Despite their earlier reluctance, the marriage of convenience soon turns sultry glances into steamy nights. And when a surprise baby calls the “fake” part of their plan into question, they’ll have to decide if they’re willing to give their second chance at love a fighting chance, or leave their blossoming future behind.

  Grab your copy of The Sheikh’s Sham Engagement

  Available 29 August 2019

  www.LeslieNorthBooks.com

  EXCERPT

  Chapter One

  Willow Everstone paced the foyer of the three-star hotel she’d been staying at for the past month. It wasn’t the best in Al Ghuman, the capital of Amatbah, but it was the best bang for her buck. She needed safe but spartan, which was essentially the tagline for the next few months of her life.

  As the project manager for Amatbah’s newest education initiative—a series of hands-on schools that would hopefully boost literacy and comprehension rates for the entire country—she needed to be very strict with the allocated funds. She had a lot to oversee, a lot to take care of, and very little time to get this train chugging along.

  She checked her phone. A car was on its way to pick her up to check out the construction site of the first school being built. Construction began three weeks ago, and she needed to make sure things were progressing according to plan. The king of Amatbah had his hands in this project, and not only was he the most revered person in all of Amatbah, Willow knew him in a personal context too.

  He was the man she’d once thought would be her brother-in-law.

  He was the eldest brother of her ex-boyfriend, the royal sheikh Nasser Safar. Which meant this wasn’t her first rodeo with the royal family. It had been almost two years since she’d spoken with anyone from Amatbah, but when this job opening showed up on her endless non-profit searches, she’d jumped at the chance. Even though it meant being within stone’s throw of her ex.

  The man who’d rejected her so painfully that some mornings, she still couldn’t believe he’d done her like that.

  The man who was on his way to pick her up right now.

  King Fatim had confirmed it in his email the previous day, dropping the detail casually, as if it didn’t matter. Willow supposed it shouldn’t matter. Two years should be plenty of time for things to heal over and become less painful, and they were going on three since their split.

  Still, it didn’t mean her stomach wasn’t in a knot waiting for Nasser to show up. Part of her hoped that Fatim had been wrong. The other part of her was darkly curious and excited to see Nasser. She tried to shove that part far, far down inside her.

  Willow stopped pacing as a black sedan pulled into the cul-de-sac of the hotel. Her entire body prickled with anticipation. This had to be the royal car. It was shiny and new in a way that most cars in Al Ghuman weren’t. And everything associated with the Safar family reeked of wealth.

  The car rolled to a stop in front of the steps at the hotel entrance. Willow stopped breathing as she waited for someone to get out.

  The back door opened a moment later. Shiny alligator shoes were followed by a dark gray kaftan. Dark aviators hid the dark eyes that she’d gazed into for two entire years while they finished up college, fell in love, and thought they were the be all, end all.

  Nasser was here. The epitome of Middle Eastern business chic. And grown up in a way she hadn’t expected after two years apart.

  He strode up to her, wetting his bottom lip with his tongue. He looked so unaffected, so casual. Like maybe he didn’t even remember her. As he approached, she realized she’d been rigid. Paralyzed, practically, by the broad shoulders and that tawny skin lined by a precisely manicured beard. Unable to do anything other than gape.

  He’d never kept a beard while in school. Its unexpected presence made heat surge through her limbs.

  “Willow.”

  The sound of her name from his lips made all sorts of emotions fill her body. Dammit, she hadn’t wanted this to be the way things still were. His rough bass could still unravel her, just from a few syllables.

  “Nasser.” She forced a grin, straightening her back. Time to play the professional. “Long time no see.” She wasn’t sure what to do with her hands—hug the man? Offer a handshake like a disinterested acquaintance? Crumble into his arms in a needy heap? She clasped them behind her back.

  He paused on the sidewalk a few steps away from her. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he wore a strained grin. “I wasn’t expecting you to be the project manager. But let’s go, at any rate.”

  He led the way toward the car, gesturing for her to get into the back. He shut the door behind her then got in the other side. Old habits died hard, she supposed. He might have been a reckless, flighty, hotheaded boyfriend, especially at the end when they broke up after graduation, but he was still a gentleman through and through. Even if he still hated her, which she suspected might be the case.

  In the back of the car, their unspoken sentiments weighed heavily. There was so much to say, yet there was nothing that needed saying. This was entirely professional—a work trip between two colleagues. A shiver ran through her. Would Nasser be her colleague the entire time? She didn’t understand why he was here, and after a few minutes of creeping through Al Ghuman traffic, she dared herself to speak.

  “So what’s your role on the project?”

  Nasser didn’t look at her, just stared out the window at the passing traffic. “I’m what you might call the head of donor relations for the tribe. Donors are the primary source of funding for this project, so I need to have a full report ready when we meet each month.”

  Willow tried not to stare at him as he stared out the window, but it was impossible not to notice this man. He’d commanded attention even when they met in the middle of their undergrad at The Royal University of Amatbah. He had the type of gaze that could start a forest fire. His mere presence was electric—he could energize her just by looking at her. So it was probably for the best that he kept his eyes focused outside.

  They didn’t need that sort of spark between them. Not again.

  Because even though they had an unfortunate history, complete with a dramatic break-up hours before Willow returned to the United States to care for her sister, Willow was confident that this time things could remain civil. Their past didn’t need to dictate the present. Or their future as sort-of colleagues.

  They could be normal. Professional. Acquaintances.

  But as time dragged on in the burning silence of the car, Willow could barely keep her mouth shut. She was dying to say something. Anything. To hear his voice. How his family was, what was new in his life.

  She allowed one question past her lips. “How have you been?”

  Nasser finally turned to look at her. And this time, she could tell that he really saw her. The hard lines of his face softened. He took off his sunglasses so he could massage the bridge of his nose.

  “Very well, actually.” He offered a small smile, which felt like an olive branch. Something in the air between them loosened, and a whoosh of air escaped her. Relief.

  Seeing him again only proved that she did still care about him.

  Only time would tell if it ran deeper than that.

  Grab your copy of The Sheikh’s Sham Engagement

  Available 29 August 2019

  www.LeslieNorthBooks.com

  BLURB

  The sexy American, Hannah, gave Sheikh Kyril a week of passion and then disappeared from his life. In the three months since, he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about her. Now, with an ancient law and his family’s expectations breathing down his neck, he has to find her. And convince her to marry him.

  Hannah spent ten years raising her younger sister and dreaming about traveling the world. Now that her sister’s grown she’s not waiting any longer. Her first trip, to the Middle East, made her wildest fantasies pale in comparison. Mostly because of Sheikh Kyril, who made her nights burn hotter than any desert day. But when she discovers she’s pregnant—with the sheikh’s baby—she can feel the walls of responsibility closing in around her again. Determined to hang on to her newfound freedom for as long as possible, she decides to embark on one final vacation before she returns to Kyril and breaks the news about the baby.

  But when Kyril finds her before she’s ready, she refuses to fall into line. So he falls in with her and begins a courtship through dream destinations and lavish pampering. But Hannah knows she won’t fit into Kyril’s royal family or lifestyle, and when they return to Al-Dashalid, discovering she’s right just might break both their hearts.

  Grab your copy of The Sheikh’s Pregnant lover

  (Sheikhs of Al-Dashalid Book One) here.

  EXCERPT

  Chapter One

  Sheikh Kyril couldn’t lose her again.

  He tore through the train station, his feet hitting hard against the cement platform, the collar of his shirt damp against his neck. Damn the people lingering everywhere in his path, faces buried in phones and squinting at the arrival and departure boards. Hannah’s hair was lit up in the afternoon sun streaming through the station’s high atrium windows. The train whistle blew shrill in his ears—and in theirs, too, but the French didn’t seem to care, only the tourists.

  Hannah stood at the opposite end of the platform, ignoring the call to board the train. Of course she was. Kyril glanced up at the departures board as he rushed by—the only train leaving from that track was one bound for Venice. Now. Hannah dug into her bag, shoulders rising and falling. Even from this distance, Kyril’s chest hummed with pleased recognition. He would know her anywhere, among any crowd. The bag was the only thing saving him. He ran faster.

  Hannah shifted the bag from one arm to the other, and her face turned to him in profile, a little frown on her full lips. The light shifted on her sandy hair, illuminating the varied shades of blonde and brown. The urgency of her digging increased, and Kyril’s lips turned up at the corners in spite of himself. What did she think, that the bag was endless?

  God, she looked good—curvy, petite, delicious. As good as he remembered. Twice as good, even. He’d like to sweep her into his arms and run her somewhere private. But that bag—he had to stifle a laugh. It was a ridiculous bag, something huge and practical. He never knew what she was going to pull out of it—or lose in it—next. That image of her—head bowed over the opening of her bag—was burned into his memory. He knew this image would be, too. Hannah. Train station. Backlit by the sun.

  They’d spent a week together, three months ago. He’d never forget a single detail of that week. Not for as long as he lived. He knew that for certain.

  A more pressing certainty pounded in his chest. He had to catch Hannah before she stepped onto the train and it pulled away from the station. Its departure was imminent. He wouldn’t run like this if the train weren’t already humming with energy, ready to spirit her away from him. Weeks of searching had brought him to this point, racing through the Gare de Lyon train station like a businessman late to a meeting with his boss instead of the ruler of Al-Dashalid.

  He ignored the shouts of his security team. Too slow, those men. Deadly, when they needed to be, but he outpaced them too easily. Sometimes his sister Adira would tease him about his hours spent in the gym, but this was precisely what those moments were for—when he had to take matters into his own hands. He’d watched his father do the same time and again when he was a child, though he’d never seen him run after a woman. Not even his mother. Kyril didn’t care.

  His headlong sprint across the train station, warm from all the people crowding the platform, was beginning to cause a murmur in the air. The voices rose as he zigzagged through the people waiting there, his security team twenty paces back and utterly useless in the event that he was ambushed. But he wouldn’t be ambushed. He would make it to Hannah, come hell or high water.

  Snippets of conversation—questions, really—came at him in broken fragments.

  “Hey, watch where you’re—”

  “Who’s that—”

  A man sprinting through the train station was noteworthy enough to draw people’s attention. If that didn’t do it, the six men on Kyril’s security team would. Kyril breathed in through his nose and forced his jaw to relax. It wasn’t in his nature to chase like this, a run verging on an all-out sprint, but his need to find Hannah—to see her, to touch her—was so strong that it overwhelmed his reservations.

  Hannah lifted her head from the bag, her eyebrows rising. She must have heard the crowd’s hum getting louder, and nothing in front of her was that much of a spectacle.

  She turned.

  In one smooth motion, she faced him, holding the bag close to her stomach as if he were a pickpocket coming for her purse. She went still, eyes wide with shock. They were green, those eyes of hers, green shot through with a startling ring of gold around her pupils. He thought of that gold ring at night when he woke from dreams about her. Three months, and he’d thought of her every day.

  And every night.

  He closed the gap between them, and she stood as still as a stone pillar in the desert, not moving a muscle. It was only when he stopped abruptly in front of her that she jerked the pointed oval of her chin to the side, as if she were looking for a way out. Hannah’s grip tightened around the strap of her bag, and Kyril consciously relaxed his fists. It wouldn’t do any good to drag her out of the train station, because Hannah wasn’t the type to come quietly. No, she’d go kicking and screaming, and then it would be an event. An unforgettable, embarrassing event. Not behavior befitting Sheikh Kyril, the ruler of Al-Dashalid.

  “Kyril.” Her lips, dressed up in red lipstick that made him want to lean in and devour her with kisses, parted again, but she had no words. “I—” She swallowed hard. “You’re here. What are you doing in Paris?”

  An urgency that he thought he’d trained himself not to feel pounded in his ears, a smile spreading across his face. “What am I doing here? Trying to find you before you step on a train and disappear into the ether.”

  “Even if I wanted to disappear into the ether—and I don’t, because that sounds awful—I couldn’t.” She seemed to struggle between a smile and a frown. “Not via this train, anyway.”

  “No?” He cocked his head to the side, considering her. A gauzy pink sundress hugged the curves of her body as if it was made for her. His palms ached to be pressed against those curves. “Have you come here for a little getaway? An escape from life?”

  The corner of her mouth turned up in a woeful grin. “Ha. In order to escape you have to have a train ticket, and mine disappeared.”

  It wasn’t the first time she’d misplaced an item like that. During their week together—that heady, passionate week—she’d lost her ticket to a special exhibit at one of the museums not far from his residence. It was sold out for the day, and he’d had to pull rank in order to get them in.

  Now that she was within arm’s reach, he felt a strangely determined calm. The thrill of the chase was over. He’d caught her. He also caught the worried glance she tossed toward the huge clock in the center of the station.

  “Come with me.” He put a hand on her arm, a firm but gentle suggestion. “I have a plane. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

  “No.” Hannah was adamant. “I want to take the train. It’s part of the experience.”

  “A private plane, Hannah.”

  “I don’t fly.”

  Kyril sighed. Her voice was firm. “I’ll get you another ticket, then.” His accompanying her on the train, security team in tow, would never fly.

  “You don’t have to do that.” She reached down into the opening of her bag again. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. Or else it’s between the ticket counter and the information desk. That’s the only place—”

  “I’ll replace your ticket.” Hannah met his eyes, cheeks reddening, and he had a flash of her face as she tilted her head back against a pure white pillow case, those same lips parted in ecstasy. “But hurry. We don’t have much time.”

  “I saw you running.” She pitched her voice low as the security team caught up to them, hanging back several paces in a loose semicircle. They had some privacy—almost. “You chased me through the train station, and now you’re going to let me carry on with my trip?”

  “I’m not sure that it was technically a chase, since you weren’t running.” He steered her toward the ticket counter. “This time, at least. You’re a surprisingly difficult woman to find.”

  “I’ve been traveling.”

  They stopped in front of the ticket window, and Kyril turned her to face him. “I’ve been looking for you for weeks. Your landlord said you were on a world tour. I didn’t believe him at first. But here you are, in Paris.” He felt it, then, the relief of finding her after the hectic search.

  “Here I am. And so are you.”

  “The food is incredible in Paris. And sometimes, if you’re looking for a woman, she might appear here, too.”

  Hannah laughed warily. “I’m trying to get out. Hence the train ticket.”

  “Tell me.” He was overwhelmed with the urge to know. “Did you plan to come back to Al-Dashalid? Or are you taking a world tour to escape from the memory of our time together?” He leaned in close, so that his lips were nearly brushing her ear, and breathed in the fresh, floral scent of her. “Or did you miss it?”

  He loved the smile that graced her lips. “I did miss it. But that’s—that’s not why I planned the trip.” She shifted from side to side, the bag still held firmly in front of her, and bit her lip. “I didn’t expect to see—” She pinched the thought off mid-sentence. “Venice is next on my agenda. I didn’t think you’d be here to…to make it happen for me.”

  “We could pick up where we left off, now that I’ve managed to find you.”

  She pressed her lips into a thin line. “I wanted to tell you….” The space between her words lingered in the air. “Thank you. For the incredible time. I left without saying that before, and it’s weighed on me.” Something else was left unsaid, he was sure of it. But he didn’t press.