.
Her pulse skidding everywhere, her eyes wide, Amalia stood rooted to the spot as the last piece of the puzzle slotted into place.
That was why the palace was mostly empty, why women had been brought in all morning. The Ms. Young he kept mentioning wasn’t a headhunter but a matchmaker.
Sheikh Zayn Al-Ghamdi of Khaleej was interviewing eligible candidates for a wife, for his sheikha, and Amalia Christensen, dedicated career woman and valuer of her independence, had inadvertently applied for the position.
Her pulse skittered as fear filled her veins.
What if she had ruined Aslam’s only chances for release with her dangerous charade?
AMALIA CHRISTENSEN WAS the kind of woman who made men grateful for being men, who brought forth all the uncivilized, rampantly aggressive instincts that men pretended they didn’t feel anymore to cater to the modern feminist’s sensibilities.
He had never been struck by an attraction so hard and so fast.
The way she’d been so hotly flustered when he’d let his gaze sweep over her lithe form had been incredibly interesting and stroked his masculinity in a way he hadn’t needed in more than a decade.
Zayn couldn’t turn his gaze away from the color seeping up her cheeks or the way her expressive eyes flashed her dismay, confusion, followed by the resolve. He could practically see her spine lock into place.
Khaleej had always been a progressive nation. Even Zayn agreed there was a place and reason for gender equality and the feminist movement.
Just not in his life. Or in his bed. He had no doubt that he, in particular, would be deemed a male chauvinist or an antifeminist devil for there was no room for another strong personality in his life, let it be a lover or a wife.
He liked and preferred women who understood and accepted that he was the dominant one in bed, that he would take care of all their needs as long as they trusted him. As long as they were equally wild as he was.
Every aspect of his life had been controlled, first by his father and then by himself, and would continue to be until he was dead. But his private life, his sex life—it was where the wildness in him ran free.
With the little time he had, contrary to the Celebrity Spy! lurid exposé about his alleged orgies and depraved tastes, he needed his sex life to be easy and simple, not an ongoing battle of sexes.
So Amalia Christensen—with her long, wavy, dirty-blond hair tightly pulled back in a ponytail that brought her exquisite features into stunning focus, her pillowy, lush mouth that argued that she wasn’t flustered when she so obviously was and her hot little body hidden in her buttoned pencil skirt and long-sleeved top—was not the kind of woman Zayn would engage with sexually.
If she was the innocent type who couldn’t even own her sexuality, he didn’t have the time or patience to teach her. If that innocence was a cunning act to attract his attention, he didn’t want to play that game.
Neither was her vehemence that her father’s heritage had no part in her life something he liked. Clearly, she had been raised to disrespect authority figures, encouraged in her rejection of an important part of her identity. He would bet her mother, who had given her those light brown eyes and the stunning golden-blond hair, was the author of that disillusionment, too.
So Ms. Christensen was not fit to be his wife in any form or way.
Was this Ms. Young’s rebellion because he had ruffled her sensibilities with his requirements in a wife? She couldn’t have believed Zayn would choose this contradiction of a woman to be his sheikha in a hundred years.
But after a morning of meeting eligible candidates—all lovely virginal women with connections in high places and with a full understanding of what it meant to be the future Sheikha Al-Ghamdi, docile and respectful of his country’s norms and traditions, and even more important, thoroughly and admittedly bowled over by what he represented—this woman was a maddening, arousing novelty. His response to her and her rough, almost insulting manner was both curious and irrational.
Because staring into those long-lashed, honey-colored eyes, he couldn’t help wishing he’d met her a few months ago. Even a month ago, before the episode of Celebrity Spy! and
