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“I won’t be willing this time, Zafir”

His hand curling around her nape, he pulled her closer Languorous heat exploded as he whispered the words at the corner of her mouth “I shall ensure you surrender that very will and I shall enjoy taking it from you”

A soundless screa down Lauren’s spine Even then, instead of protest, she said “And then?”

“And then, it’s only a nation danced in his gaze as he stepped back from her “You will be one of the ex- somewhere in the palace and the woman who bore his first child”

For days after he had left Lauren at the airstrip—barely containing his ragged temper, because he was sure, for all his threats, he would have despised hiht there while he turned into exactly the ht him to be—he hadn’t been able to concentrate on any of the nu his attention

“It is yours, Zafir”

Much as he despised what she had intended, he didn’t need a DNA test to know she spoke truth

Once he had acknowledged that beneath his sier came the realization that ate away at him—mind and heart and soul

His child would be a bastard, just like him, if he didn’t marry her

His child would question his place in society, in the royal hierarchy, would know that keening gnawing of rejection, just like Zafir had known for years

At his desk, he opened the file Farrah had given hinancy report

Lauren would hate it, he knew instinctively, to be tied to him She would hate a life of traditions and custoht and personal sacrifices The depth of her pain about her childhood had been a revelation in so many ways

She would hate to bend to his will in and out of the bedroo a third or fourth or tenth place in his life, to li his wife, the mother of his children

Because Lauren de he should have realized long ago

What stunned him to the depth of his core was how perversely a her his wife, of conquering that infuriatingly strong will of hers, of reveling in her thrilling sexuality night after night, of having soth and will ran as deep as his

But he was not just Zafir