The Sheikh's Impatient Virgin

KIM LAWRENCE

Литагент HarperCollins EUR

The innocent’s awakening…Set up against her will as a potential Arabian queen for the notorious Sheikh Karim, unworldly Eva has a plan to deter the desert King. She will convince him she’s a modern, sexually experienced woman – and definitely not marriage material.However, the next thing she knows, Eva’s still a virgin – but she’s also become a bride! And her new husband is having a startling effect on her… She finds herself increasingly impatient; could it be that she wants the renowned playboy prince to bed her?

When Karim finally lifted his head they were both breathing hard. ‘Oh, God!’ Eva sighed, unpeeling her arms from his neck as he placed her back on her feet.

Karim gave a thin-lipped smile. ‘You want it so badly you can taste it…’ His voice trailed off as he looked at her and felt need flood through his body. He had never needed a woman…wanted, but not needed.

It was suddenly very important to Karim to prove this had not changed—that what he was feeling now was a reaction to the weeks of stress and the sudden release of tension.

‘You want me so badly that you’ll beg me to take you.’

The taunt brought a rosy flush of outrage to her cheeks. ‘Never!’ she choked.

Kim Lawrence lives on a farm in rural Anglesey. She runs two miles daily and finds this an excellent opportunity to unwind and seek inspiration for her writing! It also helps her keep up with her husband, two active sons, and the various stray animals which have adopted them. Always a fanatical consumer of fiction, she is now equally enthusiastic about writing. She loves a happy ending!

The Sheikh’s

Impatient Virgin

by

Kim Lawrence

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/)

To Peter, for telling me I can and learning to cook

Chapter One

‘LET me get this straight.’

Luke was looking at her as though he expected her to produce a punchline.

‘You’re some sort of…’ he paused for dramatic effect, pushing his floppy blond fringe from his eyes before adding with a half-smile ‘…princess? Princess Evie…?’

He chuckled.

Eva did not join him, but she had some sympathy for his skepticism. She had taken some convincing herself when on her mother’s death the previous year a family she had not known existed had materialised—and not just any family!

She hooked her fingers into the belt loops of her jeans, stuck out her chin haughtily and tossed her plait over her shoulder before asking in a hurt voice, ‘Are you saying I don’t look regal?’

Luke Prentice could think of many terms, including gorgeous and sexy to describe the daughter of a woman who had been, in the small world of academia at least, a legend in her own lifetime.

He had no idea if Eva knew her mother had seduced him when he had been an eighteen-year-old student taking one of her classes to broaden his horizons—she had definitely broadened them—but he did know he stood no chance with the daughter, a situation Luke was philosophical about. Though he was something of a novice when it came to platonic relationships with women, he did find Eva’s company kind of relaxing.

‘I can’t say I’ve ever associated freckles and red hair with Middle Eastern royalty before.’

Eva expelled a deep sigh and admitted, ‘Me, neither.’

Even now it all seemed a little surreal. Her mother—her lovely, academically brilliant mother—had not been the single parent Eva had always believed, but the estranged wife of an Arab prince. Not a prince high in the pecking order, admittedly. The King, her grandfather—King, now that was still seriously weird—had produced nine sons and her father had been the youngest.

But he had been a prince and, as her uncle Hamid had explained when he had arrived at the funeral in his big black limousine with its bullet-proof windows, she was a princess, and he had produced the documentation to prove it.

Despite the fact her mother had always preached independence to her daughter, in a secret