Free SEDUCING HIS PRINCESS by Olivia Gates Page A

too...androgynous.”
    An incredulous laugh burst out of him. “Then I don’t know what that says about me, since you define femininity to me.” Before she ricocheted with another rebuttal, he cut her off. “Aren’t you going to hear my version of what happened?”
    “Will you tell me Najeeb or I jumped to conclusions, or some other lameness like that? Don’t bother. I already told you I don’t care. It was just a welcome bit of news that made breaking up with you much easier.”
    He had to accept that. It seemed he hadn’t realized how controlling his kind of life had made him, how severely allergic she had been, and still was, to any infringement on her free will. Her distress had been acute every time he’d pushed to announce their engagement. She’d kept saying she wanted more private time before their families and their feud infringed on their relationship. It seemed the more he tried to push for moving forward, the more she’d resented his attempts to herd her toward his objective. She would probably have ended it on that account alone. Her discoveries about his subterfuge had just rushed everything to its conclusion.
    He patted the space beside him again. “You still need to know my side, just so you know ‘everything’ for real.”
    She only flung a dismissing hand at him. “Suit yourself.”
    “Thank you, Your Ungraciousness.” He bowed his head mockingly. “So...when my uncle assigned me the mission of sabotaging you and Najeeb, I pounced on it, but only as a pretext to finally approaching you. That alone made me wonder if you might be as dangerous as my uncle believed. After all, how could you be the sweet innocent I thought you to be if you affected me this way, when the world’s most lethal seductresses didn’t turn a hair in me? If I was so enthralled from afar, what chance did Najeeb have?”
    He had approached her, hoping she’d turn out to be nothing like his fantasies and he could end her hold over him. Saving Najeeb would have been incidental.
    But from that first night, he’d lost sight of the whole world in her company, then of his own reality in her arms. He’d forgotten who he was and what kind of life he led to the point he’d asked her to marry him.
    “But you changed your mind once you were with me, right?”
    “When I was with you I had no mind. But if anyone gets your reservations back then, it’s me. You had your reasons for shunning marriage, and I had mine.”
    Not that his dread had stopped him from wanting to go through with it, from becoming progressively more impatient with her postponements, even when he hadn’t realized they’d been signs of trouble. This obliviousness had been why he’d been so shocked when she’d ended it. Then, after he’d found out why she hadn’t hooked up with Najeeb, she’d disappeared.
    He’d turned the world upside down searching for her, to no avail. He’d only found her when she’d resurfaced on her own, following a yearlong humanitarian trek in uncharted areas in South America. He hadn’t let her out of his sight since.
    And all the while, he’d been seeking a pretext to go after her again. Now that he’d finally found it, he would get her. She just didn’t know it yet.
    He swept her in an aching glance. “But my proposal, as ill-advised as it was, was real.” At her disbelieving huff, his lips twisted. “Whatever you think I thought or felt, not even I can feign that much hunger, for that long or at all.”
    “But men don’t have to feign anything. Put a willing woman in their bed and that’s all she wrote.”
    “Your inexperience with anyone else but me is showing.” He rose, savoring every nuance of her chagrin at being unable to contest his exclusive ownership of her body. “Those indiscriminate men you describe are aroused by the novelty, the challenge. They are notorious for losing...steam quickly when with a familiar body, no matter how tempting. But the more I had you, the more my hunger for you raged. I