Surrogate for the Sheikh: A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel (Curves for Sheikhs Series Book 7) Read online

  SURROGATE FOR THE SHEIKH

  ANNABELLE WINTERS

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  BY ANNABELLE WINTERS

  THE CURVES FOR SHEIKHS SERIES (USA)

  Curves for the Sheikh

  Flames for the Sheikh

  Hostage for the Sheikh

  Single for the Sheikh

  Stockings for the Sheikh

  Untouched for the Sheikh

  Surrogate for the Sheikh

  Stars for the Sheikh

  Shelter for the Sheikh

  THE CURVES FOR SHEIKHS SERIES (UK)

  Curves for the Sheikh (UK)

  Flames for the Sheikh (UK)

  Hostage for the Sheikh (UK)

  Single for the Sheikh (UK)

  Stockings for the Sheikh (UK)

  Untouched for the Sheikh (UK)

  Surrogate for the Sheikh (UK)

  Stars for the Sheikh (UK)

  Shelter for the Sheikh (UK)

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  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  Copyright © 2017 by Annabelle Winters

  All Rights Reserved by Author

  www.annabellewinters.com

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  Cover Design by S. Lee

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  SURROGATE FOR THE SHEIKH

  ANNABELLE WINTERS

  1

  “Did you know you’re eight times more likely to wear red when you’re ovulating?”

  Gracie Garner turned bright red as she frowned up at Jean Baylor, the much taller (and thinner . . .) soccer coach from St. Louis who was now on her way to becoming a soccer mom, last Gracie had heard. Jean had married the barrel-shaped security guard of a Middle-Eastern Sheikh (Nasser), and since it turned out that security guards to billionaire kings were themselves millionaires, was now retired and living with her gigantic Arab husband in a gigantic house near Lake Tahoe.

  “You’re visiting Oklahoma? Sweet!” Gracie had said when Jean called to invite her to a shareholder’s banquet that some rich Arabs were hosting in Tulsa and for which her husband’s new U.S.-based personal security company had been hired. “And you’re sure I can come to this banquet even though I’m not a shareholder of anything besides my niece’s lemonade stand? Which is starting up later this summer, by the way. I can get you a discount. Maybe even some extra sugar cubes on the back end.”

  “Oh, I can give out as many invitations as I want,” Jean had said over the phone, totally ignoring the awesome quip about the lemonade stand. “After heading up Sheikh Nasser’s security for so many years, my husband is almost royalty himself. In fact he was the one who asked if I had any friends from Tulsa that I wanted to invite! So I told him to get you two passes and to seat you at our table. It’s no problem. I want to see you, Grace Garner! It’s been how long . . . almost ten years, I think! God, are we that—”

  “Two passes?” Gracie had said, gulping at the reminder that she was single again and Jean Baylor—the awkward, shy, flat-chested girl whose clothes never seemed to fit right—was now married to a millionaire who was “almost royalty.” The world seriously belonged to skinny women, it seemed—not full-figured, thirty-something middle-school teachers whose old clothes didn’t even fit, let alone fit right!

  “Of course two passes, Gracie. I take care of my old friends. And it’s a black tie event, so tell that man of yours to clean himself up and rent a tux and—”

  “There’s no man, Jean,” Gracie had said quietly as she looked down and touched her belly unconsciously. “Jonathan and I . . . well, I’ll explain when I see you, yeah?”

  “Oh, wow, really? Oh, I’m sorry, Grace. I’m just going by what I saw on Facebook a couple of months ago. There were all those cute pictures of you with . . . anyway. Whatever. I’m sorry. I didn’t—” Jean had started to say before Gracie stopped her.

  “No, it’s a good thing,” Gracie had said hurriedly, perhaps trying to convince herself of it more than anything. After all, she had ended it and so by definition it was a good thing. Leaving Jonathan was a good thing. Yes, Gracie, it was good and right, smart and sensible. Sensible to leave a man whose love for you bordered on worship, who made more in a month than you make in a year, who would’ve given you a ring, a house, an SUV, a country-club membership . . . everything but the one thing you want: a baby bump. “We weren’t a good fit, and neither of us are getting any younger, and so I told him we should just—”

  “Wait, you broke up with him?” Jean had asked, her voice rising to that nasally pitch that reminded Gracie of why they hadn’t kept in close contact even after playing soccer together all the way through high school back in St. Louis. “Grace, why? Oh, God, I can’t wait to see you. Listen, I’ll have the passes—”

  Gracie had swallowed her pride and gulped down her anger, frowning into the phone as she stopped a wonderfully caustic retort from making its way past her pursed lips. She had smiled as she listened to Jean go on about how she’d have the passes delivered by “private courier” or something, perhaps in a stagecoach with rabbit-footmen and moon-faced gnomes at the reins.

  Um, you married a security guard, she wanted to snap at Jean. And “almost royalty” isn’t royalty, honey. The word “almost” is the clue. It means nope, not quite there. Sorry. Maybe in your next life you’ll be a queen, you skinny, annoying bi—

  But of course Gracie held her tongue. Nothing wrong with marrying a bear-sized security guard with ten million in the bank, she had reminded herself as she calmed down to the point where she was almost embarrassed by her own thoughts. Wow, I can be a bitch, can’t I—at least in my thoughts if not my words, she told herself as Jean finally wound up her Marie-Antoinette speech about how she could hand out passes to the street-urchins from the south side of Tulsa if she wanted, because she was so awesome and her husband was so close to being royalty. Lah-dee-dah!

  So Gracie let Jean send the two passes anyway, even though it was going to be Gracie flying solo, like it was most nights now, after “the conversation” with Jonathan—the conversation that Jonathan himself had started when he said he wasn’t going to wear condoms anymore because he had gotten “snipped.”

  “Sorry, what?” Gracie had said as she stared across the Formica-covered diner table at Jonathan’s long, pale face as he sipped his strawberry shake and glanced up at her. “You did what?”

  He had burped and leaned back against the shiny blue rexine of the booth. “A vasectomy. This way there’s no argument about kids and all that. We’re set. Like we talked about.”

  Gracie had felt the blood rise and fall so fast she almost fainted into her pancakes, blinking as she stared at the maple syrup and wondered if that side of bacon was talking to her. After all, that would have made more sense than what Jonathan was saying as he gurgled down the strawberry shake which looked way too pink to be strawberry. Pepto Bismol, perhaps.

  “Talked about it when?” she said when she finally caught up and realized she wasn’t face-first
in the pancakes and so she could finish them after Jonathan smiled and said he was joking, thereby proving what she had always known about him but had chosen to overlook: that the man had no sense of humor—never laughed at a joke, couldn’t tell if someone was joking, and clearly couldn’t tell a joke himself without creating alarm, indignation, and disgust.

  “That night when we had the abortion discussion,” Jonathan had said. “Remember? Oh, wait. You probably don’t remember, because you threw a fit and walked away after I got to the part where I said I was sick of using condoms and if you weren’t going to get on the pill then we’d have to agree that if you got pregnant, you’d have an abortion.”

  “I remember that part,” Gracie had said slowly, her jaw going tight, big brown eyes narrowing to dark slits as if she already knew where this conversation was going to end up—she was going to take this conversation, whether parsnip-faced Jonathan was expecting it or not. It was almost a relief, in a sick, twisted way. Like she suddenly had an excuse to . . . oh, God, had she been waiting for an excuse?

  But speaking of twisted, she had thought as she poked her pancakes and wondered if she should eat before or after she dumped his ass. Was he doing the same? Was he trying to get her to break up with him?

  She had studied his long white face, those light blue eyes that had once seemed so charming but now looked a bit too close together, finally deciding to hold off on the pancakes. “Yeah, I remember that part,” she said again. “The part where you wanted me to choose between jacking myself up with anti-pregnancy hormones or agree to some future surgery just because you're sick of wearing condoms.”

  “Grace, every goddamn chick in America is on the pill starting at age thirteen! That was the whole point of the sexual revolution!” he had said, nonchalantly stirring the foam at the bottom of his shake as he snorted and shook.

  “Actually the pill was just one of the many enablers of the sexual revolution,” Gracie had snapped. “And since you bring it up, the actual point of the sexual revolution was that a woman owns her own damn body, which means she chooses whether to have sex, whether to take the pill, and most certainly whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.” She had frowned for a moment, prying her sausage links out from beneath the pancakes before taking a breath and glancing up from her plate, lowering her voice as she spoke. “And this is the first I’m hearing about how much you hate condoms.” A pause and another breath. “Is this about our recent . . . um . . . challenges in the bedroom?”

  Jonathan had turned pinker than his Pepto-Bismol shake as his jaw went slack for a moment before he narrowed those blue eyes and stared at her, accusation in one eye, hurt in the other, self-consciousness all over that long, pale horse-face. He snorted now, leaning back and then forward like he was on a rexine rocking chair. “I knew you were going to make it about that. Sexual performance isn’t up to just one person, you know. Maybe if you weren’t so cold and disinterested, it’d be easier for me to get it . . . get it going.”

  “Whoa,” said Gracie, frowning and raising her hands and showing him the timeout signal, which seemed to confuse him since he never watched sports and was never around kids and clearly had been such a good kid that he had never been put in a timeout situation by mommy dearest. “Stop, Jonathan. Just stop, OK?” she had said quickly, wondering why she felt this strange contempt rise up in her as she looked at this man like he was a stranger suddenly, a person who repulsed her now, the change happening so quickly that she couldn’t understand it. “I’ve never blamed you for a moment about . . . about that. In fact I'm the one who always says that sex is about two people, and sometimes one person just isn’t aroused for whatever reason. And that’s OK! Hell, women fake it all the time!” She paused and pretended to burp so she could hide her smile. “It’s really not a big deal. You don’t need to feel all the pressure to perform. And I also told you that if it’s something we need to work on together, I’m all for it.” She gulped as she said that last line, blinking and breaking eye contact as she wondered again where that sudden feeling of repulsion was coming from, why she suddenly didn’t want to work on anything with Jonathan, that she was done and now she couldn’t wait to finish her pancakes and sausage and head home all alone, feeling full and satisfied, happy and free! What. The. Hell.

  Jonathan’s smile had gotten so tight that his lips were white as ash. Gracie had seen that look before—it happened every time he freaked out about not staying hard when they were having sex. She didn’t care nearly as much as he did—hell, of course there were times she wasn’t aroused and she just moaned and groaned her way through it anyway. It sucked that a man couldn’t hide it or fake it like a woman—but hey, that was life. Deal with it like a man, for God’s sake, she had wanted to say across that table. Have the balls to deal with your limp cock, came the wisecrack in her mind, but she faked another burp and then immediately started eating, digging into those pancakes and slicing that sausage, poking at the over-easy eggs and reaching across the table for the salt and pepper shakers.

  Jonathan’s smile seemed to get tighter, his eyes seeming to lose their color as his face went red. Soon everything about him was red except those eyeballs, and Gracie just chewed and stared at him like he was an alien lizard minion who had landed in the diner and wanted control over her body.

  It was cold and cruel, but hell, Gracie wasn’t going to deal with a man who gave her a choice like that. Did he even bother to look up what the pill does to a woman’s body? Yes, it could actually be a good thing for women with endometriosis and some other complications, but mostly women just dealt with the side effects because of the obvious benefits.

  And it wasn’t like she was just being a bitch by not going back on the pill. She’d tried several different brands over the years, and they all gave her terrible acne and swelling. She wasn’t going to waddle around with a face like a pin-cushion, ankles the size of a child’s thighs, and a belly like a gas-balloon just so thin-lipped Jonathan could wake up his sleeping lizard. And the alternative? Agree to have an abortion if she got pregnant? Seriously? Should she just hand over custody of her goddamn womb to him? Hell no, Jonathan, she had said. I’m not the kind of woman who’s going to simply . . . . simply obey!

  Of course, she had said she wasn’t that kind of woman, but a part of her whispered along that Jonathan wasn’t that kind of man . . . the kind of man Gracie would want to obey, the kind of man who could make this strict Oklahoma schoolteacher want to obey. God, men were such wimps these days!

  She touched her neck as she frowned at those pancakes, telling herself to stop eating and talk to this man who seemed close to having a stroke across from her. After all, his presumptuousness aside, he had gone ahead and done something drastic to his body after she refused to do anything to hers! Wasn’t that something? Wasn’t that love? Or was it just lame?!

  Or maybe it’s the ultimate act of presumptuousness and ownership over my body, she had thought as she speared a sausage link with her fork and took a bite. Like because he has the cock he can just decide that if we stay together, we’re never having kids? Well, it’s my womb, honeybug. I get to decide.

  Now she almost smiled, thinking for a moment that God, in a way she was almost relieved that as badly as she felt the need to someday be a mother, it wouldn’t be this wimp’s kids she’d be popping out! Oh, God, she was such a bitch in the privacy of her mind!

  “New dress?” came Jean’s voice through the privacy of that salt-and-pepper daydream. “You know you’re eight times more likely to wear red when you’re ovulating.”

  “Huh? What?” said Gracie, blinking as she felt the self-consciousness kick in. Now she remembered she was in that hotel ballroom, single and unaccompanied, and she suddenly felt almost naked in that knee-length red dress, no stockings or hose, not even Spanx to keep her tight. She had arrived way too early and had been standing alone with a glass of champagne, lost in that daydream, a part of her still in that daydream.

/>   “Jean! Hi! Wow, you look . . .” Gracie began to say even as she thought it had been a mistake to come, that how the hell was she going to make small talk with Jean when they hadn’t even been particularly good friends at the best of times.

  Oh, Lord, someone save me, she thought as she tried to figure out how to respond to the vaguely unsettling—and certainly inappropriate—comment about ovulation. Yeah, it might have come across fine if Jean had a sense of humor, but the woman was in the same category as Jonathan as far as that went. Ovulation jokes? Really? Oh, Lord, please save me before I have to deliver a comeback to an ovulation joke! Help!

  Gracie took a breath and tried to craft a sentence that wasn’t too bitchy or cold, but then from the shadows he came, arriving silent like the breeze, just the sound of his voice enough to make her turn.

  “Ladies, relax. Sheikh Dhomaar is here!” came the booming voice, the sound thundering down from above, like it really was a god announcing his arrival “I heard that a woman is ovulating in this part of the room, and so I arrived immediately!” The voice was deep and resonant, cocky and confident, smoothly accented, perfectly pitched, the delivery coming with a lazy energy that made Gracie feel a spontaneous tingle beneath her red dress as she blinked and turned.

  She had to look up to see his face, and even then she had to blink away the mist that had enveloped her in that daydream, disorienting her as those thoughts of Jonathan and limp sausage links, salt-shakers and vasectomies, baby bumps and bloating all swirled around and disappeared into the ether, leaving just this thirty-something unmarried schoolteacher standing on a thick carpet in the elegant Grand Ballroom of the Rega Royal hotel in downtown Tulsa, red dress with black panties beneath, bra tight around her heavy bosom, soft boobs feeling surprisingly firm, big bottom feeling unusually secure and strangely tingly, like everyone and everything was telling Gracie she was . . . she was . . . she was . . . ovulating?!