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But now she knew the truth. This wasn’t an indulgence.

This was part of her price.

And she was to wear it, like a tag. Another check on his status report.

A bubble of nausea pushed against her diaphragm. She thanked and dismissed Hasnaa, and collapsed on the nearest chair the moment the door closed. She lowered her forehead to her knees.

She fought back a wave of sickness that seemed to rise from her soul. Suspicion struck her, deepening her distress.

This could be what Adham had hoped for.

She could be pregnant. It would be so easy to find out.

She couldn’t find out. Not yet. She didn’t want to know one way or another when she asked him to end their pact.

But first, she had to play the delirious bride again.

This time she would indeed have to act.

But it would be the last time she did.

Six

“Oh, my, Sabrina. You look a-mazing!” Julia exclaimed, her chocolate-brown eyes wide with admiration.

“You look like a princess right out of a fairy tale!” Catherine exclaimed, awe sparkling in her eyes.

“Okay, the verdict is in!” Vanessa Hughes, Sebastian’s sister, said as she finished her inspection of Sabrina, looking every bit the fashionista with her killer body wrapped in a gold second-skin, plunging-neck, floor-length gown. “This is the most incredible outfit I’ve ever seen in my life!”

Sabrina flashed a smile at the women she’d come to like immensely, a smile as genuine as her condition allowed. “You are just too kind, ladies. I feel like a prize idiot here, coming all dressed up as if for a masquerade, while you’re all floating around looking like supermodels fresh off the runway.”

“Are you kidding?” Vanessa scoffed. “I’d give anything for an outfit like that. But I doubt I’d carry it off half as well as you do. You have that exotic tinge to your looks, that…heat to your coloring—you just set the whole thing on fire.”

“See?” Sabrina smiled again. “Too kind, I tell you. But let me say something else. All the ego boosting is very much appreciated.”

“As if you need our ego boosting,” Julia said, winking, “with a man like Sheikh Adham, who has the female population drooling, literally composing odes in homage to your charms.”

“And accompanying every word of his sonnets with a white-hot look,” Vanessa added. “The guy showers you with more ego boosts than most women could handle.”

“Ah, those hot-blooded desert princes.” Julia sighed. “If only our men were that demonstrative and vocal.”

“But Sheikh Adham is far from being either,” Catherine, who knew Adham well, interjected. “He’s certainly the best employer I could ask for, but in my opinion, reserved and uncommunicative are his middle and last names.”

“Then this is an even greater testament to your charms, Sabrina.” Vanessa held her hands together beneath her chin in a swooning gesture. “And their effect on him. I’ve never seen a man so overtly in love before!”

Each word hit Sabrina like a whip. She wanted to beg them to stop, to tell them that he’d only been putting on a show. That it had fooled them, these intelligent, discerning women. Just as it had fooled her. Until he’d slammed her with the truth about his emotions—or rather, his lack of them.

The memory of his passionless gaze as he’d decimated her world lanced through her once more. She felt her smile splintering, its cracked edges driving into her flesh.

She had to excuse herself before the heat pricking behind her eyes dissolved into an unstoppable flood.

Yeah, that would ruin her image as “his princess.”

Perhaps she shouldn’t fight the tears after all.

No. She wasn’t only his so-called princess, she was a Grant. Foremost, she was herself. She didn’t break down. Not in public. And she would stop doing it in private. She was done letting him control her emotions, her life. She was taking control, as of now.

“And I thought you looked right out of Arabian Nights, Adham.”

Sabrina swung around at hearing Sebastian’s amused comment. He faded from her awareness the moment she registered him.

Adham was beside him. Adham as