To Tempt a Sheikh by Olivia Gates Read Free Book Online Page B

do and about everything you believe in, most of all your sense of justice. Be fair with me now. Give me a chance to defend my family. Myself. Please, Talia, tell me.”
    His every word expanded in her heart like a compulsion trying to spread out and take hold of her. She resisted his influence, slammed him with her frustration. “I told you not to call me that. But since you’re breath-depleting and you can talk me under the sand, just call me T.J. if you must call me at all. Everyone does.”
    This time he let that smile spread on his lips again. “Then something’s wrong with everyone you know, if they can look on your beauty and think something as sexless and characterless as T.J., let alone articulate it. I’m calling you nothing but Talia. Or nadda jannati . It’s impossible for me not to. Deal with it.”
    She gave a smothered screech. “For Pete’s sake, turn off your female-enthrallment software. It won’t work anymore. It’s making me so sick that I’d rather you use your fists like my captors did.”
    It was as if she’d hit a button, fast-forwarding his face from teasing to ominous. He rasped, “They hit you?”
    She instinctively rubbed the lingering ache in her gut, which had been swamped by far more pressing urgencies. “Oh, a couple did, just for laughs. It wasn’t part of the interrogation, since those jerks weren’t cleared to engage in that, and I bet their orders were not to damage me. But they couldn’t resist bullying the smaller man they thought I was. One made it sound as if it’s some duty a true Zohaydan owes any foreigner messing in the kingdom’s business.”
    His teeth made a bone-scraping sound. “I wish I had used something other than tranq darts to knock them out. Something that would have caused permanent damage”
    She gave an impressive snort. “Stop pretending to care.”
    â€œI can’t stop something I’m not pretending. And I would have cared had you been a man, even the spy with the multiple agenda I thought you to be. Nothing is more despicable or worthy of punishment than abusing the helpless. Under any pretext. Those men aren’t patriots as they pretended, they’re vicious, cowardly lowlifes who can’t pass up a chance to take their deficiencies out on those who can’t retaliate.”
    â€œRight. Like you’re the defender of the weak and the champion of the oppressed.”
    He gave a solemn nod. Then, as if he was renewing a blood oath, he said, “I am.”
    And she couldn’t hold back, blurted it all out. “Like you defended my brother? Like you championed him against the bullies in your family who abused their power and threw him in jail?”

Four
    H arres had thought he’d been ready for anything.
    He had made peace with the fact that he would never know what to expect next from Talia Jasmine Burke.
    But this was beyond unexpected. And he wasn’t ready for it.
    He stared into her eyes. They were flaying him with rage. But now anxiety muddied their luminous depths. It fit what he knew of her, that his first sighting of the debilitating emotion there wouldn’t be on her own account, but on a loved one’s.
    Her brother.
    So that was it. Why she was here.
    He knew she’d been determined not to tell him, hated that she had, was madder than ever, at herself. But it was out.
    At least, the first clue was. He realized she was talkingabout the same T. J. Burke he’d investigated. There couldn’t be another one who happened to be in jail, too.
    That still didn’t tell him why she’d implicated his family in her brother’s imprisonment. And it was clear he had another fight on his hands until she gave him anything more.
    After a long moment of refusing to give an inch, her whole body started shaking from escalating tension, her eyes growing brighter as pain welled in them. His insides itched with the