Chosen as the Sheikh's Royal Bride Read online

  Swept from her ordinary world...

  into the royal bedchamber!

  Among the many beautiful, accomplished candidates hoping to be chosen as Sheikh Omar’s wife, shop assistant Beth can’t believe this powerful desert king would even notice her. Yet Omar does select her—and his heated gaze sets her alight, making her innocent body crave caresses she’s only dreamed about! She’s instantly thrown into his world of unimagined luxury, but can this shy Cinderella ever be a queen?

  A Cinderella story with a royal twist!

  Omar lifted his hand in a single gesture, and the crowds fell into silence.

  “I have chosen my bride.”

  His deep, husky voice carried on the wind. Beth looked around the royal square, with its palm trees and lush flowers and burbling stone fountain beneath the blue sky.

  “My new queen will be...”

  Omar stopped. It was so quiet, Beth could hear the plaintive call of a seagull, soaring high overhead. The pause stretched out as he looked from Laila, dignified and still, standing regally beside the first palanquin, past Sia, Anna, Taraji, to Beth at the very end.

  Omar’s eyes met hers, and her heart twisted. I nearly kissed you last night, he’d said. If things had been different, if he’d just been a regular guy she’d met at the thrift shop—

  But he wasn’t. And no amount of people cheering now could make her Samarqara’s queen. The council already despised her. How much more would they detest her if they knew Beth had been lying about her identity, and was just a shopgirl from Houston?

  Conveniently Wed!

  Conveniently wedded, passionately bedded!

  Whether there’s a debt to be paid, a will to be obeyed or a business to be saved...she’s got no choice but to say, “I do!”

  But these billionaire bridegrooms have got another think coming if they imagine marriage will be that easy...

  Soon their convenient brides become the objects of inconvenient desire!

  Find out what happens after the vows in:

  Claiming His Wedding Night Consequence by Abby Green

  Bound by a One-Night Vow by Melanie Milburne

  Sicilian’s Bride for a Price by Tara Pammi

  Claiming His Christmas Wife by Dani Collins

  My Bought Virgin Wife by Caitlin Crews

  The Sicilian’s Bought Cinderella by Michelle Smart

  Crown Prince’s Bought Bride by Maya Blake

  Look for more Conveniently Wed! coming soon!

  Jennie Lucas

  Chosen as the Sheikh’s Royal Bride

  USA TODAY bestselling author Jennie Lucas’s parents owned a bookstore, so she grew up surrounded by books, dreaming about faraway lands. A fourth-generation Westerner, she went east at sixteen to boarding school on a scholarship, wandered the world, got married, then finally worked her way through college before happily returning to her hometown. A 2010 RITA® Award finalist and 2005 Golden Heart® Award winner, she lives in Idaho with her husband and children.

  Books by Jennie Lucas

  Harlequin Presents

  The Sheikh’s Last Seduction

  Uncovering Her Nine-Month Secret

  One Night With Consequences

  Nine Months to Redeem Him

  A Ring for Vincenzo’s Heir

  Claiming His Nine-Month Consequence

  The Consequence of His Vengeance

  Secret Heirs of Billionaires

  Carrying the Spaniard’s Child

  The Secret the Italian Claims

  The Heir the Prince Secures

  The Baby the Billionaire Demands

  Wedlocked!

  Baby of His Revenge

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Join Harlequin My Rewards today and earn a FREE ebook!

  Click here to Join Harlequin My Rewards

  http://www.harlequin.com/myrewards.html?mt=loyalty&cmpid=EBOOBPBPA201602010002

  For Susan Mallery, Christine Rimmer and Teresa Southwick, in gratitude for an amazing weekend full of laughter, food, wine and brainstorming. I couldn’t have written this book without you.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  EXCERPT FROM SPANIARD'S BABY OF REVENGE BY CLARE CONNELLY

  CHAPTER ONE

  “YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS!”

  Omar bin Saab al-Maktoun, King of Samarqara, replied coldly to his vizier, “Always.”

  “But—a bride market?” The vizier’s thin face looked shocked beneath the brilliant light from the throne room’s high windows. “It hasn’t been done in Samarqara in a hundred years!”

  “Then it is past time,” Omar replied grimly.

  The other man shook his head. “I never thought you, of all people, would yearn for the old ways.”

  Rising abruptly from his throne, Omar went to the window and looked out at his gleaming city. He’d done much to modernize Samarqara since he’d inherited the kingdom fifteen years ago. Gleaming steel and glass skyscrapers now lined the edge of the sea, beside older buildings of brick and clay. “Not all my subjects are pleased by my changes.”

  “So you’d sell your private happiness to appease a few hardliners?” His adviser looked at him blankly. “Why not just marry the al-Abayyi girl, like everyone expects?”

  “Half of my nobles expect it. The other half would revolt. They say Hassan al-Abayyi is powerful enough without his daughter becoming queen.”

  “They’d get over it. Laila al-Abayyi is your best choice. Beautiful. Dutiful.” Ignoring Omar’s glower, he added, “Marrying her could finally mend the tragedy between your families—”

  “No,” Omar said flatly. He’d spent his whole reign trying to forget what had happened fifteen years before. He wasn’t going to marry Laila al-Abayyi and be forced to remember every day. Shoulders tight, he said, “Samarqara needs a queen. The kingdom needs an heir. A bride market is the most efficient way.”

  “Efficient? It’s cold as hell. Don’t do this,” Khalid pleaded. “Wait and think it over.”

  “I’m thirty-six. I’m the last of my line. I’ve waited too long already.”

  “You’d truly be willing to marry a stranger?” he said incredulously. “When you know, by the laws of Samarqara, once she has your child, you can never divorce her?”

  “I am well acquainted with our laws,” Omar said tightly.

  “Omar,” his vizier said softly, using his first name by the rights of their childhood friendship, “if you marry a stranger, you could be sentencing yourself to a lifetime of misery. And for what?”

  But Omar had no intention of sharing his feelings, even to his most trusted adviser. No man was willing to lay his deepest weakness bare. A king even less. “I’ve given my reasons.”

  Khalid narrowed his eyes. “What if all the kingdom united, and begged you to marry Laila al-Abayyi? Then you would do it?”

  “Of course,” Omar said, secure in the knowledge that it would never happen. Half of his nobles were Hassan al-Abayyi’s minions, while the other half violently opposed the man and insisted Omar must choose a bride from a competing Samarqari family. “All that matters is my people.”

  “Yes,” his vizier said, tilting his head thoughtfully. “So for them, you’d risk everythin g on an old barbaric tradition.”

  Omar’s jaw tightened. “A thousand times and more, rather than risk Samarqara falling back into war.”

  “But—”

  “Enough. I’ve made my decision. Find twenty women who are brilliant and beautiful enough to be my queen. First make sure they are all willing to be my bride.” Omar strode out of his throne room in a whirl of robes, calling back coldly, “And do it now.”

  * * *

  Why had she been stupid enough to agree to this?

  Beth Farraday looked right and left nervously inside the ballroom of the elegant Paris mansion—hôtel particulier, they’d called it, a private eighteenth-century palace with a private garden, worth a hundred million euros, in the seventh arrondissement, owned by Sheikh Omar bin Saab al-Maktoun, the King of Samarqara. Beth knew those details because she’d spent the last twenty minutes talking to the waitstaff. They were the people Beth felt most comfortable talking to here.

  Gripping her crystal flute, she nervously gulped down a sip of expensive champagne.

  She didn’t belong with these glamorous women in cocktail dresses, all the would-be brides who’d been assembled here from around the world. Like a modern-day harem, she thought dimly, from which this unknown sheikh king would choose his queen.

  The other nineteen women were so incredibly beautiful that they wouldn’t have needed to lift a finger to get attention. Yet they’d all achieved amazing things. So far, Beth had met a Nobel Prize–winner, a Pulitzer Prize–winner, an Academy Award–winner. The youngest female senator ever to represent the state of California. A famous artist from Japan. A tech entrepreneur from Germany. A professional gymnast from Brazil.

  And then there was Beth. The nobody.

  She so didn’t belong here, and she knew it.

  She’d known it even before she’d taken the first-class commercial flight from Houston yesterday, and gotten on the private jet awaiting her in New York, where she’d met the other women traveling from North and South America. She’d known it from the moment her brainiac twin sister had asked her to take her place in this dog and pony show.

  “Please, Beth,” her sister had begged on the phone two days before. “You have to do it.”

  “Pretend to be you? Are you crazy?”

  “I’d go myself, but I just barely saw the invitation.” Beth wasn’t surprised. She knew Edith had a habit of letting mail pile up, sometimes for weeks. “You know I can’t leave my lab. I’m on the edge of a breakthrough!”

  “You always think that!”

  “You’re much better at schmoozing anyway,” her sister wheedled. “You know I’m no good with people. Not like you.”

  “And I’m totally princess material,” Beth replied ironically, as she’d paused in pushing a broom around the thrift shop where she worked.

  “All you have to do is show up at this event in Paris, and they’ll give me a million dollars. Just think what this could mean to my research—”

  “You always think you can make me do anything, just by telling me you’re saving kids with cancer.”

  “Can’t I?”

  Beth paused.

  “Yes,” she’d sighed.

  Which was why Beth was in Paris now. Wearing a red dress that was far too tight, because she was the only potential bride who didn’t fit sample size. She didn’t fit in, full stop. After being driven in a limo, like all the other women, from their luxury hotel on the avenue Montaigne to this over-the-top mansion, she’d spent the last few hours in this airless, hot ballroom, watching beautiful, accomplished women go up one by one to speak to a dark-eyed man in sheikh’s robes, sitting in tyrannical splendor on the dais.

  Except Beth. The sheikh’s handlers seemed bewildered by what to do with her. They’d apparently already decided that she wasn’t remotely their boss’s type. With that, she fervently agreed.

  She looked up at the scowling man sitting in his throne on the dais. She watched as he imperiously motioned these amazing women forward, one by one, with an arrogant movement of his finger. And to Beth’s shock, the women obeyed, not with glares but with blushing smiles!

  Why would they put up with that? Bewildered, Beth finished off her champagne. These other women were huge successes! Geniuses! She’d even recognized Sia Lane—the most famous movie star in the world!

  Beth knew why she herself was here. To help her sister help those kids, and perhaps selfishly see a bit of Paris in the process. But the other women’s reasons mystified her. They were all so accomplished, beautiful and well known—they couldn’t need the money, could they?

  And the king himself was no great shakes. Beth tilted her head, considering him from a distance. He was too skinny to be handsome. And he was rude. In West Texas, where she was from, any host worth his salt would have welcomed every guest from the moment they’d walked through his door. King or not, the man should at least have common manners.

  Putting her empty flute on a passing silver tray, Beth shook her head. And what kind of man would send out for twenty women like pizza, to be delivered to him in Paris so he could choose his bride?

  Even if Omar al-Maktoun was some super rich, super important ruler of a tiny Middle Eastern country she’d never heard of, he must be a serious jerk. Lucky for her, she wasn’t his type. A lump lifted to her throat.

  Lucky for her, she was apparently no one’s type.

  There was a reason why, at twenty-six, Beth was still a virgin.

  Memories ambushed her without warning, punching through her with all the pain still lingering in her body, waiting to pounce at any moment of weakness. I’m sorry, Beth. You’re just too...ordinary.

  Remembering Wyatt’s words, she suddenly felt like she was suffocating, gasping for breath in the too-tight cocktail dress. Blindly turning from the stuffy ballroom, she fled out the side door, where, like a miracle, she found a dark, moonlit garden in the courtyard.

  Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath of the cool air, pushing away the memory of the man who’d broken her heart. She didn’t need to be loved, she told herself desperately. She was helping her sister, earning money for important research. She was lucky. She’d gotten to see a bit of Paris this afternoon. The Eiffel Tower. The Arc de Triomphe. She’d sat for an hour at a sidewalk café and had a croissant and a tiny overpriced coffee, and watched the world pass by.

  That was the problem. Beth wiped her eyes hard in the dark courtyard garden. Sometimes she felt, unlike her super busy sister, that all she did was watch the world pass by. Even here, in this fairy-tale Parisian mansion, surrounded by famous, glamorous people, that was all she was doing. She wasn’t part of their world. Instead, she was hiding alone in the private garden.

  Not entirely alone. She saw a dark shadow move amid the bare, early spring trees. A man. What was he doing out here?

  She couldn’t see his face, but she saw the hard, powerful grace of his stride and the tightness of his shoulders in his well-cut suit. By the hard edge of his jaw, Beth presumed he was angry. Or possibly miserable. It was hard to tell.

  She wouldn’t have to think about her own problems if she could help someone else with theirs. Going toward him, she said in halting, jumbled high school French, “Excusez-moi, monsieur, est-ce que je peux vous aider—?”

  The man turned, and she gasped.

  No wonder she hadn’t seen him at first amid the shadows. He was black-haired, black-eyed, in a black suit. And his eyes were the blackest of all.

  “What are you doing here?” His voice was a low growl, in an accent she couldn’t quite place, slightly American, slightly something else.

  The stranger was so handsome she lost her voice. She wished she hadn’t come over. She didn’t know how to talk to a man like this.

  It’s not his fault he’s handsome, she told herself. She took a deep breath, and tried to smile. “I’m sorry. You just looked sad. I wondered if I co uld help at all.”

  His expression became so cold, it was like ice. “Who are you?”

  Beth wondered if she’d offended him. Men could be so touchy, as prickly as a cactus on the outside, even when they were all sweet beneath. At least that was her experience with her male friends, all of whom called Beth a “pal.”

  “My name is—” She caught herself just in time. She coughed. “Edith Farraday. Doctor Edith Farraday,” she emphasized, trying to give him a superior, Edith-like look.

  His sensual lips curved. “Ah. The child prodigy, the cancer researcher from Houston.”

  “Yes,” she said, surprised. “You must work for the sheikh?”

  That seemed to amuse him.

  “Every day,” he said grimly. “Why aren’t you in the ballroom?”

  “I got bored. And it was hot.”

  His gaze lowered to her red gown, which was far too small for her. Involuntarily, she blushed. She yanked up the neckline, which barely covered her generous breasts. “Yes, I know the dress doesn’t fit. They didn’t have anything in my size.”

  He frowned. “They were supposed to have every size.”

  Beth rolled her eyes. “Every size from zero to four. It was either this or my hoodie and jeans, and those were wet. It rained this afternoon when I was walking around the city.”

  He looked surprised. “You didn’t rest in the hotel today like the others?”

  “What, beauty sleep, so I’d look extra pretty when meeting the sheikh tonight?” She snorted. “I already know I’m not his type. And this was my only chance to see Paris. I’ll be sent home tomorrow.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because his handlers don’t know what to do with me. Plus, I’ve waited in that ballroom for hours, and the man still hasn’t done me the great honor of crooking his mighty finger in my direction.”

  The man frowned. “He was rude?”

  “It’s fine, really,” Beth said brightly. “The king’s not my type, either.”

  The handsome stranger looked nonplussed. “How do you know? You obviously haven’t done any research on him.”