Read Forbidden: The Sheikh's Virgin for Free Online

dark-as-night hair and startling blue eyes. Strong-jawed and golden-skinned, he’d won her adolescent heart the moment she’d first set eyes on him. If she could have imagined her perfect man, it would have been Rafiq. Long, muscled legs, broad shoulders, and a chest that had been like a magnet for her innocent hands.
    She would glide them around him, and he’d wrap her in hisarms and tell her that she was the most beautiful woman in the world and that he would love her for ever…
    Pain sliced through her, deep and savage, old wounds ripping open so jaggedly that she had to bury her face in her hands and cover her mouth to stop herself from crying out. What was the point of bringing it all back? It was so long ago, and times had changed.
    Except Rafiq hadn’t. He was magnificent. A man in his prime.
    A man who hated her.
    ‘Is something wrong?’
    His voice tangled with her thoughts, and she opened her eyes to see that they had left the city behind. Only the occasional home or business lined the bitumen highway out of the city, the landscape giving way to desert as they headed inland.
    Two days she must spend in his company, and he had to ask if something was wrong? What did he think? ‘I’m fine,’ she answered softly. There was no point saying what she really thought or what she really felt. She’d learned that lesson the hard way.
    ‘You don’t look fine.’
    She bit her lip, refusing to face him, gathering her robes a little tighter around herself, resenting the fact he wouldn’t just let her be. It was true she would feel better if he wasn’t right there next to her, brooding and magnificent at the same time. And she would feel much better if the air didn’t carry the faint hint of his cologne, seductive and evocative. But right now she was stuck with both, and there wasn’t one thing she could do about it but survive. And if there was one thing Hussein had taught her to be good at, it was survival.
    ‘I am sorry to offend.’ She folded her hands in her lap and sat up straighter against the leather upholstery, watching the desert speed by.
    What had happened to her? This was not the Sera he knew.Or had she always been destined to turn into this bland, cowering shadow of a woman? Had her character been flawed from the very beginning and he’d been lucky to escape from her clutches when he had? Would he now be regretting it if she hadn’t found a higher-ranking, more wealthy target to get her claws into? Wouldn’t that be ironic? He was a prince now. What would that have meant to a woman who had married for wealth and prestige? Maybe there was another reason for her to look so sullen—mourning the big fish she had inadvertently thrown back and that had got away.
    He sat back in his seat, the Arabic music the driver had found on the radio weaving patterns through his mind, giving birth to yet another unsatisfactory line of thought.
    For, whatever troubled her, and however her mind worked, she was closing him out again, fleeing from him in mind and spirit as surely as she had fled from him in the stone passageway. Was this her tactic, then, to stay silent in the hopes he would leave her alone?
    Not a chance .
    He hadn’t dragged her out here simply so she could cower in a corner and pretend he wasn’t here.
    ‘How long have you been with my mother?’
    He caught her sigh, felt her resignation and more than a hint of resentment that she would not be able to avoid answering his questions, and was simultaneously delighted that his tactic was working and annoyed at her reaction. Was it such a chore for her to be with him? Such an imposition? Once upon a time she would have turned and smiled with delight at the sound of his voice. She would have slid her slender hands up his chest and hooked them around his neck and laughed as he spun her slim body around, laughed until he silenced her laughter with his kisses.
    Once upon a time?
    Since when did nightmares start with ‘once upon a time’?
    ‘How