Read Online To Tame a Sheikh by Olivia Gates - Free Book Online Page A

crowd, took an involuntary step nearer as if to force her acknowledgment, resurrect her hunger with his eagerness.
    “And I know who you’re looking at. Who would have thought our little Johara would turn out to be such a stunner?”
    Harres’s words made no sense. Had Shaheen’s mind started to deteriorate from the stress?
    Shaheen looked at Harres, seeing him for the first time since they’d started talking, the juggernaut knight the kingdom had entrusted with its security, and who’d done the best job in its history. An expression softened his hewn, desert-weathered features, one Shaheen had never seen there except around their female family members. A rare gentleness, a proud indulgence.
    And he’d thought Harres had said… No. He couldn’t have said that name. Where would it come from, anyway?
    He shook his head, desperate to clear it. “What are you talking about?”
    “The vision in gold over there. Our Johara…or I should say your Johara all grown-up.” Harres gave a nod in Gemma’s direction. “You’ve been looking nowhere else since you walked in. And I can’t blame you. I gaped at her for a solid ten seconds when Nazaryan greeted me with her on his arm. Who would have thought, eh?”
    Shaheen stared at Harres as if he’d started talking in a language he’d never heard before. “Nazaryan?”
    Harres snapped his fingers in front of his eyes. “Snap out of it. You’re scaring me.”
    Shaheen shook his head again. “What do you mean Nazaryan?”
    “I mean Berj Nazaryan, our royal jeweler, her father.”
    Shaheen’s eyes slid from Harres’s, as sluggish and impeded as his thoughts, followed the direction of his earlier nod.
    Gemma was the only one in that direction dressed in gold. Harres was talking about her. And he was calling her…calling her…
    Johara.
    The bubble of incomprehension trembled inside Shaheen. Then it burst.
    Gemma was Johara.
    Shock mushroomed through him like a nuclear detonation.
    His mysterious Gemma was Johara. Berj Nazaryan’s daughter. Aram’s sister. The girl he’d known since she was six. Who’d become his shadow since the day he’d plucked her out of the air from a thirty-foot fall.
    No wonder he’d felt he’d known her forever. He had. He had recognized her with that first look, even if not consciously.
    And no wonder. She looked nothing like the fourteen-year-old she’d been when he’d last seen her. Skinny with glasses and braces, with no ability to wield her femininity the way girls in Zohayd learned to from a very early age. She hadn’t only realized her potential, she’d become the total opposite of her former self.
    He’d thought he’d seen every brand of beauty this world had to offer. But she was something he’d never thought would be gathered in one woman, all his tastes and fantasies come to life. And that was just on the surface. Deeper, where it counted most, little Johara, as Harres had called her, had become the woman who’d seduced Shaheen on sight, had possessed him in a single night.
    He rocked on his feet with the mushrooming realization. Only Harres’s hand on his arm steadied him.
    Among the storm tossing him about, he managed to answer Harres’s worried question. “No, I don’t need air. I’m fine.”
    But he was so far from fine he could be on another planet. He might never be fine again.
    He’d taken Johara to his bed.
    He’d taken her, in every way, repeatedly.
    Just as he thought shock couldn’t engulf him any further, his eyes captured her incredible dark ones again. And the final piece of the puzzle crashed down in place. It should have been the first thing he understood the moment he realized who she really was.
    He might not have recognized her, but she had known who he was from the first moment. She’d given him enough clues. Her first word to him had been a gasp of his name. She’d later told him all about herself, which had amounted to what he did know of her family history, without the names, dates and