Lisa's Reviews > The Sheikh's Prize

The Sheikh’s Prize is book 2 in the A Bride for a Billionaire series. I read book 3 first and the continuity between the two stories is pretty off. In book 3, we’re told that Emmie, the heroine of that book, always felt like she was in her twin sister, Saffy, the heroine of this book’s shadow because Saffy was beautiful and outgoing and loved by all, while Emmie was disabled from a car crash and self-conscious. But here in Book 2, we’re told that Saffy had been carrying two major emotional wounds herself all though their childhood and it made her feel self-conscious and unworthy. So it seems like she wouldn’t have been the out-going social butterfly Emmie made her out to be.

And I have to say, when Saffy’s issues are revealed, it just makes me dislike Emmie all the more for her self-inflicted martyrdom because Saffy’s baggage is way worse than Emmie’s. It made me wish that Saffy’s truths had come out during Emmie’s book so Emmie could see how self-involved and self-pitying she had been her whole life, totally convinced that she alone had gotten such a raw deal while everyone else led a charmed life. But I won't go down that road again, I ranted about it enough in my review of Emmie's book. Suffice it to say that I came out of that book with the impression that the estrangement between Emmie and Saffy was 100% Emmie's fault and that Saffy was a great, understanding person, which is why I decided to read her book, despite giving Emmie's book 1 star.

Unfortunately, the good impression I had of Saffy coming out of book 3 was completely wrecked by her behavior in book 2. Even though her baggage is legit, she still spends the whole book acting like an irrational self-involved harpy. The most egregious example of which comes at the end when the hero confesses the Big Dark Secret and all she can think about is herself. The only thing that made this book marginally better than Emmie's was that I liked the hero a little better

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Okay so this whole book is a pretty ridiculous study in contradictions and repetitive language. As I noted in book 3, Lynne Graham has a very unhealthy obsession with eye porn and nipples. In this book she also adds in highly repeated references to “even white teeth” and some hair porn as well. All of which takes up an inordinate amount of page time that could have been better spent developing a meaningful relationship between our hero and heroine.

And the contradictions were pretty egregious. In the beginning, we meet the hero, Zahir, who is the king of a made up nation called Maraban. His brother runs in to exclaim over the fact that Zahir's shameless, heartless, slutty ex-wife, Sapphire, who is a world-famous supermodel, had the nerve to come to Maraban for a photo shoot. Zahir thinks some very scathing things about how awful Saffy is. How she's nothing more than an unrepentant gold-digger with a "cash register for a heart" (he uses that exact phrase twice). The reason he thinks this is because Saffy took the 5 million pounds of alimony he's been sending her for the last 5 years since their marriage broke up. He admits that this amount of money is mere pocket change to him, but he still thinks she's a gold-digger for taking it.....and then at the end when they've made up and it turns out Saffy never knew about the alimony and instead her lawyer had been stealing it, Zahir gets upset because he'd "wanted her to have the money so she'd be taken care of." So...why was he so scathing toward her in the beginning about the money if he'd wanted her to have it in the first place?? It doesn't make sense, other than as the author trying to artificially bump up the agnst level in the beginning but find a reason to make it all okay for the HEA at the end.

We move on to Sapphire's perspective and she's uncomfortable being in Maraban but didn't have a choice because of a last-minute change to their shooting location. She thinks about Zahir and how much she hates him, even as she uses her memories of his body to achieve the "sultry" look the photographer wants to capture. Then she gets in a limo and is kidnapped and brought to Zahir at an isolated compound in the middle of the desert. Here Saffy throws tantrums and shrieks and calls Zahir every name in the book, it was all very tedious. Particularly because Saffy's inner monologue explains that during their year-long marriage she'd constantly thrown the possibility of divorce in Zahir's face whenever they fought, which was all the time, but that she'd never expected him to take her up on that. And that he'd cut her to the core by finally divorcing her, like it was all his fault. So she's got not qualms about admitting that she's one of those women who a) says things she doesn't mean and yet expects the man to read her mind about it, and b) refuses to take ownership for her part in the relationship.

And then at the end, we find out that Zahir loved Saffy more than life itself and only divorced her to protect her from his tyrannical father, who was threatening to have her murdered. And Saffy goes on and on about how much she was still in love with Zahir when their marriage ended too and how she would have done anything to stay with him....so why do they hate each other so much at the beginning of the book? Zahir even reveals that, once he'd led the revolution to depose his father, he'd gone in search of Saffy, desperate to have back the love of his life, but that Saffy's sister, Kat, had turned him away, saying that Saffy had only just gotten over him and was better off. So yeah, I'm not seeing anything in all of this that suggests that these two should hate each other at the start of the book.

Getting back to the story, Zahir comes straight out and tells Saffy that he kidnapped her for sex. Apparently throughout their entire year-long marriage, they never once had sex. Saffy freaked out whenever Zahir touched her. They were both virgins and Zahir has always assumed that it was his lack of skills that made Saffy turn away from him. Especially because he's followed her love life in the tabloids and "knows" that she'll hook up with any guy who catches her fancy. Now that he's taken a few laps around the lady buffet and knows what he's doing in the bedroom, he wants a second chance to have the one that got away. Naturally the truth is that the tabloids are all just sensationalizing things and Saffy is still a virgin, a fact that she finds shameful.

What follows is a very tedious no-no-no-yes from Saffy. She goes on and on and ON about how she refuses to sleep with Zahir. That he's the last man on earth she'd choose to be with and yada yada yada....then abruptly does a complete 180 and tells him to hurry up and get on the bed. She seriously said "never in a million years" and "let's do this" within 2 minutes of each other. It was very jarring to read and not adequately justified in the narrative. We keep getting hints that Saffy had some big issue that required 5 years of therapy to overcome and how she feels she needs to rid herself of her virginity in order to be normal and have a normal relationship with a man. And without warning she just decides that Zahir may as well be the one to relieve her of that pesky hymen since he's the only man she's ever felt even remotely attracted to....but she still hates him! She assures herself that SHE'S using HIM. That even though he kidnapped her for sex, by her being the one to say "ok let's have sex" she's turning the tables on him in an important way.

Zahir, for his part, was pretty tedious throughout this whole section too. It was pretty irritating the way he talked down to Saffy for being pissed off that she'd been kidnapped. I mean, dude, come on. And he continued to think the worst of her all throughout the time they were together. Saying that every word out of her mouth was clearly a lie, even though when we read the ending we see he had no reason whatsoever to think that she was ever anything but honest with him. He's a little caught off guard when Saffy suddenly agrees to sex but that's what he's there for so he doesn't really question it.

The sex scene itself was pretty squicky. We're in Saffy's head for most of it and she spends the whole time thinking "I hope I don't freak out. Oh God, am I about to freak out? Oh please don't let me freak out. I have to get through this so I can be normal. Oh crap, I'm not doing it right, I'd better try to show some enthusiasm or he'll know I'm freaking out..." And so on. For the time we're in Zahir's perspective, he makes reference to the fact that Saffy is laying there, stiff and "like a human sacrifice" and questions whether that's how she really feels about sleeping with him. He offers to stop at that point, which was good, but when she opts to solider on, he doesn't have any trouble rising to the occasion. So all of this made for a really unromantic setup, which made it super hard to believe that Saffy actually achieved orgasm, and that Zahir found the experience to be "incredible." So incredible, in fact, that he's completely hooked on her after that.

They haven't even caught their breath afterward when Saffy asks if she's "earned" her trip to the airport yet. Then she gets up and goes into the bathroom. Zahir then notices that a) there's blood on the sheets and b) that the condom they used broke. He, believing she sleeps around (an idea Saffy has deliberately fostered), doesn't even consider the possibility that she might have been a virgin and instead assumes he'd hurt her. She stonewalls and says that it's just "been a long time" for her. He asks if she's on birth control and she lies and says that she is.

10 days later, Saffy's back home and showing signs of pregnancy. Zahir shows up and tries to bully her into becoming his mistress. He's already purchased a luxury apartment in London and gotten her a car. He'll visit her whenever he can but she's forbidden to sleep with other men because he doesn't share. He's already got movers poised to pack up her things and move her out of the house of her current "lover." Saffy tells him to get lost but all he has to do is trace a hand down her bare skin and she melts into a puddle and they end up having sex up against the wall. Zahir thinks this settles the matter but Saffy tells him no again then passes out. When she comes-to, she blurts out that she thinks she's pregnant. Then the roommate comes home and he's the classic gay best friend. He and Saffy use each other as beards. Him so he won't have to come out to his elderly grandparents, and her to keep men with gropey hands at bay. Saffy informs Zahir that he's been her only lover and he immediately believes her and insists they get married. Saffy dithers for a little while then finally agrees, but only to legitimize the baby. She says they'll get a divorce after a year or so, then paradoxically insists they have a big, flashy wedding, unlike the sterile and cold courthouse affair they had the first time.

The wedding plans happen entirely off page and it's just suddenly the big day. Saffy is unhappy because she keeps thinking about all the other women Zahir must have slept with since their divorce. Then one of her supermodel frenemies happily informs Saffy that she slept with Zahir at some art festival a few years back. This puts Saffy in a nasty mood for the flight back to Maraban. Then Zahir springs it on her that he's bought the company who owns her modeling contract because he "doesn't want anyone putting pressure on her" to stay thin or travel a lot or do anything that'll affect her pregnancy. He also says that for security reasons, she won't be able to go to certain parts of the world because they'd be too difficult to provide protection for her. Saffy blows up that he's trying to control her life and insists that her career is very important to her and she's worked hard to build it these last five years so she doesn't want it to change. (A statement she completely contradicts at the end when she swears blind that she never really cared about her career and would have given it up in a heartbeat to have stayed with Zahir during their first marriage) Zahir calls her childish for not recognizing that her life has to change now that she's a queen. Saffy stomps her foot and wails that she doesn't want to be a queen. That it had never occurred to her that by marrying a king she would therefore necessarily become a queen and all the responsibility that would entail. Then she scathingly thanks him for making this wedding night just as awful as their last one and then stomps off to the bedroom on the plane....and then gets mad that Zahir doesn't follow her for sex. Yeah. This was one of those times when she's said one thing but expects him to psychically know that she meant the opposite. And how ridiculous is it for the two of them to have never discussed all of this queen-protection business before they got married?? I blame both of them for that.

They touch down in the country and Saffy starts being nice again, not throwing a tantrum when Zahir is immediately taken away for running-the-country business. Then Zahir's brother from the beginning of the book yells at Saffy and calls her names for "abandoning Zahir just when he needed her most" and reveals that their father had been torturing Zahir all throughout their marriage. That when he was gone for weeks at a time, allegedly on "military maneuvers" Zahir was actually being beaten, starved and tortured to try to force him to divorce Saffy. He endured it all and didn't say anything because he didn't want her to know that she was the source of so much pain. And also, allegedly, because he was embarrassed that he'd been so naive about his father's true nature and that he was powerless to protect himself or her. Then he'd come home and Saffy would pick fights with him because she was lonely and bored and forced to live in total isolation because his father wouldn't acknowledge the marriage.

After all this is revealed to Saffy, she runs away from Zahir, insisting that she needs to be alone to process the news. And as we, the reader, follow along in her inner monologue, do you know what she thinks? She says "how could he do this to her?" Seriously. She's upset that Zahir has now trumped her in the "I've got something to be pissed off about" competition that was their marriage. She actually yells at him for "making" her look like the most awful, self-absorbed, heartless b*tch by letting her go on and on with her whining complaints while he was being literally tortured. Wow Saffy. It really is just all about you, isn't it? And how is it possible that she had no clue how badly Zahir was being injured during these sessions? We're told all about the horrific scars he has on his back that must have necessarily been caused by very deep cuts, so how could he be that badly hurt and yet Saffy totally unaware? I don't buy it.

Saffy ultimately reveals her big dark secret as well, which is that she was molested by one of her mother's boyfriends and that's why she freaked out about sex. She'd repressed the memories and required hypno-therapy in order to remember, then had to have intensive treatments to get over the knee-jerk freak-out reaction she had to sex. Oh and she holds herself responsible for the car accident that temporarily crippled Emmie, even though it makes no sense for her to have thought that. She wasn't driving and hadn't coerced Emmie into going with them so...But she also believes she made her and Emmie's father cut off all contact because he used Emmie's accident as an excuse to leave. Possibly something you could see a 16 year old girl thinking, but by the time the book starts, you'd have thought Saffy would have realized that made no sense. Especially with all the therapy she's allegedly undergone.

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And that kind of sums up the whole thing. When you get to the end, none of the facts actually support the way Saffy and Zahir were acting at the start. And given the facts, I don't understand why they didn't just sit down and have a chat with each other when they were finally brought back together. A simple "let's clear the air" session at the start would have solved virtually all their problems.