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Harper crossed her arms over her chest. “Sorry, sheikh.” Her tone was flat. “But I’m not buying it. How can I be what you and your country need?”

Khalil allowed himself a slight smile. “You do not think highly enough of yourself,qalifa.”

“I’m just being realistic.”

“What you are,” he countered mildly, “is being blind. Where do you wish me to start? Why I need you? To put it plainly, I need someone whose company I am certain to enjoy for a lifetime.”

She frowned. “Is that your way of saying you’d like to have someone you can bully for the rest of your life?”

He ignored that. “I also need someone who’snota gold-digger.”

“How do you know I’m not?”

“You’d have jumped on my offer of marriage if you were.”

“What if I’m just pretending I’mnot?”

“And you truly think I’d fall for such a ruse?”

Harper snorted. “You’re not that infallible, sheikh.”

“Perhaps. But rarely do I make the wrong call when judging people.”

She supposed she could accept that, knowing that his position as king had allowed him to meet all kinds of folks, and she highly doubted that all of them were nice and decent.

“Also—-” Her eyes flew back to the sheikh at the word, and as soon as their gazes met, he drawled lazily, “I want to fuck you.”

Oh.

“To be specific: I want to fuck you more than I’ve ever wanted to fuck any woman in my life.”

Harper coughed, and when that wasn’t enough for her to get over her toe-curling embarrassment and shameful excitement, she scowled. She scowled as hard as she could, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to swoon. “Is that supposed to flatter me?”

“Does it not flatter you?”

Yeah. It did. But she would never let him know that. “Anyway,” she said gruffly. “Moving on.”

The sheikh smirked, not at all fooled by her tone. He would have liked to tease her more, but because they were pressed for time, he reluctantly set his urges aside for another day. Anyway, once they were married, she would be his to tease for the rest of their lives.

“What else do you wish to know? The requirements of my kingdom for its queen?”

“Wouldn’t they want someone who’s local?”

“That would have been expected for most other Arab nations, but ours is different. We have had a more open culture compared to our neighbors, and more than sixty percent of our population consists of foreign settlers. My people wish for progress more than anything else. They wish to move away from the years of bigotry and tyranny they had to suffer under my late grandfather’s rule. I, too, wish for the same thing, and I want my marriage to be a symbol of that. I want my own life to be proof that different cultures – even different religions – may co-exist peacefully and work side-by-side for the betterment of this kingdom.”

His quiet but impassioned words impressed Harper, but a tiny part of her felt a little hurt. In other words, didn’t that mean he was only choosing her for all the politically correct reasons? From here, even she could see why he had specifically chosen her. Her face was familiar to his people, and more than that they knew and loved her father, who was one of the kingdom’s most cherished modern-day heroes.

But was that enough to build a marriage on?

“You still doubt my reasons for choosing you.” The sheikh’s soft tone was more a statement than a question, and she nodded reluctantly.

“I just think there are more women who’d be more qualified—-”

“But do they love my kingdom as much as you do?” Her startled glance made Khalil smile. “I love my kingdom, and it is what enables me to know the people who feel the same way about Ramil. You chose to specialize in Ramilian history, Harper—-”

She couldn’t help interrupting him, muttering, “There must be a thousand others at least who also specialize in Ramilian history—-”

The sheikh dismissed this with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “True. But I don’t want to fuck them.” And his gaze captured hers. “I want to fuckyou.”